the defeatists!

Why are we in Vietnam Again? Where's Norman Mailer when you need him"

  When I was a kid, the writer who influenced me the most was Norman Mailer. I read everything, a lot of which was pretty insane, but most of which was brilliant, if hard to understand. Mailer was a pretty weird guy. If Hunter S. Thompson was a voice of a generation, Mailer was both precursor and ghost. Mailer, Thompson, Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote are all credited as founders of New Journalism, but it's safe to say that Mailer got there first.

In many ways, Hunter's preoccupation with sex, drugs, violence, war and politics mirrored Mailer's but with a couple of differences. Hunter was a screw-up draftee in the early 60s, in the Air Force working on the base newspaper; Mailer was an academic wunderkind, entering Harvard at age 16 and graduating with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1943 when he was drafted. He had some intent to gain a deferment, contending that as a writer he was essential to the war effort; the draft board looked askance at that nonsense, and off he went to Fort Bragg and then on to the Philippines, as a grunt-screw-up.

 He talked in one of his books, Advertisements for Myself, about joining the Army because he wanted to write the Great American Novel about the war; since he spent most of his tour as a cook, he listened to a lot of stories from people who got shot at regularly which is an education in itself. He went on a few patrols, and did what he was told successfully enough that he didn't get killed and didn't end up in the stockade and left with all parts working and a Combat Infantry Badge. He took his GI Bill and took off to study literature at the University of Paris. So, drafting him spared us the possibility of flying in a plane designed by Norman Mailer... another victory for the GI Bill.

He then wrote one of the Great American Novels about World War II, The Naked and the Dead. There were a lot of contenders for that title, and I don't think it's really been awarded -- they're all fairly hard reads today, be it Here to Eternity or The Thin Red Line or Mailer. However, as you read them and pick up later books, you find that, with the exception of Gore Vidal, who was really writing about something else entirely in Williawah, the experience was such that those WWII authors were constantly rewriting that novel no matter what they were writing about.

Writers, poets, filmmakers and other veterans of war who reflect on their experiences are prone to that -- Tim O'Brien's, If I Die in a Combat Zone, is a great example from Vietnam. I expect we'll see a lot of similar stuff from Iraq and Afghanistan. Mailer summed it up in Advertisements for Myself, saying that, “The army gave me but one lesson over and over again: when it came to taking care of myself, I had little to offer next to the practical sense of an illiterate sharecropper."

If you read my pal and occasional editor Gordon Duff's occasional reflections on his Vietnam experience over at Veterans Today, , you get the same feel. Gordon was a Marine infantryman, and while I suspect he wouldn't trade the experience, he would have gladly avoided it. Starvation, disease, stupidity and ignorance -- by superiors, peers and the whole damned world at times -- has an impact on a man. My military career was gentler in a lot of ways, but when people ask me about my life choices, I point out that I'm probably not the best one to ask for advice -- after all, my Phi Beta Kappa in philosophy from Holy Cross got me a rucksack, a rifle and a toothless guy from Georgia yelling at me to get my ass down. I claim no moral superiority based on that or accept no inferiority.

What it did for Mailer, Hunter, Gordon, O'Brien and everybody who did these things was provide a framework that what happened before doesn't quite fit, and what happens later gets strapped on, like an extra appendage or primordial tail. I understand the world from the point of view of 0300-0600 guard duty in Germany at an isolated Army Airfield during the height of the Bader Meinhof activity. The weather is dark, the terrain unknown, and what the hell am I supposed to be doing? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? What's that noise? Terrorists or a stray dog?

Norman Mailer spent the rest of his life figuring out the answer to those questions, and to say he was an exceptionally screwed up dude as a human being is perhaps understatement. He saw his competition with other writers as competition; he saw it all as a fight card and he saw himself as the favorite. There were some great writers in those years, 60 years ago or so, and he had some pretty amazing competition. But, he also brought the whole "essayist/journalist/critic thing to his work."

His most famous and influential piece of writing, after The Naked and the Dead is probably The Armies of Night, his account of the first big anti-Vietnam protest march to the Pentagon. So, he was immersed; my first exposure was Cannibals and Christians, his journalistic record of the post Kennedy-Johnson years. I suspect that it was about a 12-way draw between writers, all on points.

In 1967, Mailer decided to engage in some root cause analysis, sort of.... in a novel about a rich Texas kid and his father and friends who go off to Alaska to hunt bears. In Why are we in Vietnam, he used the bear hunt as an allegory for the rationale behind the Vietnam War; while I think it doesn't work so well for Vietnam, I think it really works for Iraq and Afghanistan. Going to shoot a Kodiak bear from your wealthy neighborhood in Dallas is hardly a good substitute for war, but it is a real macho thing to do. Until it isn't and it's just a godawful mess but with no reason and no worthwhile outcome.

A lot of artists in the 60s used allegorical approaches -- Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant can be seen as one long allegory. He says so in fact, that "That's not what I came to tell you about; I came to tell you about the draft." Mailer doesn't mention Vietnam at all in the book, except for the title. If it seems dated, get a copy and black out Vietnam and write in Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or just pick one. It'll work.

I am a child of the 60s, and I'm using allegory to approach a complicated or simple question. Assuming we lost, why did we lose in Afghanistan. (How can you lose something you never had?) Thursday's edition of Foreign Policy had a piece by Jim Gourley and Tom Ricks. Ricks is acting as the Obi Wan Kenobi of a lot of journalists who find our involvement in the past 14 years of unpleasantness irritating at best, and absolutely awful most of the time; he is no longer with the Washington Post and writing for and as himself. Gourley is a "former Military Intelligence Officer and journalist", who writes about military affairs and extreme sports. The irony is apparent there; his latest book is about the Ultraman Marathon in Hawaii. They pose the question this way: In 500 words or less, why did we fail to render our enemies — those people who actively participated in open hostility against our forces — powerless? Gourley based that question on what I consider possibly the right source but the wrong emphasis. The quote from Clausewitz is from the first page of On War: “Force, that is to say physical force because moral force as no existence save as expressed in the state and law is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object. To secure that object we must render the enemy powerless.”

Now, I am of a different opinion and am not sure if this is the right question. I believe that besides "getting bin Laden" and "teaching the Taliban a lesson", we had no reason for invading and staying in Afghanistan other than the Bush Administration had to do something, and attacking Iraq wasn't something that could be done with a couple of airborne battalions and Special Forces Operators. After that, the fall of the Taliban and the whole Tora Bora issue -- we could have declared victory and left.

But, there had been not so much mission creep as rationale creep... driven in large part by the "need" to get work for the special interests propping up the various administrations in the USA, the UK and so on. In other words, Afghanistan was a violation in much the same was as Iraq of the Powell doctrine: to not commit US Forces without a defined objective, without overwhelming force and without an exit strategy.

But, that's my position. What do you think? I'm asking the questions: Why do you think we are where we are in Afghanistan and what should we do next? And, how? Post comments here and I'll summarize them and see what trends if any emerge. Possibly, we're as confused now as everyone in the Bush Administration was.

I've already published this at Vets Today and have had a number of pretty interesting and thoughtful replies. I hope to get at least a few from this forum. For the sake of Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson, sitting in heaven drinking tequila and smoking opium while taking pot shots at passing angels with a .50 cal pistol, I'm really curious about what you might think. 

Gangster Time...

Nemtsov Murder Scene Investigation

"Russia does not have a machinery of ideology or repression on the scale of the 1930s.   Mr Nemtsov did not present any plausible political threat. But the country does have plenty of the sort of scoundrels described in "The Devils", Dostoevsky's prophetic novel of moral degradation and political terrorism. “One or two generations of vice are essential now," explains that novel's chief provocateur, Petr Verkhovensky. "Monstrous, abject vice by which a man is transformed into a loathsome, cruel, egoistic reptile. That's what we need! And what's more, a little 'fresh blood' that we may get accustomed to it.” -- The Economist, 3/ 2/ 2015

"In all likelihood no one in the Kremlin actually ordered the killing— and this is part of the reason Mr. Nemtsov’s murder marks the beginning of yet another new and frightening period in Russian history. The Kremlin has recently created a loose army of avengers who believe they are acting in the country’s best interests, without receiving any explicit instructions. Despite his lack of political clout, Mr. Nemtsov was a logical first target for this menacing force."-Masha Gessen, NY Times, 3/2/2015

Russia went through a period in the 90s and the 2000s where gangster and Mafia were sort of the equivalent of man on the street. In a lot of ways, the streets of Moscow and Leningrad resembled the streets of Capone's Chicago or Wiemar Berlin and Munich.

However, there have been a lot of regime-friendly killings under the Putin-Medvedev-Putin cycle of power. The most recent, the gangland style assassination of Boris Nematov which seems to answer the question "How bad can it get?" as "Pretty damn bad" actually fits a set of data points that The Economist describes as being provided by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, indicate that since 1995, 8% of political assassinations have occurred in Russia and Eastern Europe.

