Small World: Super Secret Spy Edition

Unearthed an odd bit of buried past the other day.

It started with one of those gawdawful Facebook "memes". Even ran into one of them? Blogging tends to get them, though I haven't run across one for ages.

This one was about "how you met me", and it was mildly entertaining hear from old friends and see who remembered how who met whom all those years ago.

But in the process a name came up; a person I knew many years ago and was slightly friendly with in a very passant sort of way.

Her name is Susan Leslie Ireland, and she was just appointed the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis. As such she is "...responsible for the receipt, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence related to the Department's mission to safeguard the international financial system from abuse and to combat threats to U.S. national security."

And I knew her when. Howboutthat?

Anyway, the interesting thing is that when we were in college together I remember her as a painfully serious, intelligent, darkly pretty young woman. She roomed in a group with a clutch of other very bright and clever women, many of whom acted in our college Green Room and, as you might expect, caprioled joyfully with the sort of creative lunacy that has characterized thespians since Aristophanes' time.

Sue - as she was known in those days - was not quite of the same metal as her sisters; "forlorn" is how one of my contemporaries remembers her. She never seemed as...vivid...as her hallmates. And she seems to have had a very fraught relation with them; another former classmate of mine recalls her saying, within earshot of those long-time rooming hall associates and companions "Those people are not my friends..."; a remark almost as sad as it was tactless.I will admit to crushing on her a bit, back in those times; even callow and stupid I had a bit of a thing for seriously smart Dark Ladies. And she was - and is, it seems - very smart. And, as her picture testifies, still Dark and serious.

But I was too immature, and she too otherwise-engaged, and so we drifted away.

But after her name suddenly returning to my attention what I recalled vividly was that several years after graduation we met for a lunch.

She was already working in D.C. in a covert position - I believe probably with the National Security Agency - and I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, a line medic for the 1/505th Infantry. I was headed north on a brief leave, called her up, and we made the time to meet at some indifferent lunch place somewhere in Georgetown.

She was still dark, still handsome, and very excited about her work. I was less hairy - still callow, but leaner, and harder - and gaining in both worldly and emotional maturity. So there we were; the young spy and the young paratrooper, sitting chatting on a bright sunny spring morning while a Reagan morning broke across America.We talked of ourselves, and the world's wagging. We discussed parachuting, which it seems that she had to learn as part of her own "basic training" in intelligence - it seems that even in the Eighties U.S. spies still hung on to bit of their OSS heritage. We talked about old friends, and future plans.

There was absolutely not a flint's worth of spark between us.

We enjoyed a pleasant spring day and parted with the usual promises to keep in touch and, as usual, failed to keep them. I went on to become a paratroop sergeant, and then, in succession, a graduate student and husband, a professional geologist, teacher, senior NCO, husband (again) and father.

Sue - or, rather, S. Leslie, as she prefers to be known - continued to find her way through the Hall of Mirrors; "Executive Assistant to the Director and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and in various analytical and management portfolios at CIA related to the Middle East and weapons of mass destruction....also detailed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense as Country Director for Iran and Kuwait." She also served as the "Iran Mission Manager" for the Director of National Intelligence.

It's strange to think of my old acquaintance as a Power herself; one of the Thrones and Dominations, a Beltway Insider, making reality, as the Bushies were wont to say, with the force of her knowledge, her judgement - one hopes - and her wiles at the subtle and deadly bureaucratic infighting in the halls of the great and the mighty.

But there she is, and, what's more, one of the "Iran Hands"; one of the fonts of intelligence wisdom on that contentious and troubled land.

And now, I wonder; what secrets is she telling to those seats of power?

Because had my life gone in other directions I might be one of those whose fate depended on that tall and serious Dark Lady. On what she said, and what she did not say, to those whose decrees sway the wide world.

To those whose words move armies and fleets, and who might well have sent First Sergeant Lawes plummeting out into the night sky over Qom, on the advice of the sloe-eyed young woman who thirty years ago sat across the cheap formica table from the young sergeant who was him, on that sunny spring Georgetown day, those fine eyes glowing as she described how much she had enjoyed the adventure of her brief "combat training" at Quantico, and the fearsome power she felt as the machinegun lept and thundered in her hands.And I wonder.

What will she say?

Nutjob Rules

OK, so enough with the garment-rending. Time to get back to the wider world.

Oh - first, a question for the readership; this months' battle is either going to be the Reoccupation of the Rhineland (1936) or the Battle of Adowa (1896). I'm leaning towards the latter just because it's more interesting and less known. But in pure "decisiveness" terms the Rhineland was the more critical event. Any strong feelings one way or the other?And this morning I was scanning through the news and one thought kept sticking in my head; why does it seem that my country seems to be stuck on the notion that the world "should be" something other than it is?

One example is this year's ridiculous presidential campaign, which - in the middle of some truly spectacular economic and geopolitical fuckups - seems to be mainly about what women do or don't do with their genitals.

WTF?

One of the other examples is summed up in my friends jim and Lisa's post about the recent "Koran burning" controversy. Their money graf is:

"The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is not about liberal democratic values and has nothing to do with the welfare of the Afghan people. The entire philosophy of Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24 was based upon a simulacrum of truth, and the burning (as with previously reported incidents of Koran desecration) proves the point to the citizens of Afghanistan."

Which is absolutely true.

But IMO the greater point is; we knew that the central Asian plateau was chock full o' religious nuts when we went in there. We had a ringside seat for Charlie Wilson's War, watching the Soviets try to turn the Afghan Allah-pesterers into good little Young Pioneers and failing bloodily.

Why the hell - why the HELL - would we think otherwise?Here's my opinion; it's because we as a people, we as a polity, are eaten up from head to toe with magical thinking. We believe wholeheartedly that if we just WANT it bad enough that the world will be what we want it to be. That we have the Awesome Yankee Doodle Dandy Power that will make Afghans become suburban Maryland Presbyterians, make piles of corporate money do something other than turn our electoral process into a pimp-and-ho show, make individuals and corporations act prudently, sensibly, and responsibly...in other words, make the world into a rational and sensible place rather than the monstrous concatenation of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision we should know by now that it is.

