Nevertheless there’s value — during these weeks when the Pakghanistan policy hangs in the balance — in his assessment of the President and the Pentagon.
When he compares Obama to his old friend Jack Kennedy, he shakes his head.
“He’s twice the intellectual that Jack was, but Jack knew the great world. Remember he spent a long time in the navy, losing ships. This kid [Obama] has never heard a gun fired in anger. He’s absolutely bowled over by generals, who tell him lies and he believes them.
He hasn’t done anything. … You have to go by what people tell you. He’s like that. He’s not ready for prime time and he’s getting a lot of prime time on his plate at once.”
Very much my worry during the interregnum last year, when it became clear that Obama would retain the Bush-Cheney Pentagon leadership in its entirety.
It’s been a slippery slope since the spring of 2008, when Obama, the apparent Democratic candidate, was briefed by the Apparat on Pakghanistan and (like McCain) responded, “Sure, anything you guys say.”
He might have said No then, rejecting the Briefers (which is hard to do and dangerous if done).
‘We’re getting out of Afghanistan if I’m elected!’ he might have told the crowds all summer. But it would have been harder to be elected. He chose to go along.
Next Opportunity: Post election. The best opportunity. And the way to seize it was to replace the uniformed leadership atop the Pentagon, perhaps retaining Gates as Secy of Defense.
Next Opportunity: The “thorough review” of the policy in January and February — out of which the President dashed cheerleading Petraeus’s Pakghanistan Surge like it was summertime 2008.
Even when Europe and NATO greeted the roadshow with lip service while setting Stausbourg aflame, the President would not be swayed from pledged loyalty.
As a result, 2009 has been the costliest year (in US lives) of the eight-year war.
NS Advisor James Jones, once a general, is against the Surge.
Secy of Defense Gates is not speaking in support of the Surge.
Former everything Colin Powell is agin it.
Joe Biden (whom I respect on foreign affairs and constitutional law) is agin it, even if he betrays Kennedy-like hope in focused “counterinsurgency” ops. Rahm Emanuel is agin it. And Biden has a lot of influential pals in the Senate agin it, starting with John Kerry atop the Foreign Relations committee.
The President should take Kerry’s words to heart, and then gird his loins like a wrestler:
“John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said after the meeting that “it would be irresponsible” to send more troops until it became clear “what is possible in Afghanistan.”
The Persians of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. Alexander the Great. The early modern Brits. The Soviet Union. Everybody knows what’s possible in Afghanistan. Desultory defeat.
No one has voiced in public a coherent War Aim. Neither the various forces labelled Taliban nor the meeting of minds labelled Al Qaeda can be defeated with guns. The War on Terror is a propaganda war. Trying to win it with guns enhances the enemy’s power.
Obama in his heart knows this. The Cairo speech and his September UN speech.
What he has lacked is precisely what Gore Vidal points to: The wherewithal to get from what he knows in his heart to an effective policy.
This is the last opportunity to get out without losing a second term. Surge another 40,000 troops, tell the Pentagon to Go Get’m, and the resultant gorey mess will leave the next election to Romney.
The dice have been rolling about the table for two weeks now. If the current debate ends in a decision to send more troops, then Obama has backed down and the future is clear.
If it ends otherwise, then a turn has been accomplished, and the future’s a mist.
Mist is the best the President can hope for at the moment, after endorsing for eighteen months an Aimless war.
The story of September converges from four corners:
1. Weeks ago — on 9/11 — two top-drawer generals, Charles Krulak and Joseph Hoar, came out of retirement to blast Cheney on torture in the Miami Herald.
The timing and some particulars struck me as odd, portentous and a tiny bit ominous: Why this and why now?
Hoar was the commander of the Pentagon’s Central Command, which oversees the mideast, from 1991 to 1994.
And his co-author is a former Commandant (top dog) of the Marines and — curious — is the son of another General Krulak, Victor, who once was an ally of JFK in his struggle with the Pentagon over Vietnam policy. (See last link above.)
2. Nine days later, September 20, President Obama, during a whirlwind tour of five Sunday talk shows, went off topic (health care) to talk about Pakghanistan — and for the first time publicly cast doubt upon the policy that he had cheerleaded without reservation during the long campaign, and had then inherited:
He said before he decided whether to send more troops, he needed to determine whether the United States was pursuing the proper military strategy.
“The first question is, are we doing the right thing?” Mr. Obama said on CNN’s State of the Union. “Are we pursuing the right strategy?”
The next morning 66 pages from General Stanley McChrystal appeared in the Washington Post, predicting “failure” in Afghanistan unless the Pentagon’s request for tens of thousands of new pairs of boots were soon granted.
3. Five days later, we noted remarks by General Michael Lenhert — who built and for a time ran the Bush-Cheney Gitmo prison — denouncing the prison as a bad idea from Day One. He didn’t name Cheney (in reports I’ve seen) but, simultaneously, Cheney was telling think tanks that Obama is wrong to try to shut the prison down.
Harpers also noticed Lenhert’s remarks and quickly put out a piece that extends them to explicitly target the former vice president: “The Generals vs The Cheneys.”
