A Sugared Turd Is Still Not A Tootsie-Roll

David Ignatius, "Ten years later, recalling Iraq's hard lessons". March 20

YESTERDAY, as you no doubt already know, Pierce introduced Young Ezra to the concept of withering fire in a way America's wars never will.

Anyway, hidden amongst the chaff from Charlie's winnowing I found this bit of floss:

Wasn’t one lesson of the Iraq War that we had simply been far too confident in the American military’s capacity to invade, occupy and rebuild a complex, volatile society that we could never hope to truly understand?

Well, no.

And, no, because none of you had the slightest interest or concern about "occupying and rebuilding" a complex and volatile society like Iraq, or a simple and volatile society like Afghanistan, for that matter. Not you, Yglesias (who at least jumped off the wagon early), Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, nor the Wise Young'uns at Slate. We were just gonna roll 'em over, and God and the natural inclination of Man to seek Suburban Burgherhood would do the rest. You were interested in being Serious, as Pierce says, and in not being on the wrong side of the Quagmire metaphor. You didn't want to be anti-war hippies, or otherwise unfashionable.  If there'd been the slightest concern for the "re-building" of either Iraq or Afghanistan we'd'a known what the Plan was before people like you signed on with the Cakewalkers and the Six Months Toppers and the Dead-Ender Spotting Society.

You demonstrated what my cabbie used to say to me: "Dog, you're gonna be doomed to repeat history if you don't learn from it, but there's a fuckload a' volunteers to learn a little and repeat it anyway."

"I was a callow youth," isn't much of an excuse for a callow youth.  No such excuse is available to Ignatius.

Ten years ago this week, I was covering the U.S. military as it began its assault on Iraq. As I read back now over my clips, I see a few useful warnings about the difficulties ahead. But I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense.

The great thing about following politics, even haphazardly, as I do, is how it offers you a convenient way to test your sense of smell without a visit to the doctor.

And your cynicism. It's reassuring to me, for example, that I am not yet ready to Just Fucking Chuckle every time I hear this new development in the Non-Apology Apology: the Apology Non-Apology.

Invading Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein a decade ago was one of the biggest strategic errors in modern American history.

1) Define "modern". 2) Claiming we invaded Iraq "to topple Saddam Hussein" is already cheating, Dave.

We’ll never know whether the story might have been different if better planning had been done for “the day after,” or the Iraqi army hadn’t been disbanded, or several other “ifs.”

Yeah, like we'll never know how Vietnam would'a turned out if only They had let us win.

Let us say, first, that what did qualify as "planning" for "the day after", as brought to you by Bush & Cheney--in fairness, they were awful busy at the time figuring the best route to Damascus, Tehran, and making sure all our Boys in Morocco and Bulgaria and Who Knows Where had plenty of water, and boards--suggests that no fucking amount of planning in the world with those guys behind it would have made things any better.

Now, on to this blog's official PowerPoint™ About War Planning:

1) The best time to invade Iraq is early spring. Summer and winter are sandstorm season.

2) Early autumn would work almost as well, probably, but in 2002/2003 it was less feasible politically, and certainly less feasible militarily, after Afghanistan.

3) The Bush administration was determined to invade Iraq. The best guess as to when this was decided is "1999 or 2000, shortly after Bush was anointed nominee by the party Fathers." The best time politically to've penciled that in for is "March, 2003", because that A) gave the first two years for them to get their ducks in a row; B) finessed any charge of Wagging the Dog, which had been used on Bill Clinton during the previous election (that is, 1998); C) gave a considerable cushion to the Six Months Tops required to secure the place, just in case, while bringing The Boys home in time for that Million Dollar Parade down Pennsylvania Avenue at the start of landslide season.

Tell me that you know no one in the Bush administration could possibly have been that devious. Tell me they wouldn't have sent Americans into harm's way for temporal political gain.

Is there is some other explanation for why we rushed into Iraq we way we did (with, I remind you, one-third the force needed, unarmored Humvees, and no use of Turkish territory)? Because our option on Ahmed Chalabi was gonna run out in December? Because State and Defense had surveillance photos of that ICBM complex? Once again, despite everyone's best efforts, the cashiering of Eric Shinseki, and the reports of Hans Blix, were public knowledge even in this country.

As I think back to the crucible of 2003, two remarks made by Arab friends stand out particularly. One was from a Lebanese Shiite who supported the war, but on the condition that America was resolute enough to finish what it was starting. “If Rome is strong, the provinces are ready,” my friend said.

"There's $36.50 on the meter, Mac. You want I should wait?"

America’s military power, awesome as it was, turned out to be insufficient to impose a settlement in Iraq; and in a grinding war of occupation, all our might could not turn on the electricity in Baghdad or frighten Sunnis and Shiites into cooperating with each other.

Yeah, it's just totes unfair when an awesome military isn't enough. But how could we know? It's not like we remembered Korea, or Vietnam, or Lebanon, or Detroit….

The United States didn’t have the stomach for a protracted war that President George W. Bush couldn’t explain and the public didn’t understand.

Yeah, it's the fucking public's fault it fell for it. Unlike The Media, which did understand, but just understood wrong.

The United States did not have sufficient manpower required by its own operating manuals. It would have taken five years to raise that level through voluntary enlistment. The American public was gung-ho for the war, a situation which would have imploded immediately had we instituted a draft; why, when Charlie Rangel introduced a bill to do so all fucking hell broke loose.

Under the circumstances it was up to the President to proceed wisely. Wow, talk about Irony having nine lives, huh?

Another lesson is the importance of dignity in the Arab world. Most Iraqis despised Saddam because, in addition to torturing their sons and daughters, he had taken their dignity. But many came to loathe America, as well, because for all our talk of democracy, we damaged their sense of honor and independence. As the Arab world proves over and over, from Palestine to Benghazi, people who are penniless in terms of material possessions would rather die than lose their sense of honor to outsiders.

Jesus F. Buckley, maybe you should cut down on the reality teevee, Dave.

This feeling of knowing everything, even--maybe especially--when we've fucked everything beyond recognition, do you imagine that could have played a role? We had the Arab Psyche all sussed from inside the Beltway in 2003, too.

A final lesson is the benefit of persistence. Bush made a disastrous mistake invading Iraq in 2003. But having busted up the country, he tried his best to clean up the mess. By checking the spiraling sectarian killing, the surge of U.S. troops led by Bush and Gen. David Petraeus saved thousands of Iraqi lives. It’s one thing Americans did right in this painful story.

You'll forgive me, Dave, for questioning my betters; I know I don't have the expert's credentials on Iraq, since I wasn't wrong about everything. But I'm going to believe this when someone proves it, and not before. To my thinking, in 2007, with nothing left to lose, having taken a Cakewalk and turned it into a Nightmare Hellscape, having suffered an historic defeat in the midterm elections (though, luckily for him, to the Democrats), George W. Bush, probably facing considerable pressure from his party, yielded to reality and the best advice of his military advisors, put the guy who wrote the manual in charge of insurgent warfare, and pretty much let all Iraq know we were quit of the place as soon as we could get out, and we weren't gonna be raining death on any more cities in the interim. I know I'm a bastard for suggesting it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of American dollars--not as many as Jerry Bremer misplaced, but still--found their way to the right leaders. I suspect we started protecting Sunni towns and neighborhoods that we'd benignly neglected to that point. And we may've done a little fiddling, here or there, to keep the death toll out of the papers. I know, it's a shocking thing to think about Uncle Sam, but I've said it. The "surge" didn't bring our troop levels up to original invasion numbers, and most of our Willing partners had already turned French*. But, miraculously, "surging" had saved the day. After, you know, longer than it took us to win WWII.

"Surging" also brought our combat numbers up to where we could still defend ourselves, by basically keeping every able-bodied man and woman in country forever. I think one thing you can say the American public eventually figured out is that enlistment meant permanent deployment. So it caught up with the Ezras and the Joshes, and the Jonahs, in other words.


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* I'm not given to nostalgia, but Anniversaries and all: remember when we made it known that when the French pretended to see the light and join in on our glorious victory we weren't gonna let 'em?

