Tom Hayden : Can Obama 'Rein In' His Presidency?

Obama: Who's making the call? Image from TomHayden.com.

Competing forces at play:
Can Obama ‘rein in’ his presidency?

Obama often follows a confusing pattern of leaning toward the military’s preference while planning in his private chambers to later change course.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2013

President Barack Obama’s important speech at the National Defense University on deescalating his drone war should be seen as a window into the state of play among competing forces in the national security state.

Obama is trying, in his own words, to “rein in” the vast executive power directing the secret operations of the Long War, which was originally unleashed by George Bush after 9/11. Obama ended the Iraq phase of American combat and has promised the same by 2014 in Afghanistan while sharply escalating the drone war and special operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and beyond.

So far he has avoided direct intervention in Syria, which would require ground troops, and Iran, which would ignite an unpredictable storm.

In the process, Obama has grown a cancer on his presidency in the form of tens of thousands of disgruntled and difficult-to-control Special Forces, CIA personnel, a legion of spies and mercenaries, mainly in the Middle East and South Asia, but including also a steel defensive ring along the U.S. border with Mexico and Central America.

The apparatus of this Long War is well described by Jeremy Scahill in Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, and his previous work, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Their numbers are classified but, according to Nick Turse, the Special Ops are 60,000 or more, with their personnel deployed abroad quadrupled since 9/11; their budget jumping from $2.3 billion after 9/11 to $6.3 billion today, not including funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Additionally there are 7,000 armed border patrol agents and thousands more in the DEA.

These forces constitute the cancer, and they may not be willing to follow a presidential command to wind it down. They might fight back to the end. According to Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, the generals tried to manipulate Obama into escalating Afghanistan into a “forever war.” The same forces undoubtedly have their objections to much of Obama’s recent speech as well.


Pentagon objections

The purposes of the Obama speech, as parsed by The New York Times on May 28, were to scale back the use of drones, target only those who actually threaten the U.S., remove the CIA from drone and targeting killing, and end the paradigm of the Global War on Terrorism.

The speech and its policies were “two years in the making,” reflecting the depth of unresolved tensions surrounding the administration. Obama, himself, first spoke of “reining in” the national security state in a Jon Stewart interview in October 2012.

There is no doubt that criticisms by Obama supporters, civil liberties lawyers, and many mainstream journalists helped the administration change its calculations. But greater pressures were exerted behind the scenes by the advocates of drones and counterterrorism.

• Obama kept secret until the day before the speech that he was lifting the moratorium on repatriating Guantanamo detainees, many of them on hunger strike, to Yemen, and appointing a new lead person to implement the transfers. Similarly, in 2009, when Obama announced his 33,000 troop escalation in Afghanistan, he slipped in a paragraph at the last minute pledging to begin his withdrawals in 18 months. The military objected.


• Against CIA objections, Obama decided to declassify the fact that U.S. drone strikes had killed Anwar al-Awlaki and three other Americans who “were not intentionally targeted.”


• The CIA and Pentagon “balked” at tighter restrictions on drones, and the CIA’s counterterrorism center resisted the president’s proposal “to take its drones away.”


• A fierce debate broke out over whether “signature strikes” would continue, the drone war version of racial profiling. The new Obama policy remains murky as a result of internal compromise, and the CIA reportedly succeeded in keeping control of the drone war in Pakistan through 2014.


• The criterion for drone strikes was modified from targets that are “significant threats to U.S. interests” to targets representing “a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” No sooner was the tighter standard announced than the CIA killed a Pakistan Taliban leader in apparent revenge for his organizing a suicide bombing which killed seven CIA operatives. Ignored in the militarized targeting criteria was the fact that the same figure was considered a “moderate” Taliban leader favoring a peaceful settlement of Pakistan’s internal bloodshed.


• Obama was unable to use his own speech to endorse a mechanism to carry forward an independent review of how and when drone attacks would occur. He could achieve no consensus in the administration.

Enlisting public opinion

Many will see these compromises and deferrals as evidence of Obama indecisiveness. But this is a leader who campaigned like a man of steel in 2008 and 2012, so the problem more likely lies in the nature of the state itself and the permanent forces contesting for power. If that is so, the Obama speech was designed to enlist public opinion in the internal arguments to come.

Obama often follows a confusing pattern of leaning toward the military’s preference while planning in his private chambers to later change course. Obama escalated in Afghanistan, then deescalated. He escalated the drone attacks, then sharply reduced them this past year.

He escalated deportations, then sued Sheriff Joe Arpaio and legalized the status of 1 million Dreamers by executive order. He dispatched DEA and even CIA agents in Mexico’s bloody drug war, then called for a new “conversation” about shifting to a harm-reduction approach.

In this zigzagging course Obama has sent thousands of largely clandestine troops and police into battles they could not win, causing enormous potential resentment and pushback. When the union representative of 7,000 border patrol agents testifies in defiance against Obama’s relaxed enforcement policies, you can assume that many in the national security state are considering forms of refusal to obey their commander-in-chief. Many will not deescalate quietly or loyally.

There is a disturbing analogy here with the 1960-63 John F. Kennedy era. JFK campaigned on a Cold War pledge to fight a long twilight struggle against communism. Like Obama, JFK became enthralled with special forces as a secret counterforce against radical insurgencies in Latin America.

The counterterrorism policies unleashed by JFK would lead eventually to the CIA’s tracking down Che Guevera, whose assassination was witnessed by a CIA agent in 1967, a parallel with Obama’s raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Kennedy gradually evolved toward a greater wisdom in the three years of his presidency; antagonizing many in what Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. At first, Kennedy went along with the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, conceived by the CIA under Eisenhower. But Kennedy refused to be drawn into sending American ground troops, which doomed the invasion of Cuba and provoked a violent right-wing Cuban backlash in Miami. Those Cuban exiles remained a virulent force in American politics down through the present time.

Then, after the near-apocalypse of the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy moved steadily toward ending the nuclear arms race with the Russians, and turned instead to supporting the domestic goals of the 1963 March on Washington. JFK sent advisers to South Vietnam but showed a strong reluctance to dispatch American ground troops. In November 50 years ago, he was dead, to the unforgettable cheers of the John Birchers and the Cuban exiles, and to the more muted satisfaction of elements in the CIA and military-industrial complex.

It is by no means inevitable or even likely that Obama will meet JFK’s fate, although even the Homeland Security Agency has reported rising assassination threats due to the election of a black president and economic depression for many in the white working class. What is most important is to realize that change can evolve unexpectedly, due first to the experiences of a president while in office -- JFK regarding Cuba and nuclear weapons -- and the persistent pressure of activists demanding change -- the Freedom Riders, SNCC, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the same time, the reaction against the “threat” of change is relentless and explosive -- the Goldwater movement, the Reagan presidency.

In the Republicans' seemingly crazed opposition to everything Obama represents, and their well-organized “fixes” to their electoral deficit -- Citizens United, voter suppression, a partisan Supreme Court, reapportionment to gain Electoral College advantage, etc. -- there is a pattern of resistance that Obama himself may have underestimated.

The Republican intransigence is at least, on the surface, something that can be seen and confronted. But it is also connected to the cancerous tumors of the security state, which citizens hardly encounter and cannot easily access.

The question at hand is what force can be strong enough to offset the power of those wishing to trap Obama in the legacy of an Imperial Executive he does not want to pass to an unpredictable successor. And if there is not a civic power strong enough to put the cancer in remission, what does that say about the state of American democracy?

