While at WORLDMEETS.US, we have seen a good deal of support for John McCain in the Portuguese-speaking countries ofBrazil and Portugal, chiefly due to McCain’s promise to include Brazil in the G8 and his relatively liberal trade policies, this op-ed from Portugal’s Jornal de Negicios is decidedly concerned about what might happen under a McCain presidency.

After examining some of the specifics of McCain’s foreign policy plans, including his plans to create a “League of Democracies,” “expand NATO to include all democratic states,” exclude Russia from the G-8 and include Brazil and India, João Carlos Barradas writes for Jornal de Negocios:

“McCain’s plans are frightening in their incoherence, total lack of realism and underestimation of economic and financial constraints. … Even before Beijing or Moscow put the heat on the eventual Republican president, the apprehension of allies in Berlin, Tokyo and Riyadh would be such that either McCain will have to change course or he will condemn the United States to a proactive interventionism capable of bringing even greater misfortune.

Barradas concludes:

“It is a worrying state of the mind that animates McCain in his desire to reform the world.”

Read the rest of this entry »

There is angst on North Africa - otherwise known as the Maghreb - over the second-class treatment meted out to the region by the Bush Administration.

And since this is where the Pentagon intends to headquarter its new African Command - and since it hosts a blossoming al-Qaeda presence - this is not an inconsequential matter.

In the latest in a series of articles WORLDMEETS.US has translated that one might call “we can’t get no repect,” Read the rest of this entry »

There are 796 more reasons why the folks who declared the Surge a success should hang their sorry heads in shame. That is the number of Americans (52) and Iraqis (744) killed during the month of April in an uptick in violence that was going to occur sooner or later because the Surge has not been a “success” by any appropriate use of that term.

As I noted back on February 1 and has been noted by others far more sage than I am since then, war is not a linear thing, but rather something that ebbs and flows in stops and starts. This is especially true in Iraq, which is why the military gains of the Surge were not only temporarily, they were illusory.

Spencer Ackerman, one of those sage heads, references OODA, a jargony mouthful coined by Air Force Colonel John Boyd, to make the point. OODA stands for “Observation / Orientation / Decision / Action,” and the bottom line is that the combatant who can achieve a faster OODA than his enemy can disrupte his enemy’s OODA Loop:

Ackerman explains that:

“At the risk of saying something disputable, from 2003 to mid-2007, the insurgencies in Iraq had faster OODA Loops than the U.S. did. That’s not to say that there weren’t discrete tactical successes: there were, and lots of them. But those developments are coterminous with the concept of the Loop — you adjust and inflict pain on the enemy; but the enemy does so faster and more powerfully. Once Operation Phantom Thunder (the Surge) began in the late spring of 2007, lots of people on the right and on the fake-left declared, without using Boyd’s term, that Petraeus and Odierno had finally broken the enemy’s Loop.

” . . . what Petraeus and Odierno actually did — and it is not a small achievement — was disrupt the insurgencies’ Loops more than any other U.S. commanders were able to. They kept the insurgencies in a state of confusion for months and prevented successful orientation. But the rise in U.S. and Iraqi civilian casualties demonstrates that the insurgencies’ Loops have now closed. To cash it out, the U.S. military under Petraeus and Odierno bought as much calm as possible, and Iraq has been so horrific for so long that half the horror could seem like paradise to the hopeful American. But even with half-the-horror, no strategic goal was achieved. And no strategic goal can be achieved now that the insurgencies’ Loops have closed.”

Ackerman further notes that by any definition there cannot be victory in Iraq, only mitigation. To which I would add, 100 years of mitigation in John McCain’s case.

Please click here to read the rest of this roundup at Kiko’s House.

There’s a guy in virtually every organization who is a pop-off, and David Hackworth fit that description perfectly.

But unlike most pop-offs, this man – the most highly decorated soldier in American military history – was reliably on target. So much so that his career ended with the threat of a court martial because of his scathing criticism of the Vietnam War, but his legacy as an eccentric but fearless and brilliant officer and motivator of soldiers has lived on.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, here for a contrarian view of Hackworth by James Joyner at Outside the Beltway, and here for A Baker’s Dozen of Best Books on Vietnam.