And, specifically, in Afghanistan we the U.S. chose to go into the religious nuthouse and play with the religious nuts. Inside Chock Full o' Nuts you either play by the Nutjob Rules, you lose, or you don't play. All the power and money in the world won't change that, because you're dealing with religious nuts; they don't care about power and money - they're doing what they truly deeply believe their Invisible Sky Daddy wants.Their magical thinking is always going to be stronger than your magical thinking. It's really that simple.

Why is that so difficult to understand?

It seems that it is.

Uncle Sam and the Giant Midget?

Interesting post from James Fallows on the current enthusiasm for the "Pacific Turn" that is of recent concern in the Obama Administration's publication of "Sustaining National Leadership", the ostensible strategic blueprint for the coming decade or so of U.S. geopolitics. My fellow pubcrawler seydlitz has a nice discussion of this document here.

Central to this worldview seems to be a belief that a U.S.-v-China faceoff is inevitable.The publication states that

"U.S. economic and security interests are inextricably linked to developments in the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South Asia, creating a mix of evolving challenges and opportunities. Accordingly, while the U.S. military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region. Our relationships with Asian allies and key partners are critical to the future stability and growth of the region... The maintenance of peace, stability, the free flow of commerce, and of U.S. influence in this dynamic region will depend in part on an underlying balance of military capability and presence."

Fallows discusses this in relation to the recent work of John Mearsheimer, who seems to have an even more definite view of the degree to which this is likely to be a military confrontation.

"I--China--want to be the Godzilla of Asia, because that's the only way for me--China--to survive!"

Mearsheimer is quoted as saying,

"I don't want the Japanese violating my sovereignty the way they did in the 20th century. I can't trust the United States, since states can never be certain about other states' intentions. And as good realists, we--the Chinese--want to dominate Asia the way the Americans have dominated the Western Hemisphere."

Fallows disagrees; the PRC is too fragile, too riven and riddled with internal problems to present a genuine expansionist military threat, a factor he believes that Mearsheimer and his interviewer Bob Kaplan ignore:

"From the outside, it looks like an unstoppable juggernaut. From inside, especially from the perspective of those trying to run it, it looks like a rambling wreck that narrowly avoids one disaster after another. The thrust of Mearsheimer's argument is that such internal complications simply don't matter: the sheer increase in China's power will bring disruption with it. I am saying: if you knew more about China, you would be less worried, especially about military confrontations. He is saying: "knowing" about China is a distraction. What matters are the implacable forces."

I will be the first to admit that I don't know enough about the economics, politics, and military capabilities of the PRC to make an informed assessment, but what I know about recent history suggests to me that none of those vulnerabilities are enough to prevent a polity from embarking on a ruiniously destructive and aggressive foreign policy - we've watched it occur in our own country in our recent lifetimes.

Earlier examples abound as well. The disastrous endless wars between Byzantium and Sassanid Persia that crippled them when confronted with the Umayyads. The various military overreaches of several European states, particularly Spain in the Netherlands in the 16th Century and in general in the 17th and 18th, Portugal after the 1600s, and France pretty much throughout her history.ISTM that there is a genuine discussion on the subject to be had here; as Fallows concludes,

"I think...while we need to think constantly and seriously about China, a "showdown" would be a result of miscalculation or recklessness on either side, rather than of unstoppable tectonic pressures. On the other hand, I completely endorse Mearsheimer's (and Kaplan's) view that we should have been paying more attention to China, and been less bogged down in the Middle East, through the past decade. But his case is certainly worth considering..."

but I guess I'm skeptical that, given the current trends in U.S. politics - that tend more towards magical thinking and foreign-policy-as-domestic-politics - such a discussion of an sort of intelligent throw-weight worth having could be had, or even had at all.

Consider this a "what do you think" open thread.

(cross-posted to MilPub).

September 12th

So.

My last post was a straight-up rant, and one that those who know me have learned to dread. By late August they are avoiding meeting with me, or attending any sort of event where politics or recent history may be discussed, but as early as the First of September they are even dodging my phone calls and deleting my text messages before reading them, knowing that my vitriolic bile will be reaching explosively toxic levels.

The actual detonation is usually reserved for the collision of some innoffensively idiotic television 9/11 retrospective and my forebrain which leaves me flecking the innocent phosphor screen with spittle shouting about 1948, Lebanon, Charlie Wilson's War, Rumsfeld/McFarlane, the cake and the Bible, and the House of Saud.

After that things return rather quickly to normal, and by 13 SEPT I can even hold normal conversations with friends without more than an occasional mutter about "the fucking moron-grade American public..."

All very entertaining, but...now that the ranting is done, what now?

Over at MilPub one of the commentors brought up a post on the blog "Zenpundit" that he considered the best observation of 9/11 he had read that day. I went over and read it and found a generic "The Day History Changed" (because, of course, the Soviet Union never fell in 1989...) sort of thing, with the usual mild "perhaps we should re-examine some of the choices we made that day" caveat at the end.

And that got me thinking. Okay, so, first; what things DID change that day?

Well, remember on 11 SEPT 2001 the U.S. was snakebit by one of the snakes we'd been handling since 1948, and not in a good way (our snake made the other snakes play mean, and we had done some snake-slapping ourselves) so while it shouldn't have been a surprise the sheer effectiveness of it was a nasty shock. We'd gotten used to the idea that those Allah-pesterers were pretty much hopeless fuckups, so the notion that they could kill large groups of Americans (that is, large groups of Americans not dispatched on pointless show-the-flag-missions in the Levant by Saint Ronald of Hollywood) using boxcutters and lead pipes was a novel one.

So overseas we did what we do; we went and fucked us up some wogs. First in Afghanistan (where, in justice, the tricksy bastards who smote us were lurking and, besides, it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, anyway) but then in Iraq (which had nothing the fuck to do with 9/11 but, hell, Saddam was a right git and his sons had stupid names (Uday? Who the fuck is named "Uday"?) and we'd been itching to pimpslap him since back in '92) and then pretty much all over the Arab world, with drone aircraft, anyway. Busy, busy little Yankees!

But at home we were even busier! We did some things we hadn't done - much - before; we set up secret ways to spy on people (who were supposed to be Evul Terrists but, hey - it was SECRET. So who the fuck knows?), we started files on everyone who was different and scary; Muslim clerics, peace activists, chicks with hairy pits, Mormons (oh, wait, no...Mormons were only scary to teabaggers. Oh, wait - most of the people we spied on were scary to teabaggers. Carry on).

