The American Military Crisis
August 11, 2008
Andrew Bacevich on Democracy Now:
Despite a few flaws, I found Andrew Bacevich’s last book, The New American Militarism, an extremely well argued, and for a non-fiction book on a rather bleak subject, equally well written. He has just come out with another. I can’t wait to read, but for now, here are some tasters. Here is the first in a two part series adapted from the book for Tom Engelhart’s indispensable TomDispatch.
Illusions of Victory
How the United States Did Not Reinvent War… But Thought It Did
By Andrew Bacevich“War is the great auditor of institutions,” the historian Corelli Barnett once observed. Since 9/11, the United States has undergone such an audit and been found wanting. That adverse judgment applies in full to America’s armed forces.
Valor does not offer the measure of an army’s greatness, nor does fortitude, nor durability, nor technological sophistication. A great army is one that accomplishes its assigned mission. Since George W. Bush inaugurated his global war on terror, the armed forces of the United States have failed to meet that standard.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Bush conceived of a bold, offensive strategy, vowing to “take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” The military offered the principal means for undertaking this offensive, and U.S. forces soon found themselves engaged on several fronts.
Two of those fronts — Afghanistan and Iraq — commanded priority attention. In each case, the assigned task was to deliver a knockout blow, leading to a quick, decisive, economical, politically meaningful victory. In each case, despite impressive displays of valor, fortitude, durability, and technological sophistication, America’s military came up short. The problem lay not with the level of exertion but with the results achieved.
Cold War returns via Georgia
August 11, 2008
For some time the US has been priming Georgia for a provocative confrontation with Russia. Israeli and US military ‘advisers’ have been training and equipping the Georgian military. The US has been trying to bring it into NATO. Its military expenditures have shot through the roof. It is also the route for the long-in-planning Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. All in all, a useful foothold for the US in the Russian sphere of influence. And then strikes disaster.
Through a miscalculation worthy of Saddam Hussein, Georgia sends troops into the breakaway South Ossetia to reclaim territory. The Russians, who have been waiting for an excuse to dampen Georgian ambitions, send the still formidable remains of the old red army marching in with characteristic brutality. Georgians beat a hasty retreat, and now have Russian tanks advancing on their own territory. Now, Col (ret.) Sam Gardiner reports, tactical nukes have been thrown into the equation. All in all, a situation more explosive than the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gardiner argues.
Besides Gardiner’s report, here are a couple of useful commentaries to bring you up to speed. First is Laura Rozen’s interview with former CIA station chief Milt Bearden:
In Escalating Russian-Georgian Conflict, the Cold War is Back
As Russia stepped up attacks against Georgian moves to reassert control over the breakaway pro-Russian province of South Ossetia, and many civilians were reported killed and thousands displaced, I asked former deputy director of the CIA’s Soviet and East Europe division Milt Bearden why Russia and Georgia had chosen to escalate their long simmering dispute over South Ossetia now.
“As far as Russia goes, it’s easy: They’re baaack!” Bearden said. “And the Russians are doing what comes naturally to them in their new mood. They know the Europeans don’t want a face-off with Russia/Gazprom. They know the U.S. is so preoccupied with its own self inflicted disasters that it can do nothing but wring it hands. So why not now? It also would seem to stop NATO enlargement in its tracks. Just imagine Georgia inside NATO, and protected under Article 5!!”
What’s Sex Got to Do With It?
August 11, 2008
Chris Hedges on how salacious sex scandals tend to trump real news on the MSM.
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| AP photo / Steven Senne |
If I had to choose between George W. Bush, naked and neighing on all fours while being ridden around the Oval Office by a spurred cowgirl Condoleezza Rice, or enduring his shredding of domestic and international law to wage an illegal war and bilking of the country on behalf of his corporate backers, I could learn to stomach a wide array of sexual escapades.
Let our elected leaders and candidates have quick homosexual encounters in airport bathrooms, bring as many hookers as they want to their hotel rooms, and screw around with their campaign staff as long as they exhaust their libidos on lusts other than war, torture and economic mismanagement. Adolf Hitler, after all, was an abstemious and monogamous vegetarian who loved his German shepherd.
Suskind Revisited 2.0
August 10, 2008
Ron Suskind has now published the transcript of his interview with the source, Rob Richer. It confirms his original story that the White House tasked George Tenet with getting the CIA to produce a fake document suggesting a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’ida. However, it also doesn’t negate my view that the neoconservatives were behind the initiative as the orders from the White House came not from Bush but Cheney and the neoconservative coterie around him, particularly Scooter Libby. Con Coughlin, the hack who published the fake story on the front page of Conrad Black’s Sunday Telegraph has now revealed the source as Iyad Allawi. And Joe Conason at Salon shows that Allawi’s engagements prior to the publication of the story seem to confirm that he was the conduit for the story (thanks and happy birthday Tom).
On Dec. 11, 2003 — three days before the Telegraph launched its “exclusive” on the Habbush memo — the Washington Post published an article by Dana Priest and Robin Wright headlined “Iraq Spy Service Planned by U.S. to Stem Attacks.” Buried inside on Page A41, their story outlined the CIA’s efforts to create a new Iraqi intelligence agency:
“The new service will be trained, financed and equipped largely by the CIA with help from Jordan. Initially the agency will be headed by Iraqi Interior Minister Nouri Badran, a secular Shiite and activist in the Jordan-based Iraqi National Accord, a former exile group that includes former Baath Party military and intelligence officials.
McCommunism
August 10, 2008
Naomi Klein on China and the Olympics
“Security, central planning, surveillance state is an ideal cocoon for global capitalism”
Naomi Klein: Billions of dollars spent on Olympic security, China buys tools of war on terror (2 of 4)
Despotism & Democracy
August 10, 2008
Two short educational videos by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films from 1946/1945 respectively. UK/USA despotism or democracy? The videos would suggest the former rather than the latter.
The Politics of Free Speech
August 9, 2008
No, I am not talking about China. That is easy, and meaningless. I am not moved when some designer anarchist from California privileged enough to afford the ticket to Beijing makes a statement about — Tibet. As if things were hunky dory back home; as if being a Brit or an American grants one the moral authority to dispense such admonition. And there is ignorance. I have never heard any of these peaceniks speak about the Uighurs. Or about the sweatshop labourers. Tibet is sexy, it comes with a patina of Hollywood legitimacy. Uighurs – who are they again?
Does any citizen of the US or UK have business telling the Chinese how to run their affairs when their own countries are busy inflicting genocide abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan) and curtailing rights and liberties at home? Guantanamo, Bagram, Falluja, Abu Ghraib, rendition, shock-and-awe, 42 days without charge — and we have the chutzpah to lecture China, Zimbabwe etc? How many are aware that both UK and US have a higher incarceration rate than China, Saudi Arabia or even Burma?
And all the talk of ‘freedom of speech’ rings a little hollow when neither US nor UK has done much to ensure it at home. Remember those whistleblowers who were last year put in jail by the British state? Can any country which has laws like the Official Secrets Act claim it upholds freedom of speech?
So here comes the latest revelation. Tom Feeley, who runs the excellent news resource Information Clearinghouse is being threatened by armed goons to shut down his operation. Here is a mail Mike Whitney recently sent (thanks Liz):
My friend Tom Feeley is in Big trouble. He runs the web site informationclearinghouse.info <http://informationclearinghouse.info/> which updates “news you won’t find in the corporate media” every day. The site is strongly anti-war.
Tom has gotten his share of death threats over the years, but what happened this week is a lot more serious.
Iraq’s Lepers
August 9, 2008
This is why Al Jazeera is a head and shoulder above all competitors in the mainstream. You will never see something like this on CNN or BBC. As far as they are concerned, the ’surge’ is working and all’s hunky dory.
Untreated, it leaves sufferers with skin sores and weak muscles and can leave patients unable to walk. Leprosy, is a curable disease that’s been wiped out in most countries. But in Iraq – leprosy sufferers in the south are kept in appalling conditions, and receive little treatment.
Nicole Johnston has this report.
Suskind Revisited
August 9, 2008
An extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community has informed me that Ron Suskind’s revelation that the White House ordered the preparation of a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and also to attempts made to obtain yellowcake uranium is correct but that a number of details are wrong.
The Suskind account states that two senior CIA officers Robert Richer and John Maguire supervised the preparation of the document under direct orders coming from Director George Tenet. Not so, says my source. Tenet is for once telling the truth when he states that he would not have undermined himself by preparing such a document while at the same time insisting publicly that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Richer and Maguire have both denied that they were involved with the forgery and it should also be noted that preparation of such a document to mislead the media is illegal and they could have wound up in jail.
My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.
The Olympics: Unveiling Police State 2.0
August 8, 2008
Naomi Klein on China, the Olympics and the police state. For more on this see Klein’s earlier piece China’s all seeing eye.
So far, the Olympics have been an open invitation to China-bash, a bottomless excuse for Western journalists to go after the Commies on everything from internet censorship to Darfur. Through all the nasty news stories, however, the Chinese government has seemed amazingly unperturbed. That’s because it is betting on this: when the opening ceremonies begin friday, you will instantly forget all that unpleasantness as your brain is zapped by the cultural/athletic/political extravaganza that is the Beijing Olympics.
