Is Tiny Tim going to cry? Gonna get a spanking when he gets home to Broad and Wall tonight?
Poor Paul looks like he’s STILL not sure the Prez’ll give the word.
Major piece in February’s Harper’s. Hats off to them.
The center does not hold.
Obama has done nothing but talk on this.
Another in Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frog interviews on the National Security Apparat.
Very worthwhile — as they’ve all been. This is number 18. She’s leading one of the most important discussions around.
Ellsberg is measured in assessing Obama, and even so the judgments are bleak. Syncs well with my own black-biled broodings.
Touches on the political consequences of allowing high hopes to fail for lack of leadership. Ellsberg doesn’t mention the Carter-Reaganism dynamic, but what he says brings it to mind.
And he puts the puzzle of the escalation decision in clear terms, observing that neither the top Pentagon brass, nor NS Advisor Jms Jones (retired four-star general), nor Rahm Emanuel — with the fine DC instincts and his eye on the 2010 elections — were pusihng the escalation. (Nor Biden.) And some were on record against it.
Is Obama more of a militarist than Petraeus, whose recent interview in Newsweek shows a mind less than persuaded of any successful outcome over there? Where did the decision come from?
Westmoreland and LBJ
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Recall Col. Flectcher Prouty’s history of the American war in Vietnam — which he thinks began almost accidentally, with a big push by Textron and its lobbyists to get the Gov to start buying Bell “Huey” helicopters en masse.
As conglomerate Textron — then as now a major war supplier — was preparing a corporate takeover of Bell Helicopters, a guy from Yale working on Wall Street kept showing up at Prouty’s office atop the Air Force staff in the Pentagon — trying to sell the notion that tactical helicopters would revolutionize counterinsurgency ops …
The Air Force kept saying no. Finally somebody got to somebody on the Nat’l Security Council staff in the White House, and the order came across the river: Let’s buy some more helicopters — and let’s base them across the border from Laos, rather than where all the shootin’s going on. Yeah, let’s put them in Vietnam.
The Huey program was greenlighted — but under CIA auspices. Which perhaps rounds around to explain why a guy from Yale was lead salesman
The CIA had opened its first official spy store in Saigon in 1954 (post French defeat at Dien Bien Phu) but our involvement there reached back into the war, when the OSS helped to arm Ho’s nationalists against the Japanese. Some say that the same guys now with CIA badges, including Edwin Lansdale, were covertly on the ground again well before ‘54, working again with locals to oust the French …
In any case. Prouty writes that each new CIA helicopter base in Vietnam needed 500 soldiers to provide security. And the soldiers needed hundreds of support personnel.
And when the bases started drawing fire from local insurgents even more advisors were needed to keep the peace.
Wasn’t long before 16,000 men were in country, under CIA command, shooting at insurgents from behind barricades as the flyboys bounced and bombed around the South trying to figure out how to win their hearts and minds with helicopters.
Then a new President abruptly took office persuaded it was time to let the Pentagon clean house.
Obama and Stanley
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The obvious parallel is the CIA’s drone campaign, based in Afghanistan, attacking Pakistan, which began under lame duck Bush-Cheney, August 2008, rather late — perhaps to be sure it was online fait accompli before the new prez came in.
The latter again brings to mind the Bay of Pigs — in particular the panicked revisions to the plan that went on between November 1960, when Kennedy shocked the planners by defeating Nixon, and January when he took office.
Steps were taken to downsize the scheme (quite consciously beyond hope of success) and to persuade the new White House team that the raid had been approved by Eisenhower (not so — rather, by VP Nixon, who headed the CIA oversight committee in Ike’s White House).
The raid came 70 days into Kennedy’s presidency. He wasn’t quick enough to choke it off, but deserves great credit for frustrating the prime motive by refusing its gambit — ie, refusing to send in the Marines to rescue the raid (and execute regime change).
And, of course, he never escalated with the Pentagon in Vietnam. That came after Johnson won his ‘64 election.
Obama within weeks of taking office enlarged the CIA drone program.
And now, against the advice and/or instincts of Jones, Mullen, Eikenberry, even it seems Petraeus (four four-star generals) as well as VP Biden and CoS Rahm, he’s escalating the war.
Ellsberg pointedly compares Obama’s decision to that of Johnson (under whom and closely with he worked) in 1965 — and sadly laughs at the notion of turning on a dime and getting out in July 2011. The commitment, he insists, cannot but be anything but indefinite re both time and manpower.
More than puzzling. Why did subordinate Stanley McChrystal win this policy debate? Why was he even involved in it?
And what is the War Aim over there? I STILL don’t see one, and neither it seems does the senior brass.
Let’s see, who makes the Predator drone? Expensive little bombs ….. Who’s their anchor banker …?
This story about AIG and 2008, although in essence not important, could be used by the White House to begin the business of easing Tiny Tim into the dumpster.
If the White House were so minded. No evidence yet that it is. Reactions worth watching.
The USA: No longer a country for man, woman or beast.
A fortiori, I don’t think the Four Days in September were without significance:
A feature piece in the Times this morning airs the growling of anonymous generals about the President “pulling out the rug” from beneath them in Afghanistan, and moving to cut their budget. The nerve …
“The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.”
The horrendous suicide bomb attack today on Iranian soil and top military leaders, apparently by native unhappy Baluchi campers, is very dangerous for Team Obama and the world.
Tehran has immediately accused Washington and the Brits of being behind the attack.
A bit odd, to do so so quickly, and given that the nuke talks are about to get underway.
Might the Iranians have clear intelligence about US/Brit support of the Jundallah group that’s claiming responsibility?
In any case, if Tehran’s claims are serious, then the worries I had a year ago here — of Obama getting led by the nose into something he doesn’t see and can’t control — on the model of JFK at the Bay of Pigs …
Those worries become relevant — even if, as one hopes, the western so-called intelligence apparats, including Israel’s, had nothing to do with today’s attack.
The Pakis, of course, invaded South Waziristan in force last week, in reaction to the bombing of the Paki Army HQ outside Islamabad the week before.
South Waziristan is just north of Baluchistan, all within Pakistan’s borders. And it’s apparently Baluchi separatists in Iran behind today’s attack.
So — just a thought — PERHAPS the Paki invasion of Waziristan has led unhappy campers there or just south to undertake this attack in Iran as a way to invite Iran into the mess and thus make things more difficult for Islamabad?
Just a thought, based on nothing yet n the news. There was something suspicious in Islamabad’s reaction to the bomb of its army HQ last week, as noted here: the immediate statement by Islamabad that an invasion of Waziristan was now called for. We may be looking at a chain of events much more tightly knit, re causality, than the news we read is able to convey.
Well, it seems Marshal Sir Jock Stirrupwas on target:
John Kerry — who has been Obama’s stalking canary (?) for weeks, loudly making the argument for no more troops — today told the Sunday talk shows that another 40,000 is maybe okay if yadda yadda yadda …
There is nothing to win over there. The LBJ precedent looms.
Ed in a Nutshell: The essence of the Donkey strategy is this: The regulatory scheme passed now will make the health insurance business unprofitable, opening up, in time, a natural space for a public plan. As in Florida, re house insurance, post hurricanes.
A busy, bustlilng Saturday for health reform stuff:
To begin: A pretty strong attack by the Prez on the corporate insurers:
Well, I say bravo. Bravo.
But Charles Blow complained of Obama’s backpedaling and sloth today in the NY Times.
I wrote him this reply:
1. It seems to me the waiting (for Obama) is about over.
The health care bill will be signed probably before New Year’s, but if not, before Easter.
And the Rubicon decision re whether to continue escalating in Pakghanistan will be public before Halloween, it seems.
2. As for substance:
A. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate how hard it is, especially for an ingenue (which is what we elected and why in part we did), to tell the National Security Apparat that they can’t have a war that they’ve already waded into and badly want.
A president knows mostly what the Briefers of the Apparat choose to tell him. To reject their advice takes a lot of moxy, nerve and, unfortunately, experience. This is only one reason the Apparat is the strongest institution in Washington.
B. As for health insurance:
(i) The Public Option was declared dead the day after the Prez gave his speech re HC in September. All the loyal donkey pundits said so.
But the PO seems to be reduxing as the congressional processes wind on. The PriceCoopers report that the insurers tried to hit the Senate on the head with last week seems to have backfired — kicking sleeping dogs, as it were, who now may bite.
(ii) But the mainstream Donkey strategy is still, I believe:
– to regulate the corporate insurers down to grocery-store level profit margins, across say five years
– at which point they will bail out, as the house insurers did in Florida after the horrendous 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons
– at which point a public plan will naturally take their place, as the state-run Citizens insurance program now provides affordable house insurance in Florida where no one else will.
If this is indeed the strategy — as the structure of Obama’s Sept speech and Bill Clinton soon after on the Daily Show each suggested — then … I’m not sure the sluggish White House approach has been inapt.
It IS frustrating to watch. But that’s a Peanut Gallery problem. I’m not yet sure it’s an Inner Circle problem.
Cheers.
Paul Street complained in well informed style about the Peace Prize and Obama’s war-making trail so far.
I REPLIED:
Nevertheless, he did say Woah on a Sunday talk show a few weeks ago, triggering the current Pakghanistan policy debate — and outing McChrystal.
My blog the past 11 months is full of disapppointed rants re the people Obama kept on or hired atop the Nat’l Security Apparat, including a post headlined (like yours) with Orwell’s name after the surreal scene in Strasbourg.
But to think Obama had much of a choice about, e.g., Stanley Mac’s appointment is perhaps to overestimate a callow president’s power to reject the truths and advice of the Briefers of the Apparat.
His chief failing, it seems to me, is that of an ingenue, not a Kissinger; and those of us who elected the ingenue bear some responsibility.
During the campaign I thought Hillary was the better choice to feed into this sausage grinder. She was ready for battle and knows how to take a bullet. Obama seemed better suited as her successor.
But one goes to peace with the President one has. The policy at this moment is in the air, and for the first time since Gates-Mullen picked up the pieces post Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz. If Obama fails to make this opportunity a turning point, I’ll jump on the bandwagon damning him simply.
But I’m hoping he manages to execute a change in rough accord with the Cairo speech that will mark the end of the beginning of his foreign policy odyssey.