What little is known about Mr Nemtsov’s death fits with other data points. Though the ideology of Mr Nemtsov’s killer is still a mystery, 29% of perpetrators are seemingly motivated by ethnic or separatist sentiments. Short-range weapons like sub-machine guns and pistols are the most popular weapon among hit men, and leaders of political movements are often the victims in such crimes. Assassinations are also common in authoritarian regimes that do not quite qualify as totalitarian. If Mr Nemtsov's murder was politically motivated, it fits a pattern. 

                       Putin and Nemtsov in less acrimonious setting

Rationally, of course, this makes little sense. Nemtsov may have been an opposition leader, but under Putin's regime, opposition hasn't meant much and is meaning less and less.

What does strike me is that Putin is becoming less and less flexible and more controlling. Anyone who has indicated his respect for Stalin and comes from the KGB is probably not envisioning a liberal democracy as a positive outcome. Nemtsov was aware of the danger, but indicated that if he was afraid, he probably wouldn't be leading an opposition party. The site of the murder is also intriguing. There is no public space around with the possible exception of Tienanmen Square that is better guarded, watched and monitored with a mix of technology and human capabilities than Red Square. The guy was walking across a bridge with his younger, Ukrainian significant other at night toward the Kremlin on the way home and somebody jumped out of a car or fired from the window and nailed him four times in the back. Not a terribly hard shot, of course; but the likelihood of doing it and getting away with it given the location and level of paranoia endemic to the occupiers of the Kremlin since Ivan the Terrible is limited. Unless it was orchestrated by the guardians of the state.

Now, the mythology of Henry II and Thomas Becket provides some illustration. Kings like Henry were rare in the Middle Ages of course, but he was something of a hands on guy on the things he was interested in -- money, taxes, power, war. He picked Becket, his drinking and whoring buddy to be the Archbishop of Canterbury largely because he figured he could trust him to do what he wanted him to do in terms of money, taxes, power and the Church. Well, once ordained, Becket began to act like an actual Archbishop. They squabbled, Becket went into exile, England got into trouble with the Pope and so on; they made a somewhat mock reconciliation, and Becket was allowed to return to England. Where, of course, he continued to act like an Archbishop; as head of the Church in England, he was a very potent symbol with a certain amount of power that to a micro-manager King. The myth is that Henry was sort of drunk, started complaining about Becket and said "Somebody go kill the sonofabitch..." or, more poetically, "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" Three knights got up from the banquet, got on their horses, and cantered off to Canterbury where they offed the Archbishop. The King didn't mean anything really and so he went through a ritual scourging, did Penance and Becket remained the symbol of conscience and duty to God first for the next 1000 years...except that when Henry VIII decided to redecorate all the churches, cathedrals, monasteries and convents to his taste, Becket was yanked from his grave and tossed out on the trash heap.

"I was born in a welfare state Ruled by bureaucracy Controlled by civil servants And people dressed in grey Got no privacy, got no liberty Cos the twentieth century people Took it all away from me." --Ray Davies

Well, as Ray Davies put it so well, "This the age of machinery/a mechanical nightmare/The wonderful world of technology/Napalm Nuclear Bombs/Biological Warfare." Putin didn't have to have a drunken brawl, he just had to mutter something or less; and, while Putin is a notorious micro manager himself, this looks like something that would have been handled autonomously by some low level manager in the FSB office charged with coordination with Skinhead/Nationalist/Bikers and Mafia Contract Killers. Makes you wonder what the cost of the man's life was? A new Harley? A Dacha formerly owned by Stalin? An autographed picture of Vladimir and Dmitri skinning a bear over a beer from Putin's own brewery?

Actually, although he's a bit younger, about my age actually, I'm starting to feel a bit of kinship with Vladimir as well as with Ray Davies. After all, we're all 20th Century Men who don't really want to be here.

Activist and human rights advocate Masha Geesen -- a Russian-American who worked in Moscow for decades but left as it became harder to make a living and fearing reprisals, had her own encounter with Mr. Putin. She described it a couple of years ago, when she was forced to resign from a job with a news magazine in Moscow. She got a call from "Putin, Vladamir, Vladamirovich..." who had a meeting set up with him, the publisher who forced her to resign, and her to discuss what had happened. Putin dictated what he thought was a fair solution and the publisher offered her back her job. She turned it down. So, she's had some direct experience.

What Masha describes in her piece in the New York Times is a not so new development in Russia, and for that matter other countries going through periods of mass change. It's worth remembering that the American Legion was involved heavily in anti-union and anti-immigrant and anti-socialist activities right after it's founding; IWW activists were lynched in Centralia Washington in the 1920s. The Red Guards of Maoist China were a volunteer party organization to protect the Revolution and Mao's vision. There were a number of organizations of reactionary forces over the centuries in Russia that may not have had official government recognition or support, but were working to protect the Kremlin against...something.

Gessen points out that Nemtsov was not a threat to Putin, to the regime or to anything. The protest movement is Russia has been utterly marginalized. Part of this is due to the patriotic fervor of a people at war responding to anyone or anything whom they perceive as standing against them -- Freedom Fries, anyone? Want some tea bags with that M14?--or that might present a threat. Part of it is the desire to show that patriotic fervor and be seen showing it. And, quite frankly, the Biker-Skinhead-Anti-gay Axis and the Mafia all have their own oars in this water. So this force is utterly unorganized and uncontrolled and doing what the various elements see as protecting the Kremlin and Mother Russia...from Mother Russia. She is clear -- Gessen was of no real interest to Putin. He may have found Nemstov an irritant and perhaps my Beer-Bear fantasy has some metaphorical value But, Masha Gessen probably calls it better:

Less than a week after that march, and just before the one he had organized, Mr. Nemtsov was gunned down while walking a bridge that spans the Moscow River right in front of the Kremlin. It is under constant camera and live surveillance. The message was clear: People will be killed in the name of the Kremlin, in plain view of the Kremlin, against the backdrop of the Kremlin, simply for daring to oppose the Kremlin.

November End Times, Hierophanies and General Nuttiness

Sometimes insight arrives from the oddest places...

  

As I suspect a lot of us are experiencing,  some of my closest friends like Bob Redford and Babs Striesland are convincved the world is going to end tomorrow or on election day or whenever the next planeload of homosexual-lesbian-Ebola-Carrier-Central-American-ISIL supported Islamo-Narco-Fiat Money-Bums lands in McAllen Texas and heads north to steal our precious body fluids. Or, perhaps when the next set of Troglodyte-Fascist-1%-Libertarian-Anti-school-Lunch-pro-gun-Creationist-Koch-Soul-Brother-Malefactors (of great wealth) enter Congress and the White House and the Supreme Court. Or, on Election Day. And only a vote for Jean Shaheen or that Iowan Pig Castrator, for Bernie Sanders' or Ted Cruz's favorite can save us so SEND US ALL YOUR MONEY.

Citizens United --One of the obvious unintended consequences, because I don't think the Conservative Cabal on the Court is that ironically subtle, of Citizens United is that Americans are getting more and more irritated with politics in general and election politics in specific. It's really a sad commentary -- the people doing this or allowing it to be done in their name are then going to have to have a complete psychological and spiritual makeover in order to not be totally incapable of working for the good of the nation or people or world through debate, discussion, imagination and compromise. There are Think Tanks and Special Interests to serve, because the next election is coming...and it starts all over again.

When I saw the Ted Toles cartoon, I realized that he'd nailed the situation in this country for those of us over 40, who grew up on 5:00 PM and Saturday Morning cartoons. I suspect that I'm not the only one who realizes that while much of my thinking might be influenced by priests and nuns, the Founding Fathers, St Augustine, Aristotle and Kierkegaard, Kennedy's Inaugural and Assassination, Vietnam and Watergate, the real drivers of my education were Bugs, and Daffy, and Foghorn Leghorn, and Rocky and Bullwinkle and Popeye and Alice the Goon. However, the real existential fifth columnist was the Road Runner and his ceaseless Sisyphean encounters with his stalker, the Wiley Coyote. What can I say -- the great cartoonists of the mid-2oth Century were literate social commentators who wrote for an audience far more sophisticated than the one today.