When one of Brazil’s leading columnists, William Waack, visited the Nimitz-class USS George Washington this week, what he came away with might surprise American readers.

Among some of the interesting observations Waack made were these:

“The George Washington has 85 combat aircraft, including the Super Hornet, the most powerful carrier-based aircraft. On a single aircraft carrier of this class (the Nimitz) there are more late-generation fighter aircraft flying than the total number available to the entire Brazilian Air Force. … American pilots and technicians probably fly more hours per week in conditions similar to the real thing (45 percent of flights, for example, are nocturnal) than their Brazilian and Argentine colleagues do in a year.” Read the rest of this entry »

What’s poses the greatest danger to NATO’s effort in Afghanistan? According to Dutch Scholar Gunnar Heinsohn, the answer is clear: Afghanistan’s birth rate.

Heinsohn writes for the NRC Handelsblad of The Netherlands:

“In 2008, there are 4.5 million male Afghans within the traditional warrior age of 15 to 29 years. Out of that group come the insurgents that the approximately 35,000 NATO soldiers are now dug in to confront … and behind Read the rest of this entry »

As Frederick Kagan spins Neo-Con daydreams of “turning a corner,” McClatchy reporters on the ground are telling a different story:

“One of the most powerful men in Iraq isn’t an Iraqi government official, a militia leader, a senior cleric or a top U.S. military commander or diplomat. He’s an Iranian general, and at times he’s more influential than all of them.”

Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, as “Tehran’s point man on Iraq,” is manipulating election of pro-Iranian politicians, meeting often with Iraqi leaders and backing Shiite elements in Iraqi security forces in the torturing and killing of Sunni Muslims.

According to American and Iraqi officials, Suleimani is Iran’s Petraeus who has succeeded, among other things, in slipping into Baghdad’s Green Zone in 2006 to orchestrate the choice of a new Iraqi prime minister and building intelligence networks in Iran’s embassy while providing Shiite Muslim militias with generalship, cash and arms, including mortars and rockets fired at the US Embassy and advanced roadside bombs that have killed hundreds of Americans and Iraqis.

Read the rest of this entry.

A relatively brief but compelling prediction of the predilections of the current generation of members of our armed forces by Ray Kimball can be found at The Huffington Post.

—

Cross-posted at Random Fate.

Have you been convicted of armed robbery, arson or burglary and are having trouble making ends meet, let alone getting three square meals a day? Worry not, my fellow American, the United States Army and Marines want you.

In yet another consequence of the Forever War, the Army and Marine Corps recruited significantly more felons into their ranks in 2007 than in 2006.

The number of waivers issued to active-duty Army recruits with felony convictions jumped to 511 in 2007, from 249 in 2006, while Marine recruits with felony convictions rose to 350 from 208.

The numbers represent less than 1 percent of the 115,000 new enlistments last year in the active-duty Army and Marines, but coupled with sharp increases in the number of waivers for recruits with misdemeanors, the numbers are downright shocking:

From Sept. 30, 2006, to Sept. 30, 2007, the Army granted so-called conduct waivers for felonies and misdemeanors to 18 percent of its new recruits, a 3 percent increase from the previous year. So far, in just the first six months of this fiscal year, the Army has granted waivers to 13 percent of its recruits.

While it may be presumed that most criminals — petty or otherwise — serve honorably, that is not always the case as rapist-murderer Stephen Green proved. Besides which, The Dirty Dozen was a great idea for a movie. It should be kept that way.

The members of the ISG go their separate ways.

I am curious, how does Ed Meese say the following with a straight face?

McCain’s Iraq views are “by far” the closest to the ISG’s, says the former attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. “I think the principal, the primary, part of the report was we should go on to support the effort in Iraq and we should not cut and run or surrender,” he says.

Granted, I didn’t read the ISG report word for word, but as I recall, it called for American troops to be out of there by about … now. Didn’t it?

It had been widely assumed that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the so-called War on Terror began with military commanders and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The Bush administration has taken refuge behind this “trickle up” explanation, but as is now apparent, the origins of this dark chapter in American history — and the single most defining aspect of the Age of Bush — can be traced to the very highest levels of government.

That is the conclusion of “The Green Light,” a scrupulously researched and horrifying article in the current Vanity Fair magazine by Phillippe Sands, who follows the torture trail and asks whether war crimes were committed.