This article was also published at TomHayden.com.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Paul Atwood's 'War and Empire'

Paul Atwood's War and Empire

The book details the nation’s progression from a bunch of European colonizers to an international syndicate stealing resources and labor and replacing them with U.S. corporate products and empty culture.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / August 1, 2012

[War and Empire: The American Way of Life by Paul Atwood (2010: Pluto Press); Paperback; 272 pp.; $32.50.}

There is a debate currently taking place in the Burlington, Vermont, region over the Pentagon’s desire to station F-35 fighter bombers at an Air National Guard base nearby.

As usual, the proponents of the planes and their “bedding down” (as the Pentagon calls this action) in Vermont make claims of jobs and other benefits if the planes are based in Vermont. Opponents oppose the planes on a number of grounds: noise levels and the accompanying loss of property values, health issues related to the noise, and the dependence on the war economy, to name a few.

Like most decisions by the Pentagon, the opinions of the people affected are the least important of any of the factors involved.

The reason I mention the debate, however, has much to do with a book I just finished reading: The book, War and Empire by Paul Atwood (acting director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences and a faculty member in the American Studies Department at UMass-Boston), is a survey of the ongoing project of American Empire.

As I follow the remarks of different people engaged in the F-35 debate, echoes of the nationalist conceit known as American exceptionalism are present everywhere. Of course, the most obvious have come from the fiercest proponents of the F-35 and the military they service. One such person put it plainly as possible when he wrote to the local Gannett outlet that the roar of the fighter planes was the sound of freedom. Who cares about the death and destruction they represent, much less some pansy’s hearing?

On the other side of the argument, however, are those who always preface their opposition to the planes’ presence with praise for the military and its mission of “protecting our freedom.” Then there is Vermont’s liberal Congressional delegation, all of whom are quite supportive of the Pentagon’s plan.

Atwood’s text provides a litany of instances and a multitude of words from throughout U.S. history detailing the nation’s progression from a bunch of European colonizers to an international syndicate stealing resources and labor and replacing them with U.S. corporate products and empty culture. While this occurs, politicians and their media sycophants gloss the whole enterprise over with words like freedom and democracy.

Atwood’s judicious use of quotes and his explanation of historical incidents explain U.S. history in a manner unfamiliar to many U.S. citizens. It is this unfamiliarity which assists the creators of Empire in their ongoing march.

Other books have done U.S. history in a manner similar to Atwood. Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States comes quickly to mind. However, where Zinn emphasizes the popular (and not so popular) resistance to the U.S. imperial project, Atwood’s text focuses on the logical progression from colonial settlement to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The economic underpinnings of empire are mentioned and discussed, especially in relation to the religion, racism, and nationalist rationales that are used to encourage support for policies that primarily benefit corporate entities.

The history Atwood narrates in War and Empire is not new material for the critical student of U.S. history. Unfortunately, those are becoming few and far between. Indeed, it seems to this writer that the predominant approach to history these days is one that historian Newt Gingrich would be happy to teach.

While school boards in Arizona remove books discussing the history of the American Southwest from a Latino point of view and textbook publishers allow censors in Texas to remove negative mentions of slavery from history textbooks, many other U.S. residents get their version of history from television networks beholden to profit, religion, and an American triumphalism that denies and glosses over criticism of U.S. policy.

In short, there has never been a greater need for Atwood’s book. Its concise and politically neutral narrative, combined with its brevity, make it the perfect U.S. history book for any interested reader, no matter what their politics or scholarly status.

Getting back to the debate over the F-35s in Vermont, especially in relation to this book. It is precisely because of their misunderstanding of U.S. history and the military’s role in it that both proponents and opponents of the planes can praise the military for protecting their freedom. Perhaps if they read War and Empire, neither side would be linking the words freedom and U.S.military in their arguments.

Then again, if they did, at least they would be conscious of the misconception they were perpetrating.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Jonah Raskin : Michael T. Klare on War and Terrorism

Michael T. Klare. Still image from Klare's Blood and Oil.
A Rag Blog interview:
Author Michael T. Klare on terrorism,
paper tigers, Vietnam, and the Pentagon:

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2011

He grew up singing the lyrics to the anti-war ballad, “Ain’t gonna study war no more,” but all his adult life he’s studied war again and again. Since 1974, when his first book, War Without End, was published, until the present, Michael T. Klare has written 14 books about war, warfare, and weapons. No major war and few minor skirmishes in which the U.S. has been involved since the 1960s have escaped his critical gaze.

Perhaps before anyone else in his field of study, he saw that, even as the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam, Pentagon generals and U.S. cabinet members began to plan future wars. Klare has aimed to keep pace with them and to alert the public to the next global conflagration. He’s written about nuclear war, guerrilla warfare, and counterinsurgency, and he has exposed the machinations of the weapons industry in books such as American Arms Supermarket and A Scourge of Guns. Since the start of the 21st century, he has focused increasingly on global battles for control of oil especially in the Middle East.

A professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, and the defense correspondent for The Nation, Klare speaks frequently about war and peace, and the economics and politics of the American Empire. Along with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, and others, he has helped to educate Americans about the realities of power, wealth, and the corruption behind the promise of American freedom and democracy.

In the wake of the recent upheavals in Egypt and Morocco and the bombing of Libya, the time seemed right for an interview with an old friend, college classmate, and the foremost global expert on “War Without End,” to borrow the title of his first book.


Q: For nearly half-a-century, you have been a student of war. What do you think the Pentagon has learned in that time?

A: That public opinion at home matters, and that it must shape the media coverage of military issues as much as possible to ensure public support for what it regards as its primary mission. We see this, for example, in Defense Secretary Gates's reluctance to become involved in a ground war in Libya, which he (correctly, I think) believes would not enjoy public support.

Q: What have you learned in the past 50 years?

A: My biggest discovery has been the centrality of resource competition in warfare. During the Cold War, it seemed that ideology was the driving force for war. I now see that as an anomaly. Since the dawn of "civilization," humans have fought wars for land, water, slaves, furs, timber, spices, oil, and other resources.

Q: What surprises you the most about the current state of warfare in the world?

A: The degree to which wars are being fought with the simplest weapons -- small arms and grenade launchers -- rather than the super-sophisticated weapons that dominate military planning in the U.S. and other advanced industrial powers.

Q: Are you a pacifist?

A: No. My father fought in the Pacific during World War II and told me (as a young child) of his belief in the need to resist Fascism and Nazism, and I've always felt that I would have done the same if I were in his shoes. I haven't seen any wars since then justifying the use of force by the United States on that scale.

Q: Do you think that Obama has turned out to be a copy of Bush when it comes to war or is he a different kind of warrior?

A: Obama is more like Bush I than Bush II. He is unwilling to use force in a preemptive or unilateral fashion, as in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, but he’s willing to use force in conjunction with other countries when he feels vital U.S. interests are at stake (the threat from terrorism in the case of Afghanistan) or fundamental human values (as in Libya).

Q: Secretary of Defense Gates recently told cadets at West Point that any military men who urge the president to send large numbers of ground troops to Asia or Africa should have his head examined. Do you agree with him?

A: Totally.

Q: You grew up in a time when there were fears of nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR. That never happened. Why?

A: We came very close to a nuclear war at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the leaders of both sides were faced with the very real prospect of mutual annihilation -- and decided that nothing could justify such an outcome. After that, both sides took steps to reduce the risk of a nuclear conflict.

Q: Could you say how you were shaped in your thinking by the war in Vietnam?

