Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
Richard Clarke is the top of the heap. Peter Bergen, now here, comes to mind. Here’s a school pimping its list of justifiably ignored academics. And this Google generated list holds the potential for hours of merriment.
Amusingly, here.
You can trust me because I am a terrorism expert, but not a celebrity. We know this because, most recently, it said so right here and here. And also.
It’s a play on the old pejorative “Vietnamization,” the word for the failed strategy of propping up the old Army of the Republic of Vietnam with US air power while transferring the job of fighting the war to it.
Without US air, the Afghan toady army, like the ARVN, gets beat up.
US bombing always suppresses or removes the enemy, like removing a boulder blocking a road to nowhere.
“Asked how Afghan soldiers or police officers might manage a similar tactical problem in the same canyon, Commander Burks gave a knowing frown,” reads the Times. “I don’t know, but they’re not going to do this.???
And the Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy blog has recently posted a Congressional Research Report on Afghan Army casualties. It is here.
There are two important figures.
And the numbers, if reliable, on Afghan National military casualties.
One can only tell the national toady army and police force don’t bear the brunt of any fighting. When they do fight, they are more likely to die than US forces.
This may also indicate other problems.
The Afghan National army may, like the ARVN, be casualty and risk averse, reluctant to fight. And that when it fights, it loses.
It may also often be ambushed, in its barracks, at home or in the field. And that the handling of those blown up or shot is much less effective than US retrieval of combat casualties, meaning you are more likely to not survive if hit in the war.
Over ten years in Afghanistan and the US military cannot make a decent fighting force out of the locals dragooned to finish the war for an unpopular central government.
Surprise, surprise.
Permalink Comments off
David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, his account of the policy-makers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the nature of the Vietnam disaster, is a classic on the delusions of American power. Everything Halberstam described then is present today. Only conditions and decision-making at the highest level are more deteriorated.
This voluminous book maps the roots of the war in post WWII decision making and American dealings in China as the communist insurgency battled with an American client named Chiang Kai Shek, a man who’d been an ally against the Japanese.
Th Americans on the ground in China, diplomats and old soldiers like Joe Stilwell, knew the Chinese detested Chiang, a descendant of mandarins, and that there was no popular support for him. China was going to crumble, the communists were going to win and take power. Despite having people who knew the score the US government backed the wrong horse.
Truman became known as the President who lost China to communism.
The McCarthy era was ushered in and everyone who had a rational idea about what to do in southeast Asia was either tarred or banished in the hysteria over alleged communist infiltration of US government.
As a result, America’s leaders, including those in the Eisenhoiwer and Kennedy administrations, refused to view the Vietnam insurgency, first with the Vietminh against France and later the Vietcong in the south, as an anti-colonial struggle deeply rooted in the people of that country.
Only the views that Communism was monolithic, that every Communist country was exactly the same as Joe Stalin’s Soviet Union, were allowed to prevail.
Thus was born the Domino Theory, as countries — one after another, tipping into each other — would be said to fall if the Communists were not stopped in one poor small nation which had waged an endless war to free itself from western colonialism.
Anyone with dissenting views was purged or learned to be silent. The role of the State Department became virtually non-existent, except as an adjunct to the Pentagon.
The decision-makers held the beliefs, common now, that American technological supremacy and military might were the only answers. The government became obsessed with quantifying the unquantifiable, believing that if enough bodies were amassed (today, it’s the tabulation of al Qaeda and Taliban leaders killed in drone strikes, always advertised as a new kind of war), enough tonnage in bombs dropped, the Vietcong would be beaten.
Reports from the field that programs like the making of “strategic hamlets” in the Mekong Delta were a complete failure, that the Vietcong were much better than the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, that the enemy controlled most of the places continuously claimed to be pacified by the US military, that the natives — as with the Chiang government in China, despised the Diem government in Saigon, were either sanitized or completely suppressed. Critics were silenced. If you were right, you were fired. If you were wrong you were promoted.