And so it goes; we are now faced with a set of situations that require cool thinking, steely determination and self-sacrifice with a more than a little bit of compassion and a combination of life experience and education that was pretty normal then, and is really lacking today. We have politicians instead of statesmen, who are like the Coyote, trying to bag that damned Coyote with the same level of tools, thought and commitment. We have presidents, candidates, and congressional delegations that flit around from idea to idea, problem to problem, issue to issue with the same causal negligence of the road runner. We have "leaders" from the school of Foghorn Leghorn and Fearless Leader; policy wonks like Henry the Chickenhawk and Wimpy; volunteer saviors who resemble Bullwinkle and Dudley Doright, Nell and Clementine. Texas is governed by Quick Draw McGraw who figures that he can go to a marvelous hospital and get marvelous treatment so of course, everybody can because they can all pay for it...yeah. We have a "war hero" Ghost who's response to international problems is the same as Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent -- MORE MOREMOREMORE BPMBS!  Jesus could look down over the hill on this new Jerusalem and be torn, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

If I were Barrack Obama, I'd feel justified in asking God what the hell I'd ever done to him that merited this whirlwind of insanity. I think that smart, thoughtful presidents in the 21st Century aare at an awful disadvantage politically, and have been really since the Kennedy assassination. The guy is trying to do good things, but the world doesn't cooperate. It can't -- it's the world and consists of a lot of insane people with guns, money, lawyers, ski masks  and a mass of contradictory hidden agendas and open manifestos. In some ways, ISIL is a nice change -- they don't have a secret agenda, they're pretty open. They don't report to the same God that most of us recognize in the 21st Century. A couple of Islamic friends from Teheran have told me that they regard ISIL as not Islamic but Satanist. I think that's a reasonable approach, not unlike the Pope condemning violence in the name of God. However, the fact remains that both Christianity and Islam grew by force, so there's at least a historical connection. The Crusaders killed more innocents in taking Jerusalem than the Romans did in razing it in 78AD or so. Still, they may call him Allah, but I think they worship Cthulhu or some other very dark overlord with a completely different agenda.

This is a good place to mention empire. We don't want an empire and yet history has handed us one. We really don't want to be bothered with the damn thing. Seriously, we'd like to say, we already have too many creatures in our petting zoo, go off and play with Canada or somebody else. Of course, Canada doesn't want an empire either. However, my buddy and occasional co-conspirator Eric Garland has a great piece up on the problem of denying empire in a situation that really makes empires make sense. It's laudable in some ways while hypocritical in others, denying the desire to run thingsto avoid taking responsibility, but then when everything goes to hell, we find ourselves going in to unscrew everything and then rebuild it. Since we planned on leaving Iraq and Afghanistan from the beginning, we didn't pay a lot of attention to making the places livable and functional. Oh, we spent money, and KBR, Haliburton and every other contractor swine in the world made money on it. Cheney made money on it, although nobody likes to talk about that. The Bush family through the Carlisle Group made money on it. Problem is, the money they made came from us and future generations of us. We can't even loot effectively in this silly model.

Eric is pretty clear; doing things in a half-assed way produces a half-assed result. The West needs to man up and decide what it wants to be when it grows up, and empires have been the solution since ancient Egypt and the freaking Sumerians. As a species we got pretty good at it, and what we're doing now doesn't work.  Eric sums it up very nicely...

There is, unsurprisingly, zero endgame in sight and zero reckoning with past policies, such as, “Hey, maybe those moderate rebels we armed weren’t so moderate!” or “We are pretty terrible at establishing peaceful nation-states in the Middle East!” Still, we are headed back to destroy the thing that emerged after the last thing we destroyed. The tactics that are currently approved are airstrikes, meaning that once again we intend to destroy things, but building things will be beyond our purview – for now. One supposes that the preferred strategic outcome would be for stable, liberal, Western-style democratic nation-states to emerge in the places where our bombs just fell,  (Jeffersonian Democracy anyway? Hamiltonian Federalism? The Third French Republic? )but the national security is far from broaching the particulars of our plan. I have a solution to offer which is out of the current Overton Window of political discourse: Empire...Today, America and its allies are really trying to do Empire on the cheap. There is no dirtier epithet in Washington than “isolationist,” which applies to all elected officials and policy-makers who are hesitant about invading other people’s countries. There is a broad consensus from Maine to San Diego that America’s interests clearly extend from our main streets all the way to the middle of Eurasia....And when they fail, as they usually will given such a design, we will be right back to bombing the newest bad guys. We essentially crave the geopolitical control that comes from Empire, but we skip the step where we keep the infrastructure working and provide security...Again, this has fallen outside of the window of political correctness, but someone needs to do a cost benefit analysis of how much it would cost to just run one of these countries, administer police, courts, roads, and hospitals and just call it East Texas, as opposed to spending thirteen years knocking down power structures and hoping for a suitable, friendly power to emerge. Surely the Rand Corporation can make a detailed model of the cost of running wars versus the cost of running countries. (Parentheticals and emphasis are mine.)

(To be continued)

Trying to get the damned dogs of war back in the kennel

Getting the Damned Dogs of War Back in the Kennel – Trying to Retake the Moral High Ground, If Anyone Cares

It's hard times in the new milleniumGettin' by on just the bare minimum

Everything to lose and nothing to spare Going to hell and nobody cares

Ain't the future that Kennedy promised me In the 21st century

Finally come to the age of Aquarius And if we live through the Mayan apocalypse

There'll be pie in the sky above lemonade springs

A goddamn American utopian dream

If you believe that, you're more optimistic than me--Steve Earle

 

You know, events overwhelm me at times and the on-going military crises-circuses we have blasting around the world make my getting a handle on them especially difficult. It occurs to me, however, that the old Buffalo Springfield line about “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear/ There’s a man with a gun over there, Telling me I got to beware’ really telling in the 21^st Century.

 

If you caught the John Oliver Show, Last Week Tonight, on July 27, you caught an excellent piece on the utterly screwed up US Nuclear Program. While the problems with officer morale and performance, failure to do systems maintenance or upgrades, and general nuttiness – talking about an Air Force General who was relieved for a variety of things culminating on his activities on a trip to Russia where he was pretty much continually drunk on his ass, Oliver pointed out that he’d been “too drunk for the Russians…the Russians!” Telling of one escapade when the general demanded that his staff accompany him to a Mexican Restaurant because he wanted to see the Beatles cover band there and then got them basically thrown out for demanding to be allowed to play guitar in the band, Oliver pointed out that we should consider the chain of bad decisions leading up to that event – drunk, in a Mexican Restaurant in Russia someplace, vomiting a half-eaten Chimichanga over the drum kit of a White Russian Ringo.  Of course, his boss – a Vice Admiral -- had been relieved for trying to use counterfeit chips in a tribal casino in Council Bluff, Iowa. Oliver again pointed out that any Vice Admiral should be smarter than an Iowa Pit Boss.

 The most telling point in the bit was a brief segment of Colin Powell saying that after 30 years of involvement with the planning, deployment and potential use of nuclear weapons, he had become convinced that they were useless. So, we have over 4800 of these things, capable of blowing ourselves and everyone else to ash, and we can neither protect, maintain, nor figure out a rationale for them.

Reminds me of the old Davy Crockett jeep mounted nuke – you’d orient the jeep so that you were facing away from the target with the missile pointed out the back of the trailer, light it off and drive like hell to try and get out of the blast zone…what exactly was the genius who invented it thinking?

Well, one thing he was thinking was that the actual use of the thing wasn’t his problem. When Generals and Colonels talk about the strategic corporals, they’re thinking that that two-striper is going to be doing their job and “Ain’t it Great?” However, the most critical tool for that grunt’s ruck sack, a strong moral compass, is probably missing, broken or poorly designed.

The United States Army used to be proud of its moral stance. We didn’t torture prisoners, we liberated them. We didn’t kill children, we fed them. We didn’t kill civilians, we freed, fed, clothed and took care of them. Somewhere that went wrong.  We held ourselves up as a role model, and some people paid attention. That ethic matched where they were at – the IDF, for example, prided itself on minimizing collateral damage and civilian casualties. And then, they also lost the way.

There’s an interesting article in The Guardian this morning. Yuli Novak is a former pilot and operations officer in the Israeli Air Force, and she comments that when she was a young captain, the Israel Defense Forces prided themselves on being the “most moral military in the world.” She describes an incident where the Israeli Air Force employed a 1000 pound bomb on a house in Gaza to take out a Hamas military commander. She says that it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to consider what that weapon did to the building and the target. They killed him, but they also killed twelve civilians including eight children. She describes the outcome this way:

After the assassination, Israel shook. Even when the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) insisted that there was operational justification for the attack, public sentiment could not accommodate this assault on innocent civilians. Israeli intellectuals petitioned the supreme court, demanding it examine the legality of this action. A few months later a group of reservist pilots criticised such elimination actions....As soldiers and officers used to carrying out our missions without asking unnecessary questions, we were affected by the public reaction…my friends and I trusted our commanders to make the right moral decisions, and returned our focus to the “important things” – the precise execution of further operations.

She goes on to point out that such trust is utterly impossible today. She sees what’s happening in the Gaza Strip as nothing less than a series of war crimes originating at the operational planning level, with no effort to minimize casualties, collateral damage and maintain the moral high ground. Israel Armed Forces are to her mind no longer able to claim any moral suasion; they have become as amoral as any other invading force and are engaging in things that remind her of the SS or the Red Army rampaging in Eastern Europe.