Krulak & Hoar on torture. Lenhert on Gitmo. Three big guns, trained upon Cheney as he bellows about the speaking circuit. Curious …
It seemed curious that such men would suddenly raise their profiles and such a ruckus, merely to blast a retired, old and disgraced vice president, on issues that the new president had already turned around.
Or … Was Dick speaking for more than himself — for something yet vital in the power scheme?
4. Days later (early this week), NewsMax.com, which feeds Fox News fodder, published an elaborate memo explaining why a military coup to solve the “Obama problem” was “not unrealistic” and not a bad idea.
Chris Matthews jumped in, and appropriately so. See the Hardball clip embedded in the Harpers link in item 3 above.
And note that the clip comes from Human Rights First — and that the two military men Matthews talks with — including Lt General Henry Soyster, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, criticizing Cheney’s fear-mongering and his Gitmo campaign — are explicitly associated with Human Rights First on its webpage.
And note that Generals Krulak and Hoar, too, associate themselves with HRF.
Reading the Krulak-Hoar piece alone, in its oddness, provoked a question: Do these high generals sniff something unpatriotic fermenting within the wide circles of their brassy acquaintance?
However that may be, that a roomful of such men suddenly gathered to speak loudly against Cheney in September is reason to not summarily dismiss the NewsMax blip as lunatic-fringe fantasy signifying nothing.
The Beer Hall Putsch was lunatic fri — HA !
Matthews goes on to mention MacArthur — versus Truman! — in the same breath as McChrystal — and then asks his brassy guests if we’ve seen this movie and it’s Seven Days in May — HA !
A fortiori forsooth: It seems that sometime this summer a bevy of high-brow brass was organized to oppose a right-wing call-it-what-you-will — movement? — the poster children of which are Cheney and, for the moment, McChrystal.
Gathering under a Human Rights banner to grapple with Dick, blow by blow, topic by topic, might be a way for august generals to tell their wide acquaintance the Preakness pool has been closed until further notice.
That President Obama would sooner or later have to face down the Pentagon he inherited with so little complaint (disturbing neither Gates nor Mullen nor their vision for victory in Pakghanistan) — and would then tred paths parallel to those of JFK and LBJ — was apparent and a worry during the interregnum last winter.
Vegas odds remain stacked against deposing any president with an army.
But the bile-laden bullet points in the NewsMax memo itemize real thoughts inspiring right-wingers with rage. JFK’s inner circle initiated the production of the Seven Days in May film, and saw the work through with unprecedented support — evacuating the White House to make way for the film crew — because by 1963 they knew the novel was not fantasy.
Media talking points by a person named Perry at NewsMax, which feeds Fox News — re the bright side of a military coup to solve the “Obama problem” — were published on the NewsMax site this week.
Then taken down Wednesday (two days ago).
Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.
America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:
# Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”
# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized …
Goes on at some length.
First thought: a hoax.
But the crudeness of the language, screwy thoughts about the Constitution, were reminiscent of totalitarian hoplites that populate literature from behind the Iron Curtain.
And soon a Spokesvolker for Newsmax acknowledged the memo, telling TPM (where the text has been salvaged, linked above) that Perry was an “unpaid blogger.” The NewsMax site itself says he “contributes a regular column.”
What’s most important about the NewsMax piece is that it is not an isolated incident out standing in its field.
Rather, it’s surrounded by a bevy of high-brow generals who came out of retirement or obscurity in September to counter the Rumbling Thunder of the Miserable Media Tour of Dick Cheney, who should be history but apparently isn’t.
The Huffington Post dismisses the NewsMax memo as lunatic fringe. Um-hmm. Beer Hall Putsch … And again — but at least makes clear that, yes, the author is an ass raised on Age of Reagan television. Let’s see …
Well and good. But also a bit odd. Is there nothing current behind it? Torture, per se, is no longer an issue. Cheney seems history.
And note that one of the generals — former Marine Commandant Charles Krulak — bears a name that rings in the annals of American postwar history.
In the 1960s (and maybe 50s, under CIA auspices), Marine General Victor “Brute” Krulak was involved in the energetic effort to win in Vietnam. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty worked closely with him, and has written a lot about him.
Relevant bits in a nutshell: Prouty says that Brute, atop the Marine staff in the Pentagon in the early 60s, became a close ally and advisor to JFK in the effort to turn the Vietnam policy around.
The McNamara-Taylor of October 2, 1963 — supposedly the findings of the Secretary of Defense and JFK’s special advisor General Maxwell Taylor on their grand tour of Vietnam — was principally authored by Krulak, Prouty & co, working closely with the White House — and then placed in McNamara & Taylor’s hands, for the sake of the cameras, as they returned from their mission.
That is: The policy change this much publicized report effected was sold using Taylor’s and McNamara’s names, but was actually the thinking and initiative of JFK’s narrow circle, which at this moment included, on the brassy side, Brute and his assistant Fletch. (Thus spake Prouty.)