Please click here to read excerpts at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to my previous torture-related articles.

As this link shows and as a commenter indicated after this story was posted on Thursday, John McCain now seems to be vaccilating on whether to break with the White House and Pentagon on increasing educational benefits to veterans and is under pressure from some veterans groups to do so. Stay tuned.

John McCain was once a returning soldier – in fact a soldier returning from five-plus years as a POW who was a victim of the very torture techniques that he now embraces. But you would have to go far to top the reason that the befuddled Republican presidential wannabe is giving for not restoring the historic GI Bill to wartime levels:

It would encourage soldiers to shed their uniforms for college and civilian life.

Got that? McCain favors keeping the present crapola GI bill level of an average $9,500 a year no matter what college costs — and it costs a heap more.

Like neary 10 million other veterans, I finished my college education on the GI Bill, but that was when it provided full tuition, housing, and living costs before being scaled back to a “peacetime” program in the mid 1980s that pays a flat sum.

So McCain is just fine if American troops stay in Iraq for 100 years, but adequately rewarding them for their sacrifices is wrong and he’ll withhold support for a bipartisan bill to greatly expand educational benefits.

More here on what can only be termed a form of blackmail.

Why was a wellknown photographer jailed in Iraq? Was he punished for doing professional work in an independent fashion? “The U.S. military released Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein on Wednesday after holding him for more than two years without filing formal charges,” reports AP.

In New York, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Joel Simon, said Hussein “now joins a growing list of journalists detained in conflict zones by the U.S. military for prolonged periods and eventually released without any charges or crimes ever substantiated against them. This deplorable practice should be of concern to all journalists. It basically allows the U.S. military to remove journalists from the field, lock them up and never be compelled to say why.”

Hussein was a member of the AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005.

How many more Americans will have to die before the folly of the Iraq war collapses in on itself?

Hundreds? Thousands? (Some 25 have died this month alone, a return to pre-Surge levels.)

Proving yet again that the Baghdad government is unwilling and unable to take advantage of the opening that the military phase of the Surge strategy provided, there has been another round of Iraqi army desertions during a crucial battle, this time in the Sadr City slum district of Baghdad.

The New York Times reports that:

“The retreat left a crucial stretch of road on the front lines undefended for hours and led to a tense series of exchanges between American soldiers and about 50 Iraqi troops who were fleeing.

“Capt. Logan Veath, a company commander in the 25th Infantry Division, pleaded with the Iraqi major who was leading his troops away from the Sadr City fight, urging him to return to the front.

” ‘If you turn around and go back up the street those soldiers will follow you,’ Captain Veath said. ‘If you tuck tail and cowardly run away they will follow up that way, too.’

“Captain Veath’s pleas failed, and senior American and Iraqi commanders mounted an urgent effort to regain the lost ground. An elite Iraqi unit was rushed in and with the support of the Americans began to fight its way north.

“This episode was a blow to the American effort to push the Iraqis into the lead in the struggle to wrest control of parts of Sadr City from the Mahdi Army militia and what Americans and Iraqis say are Iranian-backed groups.”

More here.

To everything/There is a season/And a time for every purpose, under heaven/A time to be born, a time to die/A time to plant, a time to reap/A time to kill, a time to heal/A time to laugh, a time to weep. — ECCLESIASTES 3: 1-8

The second and final day of Iraq progress report testimony before by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker is as easy to sum up as the first, with one conspicuous addition:

We have no long-term strategy.

We have no end-game plan.

We just need more Friedman Units, pretty please.

As well as:

The president would like you to help him kick the can down the road to 2009.

When the authoritative histories of the Iraq war are published in future years, as opposed to the comparatively quick-and-dirty accounts that have been coming out, they with resonate with these overarching themes:

* Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place and hands down is the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history.

* Had President Bush been as remotely competent in the conduct of the war as he was in co-opting the American public, his own party and his political opponents, many if not most U.S. troops may have been home in a comparatively short time span.

* While coward is a dreadfully-loaded word and its definition varies depending upon how it is applied, the president was a coward, wrapping himself in the flag while never asking for real sacrifice, never leveling with the American people and most notably being downright eager to dump the entire tragic mess into the lap of his successor.