The View From Centrist Command

Andrew Bacevich, "The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq marks the end of American supremacy". December 16

SO the wingnuts are growing concerned they may sound too detached from reality to win a national election. This is the principle difference between a wingnut and a centrist.

In fact, it may damn near be the only difference.

In American history, every now and then we get a definitive ending. The crash of October 1929 ended the Roaring Twenties;

Um, well, Professor, it didn't, actually. It may've damped the spirits of people who owned a lot of stock, but the Great Depression didn't begin for another six months or so. I wasn't there, and my people were Midwestern farmers and railroadmen, so they didn't do much if any Roaring, or Flapping, or Stock Speculating. Anyway, my point is that if you wanna talk American historicity, not history, let's call it that.

VJ Day ended World War II. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq this month, while less dramatic, also marks the passing of an era.

Unfortunately, not the Era of Unwarranted Hubris. Nor the Era of Extraordinary Stupidity, nor Resistance to Brick-Wall Reality, nor of Imaginary Military Supremacy.

Launched in 2003 amid assurances of a rapid victory, the war is ending nearly nine years later with the United States settling for considerably less. Undertaken to demonstrate our supremacy, the war has instead revealed the stark limits of American power. It has laid waste to the post-Cold War era of great expectations once thought to define the future.

Y'know, it's fucking remarkable: while the Cold War was going on there were vast numbers of Americans who understood that our power--our multiple-global-destruction power--was extraordinary limited in application, consisting, mainly, of our ability to destroy human life as we knew it. And that question had been settled as a practical matter--meaning "answered" not "the people on the wrong side of the argument shut up"--in Korea, the first motherfucking time we tried to use our military hegemony and H-bomb supremacy to dictate to the rest of the world, and realized it was no substitute for actual fighting. Yet here we are.

Remember the 1990s, which opened with the Soviet Union in its death throes and the United States riding high? The Cold War reached a peaceful conclusion, and a new historical chapter, seemingly rich with promise, dawned. Led by the United States — its preeminence affirmed in 1991 by Operation Desert Storm — the world was moving from darkness into light.

Historicity, not history; I remember a lot of idiots talking that way. I don't recall it making any of them correct.

The first claim was ideological: The collapse of communism signified the triumph of liberal democracy, a victory deemed definitive and irreversible; viable alternatives for organizing society had ceased to exist.

Okay, it's possible that you and I just differ as to the extent that these claimants can be believed. My answer is "Nada".

Then again, perhaps it's because I paid attention to their commitment to "democracy" from the 50s t0 the 90s.

The second claim was economic: The end of the Cold War had unleashed the forces of globalization; with the unimpeded movement of goods, capital, ideas and people, previously unimaginable opportunities for wealth creation beckoned.

Yes. Yes it did. For them.

This is the thing that kills me about American right-wing corporatism masquerading as economic "freedom": when, exactly, did it triumph over the Marxist critique? Because a corrupt authoritarian regime begun in its name collapsed in a heap of paranoia and militarism, suddenly the moral pre-eminence of those who control the means of production was established for all time?

Y'know, Soviet military spending bankrupted the largest nation on earth. And instead of this being seen as a cautionary tale about our own out-of-control militarism, it somehow became proof positive of the inherent superiority of capitalism, the guarantee that our brand of political perfection was the One True Path, and, somehow, that John Paul II really was infallible.

Did we use that Cosmic Demonstration of our own superiority to, I dunno, end poverty, provide for basic medical care, replace fossil fuels, work for international brotherhood? No. Just in case you weren't paying attention. We used it to scream bloody murder about a Peace Dividend.

The third claim was military: Advanced information technology was revolutionizing warfare; armed forces able to exploit that revolution would gain unprecedented effectiveness.

Of course the interesting thing about that--aside from the fact that it merely recapitulates the "Whoever gets the A-bomb/H-bomb/atomic-powered airplane/controls Indochina/lands on the Moon" routine--is that it didn't prevent us from continuing to spend outrageous sums on Old Technology.

History had rendered a verdict: The future belonged to America and to those who embraced the American way.

And History, as we all know, is written by the most objective observer available.

For anyone unwilling to accept that verdict, there was U.S. military power. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” journalist Thomas Friedman wrote in 1999. “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Y'know, actually, that was for all those willing to accept the verdict. It's what they really meant, in fact.

Then came 9/11, which left the almighty superpower looking less like history’s architect than its victim. From the outset, President George W. Bush’s response to this affront sought not simply to avert further attacks on the American homeland, but to quash suspicions that history might not be tilting in America’s direction after all.

Isn't it curious how America is History's Annointed and The Country That Can't Face the Truth?

As measured by the number of U.S. troops killed, maimed or otherwise scarred, the Iraq war ranks as a comparatively modest affair. Even taking into account the far larger number of civilians killed,

First I've heard of it…

injured or displaced, Iraq trails well behind the really big wars of the modern era. Not casualties but consequences define the significance of this lamentable episode. There it ranks ahead of Korea and Vietnam — neither marking a decisive historical turn — and even alongside World War II.

Fer cryin' out loud: Korea should have marked that historical turn. Vietnam did, but the Military-Industrial Complex, as the old saying goes, didn't know it was dead, and forgot to fall down. Instead it bankrolled a forty-year effort aimed at obfuscating the history of those wars, and re-militarizing American sentiment. I don't know how committed the Defense establishment is to advanced information technology, but I do know that when the chips are down and they need a Jessica Lynch or Pat Tillman, pronto, it's Old Fashioned Lying gets the call.

The beliefs to which the end of the Cold War gave rise — liberal democracy triumphant, globalization as the next big thing and American dominion affirmed by a new way of war — have all come to rest in that unmarked grave reserved for failed ideas. Those who promoted and persisted in the Iraq war wielded the shovel that helped dig the hole. This defines their legacy.

It'd be nice if it took the shovel out of their hands, too. No such luck.

Remembering 9/12

The Washington Post editorial board, "Don't underestimate what America has achieved since 9/11". 9-9

THANKS are what I guess are in order to ‪ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©‬ for the above link, and certainly to Suffern AC for the capsule description: "the most important thing to do this day was to shield the elite from criticism."

I don't remember who said that Sentimentality was other people's sentiments, and it was either Doctor Swift or Doctor Johnson who said "Obsequies are always mixed with infusion of poppy." Or it was someone else. I'd look it up, but my quote collection is on Hypercard, and I'm not gonna go plug in the graphite iMac, and find a keyboard, just so I can open it. Not until Apple apologizes.

Anyway, maybe it's just me, but if you want to remember, really remember, the Fallen of that day then you watch a documentary, you look at something that happened in between the planes flying into the Towers and the subsequent shocking collapse that much of the mythology is based on; you share a moment or two in that polarscape of ash with people unable to fully comprehend the scope of what had happened, and no clue about how much bigger it would become, very, very soon. The people--fire, police, civilian--who went, as the popular parlance has it, Up, not Down that day, weren't doing so for America, or "America". They were doing it for their fellow human beings. What it had to do with turning the playing field at Cowboys Stadium into a temporary prop flag I do not know. The impulse to easy patriotic display seems all but irresistible to the profit-driven.

I mean, I don't really care what Chris Berman and Tom Jackson think about 9/11. I care about who won the late games. I'm sure their expressions were heartfelt, but I'm not sure they should bring their show to a halt every time an anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Pearl Harbor, the Normandy Invasion, Washington's Farewell, the Kennedy Assassination, Marbury v. Madison, or the Gadsden Purchase is divisible by five. The one thing I would like to ask is: can we please get rid of Tom Brokaw before the next one? If the humanitarians among us wish Mr. Brokaw a long and happy life, then let's just agree not to celebrate 9/11 again until it's over.

For fuck's sake, the man is a walking Whitman's Sampler of What's Fucked Up About the Culture. At the time of the 9/11 attacks he was making maybe $15 mil a year for reading a teleprompter--which he can't even do in English--and doing vanity reports, and he wants credit for coming in to work early that day. And he had to come into work early because the Today Show hosts--Catie and Matt--had zero gravitas about them, or just the right amount for a program NBC wanted to be gravitas-free. And once he got there he announced we were at War. or, as he put it, "Wah-ah." Imagine Cronkite or Huntley-Brinkley doing that at the height of the Cawd Wah-ah a half-hour after an ammo dump blew up.