1. Is Marine Gen. Charles C. Krulak the son of Marine Gen. Victor Krulak? Shouldn’t be hard to find out, I guess.
Uh yes — that’s a roger. Charles is the son of Victor.
2. Why is Charles coming out of retirement to hit the retired Cheney on the head now?
Check out — at Sibel Edmonds website 123Change — the Boiling Frogs podcasts, probing the National Security Apparat.
For example: An INTERVIEW with Investigative journalist Joseph J. Trento, author of, among others, The Secret History of the CIA and Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network.
From the interview:
On All Hallows Eve, 1977 [President Carter and CIA Director Stansfield Turner] fired 800 people in the clandestine services, which was the old boy club of the CIA.
And after they did that it basically started a revolution against the Carter government. Jimmy Carter never got any intelligence of any value after that as president.
Or click the Trento link above for the full podcast, which helps explain the decline of the civilian government in D.C. since the war, and goes best with sipped sour mash.
She whom Bush-Cheney repressed for seven years — “the most gagged person in the history of the USA” according to the ACLU — testified in a court case re Turkish and Israeli espionage in August.
And now has a big interview re Marc Grossman — alleged Israeli spy atop the State Dept in the 90s — and other spooks and influence peddlars she’s stumbled across, in the current American Conservative magazine.
( Me? I’m a socialist, or would be if there was a party to speak of stateside. But I like Pat Buchanan (of AmCon mag). He’s got a basic respect for discourse that’s rare among pundits raised on and trained for television. )
See Sibel’s website — 123 Real Change — for more about Grossman and other alleged Israeli spies from John Cole, former FBI Counterintel and Counterterror fellow, who has a book out this fall on the subject.
Edmonds is not yet impressed with Team Obama on these issues. From the AmCon interview:
First of all, Obama’s record as a senator, short as it was, spoke clearly. For all those changes that he was promising, he had done nothing. In fact, he had taken the opposite position, whether it was regarding the NSA’s wiretapping or the issue of national-security whistleblowers. We whistleblowers had written to his Senate office. He never responded, even though he was on the relevant committees.
As soon as Obama became president, he showed us that the State Secrets Privilege was going to continue to be a tool of choice. It’s an arcane executive privilege to cover up wrongdoing—in many cases, criminal activities.
And the Obama administration has not only defended using the State Secrets Privilege, it has been trying to take it even further than the previous terrible administration by maintaining that the U.S. government has sovereign immunity.
This is Obama’s change: his administration seems to think it doesn’t even have to invoke state secrets as our leaders are emperors who possess this sovereign immunity. This is not the kind of language that anybody in a democracy would use.
Also check out — at 123 — the Boiling Frogs podcasts, probing the National Security Apparat.
Eg, an interesting interview with investigative journalist Joe Trento, author of Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network and The Secret History of the CIA.Here’s a tidbit.
Former FBI Counterterror official John M. Cole confirms there was strong evidence that Marc Grossman (formerly of the State Dept) was spying for Israel, and says that over a hundred espionage investigations of same profile were turned off for no good reason during his time at the tiller.
Cole has a book out on the subject in November: While America Sleeps. (Echo of Churchill’s While England Slept …)
And here’s an extensive podcast interview with him. Very interesting. Robert Mueller at FBI did everything to keep this story from coming out.
See SIBEL EDMONDS’ website — 123 Real Change — for updates through time.
CAMP PENDLETON — Saying the United States lost the moral high ground, the outgoing Marine general who built and ran the Guantanamo Bay military prison in early 2002 said he quickly concluded that it was the wrong path and that the cells he constructed should be emptied.
Clearly: The Administration is alarmed. And has nothing like a consensus within its walls. And seems to have no good practical options.
Biden’s notion is perhaps the best (of those detailed). But amounts to advocating terrorism plain and simple: more mass murderous smart bombs and special force attacks in Pakistan, while giving up any hope (good idea) of dominating the fearsome land and diverse tribal powers of Afghanistan.
ED NOTE: See comments below to continue following events into 2010.
Since February I’ve been filing news bits and meditations on our mess in Pakghanistan here (and in the comments). The discussion reaches back a full year, to late August 2008 — when the Americans started dropping mass murderous smart bombs in Pakistan.
Now things seem to be coming to a head, as Obama yesterday for the first time expressed public doubts about the Gates-Mullen-Petraeus policy that he’s been cheerleading since spring 2008.
1. Everybody’s jumping on Prez Karzai, even the Europeans. I take Peter Galbraith’s word on faith that the August elections were deeply corrupt. But it’s also public and clear that the american National Security Apparat and press have been working to remove Karzai since former CIA director Hayden’s declaration of war on Pakistan last December.
2. McChrystal, the new American ground commander for Afghanistan, said in August the strategy of attacking the Taliban, or is it Al Qaeda — get your lucky scorecard, the nominated Enemy has been fluctuating, month to month, all year, just like in 1984 … We are at war with East Asia and we have always been at war with East Asia. We are at war with Eurasia and we have always –
Taliban, Al Qaeda, whatever, big diff — McChrystal says the strategy’s history.