A: I felt intuitively that U.S. intervention in Vietnam was not honorable like World War II, but rather was driven by crass realpolitik. At that time, I was studying to be an architect, but I found I couldn't concentrate on my architectural studies and needed to learn about U.S. foreign policy and the strategies that led us into Vietnam. I wound up becoming a student of peace and conflict studies.

Q: Chairman Mao said the U.S. was a paper tiger. That doesn’t seem to be the case does it?

A: Mao was wrong about many things. He did understand, however, that the U.S. government is inhibited from its use of military force by U.S. public opinion and the U.S. public's reluctance to become involved in a major land war in Asia. When U.S. public opinion supports the use of military force, as was the case in the first Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm) and to a considerable extent in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq (for the first few months), the United States is no paper tiger.

Q: The U.S. seems capable of carrying on wars in at least half-a-dozen countries at the same time? How much longer can it go on doing so?

A: I don't agree with that statement. President Bush found that the War in Iraq consumed so many resources that he abandoned the war in Afghanistan -- hence the revival of the Taliban -- and now President Obama finds that he must draw down U.S. forces in Iraq in order to step up the war in Afghanistan. Modern warfare -- as conducted by the U.S. military -- is enormously expensive and the U.S. no longer has the economic wherewithal to fight many wars at once.

Q: Will the so-called war on terrorism ever end?

A: Terrorism is a tactic used by irregular forces without access to funds and armies and will never go away. Washington's "Global War on Terror" will end when some future administration discovers a greater danger -- China, global warming, mass migrations, or whatever.

Q: Are terrorists the new equivalent of the old Communists?

A: This seems to have been the case after 9-11, but in the absence of any similar event since then, and the continuing deterioration of the U.S. economy, I don't sense that it still holds true for most people.

Q: What will be the long-term repercussions of the war on terrorism?

A: A systematic decline in civil liberties enjoyed by most American citizens, along with an abiding suspicion and dislike of the United States in the Muslim world.

Q: You were part of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Are there lessons for today from those movements?

A: At that time, we largely viewed people in the Armed Forces with suspicion and contempt, if not downright hostility. Over the years, I have come to appreciate that most people in uniform are decent and believe in the value of what they are doing. I feel nothing but sympathy for the soldiers who have fought three or more dangerous, grueling tours of duty in Iraq and/or Afghanistan for what I consider to be misconceived strategic purposes.

Q: Do you own a gun? Have you ever fired a weapon?

A: No and no. But I have accompanied U.S. soldiers on live-fire combat exercises and have seen the effects of U.S. military firepower up close.

Q: The U.S. never seems to change its basic strategy of supporting dictators and dictatorships around the world. Is that how you see it?

A: Since World War II, American leaders have supported authoritarian regimes because they believed it was in America's best interests to do so. They believed that the damage done to the societies involved was outweighed by the benefits received by the United States. The U.S. will have to abandon this policy in the face of global hostility. We are already seeing the beginning of the end of this policy in the Middle East.

[Jonah Raskin is a prominent author, poet, educator, and political activist. His recent books include Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California and The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution.]

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Grisly Calculus : Fudging on Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan

Sar Bland, an Afghan man who was injured in a rocket attack in Tagab, lies on bed at a hospital at the U.S. base at Bagram, Afghanistan. An official said the death of civilians in U.S. rocket attacks presumably aimed at military officials and local leaders underscores the inability of NATO to successfully defeat the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan. Photo by Musadeq Sadeq / AP.
Is the military fudging on civilian casualties
To avoid pentagon oversight?

By Megan Carpentier / December 11, 2009

On Monday, the anonymous blogger Security Crank noticed something interesting: all the U.S. and NATO airstrikes in Afghanistan seemingly kill exactly 30 people every time. How can that be?

Security Crank documented no less than 12 occasions in which news reports, relying on field commanders' estimates, noted that exactly 30 suspected Taliban were killed in airstrikes and, occasionally, artillery attacks. He said:

But the much more important point remains: how could we possibly have any idea how the war is going, here or anywhere else, when the bad guys seem only to die in groups of 30? The sheer ubiquity of that number in fatality and casualty counts is astounding, to the point where I don’t even pay attention to a story anymore when they use that magic number 30. It is an indicator either of ignorance or deliberate spin… but no matter the case, whenever you see the number 30 used in reference to the Taliban, you should probably close the tab and move onto something else, because you just won’t get a good sense of what happened there.

So, why is it always 30? Do 30 casualties seem like enough to justify a military attack, or few enough to not attract too much attention to an incident?

Another blogger, Joshua Foust of the Central Asia blog Registan, seemingly stumbled upon the answer. In a tweet, he noted:

In 2003, an air strike killing 30 civilians could be launched w/o issues. 31 dead civilians and Rummy had to approve.

Foust then linked to an LA Times article from last July by Nicholas Goldberg that documented what field commanders were told.

In a grisly calculus known as the "collateral damage estimate," U.S. military commanders and lawyers often work together in advance of a military strike, using very specific, Pentagon-imposed protocols to determine whether the good that will come of it outweighs the cost.

We don't know much about how it works, but in 2007, Marc Garlasco, the Pentagon's former chief of high-value targeting, offered a glimpse when he told Salon magazine that in 2003, "the magic number was 30." That meant that if an attack was anticipated to kill more than 30 civilians, it needed the explicit approval of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or President George W. Bush. If the expected civilian death toll was less than 30, the strike could be OKd by the legal and military commanders on the ground.

In other words, the Pentagon determined that 30 casualties, even if they were civilian, were too few to matter politically or to attract the attention of the press for more than a few words. If commanders expected more civilian casualties than that, political leaders had to sign off on the attack in advance to make sure they were prepared for the PR fall-out.

That PR calculus of how many deaths matter to the average American has apparently carried over from the Bush Administration to the Obama Adminstration, at least insofar as ground commanders are concerned. But the American people deserve the truth about how many Afghans -- civilian and otherwise -- are being killed by our forces. Just because senior officials at the Pentagon think that killing 30 people doesn't warrant their attention doesn't mean they're right.

Source / Air America

Thanks to S.M. Willhelm / The Rag Blog

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Virtual Coup : Times, Pentagon Returning us to Vietnam?

Afghanistan:
Beware a Times/Pentagon 'virtual coup'

It was the military's manipulative misreporting in Vietnam that fueled Lyndon Johnson's 1965 disastrous escalation.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / October 24, 2009

Some military coups are still done the old-fashioned way. Tanks surround the capital, generals grab the radio station, the slaughter begins.

Here, the Declaration of Independence scorned King George III for elevating his army over our colonial legislatures. The founders opposed a standing army. Our first Commander George Washington warned against military entanglements. So did Dwight Eisenhower nearly two centuries later. These "quaint" monuments to civilian rule form the core of our constitutional culture.

So when the Pentagon wants to trash inconvenient opposition and escalate yet another war, it seeks subtler means. For example: the "virtual coup" now being staged in league with the New York Times, aimed at plunging us catastrophically deeper into Afghanistan.

It's how they drove us into the abyss in Vietnam and Iraq. It demands we decide who will rule -- the Pentagon, or the public.

It was the military's manipulative misreporting in Vietnam that fueled Lyndon Johnson's 1965 disastrous escalation. With the much-medalled William Westmoreland front and center, the Pentagon concocted a non-existent attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, warned that a communist victory would bring on the Apocalypse, told LBJ he could win, and ran its occupation army up to 550,000 troops.

When its last advisors fled in shame off that Saigon rooftop, the Pentagon blamed those who had opposed the war from the start. It assaulted the heroic independent reporters who exposed the war's true horrors. It even attacked the corporate media that had been its willing partner in the war's creation.