Interestingly, she places the responsibility for regaining a moral force not on the shoulders of the military but on the public. That in fact makes a lot of sense in Israel, where everyone serves except those religiously exempt. Those exempt are largely the most bloodthirsty, which is something I find amusing, of course. In a nation that sees itself as living in a continual state of Total War, those most reluctant to find a peaceful solution are a permanent class of REMFs. Anyway, Novak sees it as a public as well as a military challenge:

I know how hard it is to ask questions during times of conflict as a soldier. The information that the officers get in real time is always partial. That’s why the responsibility for drawing the red lines, and alerting when we cross it, lies with the public. A clear, loud voice that says that bombing a house with civilians in it is immoral must be heard. These killings cannot be accepted without question. Public silence in the face of such actions – inside and outside of Israel – is consent by default, and acceptance of an unacceptable price.

    Novak is now the Executive Director of “Breaking the Silence” an organization of Israeli veterans who have served during and since the Intifada and want to educate the Israeli public as to what the military is doing in their name. I find that admirable, and rather similar to a lot of what we do over at Veterans Today. I’m hoping they are more successful. But, I’m not terribly confident in either case.

One of the problems that we face is the inability to define end-states. What exactly is the end state for Israel and the Palestinians? What is the end state of our involvement in Iran or Afghanistan? What do the Russians want to accomplish in Ukraine? What do the separatists want to accomplish; what do the Ukrainians want to accomplish? If you have some sort of idea as to where you want to go, you might get there. But otherwise, you’ll get wherever you end up, and it will undoubtedly be pretty lousy.

For example, as I was writing this, news broke that the Israeli Air Force has targeted a hospital and a park where children were playing. Israel denies this, claiming that Hamas had hit these targets due to malfunctioning rockets. Frankly, I don't care -- my initial reaction was that the targeting team at IAF HQ was operating off some intelligence that the hospital was being used for storing rockets and ammunition, and that the kids playing in the park were really Taliban soldiers training on the monkey bars.

Based on the casualty data available from the Gaza authorities, I tend to think the Israeli story is probably correct, but the result will remain; they are already convicted in world opinion. This is really madness --  

Looking at the elephant, buy the horse

Convergence of Liberal, Moderate and Conservative Writers Agreeing on Iraq

Universe Coming to an End!

Mike Farrell, Veterans Today Columnist, Futurist and Socratic Provocateur I haven't been writing a lot lately, largely because events in areas that I'm interested in are moving so fast that any comment by me would be overtaken by events almost before I could complete a sentence. A great case in point is the situation in Iraq. At some point, people will stop, look at each other and say, "Joe Biden was right!" about the loose federation concept. Same approach might work for Afghanistan since that place is made up of groups of people who really hate each other; geographic divisions might at least let them cluster into bombs of intolerance and rage which could be turned inward. It's a thought.

But, when I initially saw the excerpts from Pope Francis' interview with a Spanish magazine and then tracked down the complete text, I figured that it along with several other articles, should be tossed into the intellectual cauldron at Veterans Today and anyplace else that will have me.

What I'm seeing is a weird convergence of thought on the role of America in the 21st Century and the role of thought. There were some great columns in the weekend's NY Times and then the inimitable Ana Marie Cox had a marvelous insight over at The Guardian. When Friedman, Douthat, Kristoff, Cox and the Pope are all basically saying the same thing, maybe we ought to listen. Now, to steal a phrase from Molly Ivins, it's probably too much to hope that the Congress-critters obsessed with a misunderstood version of machismo and "American Exceptionalism" can drag their heads away from looking at their own prostates, but as citizens perhaps we should.

Pope Francis first: In many ways, he is really the most interesting man in the world as opposed to a guy from Queens who sometimes drinks Dos Equis. Bit by bit, he's chiseling away at the accrued bat guano of greed,  insanity, power and privilege  stretching back to the Milvian Bridge and Constantine's vision. Helluva challenge; since I don't believe in God, I can't see him succeeding ultimately but as one of his predecessors as prince of Rome, Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Any improvement, no matter how small,is no mean accomplishment." Besides, how can you not find interesting someone who in his position can say something like this, when asked about his legacy..."I have not thought about it, but I like it when someone remembers someone and says: “He was a good guy, he did what he could. He wasn’t so bad.” I’m OK with that." I have trouble imagining recent popes saying anything like that or using common language, or, for that matter, having the interview in the first place. Popes are diplomatic, slow and deliberate; Francis is gentle, quick thinking and open.

The interview is worth reading but his comment on fundamentalism is critical, and extends further than he perhaps consciously intended. Responding to the interviewer on the issue of faith-based violence in the world and the nature  of fundamentalism in the world, he said this, which should be required posting on all political, religious, economic and social magazine mastheads. Not, of course, that anyone pays attention to the masthead anymore...

Violence in the name of God dominates the Middle East. It's a contradiction. Violence in the name of God does not correspond with our time. It's something ancient. With historical perspective, one has to say that Christians, at times, have practiced it. When I think of the Thirty Years War, there was violence in the name of God. Today it is unimaginable, right? We arrive, sometimes, by way of religion to very serious, very grave contradictions. Fundamentalism, for example. The three religions, we have our fundamentalist groups, small in relation to all the rest. And, what do you think about fundamentalism? A fundamentalist group, although it may not kill anyone, although it may not strike anyone, is violent. The mental structure of fundamentalists is violence in the name of God.

Now, I think it's worth noting that Christians continue to practice fundamentalism in various places and times. But, the nature of fundamentalism is the idea of absolute adherence to established doctrine, and the elimination of any dissent from that doctrine. The nature of violence is such that it can be intrinsic as well as extrinsic, psychological as well as physical, social as well as military.  My old friend Mary E. Hunt, co-founder and Executive Director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) has written repeatedly of the intrinsic, economic and psychological violence directed against women and the LGBT communities in the Catholic Church specifically.

However, we see fundamentalism at work in the Republican Party, where the Tea Party has its own thought police run by Glenn, Rush, Laura and Annie, Sean and Bill. When politicians talk about litmus tests for the Supreme Court or for nominations for office, they are reacting to a form of fundamentalism. The idea that there are multiple sides to issues simply doesn't compute with these folks. 

Of course, what we see in Iraq today is a conflict over a different view of fundamentalism. The Sunni fundamentalism of ISIS and al Quaida  is matched by Shiite fundamentalism of Maliki and Iran. Now, this is in many ways the old Churchill dilemma of putting nations where what we're really dealing with are tribes with flags, or tribes forced into flags. Interestingly, the religious argument between them has it's roots not in the Holy Koran but rather in the succession of the Caliphs in the 7th Century. Everything else springs from that -- clerics, politicians and people in general feel fine with slaughtering each other over what in fact is a conflict over the drawing of an org chart but doing so in the name of God.

Now, Christianity has had it's share of these orgies of blood, hate, bile, and self-satisfaction. But, over centuries the perpetrators of such insanity on the violence side have been marginalized. However, what religion has done in Iraq is cover for tribalism. The middle east is really a number of ethnic groups largely captured by a single religion with multiple warring denominations and agendas that are fine-tuned with regional, ethnic, and socio-historic divisions. The US has responded to it as if it's a collaborative of rational actors, in sort of a geo-political application of the idea of rational markets. So, not only are we using the wrong mental model to look at the area, we're using a mental model that doesn't work.  What could possibly go wrong with that sort of intellectual foundation? Besides everything?

It's rare that I can read Tom Friedman without having my eyeballs bleed. However, in his column on Sunday, Friedman was perceptive, reasonable and direct; we have no dog in the Iraq fight except the dog we've largely ignored. He writes: 

... in Iraq today, my enemy’s enemy is my enemy. Other than the Kurds, we have no friends in this fight. Neither Sunni nor Shiite leaders spearheading the war in Iraq today share our values.

The Sunni jihadists, Baathists and tribal militiamen who have led the takeover of Mosul from the Iraqi government are not supporters of a democratic, pluralistic Iraq, the only Iraq we have any interest in abetting. And Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has proved himself not to be a friend of a democratic, pluralistic Iraq either. From Day 1, he has used his office to install Shiites in key security posts, drive out Sunni politicians and generals and direct money to Shiite communities. In a word, Maliki has been a total jerk. Besides being prime minister, he made himself acting minister of defense, minister of the interior and national security adviser, and his cronies also control the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry. Maliki had a choice — to rule in a sectarian way or in an inclusive way — and he chose sectarianism. We owe him nothing.