Instead, following Petraeus (Lansdale) he wants more troops for Community Policing in the shrinking areas — now roughly 20 percent — of Afghanistan not controlled by anti-Kabul warlord types (whose loose and fleeting alliances the press now generally call “the Taliban”).
3. But Obama yesterday — while talking about health care — suddenly said Wait a Second on the Sunday talk shows:
The president also said that he had no deadline for withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan. He said before he decided whether to send more troops, he needed to determine whether the United States was pursuing the proper military strategy.
“The first question is, are we doing the right thing?” Mr. Obama said on CNN’s State of the Union. “Are we pursuing the right strategy?”
Mr. Obama did not say whether he would send more troops to Afghanistan, but he added that the strategy had become “somewhat adrift,” and said he needed to remind Americans the war was a necessary front in the fight against terrorism.
“We’re there because al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans and we cannot allow extremists who want to do violence to the United States to be able to operate with impunity,” Mr. Obama said. “We lost that focus for a while and you started seeing a classic case of mission creep where we’re just there and we start taking on a whole bunch of different missions.”
Now that’s talking, kinda sorta, in a way. Perhaps, one surmised, the beginning of the end is at hand.
5. But, a day later, front page New York Times, we get the Pentagon’s reaction: 60 pages of McChrystal leakage to the Washington Post saying more boots are needed now to avoid failure:
“Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” General McChrystal writes.
Shades of Westmoreland, 1966.
To my ear this is another first: The Pentagon sees failure on the horizon.
McChrystal is not yet in step with his British predecessors, one of whom in 2007 said Yankees Go Home and another whom a year later, weeks before the American elections, said loudly and simply “We’re not going to win this war.” But McChrystal seems to have turned his gaze in that direction.
7. This horror story began — January thru July 2001 — as a Texas oil mafia adventure to compel those nice quiet student Taliban chaps we’d installed in Kabul in the 90s to say No to Argentina’s Bridas (oil company) and Yes to Houston’s Unocal on the Caspian basin pipeline project.
That is: Bush-Cheney called the Tali chaps to Washington in January 2001 — one of their first bits of business upon taking office — and then again in late spring. Calling them on the carpet.
Then, when they refused to knuckle, Washington told NATO (as the Brits have told the world), in midsummer, to prepare for action in Afghanistan. All this is public information.
The Unocal misadventure morphed on 9/11 and became a warm-up lap for the Likud Lobby’s Clean Break War, the targets of which since the mid 90s had been Syria, Iraq and Iran. And that’s where Bush-Cheney went, never bothering to tidy up in Afghanistan.
This ridiculous series of events left Obama and McCain speechless, in a way, during the prez debates last year — mouthing in unison vapid cheers for escalating an Aimless war.
I don’t see how Obama can continue to try to finesse this. But having endorsed the Gates-Mullen-Petraeus policy for 18 months, he now owns it.
It will be interesting to see how the White House reacts to today’s Pentagon leakage in the Times.
Would getting out require the resignations of Gates and Mullen?
Johnson gave the Pentagon what it wanted in 1965 and three years later was a broken president. And Nixon, five years later, the same. Heads on a platter. This is the War Room.
Also note that General Freakley has been working on the suicide problem: Mental Stress Training to wash the brain clean of bloody-minded guilt. See 4th comment here.
America … If it only had a brain. And a heart. And the courage to Stay Home.
1. The long-term trend in American foreign affairs detailed in Chalmers Johnson‘s must-read SORROWS of EMPIRE — the trend of Pentagon aggregation of policy-making power in Washington via the simple step-wise business of building more and more bases …
The trend, of course, continues. Something like thirteen “permanent” american bases have been built in Iraq since 3/19/2003. And recent reports tell us that the Pentagon :
– has decided to pursue not only Terrorists but Drug Lords in Afghanistan. Support Your Local Sheriffs. Build them each a base.
– is negotiating the lease of seven army bases in Columbia from the Bogota government. The obvious policy worry here is re Venezuela (as the Times headline over the AP story makes clear).
If Obama allows Gates-Mullen to start a public war (as opposed to the meaty tenderizing in progress since early in the Bush-Cheneytime) along the Columbia-Venezuela border …
I find I have nothing to append to that “if” aside from a repeat of a repetition:
The shrinking portion of Washington policymaking that one might deem Discretionary more and more is made by the Pentagon. This uptrend began with the world wars, has never significantly corrected, and Obama for the past 18 months has shown no inclination to curb the Pentagon’s enthusiasms whatsoever.
Sorrows of an empire nobody needs.
2. The stark choices ahead of every major power on the planet are to cooperate as the resource and climate problems escalate, or to revert to the romantic nationalist philosophy of war of the early Modern centuries. That romance died in 1914, was buried in 1945, but rose again (in accordance with scripture) circa 1991, when the Soviet Union fell.
Most americans of our time were raised to believe in cooperation, the obvious exceptions being the likes of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and baby Bill Kristol, who with their ilk daydream of Israel and the USA taking on all comers six-guns ablaze, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The view has some basis perhaps in Tel Aviv. Where one stands is a function of where one sits, by and large.