To its credit, the Times broke from its early support, making welcome history by publishing the Pentagon Papers, among much else. As today, it published opposing views all the way through.

But its big guns enlisted again in Iraq. The Bush Administration needed no convincing, but the American public did. Led by warhawk cheerleaders Thomas Friedman and Judith Miller, the Journal of Record sold a war based on Weapons of Mass Destruction and Dick Cheney's "grateful" Iraqi citizenry, both of which were non-existent.

Today central casting has brought us Stanley McChrystal to rerun the role of Westmoreland/Cheney. Now the hero of an endless stream of hauntingly familiar puff pieces, the General's carefully leaked "secret" demand for "a bare minimum" of 40,000 more troops to avoid "mission failure" has become the ultimate blackmail note, the core of a virtual coup in the making.

It comes as the Times concocts a report on "frustrations and anxiety [that] are on the rise within the military." Among “active duty and retired senior officers” there is "concern that the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room."

"Unduly influenced by political advisers?" Does this mean that for the Commander in Chief, elected by the people of the United States, advice is duly acceptable only from hawks in uniform?

Joining Tom Friedman (again!) is the Times's Roger Cohen, who says Obama needs "endurance" because if we lose in "Afghanistan, Pakistan and Pashtunistan" there "would be a disaster for Western security."

Sub in "Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos" and you can be reminded that our military is again backing a cabal of world-class heroin dealers.

And would the "loss" of AfPak, whatever that means, be a greater "disaster for Western security" than another trillion dollars diverted from education, health care, the environment, and domestic employment in a nation in deep financial chaos?

McChrystal is certainly entitled to his First Amendment rights. But so far, the American public is not buying. Polls show the country deeply divided, with slight majorities opposed to McChrystal's demand for more troops. That means, there is nothing like the public consensus that should be required for any military excursion.

The key may be the money. In the booming sixties, we could "afford" to blow $100 billion or more on a futile, senseless war merely by bankrupting our health care system, blowing college tuitions through the roof, sacking our infrastructure, failing to upgrade our grid and power systems, debasing our currency, falling from an exporting powerhouse to an import addict, and much more.

The Pentagon's gratuitous squander of another trillion in Iraq has helped squeeze the last of that "fat" out of our economy. A U.S. far beyond the brink of bankruptcy is being told to "stay the course" in the Graveyard of Great Powers, a country the size of Texas, a deathtrap to every invader for the past 2,300 years, including the Soviet Union. Pakistan is about twice the size of California. AfPak together have more than 200,000,000 people, more than 2/3 the population of the U.S.

Official military reports say there are about 100 members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Despite the global nature of terrorism we are allegedly there to stamp out, no other nation seems compelled to join us there in any meaningful way.

Obama was elected in large part because the American public has sensed that -- unlike his predecessor or opponent -- he is intelligent enough to grasp all this. He ran promising a full commitment in Afghanistan. Now he has dared to take his time making a final decision. But will he have the courage to stand against the brass at crunch time?

Robert Gates, the Bush holdover at Defense, who won't set a timetable for withdrawal, has gone public with his demand for more troops. As Yale's David Bromwich puts it, the brass at The Times wants "a large escalation in Afghanistan. The paper has been made nervous by signs that the president may not make the big push for a bigger war; and they are showing what the rest of his time in office will be like if he does not cooperate."

In other words, the virtual tanks have again surrounded the White House.

We cannot let them win. Another bloody, trillion-dollar Lone Ranger fiasco will definitively end any hope for health care, employment, education, the environment, a decent life for our children.

As usual, the Pentagon will be enriched and empowered. We will be impoverished and disenfranchised. Isn't that what coups are all about?

So when the military and its minions demand we defer to their "experts," we might recall the Cuban Missile Crisis. At its most terrifying peak, President John Kennedy -- himself genuine war hero -- polled the Joint Chiefs on how to respond to Soviet warheads in the western hemisphere. The generals unanimously demanded a nuclear attack. Thankfully, the president and his brother, the Attorney General, stood their ground.

Obama must now do the same. There are nuances in all global conflicts. But in an electronic age, when perception means virtually everything, the question is not just what happens in Afghanistan.

It is who rules here at home -- the Pentagon, or the public.

[Harvey Wasserman's History of the U.S. is at harveywasserman.com, along with Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth.]

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Just What We Needed: A New Cluster Bomb

What cynicism - "clean battlefield operation." There is no reality left in those in the power of the military-industrial complex. I believe even Dwight Eisenhower, as reactionary as he was, would be astounded at the thinking and the behavior of these people today.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Made in Mass., bomb stirs global debate: Textron seeks to quash cluster munitions pact
By Bryan Bender / September 20, 2009

WASHINGTON - The Sensor Fuzed Weapon is a marvel of military technology, says its maker, Textron Defense Systems. An advanced “cluster bomb,’’ it is designed to spray 40 individual projectiles of molten copper, destroying enemy tanks across a 30-acre swath of battlefield.

But the bomb - which is made at a Textron facility in the Boston suburb of Wilmington - violates terms of a landmark international treaty limiting cluster bombs to 10 bomblets or less. The pending treaty, signed by 98 nations last year in Oslo, has been sought for decades by human rights groups, which say that cluster bombs kill indiscriminately and leave behind duds that kill or maim unsuspecting civilians.

Now Textron, with the support of the Pentagon and the State Department, is mounting a campaign to derail the cluster-bomb treaty and write a new set of rules under the United Nations that would make it easier to sell its weapon around the world.

Textron’s primary argument for scrapping the treaty is that 99 percent of the bomblets released by the Sensor Fuzed Weapon will explode in combat, leaving only a tiny amount of unexploded ordinance that could be picked up by a child or hit by a farmer’s plow. Textron calls this capability “clean battlefield operation.’’

“It really is an extremely sophisticated weapon,’’ said Mark D. Rafferty, vice president of business development for Textron Defense Systems, which employs about 1,000 people at its Wilmington plant. Rafferty stood in front of a full-scale mock-up of the bomb, a 6-foot-long cylinder with tail fins, at an arms show in Washington, D.C., last week.

“Knowing that we are in no way, shape or form contributing to [civilian suffering] is really a very satisfying place to be,’’ he said.

The United States is among several major powers including Russia, China, and Israel that have refused to sign the Oslo treaty.

The US Air Force has purchased 4,600 of the new weapons, at a cost of several billion dollars. Textron has also sold them to Turkey, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. And it is in the final stages of reaching a deal with India for 510 of the weapons at an estimated cost of $375 million.

Textron wants the international community to rewrite the treaty to allow weapons with large numbers of bomblets, if they can be shown to avoid the potential for civilian casualties from unexploded components.

The initiative has outraged many arms control advocates, however, who secured signatures from Britain, France, and 96 other countries at last year’s Oslo negotiations. The treaty needs to be ratified by 30 countries to take effect; so far, 17 of them have done so.

“It’s a disgraceful attempt to throw mud at the most important achievement in humanitarian affairs and disarmament in the last decade,’’ said Thomas Nash, coordinator of the London-based Cluster Munition Coalition, a network of 400 nongovernmental organizations from about 90 countries.

Textron Defense Systems is a division of the Providence-based conglomerate Textron Inc., which makes products as diverse as helicopters and passenger planes and defense and intelligence systems. It had annual revenue of more than $14 billion in 2008. The Wilmington facility makes a variety of air-launched munitions, as well as both air and ground surveillance systems.