But they were reporters, and had a serious attitude about the reach of television; Brokaw is a ratings monkey. Brokaw and Peter Jennings were the first two Q-ratings anchors. Both rose after the News was taken over by Entertainment, both climbed the ladder at networks which were furiously paddling Right in an effort to catch the Silent Majority slipstream and rise to ratings semi-respectability, and both arrived at the top just in time to curl up in Ronald Reagan's grandfatherly lap. Jennings actually became a journalist after that. Brokaw became a corporation.

Just get him off the fucking air. He can write all the stupid pandering books he wants, just so someone else reads the audio version. But, fuck, the man has nothing in his head corresponding to an original thought. His is the wisdom of the man who created the fourth-largest regional grommet manufacturer starting with only the Mom & Pop grommet sweatshop his parents left him.

Fred Hiatt the WaPo Editorialistes:

ON THE 10TH anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from “We will be hit again” to “Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction.”

What channel was that on?

The feeling is understandable but incorrect, and it would be dangerous if it took hold. Yes, the nation made big mistakes over the past decade. When has America ever geared up without excess and error? But the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon alerted Americans to genuine dangers that only a relative few had noticed. We have lived safely for the decade since not because we misread those dangers but because we responded to them in a manner in which, on balance, Americans can take pride.

Yeah, about $500 billion each to make sure Qusay and Uday, or Qumoy and Mtsu, didn't succeed their father as Unfriendly President with a Bunch of Oil and a Third-World Sandhole, and another $500 billion to kill bin-Laden. I guess we can take pride in the fact that we're too ethical to've just offered $100 mil to the first person to bring us bin-Laden's head. We could have had the motherfucker in a week, except, of course, that it took that long to locate George W. Bush. Just because a straightforward approach to a criminal act probably would have netted us something closer to justice, in much less time, and at an exponentially lesser cost in innocent lives is no reason to be too hard on ourselves now. Just because we ignored the Geneva Conventions so we could slake our bloodlust, but keep our hands clean, is not excuse to run around contemplating our navels. Just because al-Qaeda turned out to be one guy with a bunch of oil residual money, a Commodore 64, and a porn stash doesn't mean it wasn't SPECTRE, once, and couldn't be again. Hey, we heard credible threats about the Tenth Anniversary! Didn't we?

Hey, You Can't Argue With A Successful Track Record

Lindsey Graham, Joseph I. Lieberman, and John McCain, "Only Decisive Force Can Prevail in Afghanistan". September 13

JUST for fun, Reader, imagine for a moment this piece authored, or "authored", by three responsible thinkers pondering the continuing US military effort in Afghanistan, rather than three of the biggest mirror-gazers in the United States Senate (consider! what prodigies of ego-wanking it would take to rank in the Top Five among reality-show contestants! There are 100 U.S. Senators!). If it helps any, go ahead and imagine the results published somewhere other than The Op-Ed Section Where Peggy Noonan Is the Voice of Sanity.

What, exactly, would falsify the idea that only decisive force can prevail in Iraq? (And we're trying to be generous, here, in overlooking the implications of that pleonasm in the title, for the nonce, anyway. As we shall see, self-fulfilling prophecy will hover around the piece like mosquitoes in swampland, and going in without DEET is just a moment's showing off we'll regret even before the actual slapping frenzy takes hold.) Would you anticipate some consideration of what "Prevail" means? Or the actual consequences of "Not Prevailing?" Perhaps a broad suggestion of what "Decisive Force" would mean in terms of numbers, or "Prevail" in terms of months or years? If so, then, you have pretty much defined what's missing in the actual exercise.

Growing numbers of Americans are starting to doubt whether we should have troops in Afghanistan and whether the war there is even winnable.

Translation: George Eff Will said so in a WaPo column.

We are confident that not only is it winnable, but that we have no choice. We must prevail in Afghanistan.

"We're confident that we have no choice."

We went to war there because the 9/11 attacks were a direct consequence of the safe haven given to al Qaeda in that country under the Taliban.

Okay, look, I realize that Nine 'Leven is for you what watching A Hard Day's Night or thinking about Westlake Drive-In and the back seat of my Dodge Valiant is for me. But, c'mon. My memories may be a little rosy after forty years, but yours ought to be a little clearer. We went to war in Afghanistan because the Paleolithic religious nuts who'd seized power in their country refused to turn over Osama bin-Laden fast enough to suit the Paleolithic religious nuts who'd seized power in ours. That they certainly did not have the power to have captured and handed them over, even if they had had the will to do so, may be regarded as immaterial, since we knew they couldn't and would have been pissed at the missed opportunity to bomb the shit out of someone. "The Taliban" enters into the equation in the same sense that "indiscriminately taking revenge on brown people, or Muslims of whatever stripe" does; they were in our way, and bloodlust isn't slaked by nuance, Charlie. It might be noted here, however inconveniently, that we didn't exactly catch bin-Laden, either, that the guy who planned the thing was in Kuwait, the guy who financed most of it in Dubai, and most of the participants were Saudis. Also, the guy who ignored the "Bin-Laden Determined To Strike US" memo was in Texas. We didn't drop any bombs on any of them, though doing so might have led to some immediate improvements. The whole thing could have unfolded in the United States of America, for that matter, and much of it did, under the lazy eye of the G-Men.

We remain at war because a resurgent Taliban, still allied with al Qaeda, is trying to restore its brutal regime and re-establish that country as a terrorist safe haven.

We're fighting an insurgency we created by invading, failing our mission--in part because we reduced American forces at a critical moment so we could prepare for failing in Iraq, which had nothing to do with it--then sticking around forever trying to save face. We call it the "Taliban" for the same reason Velveeta calls its product "Cheese"; because we may not always know what sells, but we sure as hell know what doesn't. We're still there because the successor to the Mastermind of Total Fuck Ups thought demonstrating militancy in Afghanistan would show voters his anti-Iraq war rhetoric wasn't due to Incipient Pacifist Disease, or, worse, Rationality.

It remains a clear, vital national interest of the United States to prevent this from happening. Yet an increasing number of commentators, including some of the very same individuals who opposed the surge in Iraq and called for withdrawal there, now declare Afghanistan essentially unwinnable. Had their view prevailed with respect to Iraq in 2006 and 2007, the consequences of our failure there would have been catastrophic.

There are things we know (or agree to pretend we do), and there are things we imagine, (or prefer to pretend we do). It is a little-recognized fact, apparently, that there are actual resources available to English speakers which can differentiate between them. For example: we don't know that beginning a staged withdrawal from Iraq in 2006 or 2007 would have had any consequences whatsoever. And we never will know that, because we didn't do so. What we do know is that going there in the first place was a disaster, that it was conducted under false pretenses and with a negligence beyond criminal, that our failure to define our mission or conduct ourselves sensibly engendered an insurrection there, too, and that all of that was vehemently supported every step of the way by Senators Graham, Lieberman, and McCain. We do not know the extent to which our "success" is a product of a successful PR campaign, aided by the fact that the public sickened of the thing sometime around the Third Set of New Lyin' Justifications and tuned out, how much, if any, of the reduction of violence is due to a "new" military paradigm, how much due to paying off Sunni insurgents, how much due to the Iraqi's realization that our time there is short, and how much 100% bullshit. Nor do we have any idea what will happen once we're gone, in a hundred years or so, by some estimates. Though this would not prevent "some" commentators, of roughly my height and shoe size, from offering dollars to doughnuts the results will be less than optimal. But only if the three of you agree to choke on the doughnuts if you win.

Similarly, the ramifications of an American defeat in Afghanistan would not only be a devastating setback for our nation in what is now the central front in the global war on terror, but would inevitably further destabilize neighboring, nuclear Pakistan. Those who advocate such a course were wrong about Iraq, and they are wrong about Afghanistan.

See comment above. Further, those who supported a headlong bull rush into the Graveyard of Imperial Armies and now express concern about unintended effects on "neighboring, nuclear Pakistan" are lying sacks of shit.

The growing calls for withdrawal reflect, more than anything, our failure to show progress in the war. After eight years of fighting, the American people see rising casualties and no sign that the tide is turning in our direction.

