CapitalistImperialistPig

David Barstow, writing in today's New York Times has a definitive story on how the Pentagon captured and manipulated the news media in the Iraq war. Donald Rumsfeld and Tori Clarke carried out an elaborate "Psyops" war against the American people by deploying a vast horde or so-called "military analysts" to television, the press, and radio. These people, mostly retired military engaged in lobbying for Defense contracts, received favored access and special perks as long as they spouted the official propaganda. There were clear quid pro quos: those who deviated from the official line lost access. Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings f...

Christopher Hitchens is erudite, witty, and an acute critic of almost everything except his own muddled thinking. Only the last quality is much in evidence in his defense of his Iraq war advocacy. That defense consists mainly of inaccuracies and absurdities (we were always at war with Saddam/Westasia; an implausible list of supposed benefits accruing; the argument that the bad things that happened would have happened anyway if we had stayed out). There is some quintessential pathos in his final argument: we meant well. This must, and still does, count for something. Pavement. It counts for pavement. That is the traditional valuation, I think.

Because Israel is faced with real "existential threats," in contrast to the phony ones conjured up by Senator McCain and the other Republican clowns, it tends to take its wars a bit more seriously. For the Republican Party and its many allies, a war is a profit center for It and its clients in the military-industrial complex rather than something serious enough to put aside Party in favor of the Nation. Consequently, we managed to blunder into a ridiculous and costly war and wage that war utterly fecklessly without anybody bothering to check how and why. None of those who led us into that war, from Bush to Clinton to Edwards, want the truth to come out, but the country needs to hear it. Israel, with a boost from the same clowns, made a similar mistake in Lebanon, but they ended the disaster quickly and conducted a real inquiry to find our what went wrong. That inquiry was the Winograd commission, and its final report has been produced, and it is scathing in its condemnat...

Hermann Goering on the need to invade France: I think it [the invasion of France*] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. ... We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it. ... What they needed to see was German boys and girls going house to house, from Lyon* to Paris*, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well Suck. On. This. Okay. That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Norway*, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Belgium*. We hit France* because we could. Oops! My bad. I guess that wasn't really Goering. It seems that that was really little Tommy Friedman on invading Iraq. The survivors of 4000 dead Americans and a million dead Iraqis thank...

Michael Schwartz, writing in Huffpost , links to an Asia Times article by Pepe Escobar that claims that Iraqis may be deciding that they hate us and the Saudi Jihadis more than they hate each other. If true, this would be even more surprising than the Sun coming up tomorrow, but not by much. From Escobar: The ultimate nightmare for White House/Pentagon designs on Middle East energy resources is not Iran after all: it's a unified Iraqi resistance, comprising not only Sunnis but also Shi'ites. "It's the resistance, stupid" - along with "it's the oil, stupid". The intimate connection means there's no way for Washington to control Iraq's oil without protecting it with a string of sprawling military "super-bases". The ultimate, unspoken taboo of the Iraq tragedy is that the US will never leave Iraq, unless, of course, it is kicked out. And that's exactly what the makings of a unified Sunni-Shi'ite resistance is set to accomplis...

Cheney's mercenaries shot up a bunch of Iraqis recently, and Iraq is not best pleased. The government responded by suspending Blackwater's license and ordering them out of the country. Larry Johnson is betting that Blackwater don't need no stinking license. Depending on whether the Blackwater security firm stays in Iraq will inform us whether Prime Minister Maliki has any power or is just a U.S. puppet. My money is on the puppet. Over the weekend Blackwater contractors escorting a State Department/US Embassy Baghdad convoy got into a shoot out. One problem is that if Blackwater and the Iraqi Army were to get busy, BW would probably kick ass: The Iraqi government has zero power to enforce a decision to oust a firm like Blackwater. For starters, Blackwater has a bigger air force and more armored vehicles then the Iraqi Army and police put together. As Spencer Ackerman reported, Blackwater’s little bird helicopter (an aircraft normally used by U.S. special operations forces)...

Dan Froomkin titles his latest column Bush Wins Again. He cites the building consensus among the chattering classes of Washington that the Dems are about to fold, big time, on Iraq. Despite everything, President Bush continues to be able to set the terms of the debate in Washington. Consider how the talk now is mostly about when to end the "surge" -- not when to end the war. How did that happen? ... Now, however, the big news is that Bush's commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, is willing to contemplate a possible drawdown of one brigade early next year -- if the circumstances are right. That's one combat brigade out of the five that make up the surge; one out of 20 such brigades in country in total; or less than 5,000 of the 168,000 troops currently in Iraq. I hope that Democratic leaders realize how seriously pissed off the most active Democratic voters will be if this kind of fold happens. Many of us will be convinced that it is more urgent to rid our Pa...

It's very hard to get out of a war, even a war that most know that you are losing. If you are a superpower, and your opponent is weak mini-state, the difficulty of extraction is greatly increased. An awful lot of people are certain to have a stake in continuing the war long after it becomes clear that the original goals can't be achieved, or can't be achieved at an acceptable cost. Foremost among those are the idiots who got you into the war in the first place, in our case, the President, the Congress, and the Neocon cabal. They aren't the only ones of course. For many, a war is a great moneymaking opportunity. For a partially outsourced war like Iraq, the opportunities are multiplied. All those who supply weapons, food, fuel, equipment, and contract mercenaries are making a killing, and they don't want the war to stop. The soldiers, though, are a key. In Vietnam, and in the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan, the soldiers were mostly draftees with little investm...

Democrats were elected on a tidal wave of opposition to the war, especially as conducted by GW. They have now been in office for eight months, and what have they done? Zero. Nada. Zilch. Supposedly they were waiting on the Petraeus report, but suddenly the air is full of intimations of surrender. I posted on a couple earlier. There are more here and here . Democratic leaders in Congress had planned to use August recess to raise the heat on Republicans to break with President Bush on the Iraq war. Instead, Democrats have been forced to recalibrate their own message in the face of recent positive signs on the security front, increasingly focusing their criticisms on what those military gains have not achieved: reconciliation among Iraq's diverse political factions. And now the Democrats, along with wavering Republicans, will face an advertising blitz from Bush supporters determined to remain on offense. A new pressure group, Freedom's Watch, will unveil a month-long, $15 millio...

In last night's debate, Clinton and Biden each claimed that pulling out of Iraq would take at least a year. I don't buy it. We occupied Iraq in weeks, against considerable opposition. Merely getting out, very likely with little opposition, is unlikely to take many times longer. That said, there might be very good reasons to avoid such precipitous withdrawal, but physical impossibility is a phony one.

Four years down the pike from Mission Accomplished , Editor and Publisher takes a look at the coverage. Greg Mitchell's story starts our with a fitting reminder of why we despise Chris Matthews: "He won the war," boomed MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics." The story is about the NYT coverage though, and it was a mixed bag. The much maligned Judy Miller pretty much reported the facts. Ditto Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt. Elisabeth Bumiller did her usual stenogragphy. Most egregious was Maureen Dowd. She slithered out of her den to get all multi-orgasmic about W's flight suit and ejection harness swaddled crotch: Maureen Dowd, column, May 4 The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he...

Changcho links in the comments to ex-CIA agent Ray McGovern's interview by Amy Goodman. There are many sharp points in transcript, and George Tenet has impaled himself on many of them. The question that interests me the most, though, is why the heck we got into that war in the first place. George Bush is obviously the key, and I will come back to that in a future post, but why did he have so many eager enablers? One hint comes from this part where McGovern takes a few chunks out of a couple of Democratic Senators: RAY McGOVERN: I think people like Dick Durbin have to change their whole mindset and realize that they are not a subservient branch of government. You know, I’m a Virginian, and I think George Mason and James Madison and Tom Jefferson of rolling over in their grave. Here’s Durbin saying, “I knew that the war was going to be fought on false pretenses, but I was sworn to secrecy.” Well, he was sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, both...

One victim of the President's veto of the Congress's emergency spending bill is the Mine Resistant, Armor Protected vehicle , or MRAP . This V-bottom, armored vehicle has demonstrated a capability to protect our soldiers against IEDs and other threats, and is badly needed. Congress should immediately send the president a bill to fund this one item (assuming that he vetoes the emergency spending bill). It should not be allowed to become a political football. This message, in all probability, has been brought to you by the vehicle's manufacturer, but it is a version of what has been needed for years. There is no excuse for delay on this one.

Ricks finished his story of the Iraq war disaster in mid 2006. He had seen modestly encouraging signs in 2005. General Casey, the new man in charge, understood the problem and adopted some sensible strategic principles. In a few cases, like second Iraq tour of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, impressive local successes were achieved. On this tour, the Third ACR was commanded by one on the Army's best, Colonel H. R. McMaster, a warrior scholar with a PhD who had written a notable critique of the command of the Vietnam War ( Dereliction of Duty ). Alas, most of those gains too were subsequently lost. Ricks' finale is a comparison of historical counterinsurgency counterparts and prospects for the future. The most unequivocal past success was in the Phillipines, which the US occupied for half a century, suppressing insurgency through massive carnage and ultimately wiser policy, producing the slightly democratic nation of todday. In the other "positive" examples,...

No doubt looking for another scapegoat, the White House has been looking for a "War Czar." At least three retired four star generals seem to have said "no thanks." From the WP : "The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going," said retired Marine Gen. John J. "Jack" Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job. Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. "So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, 'No, thanks,' " he said. That, of course, has been the problem all along. The President is the man without a clue , the man whose concept of strategy starts and ends with empty pieties.

The US probably spends more on it's military that the rest of the world combined. For the price, we should expect a very good miltary indeed. I had long been of the opinion that the fiasco in Iraq was produced almost entirely by "a few bad apples": Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith. Ricks has persuaded me that the rot went a lot deeper - not that this absolves the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis of evil of any of the blame. There is no doubt that our training and tactics produced an elite professional army superbly qualified to fight a certain kind of war - essentially the war we won in Kuwait under Bush I. Our troops and commanders had thoroughly absorbed the lessons of Brigade scale combat operation against an enemy armored force, and despite Rumsfeld's boneheaded micromanagement of the second Iraq war, those skills were very much in evidence when the Army smashed it's way into Bagdad. Once there, however, glaring weaknesses were quick to appear. "...

One signature of the Justice Department meltdown is the number of giant mistakes by young, inexperienced, and lightly credentialed senior officials. There clearly was a pattern of choosing these people - Kyle Sampson, Monica Goodling, etc - on the basis of ideological purity or, more precisely, personal loyalty to Bush, rather than on competence. This is absolutely no surprise - we saw the same catastrophic pattern in the response to Hurricane Katrina, and, most gravely, in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. At one level, the reason for this massive incompetence is obvious: George Bush. He is surely one of the dumbest and most dishonest inhabitants of the oval office ever. Somehow, though, that's not really quite enough of an explanation. How did he manage to attract, recruit, and appoint so many idiots to his cause? It's almost as if the man has some sort of "fifth force" attraction for stupidity and mendacity. There are a lot of smart guys in the US ...

The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgement that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish...the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, not trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive. ..................Karl von Clausewitz On War In this task, as in every other, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Franks and their minions failed utterly. Via Fiasco , by Thomas E Ricks.

There is, of course, no shortage of moments of high idiocy in the Bush administration's conduct of the war, but Paul Bremer is probably more responsible than anyone else for the explosive growth of the insurgency. He had hardly hit the ground when he took three disastrous actions: Firing anyone (Dr, lawyer, indian chief) who was a "senior" Bathist, abolishing the Iraqi Army, and abolishing the Iraqi police force. In one stroke he put most of the most educated people, the best armed and militarily trained people, and the people who understood how the country worked into unemployment. They all instantly were provided with motive, means, and allies for an insurgency. There is a mystery here, however. Were these actions Bremer's ideas? According to Thomas E Ricks in Fiasco , when his outraged subordinates protested, he said: "I have my orders." Rumsfeld, Feith, and perhaps even Wolfowitz were reputed to be out of the loop. We know who wanted these actions...

I used to admire Senator John McCain, but that was before he became a lying piece of s*** and sold his soul to the devil. Catch NBC revealing a bit of background about his stroll through a market minutes from the green zone. His stroll, in an bulletproof vest, was guarded by 100 American soldiers and 5 Army helicopters.