Read the rest of this entry »

In an earlier post Shaun Mullen suggests that what General David Petraeus says ultimately reflects the policy of the C-in-C, President George W. Bush. While agreeing with Shaun, I would like to add a few points.

First let’s jog our memory. I had written in an earlier post: “The Iraq mess is not of his making nor can he achieve a miracle on his own. But Petraeus is now familiar with the ground realities. The US troops can withdraw only when there is an international intervention strategy to save Iraq from another bloodbath. And the time begins now!!!”

I realize that in realpolitik any country that would like to give a shoulder to sort this bloody mess may also like to have its pound of flesh. But at the moment it looks unlikely that the Bush administration would seek international intervention in Iraq (maybe in the form of stationing UN forces in Iraq for a period of time once the US troops withdraw).

The other choice, and the US may just discover sooner than later that this is the only alternative, is to leave Iraq to its fate and just get out. But oh dear, I forgot about the oil!!! Stupid of me…to think that it is because of the safety of the Iraqi people that US forces continue to be there, and not for oil!!!

How time flies! Twelve months ago I wrote this post about General Petraeus. It appears to me as if I wrote it only yesterday. “Isn’t this a contradiction - on the one hand I oppose the continued occupation of Iraq by US forces, while on the other I praise this General? There are many reasons. Also, his recent interview with PBS News Hour has cleared any doubts about his professional standing.

“Here is a General, given a thankless task of trying to salvage whatever he can from the debris, explaining the ground reality without bringing into disrepute his Commander-in-Chief.”

Now let’s come to the present…with the General at the Capitol Hill. Even now Petraeus has not minced words…”We haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel.” Read between the lines and the message is clear …“WE ARE GLORIOUSLY STUCK IN IRAQ”. More here…

Moureen Dowd writes at NYT: “The guardians of Iraq offer more of the same — a post-Surge Pause or consolidation and evaluation, as the general generically puts it — and no answers about how we can stop our ward from aligning with our enemy.” But why corner the “hands” of the US administration when we know that the “hands” move on the orders of the “head”. Ironically, no one wishes to put into dock the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department. So why blame the “hands”?

While expert/intellectual discussions are welcome, there are two options before General Petraeus. Either to resign or, in keeping with the highest tradition of a man in uniform, obey the orders of the C-in-C sitting the White House. There is little else the General can do other than “stick to the script” agreed to by the High Command.

I concluded my last year’s post by these quotations: “War is too important a matter to be left to the military.” - Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) French statesman and journalist.

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” - Albert Einstein

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” - Albert Einstein

The first day of congressional Iraq progress report testimony by General David Petraeus is easy to sum up:

We have no long-term strategy.

We have no end-game plan.

We just need more Friedman Units, pretty please.

While none of this is surprising (and I hold Petraeus in the highest regard), it is deeply depressing that this is the best he can offer. It is the best that he can offer because that’s all that the White House has to offer.

More here.

It’s semi-annual Iraq progress report time for David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker. But, alas, there has been no progress beyond a return to 2005 death-toll levels, which merely has given Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki an opportunity to try to exterminate his chief political rivals, so the general and the ambassador desperately need a carrot or a bogeyman to appease the few restive senators and representatives among the fawning congressfolk to whom they will report.

You may recall that the duo dangled a carrot when they last checked in back in September.

While they both equivocated about whether the Al-Maliki government was making progress (of course it wasn’t), Petraeus was able to say that the number of troops in country might return to the 130,000 pre-Surge level by this summer.

Well, events on the ground, notably Al-Maliki’s recalcitrance, and statements from President Bush have effectively swept that wee glimmer of hope off the table, so Petraeus and Crocker need a bogeyman.

Surprise! It’s Iran.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

Anyone who takes a politician’s statements literally over and over again is either a hopeless optimist or a fool. Or likely both in the case of John McCain supporters upset over the cottage industry in misquoting his statement about being just fine with American involvement in Iraq for 100 years.

Back on January 3 at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, McCain said that he could see a 100-year American presence in Iraq like the U.S.’s presence in Japan and South Korea “where Americans are not being injured or harmed or killed.”

Good enough.

But to keep focusing on the contextual sleight of hand employed by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and a small army of pundits, Yours Truly included, in not taking McCain’s comment literally is to miss the larger and more important point: Dragging Japan and South Korea, let alone any other historic antecedent involving an American presence in a foreign country, into the Iraq quagmire is like a stripper wearing pasties to conform with a no-total-nudity law.

It is amazing that there are even any pro-war literalists left. Or maybe they’re just doing some really fine pharmaceuticals since what they have been told about the war by the White House has been one lie after another:

Americans were not greeted as liberators.

There were no WMD.

The troops were not home by Christmas 2003.

They were not properly trained or equipped to fight an insurgency.

There was a catastrophic civil war.

And the Surge has not been a success.

The truth is that the Surge has succeeded in lowering American and Iraq death tolls to 2005 levels through a combination of military smartwork and bribery while giving the Iraqi government ample opportunity to prove that it has no interest in trying to mend deep sectarian rifts as long as it is guaranteed a long-term American troop presence – in McCain’s case a presence rounded up to 100 years.

My own view of McCain has been a long, evolving and painful odyssey.

His father, John S. McCain Jr., was a beloved four-star Navy admiral and my commanding officer during the Vietnam War. His son’s exploits in combat, his capture, his heroic refusal to buckle under torture and his homecoming after five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton are deservedly the stuff of legend. And despite some differences on the issues that I care about, I was able to rationalize voting for him a year ago in what seemed then to be the unlikely event that he would be the Republican nominee and the Democrats ran another weakling against him.

That is until I started taking a close look at what McCain has been saying about the war since its outset.

Read the rest of this entry »

[First, I apologize for my long absence (well, a few days). I covered a conference called Women, Action & the Media at MIT last weekend and am still catching up.]

Because, you know, having men and women trained to do that with ordinary weapons isn’t working out so well.

Read the article from Wired here and the 2006 report here.

From the report, highighted by the magazine article:

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence… to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly.

And, the most favoritist part:

There are certain to be cases where some blog, outside the control of the U.S. government, promotes a message that is antithetical to U.S. interests, or actively supports the informational, recruiting and logistical activities of our enemies. The initial reaction may be to take down the site, but this is problematic in that doing so does not guarantee that the site will remain down. As has been the case with many such sites, the offending site will likely move to a different host server, often in a third country. Moreover, such action will likely produce even more interest in the site and its contents. Also, taking down a site that is known to pass enemy EEIs (essential elements of information) and that gives us their key messages denies us a valuable information source. This is not to say that once the information passed becomes redundant or is superseded by a better source that the site should be taken down. At that point the enemy blog might be used covertly as a vehicle for friendly information operations. Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. Better yet, if the blogger happens to be passing enemy communications and logistics data, the information content could be corrupted. If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and either take down the site (and the blogger) themselves, or by threatening such action, give the U.S. an opportunity to offer the individual amnesty in exchange for information. (emphasis in the original)

Here’s the U.S. military’s disclaimer about the report (from the Wired article):

Lt. Commander Marc Boyd, a U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, says the report was merely an academic exercise. “The comments are not ‘actionable’, merely thought provoking,” he tells Danger Room. “The views expressed in the article publication are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, USSOCOM [Special Operations Command], or the Joint Special Operations University.”

Which begs the question,”So how much did we taxpayers pay for this here merely thought provoking academic exercise?”

I guess they haven’t heard about the Pollara report that says bloggers don’t really influence anyway, they are just a source of information.

And we wonder about stalking, cyberbullying and third graders getting it in their heads to injure teachers?

Hey - there’s an idea. Maybe the military should recruit third graders.

Sigh. There are some very sick people governing some other very sick people.

Oh no. One of the report’s co-authors? Dorothy Denning? Was the chair of my alma mater Georgetown’s Computer Science department in the 1990s. Jeez. On the other hand, maybe we’ll get lucky and she’s as unique as Patrick Ewing.

Okay - you know what? I’m not being very nice here. I’m going to e-mail Professor Denning and see if she will speak with me. Otherwise, I’m being as bad as everyone else who I also think of as being bad.

Update: the e-mail to Professor Denning has been sent. I’ll let you know what I hear.

Updatex2: I will be conducting a phone interview with Prof. Denning tomorrow. Much thanks to her for being so open to it.