Their doubts are natural and understandable, and we must respond to them directly and clearly. Our problems in Afghanistan are not because the Taliban are invincible or popular. They are neither. Rather, our problems result from what was, for years, a mismanaged and underresourced war.

In other words, the problem in Afghanistan is not the lack of military progress in defeating the Poorest Most Godforsaken Nation on Earth and its Non-Existent Military; the problem is that we went about it precisely the way that Senators Graham, Lieberman, and McCain voted to. Repeatedly.

Our mistakes are infuriating, but they are also reversible.

That's what we tried to tell Connecticut, and look how that worked out.

We have an exceptional new commander on the ground, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who has begun a top-to-bottom overhaul of all aspects of our war policy and put forward a dramatically new civil-military strategy that clearly identifies failed policies and prioritizes the proven principles of counterinsurgency, including protecting civilians, creating legitimate and effective governance, and boosting economic development. With Gen. McChrystal, together with a new ambassador and a new deputy commander, we believe we now have the team on the ground that can win this war.

And this time, we mean it.

However, we need more than the right team and the right strategy. This team must also have the resources it needs to succeed—including a significant increase in U.S. forces.

Okay, fun's fun, but where th' fuck are they supposed to come from this time? Can we retrieve some of the money all three of you voted repeatedly to toss down the shit hole for a "Missile Defense System"? Maybe a feasibility study on the prospects of finding somebody willing to be lowered down there? Y'all voted repeatedly to stop redeployment of non-essential troops from Iraq. You've got access to the CBO, the Pentagon, and Senator McCain is the greatest military mind of his generation. How many troops, how much will that cost, and when do we win? And where does the money come from? Might you hazard a wild fucking guess?

More troops will not guarantee success in Afghanistan, but a failure to send them is a guarantee of failure.

It's funny, but I could have sworn you were the guys just telling me it was "decisive".

We recognize that a decision to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan will be politically difficult here at home. Some will say we can't afford it. Others will warn the president of "quagmire" and urge him to send either no new forces, or fewer than Gen. McChrystal recommends—perhaps with the promise of "re-evaluating" further deployments later on.

It is precisely this middle path—which the previous administration pursued for too long in Iraq—that is a recipe for quagmire and collapse of political support for the war at home. Mr. Obama was right when he said last year that "You don't muddle through the central front on terror . . . You don't muddle through stamping out the Taliban."

And see however many times we've noted above that it was followed with your support, even if Smoochy McCain did grouse about it not going as well as if he were Commander-in-Chief, before he had to fellate Bush in public.

As for the "middle ground", if I may prevail upon you gentlemen to wait until my head stops revolving: Christ on a cracker, the full-on Death from the Skies crusades were of 2001-2005 vintage. It wasn't until the President was safely back in office that he fired Rumsfeld and slowly began fighting an insurgency like an insurgency. Gearing up to fight the Iraq war properly would have taken years, and it would have required a draft. Meaning Bush wouldn't have been around in 2005 with the luxury to change his mind. If we can just conjure up the "decisive force" now, why didn't any of you geniuses insist on doing so back then? As in, when it might have made a difference.

We have reached a seminal moment in our struggle against violent Islamist extremism, and we must commit the "decisive force" that Gen. McChrystal tells us carries the least risk of failure.

And this time, we mean it.

In the interim, the president and his allies—and we count ourselves among them on this issue—must invest significantly greater effort to explain why, as the president recently put it, Afghanistan is a "war of necessity."

Sheesh, somebody just gave you 1000 words of prime Op-Ed real estate. * Could you have made a start here?

Additional U.S. resources must be accompanied by significant and meaningful benchmarks that hold the government of Afghanistan and our own government accountable. We must ensure that Afghan leaders are doing their part to combat the corruption and insecurity that undermine the counterinsurgency effort.

And this time…nah, we don't mean that this time, either. Had ay goin' though, didn't we?


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* albeit in Bizarro World

Oh, You Mean "We" As In "Th' Fuck Are 'We' Doing In Afghanistan, Again?"

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Spengler was an optimist.

Nicholas Schmidle, "After Mehsud: The rest of the Pakistani Taliban won't be such easy targets". August 7

EIGHT-HUNDRED words, once a week, and Douthat earns 1/50 of his salary reviewing a popcorn muncher and the oeuvre of Judd Apatow. Have they started looking for his replacement yet?

Here's a tricky moral quandary for ya: Why do our self-appointed public moralists get to self-appoint which issues are moral questions and which aren't? It's like making the Hall as a .300 hitter because you were allowed to require every pitch be a fastball, belt-high and outside. (Douthat, if memory serves, wrote a piece after the murder of Dr. George Tiller in which he took about six paragraphs before interrupting his anti-abortion screed to brush aside the actual murder as a "terrorist act". Retribution for some sins is best left to the terrestrial courts. How convenient for you.)

Oh, and, you want the moral lesson of a Judd Apatow flicker? You walked right past it. It came when the girl in the window told you it would be 10 bucks to get in.

Okay, so it's an academic complaint; I don't really care if Ross Douthat shows any moral, or intellectual, consistency. And what would it matter if he did? Still, I couldn't help thinking, when I saw the Times puff graphic, what it would be like to live in that Bizarro World where a Monday Douthat addressed, say, the weekend celebrations after the CIA, and our freedom-and-nuclear-technology-loving pals the Pakistanis, managed to robokill yet another Top Terror Official (sheesh, and I thought Indianapolis Public Schools administration was top heavy. SPECTRE board meetings must need satellite communications just to reach the other end of the table.), along with his wife, his father-in-law, and whomever else was in the area, and orphaning his four daughters.

About a month ago I saw a Military History Channel piece about the mission that brought down Yamamoto's plane. It's one of the most remarkable missions of the Second World War, crossing 400 miles of ocean at wave-top height, navigating with a pencil, to arrive at the precise moment when the attack was advantageous. And the men who were interviewed, some forty-five to fifty years after, from the looks of things, had clearly dealt with the question of whether the assassination of one man was a legitimate act of war. They were personally in the clear; they were airmen following orders, and the order had come from the President. The man they hunted and killed was the author of the attack which had killed thousands of their fellows, and plunged them into war, a plan which, so far as they knew, had included an absence of warning. Sure, they'd probably been asked about it several thousands times by then, because we used to raise such questions, and it was a ticket home for those involved, because we were desperate our code-breaking ability not leak out, so those men knew other other fliers died in their places. Still, they'd internalized the argument; such men are rarely filled with false bravado or dismissive of violent death, not like so many guys in the typing pool back home.

And today? My title refers to Slate's original headline; in all the excitement of the opening of Incessant State Fair Train Whistle Blowing, Fourteen Hours Per Day, Now For Seventeen Days! season I forgot it was unlikely "We Got Him" would still announce the thing come Monday morning. "We" got "Him", him who not one American in a thousand could have identified last Thursday, who only one in four would have gotten in a multiple choice exam. The "him" who takes his place in a long line of Second-in-Commands of the Month, a list which, by the way, requires us to believe everything the government, and the CIA, chooses to hand us. Not to mention immediately forgetting the results:

So, does Mehsud's death mean the end of the Pakistani Taliban? Not by a long shot. The Taliban are a regenerative militia; historically, the death of one Taliban member has only spurred others to avenge the fallen one's death. Several commanders are waiting to take over from Mehsud, including Qari Hussein, Mehsud's ruthless deputy, who is thought to be most responsible for training suicide bombers. Whether Hussein or another lieutenant takes over, they'll be hoping to strike back....

But in the war against al-Qaida, where symbols, DVDs, and audiotapes carry so much weight, Mehsud's death is a huge victory for both the United States and Pakistan. I imagine his elimination might be comparable to that of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—even though al-Qaida in Iraq continued after Zarqawi, it was never the same. Without their near mythical leader (whose stature had grown as a result of all the assassination attempts he had dodged), the Pakistani Taliban may find themselves in a similar, declining trajectory.

Note, by the way, how quickly, in death, Mehsud became a card-carrying al-Qaeda, much in the way, oh, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi became one by crossing the border into Iraq. Juan Cole doesn't quite agree that al-Zarqawi's death had some earth-shaking effect on the Iraqi insurgency (Motto: Now With More Insurgence!), and he points out, into the bargain, just how much good the Sharon government bought itself with its program of political assassination in Lebanon.

And, look, I don't really want Ross Douthat injuring that big Hahvahd brain of his thinking outside his own skin. And I'm not issuing one of his half-sentence denials of personal responsibility. Mehsud was a bad man, but he was our problem only because we followed George W. Bush into a quagmire, cheered on by the sort of people who imagine Bill Clinton securing the release of two jailed American journalists is a Civilization-threatening act of insufficient aggression. Schmidle has to pronounce him guilty of killing US personnel in Afghanistan just to keep up our fifty-year tradition of not knowing who it is we're fighting, and thus avoiding altogether the little matter of why we were in range in the first place. The question isn't whether he deseved killin'; the question is why we continue the shadow dance which says this can possibly mean anything at all. Why are we still listening to David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, and Bob Woodward discuss all this? Why are they still theologically convinced--at least in public--that the white upperclass in the United States can still figure out what's Right, Wrong, or Crosswise, let alone impose that successfully elsewhere?

Okay, we're in Afghanistan because it's difficult to imagine an American administration, c. post-WWII, which would have had the political courage not to invade immediately, or to try anything much different than Bush's "turn over everyone on our list by sundown or we blow you into remaining in the Stone Age." More of us are there now because Barack Obama knew he couldn't become President without supporting at least one of our two current wars, and being noncommittal, at least, on greenlighting more. I know how we got there. What I can't figure out is how we got to the point where we no longer seem to care that we should know better by now.

Catching Fugitives By Banging A Drum

Barack Obama, "My Plan For Iraq". July 14

I'LL take "They Come In Threes" for two-hundred, Alex.

A: Wagons, Airports, Drains.

Things that are circled? What are things that are circled?

You're never too old to learn. I just learned that. And, last week, I learned that if George McGovern had just pledged to reinstate Jim Crow and clarify that he was only bringing our boys home from Vietnam so he could send them to Cuba, or the Fulda Gap, he'd have been elected. Too bad such political wisdom wasn't available in them days, because, lemme tell ya, defeating a second Nixon term was a lot more urgent than defeating a first McCain one, because Nixon was a consummate operator, and Nixon had room to operate.

McCain won't, because we don't. This would be the real objection to Senator Obama's Op-Ed piece, which, otherwise, mostly restates his policy positions while adding details (new, to me, at least) about two brigades going directly to Afghanistan ("redeployment", in the accepted euphemism for " incremental escalation"), a "residual" force in Iraq, amorphous, of unknown permanence, no better tasked than what we have now, as well as the Senator's belief--or, at least, his hope that you believe--that there is some entity called "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" which may be interchangeably identified as "al-Qaeda", and so proven, by the Law of Repeated Typography, to be an arm of SPECTRE.

That last is actually not new to me; this is the man whose website promised he'd "finish the job" of eliminating al-Qaeda, and who, famously, informed Senator McCain that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before we got there, leaving out the part about how there wasn't one afterwards, either, until we started calling it such. And all of this is in the service of the sort of Lugar-Nunn "realist" foreign policy he's already expressed his admiration for, it having been as wildly successful over the past few decades as Ronald Reagan was. Especially if you're an oil company, a military contractor, or Coca-Cola™.

(My senior Senator--and I do mean senior; he could play the part of Maverick's father in The John McCain Story--is a telling choice as Republican My Administration Would Most Like To Work With. He's a Leftover Nixonian Détente Republican, which means he was willing to make political hay demonizing the Commies, but stopped short of proposing to blow the globe to pieces on the grounds this might prove excessive in case there was anything resembling hindsight. He then voted for every Reagan neo-hardliner remilitarization package that came across his desk, while crafting his persona as a bi-partisan foreign policy expert, based on the fact that he was slightly to the right of Sam Nunn, but slightly to the left of Curtis LeMay. After Reagan defeated Communism he became so despondent he actually took the chairmanship of the Agricultural Committee for a while, but the plastic acclaim he and Nunn received for finding some way to produce a chill from the lukewarm puddle left over from the Cold War returned him to prominence. And the top Foreign Relations chair.

(Now, don't get me wrong; loose nukes in Russia are a serious issue, but not so all-consuming as to excuse ignoring our own. I just happen to be a Glass Is Half-Cracked sort of guy, and I think heaping accolades on United States Senators for doing what any sensible seventh-grader who aspires to reach the eighth would do sets the bar too low, especially when they are, in the event, actually running around checking the upholstery for smoldering cigarettes at the end of a particularly long and raucous drunken party they themselves helped plan.)

So, then. Where are we, again? We've acknowledged a fracturing of the manpower equation, and the waste of $1 trillion in a criminally misguided effort in Iraq. As a result we now propose to mostly leave, excepting an unspecified body of troops whose mission will be to help eliminate enemies of a Shi'a government, thereby, assuming all goes perfectly well (heard that one before?), assuring that responsibility for the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of the United States will not go entirely to the people who put us there for Six Months Tops. And you wanna talk about no exit strategy?

And...we pass the Savings on to You! assuming You are part of that imaginary ruling coalition of Americans who can't bear the thought of quitting a disaster cold turkey. It's on to Afghanistan, where we can come to grips, now that we understand the importance of Strategic Terminology Redeployment, with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, despite the fact that they're actually in Pakistan, which turns out to be No Biggie, because, at least as I recall, Musharraf's response to the Future President's suggestion of the Right of Hot Pursuit was, "Okey-dokey. Mint tea?"

This, again, is why a period of quadrennial political spasm would, at the very least, be no worse off for honest discussion of the issues, beyond the issues of flag veneration and platitude burnishing, I mean. We invaded Afghanistan because the religious cutthroats who ran the place in '01 wouldn't turn over bin-Laden, along with their sovereignty, by the deadline demanded by George W. Bush, which was, if I recall correctly, "Sundown". That they were a bunch of religious cutthroats did not, in fact, make this approach any more sensible. In fact, seeing the sort of experience we have in this country with people who'd rather someone die, preferably some one else, than watch their pet version of Bronze-Age Nostradamus be insulted, this country should have been the first to recognize that a suitable time frame plus a large wad of tax-free currency was the best way to solve the problem. (I do realize that the Republican party was in a particular quandry here, since there was a sizable portion of its base which was, as yet, totally unaware that it pandered to religious nutjobs in their own country, and would remain so until Schiavo.) Regardless of whether we actually intended to capture bin-Laden, a political solution was certainly an impossibility, as it was too insufficient in brand-building, not to mention the fact that Iraq was already pencilled in for Spring '03, and how would it look if we invaded it while we were in Afghanistan bargaining over pipeline naming rights? And the Afghan war has been so wildly successful that today, seven years later, no one asks why we're still there, and "redeploying" a few thousand more troops there (think it'll stop there? show of hands?) is what distinguishes the anti-war candidate from the thrill-kill war hawk.

The next President of the United States has no choice, no matter what increasingly meaningless initial comes after his name; we have no more manpower to conduct these endless face-saving exercises. We have no "options" in Afghanistan, any more than we have a "surge" which is "working" in Iraq that has changed that equation. We jumped off the bridge, with George W. Bush in command, and the best we can hope for now is that we only get wet.

Shut Up

David Brooks, "The Bush Paradox." June 24

YES, yes, yes; everything bad, everything false, phony, or self-aggrandizingly stupid in modern American culture--we're speaking of its innovations, here, of course, and not the grinding stupidity, acquisitiveness, and brute violence the whole race is heir to--traces directly to Barbara Walters or Gene Roddenberry. However, this should not be confused with their perfection. which is the work of Ronald Wilson "Dutch" Reagan, or, more precisely, of Ronald Reagan Inc., and its hydra-headed subsidiaries, including the telecommunications industry, the Republican party, and David Brooks.

Brooks' point here--I am not, nor could I make this up--is that the very same "qualities" of George W. Bush (which, we may note, people such as Brooks used to tell us were misapprehensions, or the phantasms of Bush-derranged minds) which led to our failure in Iraq (which people such as Brooks used to tell us was an illusion, or the phantasms of Bush-derranged minds) is what led him to make the "courageous and astute" decision--against all advice to the contrary! mind you--to go with The Surge, which has now proven so wildly successful. History is cyclical! One day you're down, the next you're a VH-1 star! Shut up and finish your umbles, war critics!

