The Most Farcical Part of the Farce...

Matt Duss shoots, guts, dries, and renders into tasty beef jerky the Chalabi-supporting wing of the neoconservative movement:

Even after the invasion, after it became clear that there were no WMD and no Saddam-Al Qaeda alliance, and that, despite his claims of a massive following, Chalabi had no genuine political base in Iraq, the neocons — such as Michael Rubin and Eli Lake himself — continued to promote him as Iraq’s savior. That became a lot harder after Chalabi’s party — which ran on the slogan “We Liberated Iraq!” — received a pathetic 0.36 percent of the vote in Iraq’s December 2005 elections, not even enough to secure a single seat for Chalabi himself.

Eventually, Chalabi was disavowed by the Bush administration, judged to be an “agent of influence” of Iran, suspected of having tipped off the Iranians that the U.S. had broken secret Iranian codes, as well as passing Iraqi government documents to Iranian agents. The Defense Intelligence Agency concluded — in 2004 — that “Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi.” Needless to say, none of this speaks very well of the judgment of Chalabi’s neoconservative fans.

Now consider the recent neoconservative attacks on Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett of the New America Foundation for their advocacy of U.S.-Iran engagement. Back in November, Lake published a piece that suggested, on the flimsiest of evidence, that Parsi was an agent of the Iranian regime. The piece was hailed as a blockbuster in neoconservative circles, in some cases by the very people who had boosted Ahmad Chalabi.

On the one hand, you’ve got a guy whose double-dealing and treachery helped get Americans killed. On the other, you’ve got people who think that attempting to achieve rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran is in the U.S. interest, and should therefore be pursued (though, at least in Parsi’s case, not to the exclusion of human rights concerns). It’s interesting who the neocons think the real villains are. And it’s amazing that they should consider themselves credible to attack the integrity of others after having been duped by an IRGC-connected swindler like Ahmad Chalabi.

Read more...

I Am Shocked, Shocked to Learn of the Necessity of Additional Troops!!!

Donny Rumsfeld, not quite lying:

In his speech at West Point last night, Obama claimed that before he took office, "commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive."

Rumsfeld is now strongly denying that claim, calling it a "bald misstatement."

"I am not aware of a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006," Rumsfeld said. "If any such requests occurred, ‘repeated’ or not, the White House should promptly make them public. The President's assertion does a disservice to the truth and, in particular, to the thousands of men and women in uniform who have fought, served and sacrificed in Afghanistan.”

There is a sense in which Donald Rumsfeld is telling the truth. The sense in which he is telling the truth is structured as follows: Donald Rumsfeld either intimidated or outright fired anyone in the military brass who tried to make a formal request for additional troops, in either Afghanistan or Iraq. He made it clear from a very early point in his tenure that he would view such requests as acknowledgments of defeat, both in terms of the wars in question and for his project of military transformation. As Bradley Graham details, when the idea of reinforcement was mooted or when informal requests were made, Rumsfeld brusquely interrogated the generals in questions until the topic was dropped. Sending more troops was not something that Rumsfeld was prepared to entertain, and he was careful to surround himself with people who made certain that the topic was never seriously raised.

So yes, Don Rumsfeld is telling the "Truth." Virtually everyone understands the worthlessness of this "Truth;" even wingnuts, enamored of the post-Rumsfeld surge, are reluctant to man this particular barricade. Recognition of Donald Rumsfeld's incompetence is perhaps the last truly bipartisan consensus in modern American politics.

Read more...

Imperial naivete

St. Ignatius of Georgetown bestows his benediction on Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan, but, being a liberal columnist at the liberal Washington Post, he regrets that the announced plan fails to commit the nation explicitly to perpetual war:

Obama thinks that setting deadlines will force the Afghans to get their act togetherat last. That strikes me as the most dubious premise of his strategy. He is telling his adversary that he will start leaving on a date certain, and telling his ally to be ready to take over then, or else. That's the weak link in an otherwise admirable decision -- the idea that we strengthen our hand by announcing in advance that we plan to fold it.

Of course one would have to be an idiot to imagine that Obama's announced strategy of employing a Surge(tm) with a "date certain" for withdrawal is what it pretends to be. The plan as presented is obviously for public consumption: the real plan will have to be either:

(1) To abandon Afghanistan, as the Bush administration eventually abandoned Iraq, but only, as in Iraq, after a face-saving military triumph over the current wave of civil insurgency, aka the declare victory and leave option; or

(2) Perpetual occupation.

The most Orwellian moment last night was Obama's proclamation that, unlike previous empires, "we do not seek to occupy other nations."

We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for – and what we continue to fight for – is a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.

As a country, we are not as young – and perhaps not as innocent – as we were when Roosevelt was President. Yet we are still heirs to a noble struggle for freedom. Now we must summon all of our might and moral suasion to meet the challenges of a new age.

Stirring sentiments indeed. He might want to repeat them in Oslo next week, when he picks up his Nobel Peace Prize. It certainly beats "We should invade other countries when it gets good results."

Read more...

Blair: The Biggest Villain?

Tom Ricks:

As a British naval historian friend I know once noted, the time when the British government could have helped -- and perhaps stopped the war -- was back in the winter of 2002-2003. Real friends speak up when a friend is making a big mistake. Instead, Tony Blair may have destroyed the "special relationship" by supporting the invasion when he should have opposed it. My friend said he believes Blair should be confined right now in the Tower of London.

Observations:

1. I wonder if Blair really could have stood and said "No." I always kind of suspected that Blair pursued the Iraq War with the enthusiasm he did because he believed that he couldn't stop it if he wanted, and a) wanted to be part of the action, and b) wanted to maintain the "special relationship." This isn't to say that Blair privately opposed the war, just that his primary motivations were about the relationship more than conviction about the wisdom of the invasion. But I really don't know.

2. If Blair had said "no," would the neocons have spewed the same vitriol towards Britain that the sprayed at France? I would have loved to see a book explaining how the United Kingdom is our enemy, and in fact has always been our enemy; it makes even more sense than France.

Read more...

Bailing on Bin Laden

I should hope that the absurdity of conservative commentary on Afghanistan is self-evident, but to summarize briefly, the Obama administration is currently under wingnut fire for a) under-resourcing the Afghanistan mission, and b) failing to do exactly what Stanley McChrystal wants (even as it, apparently, does pretty much exactly what Stanley McChrystal wants). The patent stupidity of these arguments is manifest, as the Bush administration evidently under-resourced the Afghanistan mission for some seven years before Greater Wingnuttia noticed what was happening, and the Bush administration further overrode the authority of local commanders when those commanders had unpleasant things to say, generally to the loud applause of aforementioned Wingnuttia (see, for example, the Bush administration's decision to push forward with the Surge, in spite of the resistance of the larger US military establishment). There's some risk, of course, in making it All About Bush, but then I suspect we're not yet close to accounting for the lasting damage that the Bush administration (and its cheerleaders) did to US security.

The latest cause for re-examination comes with the utterly unsurprising news that the Bush administration completely botched the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in 2001 and 2002 by failing to deploy sufficient forces to Tora Bora, and by relying on Afghan proxies to fight Al Qaeda forces. The administration was abetted in its ineptitude by Tommy Franks, who apparently didn't believe that capturing or killing the man responsible for murdering 3000+ Americans was very interesting or worthwhile. Franks "genius" went down the memory hole around the same time that Donald Rumsfeld became persona non grata among the Wingnutty, but it bears recollection that Franks was, for a while, the Greatest American Hero Evah for Destroying the Mighty Legions of Saddam Hussein. I actually think that Franks' execution of the early weeks of the Iraq War was more capable than the retrospective judgment allows, but nevertheless it's fair to say that his inclusion in the pantheon didn't last very long.

Jules Crittenden, Standard Bearer of the Knights of Wingnuttia, seizes the opportunity to blame this all on .... John Kerry. Rather than denying the now-consensus position that the Bush administration developed and pursued an utterly disastrous Afghanistan policy (and really, this holds regardless of your larger attitudes about the Afghanistan War), Jules describes examination of the failure in the following terms:

So, eight years later, what’s the point?

The horse is still out, and going forward, the vaguely hinted-at suggestion is that it’s important to stay focused on barn door open-closed operations.

Indeed. It's never worth taking time to examine massive government failures.

Beyond the insinuation that calling the Vietnam War a mistake is somehow similar in criminal degree to the failure to catch Osama Bin Laden, Crittenden also provides this gem:

Give your highly experienced field commanders what they ask for, a counterinsurgency plan to aimed at winning, rather than some fraction of a counterinsurgency plan aimed at exiting ASAP

Right. Maybe I'm crazy, but it seems that the relevant cliche here doesn't involve a horse and a barn door, but rather a pot and a kettle. But then there's always the memory hole...