Today there is no David Halberstam, or Neil Sheehan or Malcolm Browne to make news reports and books that would expose such matters.
Still, news can be gleaned of the same fossilized strategy at the top, the poisoning of critical thinking so that nothing is allowed to get in the way of the prosecution of war.
The US isn’t fighting communism and it is not in a country struggling to rid itself of foreign interference. Vietnam deeply damaged faith in the US military as an institution. It had cost 60,000 lives. Today, American faith in the military remains high, one assumes at least part due to the fact that almost all of us have not had to go to war. In the Sixties many Americans could name General William Westmoreland and Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara. Today nobody knows the names of American fighting generals. And only perhaps slightly over half of the educated could probably name the fellow who is the definition of the
civilian functionary, the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta.
But al Qaeda has been substituted for communism and the endless battleground has become the failed states of the Middle East, Asia and Africa
In these places, the war can never end because all insurgencies and very little wars between bad people are viewed through a dark lens created on 9/11, one that colors the world much as the old Cold Warriors saw communism, a monolithic threat that can only be smashed by the immediate application of military power before it poses a threat to the homeland.
With such thinking ascendant every failed country becomes a place where the line must be held.
From the Washington Post, news of US military action in Mali, only because random special ops soldiers, not remarkable by any standard, were killed in an early morning car crash after what appeared to be a night filled with booze and prostitutes:
[The] crash in Mali has revealed some details of the commandos’ clandestine activities that apparently had little to do with counterterrorism. The women killed in the wreck were identified as Moroccan prostitutes who had been riding with the soldiers, according to a senior Army official and a U.S. counterterrorism consultant briefed on the incident, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have long worried about Mali, a weakly governed country of 14.5 million people that has served as a refuge for Islamist militants allied with al-Qaeda.
With only 6,000 poorly equipped troops, the Malian armed forces have always struggled to maintain control of their territory, about twice the size of Texas …
About six years ago, the Pentagon began bolstering its overt aid and training programs in Mali, as well as its clandestine operations …
In what would have represented a significant escalation of U.S. military involvement in Mali, the Pentagon also considered a secret plan in 2009 to embed American commandos with Malian ground troops, diplomatic cables show.
Under that program, code-named Oasis Enabler, U.S. military advisers would conduct anti-terrorism operations alongside elite, American-trained Malian units. But the idea was rejected by Gillian A. Milovanovic, the ambassador to Mali at the time.
In an October 2009 meeting in Bamako with Vice Adm. Robert T. Moeller, deputy chief of the Africa Command, the ambassador called the plan “extremely problematic,??? adding that it could create a popular backlash and “risk infuriating??? neighbors such as Algeria.
It might as well be taken from the pages of The Best and the Brightest in its disregard of the State Department in favor of whatever the US military wishes to do.
From today, on a new book by a Post reporter, extolled as “buzzy” on how the President “squandered” the Afghan surge, shows only Rajiv Chandrasekaran is no David Halberstam. (Watch the news clip. The book is presented as something which will provoke a lively chat in the corridors of power for the rest of the summer.)
Once again, the military, which runs our wars, as decades ago, brooks no interference. The security bureaucracy wants someone from the State Department ousted. After more than a decade of war, the US military and national security leadership are now as rotted as they were during Vietnam.
Paradoxically, it’s Richard Holbrooke who the military core of Obama’s advisory group wanted deposed. Holbrooke was actually a young man at the Paris peace talks which were the beginning of the end of the US involvement in Vietnam. Only intervention by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, momentarily saved his job, according to the Post’s reporter. Eventually the military’s problem was solved: Holbrooke died two years ago.
As in Vietnam, where the people loathed the government propped up by American forces, the Afghan people — logically — despise the American toady in Kabul, Hamid Karzai. If there was any goodwill after the Taliban were overthrown, it was lost many years ago:
In Afghanistan, the military surge, argues Chandrasekaran, was a mistake.