We passed something called the "USA PATRIOT Act" which let cops and spies do all sorts of cool stuff they'd been forbidden to do for years because, well, the last time they did it they railroaded a bunch of people for stuff they didn't do and spied on domestic political "enemies"...and that was just the part we KNOW about - supposedly there's this "Secret" PATRIOT Act that lets the door-kickers and snoopers do a lot MORE stuff, except, y'know, it's fucking SECRET, so we have no fucking idea what it involves.

We jammed a bunch of different agencies - the Coast Guard, the DEA, the guys who inspect poultry - into this monster superagency, called in the "Department of Homeland Security", tossed an assload of money at it and told it to go and...do stuff to scary brown people. Or something. We opened secret prisons and put secret prisoners in them because...well, it's SECRET, dummy, so we didn't know exactly why they were there except our Leaders told us they were bad, scary people, the "worst of the worst".

Except the ones we let go because, well, they turned out to be goatherders, or innocent Canadians, or carpet beaters ratted out by the guy who was sleeping with their wives.

Yeah, that.

But, anyway, I think we've pretty much pegged the stuff that Zenpundit's guy said we should "re-examine"; a bunch of wars abroad and a bunch of domestic snooping and spying at home.

So let's "re-examine" them. Let's. Let's put on our Yankee Thinking Caps and try to figure out whether there was anything different we could have done about all that crap.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Believe it or not, I don't actually think that the original, 2002, 114th Afghan War (surely they must be up in at least the low three figures by now, right?) was all that bad a move. Probably could have been done a little slicker with some cunning diplomacy, an assassination and a bribe or three, but, really - they're Afghans; feud, revenge, making an affray, putting in fear...that's cake and ice cream to them. Even the Taliban probably expected the hiding they got. It's the Afghan Way, the central Asian version of a chicken in every pot; a cluster bomb in every Islamic Center.

Now, having done the traditional punitive expedition, the notion of hanging around trying to kill enough Pashtuns to turn the place into Waterbury with more goats was simply stupid. But that was eclipsed by the Really Big Stupid; Iraq.

And, frankly, there is only one way to "re-examine" Iraq. Aggressive war is a crime under the Nuremburg verdicts.

We hung people like Jodl and Ribbentrop and Tojo for it.

Until Dubya and Dick and Wolfie and the rest are hanging alongside them we will never be able to "re-examine" Iraq in any sane fashion. Admitting that we - that members of our elected government, with our tacit approval - committed a war crime (that lead to the useless, meaningless deaths of thousands) and many subsequent crimes is the only possible first step to "re-examining" that lunacy and preventing its repetition.

And that, we will never do.

And the other thing we will never do is "re-examine" the two main pillars of our treatment of the Middle East; the Israel First, and the Your Gas Is Really Our Gas policies.

We made a conscious decision to put Israel's welfare before our own selfish interests back in 1948. All the old State Department hands - the guys who had made their bones in the Middle East, the guys who (mostly) were defenestrated by the Red witch-hunters after State "lost China" in the late Forties and early Fifties - warned Truman about that. But we made our bed, and we choose to continue to lie in it.

You know how I feel about Israel our "ally". But I am a very small minority, and I accept that so long as we have Israel's back - with all that entails, such as supporting pro-Israeli/anti-Islamist dictators like the Mubaraks and the Sauds - we put ourselves at odds with the bulk of the Middle Eastern Arab and Muslim populations.

So, too, our incessant need for petroleum, which means our need for pliant bobos or buyable clowns on the gaddis of the petroleum states. So we prop up the Shah in Iran, or the Gaddafi's in Libya, or the Malikis in Iraq, regardless of the enmity...and until the wrath...of their own peoples becomes too great.

But in the process we ensure ourselves of a constant, running, low-grade warfare with certain elements in the Islamic world. There is no element of the foolish "Islamofascism" or "hating our freedoms" so beloved of the GOP's wingnut brigade. Rather, they hate our Israel, or they hate our porn, or our bare-legged women, or our greed for their petroleum, or their disregard for their lives.

This makes them no better (and no worse) that we. They are acting selfishly, their selfish interests will always collide with ours if we persist in the policies we have pursued - and we show little or no interest in or willingness to change them - and so we are fated to encounter these Islamic characters until either we change or they do. There is no real other option.

We simply cannot have Israel, cheap Arab petroleum, and peace with the hard-core Islamists and Arab nationalists.

So that "re-examination" leads to the grim conclusions that we are in for a long, long century.

The Laughing Policeman

On the Home Front, however, what holds us back is not inevitable collision but moral and political cowardice.

We have erected, brick by brick, a monstrous edifice of surveillance and secret machination. Little in U.S. history since the Alien and Sedition Acts, or perhaps some of the most extreme lawlessness enacted in actual wars (such as Lincoln's violation of habeas corpus or Roosevelt's Japanese internment) can equal the sheer grandiosity of this vast and secretive erection. We have granted, out of our fear and anger, immense powers to our most uncontrolled servants and trusted them to remain servile.

Why, I do not know.

And, by and large, these powers have gone unneeded and unused for the demolition of actual "terrorist" plots and plans. Most of the domestic acts of "terror" have been foiled by simple citizens, or random customs agents, or street cops snitched on to someone. Several of the most "nefarious" plots appear to have been largely the work of government agents, who have tracked down various disgruntled and unhinged individuals, coaxed them, coached them, made their weapons for them, even driven them to the "terror" site before arresting them.

And many of these powers are even less comprehensible than that, like the 21st Century equivalent of the lettre de cachet, the "national security letter", that cannot even be mentioned under pain of imprisonment. We cannot know if the lettre de...excuse me, the "national security letter" has been misused...because those against whom it has been used cannot speak of their misuse, and if they attempt to do so they will find themselves in another modernization of Bourbon justice, the Chateau d'If of the "secret prison".

Can you imagine a United States with "secret prisons"? With nameless prisoners, latter-day Monte Cristos but in their orange jumpsuits and hoods? With secret letters demanding secret interrogations, carried on in secret and then buried below further layers of secrecy, lowered into a well a midnight, never to be known?

Is this the United States we pledged to as children? And if not, why not?

Because of some raggedy Islamic fantasists plotting in some dumpy motel in Lahore?


In a sane world we would shake our heads like a dog shaking off water, and immediately eighty-six about 99 percent of the ridiculous security rigamarole we've invented since 9/11, starting with the "PATRIOT" Act, the AUMF, and continuing from there. We'd relegate "terrorism" to the nuisance status it deserves and making in the province of our State Department and our spy agencies, who could make the appropriate recommendations to Congress and the President when they spotted another bin Laden lurking behind the arras.

Because, as I said, he will come. When you fight an old enemy long enough he will throw out the occasional Mosby, or bin Ladin, or Francis Marion.

But sending out troops to beat the hustings where he may be born...or sending in police to snoop and sneak on Americans guilty of nothing more than disliking WalMart or protesting foreign policy...is worse than a crime. It is a mistake, and one that we have been paying for this long decade.

But...

Again, to undo all of this harm would be to admit that we were sniveling, mewling cowards to begin with. To admit that we fucked up dozens of people's lives for no better reason than our own bed-wetting fears. And to accept the calumny due us for being frightened little weasels too small to deserve the freedoms we so boldly lay claim to, and yet so quickly piss away rather than face any potential for harm.

And we would rather give up ALL those freedoms than accept that.



So, in brief; abroad we cannot have peace with a segment of Islam - unless we radically change our goals and interests in the Middle East, which we have and continue to show no interest in doing - while at home we will not have liberty - unless we radically accept responsibility for our own panicked fuckups as well as the risk inherent in living in an open society.

So in that sense the dead of 9/11 really DID die in vain, or worse - their deaths have made their nation a smaller, meaner, more secretive, less dynamic place.

We were given a chance of greatness and instead we went shopping - on credit - whilst fools and knaves led us into dark places.

"It is by our own feathers, and not by others' shafts, are we now stricken"

The Captives of our Bow and Spear

You can take an Afghan to Hell with kindness,
but never to heaven by force
--Afghan proverb

Tribe wars with tribe. Every man's hand
is against the other and all are against the stranger
... the state of continual tumult has produced
a habit of mind which holds life cheap
and embarks on war with careless levity
--Winston Churchill
______________________

Chief advocates viewing the Battle of Little Bighorn as another fight in the progression of events which began in 1492. This perspective helps in
understanding the totality of the situation. Using that viewpoint, let us extend lessons from LBH into current scenarios in Afghanistan dealing with Counterinsurgency, unconventional/guerrilla war (UW/GW) and terrorism. This may seem a stretch, but saddle up . . .

The hostiles in both scenarios did not have a problem in the world until the outer world forcibly imposed progress upon them. The Afghans have much experience repulsing the outsiders, be they Greek, Persian, British, Russian, Paki, Indian, Chinese, American or even present-day Iranians.Minus external forces, the Native Americans and the Afghanis would do fine, thanks, without the education or whatever the interlopers wish to impose. Both nations (or more precisely, confederation of nations) would be happy to continue killing each other before it became necessary to reach out and kill The Other. The only thing better than killing each other would be to kill invaders.

Following are some ways LBH can be compared to the Phony War on Terror (PWOT):

[1] "Fighting Season" -- both the Indians and the Afghans could only fight when they could support themselves operationally. Where the Afghans gather support external to the group, the Indians had to follow the cycle of nature. Both groups were sidelined by deadly winter weather, but of course, they continued to train, plan, maintain equipment, etc.[2] Militarily, both the Afghan and Indian War campaigns had the same goals. The hostiles were given a Hobson's choice: Submit to government control or pick up the lance. There is no discernible middle ground.

[3] The Afghan fighters have a force structure similar to that of the Indians, one based upon tribal loyalties and realities. The groups are usually as strong as their leaders. Both groups possess limited ability and opportunity to isolate the battlefield, but both have the luxury and will to prepare the field before they willingly engage government forces. Both are fighting for their survival as discrete entities; neither care to subsumed into their own loosely confederated nation nor into a construction fashioned by the invaders.[4] Both must apply the concept of Mass and Economy of Force. The LBH demonstrated Mass as the prevailing principle, where most fights in Afghanistan demonstrate the principle of Economy of Force. The U.S. Army must gain and maintain contact with these adversaries, while it is the opposition's job to break contact until it is advantageous for them to turn and face the enemy. This was shown at LBH, Waygul and Wanat.

[5] Government forces used indigenous members to neutralize the indig. The government elevated the indig that they chose either to leadership positions or as judas goats.At LBH they were called Scouts and in Afghanistan they are called the Afghan National Army.[6] Intelligence is mitigated: In 1876 intel was negligible to nonexistent regarding the Indians' intentions. In Afghanistan there is so much intel that analysis is hampered. The reliability and validity in both cases is always in doubt.

[7] Concealment: In the Indian Wars, there was no place for the Indians; in Afghanistan, the hostiles hide in plain sight and there is no place for U.S. forces to hide.

In conclusion, the best hope of prevailing in the Afghan leg of the PWOT would be to use a tactic that worked with the Indians: Give them tax-free cigarettes, legal gambling casinos and tell them they are free and autonomous. Facts be damned.

---------

All I can add to what jim has written is that when tribal cultures war with outsiders there are only two outcomes; the outsider is pushed back out (or destroyed) or the tribesman is assimilated and destroyed (with this conquest there is no "or"; in order to make the tribesman into the image of his conqueror his culture and entire way of life must be destroyed, and that almost always involves massive butchery among the natives.).

Anything else lends itself to the continual low-grade warfare endemic to tribal and especially nomadic tribal societies. The skills of a pastoralist or a horse-nomad lent themselves entirely too well to warfare; the tribes will nearly always want to retain their freedom to raid when they want, to battle for mastery when they choose.

The British took 100 years to acquire India, from Clive's victory at Plassey to the crushing of the Bengal Revolt of 1857. They then spent the next 100 years trying to remake the Indian peoples into a Western-style nation. By and large they succeeded. But it took a century, billions of pounds, and hundreds of thousands of lives; both in lives taken and lives spent in the service of that immense colonial enterprise.If the United States is willing to pay that price, no one has yet informed the U.S. public.

It's not you. Really, It's me. (Foreign Policy Edition)

It seems like we spent much of the months of March and April talking here about Libya.

And then, as with almost everything except male enhancement products and Paris Hilton, the entire Libya pottage dropped off the news cycle.