But why Washington has fallen in love with world war remains something of a mystery here. Profound and near perfect despair, one guesses, must underlie it. The Likud Lobby alone does not seem to have the punch.
3. OR:
Perhaps when presented with the grim spectacle of a Nation (i.e., a people) pulling itself apart — as the American people have been since Reagan was installed to jumpstart Globalization — perhaps a self-destructive, incoherent foreign policy is precisely what one should expect.
3(a) The incoherence might be superficial. Might make perfect sense from an eccentric and very unpatriotic point of view held by Owner-Operators.
3(b) Or the incoherence might be deep, reflecting fundamental differences among factions of Owner-Ops — a covert struggle of the sort that erupted into the public space in the assassinations of the 60s. Watergate. The Iran-Contra octopus (which may well have included the murder of Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme).
On the home front, the governmental reaction to Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Again: what one might expect as the Owner-Operators cut ties to the body of the Nation.
And: An EPA director telling New York firemen and steelworkers on September 12, 2001 that the air over the smoking pile of the Trade Center is fine. Keep digging for gold, boys.
3(c) In either case — 3a or 3b — Joe Sixpack and Soccer Mom are not part of the conversation, or likely of the solution.
Which only feeds the anti-political, antisocial atmosphere where everybody’s hustlin’, Working Hard and Playing Hard, to leave the nine of ten hindmost behind.
A vicious downward spiral. Diagnosed in excellent eccentric books across the decades …
The Spoiled Child of the Western World, by Henry Fairlie, 1976. The Honey and the Hemlock, by Eli Sagan, 1991. Losing Our Souls, by Edward Pessen, 1993. A Nation Gone Blind, by Eric Larsen, 2006.
Obama is certainly the best chance to break the trend since Kennedy. Perhaps given the constellation of events, his chances are better than Kennedy’s were. But …
Chalmers Johnson concludes his little talk (video above) by suggesting that for Americans with a little cash on the side a condo in Vancouver — Canada — might not be a bad idea.
4. OR:
Let’s blame the whole mysterious mess of American foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union on my favorite martians — shall we?
It seems all the more important given Obama’s unwillingness to release Justice Dept investigations re same.Ă‚Â He has been told (the old song) it would be bad for morale to prosecute the cops, and has punted.Ă‚Â It’s a universal political problem, which he seems to have decided, as most pols do, to Look Away From.
The march of the US from something like a republic to something like a police state has been stepwise and rather clear.Ă‚Â When opportunities present themselves to escort the monsters to the gallows, one must muster the will.
Memo to files re President Obama’s thunderous yet fruitless talk about Pakghanistan this week.
The aim of the American escalation, the leaders of Europe were instructed, is to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
What’s interesting is not that he repeated the casus belli he’d been singing (often with McCain) for more than a year, but that he excluded — for the first time to my eye — mention of the Taliban.
Echoes of 1984: We are at war with Eurasia and we have always been at war with Eurasia!
But then, four weeks later: We are at war with East Asia and we have always been at war with East Asia!
Perhaps the message has gotten thru that (not only Osama but also) the Taliban doesn’t quite exist as something a Pentagon can disassemble.
He spent the week first at a G20 summit in London then, for the NATO bash, in Strasbourg, where today (Saturday) a hotel, a border police station and a grocery were torched by people protesting NATO’s participation in Afghanistan and the CIA bombing campaign in Pakistan.
Their leaders largely followed suit:
Britain pledged Gates-Mullen “up to a thousand” pairs of new boots. Poland, Croatia and sister creatures of the Great Liberator — some hundreds each. And France and Germany, pretty much nada. Niente. Nicht.
Even as the town was burning about his ears today the Prez made a last pitch. From the NY Times:
“We want to do everything we can to encourage and promote rule of law, human rights, the education of women and girls in Afghanistan, economic development, infrastructure development. But I also want people to understand that the first reason we are there is to root out Al Qaeda, so that they cannot attack members of the alliance.”
Answering a … question about whether the … escalation would be contingent on whether the Afghan government rescinded a proposed family law that the UN has likened to legalizing rape within marriage, Mr. Obama replied that the law should not deter the United States from its military goal.
“I think this law is abhorrent. Certainly the views of this administration have been and will be communicated to the Karzai government,” he said. But he added, repeating for emphasis: “I want everybody to understand that our focus is to defeat Al Qaeda.”
We are at war with East Asia and we have always been …
Most revealing of the administration’s mind on this is a transcript of two shadow-advisors trying to explain the President’s policy to the White House press corps after the formal speech. The two murderous clowns who escort Joseph K to his death upon the dissolution of his Trial come to mind, and Brazil, and Robert Edwards’ recent Land of the Blind, rather than Nineteen Eighty-Four pure and simple.
Late in the script Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke pops in, terribly enthusiastic about the escalation. (Happy to have a job, perhaps. Used to be a banker.)
I’ve watched him over the years, have spoken with him a few times about Yugoslavia. He did not seem silly. (Maybe Bernie Madoff bit him.)