“What we fail to understand was that the Afghan people largely wanted to be left alone and they hate their government, in many cases, as much as they hate the insurgents. And when we went to them and said, ‘Ah, we’re coming here to help bring your government to you.’ They said, ‘Whoa we don’t want our government!’
It’s presented as diverting froth from the war on terror, something to be clucked over on the evening news for a few minutes. And so it will be taken.
On propping up the new Diem Karzai government:
KABUL — The United States declared Afghanistan a major non-NATO ally on Saturday, with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton personally delivering the news of Afghanistan’s entry into a club that includes Israel, Japan, Pakistan, and other close Asian and Middle Eastern allies.
The move, announced as Clinton stood with President Hamid Karzai amid the towering trees and rose beds on the grounds of the presidential palace here …
The moves also appear to have already yielded one dividend for the United States: Karzai has not recently lashed out at his backers, as he has in the past, at one point calling Americans ‘‘demons.’’
“Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.??? — Sun Tzu for the American Geo-Politician
Permalink Comments off
Earlier this year, on the publication of al Qaeda’s magazine, Inspire:
Inspire magazine, while not meant to be an al Qaeda joke, has always been easy to brush off. It’s been an example of how al Qaeda has had a serious problem with recruitment filled as it is with wishful thinkers and fantasies on terror that will never come true. Al Qaeda, for practical purposes, is operationally dead. As far as the 99 percent and middle class America is concerned, it poses no serious threat.
Al Qaeda has been whittled down by American might over a decade of war. The US employs more money and manpower hunting it than it needs to destroy a handful of medium-sized nations …
The al Qaeda men writing for Inspire have obviously never actually been to the United States.
They just wishfully think it would be good, and really terrorizing, if someone could like, uh, start a couple fires in … wait for it … Montana!
Inspire only shows two things — that al Qaeda is virtually destroyed and that US war-on-terror reporters are crap.
The men who launched al Qaeda’s English-language magazine may have died in a U.S. missile strike last fall, but “Inspire” magazine lives on without them — and continues to promote jihadi attacks on Western targets, offering detailed advice on how to start huge forest fires in America with timed explosives …
Readers know — not a single William L. Shirer in the entire press army covering the war on terror.
Today:
WOODLAND PARK, Colo. – A stubborn and towering wildfire jumped firefighters’ perimeter lines and doubled in size in the hills overlooking Colorado Springs, forcing frantic mandatory evacuation notices for more than 9,000 residents, destroying an unknown number of homes and partially closing the grounds of the sprawling U.S. Air Force Academy.
Heavy smoke and ash billowed from the mountain foothills west of the city. Bright yellow and orange flames flared in the night, often signaling another home lost to the Waldo Canyon Fire, the No. 1 priority for the nation’s firefighters.
Interstate 25, which runs through Colorado Springs, was briefly closed to southbound traffic Tuesday. All told, officials said, evacuation orders affected as many as 32,000 residents …
Throughout the interior West, firefighters have toiled for days in searing, record-setting heat against fires fueled by prolonged drought. Most, if not all, of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana were under red flag warnings, meaning extreme fire danger.
In central Utah, authorities found one woman dead Tuesday when they returned to an evacuated area, marking the first casualty in a blaze that consumed at least two dozen homes. Sanpete County sheriff’s officials said they hadn’t identified the victim, whose remains were found during a damage assessment of the 60-square-mile Wood Hollow Fire near Indianola.
The nation is experiencing “a super-heated spike on top of a decades-long warming trend,” said Derek Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Massive wildfires are a fact of life in the mid-west and west. Global warming has made them worse but they’ve always been part of the landscape. Sparks from cars, guns, lightning, arsonists, careless campers — many things touch them off.
Southern California has its red flag days every year. There is probably not anyone who lives here who hasn’t seen a helicopter dropping dyed fire retardant or been close to, if not too close, to a big wildfire.