As part of its public relations push, Textron has established a new website, dontbanthesolution.com, replete with expert testimony and computer-generated battle scenes to demonstrate its weapon’s pinpoint accuracy and fail-safe design. Textron Systems chief executive Frank Tempesta, has penned an oped in a leading international trade magazine contending that the proposed treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, will do more harm than good by leading militaries to use more powerful, and less accurate, weapons to achieve the same effect. And the company has dispatched officials to foreign capitals and the conference rooms of skeptical human rights groups to make their case.

Dropped from a high-flying aircraft, the Textron weapon releases 10 canisters that parachute downward, scanning for the enemy with a built-in sensor. When they reach an optimum altitude, the canisters, spinning at high speed, release four separate bomblets, or “skeets,’’ each with its own rocket motor and targeting system.

Each skeet has a 2.2-kilogram warhead, sufficient to pierce and disable a 70-ton tank, and weighs a little less than 4 kilograms including its motor and electronics.

Just two of the weapons, released from a B-52 bomber, destroyed 24 Iraqi tanks in 2003.

If they don’t find a target, the company says, the 40 bomblets are designed to self-destruct. For example, if the skeet reaches a height of 50 feet without homing in on the heat from a tank or armored vehicle, it will explode in midair. And once armed, the projectile is only capable of exploding for eight seconds before it disarms. As a third safety mechanism, any unexploded skeets lying on the ground will disarm after two minutes.

The Pentagon has certified in testing that the Sensor Fuzed Weapon leaves unexploded bomblets only 1 percent of the time or less. That is a standard that Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has stipulated all cluster munitions must meet by 2018.

Arms control advocates remain unconvinced, however.

“They think technology is the answer,’’ said Nash, the Cluster Munition Coalition coordinator. His group contends that Textron’s claims of accuracy and reliability have historically been overstated.

“It is not reasonable to base your policy on the continued failure of weapons manufacturers to make reliable weapons,’’ he said. “They make money from selling weapons, and I think that compromises to a certain extent the credibility of their humanitarian analysis.’’

Other experts, including supporters of the Oslo treaty, acknowledge that Textron has made significant breakthroughs to minimize harm to civilians. Ove Dullum, chief scientist at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, said in an interview that based on tests he considers the Sensor Fuzed Weapon a minimal risk to civilians.

Still, he says that may not hold true under battle conditions.

“My experience . . . is that even if carefully conducted tests of ammunition show a very low dud rate, that will not represent the dud rate in war,’’ he said, citing the aging of munitions, environmental impact, and the handling of the weapons in a real war environment.

Moreover, even if the weapon can achieve the level of reliability advertised, it is still highly dangerous for civilians on the battlefield, said Jeff Abramson, deputy director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. He said that, depending on how many are used in a future conflict, a 1 percent dud rate could still affect many innocent bystanders.

“If you have 1 percent of 10,000 submunitions, that is 100 left that could possibly explode in the future,’’ he said.

Textron and the US military say that, without the ability to use cluster bombs with 40 bomblets, military forces will inevitably use greater numbers of traditional bombs. That, Gates concluded in a policy memorandum last year, “could result, in some cases, in unacceptable collateral damage and explosive remnants of war.’’

Nations that do not sign the treaty could have trouble selling their weapons. Cluster bombs made by Diehl and Rheinmetall in Germany and by Bofors Defence and GIAT Industries in France meet the requirements of the treaty, with two bomblets contained in each. They would be expected to pick up market share at Textron’s expense if the treaty is ratified as written.

Also, nations that ratify the treaty may place restrictions on cooperating with any military that doesn’t abide by it.

UN negotiations to craft a new agreement are at a standstill. “There is still a wide divergence,’’ said a US defense official involved in the talks who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to do so. Another meeting is scheduled in Geneva in November.

But a State Department spokesman, Jason Greer, argued that a new treaty that takes into account the potential to reduce civilian casualties would be an improvement over the Oslo pact, which merely sets standards for bomblets and their size.

The US government also argues that the current treaty will have little effect if the holdouts - which have the largest militaries and explosive stockpiles - refuse to participate. A new treaty, said Greer, would probably include "more of the countries that actually produce cluster munitions."

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

Source / Boston Globe

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Engelhardt: For America, War Is Peace

Graphic: Source.
Is America Hooked on War?
By Tom Engelhardt / September 17, 2009

"War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in "Newspeak," the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell's imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable to the United States.

Last week, for instance, a New York Times front-page story by Eric Schmitt and David Sanger was headlined "Obama Is Facing Doubts in Party on Afghanistan, Troop Buildup at Issue." It offered a modern version of journalistic Newspeak.

"Doubts," of course, imply dissent, and in fact just the week before there had been a major break in Washington's ranks, though not among Democrats. The conservative columnist George Will wrote a piece offering blunt advice to the Obama administration, summed up in its headline: "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan." In our age of political and audience fragmentation and polarization, think of this as the Afghan version of Vietnam's Cronkite moment.

The Times report on those Democratic doubts, on the other hand, represented a more typical Washington moment. Ignored, for instance, was Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's end-of-August call for the president to develop an Afghan withdrawal timetable. The focus of the piece was instead an upcoming speech by Michigan Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He was, Schmitt and Sanger reported, planning to push back against well-placed leaks (in the Times, among other places) indicating that war commander General Stanley McChrystal was urging the president to commit 15,000 to 45,000 more American troops to the Afghan War.

Here, according to the two reporters, was the gist of Levin's message about what everyone agrees is a "deteriorating" U.S. position: "[H]e was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces."

Think of this as the line in the sand within the Democratic Party, and be assured that the debates within the halls of power over McChrystal's troop requests and Levin's proposal are likely to be fierce this fall. Thought about for a moment, however, both positions can be summed up with the same word: More.

The essence of this "debate" comes down to: More of them versus more of us (and keep in mind that more of them -- an expanded training program for the Afghan National Army -- actually means more of "us" in the form of extra trainers and advisors). In other words, however contentious the disputes in Washington, however dismally the public now views the war, however much the president's war coalition might threaten to crack open, the only choices will be between more and more.

No alternatives are likely to get a real hearing. Few alternative policy proposals even exist because alternatives that don't fit with "more" have ceased to be part of Washington's war culture. No serious thought, effort, or investment goes into them. Clearly referring to Will's column, one of the unnamed "senior officials" who swarm through our major newspapers made the administration's position clear, saying sardonically, according to the Washington Post, "I don't anticipate that the briefing books for the [administration] principals on these debates over the next weeks and months will be filled with submissions from opinion columnists... I do anticipate they will be filled with vigorous discussion... of how successful we've been to date."

State of War

Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment. Similarly, we've become used to the idea that, when various forms of force (or threats of force) don't work, our response, as in Afghanistan, is to recalibrate and apply some alternate version of the same under a new or rebranded name -- the hot one now being "counterinsurgency" or COIN -- in a marginally different manner. When it comes to war, as well as preparations for war, more is now generally the order of the day.

This wasn't always the case. The early Republic that the most hawkish conservatives love to cite was a land whose leaders looked with suspicion on the very idea of a standing army. They would have viewed our hundreds of global garrisons, our vast network of spies, agents, Special Forces teams, surveillance operatives, interrogators, rent-a-guns, and mercenary corporations, as well as our staggering Pentagon budget and the constant future-war gaming and planning that accompanies it, with genuine horror.

The question is: What kind of country do we actually live in when the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) lists 16 intelligence services ranging from Air Force Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency to the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency? What could "intelligence" mean once spread over 16 sizeable, bureaucratic, often competing outfits with a cumulative 2009 budget estimated at more than $55 billion (a startling percentage of which is controlled by the Pentagon)? What exactly is so intelligent about all that? And why does no one think it even mildly strange or in any way out of the ordinary?

What does it mean when the most military-obsessed administration in our history, which, year after year, submitted ever more bloated Pentagon budgets to Congress, is succeeded by one headed by a president who ran, at least partially, on an antiwar platform, and who has now submitted an even larger Pentagon budget? What does this tell you about Washington and about the viability of non-militarized alternatives to the path George W. Bush took? What does it mean when the new administration, surveying nearly eight years and two wars' worth of disasters, decides to expand the U.S. Armed Forces rather than shrink the U.S. global mission?

What kind of a world do we inhabit when, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7% and an underemployment rate of 16.8%, the American taxpayer is financing the building of a three-story, exceedingly permanent-looking $17 million troop barracks at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan? This, in turn, is part of a taxpayer-funded $220 million upgrade of the base that includes new "water treatment plants, headquarters buildings, fuel farms, and power generating plants." And what about the U.S. air base built at Balad, north of Baghdad, that now has 15 bus routes, two fire stations, two water treatment plants, two sewage treatment plants, two power plants, a water bottling plant, and the requisite set of fast-food outlets, PXes, and so on, as well as air traffic levels sometimes compared to those at Chicago's O'Hare International?

What kind of American world are we living in when a plan to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq involves the removal of more than 1.5 million pieces of equipment? Or in which the possibility of withdrawal leads the Pentagon to issue nearly billion-dollar contracts (new ones!) to increase the number of private security contractors in that country?

What do you make of a world in which the U.S. has robot assassins in the skies over its war zones, 24/7, and the "pilots" who control them from thousands of miles away are ready on a moment's notice to launch missiles -- "Hellfire" missiles at that -- into Pashtun peasant villages in the wild, mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan? What does it mean when American pilots can be at war "in" Afghanistan, 9 to 5, by remote control, while their bodies remain at a base outside Las Vegas and then can head home past a sign that warns them to drive carefully because this is "the most dangerous part of your day"?

What does it mean when, for our security and future safety, the Pentagon funds the wildest ideas imaginable for developing high-tech weapons systems, many of which sound as if they came straight out of the pages of sci-fi novels? Take, for example, Boeing's advanced coordinated system of hand-held drones, robots, sensors, and other battlefield surveillance equipment slated for seven Army brigades within the next two years at a cost of $2 billion and for the full Army by 2025; or the Next Generation Bomber, an advanced "platform" slated for 2018; or a truly futuristic bomber, "a suborbital semi-spacecraft able to move at hypersonic speed along the edge of the atmosphere," for 2035? What does it mean about our world when those people in our government peering deepest into a blue-skies future are planning ways to send armed "platforms" up into those skies and kill more than a quarter century from now?

And do you ever wonder about this: If such weaponry is being endlessly developed for our safety and security, and that of our children and grandchildren, why is it that one of our most successful businesses involves the sale of the same weaponry to other countries? Few Americans are comfortable thinking about this, which may explain why global-arms-trade pieces don't tend to make it onto the front pages of our newspapers. Recently, the Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker, for instance, wrote a piece on the subject which appeared inside the paper on a quiet Labor Day. "Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms Supplier Grows" was the headline. Perhaps Shanker, too, felt uncomfortable with his subject, because he included the following generic description: "In the highly competitive global arms market, nations vie for both profit and political influence through weapons sales, in particular to developing nations..." The figures he cited from a new congressional study of that "highly competitive" market told a different story: The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007), controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008. Highly competitively speaking, Italy came "a distant second" with $3.7 billion. In sales to "developing nations," the U.S. inked $29.6 billion in weapons agreements or 70.1% of the market. Russia was a vanishingly distant second at $3.3 billion or 7.8% of the market. In other words, with 70% of the market, the U.S. actually has what, in any other field, would qualify as a monopoly position -- in this case, in things that go boom in the night. With the American car industry in a ditch, it seems that this (along with Hollywood films that go boom in the night) is what we now do best, as befits a war, if not warrior, state. Is that an American accomplishment you're comfortable with?

On the day I'm writing this piece, "Names of the Dead," a feature which appears almost daily in my hometown newspaper, records the death of an Army private from DeKalb, Illinois, in Afghanistan. Among the spare facts offered: he was 20 years old, which means he was probably born not long before the First Gulf War was launched in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. If you include that war, which never really ended -- low-level U.S. military actions against Saddam Hussein's regime continued until the invasion of 2003 -- as well as U.S. actions in the former Yugoslavia and Somalia, not to speak of the steady warfare underway since November 2001, in his short life, there was hardly a moment in which the U.S. wasn't engaged in military operations somewhere on the planet (invariably thousands of miles from home). If that private left a one-year-old baby behind in the States, and you believe the statements of various military officials, that child could pass her tenth birthday before the war in which her father died comes to an end. Given the record of these last years, and the present military talk about being better prepared for "the next war," she could reach 2025, the age when she, too, might join the military without ever spending a warless day. Is that the future you had in mind?

Consider this: War is now the American way, even if peace is what most Americans experience while their proxies fight in distant lands. Any serious alternative to war, which means our "security," is increasingly inconceivable. In Orwellian terms then, war is indeed peace in the United States and peace, war.

American Newspeak

Newspeak, as Orwell imagined it, was an ever more constricted form of English that would, sooner or later, make "all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended," he wrote in an appendix to his novel, "that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought... should be literally unthinkable."

When it comes to war (and peace), we live in a world of American Newspeak in which alternatives to a state of war are not only ever more unacceptable, but ever harder to imagine. If war is now our permanent situation, in good Orwellian fashion it has also been sundered from a set of words that once accompanied it.

It lacks, for instance, "victory." After all, when was the last time the U.S. actually won a war (unless you include our "victories" over small countries incapable of defending themselves like the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1983 or powerless Panama in 1989)? The smashing "victory" over Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War only led to a stop-and-start conflict now almost two decades old that has proved a catastrophe. Keep heading backward through the Vietnam and Korean Wars and the last time the U.S. military was truly victorious was in 1945.

But achieving victory no longer seems to matter. War American-style is now conceptually unending, as are preparations for it. When George W. Bush proclaimed a Global War on Terror (aka World War IV), conceived as a "generational struggle" like the Cold War, he caught a certain American reality. In a sense, the ongoing war system can't absorb victory. Any such endpoint might indeed prove to be a kind of defeat.

No longer has war anything to do with the taking of territory either, or even with direct conquest. War is increasingly a state of being, not a process with a beginning, an end, and an actual geography.

Similarly drained of its traditional meaning has been the word "security" -- though it has moved from a state of being (secure) to an eternal, immensely profitable process whose endpoint is unachievable. If we ever decided we were either secure enough, or more willing to live without the unreachable idea of total security, the American way of war and the national security state would lose much of their meaning. In other words, in our world, security is insecurity.

As for "peace," war's companion and theoretical opposite, though still used in official speeches, it, too, has been emptied of meaning and all but discredited. Appropriately enough, diplomacy, that part of government which classically would have been associated with peace, or at least with the pursuit of the goals of war by other means, has been dwarfed by, subordinated to, or even subsumed by the Pentagon. In recent years, the U.S. military with its vast funds has taken over, or encroached upon, a range of activities that once would have been left to an underfunded State Department, especially humanitarian aid operations, foreign aid, and what's now called nation-building. (On this subject, check out Stephen Glain's recent essay, "The American Leviathan" in the Nation magazine.)

