Blood in Paris and beyond...

What follows is a sort of smorgasbord-compass that I have put together to help me, and hopefully others, get some idea of where this mess we now find ourselves in comes from and where it might lead us,

I hope the material quoted below might help to provide readers with a workmanlike framework for thinking about the new era we have entered into, with  ISIS' attacks on Paris...  a conflict which might be turning into the "Third Gulf War" or even WWIII.

We begin with what I would call the "mantra" to repeat constantly while reading, watching and hearing the news these days:

Multiculturalism is not a naive liberal aspiration — it is the reality of the modern world

Gideon Rachman - Financial Times

This is simply reality:

With globalization and its new communication tools, we have all been thrown together brutally, helter skelter, in a worldwide, multinational-economy-mishmash, with no regard for history, culture, faiths or national idiosyncrasy, like having several different, large families, who don't even speak the same language, shut up together in the same small flat, sharing, bedrooms, kitchen... and bathroom. And somehow we are going to have to learn to live like this together in peace and harmony or else.

The French part of all of this not that new, the unrest among young French citizens of North-African origin has been growing for some time, it came to a head 10 years ago:

In October and November of 2005, a series of riots occurred in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities, involving the burning of cars and public buildings at night.  The unrest started on 27 October at Clichy-sous-Bois, where police were investigating a reported break-in at a building site, and a group of local youths scattered in order to avoid interrogation. Three of them hid in a power-station where two died from electrocution, resulting in a power blackout. (It was not established whether police had suspected these individuals or a different group, wanted on separate charges.) The incident ignited rising tensions about youth unemployment and police harassment in the poorer housing estates, and there followed three weeks of rioting throughout France. The rioters were the children of immigrants from North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa for whom Islam was an inseparable component of their self-identity which strengthened their sense of solidarity, gave them the appearance of legitimacy and drew a line between them and the French. Wikipedia

Why are there so many  North-African Muslims living in France?

After WWII there was a literally wonderful period of never before experienced prosperity in France:

Les Trente Glorieuses (French pronunciation: ​[le tʁɑ̃t ɡlɔʁjøz], "The Glorious Thirty") refers to the thirty years from 1945 to 1975 following the end of the Second World War in France.(...) Over this thirty-year period, France's economy grew rapidly like economies of other developed countries within the framework of the Marshall Plan such as West Germany, Italy and Japan. These decades of economic prosperity combined high productivity with high average wages and high consumption, and were also characterized by a highly developed system of social benefits. Wikipedia

Because of this economic boom there was a tremendous need for low-paid manual labor, which the native French population couldn't satisfy and at the beginning of "The Glorious Thirty" most immigrants came from poorer southern European countries like Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal... white and Christians.  Many of them became totally assimilated, took French nationality and have become quite successful. The mayoress of Paris was born in Spain and so was the present Prime Minister's father. However in the mid-1960s the economies of these southern European countries also began to boom and they dried up as a source of cheap labor for France.

At this point, still booming France turned to its former colonies in North Africa for the workers who would accept low pay doing the dirty jobs the French didn't want to do and southern Europeans didn't need to do anymore... And when in the 70s, the economy cooled off, the North Africans were left stranded in immigrant urban ghettos, and unlike the southern Europeans, they had nowhere to go back to, as things were even much worse in North Africa than in France.

So you could say that in some way, today the French are paying their imperial "karma":

Paris, November 20, 2005 - 'We're here because you were there'
Three Weeks of urban rioting by thousands of children and grandchildren of post-colonial migrants have finally forced France to grapple with the bitter fruits of its fallen empire. The lesson should not be lost on any Western nation. It is encapsulated in the slogan that activists have been employing throughout Western Europe for the past few decades: "We are here because you were there." Gregory Rodriguez - LaTimes

What has turned the secular urban riots of 2005 - rather similar to the "burn baby burn" riots in the USA during the Civil Rights period of the 1950s and 60s - into the militarily organized horror of ISIS' attacks in today's Paris?

The answer is simple: Ideology, that is to say, structure for action.

Wahhabite Islam is the specific ideology that is structuring the turbulence. You might say that Whahhabism is a sort of Muslim version of "ultra-Calvinism", iconoclastic: lunatic-fringe, but very, very well financed:

Wahhabism has been accused of being "a source of global terrorism", inspiring the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and for causing disunity in Muslim communities by labeling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi definition of monotheism as apostates (takfir), thus paving the way for their execution for apostasy. It has also been criticized for the destruction of historic mazaars, mausoleums, and other Muslim and non-Muslim buildings and artifacts. The "boundaries" of what make up Wahhabism have been called "difficult to pinpoint", but in contemporary usage, the terms Wahhabi and Salafi are often used interchangeably, and considered to be movements with different roots that have merged since the 1960s.But Wahhabism has also been called "a particular orientation within Salafism", or an ultra-conservative, Saudi brand of Salafism.

That's right, the center of this ideology is coming from the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, straight from the world's filling station, Saudi Arabia.  Literally every time you fill up your gas tank you might be financing Al Qaeda or ISIS (Daesh):

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books. Kamel Daoud - New York Times

I'll try to illustrate the center of the problem, past, present and future with this simple photo-montage:

Charlie Foxtrot

The the best caption I could find for these photos is...

Clusterfuck ‎(plural clusterfucks) (slang, vulgar) A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment. Wiktionary

To be continued... DS

The Israelis are playing with fire...

Nick Cook, 36, of Grand Ledge did two tours in Iraq and, as an Army troop commander, lost five soldiers. “For me, it’s very upsetting,” he said, “I watch what’s happening there. My first six months, it was very intense fighting in Baghdad, but then there was prosperity and good news. And to see that now on the verge of collapse, and knowing I lost five soldiers, it’s very hard. These kids may have died in vain.” (...) It also was a costly war financially for the U.S. The war will eventually cost U.S. taxpayers at least $2.2 trillion, including long-term care for wounded veterans, according to a 2013 study by the Costs of War project, based at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. Detroit Free Press

"If people don't do politics, others will do it for you. And when others do it for you, they can steal your rights, your democracy and your wallet." Pablo Iglesias - Podemos

The Middle East now has been torn apart by American invasions and attacks, and careless ideas about how to remake other peoples’ lives according to our own ideas about how they should live and behave and believe. It’s been like the Huns passing through: millions are dead, cities in ruins, the Muslims at war with one another. Iraq and Syria, and probably Jordan, as they exist today, and possibly Lebanon, may never recover from this. The Arabs will survive, and one day Palestine and ancient Syria and Mesopotamia will undoubtedly be reconstituted. Israel? It has existed as a modern state for little more than six decades, although it too existed in antiquity. Will modern Israel still exist at the end of this century? After all that has, and will, happen? I wonder what is the answer. William Pfaff

Through their actions, young American Jews can shape the way a Jewish state wields power. And how Jews behave with power represents a post facto referendum on the Jewish ethical tradition itself. We should tell them that if they believe Jews possess a special passion for justice, they must prove it. And they must prove it in Israel, because although justice is endangered in the United States and all over the world, only in Israel is the Jewish people’s honor at stake. Peter Beinart - Haaretz

Things change if people make them change.

Things have changed since the American people were encouraged to put Vietnam behind them and "move on". The "gate keeper" function of  "mainstream media" which worked mightily to that end is, if not dead, very, very sick and not expected to recover... especially when confronting something as stubborn as Middle Eastern reality.

Unlike "manufactured consent" social media opinion  today is largely grassroots, village-like. It is a  sullen, brooding, self-confirming, bench tested, consensus, slow to build, hard to budge and in this sense "authentic".

Many commentators discount the sullen power of public opinion, this is most unwise. Publicists and think tanks can spend billions trying to convince the public that the sky is green and the grass is blue, but to no effect, finally their efforts boil down to Redd Fox’s cheating wife, who, when caught in the act, tells her furious husband, "go on, believe your goddamn, lying eyes!".

This is now the case of American public opinion and the Middle East. Liberal-Interventionists can whine and Neocons can howl, but Americans have had enough of the Middle East, they will not be easily dragged back there again to spend blood and treasure poring sand down a rat hole and will resent mightily anyone who tries to drag them back.

Netanyahu and the settlers should not press their luck much farther, if Israel negotiates a two state solution with the Palestinians and pulls back to something like the 1967 borders, I believe that Americans would still be willing and still be able to defend that status with decisive armed force and considerable soft power, but that is certainly not the direction things are moving. What I don't think is that Americans will agree to sending their sons and daughters to die defending apartheid and ethnic cleansing or agree to pay for that out of their taxes. Time is running out. DS

Groundhog day in Iraq and... you name it

Onward and upward

Sometimes, when you get older you get what Yogi Berra called the "dejá vu all over again" feeling while observing life and especially world affairs; a little like an usher in an all day movie theater might get... the moviegoers are glued to the screen to see if the hero gets the girl or the bad guy gets his just desserts, while you who have seen this film a dozen times or more before are pulling back curtains, opening doors and spraying air freshener... From Vietnam through Iraq and back to Iraq... from 1964 to 2014: 50 years of my life watching, the drip, drip, drip, of useless bloodshed, death and stupidity...

Perhaps the time has come to put on a saffron robe, take up a begging bowl and retire to a forest hermitage to contemplate my navel or maybe just take a big dose of fruit salts. DS

Chutzpah, thy name is Tony Blair

Nobody here but us chickens boss

In a defense of his actions in Iraq, Blair attacked as "extraordinary" any notion the country would be stable if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power. (...) Tony Blair has strongly rejected claims that the 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq was to blame for the current crisis gripping the country, pointing the finger instead firmly at the Maliki government and the war in Syria. In a passionate essay published on his website, the former prime minister said it was a "bizarre" reading of the situation to argue that the US-British invasion of Iraq had allowed the growth of Sunni jihadist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis), whose fighters have swept through towns and cities north and west of Baghdad over the past week. "We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven't. We can argue as to whether our policies at points have helped or not: and whether action or inaction is the best policy. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it Guardian

Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as "gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible 'guts,' presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to." In this sense, chutzpah expresses both strong disapproval and condemnation. In the same work, Rosten also defined the term as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan." Chutzpah amounts to a total denial of personal responsibility, that renders others speechless and incredulous ... one cannot quite believe that another person totally lacks common human traits like remorse, regret, guilt, sympathy and insight. The implication is at least some degree of psychopathy in the subject, as well as the awestruck amazement of the observer at the display. Wikipedia

Today I am speechless: enjoy. DS

What is a girl like you doing in a box like that?

 The message couldn't be plainer: Israel's intransigence could cost American lives. " Mark Perry - Foreign Policy

Pfc. Erin L. McLyman, 26, of Federal Way, Wash., died March 13, 2010 in Balad, Iraq, of wounds sustained when enemy forces attacked her base with mortar fire. She was assigned to the 296th Brigade Support Battalion, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Joint Base Lews-McChord, Wash. Government Press Release (hat to Rutabaga Ridgepole)

David Seaton's News Links

When I followed up the government press release, the picture of Erin McLyman that I found in the Tacoma News Tribune, hit me like a punch in the stomach. Paint a red beard on her and she looks just like I did at 26... That's the age she was when she died.

My family tree is filled with McThises and McThats and before it turned gray I had the same Celtic red hair as Erin did, and so did my mom, and so did her mom, and for that matter so did her mom too... and Badb only knows how many more of us before that.

If this tribal business is so important in all things pertaining to the Middle East,  Erin might not have been of "The Tribe", but she sure as hell was from my tribe.

It also brought it home to me that when we hear talk about "support our troops", it's not like when I was a kid and they were "our boys"... Now it's "our girls" that are also getting cut down by enemy fire, in a useless war, in what, with no exaggeration, we could call the "the flower of their youth".

The latest Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldier reported killed in Iraq overcame drug addiction in her teen years and later served in the Air Force and Army before dying from mortar fire on her first deployment. (...) The 26-year-old is the fourth soldier from the Stryker brigade to die since it deployed in August; the first three were not combat-related.(...) And, to underscore the increasing role women play in combat zones, three of the past four Lewis-McChord soldiers to die in Iraq have been women. Tacoma WA. News Tribune

She looks vital and charming in the photo, but as you see reading the article she didn't have that easy a life. She was obviously a person of will power, able to take control of her life and possessed of a desire to escape a toxic environment and have something to be proud of.

Her short life and violent death also brings home some other things that bear thinking about. According to her home town newspaper she was proud to serve, and her family is proud of her sacrifice.

If she was and they are, we should be too.

But, to me it is a hell of a thing that we have arranged our economic system in such a way that, these days, practically the only way that a pretty working class girl with only a high school education can avoid the fate of slaving, working-poor, in a Walmart or as a waitress in a funky bar and all that goes with that and manage to achieve a structured life with good medical care and opportunities for vocational training or further education and a decent pension on retiring is to have to risk losing her life or getting mutilated in some far off land. ... And find herself buying the farm just for trying to get the things that are simply normal entitlements that go with citizenship in most developed countries.