Well, a small article on the Beeb yesterday noted that one Mr. Mahmoud Jibril, described as the "deputy leader of the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council (NTC)" met with several U.S. suits at the White House on Friday. These included the U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilan. Among the things the TNC asked for, apparently, was recognition from the U.S. as the "government of Libya".

The U.S. officially said; no.

"White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Thursday that such a step would be "premature". The US has said it is up to the Libyans to decide their government, not foreign powers."

And yet...just a couple of months ago U.S.-taxpayer-funded ordinance was flying all about Libya in an orgiastic foreign-power-y feu-de-joie of...ummm...helping the "Libyans decide their government". The U.S. and its allies have been pasting the Libyan capital with projos in apparent hope that Mister Gaddafi will walk under a 1,000-pound bill of impeachment, or something. We've frozen his assets, trash-talked his regime, for all I know we've even offered candy to his Virgin Bodyguard.Our policy towards Libya, whilst not as vigorous as seydlitz might have preferred, seems to be decidedly tilted towards one side of this nasty little scuffle.

But we won't jump all the way in the bed with our BFFs the TNC.

WTF?

Call me simple.

I don't get it.

During the Bush years I would often read editorials, especially in Middle Eastern publications like Al Jazeera, complaining that our foreign policy towards that troubled region not only made no sense but was actively confusing. We would say one thing while doing another...that actively undermined or contradicted what we were saying. That we were either being hypocritical, or simply duplicitous, in pretending to want "democracy" and "freedom" while bankrolling the usual crew of loathsome dictators, tyrants, oligarchs, and thugs.

And I would have to admit...what else could we do?

To allow popular sovereignty in most Middle Eastern countries would be to accept a much higher risk of war between them and our real BFF, Israel. Which would have been risky in a global sense because Israel, backs to the sea, might have used its nukes and sent the entire eastern Levant, and perhaps half the globe, up in flames.

But...that's a done deal, now. The dominoes - Egypt, Tunisia - have fallen or - Yemen, Syria, Libya - may be falling. The Arab publics have seen their pharoahs overthrown; we can hardly rebuild those pyramids now.And here, especially, it seems to me like a nearly perfect situation for us to do well while doing good. Libya is not a real player in the Arab-Israeli Great Game. A TNC-Libya will probably be more "Islamic" than the late-Gaddafi Libya, but then, that was almost inevitable. Until the Arab world undergoes its own Enlightenment political islam will always be a factor there.

Here was the opportunity for a supposedly post-Bush U.S. to walk the walk, to formally ally with an Arab "democracy" - to, in my cynical view, force an Arab government to willingly and publicly take the U.S. hand in alliance, putting the lie to the "arab street" and its contention that Arab rulers only side with the United States because of greed and cowardice.

And yet on Friday it was..."premature"...to pal up with an Arab government that is only greedy for survival and only afraid of the nutjob that it's rebelling against?

I'm not going to pretend that these TNC characters are adorable, fluffy, democracy-loving peacemongers. Surely they'll bring in trouble enough in time.

But we're helping bomb their enemies!Wouldn't it make some kind of sense to give 'em a hug today?

Sometimes I think I have absolutely no understanding of foreign policy at all.

LIBYA! (A Dramedy in Probably-more-the-one-Act)

Act 1, Scene 1. The Western Desert outside Tripoli.

(Enter GADDAFI in Hawaiian shirt and baggies.)GADDAFI: “Behold, my people! I just don't want to live like I used to. And at some point, I'm going to put a gag order on myself in terms of talking about the past. I've got to slam the door and deal with the present and the future!”

(Enter right LIBYAN REBELS; a dozen or so midgets with banners and signs.)

REBELS: "Boo! Down With the despot! Power to the People!"
GADDAFI: “I'm dealing with fools and trolls and soft targets. It's just strafing runs in my underwear before my first cup of coffee. I don't have time for these clowns.” (produces a comically immense scimitar and begins smiting the REBELS)
REBELS: "Aieee! You bastard! Take that, and that!" (etc)

(FIGHT ensues, with GADDAFI driven upstage.)REBELS: “Hurrah! Freedom! Victory!”

(Enter left FRANCE, ENGLAND, the UNITED STATES, and the ARAB LEAGUE, who watch the battle with concern. GADDAFI appears to be cornered until he leaps forward, roaring;)

GADDAFI: “I have a different constitution. I have a different brain; I have a different heart; I got tiger blood, man!”

(REBELS are driven back in panic, shrieking. GADDAFI follows, laying about him and bellowing.)

GADDAFI: “I have defeated this earthworm with my words! Imagine what I would have done with my fire breathing fists! I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips! Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro! And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground!(GADDAFI continues to drive the REBELS back, killing several in the process.)

ARAB LEAGUE: “Oh, my, how terrible! The poor people! Won’t someone do something?
FRANCE: “Ah, zut alors! Yes, we should do something, Albert.
ENGLAND: “Yes, indeed, Gaston. Shall we ask the UN?
UNITED STATES: “Go right ahead, I won’t stop you, but I’m not so sure this is a good idea.”

(Enter left the UN, garbed as a diplomat)

UN: “Ahem. By the power vested in my by the Great Powers, I hereby authorize the Member States that have notified the Secretary-General and the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, to take all necessary measures to enforce compliance with the ban on flights imposed by paragraph 6 above, as necessary, and request the States concerned in cooperation with the League of Arab States to coordinate closely with the Secretary General on the measures they are taking to implement this ban, including by establishing an appropriate mechanism for implementing the provisions of paragraphs 6 and 7 above.”(bows, exits left)
(GADDAFI is still beating the REBELS as other NATO MEMBERS crowd onstage left, garbed for war.)

ENGLAND: Alright, lads, who’s up for some war!”
GERMANY: “Ach, ve don’t sink zis is zuch a goot idea. Maybe ve’ll zit zis vun out.
FRANCE: “Tais-toi, Heinz, you didn’t used to be such une pussy. Allons, avec le battaille! Go on, Pietro, you hit him”
ITALY: “Eh, I dunno, Gaston. We useta be-a paisanos but now, not-a so much. I think-a these-a rebels, they don’-a wan’-a me aroun’-a so much any mo'. Maybe-a you hit-a him first, eh?”
UNITED STATES: “Well, go on, now that you’re all here, SOMEbody go take a whack at him…”
FRANCE: “Helas, I would love to, but I don’t seem to have ze resources, me. How about you, Albert?”
ENGLAND: “I say, I don’t know what happened to it, but I seem to have misplaced my aircraft carrier. Could you lend me one, Sam, old boy?”
UNITED STATES: “Well, fuck. What the hell do I hang around with you people for? Can’t you do anything by yourselves?”
REBELS: "You da Big Man! Hit him! Hit him!" (scurry about randomly)UNITED STATES: "Well. OK. Fuck."

