at-Largely

In for a Penny

Posted by Jeff Huber

The good news is that Defense Secretary Bob Gates is going to save money by shutting down Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) in Virginia. The bad news, as the New York Times reports, is that the White House says the money Gates saves will free money that can be “better spent on war fighting.”

Egad. That’s like selling off your garage full of vintage sports cars so you can blow the money on booze and hookers.

Actually, it’s more like selling the cars plus taking out a loan to finance your booze and hooker habit, because Gates’s thrift measures will result in a net defense spending increase; the 2011 budget will top $700 billion, and that just counts the defense dollars spent by the Pentagon. Throw in the Homeland Security budget and the defense-related items from all the other cabinet departments’ budgets, plus the interest owed on money borrowed to fight our wars and the interest on the accrued interest, and pretty soon, to channel the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, you’re talking real money.

That’s not to say that making JFCOM fade away isn’t an overdue measure. A descendant of the once-proud Atlantic Command that fought the Battle of the Atlantic against Hitler’s U-Boat force in World War II, JFCOM (pronounced “jiffcom”) was a boil in dismal need of lancing.

To Spite Our Faces

Posted by Jeff Huber

Time magazine’s new cover girl certainly spawned a piranha swarm of controversy.  Lamentably, the outrage Time‘s Aug. 9 issue inspired has served to further mask the extent to which Obama-era war propaganda has eclipsed even the Orwellian efforts of the Bush/Cheney regime, and how that propaganda has buried the uncomfortable truth about our global military crusades.   

Certainly, the image and the story that accompanied it were as atrocious in a fundamental sense as the circumstances that led to the subject’s mutilation.  Equally awful was managing editor Richard Stengel’s jack-asinine excuse for the content of the issue. "I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us," Stengel wrote.  

If Stengel wanted to show us what is really happening, why didn’t he run images of Taliban leaders receiving bribe money that came from the United States.  Why not show pictures of President Hamid Karzai’s political machine stealing the most recent election?  Why not show the heroin crop our military has been ordered not to destroy?  Let’s see the innocent women and children that we have maimed and killed in the course of pursuing a war that weakens to our nation’s security and is counter to our best interests.   

Let’s see the American G.I.s whose faces have been mutilated in the pursuit of waging that woebegone war.  Pismire Stengel argues it was okay for American kids to see the mutilated Afghan girl on the cover of Time because "children are so used to seeing violence in the media."  But the kind of violence children see in our media is mostly the cartoonish variety they see in video games and vapid action films and other popular American entertainments.  Our access-poisoned media seldom show us real violence, the kind our soldiers see and smell and feel and hear on a daily basis.  Any video we see of fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq is so sanitized it looks no more gory than footage from the 1960s ABC television series Combat!

Code of Military Justice

Posted by Jeff Huber

Gen. Stan McChrystal, United States Army, will leave active service with four stars instead of three because of a special waiver bestowed on him by President Barack Obama. One is supposed to hold four-star rank for three years before one can retire at that pay grade, something McChrystal obviously didn’t do, but Obama made nice and let him walk away with a full set of collar candy anyway. The extra star makes a staunch bit of difference in McChrystal’s retirement pay. He’ll start at $181,416 per year versus the measly $160,068 he would have received otherwise. But both of those amounts are chump change compared to what Mr. McChrystal is likely to knock down in his Beltway banditry career.

Noted counterinsurgency illusionist John A. Nagl, a retired Army light colonel and a Beltway bandit himself, says that “forcing” McChrystal to retire with three stars “would have sent a signal that he was out of favor.” Colleagues, according to the New York Times, say that because McChrystal kept his fourth star he’s not “radioactive,” so he can expect a bright future “as a well-paid outside consultant to the Pentagon or a government intelligence agency.” Don’t be shocked to see McChrystal named CEO of whatever Blackwater winds up calling itself next.

Retired three-star Beltway bandit Jack Keane, a key node in the war mafia’s AIPAC-neocon-Pentagon-Congress-White House connections, says of his protégé McChrystal, “Stan will land on both feet, make no mistake about that.”

Lynndie England, the marginally self-aware former private in the United States Army Reserve, was one of the few bad apples who took the fall for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. She received no pension at all after she left the Army with a dishonorable discharge, and she couldn’t get back her civilian job as a chicken-plucker after she was released from military prison.

It took two trials by courts-martial to convict England. The judge in the first court-martial, Army Col. James Pohl, declared a mistrial because he doubted whether England was mentally competent enough to understand what a raw plea deal her incompetent military defense lawyers had wheedled her into. Pohl also questioned whether she possessed sufficient cognizance to discern right from wrong. The five officers on the second jury clearly had a more flexible conscience about making junior enlisted personnel the patsies for policies established at the four-star level and above; they sentenced her to a three-year term.

The Stepmother of Invention

By Jeff Huber

It’s a sign of the New American times that even when we know we don’t have cogent grounds to continue our woebegone wars, we can’t invent compelling reasons to end them.

In September 2009, President Obama caved to Pentagon demands to send more troops to the Bananastans* even though nobody in the Department of Defense could tell him what they’d do with the extra troops. This was before Obama fired Gen. David McKiernan as Bananastan commander to make way for Gen. Stan McChrystal, who was fired to make way for Gen. David Petraeus, whom Obama should have fired the second he took office, along with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, and the rest of the Bush administration Pentarchy**.

Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana is the latest voice in Congress to express doubt about what is now inescapably Obama’s war. Once a supporter of our imperial pratfall in the Bananastans, Lugar now says, “The lack of clarity in Afghanistan does not end with the president’s timetable,” and he thinks that our involvement there is “proceeding without a clear definition of success.” Politeness Man couldn’t have put it more civilly.

We don’t have coherent war aims. The “realistic and achievable” objectives that Obama’s national security “Chess Masters” established in their March 2009 Bananastans policy paper revolved around a “core goal” to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.”

CIA director Leon Panetta recently reaffirmed that the number of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is “50 to 100. Maybe less.” Maybe none. Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, says there are “somewhat more than 300” al-Qaeda characters hiding in Pakistan, which means there are somewhat fewer than 400 there for a total of less than 500 of them in the Bananastans. Since experts like Leiter say the vast majority of al-Qaedeers are in the Bananastans that puts their strength worldwide at comfortably under 1,000. A 2005 report by the Century Foundation said that al-Qaeda never had more than “several hundred” formal members. (The Century Foundation was talking about the real al-Qaeda, not the copyright violators in Iraq. The “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” hooligans are like a college that calls itself “The Harvard of Northwest Indiana.”)

Pavlov's Dogs of War Revisited

Posted by Jeff Huber

Super Dave Petraeus, newly installed as top banana in the Bananastans*, is practicing the exploding-cigar kind of diplomacy Dick Cheney and his cabin boys perfected during the Li’l Bush regime.

Following policies outlined by the neoconservative cabal in their September 2000 manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Dick and the Destroyers’ negotiations with Iran amounted to a bad practical joke. Making an unacceptable demand as a precondition to talks – namely that Iran give up its UN-guaranteed right to refine uranium for peaceful purposes – ensured that talks would never take place. When the Iranians refused to knuckle under to an outrageous demand, Team Cheney could say they tried diplomacy and it didn’t work, and continue to press for war.

Nothing has changed under the Obama administration; we’re still demanding that Iran give up its right to refine reactor-grade uranium, and it still refuses to cave in to what amounts to bullying on our part. And perennial AIPAC Shemps** John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are still running around telling the world how we’ll go to war with Iran if we have to and that the U.S. Congress “has Israel’s back” in return for Israel maintaining the oldest established permanent floating campaign-finance racket in American history. So our animosity toward Iran is theoretically based on the threat Iran poses to Israel, even though, despite what the Ministry of Truth Network would have you believe, Iran can’t do anything to Israel militarily.

It’s little wonder then that one of King David’s first acts as praetorian governor of Central Asia ensured that peace talks don’t take place among the concerned local parties. As “senior officials” have told the New York Times, the Teflon General has introduced the idea of “blacklisting” the Pakistani warlord group known as the Haqqani network by having it declared to be another Club Terror affiliate. That would disrupt the peace coalition Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai is trying to form.

'Til the Fat General Sings

President Obama’s troop withdrawal deadlines continue to vanish like a blind dowager’s silverware.

At his June 15 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, “King David” Petraeus fainted like Blanche DuBois when inquisitors from both sides of the aisle tried to wedge him into saying that he thought President Obama’s July 2011 withdrawal date for Afghanistan was a moronic idea even though he fully supported it.

Petraeus didn’t take long to redeploy from his endorsement of Obama’s policy. At the June 29 confirmation circus that made him the new top Banana in the Bananastans*, Petraeus and his allies on the committee returned with a new script that was polished to a spit shine and loaded with combat-ready talking points.

Petraeus allowed to the committee as how poor old Obama, as elected official in chief, had to take into account sticky issues like campaign promises so as to suck up to the liberals who put him in office, the kind of thing real men like generals don’t have to worry about.

When ranking war pug John McCain asked Petraeus on cue if there had been “a recommendation from you or anyone in the military that we set a [drawdown] date of July 2011?” Petraeus took a beat and replied, “There was not.” To ensure that anyone who might have a shorter attention span than his got his point, McCain followed up with, “There was not – by any military person that you know of?” “Not that I’m aware of,” Petraeus answered. A regular Abbott and Costello, those two were.

Helmand in a Handbag

“What, Me McWorry?” noted that by replacing Stan McChrystal with David Petraeus, Barack Obama has bought the Pentagon’s Long War agenda lock, stock, and pork barrel. “Helmand in a Handbag” discusses why it seems that our national security team is losing its woebegone wars on purpose.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal had ample reasons for wanting to get fired as top banana in the Bananastans*. The Marjah offensive that was hyped as the “test” of the Afghanistan strategy had, by his own admission, turned into a “bleeding ulcer.” He’d been forced to postpone the follow-on offensive to liberate Kandahar – called “the most critical operation of the war” – because the Kandaharis told him thanks anyway, but they were liberated enough for now. “It takes time to convince people,” McChrystal told his press entourage in early June, well aware that time was a commodity he was fresh out of.

Inside reports have it that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, thefraudulent head of state of the second most corrupt country in the world, has “lost his confidence in the capability of either the coalition or his own government to protect this country.” That’s probably why he’s told us to bugger off and is looking to strike his own deal with the Taliban and arch-rival country Pakistan.

Afghan troops, whom we’ve been training for nine bloody years, still woefully suck. A January 2010 60 Minutes piece noted that “elite” Afghan Special Forces were incapable of loading their rifles or even carrying them the right way. Once their Green Beret instructors helped them load and hold their weapons, the Afghan commandos quite literally shot their instructors and themselves in the foot.