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility.

I read this thing without even bothering to consider its rebuttal, which, to be sure, is simply enough as to be effortless: Basra. Mosul. Which demonstrated just who's who and what's what, in case anyone, say a leading Presidential contender, believed otherwise. The popular notion in the United States, a country not known for the reasoned, well-informed military punditry, that the addition of 20,000 troops plus a new doctrinal approach has fundamentally changed anything in what's left of Iraq is as misguided as all earlier declarations of Victory, or its slightly-retarded cousin, Victory in Six Months Time. We've thrown in with the Sunni, where expedient, something the earlier, "humbly deferring" Bush (really, it's a quote) refused to do; we are now in control of not more than half of Iraq's provinces. And it's not even a devil's bargain. There's no corresponding Sunni support for Iraq's Shi'a government, or "government", and violence in Diyala, e.g., may, or unquestionably is, simply being delayed so Bush can ride back to his "ranch" with his, and Brooks', illusions intact, at least in so far as public consumption is concerned.

Of course the government could just be lying its ass off to make a bad situation look better, or what we might describe with regard to the Bush administration as The Default Setting.

Even so, it's not exactly pretty, and insisting that Sunshine, Lollypops, and Rainbows are up, respectively, 23, 84, and 61% is a touch, let's say, macabre. Juan Cole on the new "record low" body count:

But over 500 a month dead in political violence is appalling enough. The Srebenica massacre in 1995 killed 8,000. At the average rate of death in Iraq this winter and spring, a similar massacre will have been racked up in 2008. In the Northern Ireland troubles over 30 years, about 3,000 people died, and it was widely considered a bad situation. That death toll is still being achieved every 6 months in Iraq according to the official May statistics.

So let us repeat for those who don't seem to have been listening, including Times columnists who said, circa December 2005, that maybe they needed to have a bit of a rethink on this whole Iraq Success Story, then went silent until they judged it safe to pop back up and say Told Ya!: you were wrong, so astonishingly wrong about Iraq that it is beyond question that your assumptions, your predictions, your certitudes and your guarantees had nothing whatsoever to do with Reality, and everything to do with the blind faith that the tiniest involuntary muscle twitch of the American right was not just correct, not just philosophically justified, but Divinely inspired. You were not proved wrong about Iraq in the fall of 2003; you were proven clinically, certifiably, and cynically, to boot, the victim of megalomania profundus. This was not a slow leak, to be patched at leisure. The balloon popped, the bucket had no bottom. You put everything on Black, and you lost. You do not get to come back five fucking years later and say, There! I told you Black was going to come up! and demand your winnings, respect for your (latest) version of events, or that we now accept a share your humiliation. No sireee, as we say in the Land of real Appleby's customers; you're done, long since, and you have no standing at any point to return to the debate, let alone shape it.

Nah, y'know, I wasn't thinking that at all. I was thinking about how flappers and jitterbugs, hepcats and Beats and longhaired freaks could all, at some point, simply fade back into the crowd scene when their moment in the spotlight was over, but the trendy Reaganauts of Brooks' generation have doomed themselves to repeating sophomoric profundities over and over to a diminishing audience, as if Sisyphus had to endure, not just eternal worthless labor, but the humiliation of everyone laughing at him as his rock kept getting smaller and smaller, without his seeming to notice.

Next Week: Smith & Wesson Debate Handgun Violence

What: "How to See This Mission Accomplished".


Where: Times Sunday Opinion back page

Intro:  For the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s declaration of the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq, the Op-Ed page asked nine experts on military affairs to identify a significant challenge facing the American and Iraqi leadership today and to propose one specific step to help overcome that challenge.

The Experts:

L. Paul Bremer III
Anthony Cordesman
Gen. Paul D. Eaton, USA (ret)
Nathaniel Fick, Center for a New American Security
Frederick Kagan
Richard Perle
Danielle Pletka
Kenneth M. Pollack
Anne-Marie Slaughter

Ouch.  Quit It: Slaughter, Huffington Post, March 20:

"Hayden's post and many other commentaries surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion are a microcosm of the problem with our Iraq policy as a whole. The debate is still far too much about who was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion and far too little about how, in Obama's formulation, to be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in."

Getting The Jump On Last Week

Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan, "The Basra Business: What we know and what we don't." Weekly Standard, April 1.

OKAY, so it's nice to see that a barrage of Kagans (look it up; it's the accepted collective noun) now insists on waiting for actual evidence from Iraq before drawing any conclusions, even if the requirement applies only to their detractors.

The legitimate Government of Iraq and its legally-constituted security forces launched a security operation against illegal, foreign-backed, insurgent and criminal militias serving leaders who openly call for the defeat and humiliation of the United States and its allies in Iraq and throughout the region. We can be ambivalent about the political motivations of Maliki and his allies, but we cannot be ambivalent about the outcome of this combat between our open allies and our open enemies.

We honestly admire military historians, the only endangered species to have put itself on the list, and the only one which combines self-awareness of its plight with a fearless continuation of its showy (largely) male public displays. We remain unconvinced of The Surge's effectiveness, or even that it had the potential to succeed, but we think everyone must now admit that if our enemy proves vulnerable to the long-distance adjective this war has found its Curtis LeMay.

Maybe people who still read the Weekly Standard are taken in by this sort of thing, and maybe there are still people who read the Weekly Standard. Our pathetic attempts to marginalize (and criminalize! as though that term has any real meaning before the victors write the history) Muqtada al-Sadr back when we still imagined we were running things were simply brushed aside. That a pair of high-altitude-bombing Kagans now see fit to taunt Sadr for not returning to Iraq would be ironic if it weren't just plain ludicrous, not to mention being yet one more example of just how easy it is to win a war from 6000 miles away.

(How much have taxpayers spent over the past eight years to keep Dick Cheney alive? Shouldn't we demand that when his time comes we get his brain in a jar, so that some future generation might discover whatever serious anomaly makes a man susceptible to this sort of advice?)

The First Twenty-five Names in the Phone Book

Michael Ignatieff, "Getting Iraq Wrong." New York Times Magazine, August 5

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

NAH. That just seems like the decision to get a particularly regrettable tattoo in the throes of a bad romance a couple of seasons back. What seems like a distant dream is Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, or the dewey promise of the United Nations after the most horrific conflict in human history. Strangely enough, their being co-opted by liberals who intended to "spread freedom" to all the countries they hated is still fresh in the mind, even though I wasn't yet born when the process took off.

Having left an academic post at Harvard

Did you say Harvard?

in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle, trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from the sidelines. I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.

Uncounted thousands of deaths, but Professor Ignatieff picked up a homily. So I guess it wasn't all bad.

In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

Well, that's Harvard for ya...you can feel the quality of the nonsense.

I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.

Michael Grant Ignatieff. Born May 12, 1947. Awakened from profound coma, early 21st Century.

The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality. “What is called wisdom in statesmen,” Berlin wrote, referring to figures like Roosevelt and Churchill, “is understanding rather than knowledge — some kind of acquaintance with relevant facts of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits with what; what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know.” Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings.

Y'know, simple mathematics suggests there's a battalion of lesser politicians for whom that description is an even worse fit that it is for Churchill, but I don't know why you'd bother compiling it. I guess Churchill the theoretical construct is a lot more valuable than Churchill, the sainted war leader who was wrong about practically everything else in his political life, and usually at the service of his own imaginings.

As a former denizen of Harvard,

Did you say Harvard?

I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners.

Good Lord. Talk about your ivory towers. It's cab drivers, Doc. That way they can write your column for you. You're not allowed to talk to the bus driver.

The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t.

What're you, climbing back down the academic ladder now, Doc? Let us know when you make it to kindergarten. I understand that's where the real learning takes place. In the meantime, there's something somewhere about learning from history. I'll look it up and get back to ya.

Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.

No. Please. You've done enough already. Do not encourage the search for untried remedies that miraculously solve the disasters we've created listening to your earlier suggestions.

Having taught political science myself,

Really? Where?

I have to say the discipline promises more than it can deliver.