Helluva thing. DS

Throwing shoes at politicians? Soon a barefoot world.

Muntazer al-Zaidi threw the shoe heard round the world

Zaidi's action won him widespread plaudits in the Arab world where Bush's policies have drawn broad hostility. The Lebanese television channel NTV, known for its opposition to Washington, went as far as offering a job to the journalist. In its evening news bulletin on Monday, it said that if he takes the job, he will be paid "from the moment the first shoe was thrown". Zaidi A manager at the channel told AFP that it had made its offer known to Zaidi and was ready to post bail on his behalf.(...) In Gaza, around 20 Palestinian gunmen from the Popular Resistance Committees, a hardline militant group that has been behind a spate of rocket attacks on Israel in recent weeks, staged a demonstration in support of Zaidi. Wearing fatigues and brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, they stamped on photographs of the US president and held banners in support of the journalist. Egyptian independent daily Al-Badeel carried a frontpage caricature of the US flag with the sole of a shoe replacing the stars in the top corner. Even government-owned newspapers in Cairo praised Zaidi's actions. "Pelting the American president with shoes was the best way for expressing what Iraqis and Arabs feel toward Bush," wrote Al-Gomhuria editor Mohammad Ali Ibrahim. AFP

David Seaton's News Link
Bush is lucky they don't play baseball in Iraq. If Americans start throwing shoes at politicians this could get serious.

It was a beautiful moment though and I wish I knew the Arabic for "it's about bloody time"; however, with the way things are going, if this catches on, we could soon have a barefoot world. DS

Iraq and Afghanistan: Does America still beat its wife

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"Do you still beat your wife?" is the classic "damned if you do, damned if you don't" question. There is no satisfactory answer to it.

The situation the United States finds itself in the Middle East and in Afghanistan is like a bookshelf filled with tome upon tome of similar questions.

Just as to answer to the wife beating question is self-incriminating, and based upon a hopefully false premise -- that you beat her in the first place -- so it is too if we try to describe Iraq and Afghanistan today as an "either or" proposition.

Taking troops from the "wrong war" and putting them into the "right war" is simply to make worse a shameful situation, one that might be salvaged to some extent, and then setting off merrily to fall into a bottomless pit.

The war in Iraq is/was a criminal error and the USA is stuck with the results. As Colin Powell said, "you break it, you own it." We broke it and we own it. the situation, not the country, but almost the country.

In my opinion George W. Bush is a straight forward war criminal and should be tried by the Hague Tribunal, just like Milosevic or Charles Taylor. I also agree with Barack Obama when he says that the invasion of Iraq distracted the United States from the priority of catching Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. However I would put emphasis on the use of the past tense... It was a distraction, it no longer is.

Osama bin Laden is not the priority he once was and the "terror" (that threatens the USA) is not being fought in either country today. Terror that could affect the USA is to be fought in the immigrant communities of Europe, whose passports grant them visa-free access to the USA, not in benighted Waziristan.

The United States should never have invaded Iraq... but it did and that cannot ever be changed. It is still a matter of argument whether the USA invaded Iraq for "oil" or for "Israel", I think that both were factors, but whatever the reason, it has been a disaster for both oil and for Israel.

Like many people caught in a criminal situation, the United States has to brazen it out. Repentance, Confession, Restitution, followed by Absolution, which is how Christians are supposed to handle such situations, are unfortunately none of them options for a superpower.

Much is still at stake in Iraq.

Take this example:

Do you think that people all over the world happily accept dollars in payment: dollars which the USA prints at its pleasure like bubble gum cards with nothing to back them up except a huge current account debt... and its military power? Do they accept this near worthless paper just because they think we are cute?

Try to imagine your life if America had to buy Euros in order to pay for oil.

In my opinion America's real challenge in Iraq today is to extract itself with mastodontic leisure in order not to terminally destabilize the Middle East.

Most of the Middle Eastern regimes are clients of the USA, this includes an extremely precarious Egypt, with its 70 million people, and most of the major oil producers... excluding Iran.

Any American enthusiasm for accepting Maliki's (of all people's) endorsement of a pre-established date for a complete American withdrawal from Iraq might have consequences similar to those that June to August 1914 had in Europe. A vortex of unforeseen consequences.

At this point the United States must not be seen to bow to any pressure, especially from a rogue puppet like Maliki, a man that the USA installed in the first place.

"Act in haste (invade Iraq) repent at leisure" (leave at a time entirely of our own choosing) should be the guiding principal.

The damage has already been done, it cannot be undone, there is no hurry now. If the USA gets neither oil contracts, bases nor any safety for Israel out of this disaster, it will not only be (justly) accused of criminal behavior, but also thought (justly) to be weak, feckless and stupid. On this point of being thought weak and stupid. the opinion of "nice" people is not as important as the opinion of, say, Russia and China.

If the United States, just because invading Iraq was a criminal mistake in the first place, now "declares victory" and withdraws within a time frame not entirely of its own choosing, a general war may break out between Israel and its neighbors within weeks or months. This is not a serious option and neither McCain or even Obama will finally do that, no matter what they are saying today.

Hold on, it gets worse.

Iraq is a war that strains America's armed forces "to the breaking point", but in fact has been "managed", by a relatively small number professional troops and a pack of venal contractors.

Iraq is civilized, modern country, which we have done our best to destroy, but it is still able to re-organize itself. The situation, in Iraq, miserable as it is, could drag on for years and the USA would still control some of the world's best oil fields at what would probably be a decreasing cost to its forces.

Afghanistan is a completely different story. it never was organized, it never was "civilized"... Afghan's are famous for being the most recalcitrant and bloody minded people in the world... They are famous for that and for flying kites.

To quote my favorite pundit, William Pfaff,

There is a civil war going on in Afghanistan. There may soon be a civil war in northern Pakistan. The Taliban are involved in both, and the United States has every interest in staying out of both. (...) The Taliban believe in a deeply obscurantist mixture of fundamentalist Islam and traditional tribal practice. They belong to the Pathan (or Pushtoon) people, which means that they are kinsmen to more than 40 million other Pathans in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, whom no one has conquered since Alexander the Great. (...) The vast majority of Taliban undoubtedly are ignorant even of the existence of the United States of America, other than those currently being bombed by the United States in Afghanistan or Pakistan. At one point in their tangled history they afforded hospitality to their fellow-traditionalist Muslim, the Saudi Arabian Osama ben-Ladin. That was their big mistake. The Bush administration made the bigger mistake of becoming entangled with them, for which the United States will eventually be sorry. Barack Obama should think again about what he proposes to do.