A wildfire crawled through the south side of the San Gabriel mountains the first year I was here. The smoke plume from it dropped ash like a light snow on Pasadena for days. Coals set palms and rooftops on fire.
A smoke cloud from a wildfire near Venture turned the highway into Santa Barbara on a Sunday afternoon into what seemed like midnight to me and a friend a couple years ago.
Massive wildfires destroy lots of property. Casualties always remain low, hardest hit being the firefighters. People usually have time to get out of the way. Terrorizing is a poor way to describe them.
Firestorms that incinerate cities have been caused by massive strategic bomber raids. They were the property of the old US Army Air Force, Curtis LeMay and Bomber Harris of the United Kingdom during World War II.
The ineffective Japanese fire balloon campaign was more effective than Inspire.
The US had a small project to develop incendiary bats to be dropped over Japanese cities in World War II. A most excellent, authoritative and amusing book on the affair, which I have, is here.
The bats were kitted with white phosphorus encapsulated in a decaying gel strapped to a foot, put on racks, and packed into a bomb
which opened in mid-air. The only test resulted in a building burned down at the project site after an experimental bomb was released over a target. The bats flew out, declined to go where they were supposed to, flew back to roost at the base — their home, and set a fire.
The bat bomb’s scientist, and the bats, had roots in Pasadena.
“Fletch grinned when faced with my mastiff,” it reads. (The greater mastiff bat is the largest bat in the US.)
Continuing, from Bat Bomb:
(Fletch) had never seen a bat that large. “Man,” he said appreciatively. “Just think what Doc could do with a plane load of those puppies. Where’d you get ‘im from, Africa?”
“Pasadena,” I said. “Ain’t he just a dilly!”
On March 9 and 10, 1945, Curtis LeMay hit Tokyo with incendiary raids.
Deaths went over 100,000. More than a million were made homeless.
What’s left of al Qaeda and the US war on terror press corps — all of them, douchebags.
My friend Don had a wonderful library. Books were a big part of his life and I have been trying to give the many fine ones in it new homes. All those worth having and reading, and there are many, will not be wasted on public school libraries or other similar “charity,” since the actual valuing of books in such traditional places is well and truly dead.
One of the great finds is a two volume set, Reporting WWII. It anthologizes a large number of American news reports from old foreign correspondents hardly anyone, except for other journalists, remember: A. J. Liebling, Bill Shirer, Ernie Pyle and many others.
William Shirer, from Berlin in September of 1940:
The statement of the High Command, obviously forced upon it by Hitler himself — he often take a hand in writing the official communiques — deliberately perpetrates the lie that Germany has only decided to bomb London as a result of the British first bombing Berlin. And the German people will fall for this, as they fall for almost everything they’re told nowadays. Certainly, never before in modern times — since the press, and later the radio, made it theoretically possible for the mass of mankind to learn what was going on in the world — have a great people been so misled, so unscrupulously lied to, as the Germans under this regime.
[Most Germans] I speak to are beginning for the first time to wonder why the invasion of Britain hasn’t come off. They’re still confident the war will be over by Christmas. But then, until a fortnight ago they were sure it would be over by winter … I have won all my bets with Nazi officials and newspapermen about the date of the Swastika appearing in Trafalgar Square and shall — or should — receive from them enough champagne to keep me all winter. Today, when I suggested to some of them another little bet so they could win back some of their champagne, they did not think it was funny. Nor would they bet.
Hitler made a surprise speech here this afternoon, the occasion being the opening of the Winterhilfe — winter relief — campaign. Like the Volkswagen, the cheap “people’s car” on which Germans are paying millions of marks a month in installments though the factory which is supposed to make them is actually manufacturing only arms, the Winterhilfe is one of the scandals of the Nazi regime, though not one German in a million realizes it. It is obvious in a country without unemployment not much “winter relief” is necessary. Yet the Nazis go on wringing several hundred million marks each winter out of the people for “winter charity” and actually use most of the money for armaments or party funds.