(The UNITED STATES, followed by FRANCE, ENGLAND, SPAIN, ITALY, CANADA, BELGIUM, and DENMARK, trudges over and attacks GADDAFI, beating him with a large rubber cruise missile.)

GADDAFI: A sneak attack! Curse you, Western dogs! You have the right to kill me, but you don't have the right to judge me! That's life. There's nobility in that. There's focus. It's genuine. It's crystal and it's pure and it's available to everybody, so just shut your traps and put down your McDonalds, your vaccines, your Us Weekly, your TMZ and the rest of it!”

(The REBELS mill about smartly but on the opposite side of the stage. The Western powers knock GADDAFI down.

UNITED STATES: “C’mon, you little bastards, he’s at your mercy!”

(The REBELS advance towards GADDAFI, who lashes out from the ground with his scimitar, bellowing;)

GADDAFI: “Boom, crush! Night, losers! Winning, duh!”

(The REBELS shriek and flee. The UNITED STATES continues to thrash GADDAFI, who struggles. The other WESTERN NATIONS add their blows, but have started to look around hesitantly.)UNITED STATES: “Well, fuck me sideways. Hey, I’m ready to let you guys finish this beating. Who’s got me?”
FRANCE: “Oh, la’ la’, after you, my dear Albert.”
ENGLAND: “Oh, no, I insist, after you, my dear Gaston!”
ARAB LEAGUE: “Oh! My! Dear! MUST you hit him so…so…hitally? I think you might hurt him!”
UNITED STATES: “That’s the idea, dumbfuck.”
GADDAFI: (still fighting) “From my big beautiful warlock brain, welcome to 'Kaddafi’s Korner'! You're either in my corner, or you're with the trolls!”
UNITED STATES: “Guys..?”
TURKEY: “I don’t want us to take over. It would be wrong!”
ENGLAND: “Really, I insist. After you, Gaston.”
FRANCE: “No, no. You must precede, I insist. After YOU, my dear Albert!”
UNITED STATES: “GUYS…!”
GADDAFI: “What they're not ready for is guys like you and I and Nails and all the other gnarly gnarlingtons in my life, that we are high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks. Boom! Print that, people. See where that goes!”(As the lights fade signaling the end of Scene 1, the confusion on stage continues noisily...)

I'm just sayin': he'll do to the country what he does to Callista

The Man Who Would Be King, Newt Gingrich, has decided that the REAL problem in the Middle East is that we just aren't warry> enough.So he wants to

"Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. It’s also an ideological problem. The United States doesn’t need anybody’s permission. We don’t need to have NATO, who frankly, won’t bring much to the fight. We don’t need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we’re intervening. And we don’t have to send troops. All we have to do is suppress his air force, which we could do in minutes."

All of which is true, and all of which means less than a zero in the calculus of national interests of which Mister Gingrich seems to care not a whit.

Does this idiot recall that, craptacular little Third World shithole that it is, Libya is still a Wesphalian state? That the very definition of national existence is the ability to prevent other people from flying around over your territory "without anyone's permission"?

Right now the Libyans are in the middle of a civil war. The opposing sides in civil wars are notoriously touchy about foreign meddling.We would have gone crackers if the British had openly intervened in ours, as was the Confederate intent (see "Trent Affair, The") or even attempted to "mediate" between the Federal government and the rebels. Why does Gingrich believe that the Libyans, rebel or government, would behave any differently?

This gormless wretch Gingrich is only one of the several right-flank characters who seem to be all excited about killin' them - no, wait, getting OTHER Americans to kill - some Libyans, and you know who these people are; the usual suspects - Hitchens, Krauthammer, and no, I won't link to those dopes. And the biggest single commonality between them is that they none of them suggest the simple expedient of asking the friggin' Libyans if they want help.

I'm all in favor of slotting some dictators. Ask my pals; I practically had to be sedated when the Ceauşescus got their 7.39mm pink slip. Gadaffi would look great dangling tastefully a la Benito, or in the dock alongside Charles Taylor.

But if I want to do that I'll have to wait until this knucklehead Gingrich siezes power; a Libyan dictator is a Libyan problem...until the Libyans ask for my help. So Gadaffi is still a Libyan problem, and if we expect and demand the rights of a soveriegn state we owe it to the rest of the world to behave like one. Even before we were a formally a nation we expected the French to go through channels and sign a treaty of alliance before taking a slap at the Brits on our soil; WTF, Newt? You're supposed to be all historical n' shit (at least you and your ghostwriters seem to pick American history to make up stories about); you don't remember this? Has Callista's botox done something to your brain?So, yes, dummy, we DO "need anyone's permission". We need the permission of the very fucking people you're so anxious to "help", if that's really what this is about and knowing you I doubt very much that it is. To even suggest that we just fly around over someone else's country uninvited reminds the rest of us why your skeevy ass only lasted two terms in the House; because you showed that you had no compunction about bullshitting, lying, shuckin' and jiving if it helped you or your political party.

So if you have something sensible to say about Libya I'd love to hear it.

(sound of crickets chirping)

Okay, fine. You now have my permission to put on your little hat and tool off to do something useful. Like shoving a sock in your pie-hole before you say more dumb stuff like this.

The Bourne Stupidity

I'm a middle-aged American guy; I was raised on "spy thrillers". And don't get me wrong - I enjoy the celluloid adventures of spies and counterspies as much as the next guy.Not to mention the stylings of the deliciously cerebral Franka Potente.

So it's just kind of irking when my country's spies don't seem to have watched those same flicks or have forgotten the plots. WTF, Felix Leiter?

Take the case of Raymond "Not Jason Bourne" Davis.