But now there he is, bubbling over at length about using the Pentagon to wipe out “corruption” in Afghanistan. Â
?!? Corruption?!? In Afghanistan?!?
To become its FBI? Its local police? It’s judiciary?
Sniffs of Petraeus’s Community Policing in Iraq. But surely no one thinks the hard lands, many nations and turbulent tribes encompassed by Afghanistan’s borders are susceptible to such treatment? Let alone by Yanks & Brits? Surely…?
Sideshow:Â A question in the transcript about Osama bin Laden gets a SOP robotic response (Can’t discuss intelligence) that doesn’t bother to even imply that Osama is alive.
And Mr Stewart in New York re the Obamarama’s new term of art for the War on Terror which even the OMB director (doesn’t he have enuf trouble?) is out there insistently singing:Â “Contingency Operations Overseas.”
Finally, the day after the big speech, Viceroy Petraeus informed the Senate he would like another 10,000 pairs of boots — beyond the 21,000 Obama has already put on boats — by Christmas.
But awaits the President’s decision on this in the fall …
An American in Ireland, Richard Moore, worries often aloud about the world in articulate, informed style — at the moment about the Bilderbergers. Just now I dashed off a reply email that without trying hard encapsulates a view of the world (if not a Worldview):
The Bldbrgers are good and useful to consider. They don’t Run the World but they give insight into some of the people involved in the high level struggles to operate and endure the world.
They express a more European point of view than, eg, the Davos gatherings, which are more technocratic and global and American influenced. This European view is caught in our time in the middle, and I tend to sympathize with it.
I mean — the world today is dividing in a new way:
1. Russia and China, among the major powers, are still nation-states. Their owner-operators are still wed to their Nations (ie People). These powers can be read fairly easily as to what their interests are and how they are likely to behave to protect and forward them.
2. The US since the advent of the bomb has been ceasing to be a nation-state (if indeed it was ever a good idea to consider it as such).
(The bomb brought pressure to control events globally and to do so without major-power war; this pressure has been bending the minds of the people who run the National Security Apparat since the end of the war 1945. This is one big reason why the Apparat has grown so strong in Washington while the Congress has almost ceased to exist as a policy making body and the White House careers back and forth, with presidential heads more often than not winding up on platters.)
The owner-operators of the US began to reassert themselves behind Reagan’s smile and broad shoulders, having gone to school on the lessons of Vietnam (an educated working class is not a good idea, reliable pensions are not a good idea, fairly free and balanced mass media are not a good idea) and having realized that the technological revolution meant (re capital) that Globalization was the ticket.
To be extremely brief then: The US since the war has been morphing from something like a nation-state to a thing bestride the globe with two primary interests: to float the National Security Apparat (chiefly the Pentagon but also the mature so-called intelligence agencies) and to float the large globalizing corporations. Responsibility of the owner-operators for and to the Nation (ie People) has become almost neglible.
(Even the most Progressive voices among the American owner-operators are corporate-centric, as if someday Google may just blast off into space, Silent Running with Hughie, Dewey and Louie … )
3. Europe occupies too a rather new and strange space — having undertaken the Euro Union. But the traditional bonds between the component ruling classes and Nations (Peoples) — born of millenia of strife and tight geography — are still rather strong.
The Bilderbergers convey this uneasy place in the middle — between the brute classico Russian and Chinese nation-states and the global military-industrial enterprise based in the U.S.
Europe: Trying to “compete” with the run-amok North American colossus, while trying (as always) to survive the “Asian Hordes,” while trying to maintain the distinctly European take on the Individual-in-Society.
For my money, Europe’s approach to Modernity (the technological civilization that in the West succeeded Christendom) is superior to the American, the Russian and the Chinese. European societies seem to me superior.
So then — even though my own feet are rooted in the Working Class, I don’t find the Bilderbergers as alarming as some. (And I have always valued the reports from the chamber that Mr Estulin has been channeling for some time now.)
Rather, I find the entire careering planet alarming. Chiefly the unbridled advance of science these past two centuries, which has created monstrous wealth, technological processes and weapons that have left us and the earth at the mercy of forces I think NO one or one body of people has a chance to control, let alone govern. Everything put together sooner or later falls apart, as Paul Simon noted circa Watergate.
My view of Europe’s “superiority” doesn’t mean, of course, that if one had to bet on the Last Man Standing he should bet on the European Union. Indeed, many have been writing that the current financial crisis may ruin it.
Would Europe survive the Union’s disintegration? In some fashion, surely. Might that seismic de-centralizing move actually, despite costs, show us something of the way out of Modernity’s disaster? Too much to hope for, I suppose.
The Times in the person of familiar fool-tool Thom Shanker explained this weekend why the Pentagon must be redoubled to fight not just one, not just two, but several wars, indeed many, simultaneously …
The piece focuses on Gates and anonymous brass, and is clear that the movement to re-tool the Pentagon for perpetual occupation of new far flung places (and thus for continual “counterinsurgency” warfare) is front and center.
This unilateral militarist movement became policy with the installation of Bush-Cheney, after a struggle during the 90s, post collapse of Soviet Union, among the hearts & minds of Washington and Wall Street.