Diplomacy itself has been militarized and, like our country, is now hidden behind massive fortifications, and has been placed under Lord-of-the-Flies-style guard. The State Department's embassies are now bunkers and military-style headquarters for the prosecution of war policies; its officials, when enough of them can be found, are now sent out into the provinces in war zones to do "civilian" things.

And peace itself? Simply put, there's no money in it. Of the nearly trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so discredited that it's left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves. As in Orwell's Newspeak, while "peace" remains with us, it's largely been shorn of its possibilities. No longer the opposite of war, it's just a rhetorical flourish embedded, like one of our reporters, in Warspeak.

What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases -- recently, there were almost 300 of them, macro to micro, in Iraq alone -- and bring our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an apostate to America's true religion and addiction, which is force. However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also -- always -- marching as to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war.

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.]

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

Source / Tom Dispatch

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Steve Weissman : Obama's Big Stick

Barack Obama: Taking up where Teddy Roosevelt left off? Political cartoon from Dakin Archives.

In less than hundred days in office, President Barack Obama has already demonstrated his desire to speak softly to all comers, friend or foe, while his proposed military budget shows a determination to carry America’s big stick into far-off trouble spots that most of us don’t know how to spell.

By Steve Weissman / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2009

“Speak softly and carry a big stick,” President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed just over a hundred years ago. Unabashedly committed to make America an imperial power, the energetic Roosevelt looked to a strong Navy to enforce the Monroe’s Doctrine’s hold over Latin America and to project the country’s growing power into the far corners of the world.

In less than hundred days in office, President Barack Obama has already demonstrated his desire to speak softly to all comers, friend or foe, while his proposed military budget shows a determination to carry America’s big stick into far-off trouble spots that most of us don’t know how to spell. The budget numbers and choice of weapon systems tell the story. Obama turns out be far more globally ambitious than either his supporters or detractors expected, and far more eager for Washington to remain the world’s policeman, ready, willing, and able to intervene militarily in what the Pentagon calls counter-insurgency and Teddy Roosevelt would have called colonial wars.

As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, the Pentagon would retain a hedge against other risks, but the primary goal was to prepare to “fight the wars we are in today and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years to come.”

Up to now, the raw numbers have drawn the most attention, much of it scurrilous or silly. Republican hawks condemn Obama for “gutting the military budget.” Anti-war bloggers defend him for proposing the most military spending in years, an estimated $534 billion or some 4% higher than George W. Bush’s last budget. And, it takes the right-wing libertarians at the Cato Institute to point out that the total military spending – including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other incidentals – amounts to more than $750 billion. According to CATO researcher Benjamin H. Friedman, “That is more than six times what China spends, 10 times what Russia spends and 70 times what Iran, North Korea and Syria spend combined.”

Obama’s choice of which arms to keep – and which to cut – further highlights his global ambitions. He has forced the Pentagon to cut down on overly exquisite and under-performing weapons systems, especially those intended primarily to combat technologically sophisticated opponents, such as Russia and China. The cuts would halt or scale back the F-22 fighter jet, the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic that the Kremlin opposes, non-workable armored vehicles for the Army’s Future Combat Systems, a new communication satellite, the C-17 transport plane, a new generation of stealth destroyers, and new helicopters to rescue downed pilots and for President Obama himself.

In place of these, Obama is boosting proposed expenditures for more boots on the ground and more plentiful, more modular, lower-tech, and somewhat lower-cost arms that make military intervention in colonial wars faster, cheaper, and – he hopes – more effective. Among the keepers:

• Littoral Combat Ships – smaller, high-speed, multi-purpose surface vessels that can operate in shallow water close to shore. The Pentagon will use them to move troops and equipment onto a beach, support Special Forces in commando raids, collect intelligence, perform surveillance and reconnaissance, sweep mines, hunt submarines, and fight pirates.


• F-35 joint-strike fighter planes – high-speed, multi-purpose single-engine jet fighters optimized for air-to-ground rather than air-to-air combat. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps will use as many as 2,443 F-35’s to provide close air support, tactical bombing, and air defense. Allied nations will also use them.


• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – remotely piloted drones to fly over targeted areas to collect intelligence and fire rockets. The Pentagon and CIA are already using them in Afghanistan and Pakistan, often killing civilians and provoking a militant reaction.

These are the weapons systems Obama wants to help Washington police the world. Whether he gets them, and whether he gets rid of those arms that do little to serve that task, remain to be seen. Each of the wasteful weapons systems has a powerful constituency, including the companies that make them, all the sub-contractors, the unions, the communities in which all of the work is done, and the senators and representatives who feed at the military trough. But, win or lose, Obama’s first military budget reveals his global goals and the technocratic rationality with which he is pursuing them. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes regularly for The Rag Blog.]

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Wall Street and the Pentagon : Greed and its Delusions

Greed and its requisite delusions. Art by Tom Payne / Eyeball Press.

At the heart of both scams is the deliberate corruption of information on such a vast scale that it overwhelms the mind of the educated layman to make sense out of it.

By Chuck Spinney / The Rag Blog / April 12, 2009

MARMARIS, Turkey -- Bill Moyers conducted a fantastic interview with Professor Bill Black, a specialist in securities fraud, on April 3 (Listen to the podcast here and read Moyers' analysis of this interview in Counterpunch.) I found the interview fascinating, because the scam in the banking industry is so similar to the scam in the Pentagon, only the scale of the fraud perpetrated by the bankers made the milcrats in the Pentagon look like pikers.

At the heart of both scams is the deliberate corruption of information on such a vast scale that it overwhelms the mind of the educated layman to make sense out of it. This of course is no accident. Overloading other people's minds results in enormous leverage to the faction doing the overloading -- whether that faction is made up of the power hungry Apparatchiks in Versailles on the Potomac or the greedy Oligarchs in Versailles on Hudson.

Moreover, the very process of constructing the Potemkin village of misinformation creates a world view that captures the imagination and thinking of its builders. Note how Black hints that some of the scam artists become true believers. Alan Greenspan's pathetic revelation that his "model" was wrong proves the power of this effect.

Greenspan's self delusion is very familiar to old line reformers in the Pentagon. We called it incestuous amplification -- or the process by which a decision maker's orientation, or his interior model of how the world operates, distorts his observations of external events to such a extent that he sees and act on what he wants to see, rather than the external world as it is.

When this happens, the whole decision cycle insensibly becomes disconnected from the external environment it purports to cope with, and the inevitable result is confusion, chaos, and in the presence of menace, it can even devolve into panic, which is now clearly evident in the irrational gyrations of the stock market. Add in the insidious effects of criminal greed (among the relatively few rotten apples) and of self interest (which affects everyone), and incestuous amplification becomes a recipe for a catastrophe on a humongous scale -- whether it takes the form of a failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a meltdown of the Pentagon's modernization program, a Wall Street meltdown, or even a national meltdown.

The really scary thing about this kind of behavior is the self-organizing character of the evolving catastrophe, or what I call the anatomy of decline. It evolves more from the bottom up via a process of trial and error than from a top-down conspiratorial design. The morally bankrupt oligarchs on Wall Street did not design their corrupt financial structure from the git go; they evolved it over time through little corruptions or adaptations in an interplay of chance and necessity -- lobbying here, creating an instrument there, cleaning out a regulator, constructing new bonus formulae, and so on.

Consequently undoing the intricate web of relations, like those now shaping the collective behavior in the Pentagon or on Wall Street, is the real challenge of reform. Boyd's work on the OODA loop is really insightful with regard to understanding and attacking this problem (but I must acknowledge that in the end, the reformers led by Boyd failed to reform the Pentagon).