To "win" in Afghanistan would mean bringing back the draft in order to put boots on the ground of every inch of Pakistani Waziristan for the next decade (at least). It would probably cause the disintegration of Pakistan itself and destabilize all of South Asia... And still lose!!!

Iraq and Afghanistan have no real connection to each other except the idiocy of George W. Bush. They are a "do you still beat your wife?" equation, to which their is no clean answer.

The harm done in and to Iraq can never be undone, the harm the USA does in the near future, to itself and those oil rich criminals upon which our way of life so depends, is still in the hands of the US armed forces.

Afghanistan, thought erroneously to be the "war we cannot lose", should be left to its own devices.

To not do so invites the fate that Rudyard Kipling so colorfully described,

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier."

If I didn't think Barack Obama was a total opportunist who will say anything at any time to anyone, I might take what he says about Iraq and Afghanistan seriously and get seriously concerned.

One takes comfort where he can these days. DS

Afghanistan/Pakistan: the new "Vietnam"?

Pashtun tribesman - photo by Thomas Cole

David Seaton's News Links
As a blogger and as a columnist, I'd love to always be original or be a huge expert on a specific subject, but I am what is known as a "generalist", a jack of all themes and a master of none.

If I pride myself on anything, it is on my taste in experts and guides. I have learned who to ask, what to ask, and who to trust and when to trust them and when not and to all of this and all of them, I owe my living.

I happily stand on the shoulders of giants and every now and then, they put me in range of a slam dunk.

Two of my all time favorite experts, William Pfaff and Juan Cole, have both written about Barack Obama's strategy for the war in Afghanistan. A strategy which might be defined as "out of the frying pan (Iraq) and into the fire (Afghanistan). Briefly, to take troops from Iraq and take them to Afghanistan to "fight Al Qaeda".

Pfaff and Cole both coincide in their advice: Bad idea, don't do it.

Please read the quotes below with great care.

Age before beauty, first at bat, William Pfaff:

Barack Obama has announced his intention to commit himself to another disaster in the making. As president, he would dispatch reinforcements “to fight Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” During the campaign has repeatedly attacked George Bush for going to war against the wrong enemy, Iraq, in the guise of fighting Al Qaeda. Now he will reinforce the fight against the Taliban, once again in the guise of fighting Al Qaeda. The Taliban are not Al Qaeda, any more than the Iraqis were. There is a civil war going on in Afghanistan. There may soon be a civil war in northern Pakistan. The Taliban are involved in both, and the United States has every interest in staying out of both.(...) At one point in their tangled history they afforded hospitality to their fellow-traditionalist Muslim, the Saudi Arabian Osama ben-Ladin. That was their big mistake. The Bush administration made the bigger mistake of becoming entangled with them, for which the United States will eventually be sorry. Barack Obama should think again about what he proposes to do.

Now for Juan Cole:

If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don't think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.(...) We who admire him don't want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win. Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai's army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. "Al-Qaeda" was always Bin Laden's hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

Both Cole and Pfaff coincide that Osama bin Laden is not really the issue. I myself believe that Tora Bora was the unique chance to get him and the US blew it. After that the USA has "taken the bait" and fallen into Bin Laden's trap and should extract itself forthwith.

In the middle of the above extract Juan makes, for me, the most important point:

We who admire him don't want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win.

Why is this so important?

Two important premises that I argue from after reading Pfaff and Cole:

• If Barack Obama is sworn in a President of the United States, his first objective, as it is the objective of every young man who has ever been elected president, will be to get reelected president. 2012 will loom before him like a chimera and will color his every thought, his every word and his every action.
  

• Democrats with no military experience are obsessed with not being viewed as wimps (Republicans like Bush and Cheney are too, but the Republicans don't attack them). President Obama, not the world's most mannish boy to begin with, will want to prove beyond a doubt to everyone here and abroad that he has big, big, big, cojones.
  

That need to prove his masculinity was what broke Lyndon Baines Johnson, perhaps the only potentially great president after Roosevelt and cost a million dead Vietnamese and 50,000 dead Americans.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was one of the smartest, big hearted, can do, practical and experienced men to ever sit in the White House. Barack Obama is not worthy to tie LBJ's sandal, or at least nothing in his brief public life would give him any right to presume so. Therefore I think Obama would be much more vulnerable than Johnson to prove he had the "right stuff". That is the formula for disaster, because, don't kid yourself, to "win the war" would finally lead, escalation by escalation into an invasion and dismemberment of Pakistan and that is the abyss, the bottomless pit of America's self destruction if ever there was one.

Quite reasonably you could point out that McCain is also in favor of "winning".

Sure he is. The only thing he has going for him is that people may doubt his health, sanity and temper, but nobody, but nobody, anywhere, is ever going to doubt John McCain's cojones. Which means that if it becomes obvious to military experts that America has to pull out of Afghanistan or suffer the same fate there as the Soviets did, McCain will be able do it without anybody (especially the "Republican attack machine") calling him a wimp or doubting for one moment his patriotism. He has that credit, which would be vital in this situation.

As to Iraq: finally the US will have to content itself with the "legacy" of having removed Saddam Hussein and created a freely elected government in Baghdad. Drawing the line under that would allow Americans to still think that they are somehow "special" and save another few trillion dollars and God knows how many lives.

As Pfaff says,

Barack Obama calls the Iraq prime minister’s demand for an American troop withdrawal schedule “an enormous opportunity.” He is right, and it must be accepted. This is what the majority of the American public voted for, but didn’t get, from the midterm American election of 2006.

Instead the Bush government gave Americans the surge. The surge has resulted in Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s demand for a phased American withdrawal from Iraq. Bush expected the surge to produce victory, whatever that might mean, and the right to dictate the terms on which the United States would stay in Iraq, not leave.

Those terms were made known earlier this year: total American exemption from Iraqi law (meaning extra-territorial legal status), veto over Iraqi government decisions, control over Iraqi military and police operations, authority to arrest and imprison Iraqi citizens and foreigners, immunity for American contractors from Iraqi law, and control of Iraq’s airspace.

The surge did the opposite. It created the conditions for Maliki’s demand that the U.S. and its allies leave. General David Petraeus built cement walls in cities to separate Sunnis from Shi’ites. This meant reciprocal ethnic cleansing in sensitive areas, to suppress conflict.

Petraeus paid Sunni tribal groups to fight foreigners – the self-named “al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” – and to keep order in their areas. He encouraged the Maliki government to impose its authority on the radical militia controlled by the young Shi’ite leader, Moqtada al-Sadr.

This created the conditions in which rival power groups, as in Basra, provisionally settled the power issues at stake between them, which would have (and possibly will again) produce conflict when the occupation ends.