There was a short time when the Reich took over Norway — the same is true of Holland — when Germans might have succeeded in winning the goodwill of the people there, who saw it was helpless to struggle against the overwhelming military power of Hitler. But the Germans did everything possible to forfeit goodwill and in a few weeks the sentiment changed. Now in all the occupied countries the Germans are bitterly hated. No decent Norwegian or Dutchmen will have anything to do with them.
The United States isn’t Nazi Germany in 1940. There are also exactly zero William Shirer’s in the national press corps. Life is bleak, though. Forty six million are on food stamps but the United States has the biggest military in world history.
And we get press reports from the war on terror, in ludicrous style similar to anything that so annoyed Shirer in 1940.
A Norwegian man who received terrorist training in Yemen is “operational” and is likely awaiting instructions to attack Western targets, according to a report by The Associated Press, which was confirmed by an ABC News intelligence source.
The AP reported today that officials from three European security agencies said that the man, who was not identified, is in his 30s, a convert to Islam and had completed training from the al Qaeda offshoot AQAP. One of the officials said the man was believed to still be in Yemen, but said that he has no criminal record and would be able to move freely across borders.
“Not even a parking ticket,” the official said, according to the AP. “He’s completely clean and he can travel anywhere.”
A terrorist. From Norway. Who went to Yemen and is now trained to hit us. He has not even a parking ticket, delivered in dead seriousness. Certainly this man must be of the most serious menace to American society. Perhaps he will finally be able to get through with an underwear bomb.
The White House on Monday promised to work with Turkey and other NATO allies to hold Syria “accountable” for what American officials have described as the deliberate downing of a Turkish military jet, apparently in international airspace …
“We stand in solidarity with Turkey, a key U.S. ally,” spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One. “We will work with Turkey, and other partners, to hold the Assad regime accountable …”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the shoot-down as a “brazen and unacceptable act” after discussing the incident by telephone with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Sunday.
“It is yet another reflection of the Syrian authorities’ callous disregard for international norms, human life, and peace and security,” Clinton said in a statement.
Permalink Comments off
The only fault is that the nation is now seen to lack character and a basic morality in men of this station — except for Jimmy Carter. The silence from everyone else is deafening. And it tells you everything you need to know about the empire in decline.
Jimmy Carter, on the opinion page of the New York Times:
THE United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.
Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended …
While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past …
At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice … But instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies …
Permalink Comments off
Stimulus works. It creates jobs. One of the best examples is the explosion in hiring for homeland security, at the local level, for the last twelve years.
Coincidentally, following upon the weekend post which discussed parts of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, this new hire in Odessa, TX:
Ector County Commissioners approved the hiring of a bioterrorism technician at their meeting Monday, but the position covers more than just the threat of terrorist attacks.
Ector County Health Department Director Gino Solla said the position, part of the public health preparedness system, is part-time and assist with duties that involve dealing with disasters that range from manmade attacks to natural incidents.
“It could be radiological or even … a tornado,??? Solla said. “Any time people are hurt or killed, public health gets involved.???
Hired at a step five, or $13.36 an hour, Dillon Harris will be coming from Dwight, Ill., and is a student at Monmouth College. Studying to get into medical school while in college, Harris said he will be taking time off from his studies to get hands-on training before entering his field …
Bioterrorism technician. For this part of Texas. It’s an eye-rolling proposition.
There will never be a bioterror or any other kind of terror incident in this place. Still it is a job for someone who does not have one, which means money spent on the local economy. And — ultimately — all these jobs come from the federal government and grants from agencies like the Dept. of Homeland Security.
They are the equivalent of stimulus. Or, if you prefer, Keynsian jobs programs.