As I recall it, I picked up this little tidbit about twenty minutes into my first Poly Sci 101 lecture. Maybe it's time to take the world out of the hands of the terminally credulous and let the spitball-throwers in the back--the ones who felt that smokin' a doob and layin' a little pipe was at least equally important in the grand scheme of things--take over. They can't do much worse. And then you could, y'know, go find yourself somewhere. Somewhere farther away than Canada.

A sense of reality is not just a sense of the world as it is, but as it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities.

Well, for one thing, yuck, and for another, we continue to learn from the work of great artists while we continue to view them as flawed human beings, a goodly number of whom we would not allow to babysit, let alone start wars. We seek to understand not just the work but how it came into being. There's not a whole lot of time in the Arts for knob-polishing some dead guys in order to turn your present inventory over a little faster. That is left to the political scientists. In politics it is permissible, even encouraged, to say something like, "George Bush is standing up to terrorists," or to compare him with that gold-painted bust of Churchill you admire so. In the Arts one lets out with a "Patricia Cornwall is the new Tolstoy" at peril of one's career. Unless one is happy to remain in public relations or has a Salon column.

To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

We have now roared past the 800 word mark, and we're discussing cavalry tactics. I could swear the title said something about Iraq. Will all of this be on the quiz? Is this going on much longer? Some of us would like to experience a little more of life while we're still able.

Improvisation may not stave off failure.

Do tell.

The game usually ends in tears. Political careers often end badly because politicians live the human situation: making choices among competing goods with only ordinary instincts and fallible information to go by. Of course, better information and factual criteria for decision-making can reduce the margin of uncertainty. Benchmarks for progress in Iraq can help to decide how long America should stay there. But in the end, no one knows — because no one can know — what exactly America can still do to create stability in Iraq.

Nine-hundred and fourteen.

Okay, I apologize. I'd read all the way to the end before I did that, and it was cruel to subject you to such a chunk of--I'm not kidding--the first third. I suspect that you might be treated elsewhere to a couple of pull quotes about Iraq, namely:

[M]any of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

or

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action.

without a full appreciation that the payoff of Dr. Ignatieff's 2500 words, a stunning professorial version of "sure they were right and I was wrong, but I saw one of them compare Bush to Hitler", was preceded by four pages of gibberish, but not one word explaining why he put his Liberal Academic imprimatur on torture in 2004, long after the worst America-hating Leftist could back his knee-jerk opposition with plain evidence. We've suggested before that it was time for a new version of Godwin's law for this, but the difficulty is that anyone playing the You Lefties Made A Lucky Guess card already lost the game four years ago and still doesn't realize someone turned out the lights.

So again, Professor, since you appear to be the last man in the Americas to hear the response: there were plenty of voices cautioning against the rashness and the insane presumptions and the interminal commitment of the Iraq Adventure who did manage to observe the proper rites while addressing their superiors in the Bush administration and its academic enablers. They were ignored, too. And even granting you pardon for your emotional attachment to the pre-post-Sadam Iraqis and its horrific results--and we don't--we have to ask how a political science specialist, a professor of international stature, could, to chose just one example, have slept through 150 years of US-Latin American relations. Or how the editors of the Times Magazine could imagine the rest of us had slept through the last four years.

Now, George, Let's Not Be Too Hasty.

CNN: Senator Voinovich tells Karl Rove Bush legacy "on the line" in Iraq.

SPEAKING on condition of anonymity, top aides of the Ohio Republican have revealed that the frank discussion with the President's top political advisor has emboldened him to take other steps without regard for how long it's been since they might have done some good. "We're going to let the chips fall where they may," Voinovich is reported to have told his staff, and is said to be weighing a warning to Michael Richards that ranting about "niggers" could be detrimental to his career, urging the San Diego Chargers to draft "someone other than Ryan Leaf", and has assigned staffers to find a way to "gently convince" the Elvis Presley estate that he might be abusing prescription drugs and eating improperly. A proposal to recommend that citizens of Johnstown move upstream with all due haste has been tabled for now. "That's more of a Pennsylvania problem," sources said. "Besides, we don't think rushing into something like that serves much of a purpose."

One: Iraq Is a Desert, Whereas Vietnam Is a Jungle. Two: Paul Yingling's Self-Immolation Did Not Involve Gasoline.

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, "A Failure in Generalship." Armed Forces Journal, April 27

VIA Fred Kaplan in Slate we meet up with Colonel Yingling who, in what was likely his last act as a career-path officer (a Lieutenant Colonelcy is where this happens, kids! John Paul Vann was a Lt. Colonel! So was Ollie North!) tells the world that 1) We failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam, either in Vietnam or afterwards; 2) Our general officers had a responsibility to speak up before the Iraq disaster but didn't; 3) The promotion system for general officers is hugely flawed.

To which we could add, "And the sky is frequently perceived by the sighted as being some shade of blue," but won't, because we're not the one risking anything. We come to salute Lt. Colonel Yingling, not to reprimand him, except that we won't because we have a personal problem with the whole of military culture, even on those occasions when it works, which it actually does once in a while.

Let's start with a confession. I've argued for years that the military did take the lessons of Vietnam seriously. Most everything I'd read suggested that it had. Col. Yingling admits this much: the Army learned the idea was to fight only those wars it knew it could win. It's a dismaying analysis, if true.

It's difficult to argue with the hunka hunka burning humiliation that is Iraq, especially as mortar rounds land inside the Green Zone, or to ignore the fact that it was the man for whom the Powell Doctrine was named who did that stand-up routine at the UN. But the Powell Doctrine has always had more than a whiff of PR bullshit about it--it can be distilled as "Don't fight wars unless you know you're going to win"--and whatever the failures of our general officers we did have the right man in place at the right time, one Eric Shinseki, USA (ret).

So it's always been necessary for us to acknowledge that the game was rigged, that all the Bush administration, like Robert Graves' Caligula, was required to do was find a dog who'd eat a dog. I'd never framed the issue as a question of moral courage, because it was unthinkable, given that hyperbole and blood lust ruled the agenda in 2001-02, that the military would refuse to acquiesce regardless of what was asked of it. The failure was the administration's.

Was there a lack of moral courage down the line from there? The easy answer, and probably the correct one, is Yes. But could moral courage conceivably have saved us? The military is just another corporate culture. For all its emphasis on Honor and Duty the public still gets a monthly bill from the cleaners. We used to make a big deal about how Messy Democracies always managed to defeat the armies of Totalitarianism, because, in the long run, our soldiers are used to taking initiative, to asking questions, and to fighting for a consensus that may not be perfectly aligned with their own beliefs. Well, we've been at war with individual freedom for four decades now (there's your real Long War, Colonel). Winner take all, Jack Welch vanity projects on top of the best sellers list, Halliburton scamming millions billions, a brain-dead heiress as our most famous celebrity and another in the Oval Office. Why shouldn't that be reflected in the military? Isn't this the sort of leadership the public deserves? At least that portion which claims with one breath that we're in a fight for The Very Survival of Civilization, and with the next says it's too busy earning money to make a personal contribution? Military officers vote Republican as reliably as African-Americans vote for Democrats, Colonel. Refusing to learn the lessons of Vietnam has been a party plank since 1968.

So, yes sir, the military shoulda saved us, elections should have saved us, Congress, the "free press", you name it. Instead, an election was stolen, Congress lined its own pockets, the mass-market media whipped up some war fever, and careerist officers stepped up to do the administration's bidding. None of those will be eliminated, however deserving, and no one is ever going to be held accountable in any real way. You're a student of military history, Colonel. How furiously did we pursue war profiteers during and after the Civil War? Or WWII? Today any of those same people who aren't actively trying to figure out how to invade Iran before 2008 are plotting their return to power in 2012. It's not time to reform the promotion process, to reconsider conscription, or to sacrifice social good for the sake of The Long War. It's time to return the military to a defensive posture, to destroy the myth of a Free World which We Lead and replace it with an accurate history of our military and political adventurism since the Spanish-American War. To clean the Augean stables, in other words, though it won't be done in a day. In fact it won't be done before it's left to the next generation, and the next.

Happy Anniversary

Seems to me that this is the perfect occasion to launch a new campaign. It's time to tell your Congressperson We Want Our Victory Parade!

The last Congress already allocated $20 Million, which seems laughably small when you compare it to the amount of currency we can just plain lose in the course of a few hours. I know, I know, some sticklers for detail will point out that we haven't actually achieved victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would answer that in these with these conflicts, and this administration, it seems particularly appropriate that the celebration of victory and the actual achievement of anything remotely resembling one be two separate, even wildly disparate, matters.

Need I remind everyone of the delicate psyche of the US service personnel? The thoughtless whisper of a Congressman 8000 miles away suggesting we reconsider military appropriations sends morale into a dangerous tailspin. Remember all those psycho Vietnam Vets on all those teevee shows in the 70s and 80s? They never got a parade!

We will, of course, need to make this an annual event, in order to make sure no one feels left out, so I think it's high time we appointed a Memorial Commission so there'll be some place to rally before the parade begins. And not one of your post-modern monstrosities like The Wall, which caused so much controversy before we all agreed it was just too depressing and refused to build it. No, something Classical, with columns and metopes and atlantes and caryatids and plinths. Lots of plinths. I'm a big fan.

The only problem I see is whittling down the hundreds of inscription-worthy administration statements: "Bring It On." "I Doubt Six Months." "A Few Dead Enders." "The Insurgency Is In Its Last Throes." "They’re In the Area Around Tikrit and Baghdad and East, West, South and North Somewhat." "A Slam-Dunk Case." "We Have Found the Weapons of Mass Distruction." "We Never Said 'Imminent Threat'." So many to choose from. And the friezes! The heroic filming of the staged rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch! The heroic framing of the crowd scene at the Saddam statue-toppling! Our brave defense of the Iraq Oil Ministry building while all around everything that could be picked up was being looted! The mess-hall battle for the bigger of the two drumsticks Bush was holding! The even bigger battle when they turned out to be plastic!

Yes, we're gonna need a really big monument to fully memorialize this one.

(Full disclosure: my family owns limestone quarries, but I'm sure they're willing to let Halliburton act as intermediary if that'll speed things along.)

He Was Only a Lieutenant Colonel/ But He Had the Brains God Gives a Bird

Steve Buyer and another of the Big Guns in the JAG Corps, Gulf War I

Indy Star:

Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind.,...the top Republican on the House Veterans Affairs Committee...said he is concerned that the military care for active-duty soldiers and for veterans is being confused and that Democrats are using the issue for political purposes.

No, I don't know where we get 'em. I do know how we wound up keeping Buyer--he won a three-way Republican nutjob clusterama in 2002 over Freshman Brian "I Saw The Plane Hit The Pentagon" Kearns, who had chosen to fight it out in the newly-redistricted 4th, rather than continue in his old district, the 8th, the new home of John "But I Thought Congressmen Were Allowed To Smuggle Guns Onto Planes" Hostetler. Kearns actually proved too nutty even for Indiana Republicans, and the 4th proved solidly Republican, which was good news for Buyer, who had already suggested using nuclear weapons in Afghanistan provided--get this--that we prove the anthrax attacks were the work of al-Qaeda. Sure brings back memories, huh? Buyer made news again in 2003 when he wrote Denny Hastert requesting "indefinite paid leave" from Congress (!) because he'd been called up to active duty, a request made even more curious by the fact that he--how do we put this nicely?--hadn't. And couldn't, for that matter, being a Member of Congress. So he went home and spent some time getting his equipment and his story straight.

That paid leave probably explains how it is that Buyer, a signatory of the Contract With America's pledge to set term limits at twelve years found himself running for a seventh term in 2006.

By the way John Aravosis has the story of how Buyer came to be chairman of Veterans Affairs under Tom DeLay (follow the links).

(Buyer is now a full Colonel in the reserves, having received that distinction in 2004, along with Lindsay Graham, in a special White House ceremony, after it was discovered that there were, indeed, two Republicans with actual verifiable military records.)

The Chuck Norris Solution

I don't remember what time the email came. It was from Buzzflash, and the subject line said something like "Breaking News: Plane Hits World Trade Center".

I knew watching that the world had changed. Not in the sense that people who say 9/11 Changed Everything mean it. In the sense that there were now going to be people--a lot of people, at first, as the shock wore off--going around saying "9/11 Changed everything". And that what that would engender was not going to be good unless you were a defense contractor.

I also knew that some day we'd revisit what we'd done, and when we did it wouldn't be on a timetable we dictated. That's just common sense. I had no idea it would come around so soon.

There was no use arguing the manichean reaction. Our enemies see the world exactly as we do just reversed. Our enemies understand that free enterprise and representative government are the best possible systems, but they desire the worst. They hate us for our freedoms, after all.

Such an attitude can't be pulled off without insisting that those Americans who believe that the worst excesses of capitalism are something civilized people should be protected from, or who imagine that being buried under tons of crappy disposable merchandise is not the next thing to Paradise are in fact not real Americans at all. Andrew Sullivan was hunting fifth columnists before the fires were out. And he's from the rationalist wing. It was clear that we meant to have our revenge, that revenge meant people were going to die, and that we weren't too particular about who.

There's no use being a voice of moderation in the middle of an angry mob. The only place that'll work is out in front. In this we were doubly cursed, and not just because we had no idea whether that position was being fillied by a twisted psychopathic liar or the pee-puppy titular Commander so far out of his league they had to design standing ovations into his first address to Congress like he was a second-grade violinist butchering "Greensleeves" at a school recital. Any US President, however deep his understanding, would have been hard-pressed to resist the cries of War! In the era of modern (that is, post-Napoleonic) warfare the United States has been blessed by two of the greatest political leaders, and they both made serious blunders while playing to public bellicosity. And this time the Law of Averages had returned, looking to settle the score in spades. The a) Bush b) Cheney administration wasted no time in proclaiming the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks "an act of War!" Well, a small amount of time was wasted physically extracting George W. Bush from the well of his desk, but otherwise...

We have no idea whether the dire warnings of an imminent Taliban offensive are accurate. This is, after all, military intelligence, what the noted philosopher Rocket J. Squirrel once referred to as a Contradiction in Terms. But if not this Spring, then the next, or the next. What is plain now is that, had we been able to act like rational people then, we wouldn't be in these straits now. Is there anyone left to argue that the Hell-for-Leather attack on Afghanistan achieved something that wouldn't have been achieved otherwise? Remember, we didn't accuse the Taliban of complicity in 9/11, only of harboring al-Qaeda, and our response was to demand that they cede their sovereignty to us and hand over people we said were guilty, and all Before Sundown, Pardner. We wouldn't have done so ourselves, mutatis mutandis, to the Israelis, let alone the Afghans.

The point of all this, which was conveniently ignored if not actively disputed, was not that one should observe all the niceties of international diplomacy out of some sense of propriety. It was that five seconds after the first-round bell is too soon to start swinging from the heels, regardless of how much you outweigh the other guy. No one can say whether international pressure could have caused the Taliban to turn over bin Laden. All we can say at this point is that the opposite approach sure didn't get the job done. Haste caused us to grant far too much for Musharraf's cooperation, which, not surprisingly, did not seem to extend to committing political suicide in order to serve us up a heaping bowlful of al-Qaeda. We stuck our noses into the most dangerous potential conventional nuclear confrontation on the planet (on China's doorstep, no less), which we had to resolve (if that) by rewarding India for failing to sign the Non-Proliferation treaty.

I guess we should all be thankful that the government of Pakistan is so stable.

Every month's "delay" in 2001-02 would be one more month's rest for what's now left of US ground forces, one less month's worth of junked equipment, one less month's worth of disabled GIs being strongarmed for reporting appalling hospital conditions to the press. (Throw in, if you wish, that after four years of horseshit about the Clinton administration and North Korea we eventually forced ourselves to make essentially the same deal but from a position of weakness.) But we were the aggrieved party, and we were going to show the world who the superpower was.

Honestly, I have no idea whether or how long a President could have been held off the demand for action, for A Military Response. But it should be remembered, every now and then (like whenever further disaster looms). that it's not just the Bush administration or the neocon cabal which is responsible for the false sense of invincibility and the smug perpetual rightness of our every act, and the mess that landed us in.