Read more...

Here's Some Unhappy...

Some interesting bits in this Telegraph report from last week:

Top British commanders angrily described in the documents how they were not even told, let alone consulted, about major changes to US policy which had significant implications for them and their men.

When the Americans decided, in March 2004, to arrest a key lieutenant of the Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr – an event that triggered an uprising throughout the British sector – “it was not co-ordinated with us and no-one [was] told that it was going to happen,” said the senior British field commander at the time, Brigadier Nick Carter.

“Had we known, we would at least have been able to prepare the ground.” Instead, “the consequence [was] that my whole area of operations went up in smoke… as a result of coalition operations that were outwith my control or knowledge and proved to be the single most awkward event of my tour.”

Among the most outspoken officers was Col Tanner, who served as chief of staff to General Stewart and of the entire British division during Operation Telic 3, from November 2003 to May 2004.

He said: “The whole system was appalling. We experienced real difficulty in dealing with American military and civilian organisations who, partly through arrogance and partly through bureaucracy, dictate that there is only one way: the American way.

“I now realise that I am a European, not an American. We managed to get on better…with our European partners and at times with the Arabs than with the Americans. Europeans chat to each other, whereas dialogue is alien to the US military… dealing with them corporately is akin to dealing with a group of Martians.

“If it isn’t on the PowerPoint slide, then it doesn’t happen.”

Broadly speaking, the pendulum of opinion on British participation in Iraq has swung back and forth during the conflict. At the beginning of the insurgency, the British had a (perhaps undeserved) reputation for capability in counter-insurgency conflicts. Senior British officers were not shy about criticizing what they believed to be the incompetence and cultural insensitivity of their American allies. However, as time went by there seemed to be little indication that the British Army was doing any better in its sectors than the Americans were doing in the rest of the country. During the Surge, it became widely believed that the British were having serious problems holding onto what should have been a relatively easy sector. The Iraqi Army offensive into Basra of spring 2008, supported by the United States, embarrassed a British contingent that had essentially conceded the city to a variety of militia groups.

And so these leaks can be read as after-action bitterness on the part of an organization that saw its reputation for counter-insurgency success crushed in Iraq. On the other hand, it's difficult to run competent COIN in one sector while the rest of the country is falling apart, and it's really difficult to do so when directives from HQ are contradictory, incompetent, or simply absent. We know that some of the critiques leveled by the British are undoubtedly true; Sanchez did a poor job of communicating with his own commanders, Americans did display arrogance and cultural insensitivity in the first years of the war, and so forth. The difficulties of communication (PowerPoint and all that) are to be expected when any two organizations work together, and probably shouldn't be blamed on either side. However, I'm not sure that these can fully explain the situation that held in Basra in early 2008.

Read more...

"In Any Meaningful Sense"

I endorse most of what Gian Gentile says here about the Vietnam War, especially in the context of this quote from George Herring:

…the war could [not] have been ‘won’ in any meaningful sense at a moral or material cost most Americans deemed acceptable.

Gentile is a pretty harsh critic of the COIN turn in the US Army, and is pushing back against some of the more aggressive claims made by COINdistas about how the Vietnam War might have been won with better tactics. This dovetails, of course, with revisionist right wing accounts of the Vietnam War. This, in turn, has the potential to create some odd bedfellows; while COINdistas blame both the Army and the dirty hippies for losing the war (with the bulk of blame, in fairness, falling on the Army), right revisionists prefer to reserve responsibility for perfidy of the flower children. I'm sure that Ralph Peters has an opinion, and I'm sure that I don't want to know what it is.

At the same time, I think it's fair to say that the Vietnam War, like the Iraq War, involved both strategic and tactical errors. Both wars were stupidly conceived and ineptly conducted. The difference between 2007 and 1968, I think, is the disappearance of the Red Army. The need to prepare for war against an actual peer competitor made the "COIN turn" impossible; David Petraeus could not have found purchase in the US Army of the Vietnam era. So, while many of the tactical errors could be resolved in Iraq (even as the strategic error could not be remedied), such was never a possibility in Vietnam.

Incidentally, I just finished Tom Ricks' The Gamble, and he makes a connection that I hadn't previously understood between Petraeus' fitness obsession and his professional success. Ricks argues that Petraeus outstanding performance on the physical indicators helped promotion boards ignore some of the more troubling aspects of his career, such as the overt intellectualism and the focus on COIN.

Read more...