By the way, Bill Black's interview also highlights the central flaw in the theory (really the ideology) of free market capitalism -- namely the necessary assumption that information about the market is freely available to all decision makers. This assumption also implies people have no memories, but conveniently for the theorists, the assumption makes the mechanistic "model" of economic equilibrium possible. Of course, in the real world, information is not free. If information were free, there would be no "experts." Fraud would be impossible. Indeed, the very existence of the information industry proves that information is not free.

Moreover, if information were free, the information industry would not be a two-edged sword, where the increasing power to manipulate vast amounts of "information" with computers (and increase the complexity of information to mind-numbing levels) also makes fraud, self-delusion, and disequilibrium easier, not harder. I found this systematic corruption of information to be central to the chaos and corruption in the Pentagon, and although I do not know him, I think Bill Black would agree that it is also the case on Wall Street.

Thanks to Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog

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Barack Obama Takes a Ride on the Pentagon Escalator

World's Highest Escalator. Image from TechEBlog.
Will He be Able to Get Off?

President Obama has made a crucial mistake that could very well come back to haunt him, like the initial decision to escalate in Vietnam, made in 1965 against his better judgement, came back to haunt Lyndon Johnson.

By Franklin Spinney / February 23, 2009

MARMARIS, Turkey -- Perhaps the greatest weakness in any foreign policy is the temptation to shape it according to the dictates of domestic politics. This seduction corrupts the synthesis of a sensible grand strategy as well as the formulation of sound military strategies. Although the temptation afflicts all nations, recent history has shown the United States to be dangerously prone to seeing and acting on the world through the disorienting lens of domestic politics. One need only recall Bush's asinine grand-strategic assessment that the terrorists hate us, because they hate our way of life, to realize how dangerously misleading this kind of self referencing can become.

Bush's inward focus was no anomaly, however. One of JFK's most successful campaign tactics in presidential campaign of 1960, for example, was his phoney allegation of a missile gap between the Soviet Union and the United States, when in fact he knew the opposite was the case. JFK's reckless campaign rhetoric unnecessarily intensified the cold war and reinforced militarists in both political parties. No doubt, his "bear any burden" rhetoric encouraged an atmosphere that helped to pave the way to Vietnam.

Ronald Reagon played the same game in 1980, with the same effects, using a phoney assertion of a "window of vulnerability," together with equally spurious claim that the so-called hollow military of the Carter years was the product of budget cuts made by Democrats, when in fact the hollow military was a self-inflicted wound created by a perverse pattern of decision making within the Pentagon. The success of Reagan's gambit intensified the Cold War in the early 1980s and launched an unprecedented "peacetime" spending spree that not only did not fix the Pentagon's decision making pathologies, but put the US defense budget on a budget escalator that now can only be justified by continuing wars after the USSR had collapsed, much as George Kennan had predicted it would (i.e., due more to its internal contradictions than Reagan's spending spree). That the continuing addiction to cold-war level defense budgets needs continuing war to justify the high spending levels can be seen clearly in the obsessive predilection toward bullying coercive diplomacy punctuated by the use of military force, especially bombing, exhibited by President Clinton and especially President George W. Bush.

Fast forward to 2008. During the last election, Candidate Barack Obama chose to attack President Bush's catastrophically flawed grand strategy of belligerent warmongering (you are either with us or against us) by portraying Iraq, correctly in my opinion, as an unnecessary war that distracted attention away from Al Qaeda. But to shore up support from the "pro-military" parts of the democratic and independent electorates, Obama contrasted Iraq, the bad war, to Afghanistan, the good war. To that end, he pledged to draw down troops in Iraq and increase troops in Afghanistan, implicitly buying into Bush's grand strategy of an open-ended, militarized, global war on terror -- where al Qaeda remains forgotten but with the anti-Taliban war mutates into a far more dangerous anti-Pashtun war. Pointedly, Candidate Obama never called for reductions in the defense budget.

Candidate Obama's domestic politicking is now coming back to haunt President Obama's foreign policy and military strategy.

Specifically, Obama's promise to focus on the "good war" is undermining his formulation of a sensible grand stategy as well as a sound military strategy, particularly with regard to the question of escalating our war in Afghanistan and intervening in Pakistan, which is clearly destabilizing Pakistan, the world's only Muslim nation with atomic weapons.

To wit -- Obama just approved an increase of 17,000 troops for Afghanistan, which is in line with his campaign promise, but far less than the 30,000 increase requested by the military. According to an unnamed source interviewed by Gareth Porter, the reason he reduced the military's request is because the commander in Afghanistan, General McKiernan, could not tell Obama how the increased force would be used, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not tell him what the end-game in Afghanistan would be. In other words, the leaders of the military told Obama they have no strategy in Afghanistan, except doing more of the same, which everyone agrees is not working, and therefore, echoing the peculiar logic found in the Pentagon Papers, the military wants to redeem failure by escalating.

Rather than just saying no and telling the military to go back to the drawing board, Obama chose to make good on his campaign pledge by approving a smaller increase than requested (domestic politics), perhaps thinking he could keep his options open by buying himself a little time while he did a strategy study. However, in so doing, he bought into an admittedly strategy-free escalation decision (foreign policy), without understanding the future consequences of that decision. Straddling the fence may make sense in the context of day-to-day domestic politics, but Mr. Obama needs to understand Pentagon plays long-term bureaucratic politics, and over in Versailles on the Potomac, the stakes are high, because careers, budgets, and contracts are at stake.

Porter is right, President Obama has made a crucial mistake that could very well come back to haunt him, like the initial decision to escalate in Vietnam, made in 1965 against his better judgement, came back to haunt Lyndon Johnson. That is because, with his approval of a partial escalation in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama is now a vested party in General McKiernan's strategy of mindlessness escalation. And Obama knows it is not good domestic politics to unring the bell. So, Mr. Obama will be under tremendous pressure and temptation to construct a strategy ex-post facto to justify his decision. Moreover, given his approval of an initial escalation, the priniciple of escalation is now an agreed-to option and he will soon learn that his credibility is at stake. You can be sure the milcrats understand this, because Front Loading decisions (i.e., getting politicos to commit to things before they understand the future consequences of their approval) has been raised a high art form in Versailles on the Potomac. It is now virtually certain the milcrats will try to use Obama's initial escalation decision as the thin edge of the wedge to lever in a "new strategy" that will include sending even more troops into the Afghan/Paki meatgrinder.

So, is Obama repeating the mistakes of the Americans in Vietnam or the Russians in Afghanistan? General McKiernan apparently doesn't think so, because the arrogantly dismissed analogies to the Russian experience in Afghanistan at a news conference on February 18 by saying, "There's always an inclination to relate what we're doing with previous nations ... I think that's a very unhealthy comparison." Old timers, however, will remember, however, this is exactly how McKiernan's predecessors blew off the warnings of Bernard Fall in the early 1960s, when they dismissed France's experience in Indochina.

The sooner Obama realizes that studying and learning from past mistakes is a good idea, the easier it will be for him to jump off the Pentagon's escalator, but he is just where the apparat wants him to be ... alone. He has no George Ball in the Ms. Clinton's State Department to act as the canary in the coal mine. And as for the dilletentes he appointed to sub-cabinet levels in Mr. Gate's Pentagon, the milcrats know it will be far easier to roll over them that it was for their predecessors to successfully roll the best and the brightest in Mr. McNamara's Pentagon.

[Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com.]

Source / CounterPunch

Thanks to Tom Cleaver / The Rag Blog

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