And Obama — by making no changes atop the Pentagon and hiring generals to run most of the remainder of the foreign policy establishment — is doing little more than shout Me Too.Ă‚Â No Change We Need.Ă‚Â Very little change at all.
While the policy is not eccentric, Shanker quotes at some length a familiar Beltway cretin named Donnelly selling it.
Donnelly was the “Principal Author” of Rebuilding America’s Defenses — that manifesto of global conquest issued in September 2000 by Likud Lobby organ The Project for the New American Century (founded in 1997 by Perle, Wolfowitz, baby Kristol, the Kagans, etc, to promote a US war on Iraq).
Sounding like Rumsfeld, Principal Author Donnelly encourages Obama to sound like Cheney:
QUOTE
Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he believed that the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with “a multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct.”
“We have to do many things simultaneously if our goal is to remain the ultimate guarantor of international security,” Mr. Donnelly said.
“The hedge against a rising China requires a very different kind of force than fighting an irregular war in Afghanistan or invading Iraq or building partnership capacity in Africa.”
END QUOTE
Preparing to win a nuclear war with China is a primary concern of the 2000 manifesto. Consolidating the Pentagon’s new empire in Africa is a more recent now familiar clanging bell.
Donnelly plainly needs a hole to drain the swamp between his ears.
As for Shanker, who willy nilly figured loudly in a disinformation campaign years ago designed, by Brit-Franco interests, to confuse and deflect US policy and thus ease the Bosnian state and people into oblivion … Something more like an Egyptian dungeon perhaps …
But, again, while the salesmanship may here be eccentric, the policy is mainstream, although largely unreported upon in the mainstream. Ă‚Â Ă‚Â And so far Obama seems entirely in step with it. Enter the War Room.
When I worried (in the penultimate sentence of an essay about zombies) about things soon “getting rough” for the new President, I was thinking foreign affairs.
And was thinking of President Kennedy, who was blasted by the Bay of Pigs raid on his 76th day in office. Things were never the same. The White House’s struggle thereafter to gain control of American foreign policy and change course might best be imagined as one long scraggling slide off a cliff.
But to return to current affairs:
1. Iraq.
Mass murderous bombs are going off again. Very bad for the Pentagon song that both McCain and Obama began to sing last spring, a coro castrati. For if the Surge there was not simply a Success — if the relative calm of 2008 was tactical and keyed in good part to the American audience/elections — if the basic animosities (Shia, Sunni, Kurd) and political questions (who shall control the state?) have not been soothed by General Petraeus’s community policing, what then?
And with what effect on the marketing of the Iraqi Surge’s young cousin on Iran’s eastern borders?
2. Pakghanistan.
Benazir Bhutto’s murder. The rocky greeting given her widow-successor, Zardari, after his first address to parliament. (During the reception unhappy campers blew up the nearby Marriott, home to yankee journalists and diplomats.) The attack on the Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay by a Paki assault team.
And, meanwhile: the mass-murderous missile attacks by the Americans in northwest Pakistan, which began circa Labor Day and which yesterday killed 21 people identified — in first reports — as “militants aligned with a Pakistani Taliban leader,” and wounded fifteen others.
Note that three weeks ago, a similar first report by American authorities, claiming that 15 of 16 killed were “militants,” was revised to acknowledge that 13 were random walkers — indeed, “civilians.” The Army general in charge issued not an apology but “deepest condolences” and a week later the New York Times observed in an editorial:
Almost no one wants to say it out loud. But between the threats from extremists, an unraveling economy, battling civilian leaders and tensions with its nuclear rival India, Pakistan is edging ever closer to the abyss.
Such were the trends inherited by Obama and, for his part, left on Cruise Control.
In the past ten days they have coalesced into a major political crisis — based on widespread anti-Americanism — that might leave Islamabad looking more like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas than the capital of a large industrialized state armed with nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile across the border ….
Today the Times relays White House views (elaborating upon Obama’s comments in a pub’d interview last weekend) sketching the new US plan for Afghanistan:Â Lots of carrots and a stick or two, to tease out from among the Evil feuding warlords those We Can Work With, and to encourage those to enforce a sort of peace (stability, equilibrium) that at least does lip service to the quasi-installed, quasi-foreign government in Kabul.
Or maybe President Karzai and Kabul will be abandoned in public, in favor of something even more Realistic with the so-called Northern Alliance warlords (non Afghan and non Pashtun) who Bush-Cheney found, however briefly, to be Men We Can Work With.
This range of possibilities seems to be the Petraeus Plan at the moment. Maybe it’s the best Obama can do with a long-neglected and seemingly pointless situation. Maybe it’s the best way Home. (Then again, whatever happened to that Unocal pipeline?) One might hope.
But the Times piece also talks about transferring US attention and resources to Pakistan. And so perhaps (as surmised here since erstwhile CIA director Hayden’s belligerent speech of December) the new Afghan policy will be best understood (largely in retrospect) as what the Pentagon thought best to quickly stabilize Afghanistan to allow it to function as the staging of a boots-on-the-ground war in the FATA across the border.