Remember this guy? The "diplomat" who shot his way out of the holdup in Lahore, Pakistan?Okay; first off - I have no idea what the hell happened in the streets of Lahore on January 27th. It seems very plausible to me that the guys Davis slotted were robbers, bazaar badmashes intent on at least holding him up and possibly murdering him.

But.

This discussion by a BBC reporter reports that

"investigations by the police, forensic labs and the local and international media suggest that the two men were driving away from Mr Davis when they were shot. That "no fingerprints had been uncovered on the triggers of the pistols found on the bodies of the two men. Furthermore he said that tests had shown that the bullets remained in the magazines of their guns, not the chambers."

Even more damning, far from the bad guys the U.S. has suggested,

"...the men have no criminal records as such. Both...were carrying licensed pistols (and) security sources in Lahore say that they were part-time or low-level operatives for the local intelligence services. Although reports are sketchy about what they were doing in relation to Mr Davis, security officials believe it could be the case of a surveillance operation gone horribly wrong."

Well, damn. So maybe it really was the case of a guy getting flaky at the wrong time and busting a cap on a couple of local snoops from the Lahore ISI Nose Patrol.

But, whatever, you've seen the movie and you all know what happens now, right? Our hero disappears into the crowd, makes his way to the "safehouse" where he changes his appearance and his identity cards and then slips out of the country one step ahead of the dictator's secret police (or his own agency, whichever is cooler...). Every spy has seen this part and knows what to do now.Or not.

Seems that the guy gave himself up on the spot, and was thrown into the local carcel.

Now this is the part where the CIA activates its cunning plan, sends its mole into the Lahore cop shop while the suave State Department spokesmodel spins a seamless web of denials and diversions that baffles the locals, enemies, and reporters alike. Our boy is whisked out of the country as if he had never existed, right?

Or not.

Of course this gentleman was not a "legal" CIA officer, accredited as a U.S. diplomat; he was another damn contractor, more of what appears to be the "secret" side of the war in central Asia which is about as secret as Lady GaGa's underwear. Instead of a cunning plan the U.S. government began by loudly beating the stupid drum by demanding his release AS a diplomat, despite the fact that it seems that both the State Department and the Pakistanis knew from the get-go that he was not.What's worse, the U.S. has insisted in doubling-down on this lie from almost immediately after he was arrested until just this past week after everyone from The Lahore News and Advertiser to the Onion published the truth. Finally, after several British news outlets stated the truth, the U.S. 'fessed up.

Well, damn.

So now what?

I doubt whether this guy is going to rot in a Pakistani jail; he'll get some public spankings to placate the Paki mobs and then quietly slip out of the country.But in the meantime, again, the U.S. ends up looking both foolish and deceptive, reinforcing the Dubya image of the idiot cowboy, shooting up the surroundings and bagging nothing but a couple of cottontails and the local schoolmar'm. And looking incompetent; the bumbling spy is a classic staple of movie comedy from Buster Keaton to Peter Sellers.

Don't get me wrong; I'd prefer that my country not be sneaking around other people's countries unless there was a hell of a good reason for it. But I'm realist enough to understand that all sorts of spying happens for all sorts of reasons, and many of those reasons are too secret for me to know. So I know my country is going to spy all sorts of places for all sorts of reasons, good and bad.But is it too much to ask that if we're gonna sneak around the globe making real-life spy films my country tries to spy more like Jason Bourne and James Bond than Phil Moskowitz and Inspector Clouseau?

You Can't Get There From Here

We'v been spending a good bit of time discussing the current events in Egypt. Jim addresses the specifics of the apparent dissonance between our domestic and foreign policies over the protests there in the preceding post; Jason over at "Armchair Generalist" goes even further, describing our Middle East policy as "broken".But I can't honestly see how the U.S. could have taken a different route than backing the strongmen who have ruled in Egypt since Nasser.

We're caught on the cleft stick of our own making because we want two things that, like matter and anti-matter, don't and can't exist together. We want to:

1) back Israel without serious question; we've been fairly supine on every question of Israeli internal defense. The Israelis make their decisions based on their own analyses, but we have been pretty muted when these analyses end up producing the punitive acts that Israel has used to defend itself from its Palestinian enemies. The cumulative effect is to make us look like Israel's complascent sugar daddy. While Israel is a nice little democracy this is really a luxury on our part, since Israel is strategically worthless, but Great Powers are allowed to have their luxuries and Israel is one of ours.

But we also want (and need):

2) at least some sort of passive neutrality from the Arab states, because they control the REAL geopolitical/strategic assets we need from the region; passage through Suez, petroleum, cooperation against the jihadis.

Genuinely "democratic" Arab states would be unlikely to help with #2 if we insisted that they come with us on #1. You can argue this until the end of forever - I personally think that the Arab states would be well off to get Egypt to absorb Gaza, Jordan the West Bank, accept a whopping cash payoff from the U.S./Israel and get the fuck on with life - but the reality is that to get an Egypt to Camp David you NEEDED a Mubarak (or a Sadat, whatever - a leader who had to be responsive to Abdul and Maryam Lunchpail would have risked his life doing it. Sadat did, and did, remember?).

So I don't see how the U.S. has any real options here. To get an "un-broke" policy you'd need to have different goals. So I think the thing here is that walloping the current U.S. leadership about Egypt is hammering on a symptom. The "disease" - the underlying malfunction that produces things like the current U.S. paralysis on Egypt - is that you can't really design a Middle East policy that gets to have both #1 and #2. And discussing the pros and cons - especially the cons - of #1 are completely and utterly off limits in Washington D.C.

It's worth noting that the fall of a U.S. backed dictator doesn't HAVE to be traumatic or disastrous for U.S. foreign policy. Sure, the post-Marcos Philippines closed Subic (Clark was unusable after Pinatubo, anyway) but in the long run the successor governments have been quite cooperative on many issues; the threat of domestic islamic rebels as well as the loom of the dragon to the west surely has a lot to do with that. Post-Pinochet Chile hasn't really been hostile, and post-Somoza-post-Ortega Nicaragua is relatively quiescent. The real notable outlier is the post-Shah Iran, but Egypt doesn't have anyone like the Ayatollah Khomeni to push it towards a violently islamic state.

So overall I suspect that post-Mubarak Egypt, though possibly not as passive on matters involving Israel, has as good a chance of being willing to cooperate with the U.S. to some extent as it does of becoming a rival. But it IS unlikely to cooperate on Israeli issues, and if the U.S. forces those issues and the Egyptian leaders - whoever they turn out to be - are forced to choose, a democratic Egypt would seem to be much less likely to follow the U.S. policy.