The funding, reads the newspaper, came from “the Bioterrorism Response Program after it was formed in 2003 in response to the Anthrax scares … a large part of the Public Health Emergency Preparedness budget has been issued through grants.”
The grants for the hire are scheduled through 2012 and 2013, it adds.
Readers know I’m a bioterrorism expert. They can easily understand the outrage that results when all domestic jobs which could theoretically be sustained or created by stimulus or thought of as bad.
Except in the cases of creating homeland security positions where there will never even be a theoretical need.
Having said that, creation of a new job in the Odessa area, whatever it may be, is a good thing.
Permalink Comments off
The general American attitude toward war: Our troops are the greatest as long as I don’t have to serve and I promise to make appreciative mouth noises or go to parades on key days of remembrance … The honest approach: Admitting you don’t give a rat’s ass about Memorial Day as long as you get hot dogs and hamburgers. I don’t buy the argument that anyone’s fought for my freedoms in the last ten years.
The military, our political leadership, and the people all wanted a fighting force that was unrepresentative of the nation and only a sliver of the population. One that would insulate the country from Viet Nam-style war protest because the sacrifice is not shared.
And that’s what they have.
And this is impolite and churlish but accurate:
The US military, despite being the largest, most well-equipped and capitalized of any in world history, is BAD. It smashes weakling countries and bombs the guilty as well as the innocent who have nothing in the desperate places of the world, delivering it all with a special brand of American pomposity that tolerates no soul-searching or regret.
It is thought to be led by men deemed the best and the brightest. So best and bright the majority of Americans cannot name one general, admiral, or even the guy who led the force that invaded Iraq a decade ago.
If these guys are scholars of anything making arguments worth consideration by anyone outside their insular profession of national war-making, I’m Ernest Hemingway.
Good news, lads! Good news. It’s Memorial Day.
Proving only that putting Republicans in power is dangerous because they do paranoid as well as predatory things antithetical to what the country once stood for, Kansas governor Sam Brownback signed into law the state GOP’s anti-shariah bill.
Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a bill aimed at keeping state courts and agencies from using Islamic or other non-U.S. laws when making decisions, his office said on Friday, drawing criticism from a national Muslim group.
The law has been dubbed the “Shariah bill” because critics say it targets the Islamic legal code …
About 20 states [all under GOP governance] have considered similar legislation but the Kansas law is the only one signed in recent weeks, Council on American Islamic spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said.
“It’s unfortunate the governor chose to pander to the growing Islam-phobia in our society that has led to introduction of similar unconstitutional and un-American legislation in dozens of state legislatures,” Hooper said.
Hooper said legislators have often referred to Shariah law in supporting such legislation, but he said they take the word out of the bill to stave off legal challenges. The Kansas bill does not mention Shariah.
The Islam-o-Phobe most responsible for the national campaign to get anti-Shariah legislation passed into law in red states is birther Frank Gaffney, the man lampooned in the excerpt from the Tom Tomorrow cartoon, above.
Gaffney is also a prime mover in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy and a vocal part of the Bomb Iran/ballistic missile defense lobby. Over the past few years he’s been in the blog on a frequent basis, every time for activities connected with electromagnetic pulse doom and whipping up fear, confusion and hysteria over the imagined creeping threat of shariah law in this country.
While we won’t be around to read future histories of the country, those who write them won’t be kind because of the likes of Frank Gaffney and the extremists of the Republican Party. They are a symptom the country is ungovernable and immune to reason, now in a demonstrable decline.
The debate in Kansas over the anti-Shariah bill showed a few state Republicans making slight noises over how they were ashamed to have been part of it. However, when they had the opportunity to do something they chose not to, going with the crazy crowd, lacking spine over fears of lost careers for the sins of common human decency, ethics and principles.
The official party of true blue American bigots wins one for the patron saints of intolerance and the setting of notoriously bad examples.
Frank Gaffney — from the archives.
Anti-shariah and Islam-o-Phobe crazy — from the archives.
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »