Herbert sounds like a classic New Left socialist -- the evil capitalist warmongers are ensuring there are, few if any quality, good-paying jobs for liberal arts graduates. The military/IC and its perpetual wars of intervention are indeed a significant waste of money, but what's spent is still a small fraction of what is spent on social welfare, income redistribution, and health and education programs. While some of those services are very important, they are being produced or delivered very inefficiently. We spend more per capita on medicine and education than most of the world does on food, clothing, and shelter.
Maybe that is because even rich America can't afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year per student in our extremely inefficient, unresponsive, and un-competitive State-run primary and secondary schools, nor can afford to spend $50-100K to send a kid to college so they can "find themselves" or "self-actualize" in arts and letters from State-run or State-subsidized and -regulated universities. For that sort of money, they need to become lawyers, engineers or medical doctors.
There are plenty of decent paying jobs out there, but they're not for college grads -- they're for technical trade school grads -- "gray collar" jobs that everyone needs, but no one wants to do. There is a global glut of college educated people, and usually with the wrong sort of degrees -- it is a major cause of the upheavals in much of the 3rd world, where what are needed are productive farmers, civil engineers, entrepreneurs, production managers, transportation specialists, etc., not more lawyers, managers, heavy industrial engineers, professors, bureaucrats, or military officers, etc. They need more doctors, etc., but can't afford them because their societies don't produce enough and people can't earn enough no matter how hard they try.
www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/opinion/26herbert.html
March 25, 2011
Losing Our Way
By BOB HERBERT
So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.
Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone. The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family. There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.
Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn't be, and didn't used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now. The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation's wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.
This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.
A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: "G.E.'s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether." Despite profits of $14.2 billion - $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States - General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.
As The Times' David Kocieniewski reported, "Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore."
G.E. is the nation's largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.
Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home. New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Whither Army: A Frontline View
DoDBuzz.com
March 14, 2011
By Colin Clark
The Army is trying to figure out how to take advantage of the coming period of retrenchment and restructuring. The presumptive Army Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey started the early stage of the discussion during Unified Quest, the annual Army war games designed to figure out what
to do down the road. There was talk of another battalion for each Army brigade and much worrying about just what constitutes a full spectrum force.
The 22,000 people brought in to cushion the Army for the Iraq and Afghan surges and help its troops recover from the grueling pace of the last decade will be vanishing. The fights in Afghanistan and Iraq will be waning for the U.S. over the next five years, raising the question of just how should the Army be structured to cope with the future. One of the most original thinkers on the issue of Army organization has been retired Col. Doug Macgregor. Knowing an opportunity when he sees it, Macgregor has been pushing his ideas within the Army and to senior Pentagon leaders.
But his reputation as a disruptive influence has often blunted the impact of Macgregor’s ideas, along with the Big Army’s deep and abiding reluctance to engage in major change, especially in time of war. (Of course, Army leaders have also resisted change in time of peace; just
look at the Clinton era.)
We got a glimpse at the internal Army debate from an email sent from a lieutenant colonel in Afghanistan, who said “the same forces of obstruction and unwillingness to make meaningful change that held sway then still do today.”
If the service had adopted Macgregor-style changes in organization and weapons, this officer says he thinks the Army “would have saved tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars and had a significantly more capable
military.”
This officer wonders what it will take to get the Army to change as he and others believe it must to ensure the service can respond effectively and rapidly to the nation’s needs. “So on that inevitable day when we plunge off the cliff, once the wreckage has come to a halt and the pieces have settled from their tumult, those who survived will say, ‘you know, that Macgregor fellow seemed to have warned about this in the past. Had we followed his recommendations, maybe we wouldn’t have crashed and burned just now. Hmmm, maybe it would be a wonderful idea if we listened to him NOW and tried to rebuild on the ashes of the disastrous past…”
We hear senior OSD officials are considering proposals derived from Macgregor’s work as they struggle to rebuild the Army. More on this later this week.
March 14, 2011
By Colin Clark
The Army is trying to figure out how to take advantage of the coming period of retrenchment and restructuring. The presumptive Army Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey started the early stage of the discussion during Unified Quest, the annual Army war games designed to figure out what
to do down the road. There was talk of another battalion for each Army brigade and much worrying about just what constitutes a full spectrum force.
The 22,000 people brought in to cushion the Army for the Iraq and Afghan surges and help its troops recover from the grueling pace of the last decade will be vanishing. The fights in Afghanistan and Iraq will be waning for the U.S. over the next five years, raising the question of just how should the Army be structured to cope with the future. One of the most original thinkers on the issue of Army organization has been retired Col. Doug Macgregor. Knowing an opportunity when he sees it, Macgregor has been pushing his ideas within the Army and to senior Pentagon leaders.
But his reputation as a disruptive influence has often blunted the impact of Macgregor’s ideas, along with the Big Army’s deep and abiding reluctance to engage in major change, especially in time of war. (Of course, Army leaders have also resisted change in time of peace; just
look at the Clinton era.)
We got a glimpse at the internal Army debate from an email sent from a lieutenant colonel in Afghanistan, who said “the same forces of obstruction and unwillingness to make meaningful change that held sway then still do today.”
If the service had adopted Macgregor-style changes in organization and weapons, this officer says he thinks the Army “would have saved tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars and had a significantly more capable
military.”
This officer wonders what it will take to get the Army to change as he and others believe it must to ensure the service can respond effectively and rapidly to the nation’s needs. “So on that inevitable day when we plunge off the cliff, once the wreckage has come to a halt and the pieces have settled from their tumult, those who survived will say, ‘you know, that Macgregor fellow seemed to have warned about this in the past. Had we followed his recommendations, maybe we wouldn’t have crashed and burned just now. Hmmm, maybe it would be a wonderful idea if we listened to him NOW and tried to rebuild on the ashes of the disastrous past…”
We hear senior OSD officials are considering proposals derived from Macgregor’s work as they struggle to rebuild the Army. More on this later this week.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Fix the Army, Now!
Fix the Army, Now!
By Douglas Macgregor
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 11:59 am
Posted in Land, Policy
EDITOR:
Doug Macgregor is alternately revered, respected and ridiculed by his Army colleagues and senior Pentagon officials. Ever since then-Army Chief Dennis Reimer made his book, Breaking the Phalanx, required reading for the general officers corps, his ideas have stirred passions in the largest U.S. military service. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' West Point speech elicited strong reactions from Macgregor. In the following op-ed he calls on the next defense secretary to remake the Army in truth--and not just to give the idea lip service.
He calls his piece:
Generals: The Truth will set you free!
By Douglas Macgregor
Nowhere in the world does stating the obvious provoke more shock and alarm than inside the beltway in Washington, DC. Defense Secretary Robert Gates's recent speech at West Point is a case in point.
In what was an unambiguous reference to the commitment of large Army and Marine ground forces to Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates said, "Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should "have his head examined." Do you think so?
Events in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the Islamic World demonstrate that while many of the societies in the Middle East and North Africa are broken and their people are angry about it, these problems have nothing to do with the United States. These societies struggle with dysfunctional cultures and severe socio-economic problems that will not be solved through American military occupation and counterinsurgency operations aimed at exporting liberal democracy at gunpoint. The million dollars a year it costs to keep one American Soldier or marine stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan makes no sense when, for a fraction of the cost, the U.S. Government could easily protect America's borders from the wave of criminality, terrorism and illegal immigration pouring in from Mexico and Latin America.
Gates did not stop there. He went on to say "the need for heavy armor and firepower to survive, close with, and destroy the enemy will always be there, as veterans of Sadr City and Fallujah can no doubt attest." However, Gates suggested the future would not involve the employment of Army divisions warning the Army's generals they "must confront the reality that the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements."
In 1997 I published a book, Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Land Power in the 21st Century. In it, I advocated the dissolution of the Army's World War II industrial Age warfighting structure arguing instead for a new paradigm with a flatter command structure designed to tightly integrate Army ground forces with air and naval power. The design I set forth replaced conventional Army brigades and divisions with a new formation, the Combat Group; a permanently organized, all arms formation commanded by a brigadier general with the staff and the critical links to plan and execute decisive operations under a Joint Headquarters that replaced the WW II Corps and Army headquarters. I also implored the generals to harmonize readiness training and deployment schedules with the Navy, Air Force and Marines on the Navy's rotational readiness model to ease the burden on the individual soldier and to reduce the costs.
In 2003, I extended this analysis in Transformation under Fire: Revolutionizing the Way America Fights, arguing for the employment of the Combat Groups outlined in Breaking the Phalanx under a joint integrative command structure that crossed service lines to drive critical warfighting capabilities to lower levels. Instead of organizing around its anachronistic branches, I urged the Army generals to reorganize the ground force around the functions of maneuver, strike, ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and sustainment (logistics) to facilitate its integration with the capabilities in the air and naval services.
Gates, like his predecessors in the office of the Secretary of Defense, was well aware of these works, works widely supported inside the armed forces. But neither Cohen, Rumsfeld nor Gates did anything. Why?
The Army's active and retired four stars were certainly not interested in changing the Army. The politicians who were nominally in charge of overseeing the military were much more concerned about getting their share of the defense budget than in changing the way we organize to fight.
Sober analyses like the ones in my books were pushed aside in favor of purchasing new and ever more expensive silver bullet equipment like the Army's Crusader Artillery System or the Future Combat System (FCS) - systems designed to support vacuous programs like the Army After Next and the Objective Force - preferably for delivery in the indefinite future and heavily classified so their effectiveness could not be judged. Meanwhile, the number of professional combat Soldiers declined while the numbers of generals on active duty increased and the contractors got rich.
Hundreds of billions of dollars and years later the retired four stars who launched these flawed programs are wealthy men, but the Army is poor; stuck with huge inventories of broken equipment developed in the 1970s for use in the 1980s and armored trucks designed to chase men with rifles through alleys and valleys.
Churchill insisted Americans eventually do the right thing after they've done everything else. It's time for a new Secretary of Defense to do the right thing. It won't be easy, but the alternative is to risk a repetition of the bloody and cripplingly expensive debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor is a decorated combat veteran and the author of four books. His newest book is Warrior's Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting published by Naval Institute Press.
Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/03/02/fix-the-army-now/#ixzz1FTxEqAtV
Friday, September 10, 2010
So, Who Won the War in Iraq? Iran
By Mohamad Bazzi
BEIRUT, Lebanon - In February 2003, as he marshaled the United States for war, President George W. Bush declared: "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region."
Now, as the U.S. military concludes its combat role - which President Barack Obama will formally announce from the Oval Office on Tuesday - Iraq is indeed a dramatic example for the Middle East, but not in the ways that Bush and his administration envisioned. Iraq did not become a beacon of democracy, nor did it create a domino effect that toppled other dictatorial regimes in the Arab world. Instead, the Iraq war has unleashed a new wave of sectarian hatred and upset the Persian Gulf's strategic balance, helping Iran consolidate its role as the dominant regional power.
The Bush administration argued that its goal was to protect U.S. interests and security in the long run. But the region is far more unstable and combustible than it was when U.S. forces began their march to Baghdad seven years ago. Throughout the Middle East, relations between Sunnis and Shiites are badly strained by the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq. Sunnis are worried about the regional ascendance of the Shiite-led regime in Iran; its nuclear program; its growing influence on the Iraqi leadership; and its meddling in other countries with large Shiite communities, especially Lebanon.
Iran is the biggest beneficiary of the American misadventure in Iraq. The U.S. ousted Tehran's sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein, from power. Then Washington helped install a Shiite government for the first time in Iraq's modern history. As U.S. troops became mired in fighting an insurgency and containing a civil war, Iran extended its influence over all of Iraq's Shiite factions.
Today's Middle East has been shaped by several proxy wars. In Iraq, neighboring Sunni regimes backed Sunni militants, while Iran supported Shiite militias. In Lebanon, an alliance between Washington and authoritarian Sunni Arab regimes - Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries - backed a Sunni-led government against Hezbollah, a Shiite militia funded by Iran. And in the Palestinian territories, Iran and Syria supported the militant Hamas, while the U.S. and its Arab allies backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah movement.
In 2007, at the height of the insurgency and sectarian conflict in Iraq, I went to see Marwan Kabalan, a political scientist at Damascus University. He explained the regional dynamics better than anyone else. "Everyone is fighting battles through local proxies. It's like the Cold War," he told me. "All regimes in the Middle East recognize that America has lost the war in Iraq. They're all maneuvering to protect their interests and to gain something out of the American defeat."
With U.S. influence waning and Iran ascendant, Iraq's other neighbors are still jockeying to gain a foothold with the new government in Baghdad. For example, Saudi Arabia's ruling Al-Saud dynasty views itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim world, but Iran is challenging that leadership right now. Although Saudi Arabia has a Sunni majority, its rulers fear Iran's potential influence over a sizable and sometimes-restive Shiite population concentrated in the kingdom's oil-rich Eastern Province. In Bahrain (another American ally in the Persian Gulf), the Shiite majority is chafing under Sunni rulers who also fear Iran's reach.
Even worse, the brutal war between Iraq's Shiite majority and Sunni minority unleashed sectarian hatreds that are difficult to contain. This blowback has been most keenly felt in Lebanon, a small country with a history of religious strife. During Lebanon's 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990, the sectarian divide was between Muslims and Christians. This time, the conflict is mainly between Sunnis and Shiites - and it is fueled, in part, by the bloodbath in Iraq.
After Saddam was executed in December 2006, Sunnis saw the U.S. and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government as killing off the last vestiges of Arab nationalism. Although Saddam was once a dependable ally of the West, by the 1990s he was among the few Arab leaders who defied the United States and European powers. In the Sunni view, America and its allies eradicated the idea of a glorious Arab past without offering any replacement for it - other than sectarianism.
In 2007 and 2008, Lebanese Sunnis felt besieged as they watched news from Iraq of Shiite death squads executing Sunnis and driving them out of Baghdad neighborhoods. At the same time, Hezbollah was trying to topple the Sunni-led Lebanese government by staging street protests and a massive sit-in that paralyzed downtown Beirut. In January 2007, as they confronted Hezbollah supporters during a nationwide strike, groups of Sunnis waved posters of Saddam and chanted his name in front of TV cameras.
It was a rich contradiction: American-allied Sunnis in Lebanon carrying posters of Saddam, a dictator the U.S. had spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives to depose. But it was also a declaration of war. Saddam, after all, killed hundreds of thousands of Shiites in Iraq. Many Lebanese Shiites have relatives in Iraq, and the two communities have had close ties for centuries. Lebanon's political factions eventually compromised on a new government, but the underlying sectarian tensions are still in place, with everyone keeping a wary eye on Iraq.
As Iraq's Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds argue over sharing power and the country's oil wealth, violence is on the rise yet again. The latest elections produced a deadlocked parliament in Baghdad that has not been able to agree on a new government. Far from becoming a model of freedom and religious coexistence, Iraq remains a powder keg that could ignite sectarian conflict across the Middle East.
Mohamad Bazzi is a journalism professor at New York University and an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Douglas Macgregor, PhD
www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/100829/iraq-war-iran-US-military
BEIRUT, Lebanon - In February 2003, as he marshaled the United States for war, President George W. Bush declared: "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region."
Now, as the U.S. military concludes its combat role - which President Barack Obama will formally announce from the Oval Office on Tuesday - Iraq is indeed a dramatic example for the Middle East, but not in the ways that Bush and his administration envisioned. Iraq did not become a beacon of democracy, nor did it create a domino effect that toppled other dictatorial regimes in the Arab world. Instead, the Iraq war has unleashed a new wave of sectarian hatred and upset the Persian Gulf's strategic balance, helping Iran consolidate its role as the dominant regional power.
The Bush administration argued that its goal was to protect U.S. interests and security in the long run. But the region is far more unstable and combustible than it was when U.S. forces began their march to Baghdad seven years ago. Throughout the Middle East, relations between Sunnis and Shiites are badly strained by the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq. Sunnis are worried about the regional ascendance of the Shiite-led regime in Iran; its nuclear program; its growing influence on the Iraqi leadership; and its meddling in other countries with large Shiite communities, especially Lebanon.
Iran is the biggest beneficiary of the American misadventure in Iraq. The U.S. ousted Tehran's sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein, from power. Then Washington helped install a Shiite government for the first time in Iraq's modern history. As U.S. troops became mired in fighting an insurgency and containing a civil war, Iran extended its influence over all of Iraq's Shiite factions.
Today's Middle East has been shaped by several proxy wars. In Iraq, neighboring Sunni regimes backed Sunni militants, while Iran supported Shiite militias. In Lebanon, an alliance between Washington and authoritarian Sunni Arab regimes - Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries - backed a Sunni-led government against Hezbollah, a Shiite militia funded by Iran. And in the Palestinian territories, Iran and Syria supported the militant Hamas, while the U.S. and its Arab allies backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah movement.
In 2007, at the height of the insurgency and sectarian conflict in Iraq, I went to see Marwan Kabalan, a political scientist at Damascus University. He explained the regional dynamics better than anyone else. "Everyone is fighting battles through local proxies. It's like the Cold War," he told me. "All regimes in the Middle East recognize that America has lost the war in Iraq. They're all maneuvering to protect their interests and to gain something out of the American defeat."
With U.S. influence waning and Iran ascendant, Iraq's other neighbors are still jockeying to gain a foothold with the new government in Baghdad. For example, Saudi Arabia's ruling Al-Saud dynasty views itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim world, but Iran is challenging that leadership right now. Although Saudi Arabia has a Sunni majority, its rulers fear Iran's potential influence over a sizable and sometimes-restive Shiite population concentrated in the kingdom's oil-rich Eastern Province. In Bahrain (another American ally in the Persian Gulf), the Shiite majority is chafing under Sunni rulers who also fear Iran's reach.
Even worse, the brutal war between Iraq's Shiite majority and Sunni minority unleashed sectarian hatreds that are difficult to contain. This blowback has been most keenly felt in Lebanon, a small country with a history of religious strife. During Lebanon's 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990, the sectarian divide was between Muslims and Christians. This time, the conflict is mainly between Sunnis and Shiites - and it is fueled, in part, by the bloodbath in Iraq.
After Saddam was executed in December 2006, Sunnis saw the U.S. and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government as killing off the last vestiges of Arab nationalism. Although Saddam was once a dependable ally of the West, by the 1990s he was among the few Arab leaders who defied the United States and European powers. In the Sunni view, America and its allies eradicated the idea of a glorious Arab past without offering any replacement for it - other than sectarianism.
In 2007 and 2008, Lebanese Sunnis felt besieged as they watched news from Iraq of Shiite death squads executing Sunnis and driving them out of Baghdad neighborhoods. At the same time, Hezbollah was trying to topple the Sunni-led Lebanese government by staging street protests and a massive sit-in that paralyzed downtown Beirut. In January 2007, as they confronted Hezbollah supporters during a nationwide strike, groups of Sunnis waved posters of Saddam and chanted his name in front of TV cameras.
It was a rich contradiction: American-allied Sunnis in Lebanon carrying posters of Saddam, a dictator the U.S. had spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives to depose. But it was also a declaration of war. Saddam, after all, killed hundreds of thousands of Shiites in Iraq. Many Lebanese Shiites have relatives in Iraq, and the two communities have had close ties for centuries. Lebanon's political factions eventually compromised on a new government, but the underlying sectarian tensions are still in place, with everyone keeping a wary eye on Iraq.
As Iraq's Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds argue over sharing power and the country's oil wealth, violence is on the rise yet again. The latest elections produced a deadlocked parliament in Baghdad that has not been able to agree on a new government. Far from becoming a model of freedom and religious coexistence, Iraq remains a powder keg that could ignite sectarian conflict across the Middle East.
Mohamad Bazzi is a journalism professor at New York University and an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Douglas Macgregor, PhD
www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/100829/iraq-war-iran-US-military
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Future U.S. Geostrategic Focus
There will be plenty spirits of Iraq policy past, present and future crowding the dais tonight as the President announces a “successful” transition and “a promise kept” for the drawdown of American troops from Iraq.
There’s George W. and Dick Cheney and their ghoulish courtiers – Donald Rumsfeld and his number two Paul Wolfowitz, not to mention coalition provisional authority viceroy L. Paul Bremer and Douglas Feith, all who dragged the country into Iraq and then botched it irreparably.
Hovering close by are our military demigods, Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, gently plucking and pulling the strings of the president who is trying to convince the American people that Iraq is all but over, despite leaving 50,000 soldiers and a civilian force of at least 10,000 staff and heavily armed security contractors behind.
But the real phantasm casting a pall over the proceedings is an Iraqi one and he represents it all – the past, present and more importantly, the future of Iraq .Muqtada al Sadr, once dismissed by Washington neoconservatives as a desperate, washed-up five-cent firebrand, is now an Iranian-supported kingmaker who will not only help determine the next government and prime minister, but has threatened to activate the armed wing of his low-lying Mahdi Army, the Promised Day Brigade, if the American “occupier” doesn’t pack up and leave entirely.
The “Promised Day Brigade” will “prepare quietly to launch qualitative attacks against the occupiers ( U.S. forces) if they stay beyond 2011,” said Sadr spokesman Salah al-Obeidi, to the Associated Press, in May. “It will have a big role to play to drive them out of Iraq .”
Sadr is of course, an awkward subject for an administration attempting to project the best, most optimistic image in the rear-view. This was Bush’s war, and Obama seems eager to keep it that way, more so, to move on and to focus on his mess in Afghanistan. But he is having a hard time fully extricating – Odierno has already suggested scenarios in which the U.S combat mission might have to resume – and the fact that there is no government, and may not be any government without Sadr’s say-so, must be very difficult to stomach back in Washington.
Says writer Babak Dehghanpisheh, in his August Foreign Policy piece, “The King of Iraq“:
“The Sadrists … aren’t going anywhere – which puts Washington , among others, in a bind. Sadr’s supporters are more than just a political party. The cleric is clearly following the Hezbollah model, creating populist political movement backed by a battle-hardened militia. The language Sadr uses when discussing the U.S. presence in Iraq – resistance, occupation, martyrdom – could easily have been taken from a speech by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. All this has discouraged U.S. officials from holding talks with Sadr – something they’ve never done since 2003. It’s not exactly like Sadr has gone out of his way to open up a dialogue, either. In fact, Sadr and many of his top aides have made it clear that the Mahdi Army won’t disarm as long as there are American troops on Iraqi soil.”
From the start, the 37-year-old cleric, politician and militia leader has openly denounced the security agreement allowing for the gradual drawdown of troops by 2011. When the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) was signed in 2008 by Bush and Sadr’s political rival, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, Sadr promised blood in the streets unless the U.S left sooner.
“I repeat my call on the occupier to get out from the land of our beloved Iraq , without retaining bases or signing agreements,” said Sadr, who has been in religious training, and managing his political affairs from a safe perch in Iran for the last three years. “If they do stay, I urge the honorable resistance fighters … to direct their weapons exclusively against the occupier.” His words came a month after tens of thousands of his supporters took to the streets in Baghdad against the SOFA.
In a piece called “The Bad Boy of Iraqi Politics Returns,” Mohamad Bazzi points out how “Sadr’s political ascendance threatens to stoke sectarian tensions in Iraq,” which are particularly acute as a wave of violence, reportedly sparked by remaining al Qaeda factions in Iraq, have killed hundreds in the country over the last several weeks. While American leaders appear to downplay it, the fact that an anti-American Shia who once tested U.S military resolve in Najaf, Karbala , Basra and Baghdad , is gathering himself up for a big political victory and possibly, a future Shia revival, seems to be the silent ugly truth of Obama’s “successful” troop drawdown.
“Under the circumstances, (Sadr’s) power and influence inside Iraq ’s Shia community is both permanent and growing,” noted retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor. “He is unlikely to lead the country, but he and his supporters will wield decisive influence.”
But We Thought He Was Dead!
Maybe not dead, but certainly defeated. A number of times – or at least it always seemed so. But he always comes back. Sadr is the son-in-law of a Shia martyr and the fourth son of the beloved Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, who was murdered in 1989 along with two of Sadr’s brothers, allegedly by Ba’athists working for dictator Saddam Hussein. Because Sadr’s father had sacrificed his life by remaining in Iraq rather than fleeing to Iran during Saddam’s dictatorship, his family name invokes great respect and authority among the Iraqi Shia to this day. Baghdad ’s Sadr City was later named for his martyrdom.
Muqtada al Sadr has only enhanced this influence and legitimacy among Sadrist Shia followers during the U.S war, for rebelling against and not consorting with “the occupier,” nor bending to the wills of Maliki or even Iran . Just last week, Sadr told his hosts in Iran that he will leave them and set up shop in Lebanon if they continue to exert pressure on him to join Maliki in a coalition government. The political situation has been in a stalemate since March when parties backed by Sadr and former prime minister Iyad Allawi won enough seats to break Maliki’s grip over the formation of the future government.
Sadr does not support, nor trust Maliki, after the Iraqi prime minister took up common cause with the Americans and helped lead a series of crackdowns on Sadrist strongholds, particularly Sadr City , in 2007 and 2008 as part of the infamous “Surge.” At the time, throughout several wobbly ceasefires and Sadr’s exile to Iran , his movement appeared doomed to the dustbin. Since then, Maliki’s forces have fully penetrated Sadr City , the remaining loyalist fighters seemingly melted away.
According to the Washington Post, Sadr froze the Mahdi Army’s activities in 2008 and “has since divided most of his men into two unarmed civic organizations called Mumahidoon, ‘those who pave the way,’ and Munasiroon, ‘the supporters,’ to provide services to the poor, protect mosques and study religion. The aforementioned Promised Day Brigade is the Mahdi’s only armed wing. Offshoots of the old army, referred to by the U.S military as “special groups,” operate independently, and often contrary, to Sadr’s leadership and goals.
But Muqtada’s influence among the Shia has always been second-guessed by American analysts. During a wave of Mahdi Army uprisings in 2004 in which Sadr’s forces briefly gained control of key Shia cities over American forces, neoconservative Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute called Sadr “a desperate man,” who wanted to “cash in on his family’s name,” and whose “support has hemorrhaged over the past several months.” A month later, Charles Krauthammer declared that Sadr’s militia, was “systematically taken down by the U.S military.”
Not quite – it turned out they had a few good fights left in them. Sadr, meanwhile, was not so disregarded by the Shia that he wasn’t able to influence the 2006 elections. Sadr-backed candidates won an impressive 30 seats in the election and helped to propel Maliki to the head of the government. Sadr’s political sway was only matched – and surpassed – in this way in March, when his candidates won 40 seats and a coveted place at the bargaining table.
“Sadr has once again shown greater political skill than the United States and his Iraqi rivals usually give him credit for,” wrote Mohamed Bazzi in July. Patrick Cockburn, author of Muqtada, told Antiwar Radio’s Scott Horton recently that Sadr represented “the only grassroots movement in Iraq .”
As Cockburn explained in his book, while U.S media and government “demonizes and belittles” Sadr, his political – and physical – survival belies a strength that Americans may not be fully prepared to understand or ultimately overcome. “Muqtada and his followers are intensely religious and see themselves as following in the tradition of martyrdom in opposition to the tyranny established when Hussein and Abbas were killed by the Umayyads on the plains of Karbala fourteen hundred years ago,” writes Cockburn.
In other words, while the American lens might see Sadr as just another ambitious man seeking political control of Iraq, it may be missing the bigger picture, that Sadr is studying in Iran to become an ayatollah in the tradition of his family, perhaps seeking to become an authoritative, supreme religious leader who commands the politics and steers Iraq into a more purist Shia vision – one that has no place for the America’s own strategic vision for the Middle East.
The prospect for this should be what tickles the back of Obama’s neck as he takes to the podium this evening.
“The key point,” says Macgregor, “is we spent a trillion dollars, sacrificed and destroyed thousands of US lives and millions of Arab lives with the result that we changed nothing of significance inside Iraq .”
Douglas Macgregor, PhD
Response received from H. Mark R.
Dear Colonel Macgregor,
I am not a writer but your views on the HDNet show coincided so much with my deep down gut feelings that I decide to write my views.
--------------------------------------------------------------
I heard a speech by Colonel Douglas Macgregor, US Army retired, where he said “ America’s first concern should be prosperity because economic prosperity is the foundation of military power. We are not a great military power because we had genius generals. We are not a great military power because God necessarily selected us for this role. We are a great military power because of this economic engine that was constructed between the Civil War and World War I and then expanded as a result of World War II. That engine is in trouble.” Our number one concern, as taxpayers, should be economic prosperity.
Ask yourself the really tough question, was (is) Iraq worth it? Economists today say that the total cost of the Iraq war will total three (3) trillion dollars from the United States taxpayers. A number that is hard to comprehend. Was Iraq and taking down its leaders really worth 3 trillion dollars? Oh! I remember now; it was about those questionable weapons of mass destruction. How many problems of the United States could we have resolved with that amount of money? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, securing our borders, not increasing our national debt, education, roads and bridges, just to mention a few. I am talking about issues within our United States borders.
I support our Military; however, our leaders (the President, Congress, and Department of Defense) have let spending get out of hand. They are not asking the right questions. Today, the United States is spending 250 million A DAY in Afghanistan. According to experts, we could be there another 10 years. You do the math. How much is Afghanistan going to cost American taxpayers? What will we, the taxpayers, benefit from this Afghanistan expenditure? Will this help our economic prosperity?
What was the cost of Vietnam? What did that war cost in lives and dollars? Oh! I remember now, it was about that questionable Gulf of Tonkin issue. Did Vietnam help our economic prosperity?
Can anyone tell me how we get economic prosperity by spending trillions of dollars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? What is the benefit to the taxpayer? I understand the benefit to the military contractors like Halliburton and its subsidiaries, but what about main-street, the people like you and me?
The United States spends more on its military budget than the next 48 largest military budgets combined! Our military budget is about half of all the world's military budgets combined. Is this helping us achieve economic prosperity here in the United States? What is the benefit to the taxpayer? Opposition will say “safety.” Is spending trillions being “over there” really making the United States safer “over here?”
Colonel Douglas Macgregor states “If you take all of the tax revenues that we create every year in the United States, collectively they will pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That’s all. All other federal spending whether it is for the Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy or Department of Defense comes from printed and borrowed money. Now my question and what every American citizen should ask is, “Is this sustainable?” I don’t think it is.”
I agree with Colonel Macgregor that it is not sustainable. Unless we stop spending our tax revenue for causes that do not make sense over the long run, we can say goodbye to economic prosperity and hello to bankruptcy.
Are we interested enough in democracy and this way of life to sit down and think things through on the really tough issues, to bring about real economic prosperity?
H. Mark R.
There’s George W. and Dick Cheney and their ghoulish courtiers – Donald Rumsfeld and his number two Paul Wolfowitz, not to mention coalition provisional authority viceroy L. Paul Bremer and Douglas Feith, all who dragged the country into Iraq and then botched it irreparably.
Hovering close by are our military demigods, Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, gently plucking and pulling the strings of the president who is trying to convince the American people that Iraq is all but over, despite leaving 50,000 soldiers and a civilian force of at least 10,000 staff and heavily armed security contractors behind.
But the real phantasm casting a pall over the proceedings is an Iraqi one and he represents it all – the past, present and more importantly, the future of Iraq .Muqtada al Sadr, once dismissed by Washington neoconservatives as a desperate, washed-up five-cent firebrand, is now an Iranian-supported kingmaker who will not only help determine the next government and prime minister, but has threatened to activate the armed wing of his low-lying Mahdi Army, the Promised Day Brigade, if the American “occupier” doesn’t pack up and leave entirely.
The “Promised Day Brigade” will “prepare quietly to launch qualitative attacks against the occupiers ( U.S. forces) if they stay beyond 2011,” said Sadr spokesman Salah al-Obeidi, to the Associated Press, in May. “It will have a big role to play to drive them out of Iraq .”
Sadr is of course, an awkward subject for an administration attempting to project the best, most optimistic image in the rear-view. This was Bush’s war, and Obama seems eager to keep it that way, more so, to move on and to focus on his mess in Afghanistan. But he is having a hard time fully extricating – Odierno has already suggested scenarios in which the U.S combat mission might have to resume – and the fact that there is no government, and may not be any government without Sadr’s say-so, must be very difficult to stomach back in Washington.
Says writer Babak Dehghanpisheh, in his August Foreign Policy piece, “The King of Iraq“:
“The Sadrists … aren’t going anywhere – which puts Washington , among others, in a bind. Sadr’s supporters are more than just a political party. The cleric is clearly following the Hezbollah model, creating populist political movement backed by a battle-hardened militia. The language Sadr uses when discussing the U.S. presence in Iraq – resistance, occupation, martyrdom – could easily have been taken from a speech by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. All this has discouraged U.S. officials from holding talks with Sadr – something they’ve never done since 2003. It’s not exactly like Sadr has gone out of his way to open up a dialogue, either. In fact, Sadr and many of his top aides have made it clear that the Mahdi Army won’t disarm as long as there are American troops on Iraqi soil.”
From the start, the 37-year-old cleric, politician and militia leader has openly denounced the security agreement allowing for the gradual drawdown of troops by 2011. When the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) was signed in 2008 by Bush and Sadr’s political rival, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, Sadr promised blood in the streets unless the U.S left sooner.
“I repeat my call on the occupier to get out from the land of our beloved Iraq , without retaining bases or signing agreements,” said Sadr, who has been in religious training, and managing his political affairs from a safe perch in Iran for the last three years. “If they do stay, I urge the honorable resistance fighters … to direct their weapons exclusively against the occupier.” His words came a month after tens of thousands of his supporters took to the streets in Baghdad against the SOFA.
In a piece called “The Bad Boy of Iraqi Politics Returns,” Mohamad Bazzi points out how “Sadr’s political ascendance threatens to stoke sectarian tensions in Iraq,” which are particularly acute as a wave of violence, reportedly sparked by remaining al Qaeda factions in Iraq, have killed hundreds in the country over the last several weeks. While American leaders appear to downplay it, the fact that an anti-American Shia who once tested U.S military resolve in Najaf, Karbala , Basra and Baghdad , is gathering himself up for a big political victory and possibly, a future Shia revival, seems to be the silent ugly truth of Obama’s “successful” troop drawdown.
“Under the circumstances, (Sadr’s) power and influence inside Iraq ’s Shia community is both permanent and growing,” noted retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor. “He is unlikely to lead the country, but he and his supporters will wield decisive influence.”
But We Thought He Was Dead!
Maybe not dead, but certainly defeated. A number of times – or at least it always seemed so. But he always comes back. Sadr is the son-in-law of a Shia martyr and the fourth son of the beloved Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, who was murdered in 1989 along with two of Sadr’s brothers, allegedly by Ba’athists working for dictator Saddam Hussein. Because Sadr’s father had sacrificed his life by remaining in Iraq rather than fleeing to Iran during Saddam’s dictatorship, his family name invokes great respect and authority among the Iraqi Shia to this day. Baghdad ’s Sadr City was later named for his martyrdom.
Muqtada al Sadr has only enhanced this influence and legitimacy among Sadrist Shia followers during the U.S war, for rebelling against and not consorting with “the occupier,” nor bending to the wills of Maliki or even Iran . Just last week, Sadr told his hosts in Iran that he will leave them and set up shop in Lebanon if they continue to exert pressure on him to join Maliki in a coalition government. The political situation has been in a stalemate since March when parties backed by Sadr and former prime minister Iyad Allawi won enough seats to break Maliki’s grip over the formation of the future government.
Sadr does not support, nor trust Maliki, after the Iraqi prime minister took up common cause with the Americans and helped lead a series of crackdowns on Sadrist strongholds, particularly Sadr City , in 2007 and 2008 as part of the infamous “Surge.” At the time, throughout several wobbly ceasefires and Sadr’s exile to Iran , his movement appeared doomed to the dustbin. Since then, Maliki’s forces have fully penetrated Sadr City , the remaining loyalist fighters seemingly melted away.
According to the Washington Post, Sadr froze the Mahdi Army’s activities in 2008 and “has since divided most of his men into two unarmed civic organizations called Mumahidoon, ‘those who pave the way,’ and Munasiroon, ‘the supporters,’ to provide services to the poor, protect mosques and study religion. The aforementioned Promised Day Brigade is the Mahdi’s only armed wing. Offshoots of the old army, referred to by the U.S military as “special groups,” operate independently, and often contrary, to Sadr’s leadership and goals.
But Muqtada’s influence among the Shia has always been second-guessed by American analysts. During a wave of Mahdi Army uprisings in 2004 in which Sadr’s forces briefly gained control of key Shia cities over American forces, neoconservative Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute called Sadr “a desperate man,” who wanted to “cash in on his family’s name,” and whose “support has hemorrhaged over the past several months.” A month later, Charles Krauthammer declared that Sadr’s militia, was “systematically taken down by the U.S military.”
Not quite – it turned out they had a few good fights left in them. Sadr, meanwhile, was not so disregarded by the Shia that he wasn’t able to influence the 2006 elections. Sadr-backed candidates won an impressive 30 seats in the election and helped to propel Maliki to the head of the government. Sadr’s political sway was only matched – and surpassed – in this way in March, when his candidates won 40 seats and a coveted place at the bargaining table.
“Sadr has once again shown greater political skill than the United States and his Iraqi rivals usually give him credit for,” wrote Mohamed Bazzi in July. Patrick Cockburn, author of Muqtada, told Antiwar Radio’s Scott Horton recently that Sadr represented “the only grassroots movement in Iraq .”
As Cockburn explained in his book, while U.S media and government “demonizes and belittles” Sadr, his political – and physical – survival belies a strength that Americans may not be fully prepared to understand or ultimately overcome. “Muqtada and his followers are intensely religious and see themselves as following in the tradition of martyrdom in opposition to the tyranny established when Hussein and Abbas were killed by the Umayyads on the plains of Karbala fourteen hundred years ago,” writes Cockburn.
In other words, while the American lens might see Sadr as just another ambitious man seeking political control of Iraq, it may be missing the bigger picture, that Sadr is studying in Iran to become an ayatollah in the tradition of his family, perhaps seeking to become an authoritative, supreme religious leader who commands the politics and steers Iraq into a more purist Shia vision – one that has no place for the America’s own strategic vision for the Middle East.
The prospect for this should be what tickles the back of Obama’s neck as he takes to the podium this evening.
“The key point,” says Macgregor, “is we spent a trillion dollars, sacrificed and destroyed thousands of US lives and millions of Arab lives with the result that we changed nothing of significance inside Iraq .”
Douglas Macgregor, PhD
Response received from H. Mark R.
Dear Colonel Macgregor,
I am not a writer but your views on the HDNet show coincided so much with my deep down gut feelings that I decide to write my views.
--------------------------------------------------------------
I heard a speech by Colonel Douglas Macgregor, US Army retired, where he said “ America’s first concern should be prosperity because economic prosperity is the foundation of military power. We are not a great military power because we had genius generals. We are not a great military power because God necessarily selected us for this role. We are a great military power because of this economic engine that was constructed between the Civil War and World War I and then expanded as a result of World War II. That engine is in trouble.” Our number one concern, as taxpayers, should be economic prosperity.
Ask yourself the really tough question, was (is) Iraq worth it? Economists today say that the total cost of the Iraq war will total three (3) trillion dollars from the United States taxpayers. A number that is hard to comprehend. Was Iraq and taking down its leaders really worth 3 trillion dollars? Oh! I remember now; it was about those questionable weapons of mass destruction. How many problems of the United States could we have resolved with that amount of money? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, securing our borders, not increasing our national debt, education, roads and bridges, just to mention a few. I am talking about issues within our United States borders.
I support our Military; however, our leaders (the President, Congress, and Department of Defense) have let spending get out of hand. They are not asking the right questions. Today, the United States is spending 250 million A DAY in Afghanistan. According to experts, we could be there another 10 years. You do the math. How much is Afghanistan going to cost American taxpayers? What will we, the taxpayers, benefit from this Afghanistan expenditure? Will this help our economic prosperity?
What was the cost of Vietnam? What did that war cost in lives and dollars? Oh! I remember now, it was about that questionable Gulf of Tonkin issue. Did Vietnam help our economic prosperity?
Can anyone tell me how we get economic prosperity by spending trillions of dollars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? What is the benefit to the taxpayer? I understand the benefit to the military contractors like Halliburton and its subsidiaries, but what about main-street, the people like you and me?
The United States spends more on its military budget than the next 48 largest military budgets combined! Our military budget is about half of all the world's military budgets combined. Is this helping us achieve economic prosperity here in the United States? What is the benefit to the taxpayer? Opposition will say “safety.” Is spending trillions being “over there” really making the United States safer “over here?”
Colonel Douglas Macgregor states “If you take all of the tax revenues that we create every year in the United States, collectively they will pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That’s all. All other federal spending whether it is for the Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy or Department of Defense comes from printed and borrowed money. Now my question and what every American citizen should ask is, “Is this sustainable?” I don’t think it is.”
I agree with Colonel Macgregor that it is not sustainable. Unless we stop spending our tax revenue for causes that do not make sense over the long run, we can say goodbye to economic prosperity and hello to bankruptcy.
Are we interested enough in democracy and this way of life to sit down and think things through on the really tough issues, to bring about real economic prosperity?
H. Mark R.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Four More Years Of War -- Just For Starters
Four More Years Of War -- Just For Starters
First Posted: 07-30-10 09:30 AM | Updated: 07-30-10 10:33 AM
Dan Froomkin
froomkin@huffingtonpost.com
The ever-accumulating case against the war in Afghanistan was bolstered this week by WikiLeaks's dissemination of over 70,000 previously secret reports documenting in vivid and unvarnished detail the brutality and futility of the American mission there.
But even as the public's patience with the war in Afghanistan is growing shorter, the timeline for an American troop withdrawal appears to be growing longer.
There are increasingly clear signs that President Obama's vow to start withdrawing American troops less than a year from now will be fulfilled through a technicality if at all, and that the real timeline for significant troop withdrawal -- barring a change in course -- now extends at least to 2014, if not far beyond.
One signal was Vice President Joe Biden's offhand remark to ABC News earlier this month that the promised summer withdrawal "could be as few as a couple thousand troops" although "it could be more."
This from the administration's most prominent opponent of escalation, a man who had earlier said you could "bet on" a "whole lot of people moving out" in July 2011.
The uninspiring Senate testimony in mid-July from Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan , also raised red flags. Holbrooke repeatedly ducked questions about what the administration's desired "end state" is, and whether things are going along on schedule. He instead pointed senators toward a list of what he called "benchmarks."
But the document to which Holbrooke referred is in fact full of vague, sometimes entirely unmeasurable "milestones" that carry no deadlines and trigger no consequences.
"All of these benchmarks are designed to pacify onlookers on the Hill, help to justify our presence in the country, and set unrealistic goals that everyone knows are not going to be met," said retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a respected military strategist and author. "You're never going to achieve them. None of this is aimed at extricating American power and forces from anywhere."
So, asked for an exit strategy, the administration instead offered up guidelines for an endless occupation.
And then last week, in a nearly unnoticed development at an international conference in Kabul, world leaders including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed their "support for the President of Afghanistan's objective that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) should lead and conduct military operations in all provinces by the end of 2014."
That's right: The end of 2014.
"I was kind of struck that the 2014 didn't get more critical attention than it did," said Paul R. Pillar, formerly the CIA's top Middle East analysis and now a Georgetown University professor. "The war will have gone on 13 years at that point."
Pillar said he expected a strong public reaction along the lines of "Wait, what does that imply in terms of our troop presence? In terms of how fast or how slowly our withdrawal next year is going to go?" And: "Whoa, you mean it's going to be another four years from now... and even that's not total victory?"
And keep in mind that 2014 is the corrupt, ineffective Afghan President Hamid Karzai's best-case scenario. That's if all goes according to plan. And nothing in Afghanistan ever goes according to plan.
Indeed, the Guardian recently reported that plans made not so long ago to begin handing control of some provinces to Afghan security forces by the end of this year "have been quietly dropped."
The British paper also noted: "Gen. David Petraeus is said to be planning a campaign measured in years, not months."
The uselessness of the so-called "benchmarks" the administration is now citing, in a document entitled Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional Stabilization Strategy, are particularly telling.
Some are specific -- but meaningless in the absence of a target date:
"That means you're going to create a national system in a place that has never been a nation-state?" asked Macgregor, the military strategist. "If you wait for that one, you will be in Afghanistan for about 200 years."
Some are delusional. For instance under the heading of reducing corruption:
Appointment of competent, reform-minded leaders of critical ministries... and also to key provincial and district positions in the South and East.
Macgregor grumbled to the Huffington Post: "If they find them there, they should recruit them and use them here first."
Some are naïve, delusional, unmeasurable and meaningless all at once.
Afghanistan's neighbors begin to shift their policies to reinforce increased cooperation, over time.
Macgregor sees the benchmarks not as reflecting a sincere attempt to describe a way out of Afghanistan . Rather he sees them as a witting or unwitting reflection of the neoconservative desire to keep the American military deployed in that region indefinitely. "They're designed to keep you in Afghanistan , because you're never going to achieve them," he said.
"If you wanted to pick a place that was a nightmare for every conceivable form of nation-building, Afghanistan would be it," Macgregor said. Only the people that live there can fix their problems, he said. "It's not going to happen as a result of military power."
It's worth noting that the benchmarks document itself apparently went through a pretty serious declawing process, sometime between last September, when the Foreign Policy website got hold of an early draft, and January, when the first version of the existing plan was first released.
For instance, gone from the new plan is this commitment:
By March 30, 2010 and on regular intervals thereafter, the interagency will draft an assessment of progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan . As a check and balance on the interagency, a separate assessment will also be produced by a Red Team, led by the National Intelligence Council."
In the earlier draft, but missing from the final version, are actually measurable metrics, such as "percent of population living in districts/areas under insurgent control" and "Afghan Government's institutions at the national, provincial, and local level, including ability to hold credible elections in 2009 and 2010" (already quite definitively resolved to the negative.)
The administration's aversion to real benchmarks is understandable, to a certain extent. So far, all accountability has got them is heartache.
Specifically, in audit report after audit report, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Arnold Fields, has exposed major problems not just in accomplishing key goals, but also in the administration's attempts at measuring them.
For instance, the successful development of Afghan security forces is, of course, central to Obama's strategy. But the SIGAR reported last month that the "Capability Milestone" rating system (CM) that has been the Pentagon's primary metric for measuring the development of Aghan forces had overstated their capabilities.
Among other problems the SIGAR found, top-rated Afghan units were not capable of what the Pentagon said they were, and the rating system didn't sufficiently account for such endemic problems as attrition, corruption, poor leadership, drug abuse, and illiteracy.
And then there's the single biggest problem with benchmarks: Their fundamental misuse by this administration, just like the last one. Benchmarks only really mean something if meeting them -- or failing to meet them -- has consequences.
But Obama, just like George W. Bush did with Iraq, refuses to say what message he will take from these assessments. If we meet the benchmarks, does that mean mission accomplished and we can leave? And more realistically, if we fail to meet the benchmarks, does that mean we have to try harder? Or does it mean that we finally acknowledge the futility of the enterprise and withdraw?
Ironically, it was then-senator Obama who, back in 2007, asked then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice the exact questions he won't answer today, namely: What if things don't go according to plan? What if the occupied country's government remains in shambles? What exactly are the benchmarks for success? And what are the consequences if they are not met? Is the United States really willing to walk away? (See my December column, Obama's Questions for Obama.)
But when it comes to the "or else" part of the benchmarks, Obama, just like Bush, is boxed in because he has declared this to be a war that we must win.
Meanwhile, however, Obama remains on the record as saying that his commitment to Afghanistan is not open-ended. "There's gotta be an exit strategy," he told CBS News last April. "There's gotta be a sense that this is not perpetual drift."
But perpetual drift is as good a description of what we're seeing today as any. And the longer the drift continues, the louder the voices of concern and dissent will get.
Already, there are signs that the political dynamic that has fueled our war efforts may be shifting. Since 9/11, continuing the war has generally been seen by politicians as synonymous with supporting the troops and keeping our nation secure. (It's the ultimate victory of the Neocons.) In reality, of course, they are not synonymous at all -- if anything, they are inimical. But with the Republican Party in lockstep behind the war effort, the Democratic leadership -- terrified of appearing weak -- has gone along enthusiastically.
Now, however, there are signs that some Republicans are joining forces with some Democrats in opposing the war.
So far, they are short of critical mass.
In a series of votes in the House on July 1, a measure to provide funds only for a withdrawal won 100 votes. A measure to create a timetable for withdrawal drew 162 votes of support.
And on Tuesday, 102 Democrats joined a dozen Republicans to oppose Obama's war supplemental in its entirety, resulting in a 308-114 vote.
With polls showing a distinct drop in support for the war, and opposition growing in Congress, Obama's options may soon become more limited.
"I think the political pressures back here are going to push the Obama administration into something more rapid than that 2014 implies," said Pillar.
WATCH Obama questions Condoleezza Rice about the Iraq benchmarks in 2003:
Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post. You can send him an e-mail, bookmark his page; subscribe to RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get e-mail alerts when he writes.
First Posted: 07-30-10 09:30 AM | Updated: 07-30-10 10:33 AM
Dan Froomkin
froomkin@huffingtonpost.com
The ever-accumulating case against the war in Afghanistan was bolstered this week by WikiLeaks's dissemination of over 70,000 previously secret reports documenting in vivid and unvarnished detail the brutality and futility of the American mission there.
But even as the public's patience with the war in Afghanistan is growing shorter, the timeline for an American troop withdrawal appears to be growing longer.
There are increasingly clear signs that President Obama's vow to start withdrawing American troops less than a year from now will be fulfilled through a technicality if at all, and that the real timeline for significant troop withdrawal -- barring a change in course -- now extends at least to 2014, if not far beyond.
One signal was Vice President Joe Biden's offhand remark to ABC News earlier this month that the promised summer withdrawal "could be as few as a couple thousand troops" although "it could be more."
This from the administration's most prominent opponent of escalation, a man who had earlier said you could "bet on" a "whole lot of people moving out" in July 2011.
The uninspiring Senate testimony in mid-July from Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan , also raised red flags. Holbrooke repeatedly ducked questions about what the administration's desired "end state" is, and whether things are going along on schedule. He instead pointed senators toward a list of what he called "benchmarks."
But the document to which Holbrooke referred is in fact full of vague, sometimes entirely unmeasurable "milestones" that carry no deadlines and trigger no consequences.
"All of these benchmarks are designed to pacify onlookers on the Hill, help to justify our presence in the country, and set unrealistic goals that everyone knows are not going to be met," said retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a respected military strategist and author. "You're never going to achieve them. None of this is aimed at extricating American power and forces from anywhere."
So, asked for an exit strategy, the administration instead offered up guidelines for an endless occupation.
And then last week, in a nearly unnoticed development at an international conference in Kabul, world leaders including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed their "support for the President of Afghanistan's objective that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) should lead and conduct military operations in all provinces by the end of 2014."
That's right: The end of 2014.
"I was kind of struck that the 2014 didn't get more critical attention than it did," said Paul R. Pillar, formerly the CIA's top Middle East analysis and now a Georgetown University professor. "The war will have gone on 13 years at that point."
Pillar said he expected a strong public reaction along the lines of "Wait, what does that imply in terms of our troop presence? In terms of how fast or how slowly our withdrawal next year is going to go?" And: "Whoa, you mean it's going to be another four years from now... and even that's not total victory?"