He goes on to discuss the two places that are in fact working well in the region: the Kurdish region in Iraq and Tunisia, pointing out that we've pretty much left these areas to their own devices while we've been being "geo-political" somewhere else. They have functioning, somewhat inclusive and effective governments, and the people aren't trying to kill each other. They reflect in so much as any Islamic nation can those values of Jeffersonian Democracy that we had planned to impose on the region by forcing them on Iraq and then having a "thousand blossoms bloom." From this, Friedman comes to an interesting revelation: it's not about the US or the West or Russia and the Geo-Political stuff we love so much. It's about the people of the region. As he says, "Arabs and Kurds have efficacy too..."

This leads him to another major insight: 

The Middle East only puts a smile on your face when it starts with them — when they take ownership of reconciliation. Please spare me another dose of: It is all about whom we train and arm. Sunnis and Shiites don’t need guns from us. They need the truth. It is the early 21st century, and too many of them are still fighting over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad from the 7th century. It has to stop — for them, and for their kids, to have any future.

Friedman then wonders about Iran, and comes to the conclusion that the Iranians who plotted with Maliki to get us out so they could "help" weren't quite so smart. They're looking at a long, involved period of support in a nasty, sectarian civil war with the inherent explicit and implicit costs as opposed to having US and NATO propping up their henchmen in Baghdad. Interesting issue, and one that I find very ironic. I envision the US and some other nations providing logistical, intelligence and related support to a largely Iranian "Peace Keeping" force for a long time. If we're smart, we'll get Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Dubai to pay for it along with the Iranians; that's probably a bit to Jesuitical for the State Department and Congress, but it makes a lot of sense.

Friedman finishes on a very high level of perception, especially for him. He surveys the situation, and asks a couple of very telling questions and gives a somewhat unexpected answer for someone usually so conflicted about Iraq and the Islamic world.

Finally, while none of the main actors in Iraq, other than Kurds, are fighting for our values, is anyone there even fighting for our interests: a minimally stable Iraq that doesn’t threaten us? And whom we can realistically help? The answers still aren’t clear to me, and, until they are, I’d be very wary about intervening. 

I think that Friedman has the root of a new US doctrine of global involvement; if you're not fighting for something that fits in our values or in our true strategic interests we shouldn't consider getting involved. And, if we can't figure out a good way to help effectively, we shouldn't get involved either. I'm a retired soldier and an activist by nature, but after 63 years I've finally learned that there's no need to save the bad guys from destroying themselves by uniting everyone against US! Be nice if we all learned that...sometimes we're the windshield, but we can always make like the bug if we're not careful.

The June 14 2014 edition of the NY Times OP-ED was unique in that it also had a column by Russ Douthat, who usually irritates or bores me. In this case, he looks at the Iraq situation with some real historical perspective, pointing out that the creation of the states in the middle East was based on some seriously flawed thinking, and with the goal of preserving French and British hegemony as opposed to providing the basis for coherent and effective nation states. Pointing out how various thinkers since the start of the Iraq war have been re-drawing the map to show how in the best of all possible worlds these various nations could function, Douthat cites Ralph Peters initial effort in the Armed Forces Journal June 2006 issue as the initial draft of a new system of map drawing.

Peters was accused by some of flacking for the Pentagon, which given Peters relationship with the Defense establishment is kind of funny, that he had drawn the map the way the US wanted it redrawn. Actually, as Douthat points out, Peters felt and still feels that US policy makers have a vested interest in keeping the old Franco-British lines in effect, and he thinks that's stupid. Douthat agrees, and has a clear, concise and effective argument as to why but shows the rational side of letting the status quo stands.

While the USA values diversity and inclusion, the facts don't belie that. In Europe, the tendency has been toward exclusive states; states that are more cosmopolitan in their makeup -- Yugoslavia, the Austria-Hungary Empire, the Ottoman Empire -- have largely failed and been split. More coherence has allowed for more national identity and success and what we observe in Europe is the result of several generations of Ethnic Cleansing and two World Wars. While it might make sense to redraw the map in western Asia and North Africa, Douthat points out that process is not going to be peaceful and believes it's underway now. Are we ready for generations of bloodshed and chaos to get there? In the long run, perhaps we should be, but it's always worth remembering that in the long run, we're all dead. Douthat writes: 

This was true even of the most ambitious (and foolhardy) architects of the Iraq invasion, who intended to upset a dictator-dominated status quo ... but not, they mostly thought, in a way that would redraw national boundaries. Instead, the emphasis was on Iraq’s potential for post-Saddam cohesion, its prospects as a multiethnic model for democratization and development. That emphasis endured through the darkest days of our occupation, when the voices calling for partition — including the current vice president, Joe Biden — were passed over and unity remained America’s strategic goal.

This means that Iraq is now part of an arc, extending from Hezbollah’s fiefdom in Lebanon through war-torn Syria, in which official national borders are notional at best. And while full dissolution is not yet upon us, the facts on the ground in Iraq look more and more like Peters’s map than the country that so many Americans died to stabilize and secure...Our basic interests have not altered: better stability now....But two successive administrations have compromised those interests: one through recklessness, the other through neglect. Now the map is changing; now, as in early-20th-century Europe, the price of transformation is being paid in blood.

Douthat is one of the more conservative writers on the Times OP-ED and he takes the opportunity there to take a slap at the Obama administration. Since I have a different lens and see this as the fruits of an absurd policy to begin with, I think his analysis is dead wrong. You deal with reality as it is, not as you wish it could be and demanding doesn't make it so. The US may have wooed the Sunni warlords during the Surge but in reality, we were all in on the Shiites, and they wanted us out. And so we left and here we are. Ana Marie Cox seems to think that was not only inevitable but a good idea. 

Cox is an interesting writer. She started the satirical blog Wonkette, worked for Time starting their Swampland Blog while covering the McCain Palin campaign; she left Time and worked briefly for Air America before that enterprise cratered; wrote a blog and column for Gentleman's Quarterly and since 2011 has been a correspondent, blogger and columnist for The Guardian. My theory is that she no longer appears on the Rachel Maddow show because of the famous "tea bagger" incident where she reduced Maddow to blushing giggles and tears. She still appears on the rest of MSNBC.

She remains unapologetic about her progressive tendencies and while less whimsical, she continues to write with clarity and fairness.  In her column on June 15, she discusses the Republican complaint about Obama's imprecise and indirect foreign policy; while seeing substance in the complaint, she looks at it in a different way, that at the moment vague imprecision the best policy for the US and complaints apart, the only one the nation really wants. 

 Cox has the same yearning for clear choices and a certain trumpet that many on the right argue for but, she points out very lucidly, we really need to be careful in what we wish for. Iraq is a mess, largely of our own making and we need to step carefully, not ape Uncle Teddy in Arsenic and Old Lace, charging down the stairs to bury more laborers on the Panama Canal in the basement. Rather, she asks us to remember how we got into that mess in the first place.

But let's remember the way we got in too deep: it wasn't by underestimating the threat Iraq posed to US interests, it was byoverestimating it. "Overestimating" may even be too generous. We created a threat when there was none, not out of whole cloth so much as a web of pride, avarice and insecurity. Obama's haters on the right – and maybe even some formerly hawkish apologists on the left – need a refresher course on just how much of the Iraq invasion hinged on ego and imagined taunts.... That the Bush administration misled the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq is now all but common knowledge; what we talk about less is why Americans were moved so easily from concern about possible attacks from overseas into almost pornographic nationalism. Clearly, we were intoxicated by some heady perfume of testosterone and saddle leather that pulled along George W Bush by the nose. When the Iraq war began, nearly 80% of Americans thought it was a good idea.Almost as many approved of how the president was handling it. Irrational exuberance is not just for markets. How we have sobered since then!

Cox points out that governments are not people, and that the mechanisms of government are supposed to grind slowly, not jump on the first impulsive concept that comes to mind. She believes that Republicans think that Americans want smaller government, by which they understand governments that act like people. Fortunately, that isn't possible. T

he more we expect government to produce magic beans capable of solving some immediate problem, the less capable the government ultimately is to respond to the next one. Using the economic analogy again, if the rational actor in the marketplace is your drunken uncle Bernie or schizo cousin Pearl, you can't trust the market to make rational decisions. Thus in government -- the idea that, as some Republicans claim, the administration considers all options and chooses none strikes her as superior to the alternative -- grabbing the first option that fits you underlying desires whether or not it's going to be effective and going all in on it.

Cox sees an almost metaphysical transformation in the American electorate. After Bush, as a group we no longer see the President as the personification of the state. Part of that is probably due to the difference in attitude, intellect, personality and race between this President and most of his predecessors.  A large part of it is due to the results of the Iraq invasion; as a people, we're sick of conflict with no end, no logic, no goals and no plausible outcome. Leaving Iraq was inevitable and Maliki screwed himself because he made out exit so abrupt and complete; Afghanistan will probably be slower but still, inevitable. The Islamic world will figure it out or not. As Cox says with much the same insight as Friedman and Douthat, and the Pope, "It is most certainly a function of having seen so many lives lost, but the American people are comfortable with inaction. Barack Obama's foreign policy is less of a doctrine than a stance – guarded but cautious, careful but alert ... just like us."  

   

 

 

Clarity in all it's glory...

  Now, certainly there will be peace in our time in the Middle East[/caption] A reader of the Financial Times which I will occasionally read whenever I get a chance particularly if Martin Wolfe is writing that day, provided the world today with the perfect explanation of the Middle East.

A Short Guide to the Middle East

Sir,

Iran is backing Assad.

Gulf states are against Assad!

  Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood.

Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi.

But Gulf states are pro Sisi!

Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood!

Iran is pro Hamas, but Hamas is backing Muslim Brotherhood!

Obama is backing Muslim Brotherhood, yet Hamas is against the US!

Gulf states are pro US.

But Turkey is with Gulf states against Assad; yet Turkey is pro Muslim Brotherhood against General Sisi.

And General Sisi is being backed by the Gulf states!

Welcome to the Middle East and have a nice day.

Mr KN Al-Sabah, of London, SW1

There, that's all perfectly clear. What could possibly be the problem...

 

 

Sometimes the only question is, did anybody do anything right?

Failure of Leadership with Lots of Unexpected Consequences

I have been relatively quiet on Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden because I am very conflicted about what to think. Like a lot of folks who are reading this, I’ve had the clearance and the access and I remember the oaths I swore and the penalties. A lot of stuff then was pretty silly, but the primary reason for the BURN BEFORE READING stamps was fairly simple – releasing the information would reveal the source. Since I had a kind of obscure specialty for a while, I can recall being dragged out of the Fort Clayton Golf Course Bar by a CW4 who had been one of my students to read traffic that came in as HOTHOTHOT and reading, shaking my head and pointing out the problem. It was pretty funny, the chief went back and bought me another beer and we howled. But, I still can’t talk about more than 20 years later.

Nor would I. Someone got some information they probably should not have had and passed that along to someone else who somehow got it to someone else. The fact that in that chain of someone’s was probably a source just like Bradley Manning or Mr. Snowden is irrelevant. I don’t need to get cheap laughs. However, if you have a SCIF handy, read me back on and I’ll tell you the story.

So, you don’t talk about what you know. I taught at the INTEL School and that’s where I learned my SKIF etiquette but that training started a lot earlier. A boss of mine was reading one of Kissinger’s books where it referenced the clearance that he had, and the boss went ballistic – some things are incredibly sensitive even if you don’t care why. Henry the K didn’t care about a couple of 10000 grunts and a couple of 100000 Vietnamese and Cambodians or so; why would he care about something silly like the name of an access? The boss’ boss came in to talk to us about it, and said that “We are held to a higher standard.” You put on the uniform and you are held to a higher standard.

On the other hand, the stuff that Manning leaked through International Man of Mystery Julian Assange was primarily battle journals. In other words, the old DA 1594s or whatever they are calling them now, some SITREPs, some raw SPOT Reports and so on. He was a computer geek and a very junior Intel Analyst. He plotted stuff on maps. If he had access to a lot of highly classified stuff, that was really stupid.

But, the material is pretty damning. We were in a war that we should not have started, fighting a professionals’ war against the people – with the exception of the Kurds, at one time or another we were fighting everybody while they consistently were and are fighting and killing each other. We don’t get the culture, the religion, the climate the history. We still don’t, but that last time worked out so well that there’s really no reason not to do it again. I just don’t see a statue of Tommy Franks in the future of West Point.

Manning was getting a view of how silly that was, how insane, how brutal and how fruitless. I don’t know what motivated the guy. But, I do know that most of what he revealed was probably vastly over classified. And then we get to another problem, one that I realized last night at dinner with my wife who in her Army incarnation was a Documents Custodian in a Brigade S2 in Europe.  The coin dropped; she worked as a civilian for DOD and DOT and I had been a contractor. Guess what – no way if any current security procedures were being adhered to could Manning have gotten the stuff he had to Wikileaks. We’re not discussing a highly trained intelligence operative here, we’re talking about a pretty flakey private in a combat zone., who appears to have been violating every principle of handling sensitive and classified material in the book; according to Wikipedia he told one of his biographers that he smuggled the stuff out on his data card.

When the coin dropped, I dropped my sandwich. My wife at best tolerates my jousting with windmills, but this one bugged her as much as it bothers me. This should not have happened. And it did – and it was not Manning who was the weak spot, but the supervision and leadership that let him do whatever misguided and deranged crap he did.

Manning was on a secure DOD/ Army system, in a sensitive compartmentalized intelligence facility (SCIF) of some sort and he was able to download highly classified materials to either thumb drives, data cards or CDs. The military banned all that stuff on its computers prior to the kid's enlistment. While it might be possible to cheat if you were on night shift in a CP someplace with just a normal Army computer and nobody checking on you, in a SCIF there are a lot of people checking on you usually. When you enter the SCIF, you are subject to search; brief cases, backpacks and similar things are checked as a matter of course. HOW THE HELL DID HE BREACH THE BASIC IT SECURITY AND THE PHYSICAL SECURITY PROTECTING THIS STUFF? This is a serious concern. Certainly, the officers and NCOs running the place should be investigated for either complicity or negligence or both. If they say him with a CD, they needed to act immediately; if they saw him with a data stick, ditto. Slipping a micro into a slot would be really disturbing. Either they didn’t care, they allowed it to happen or they just didn’t bother to watch this obvious candidate for Soldier of the Millenniums. Somewhere, SGT Morales is crying.

The fact that somehow this kid had access to TS and higher should bother a lot of us. Did DOD not investigate the guy prior to the granting of the clearance? Was there no interview? How did he keep the clearance after reprimands? WHO GETS REPRIMANDED FOR ASSAULTING AN OFFICER? Maybe some hard corps grunt dealing with the problems of cooling down after a fraught mission and being asked some silly crap; but, this guy was a REMF. There's a lot to be concerned about here, but Manning's actual leaks are the least of it. He was a computer GEEK and gee, the Army needs those for places like Fort Meade and various Field Stations. Was he in a Field Station? No, he was in the SCIF in a Forward Operating Base in Iraq. The Army knew he needed help; they were going to discharge him during Basic for unsuitability. Instead of washing him out, they sent him on to AIT and he got a TS/SCI clearance. The unit wanted to leave him behind instead of taking him to Iraq but they were short analysts so...  Where the hell were the Counter-Intelligence people who were supposed to be there? He was acting out all over the place in all sorts of ways…and nobody noticed until a hacker reported him? Seriously.  In a combat zone, prior to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the guy was openly gay, disrespectful and out of line.

Now, many years ago there was an Army Security Agency analyst we’ll call Randy. Randy was at Field Station Augsburg and was very, very gay. Openly gay. Blatantly gay. He cross-dressed and hung around the Bahnhof according one guy who knew him. Nobody cared, he was really good at his job. The MI community was always very tolerant of a lot of deviance, up to a point. One story had the Politzei catching him at the Bahnhof along with the MP liaisons and there he went. How do I know the story is true? One of my officer students at the INTEL school told me about him; then others told me about him; and then, when I was facilitating course with the Warrants and the subject of stress and reactions to it was on the table, one of the Warrants started saying that none of that was problem in the old ASA, none of their soldiers had issues and this was a waste of everyone’s time to consider. “Chief,” I asked, “Were you ever in Augsburg?” “Yeah, Sarge, I spent most of my enlisted in Augsburg.” “Chief, did you ever know a guy named Randy?” Silence…followed by laughter. “Oh hell, Sarge, Randy was my squad leader…” “Were the stories true?” “Oh Shit! You had to be there…”

So, yeah, Manning is guilty of a lot of stuff. However, given the obvious questions and the way the guy was treated while awaiting trial -- Marine Stockade as opposed to Army Stockade? Solitary confinement because he was suicidal? Naked? -- make me think that justice could be best served in his case by sentencing him to reduction to E-1, a Less than Honorable Discharge, and a couple of years in Leavenworth. I'd actually prefer the reduction, a General Discharge under Honorable Conditions and time served. 

And then, the Army needs to start asking some hard questions about what the hell happened to common sense and adherence to basic procedures safeguarding materials. Manning's Chain of Command needs desperately to have a bunch of their careers ended so they can move on to their true calling of asking if you want paper or plastic. If they'd been doing their jobs, this wouldn't have happened. Everything about Iraq that went bad, down to the way we found out a lot about it was due to a failure of leadership at a really existential level.

I’d also like to turn to the helicopter footage that has gotten so much attention. Why would that have been TOP SECRET? I wonder why it would have been more than CONFIDENTIAL – where was the serious harm to the nation in that footage? It was sad, tragic, reflected poorly on the rules of engagement and all the nonsense we’ve been told about how carefully precise everything is on the digital battlefield. It’s not, and we know. Reuters knew the stuff existed and asked for the material. They submitted a Freedom of Information Act request and were rebuffed. The FOIA request should have been granted, with some redaction, and then de-classified.

Soldiers in combat cause collateral damage. Soldiers in combat do a lot of things to block the horror. We know that. But, the American people need to know that. They need to have their noses rubbed in it so every time some yahoo decides to start demanding we go off to some war some goddamned place, there are no surprises. Bradley Manning broke the law, broke his oath as a soldier and did it irresponsibly and almost blithely. No Luther-Ellsberg existential “Here I am, I can do no other…”anguish there. But, he needed help, guidance and the attention that soldiers, especially weak soldiers need and deserve all the time, not just in combat.

I had soldiers like Manning. Any NCO or Officer who led troops had to deal with people like Manning. Too smart for their MOS, too smart for their duties, not fitting in, not a lean mean fighting machine – just a kid who needed his ass kicked and his shoulder patted. Instead, he was ignored, not mentored, not helped and this is what happened. I had 200 soldiers in my last company, and I knew all the flakes and made a point of watching them. I didn’t bully them, I didn’t berate them, and I sought ways to help them grow and adapt. I know my last company was at Fort Lewis and this was in Combat. I don’t care; the way you operate in garrison is the same way you need to operate in the field. If you take care of you soldiers, they’ll amaze you when the chips are down. If you don’t, well, this is what happens.

Manning appears to have had other problems. He lived an openly gay life prior to enlisting in the Army. While If you can salvage a marginal soldier, you might create a superstar. But if you can’t, and it appears his chain of command had figured out he wasn’t going to hack it, you don’t take them Iraq, you don’t cut them slack for acting crazy, you don’t look the other way. You get them out of combat, away from the unit and let the psychiatrists and JAG determine what needs to happen next. YOU DON”T SHOVE THEM IN A POORLY SUPERVISED SKIF for fifteen hours a day. But, “ Farrell, we were short analysts in the worst way”. To which I can only respond, “Yeah, and look what that kind of short term thinking got you.”

 

 

 

 

 

Mighty long way down a dusty road all the way to the abyss...

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan largely because they were totally frustrated with their client state's inability to do just about anything that they expected them to do. The people of the former Soviet Union are still suffering the impact of that decision. Russia is still engaged in the continuing kerfluffle in the Caucasus but that at least seems consistent. Chechnya is a small scale version of Afghanistan but Russia has all the cards; we're not arming the Chechens, and the various Islamic cash cows have avoided providing a lot of support beyond prayer and some limited humanitarian. Part of that has to do with the global war on terror's chilling effect on dissident elements in various Islamic nations; part of it has to do with the fact that the Chechens have proven themselves to be basically threats to anybody they don't like very much.

 

One would have thought that after the almost 12 years of war in Afghanistan with the ongoing unmentioned conflicts in Somalia and Yemen and watching the emerging religious cleansing in Iraq, that we'd have learned to not get involved in another Islamic intramural cluster in Western Asia. The old saw about not getting involved in a land war in Asia really is about the continent of Asia, not just the parts we've already had our asses kicked in. Like it or not, global power projectors, none of our land wars in Asia have turned out well. At best, we've had a draw in Korea lasting almost as long as I've been alive; I guess the Boxer Rebellion turned out ok, and of course, there was Vietnam...But now the US has decided that the Syrian government has crossed a red line and used chemical agents. This horrible crime against humanity that supposedly killed about 200 people in multiple attacks will not stand. (Give me a squad,  some .50 cal sniper rifles, Mk19 Automatic grenade launchers, some mortars, some M2 machineguns, a lot of bullets and maybe some close air support -- all of which the Syrians have or at least have the equivalents--and we'll deliver a helluva lot more than 200 casualties if you give us a village or six to take out, if we were the types of guys who slaughter civilians. The Syrian Army doesn't have that squeamish ethical reserve that we have. 

 

 McCain and Co. are all in on doing more in Syria and have been for a long time. In fact, the White House let him know that they had decided to start arming the rebels and he went on the Senate floor before the either the President or the White House could make the announcement to complain that the offer of aid was obviously insufficient and we need a no-fly zone and a CAP. Hard for me to see much of an up side, given that once again, they're all evil bastards and whatever we do will turn out wrong. On one side, we have the Assad regime which is a totally awful bunch of psychopaths assisted by Hezbollah another total bunch of psychopaths and funded by the Iranians whose government is almost but not quite in the North Korean government mode of batshit insane. Yeah, anything might be better -- until we look at the rebels, who are a hodgepodge of factions and elements who are opposed to the Assad control because of tyranny and evil and...oh yeah, the Assad family is Alawite, a Shiite sect that is a minority in Syria but seized power back in the day as part of the Baathist movement under this Assad's dad. If you recall the Sadr clan in Iraq fondly, then you'll love the rebels because they represent the mirror image of the Shiites in Iraq. In Syria, the Sunnis are the majority and they've been jerked around unconscionably by the Shiites under the Assad family. So, there are people who are opposed to the regime because the regime is bad and they want to do better; and, there are people who just want to kill the Alawites.

 

I've been out of the Army for 16 years and seldom worked in my original MOS during it. However, I remained really good at the technical aspects of it, and was in fact distinguished graduate of my advanced course where we focused largely on the technical stuff. I was an expert on Chemical, Biological and Chemical weapons. We did a lot of experimentation with chemical weapons in places like Toole and Dugway, and we have a really good idea of how the lousy things work. So, the news that the Syrians have chemical weapons wasn't surprising to me bu the news that they had used them was pretty surprising, and the way that they've been employed is really weird. They appear to have used them in isolated attacks against small targets with very light casualties resulting. I'd like to know more, just from a student of stupid ways to fight bad guys point of view. The news that they have managed to inflict 150-200 casualties in a war that has killed 93000 people so far with Saran Nerve Agent is absolutely dumbfounding. If some dipshit told me he  could take out 200 people in a single attack with nerve agent, I'd refuse to waste the rounds. That simple -- the casualties aren't worth the effort of issuing and safeguarding the munitions or of the bad press resulting in the US now announcing it will arm the rebels while John Napoleon McCain demands we do more. You terrify the rebels, maybe; but you really piss off the Israelis and the Turks and Europe and we've got that red line rhetoric hanging out there. Assad may be a lousy dentist and sit at the head of a politic0-criminal gang of thugs, thieves, torturers and sociopaths; but, he is not stupid. Pissing on the US is just not a great idea because, well, we've been feeling testy lately.

Iranian Soldiers in Iraq-Iranian war in Chemical Protective equipment.

So, who'd be dumb enough to do this? I am not an advocate of everything that happens has a false flag aspect, but I'm pretty open to the idea in this case. The use of the weapon really makes no sense. But, for Israel or Iraq or the Rebels, it makes a lot of sense. There is another possibility, that these numbers are based on the number of people who had their blood tested and showed some sign of a lack of acetyl-cholinesterase, the cause of casualty with nerve agents. There have been multiple attacks and 200 deaths is just not something worth doing; but, 20000 might be worth it. The Islamic reqirement to get bodies buried as soon as possible really works against any scenario of heaps of dead bodies to check; if I wanted to mazimize casualties, I'd have used a persistent agent, VR55 or VX. You have something like motor oil hanging around and in the case of VR55 actually producing significant amounts of vapor casualties as well as contact casualties for anyone who gets a drop on bare skin. There's no upside in a war like this to using an aerosol agent unless you're just using it stupidly out of sheer anally fixated evil stupidity. Which is certainly possible, given the nature of the players in this snake rodeo.

The geo-political aspect of this are pretty obvious -- we need to do something different than rush into the Syrian goat rodeo with all the gusto of a starving middle linebacker going to an all you can eat ribs dinner. My thought is that we take the old Churchillian description of the area as correct, a collection of tribes with flags, and act accordingly. In this case, we need to be very careful about strategic interests of ourselves and our allies. And we need to be very conscious of what looks like a resurgence of the Islamic civil war between Shi'ia and Sunni. There is a belt of Shiite power running from Iran through Iraq to Syria; in Syria, however the balance of population shifts from predominantly Shiite to predominately Sunni. Long range goal for a peaceful solution would probably involve a people and land swap; that probably won't happen, but if the Sunni in Iraq were to move to Syria and the Alawites from Syria to Iraq, then the problem of minority majority would be eliminated. 

I'm not sure who is most deserving of aid here -- probably Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon for having to deal with the refugee problem. It would be interesting to have the new Sunni state of Syria declared a demilitarized zone under UN protection, but that probably can't happen. And, I suspect the Iraqi Sunni and the Syrian Sunni would have plenty of conflict; the Alawites and the more traditional Shiites of Iraq and Iran would probably have issues. Probably just degenerate into constant civil war regardless of what we do. 

Ireland found some peace after 800 years, but largely because both sides were stuck with an outside mediator they had to trust and to whom they had ties. More importantly, the people of Ireland, especially in Ulster, were sick of fighting, the British were sick of fighting and the people -- the sea in which the IRA and the Orange paramilitaries swam to steal an allusion from cousin Mao -- were desperate for an alternative. In the great clash of Islamic sects, the people respond to the demagogues and the demagogues are even warmed up yet. So, we need to assist Turkey and probably Jordan, and actively quarantine this area of conflict. That would be our strategic interest. I suspect we won't do that, but the idea of US forces, even if primarily Air and perhaps Naval getting involved with a proxy war with Iran -- because of the Shi'ia versus Sunni thing, the financial and weapons support of Iran and the involvement of Hezbollah -- is just not a good idea. 

Or, we can get involved in another land war in Asia. It worked so well the last time...After all, if you've done something multiple times with lousy results, doing it again has got to be a good idea. 

 

Educated Arrogance

Among the many abominations foisted on us is the merging of Lincoln's Birthday with Washington's and calling it President's Day. Frankly, we need more holidays, and Federal Holidays should be made mandatory paid holidays. Like in civilized countries – double time for workers and everybody else is off doing their thing. Now, celebrating Lincoln and Washington makes a lot of sense – but, Jerry Ford? Grover Cleveland? Warren G. Harding? John Tyler? James Buchanan? Seriously, give us back our holidays and make the bastards give them to workers…

There is method in my madness, by the way. Reduce work hours and you'll spur hiring to maintain productivity. It's a fairly simple idea and works very well especially when you're trying to maximize employment. If you have an idle assembly line, well, if you need a hundred employees to run it, and you cut the hours of 1000 employees enough to reduce productivity to where profit is affected, it will make economic sense to hire more workers. It probably does on a macro scale anyway – as Paul Krugman and other non-Friedmanesque economists keep saying, it's demand, stupid. No demand, no need for supply to keep up. No money, no demand…why is this hard?

I was wandering through various interweb sites this morning and discovered a number of things at places I don't always visit. Probably the best way to be exposed to new thought and new thinking is to just go out and look. I recommend Twitter for that – follow some of the links that are twittered and be prepared to be amazed, enlightened and generally entertained.

"Well, that was fun, wasn't it?" Uhh, no...

 Jerry Harvey, expert on management dysfunction and organizational behavior, has a classic finding called The Abilene Paradox. Basically, it discusses our inability to deconflict -- agreement. We may all "want to do X but there are hidden voices saying, We should do Y because..." His story involves the disruption of a family afternoon in north Texas in the summer because his mother in law figured that he and his wife were probably bored. This resulted in a four hour car trip over beat up roads in a beat up, unairconditioned car to a Rexall Drug Store and Lunch Counter in Abilene. It was hot, it was dusty, it was a lot like the Texas in The Last Picture Show. When they finally got home and collapsed in the living room, there was dead silence punctuated by gas and burps from that fine Rexall Lunch Counter cusine for about 45 mintues. As Harvey tells the story, realizing that he was a trained social scientist with a PhD in Organizational Psychology and Behavior, felt compelled "to make a behavioral intervention." So, he said, "That was fun now, wasn't it?" To which his father-in-law responded by looking at him and visibly questioning the wisdom of letting his daughter marry this clown and then saying as only someone who's from Texas or at least spent a lot of time there can say it, "SSSSHHHEEEEIIITTTT --that was awful." The family did a post mortem, and when their reasoning got exposed -- Momma thought the kids were bored and wouldn't want to eat left overs, the kids didn't want to deny Momma anything, Papa wasn't going to push back against eveyone else so...the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and in the early 70s, the road to Abilene was paved with kind thoughts and care for other people's feelings. Book is a classic, and I recommend it to anyone -- Harvey is one of my heroes along with Keith Richards, Guy Clark and Kierkegaard.

 

I am drawn to this example today as we observe the final drawdown of US Forces in Iraq and the casing of the colors... Although we were not militarily defeated and did eliminate a crazed dictator, in a very large sense this was a strategic if not ontological defeat for the United States. Bush's decision to invade Iraq may rank historically with Cyrus invading Greece, Hitler Russia or Lee Pennsylvania. 

 This war was a terrible idea as a use of blood, power, treasure and time. Our soldiers performed incredibly well -- the average enlisted guy in Vietnam served one tour of 11.5 months. Once. In World War II and Korea, once you got there, you stayed until you couldn't fight anymore but there were long lulls between battle and fear. But in Iraq, it was never quiet, never safe, never secure, never lulled -- every day, anywhere, was a day in combat. Everybody hated you, and if they didn't, you figured that there was something wrong with them. As I talked to our kids returning from this cauldron, the general theme echoed one I heard from a British Peacekeeper in 1994 -- "They're all guilty bastards."

Were there problems? Hell yes; war is nothing but problems. This one was fought so poorly that it makes you wonder if Rumsfeld, Cheney and Tommy Franks had bet against at some British bookies...their ignorance, stupidity and basic inhumanity wasn't just criminal. It was of some other dimension -- as if the DOD was run by Reptilian-Alien overlords. Bizzare...

 Did we have soldiers do some bad things? Yup -- every war has soldiers do bad things. But, the vast, vast majority of the American military served incredibly well, honorably and effectively. It was a bad idea; it's the Iraqis country; we broke it, we fixed it, and we need to get our guys all home. Now. 

So, it was with a certain degree of stunned outrage that the drumbeat from the Republican party managed to get through my skull. The leadership of the Republican party is so committed to reflexive condemnation of anything that this White House does that they're not only willing to destroy the economy of the foreseeable future, the lives and hopes of millions of Americans; they are willing to denigrate the sacrifices of the people in the boots on the ground by saying that this war was in vain because we didn't stay there. Motherfuckers...American values were defeated in Iraq, and American interests were crushed in Iraq. They were crushed when the first bombs fell in Bagdad; they were defeated when the first tanks rolled across the Kuwaiti border. We lost the war then, in early 2003; our political leaders, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, etc., dealt us this defeat as sure as the Austrian high command dealt their army and empire defeat in 1914. Criminal ignorance, stupidity, cupidity, intellectual sloth and emergent dementia later, and here we are...again. 

 

If you recall when the agreement to end the war was signed, GW Bush was president, Condi Rice was Secretary of State, and Petraeus was still in charge of the Army in Iraq. That team didn't negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement; the Iraqis want us gone. We just lost 4500 killed, thousands of lives shortened by wounds both physical and psychological fighting a war to bring self-determination and Jeffersonian Democracy to a nation made up of various ethnic, religious and cultural groups that all hate each other. As a whole, they want us gone, and we need to go. 

Now the clowns are rattling their cages about Iran. Seriously, what do they expect to happen? The drone goes down in their country; we should bomb them? Was that Gingrich or Romney or Palin? Insane. Again, total lack of historical perspective on how the "great Game" or any game for that matter besides Monopoly is played. When a Soviet defector flew a MIG 25 Foxbat to Japan about 30 years ago, we totally dissassembled the plane, kept it for 67 days and returned it to the Soviets in boxes.  

Of course, these guys are all operating in a vacuum. What we do to them, they can do to us. If we torture prisoners, they will torture prisoners. If we bomb indiscriminately, they will bomb indiscriminately.

It's important as this mess ends that we honor the victors, the American Armed Forces and Veterans who overcame the strategic defeat that was the whole war, and won an operational and tactical success in conditions of incredible difficulty. 

 

So, while I find Barrack Obama less than a success, and I resent the mistake that you can have bi-partisan cooperation when only one side cooperates as being the worst of new age gibbersih made into policy, we need to make certain that he is re-elected but, more importantly, that the Democrats take back the congress, a greater majority in the Senate and begin to work dismantling the Oligarchs on the right side of the Supreme Court. 

Or, fuck it. We have backed a mythical monster -- Cthulhu -- an anarchist analytic philosopher --my brother from another mother, Crispin Sartwell -- and a dead Communist -- Gus Hall -- for President. We were being satirical...but, if you can't get your head out of your ass far enough to care this time around, just vote for our new ticket of Gary Busey and Callista Gingrich. What the hell -- he's beyond certifiable and she's obviously controlling Newt through a combination of shiny things and sexual deviance. At somepoint Gingrich will either choke on a ring or she'll suck his brains out; might as well get it over with. 

However, I am going to care. I'm going to encourage other people to care. I'm going to get goddamned irritable about people not caring and doing jejune parlor tricks with semantics. You know what the meaning is of "lesser of two evils?" The better choice. Our soldiers, our people and the world deserve to be free of these madmen for at least a complete term. It needs to be done, and if we don't do it now, who will?

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded with hatred
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

--Bob Dylan, 1962