The surge segregated groups, imposed truces, and made provisional arrangements to buy peace between factions. It thus created conditions in which the Iraqis want the occupation to end.

Some in Washington don’t want this because the Pentagon has built bases throughout Iraq it certainly does not want to give up, and the State Department has built in the Green Zone the world’s biggest American embassy, complete with tennis courts, swimming pools, leaking roofs and flooding toilets, and a fast-food shopping mall complete with blast shelters, just for Americans, and is anxious to move in and run Iraq. Is all this to be sacrificed to an unwelcome Iraqi sovereignty?

No one knows; but it begins to look that way, as according to the latest reports, American and Iraqi officials have now abandoned negotiations, leaving it to a new American president to take up the matter.

Barack Obama, if elected, would do well to immediately accept the Maliki demand, and leave no U.S. forces behind that could pull Americans back into Iraq. Give the Iraq government what it wants, and leave the disaster of the past six years totally on the account of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney

Who knows, if the US did that, maybe someday, when today's dead have turned to dust, the Iraqis might even feel grateful.

But to use that retreat to up the ante in Afghanistan, thus ignoring the experience of both the British and the Russians there, would be the height of folly and lead to disasters that would turn the Vietnam horror into a dry footnote in the theses of future Chinese historians. DS

Yes we can't... A belief we can change in

Speaking of the dogs that do not bark, the most conspicuous silence maintained during the Democratic primary campaign was on the subject of Iraq and how, or how not, to leave it. As the greatest single issue in the 2006 American congressional election was, by general acknowledgment, ending the war in Iraq, and the public delivered a powerful mandate to the U.S. government to end the war and get out of Iraq, why has so little been said about this by the Democratic candidates? William Pfaff

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The New York Review of Books is a treasure trove of goodies and like Forrest Gump's chocolate box, you never know what you are going to pull out. The present edition has a marathon book review-bibliography of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by Thomas Powers, entitled: "Iraq: Will We Ever Get Out?", where, after an exhaustive review of ten books on the subject he comes to the following conclusions:

There is a working assumption among the American people that a new president enters the White House free of responsibility for the errors of the past, free to set a new course in any program or policy, and therefore free—at the very least in constitutional theory, and perhaps even really and truly free—to call off a war begun by a predecessor. No one would expect something so dramatic on the first day of a new administration but it remains a fact that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, and the power that allowed one president to invade Iraq would allow another to bring the troops home.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the current presidential campaign have promised to do just that—not precipitously, not recklessly, not without care to give the shaky government in Baghdad time and the wherewithal to pick up the slack. But Obama and Clinton have both promised that the course would be changed on the first day; ending the American involvement in the Iraqi fighting would be the new goal, troop numbers would be down significantly by the middle of the first year, and within a reasonable time (not long) the residual American force would be so diminished in size that any fair observer might say the war was over, for the Americans at least, and the troops had been brought home.

The presumptive Republican candidate, John McCain, has pledged to do exactly the opposite—to "win" the war, whatever that means, and whatever that takes. Politicians often differ by shades of nuance. Not this time. The contrast of McCain and his opponents on this question is stark, and if they can be taken at their word, Americans must expect either continuing war for an indefinite period with McCain or the anxieties and open questions of turning the war over to the Iraqi government for better or worse with Obama or Clinton. Which is it going to be?

Getting out of Iraq will require just as much resolution as it took to get in—and the same kind of resolution: a willingness to ignore the consequences. The consequence hardest to ignore will be the growing power and influence of Iran, which Bush has described as one of the two great security threats to the US. Israel shares this view of Iran. No new president will want to run the risk of being thought soft on Iran. This is where the military error exacts a terrible price. A political conflict transformed into a military conflict requires a military resolution, and those, famously, come in two forms—victory or defeat. Getting out means admitting defeat.

Is it possible that the new president will have that kind of resolution? I think not; to my ear Clinton and Obama don't sound drained of hope or bright ideas, determined to cut losses and end the agony. Why should they? They're coming in fresh from the sidelines. Getting out, giving up, admitting defeat are not what we expect from the psychology of newly elected presidents who have just overcome all odds and battled through to personal victory. They've managed the impossible once; why not again? Planning for withdrawals might begin on Day One, but the plans will be hostage to events.

At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment somewhere between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going.

We are committed in Afghanistan. We are not ready to leave Iraq. In both countries our friends are in trouble. The pride of American arms is at stake. The world is watching. To me the logic of events seems inescapable. Unless something quite unexpected happens, four years from now the presidential candidates will be arguing about two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one going into its ninth year, the other into its eleventh. The choice will be the one Americans hate most—get out or fight on.

That is about the best summing up of the situation that I have read yet. The entire article is well worth looking at.

We are at the Rubicon and suddenly all the politicians have taken out poles and started to fish.

As William Pfaff, for me the best foreign affairs columnist in the English language, writes:

If a new American government – an Obama administration, let us say – wanted to end the war it would also need to negotiate with the regional actors who are sponsors or defenders of Iraqi factions and have their own national interests bound up in the outcome. Iran is the most important. Until now, one of its interests has been to make life as hellish as possible for the Americans in Iraq, up to a certain point. I say this interest prevails only up to a point because Iran presumably does not want chaos next door, nor on the other hand, a war with America.

Otherwise the Turks, Saudi Arabians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians all have their own stakes in the affair. To unknot this diplomatic conundrum a genuine ceasefire and compromise must be fostered among the Iraqis, with American and regional involvement. This – it must be noted – is true only if a future Obama government really wants to end the war and leave.

Would it really wish to do so? This remains to be confirmed. The Bush administration has always opposed leaving Iraq, and the Republican candidate, John McCain, proclaims his certainty that “victory” is possible. In both cases this means maintaining the huge permanent American military bases that have been built in Iraq, and a gigantic and permanent American political presence, radiating its influence (and military threat) throughout the Middle East. It also requires an Iraqi government which is a satellite of Washington.

This is the expectation or objective today in most of the American foreign policy community. It would seem to be accepted, as well, by Hillary Clinton.

It makes it plain why nobody during the Democratic primary campaign dared say anything of substance about withdrawal from Iraq. Even if the vast majority of Americans want peace and troop withdrawal, a large and powerful part of the American government and political and policy communities does not. It is a dynamite subject. It will remain one.

My opinion is that the United States won't be able to leave either war without relinquishing its role as the world's defining power. The incredible living standard of Americans that have a living standard depends in great part on the ability to define the world. This power will not be surrendered willingly.

Staying in the war will mean, however, such a drain on America's resources and influence that hegemonic power will slip through its fingers anyway and America will fade out of the Middle East like the Turks and the English before us.

The contradictions of power destroy power. The desire to dominate, dominates the dominator.

An uncannily apt historical example of what is happening to the USA would be the story of the Spain's wars in the Netherlands during the reign of the Hapsburgs. What broke the world's greatest power of the time was the "Thirty Years War". Before now, it is hard to find a better example of how a dominant position was pissed away than how the Hapsburgs ran Spain into the ground.

Only thirty years? Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates and many others speak of a war without end. Here is Secretary of Defense Gates speaking to the cadets of West Point on April 21rst of this year:

A drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq is inevitable over time – the debate you hear in Washington is largely about pacing. But the kind of enemy we face today – violent jihadist networks – will not allow us to remain at peace. What has been called the “Long War” is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies. To paraphrase the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, we may not be interested in the long war, but the long war is interested in us.

He even quotes Trotsky!

Americans have trouble believing in the iron laws of karma and the inevitable remorse of, "we have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done."

The die is cast. DS

Middle East: the skinny

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Charles Krauthammer column in the Washington Post is what you might call a "neocon watershed". Here is what Krauthammer wants:

During the Cold War, we were successful in preventing an attack not only on the United States but also on America's allies. We did it by extending the American nuclear umbrella -- i.e., declaring that any attack on our allies would be considered an attack on the United States.

(...)We should do the same to keep nuclear peace in the Middle East. It would be infinitely less dangerous (and therefore more credible) than the Cold War deterrence because there will be no threat from Iran of the annihilation of the United States. Iran, unlike the Soviet Union, would have a relatively tiny arsenal incapable of reaching the United States.

How to create deterrence? The way John Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis. President Bush's greatest contribution to nuclear peace would be to issue the following declaration, adopting Kennedy's language while changing the names of the miscreants:

"It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran."

This should be followed with a simple explanation: "As a beacon of tolerance and as leader of the free world, the United States will not permit a second Holocaust to be perpetrated upon the Jewish people."

This policy -- the Holocaust Declaration -- would not be tested during the current administration, because Iran is not going to go nuclear before January 2009. But it would establish a firm benchmark that would outlive this administration. Every future president -- and every serious presidential candidate -- would have to publicly state whether or not the Holocaust Declaration remains the policy of the United States. (underlining mine)

This proposal is what the neocons think they can salvage from the Iraq debacle. In a sense it is a white flag.

Israel has literally bet the farm on American hegemony and if that is fading, Israel finds itself painted into a corner. As I wrote in a previous post, "For the lack of CHIPAC",

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was supposed to set in motion a domino effect which would lead to new democratic regimes in Iran and the Arab world that would recognize the state of Israel. Instead it has only hastened the decline of American influence there and around the world.(...) Probably a lot of Israel's present behavior is explained by the hysteria-producing feeling that this is the "last dance": the "last days" of the White Man's Burden.(...) In a few years the Israelis simply won't have the same levers of power in their hands they do today and they will be forced to make what Ariel Sharon called "painful concessions", only a bit more painful than Sharon ever dreamed (dreams?). This is not a plot or a conspiracy, it is simply that the world is no longer a white soliloquy.

The bottom line is that all of Israel's eggs are in America's basket and if the United States ground forces ever manage to extricate themselves from Iraq, committing them again to fight in the Middle East would be next to impossible.

Perhaps the only thing that could ever bring back the American boots on the ground in the Middle East would be to avoid having to execute some of the clauses in Krauthammer's contract.

I am very sure that Charles Krauthammer doesn't just wake up in the morning and think it would be nice if the United States committed itself to vaporizing 70,049,262 people. This is a very serious proposal that has been discussed at length and that Krauthammer has been chosen to float. This is an opening move in a new game.

It will be interesting to see if any of the presidential candidates sign on this proposal in the coming months. DS

Petraeus reads The Rubaiyat

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On the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the war, the commanding General David Petraeus went to Washington and argued before the US Congress against the promised withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

He bleakly refused to offer any timetable for resuming reductions or to estimate how many U.S. soldiers would be in Iraq by year's end. "We haven't turned any corners, we haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel; the champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator," he said. "And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible."

Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times:

The Maliki debacle in Basra, (...) made it stunningly clear — after a cease-fire was brokered in Iran — that we’re spending $3 trillion as our own economy goes off a cliff so that Iran can have a dysfunctional little friend.

And David Ignatius in the Washington Post:

Iran's covert campaign to reshape Iraq has been clear since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Iranian intelligence officers prepared lists of Iraqis for assassination in the weeks and months after the war began; they sent Iranian-trained mullahs to take over the Shiite mosques of central and southern Iraq that had been smashed by Saddam Hussein; they pumped an estimated $12 million a week in covert financial support to their allies as the January 2005 election approached; they infiltrated all the major Shiite political parties, and many of the Sunni ones, too.

The Iranians have fixed the political game. They are on all sides at once. They have links to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Dawa party; they funnel money to the Badr organization of Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, which is a key recruiting ground for the Iraqi army; they provide weapons, training and command and control for the most extreme factions of the Mahdi Army. Moqtada al-Sadr, the Mahdi Army's nominal leader, is actually living in the Iranian holy city of Qom, suffering from what intelligence sources believe may be clinical depression. A useful ploy would be to invite him to come home and see if he can be drawn into negotiations.

The Iranians were able to start the recent trouble in Basra and Baghdad through one set of operatives, then negotiate a cease-fire through another. In short, they play the Iraqi lyre on all its strings.

Fighting a war against Iran is a bad idea. But fighting a proxy war against it in Iraq, where many of our key allies are manipulated by Iranian networks of influence, may be even worse.

How can the United State extricate itself from this tar baby?

Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Daily News:

After watching hours of the dreary Senate hearings on Iraq on Tuesday, I have only one remaining question: Why would anybody want to be the next President of the United States?

There is no clear way forward or out of Iraq. Beyond changes on the margins - forcing the Iraqi government to pay more reconstruction costs, for example - the most likely prospect is more of the same slog in the hopes Iraqis eventually will build for themselves the country we are unable to build for them.

I say that despite knowing that Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have promised to withdraw our troops within a year or so, no matter the ground conditions. I don't believe it's a promise they can keep.

Obama admitted as much on Tuesday by creating big-time wiggle room for himself. He told Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker that everybody wants a "successful resolution" and that nobody was demanding a "precipitous withdrawal" of our troops. He also seemed to be seeking a way of defining limited victory rather than sticking with his vow of a rapid retreat.

It was a grownup moment for him, one that reflects the stubborn reality of Iraq. As bad as it is, and it is disastrously bad, it could get far worse if we suddenly pull the plug on our role.

Obama and Clinton had been ducking that issue in their primary battle, but ducking will not be an option in the general election or in the Oval Office. Faced with the prospect of an all-out civil war, maybe genocide and almost certainly a failed state taken over by Islamic fundamentalists or Iran, the next President will be forced to fight in some fashion.

At this moment numerous observers are predicting that the United States will attack Iran in the near future and that Israel will use the ensuing confusion to simultaneously attack Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. At that point you might be able to double the value of your automobile by filling the gas tank.

Much has been made of the scars left on the American psyche by the war in Vietnam, but I think a quite a bit of that was self pity at having lost a war for the first time: of being "losers".

There was much self-dramatization involved in both those who were against the war in Vietnam and those who were for it. To some extent the obscenity and the needlessness of Vietnam cut through the overstimulated banality of everyday American life. A hint of reality. For many of us defeat in Vietnam was just another of the drugs my generation experimented with.

The United States had stumbled, but the momentum of the cold war gave an ideological cover and sense to Vietnam's senselessness. At the same time the war in Vietnam itself and the consequences of losing it had little or no effect on American's standard of living and that standard of living has become the essence of America's being: wealth is America's mystical body. Vietnam didn't touch that.

Iraq is different. If wealth is America's mystical body, gasoline is its holy spirit.

There is in the war in Iraq something of the inevitable, the inescapable; of winning the lottery in reverse: something old and dead and clinging that is deeply foreign to the American genius.

One of the most attractive traits of the American character is its belief that it is possible to rewind life and erase the past; a belief in the endless possibilities of new beginnings.

However, before committing ground troops to the Middle East, perhaps someone in the White House should have read the classic Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, who wrote in The Rubaiyat

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

A more un-American sentiment is hard to imagine. Muslims are always being accused of being fatalistic... Go to their world and learn why. DS

I just couldn't stomach writing about Petraeus today

Jyoti Amge, the world's smallest teenager

David Seaton's News Links
General Petraeus is in Washington and I know I'm going to have to write about Iraq again sometime this week, I'm even going to get paid for it... but I'm going to hold off as long as I can...

Depressing is not exactly the word... The war in Iraq is like... I dunno, writing about Iraq is like... like playing the part of Bill Murray in "Ground Hog Day"... on LSD, or like rowing a boat with a clothes line.

HDS Greenway has got it down pretty good in the Boston Globe:

"The American public hears no realistic plans from Democrats on how to disengage from this fruitless enterprise. McCain talks about a 100-year troop presence as if Iraq were a homogeneous, industrial democracy like Japan, (...) In the meantime, the through-the-looking-glass atmosphere surrounding whatever Bush says about Iraq becomes ever-more bizarre."

After surviving all the atomic perils of decades of cold war, who would have ever thought that the USA would attempt suicide in a place, that if God were to give the earth an enema, he would surely insert the hose?

So today, instead of Iraq, I have decided to pay homage to this lovely little person, Jyoti Amge from India. Here is what the agencies have to say about her:

A teenager from India who stands at a tiny 1ft 11in (58cm) tall is the smallest girl in the world.

Jyoti Amge, 14, is shorter than the average two-year-old child and only weighs 11lb (5kg).

Despite this, she goes to a regular school in Nagpur, central India, where she has her own small desk and chair, and her classmates treat her like any other student.

She said: 'I am proud of being small. I love all the attention I get. I'm not scared of being small and I don't regret it.

She will even be releasing an album with her favourite Indian pop star, the bhangra/rap star Mika Singh.

Jyoti is ambitious and hopes to work as a Bollywood actress one day.

She said: 'I would love to work in a big city like Mumbai, act in films and travel to London and America."

I love the line, "'I am proud of being small. I love all the attention I get. I'm not scared of being small and I don't regret it." She is obviously intelligent and from the expression on her face sitting next to the baby, she also has a mischievous sense of humor and must be full of fun. Irresistible!

Personally, I think that if a drip like Paris Hilton can get all the attention she gets, this adorable tiny creature is going to be a (adjective that means "big" or "huge" without being a joke) star.

Jyoti Amge should be making a world tour, not Alan Greenspan. DS

Admirals, foxes, cabbages and kings

Admiral William Fallon

"A fateful debate is now taking place at the Pentagon that will determine the pace of U.S. military withdrawals for what remains of President Bush's term. Senior Pentagon officials -- including, we hear, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, Army Chief of Staff George Casey and Admiral Fallon -- have been urging deeper troop cuts in Iraq beyond the five "surge" combat brigades already scheduled for redeployment this summer.(...) their rationale for troop withdrawals seems to have less to do with conditions in Iraq and more with fear that the war is putting a strain on the military as an institution." Wall Street Journal

'You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people,' Colin Powell told the president. 'You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You'll own it all.' Pottery Barn Rule

"In War, victory should be swift, if victory is slow, men tire, morale sags. Sieges exhaust strength; protracted campaigns strain the public treasury. If men are tired, moral low, strength exhausted, treasure spent; then the feudal lords will exploit the disarray and attack. This even the wisest will be powerless to mend.(...) No nation has ever benefited from a protracted war.(...) The skillful warrior never conscripts troops a second time " Sun Tzu, 500 BC

"It’s probably Fallon’s good sense that made it impossible for him to work for this administration." Cato Institute

David Seaton's News Links
Admiral Fallon's revelations in Esquire, nearly constitute what in 19th century Spain and Latin America was called a pronunciamiento. In a sense, so was the intelligence report that Iran had dropped its nuclear program. This is probably as close to a coup d'etat as you can get in the United States today. The military and intelligence establishments are defying the President. Fallon has taken early "retirement" in order to publicize his views and throw a monkey wrench into the neocon/Israeli juggernaut to have the United States attack Iran before there is a changing of the guard in the White House.

I have very little to add to the many articles and columns being written about the Fallon affair. I would only underline the concern that I detect among the professional soldiers for the deteriorating state of the armed forces as an institution. This concern goes back before Bush. The Clinton administration was very impatient with the Powell Doctrine, "What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?" asked Madeline Albright. And although Barack Obama wants to "change the mindset that got us into the war", his recently canned adviser, Samantha Power wants to send the US armed forces all over the world to prevent genocide and stabilize failed states and bring democracy to the benighted heathen. Über-neocon Robert Kagan has this to say about Obama's military philosophy:

Obama wants to increase defense spending. He wants to add 65,000 troops to the Army and recruit 27,000 more Marines. Why? To fight terrorism. He wants the American military to "stay on the offense, from Djibouti to Kandahar," and he believes that "the ability to put boots on the ground will be critical in eliminating the shadowy terrorist networks we now face."

This endless patrolling of the world's sewers is something that the US armed forces desperately don't want to do. I think that it is forgotten that in many ways the armed forces are a community of families, deeply rooted in American life, with a continuity over generations. The recent film "In the Valley of Elah" gives some of the flavor of that.

Probably the only reason I am skeptical that John McCain is eager to follow the Bush/neocon/liberal-interventionist doctrine of endless tilting at windmills all over the globe is that his father and grandfather were US Navy admirals. The Republican candidate spent his entire life until entering politics in the US Navy: it is his home town, his youthful reality and dreams. Politics was a second choice career for him when he saw that his "lost" years as a prisoner of war were a detour from the chain of command that made it practically impossible for him to be an admiral like his father and grandfather.

I just can't imagine anyone with that background using up the lives and families of the men and women he grew up with in fool's errands, which may in fact not even be in America's greater interest. Not even Colin Powell himself could have such deep emotional ties to the military community that McCain must have. I can just imagine the hell he would catch from his Navy wife of a mother.

Nobody campaigning for the presidency is going to say a word that would trouble or concern AIPAC, so I discount all the words that all of them pronounce. I am only looking at their lives and trying to see their deepest motivations. It may be innocent on my part, but I feel that McCain's threats to bomb Iran follow the teachings of the timeless master of strategists, Sun Tzu:

"Strong words combined with an aggressive advance are a sign of impending retreat."

This is the context within which I see Admiral Fallon's "pronunciamiento". DS

The world of Charlie-Foxtrot

David Seaton's News Links
There is something nightmarish about the meteoric ascension of Barack Obama, a perfection of the same surrealist stupidity, of national foot shooting, that gave the world George W. Bush; as if the United States was imitating ancient Rome, where the Emperor Caligula made a consul of his horse. Caligula only did it once.

"Strange" is a good word, but there is a better one.

What do you call it when many problems, all with many intersecting vectors, each with its own conflicting internal contradictions, all of them in mutual contradiction with each other, all of which then line up like planets in a malignant horoscope? A series of thesis and antithesis with a dialectical result that can only produce a sinister synthesis?

The US military calls this construction a "clusterfuck"; sometimes known by the NATO, phonetic-alphabet acronym, "Charlie-Foxtrot".

The United States finds itself at this moment immersed in full-spectrum, multilayered, universal, clusterfuck of historic proportions.

Just for starters, while the Israelis continue to do what they do to the Palestinians, atomic bomb brewing, Holocaust denying, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just warmly received in Baghdad. So much for Iraq.

Turning to atomic Pakistan and that failed state, opium farm, Afghanistan, Arnaud de Borchgrave has this to say:

Replacing U.S. influence topside in Pakistan — or still competing for it — is Saudi Arabia and its protege Nawaz Sharif, the man deposed by Mr. Musharraf in 1999 and exiled to the Saudi kingdom for 10 years. He flew home last fall after Mrs. Bhutto's return, this time generously bankrolled by his Saudi friends. Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries (with Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates) to recognize the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The new triumvirate gradually superseding President Bush's "most trusted non-NATO ally" is made up of ISI, Saudi Arabia and Nawaz Sharif. This does not bode well for the future of NATO in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul controls only a third of the country while a resurgent Taliban is now solidly entrenched in 10 percent of the narco-state, according to National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell. And tribal leaders call the shots in the rest of a barren, medieval country whose opium poppy production generates more than two-thirds of its gross domestic product (and funds Taliban's insurgency). The most optimistic estimate calls for the United States and NATO to remain engaged, with increased military and economic assets, for another three to five years. Ten years would be more realistic. Speaking not for attribution, a Darwi-speaking U.S. official, back from a wide-ranging inspection trip to Afghanistan, said: "The corruption defies imagination. It has to rank as the worst in the world." Mr. Karzai, he said, used to be called the mayor of Kabul. No more, said my informant. Now Mr. Karzai doesn't even control the capital. Most of his ministers have U.S. visas up to date — just in case. More important, NATO could fracture and founder over the Afghan commitment. Violence and terrorism could then quickly escalate across the world. READ IT ALL

And then of course, there is the economy. James Howard Kunstler is the "Sultan of Clusterfuck", America's most entertaining prophet of doom. Here is what he has to say about the economy:

When you introduce perversities into an economic system, they invariably end up expressing themselves as distortions. The economy that evolved the past two decades, driven by the perverse securitization of wishes and frauds, will now express itself in a stark cratering of American living standards. Incomes and jobs will vanish, massive quantities of stuff will collect dust on the WalMart shelves, the fragile infrastructures of daily life will go to shit, and there will be political hell to pay. Every attempt to avoid a straight-up workout of our massive losses, will represent another layer of perversity and more consequent destructive distortions. I feel sorry for the next president. Even as he takes his oath of office, the nation will be flying apart like a seized-up engine. READ IT ALL

Into this world sails the USS Barack Obama, brilliant law student who has practiced little law, community activist, state legislator, three years in the US Senate... the man of the hour.

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, with his wife, Valerie Plame, were a couple at the center of the fight against the rush to war in Iraq: Wilson's is the most damning dismantling of Barack Obama that I have read so far.

Joseph C. Wilson: Obama's Hollow "Judgment" and Empty Record - Huffington Post
I was involved in that debate in every step of the effort to prevent this senseless war and I profoundly resent Obama's distortion of George Bush's folly into Hillary Clinton's responsibility. I was in the middle of the debate in Washington. Obama wasn't there. I remember what was said and done. In fact, the administration lied in order to secure support for its war of choice, including cooking the intelligence and misleading Congress about the intent of the authorization. Senator Clinton's position, stated in her floor speech, was in favor of allowing the United Nations weapons inspectors to complete their mission and to build a broad international coalition. Bush rejected her path. It was his war of choice.There is no credible reason to conclude that Obama would have acted any differently in voting for the authorization had he been in the Senate at that time. Indeed, he has said as much.(...) Obama's gyrations on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran are not the actions of one imbued with superior intuitive judgment, but rather the machinations of a political opportunist looking to avoid having his fingerprints on any issue that might be controversial, and require real judgment, while preserving his freedom to bludgeon his adversary for actually taking positions as elected office demands. It is hard to discern whether Senator Obama is a man of principle, but it is clear that he is not a man of substance. And that judgment, based on his hollow record, is inescapable. READ IT ALL

Well, as soldiers often say when in the midst of a clusterfuck, "shit happens". DS