And keep in mind that 2014 is the corrupt, ineffective Afghan President Hamid Karzai's best-case scenario. That's if all goes according to plan. And nothing in Afghanistan ever goes according to plan.
Indeed, the Guardian recently reported that plans made not so long ago to begin handing control of some provinces to Afghan security forces by the end of this year "have been quietly dropped."
The British paper also noted: "Gen. David Petraeus is said to be planning a campaign measured in years, not months."
The uselessness of the so-called "benchmarks" the administration is now citing, in a document entitled Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional Stabilization Strategy, are particularly telling.
Some are specific -- but meaningless in the absence of a target date:
"That means you're going to create a national system in a place that has never been a nation-state?" asked Macgregor, the military strategist. "If you wait for that one, you will be in Afghanistan for about 200 years."
Some are delusional. For instance under the heading of reducing corruption:
Appointment of competent, reform-minded leaders of critical ministries... and also to key provincial and district positions in the South and East.
Macgregor grumbled to the Huffington Post: "If they find them there, they should recruit them and use them here first."
Some are naïve, delusional, unmeasurable and meaningless all at once.
Afghanistan's neighbors begin to shift their policies to reinforce increased cooperation, over time.
Macgregor sees the benchmarks not as reflecting a sincere attempt to describe a way out of Afghanistan . Rather he sees them as a witting or unwitting reflection of the neoconservative desire to keep the American military deployed in that region indefinitely. "They're designed to keep you in Afghanistan , because you're never going to achieve them," he said.
"If you wanted to pick a place that was a nightmare for every conceivable form of nation-building, Afghanistan would be it," Macgregor said. Only the people that live there can fix their problems, he said. "It's not going to happen as a result of military power."
It's worth noting that the benchmarks document itself apparently went through a pretty serious declawing process, sometime between last September, when the Foreign Policy website got hold of an early draft, and January, when the first version of the existing plan was first released.
For instance, gone from the new plan is this commitment:
By March 30, 2010 and on regular intervals thereafter, the interagency will draft an assessment of progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan . As a check and balance on the interagency, a separate assessment will also be produced by a Red Team, led by the National Intelligence Council."
In the earlier draft, but missing from the final version, are actually measurable metrics, such as "percent of population living in districts/areas under insurgent control" and "Afghan Government's institutions at the national, provincial, and local level, including ability to hold credible elections in 2009 and 2010" (already quite definitively resolved to the negative.)
The administration's aversion to real benchmarks is understandable, to a certain extent. So far, all accountability has got them is heartache.
Specifically, in audit report after audit report, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Arnold Fields, has exposed major problems not just in accomplishing key goals, but also in the administration's attempts at measuring them.
For instance, the successful development of Afghan security forces is, of course, central to Obama's strategy. But the SIGAR reported last month that the "Capability Milestone" rating system (CM) that has been the Pentagon's primary metric for measuring the development of Aghan forces had overstated their capabilities.
Among other problems the SIGAR found, top-rated Afghan units were not capable of what the Pentagon said they were, and the rating system didn't sufficiently account for such endemic problems as attrition, corruption, poor leadership, drug abuse, and illiteracy.
And then there's the single biggest problem with benchmarks: Their fundamental misuse by this administration, just like the last one. Benchmarks only really mean something if meeting them -- or failing to meet them -- has consequences.
But Obama, just like George W. Bush did with Iraq, refuses to say what message he will take from these assessments. If we meet the benchmarks, does that mean mission accomplished and we can leave? And more realistically, if we fail to meet the benchmarks, does that mean we have to try harder? Or does it mean that we finally acknowledge the futility of the enterprise and withdraw?
Ironically, it was then-senator Obama who, back in 2007, asked then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice the exact questions he won't answer today, namely: What if things don't go according to plan? What if the occupied country's government remains in shambles? What exactly are the benchmarks for success? And what are the consequences if they are not met? Is the United States really willing to walk away? (See my December column, Obama's Questions for Obama.)
But when it comes to the "or else" part of the benchmarks, Obama, just like Bush, is boxed in because he has declared this to be a war that we must win.
Meanwhile, however, Obama remains on the record as saying that his commitment to Afghanistan is not open-ended. "There's gotta be an exit strategy," he told CBS News last April. "There's gotta be a sense that this is not perpetual drift."
But perpetual drift is as good a description of what we're seeing today as any. And the longer the drift continues, the louder the voices of concern and dissent will get.
Already, there are signs that the political dynamic that has fueled our war efforts may be shifting. Since 9/11, continuing the war has generally been seen by politicians as synonymous with supporting the troops and keeping our nation secure. (It's the ultimate victory of the Neocons.) In reality, of course, they are not synonymous at all -- if anything, they are inimical. But with the Republican Party in lockstep behind the war effort, the Democratic leadership -- terrified of appearing weak -- has gone along enthusiastically.
Now, however, there are signs that some Republicans are joining forces with some Democrats in opposing the war.
So far, they are short of critical mass.
In a series of votes in the House on July 1, a measure to provide funds only for a withdrawal won 100 votes. A measure to create a timetable for withdrawal drew 162 votes of support.
And on Tuesday, 102 Democrats joined a dozen Republicans to oppose Obama's war supplemental in its entirety, resulting in a 308-114 vote.
With polls showing a distinct drop in support for the war, and opposition growing in Congress, Obama's options may soon become more limited.
"I think the political pressures back here are going to push the Obama administration into something more rapid than that 2014 implies," said Pillar.
WATCH Obama questions Condoleezza Rice about the Iraq benchmarks in 2003:
Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post. You can send him an e-mail, bookmark his page; subscribe to RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get e-mail alerts when he writes.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
News Alert: Secret Archive Gives Grim View of Afghan War
Hopefully, the revelations from these archives, especially about the inadequacy of the deployed forces, equipment, generalship and RoE in Afghanistan even with the "surge," and the perfidious duplicity of so-called "allies" and "partners" in Kabul and Islamabad, along with the acute lack of progress on most fronts, will make it clear that the US and NATO need to pack up their civilians and conventional forces and withdraw quickly, and totally shift to a punitive policy of seeking out and liquidating international Islamist terrorists and those harboring them inside and outside of the United States. The United States cannot afford to modernize, secularize, liberalize, democratize, or even enduringly stabilize Afghanistan , let alone, the Islamic World even if it was possible to do so and it is not. We should withdraw and let the centuries-old Great Game between India , Russia , and Iran play out without wasting American, British, French and other allied blood and treasure in a pointless military intervention.
A gradual pull-out will only lengthen the agony, increasing the cost in lives and resources without changing the ultimate outcome: persistent civil and cross border conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan . There is no point in delaying the inevitable withdrawal and the equally inevitable de facto division of Afghanistan along ethnic and cultural lines. The same holds true for pulling out of Iraq . Extending the time will not alter the strategic outcome.
Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Sun, July 25, 2010 -- 5:27 PM ET
-----
Secret Archive Gives Grim View of Afghan War
A six-year archive of classified military documents to be
made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level
picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects
more grim than the official portrayal.
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html?emc=na
A gradual pull-out will only lengthen the agony, increasing the cost in lives and resources without changing the ultimate outcome: persistent civil and cross border conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan . There is no point in delaying the inevitable withdrawal and the equally inevitable de facto division of Afghanistan along ethnic and cultural lines. The same holds true for pulling out of Iraq . Extending the time will not alter the strategic outcome.
Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Sun, July 25, 2010 -- 5:27 PM ET
-----
Secret Archive Gives Grim View of Afghan War
A six-year archive of classified military documents to be
made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level
picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects
more grim than the official portrayal.
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html?emc=na
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