And what further necessities might that incursion give birth to? Where will the Petraeus Plan really lead? This is the relevance of the Bay of Pigs precedent. (See the “blasted” link above.)
3. China.
It’s hard to imagine serious trouble breaking out between China and the US right now, since they both have so much at stake in the effort to stabilize the global economy.
And gee, surely the Obama honeymoon (internationally — like Gorbachev’s) has more legs than this?
But for the files if nothing else (you realize you have fallen into my filing cabinet?), one must note:
– the seemingly silly quasi-naval confrontation off the Chinese coast. The Times says the American vessel is a submarine hunter. But gee, the South China Sea is exceedingly shallow. Perhaps “spy vessel” is best? Recall the Mayaguez, during Ford. In any case, now we’re sending in ships with guns and missiles mounted in plain sight.
–Â the Chinese premier expressing worries about getting stuck holding the bag on a trillion in US Treasury bonds. Various voices over there have been expressing concern for some time, and more than a year ago Peking began to swap dollars for gold, but this is the most salient signal to date.
Surely Uncle Sam and China must be friends. Surely.
HOWEVER THE CURRENT contretemps may work out, things are indeed getting rough. The Prez is going to have much less time on his hands to muse about where precisely to suggest his arm’s-length adjuncts apply their Band-Aids to the buboed bodies of the big banks and the health care system.
One must temper expectations, of course. Things since November 1963 (of which I have no memory — I was five) have indeed never been the same. A hundred years hence, Chinese grade-school textbooks will use Julius Caeser’s crossing of the Rubicon River and the murder of JFK to illustrate how republics by and for people morph into empires run by and for the state’s military-money complex.
Nevertheless, Obama has a few miles of blue water left as the pounding of the lee shore drifts to his ears. As an aid to navigation, Robert Dallek points out this morning that LBJ walked away with neither Guns nor Butter from the White House, after one elected term.
A cautionary tale about Imperial Overreach. It’s worth noting in addition that not one president, but three, back then, were handed their heads by the brassy entrepreneurs of the Vietnam war.
Came across this Times magazine piece by Tim Weiner while musing about Petraeus and Lansdale in Pakghanistan and Vietnam. Adapted from Weiner’s excellent CIA book of 1995, Legacy of Ashes. Touches on Lansdale among other interesting things.
And it takes one back to that fled world, post Soviet Union before 9/11, when dreams of Peace Dividends and calls for the dissolution of the CIA were in the air, the latter from the likes of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The CIA is impossibly inpenetrable and corrupted — ungovernable. Better to start over from scratch …
But even way back in 1995 all that was something of a cover story, or, rather, an effect of a cover story — an approach to policy distorted and frustrated by the privatization of America’s covert ops capacity, so to speak.
Journalist Joseph Trento (with whom on points I disagree) touches on this firmly in his book Prelude to Terror – The Rogue CIA and America’s Private Intelligence Network (2005).
The privatization of what had been, since the CIA’s founding (1947), its bread and butter work (intelligence collection being merely its cover — its day job), was touched off by:
(i) the cashiering in 1973 of CIA director Richard Helms, a career spook back to the OSS — the Man with dirty hands Who Kept the Secrets — and
(ii) attempts thereafter to clean the Augean stables by presidents — appointing a string of clean-hands DCIs: James Schlesinger, William Colby (who died soon enough in a boating accident) and Stansfield Turner — and by Congress — with the Rockefeller and Church hearings in the Senate, culminating with the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
But when one cleans the stables, what happens to the manure?
An illuminating side-show result of the attempted purgation:Â George HW Bush’s prez campaign in 1980 was staffed by a lot of retired guys in trenchcoats.
(And his victory in 1988 was the first signal failure of US presidential exit polls. A problem that then slept until … 2000. And 2004. Bush boys don’t poll properly …)
To return to Weiner:Â The ongoing privatization of the private banking black bag work the CIA did for corporate and other chums in the good old days leaves somewhat moot, even in 1995, the isolated CIA question when considering the problems that come to mind when one thinks of the so-called intelligence community.
The problem is now larger and more insinuated throughout the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower’s term now ringing somewhat quaint) than during the days of Gentleman Spy Allen Dulles. Post 9/11, instead of following Moynihan’s lead by simplifying (to clarify) the National Security Apparat, a stampeded Congress slapped on several more layers of bureaucracy. And meanwhile the private sector in this growth industry expanded as never before, under Cheney’s guiding hand in particular.
Today’s rather cleansed CIA, then, is something of a front, more akin to the straight-shooting Pentagon than the dirty-tricks outfit of the golden age.
The dirtiest business — the most unpatriotic business — has been outsourced. To small and mid-sized firms owned and operated by ex-CIA, DIA, FBI, ATF and SS agents, ex-Army Rangers and ex-Navy Seals …
I don’t agree with some detail here but it’s certainly worth chewing on, particularly as we watch Obama sleepwalk (?) into the Pakghanistan quagmire.
The DVD can be ordered from Alex Jones’s web site: http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/obdedvd.html