And it seems to me that there's no way to really do much about that.

(crossposted from MilPub)

Bite Me

The latest pearls of military wisdom from Our Man in Bananastan:

"One aide as saying McChrystal seized control of the war "by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House."

"One aide called White House National Security Adviser Jim Jones, a retired four star general, a "clown" who was "stuck in 1985."

"On Holbrooke, an aide is quoted saying: "The Boss says he's like a wounded animal. Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to be fired, so that makes him dangerous." McChrystal is also described as exasperated on receiving an e-mail from Holbrooke. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke. I don’t even want to open it."

Obama agreed to dispatch an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan only after months of study that many in the military found frustrating. And the White House's troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to begin bringing them home in July 2011, in what counterinsurgency strategists advising McChrystal regarded as an arbitrary deadline.

McChrystal's team disapproves of the Obama administration, with the exception of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who backed McCrystal's request for additional troops in Afghanistan.

A member of McChrystal's team making jokes about Biden, who was seen as critical of the general's efforts to escalate the conflict and who had favored a more limited counter-terrorism approach. "Biden?" the aide was quoted as saying. "Did you say: Bite me?" Biden initially opposed McChrystal's proposal for additional forces last year. He favored a narrower focus on hunting terrorists."

That's it. I'm now officially sick of my Army's general officer corps. From Ray "The Desert Ox" Odiernio, Abizaid, Sanchez, Slick Dave Petraeus, and now this idiot McChrystal - and remember, though none of these quotes come from the Man Who Wears The Stars these are his dogrobbers, selected for their enthusiastic syncophancy and utterly craven lickspittality...if they had an independent thought somewhere in their bullet heads they would be out leading a presence patrol in West Buttfuckistan - I swear, I can't find one of these douchenozzles I'd consider capable of leading four privates to a latrine.The quality of American general officers has never, in my opinion, been truly high. The officer selection process has always seemed to follow the old Japanese adage "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down". And we've had eight years of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld ideal of the big-R Republican general, committed not to the safety of the small-r republic but the geopolitical fantasies of the red-meat wing of the Grand Old Party.

And here is the result.

I have no doubt that Holbrooke is a paranoid dick and Biden an interfering old nanny goat. But;

1. Our entire system is built around civilian control of the military. No doubt that George Washington and Ulysses Grant thought that their civilian masters were dicks and nannies, too. But they got it, and kept their fucking mouths shut.

2. And this entire clusterfuck in central Asia is all about civilian political objectives. Killing raggedy-assed Afghan hillmen is utterly meaningless, and if McChrystal doesn't get this - and these quotes suggest that he and his dogrobbers don't - then he's not just a problem but THE problem and needs to go, like, yesterday.

3. And the final word on this comes from my old First Sergeant Holmes, uttered when he caught me mouthing off about the political situation in Panama, circa 1986."Who da fuck elected you, sergeant?" he snarled.

"Nobody, First Sergeant." I replied.

"You gots a whole bunch of politicians folks in CONUS done elected they ass and they job to tell yo ass what the fuck you gotta do. It you job to shut yo piehole and get the fuckin' job done they tells you to do. You gots a problem with that, you can tell yo momma. But you shut the fuck up around the troops, and around the civilians. Are we Airborne?"

"Airborne, First Sergeant!"

It seems that if we're going to keep him around we need to recall First Sergeant Holmes from his well-deserved retirement to adminster some Old Army wall-to-wall counseling to the good general and his aides.

The sooner the better.

(cross-posted to MilPub)

Removing the Teat

Interesting post over at Spenser Ackerman's place here.

Jason at Armchair Generalist discusses it - and the Cordesman piece that set the discussion in motion - here, and he is somewhat skeptical of Cordesman's unwillingness to come out and flat say "this isn't do-able with the resources we're willing to commit and the political capital we have to spend".I'll go further than that. The problem with the way Western nations, or at least the U.S., does foreign internal defense and rebellion suppression (which is all this is - it's trying to gut a slave revolt, same-same as in Cicero's time.) is that by our very nature we infantilize and marginalize the local proxies we adopt. We make them into little local copies of ourselves, or as close as we can. I don't know why, but it probably has a lot to do with our incapability to imagine a better way to fight war than the American way - lots of firepower and mechanization, lots of dead stuff, the liberation-of-Metz kind of war.

But this kind of war - and this kind of government, since we tend to do the same thing to the local political elites - takes an obscene amount of jack, cash which these crappy little countries don't have. So essentially these supposed foreign proxies get locked on to our military and economic teat and neither want nor try to let go. We end up with a crippled proxy run by a kleptocratic parasitic elite whose "army" is a little Mini-ME, a U.S. Army minus the air, armor, and artillery support, minus the trustworthy officer corps, a brutally incompetent bayonet-prop for the Quisling throne.We've been here before, remember?

The U.S. Army has always sucked at this. You could trace it back to George Washington's day, when the "lesson" he learned from Braddock's defeat wasn't that low-tech irregular soldiers do better in low-intensity guerrilla wars than expensive, foreign regulars, but that you just have to be more...regular. The last chance we might have had to produce genuinely effective foreign proxy armies - the sort of thing that people like "Chinese" Gordon used to do for the British - vanished some time in the middle Nineties when the Charlie Beckwith/SAS/Ranger faction captured the U.S. Army Special Forces and turned them into a glorified SWAT team. We haven't managed to create an effective foreign armed force - particularly one that can stand on its own for more than the time it takes to load the swag into the trunk of the Lexus, huck the door keys at the maid, and grab a hat - since the fucking Apache Scouts.

And they were pretty much "trained" when we got'em.

Think about it. The Americas? Africa? Asia? Where has a large American maneuver MAC produced a local military that successfully resisted a truly popular local guerrilla movement - none of this crappy fake-ass MRLA stuff like in Malaya - serious, hard-core G's like the Shining Path or the Tamil Tigers?

We just don't have the right stuff. We're shitty colonialists.

Look at what we're doing now in Afghanistan in "going after corruption". Think about that. Let's say that American culture was permeated with a tradition that put family loyalty first, that rewarded compliant and sycophantic servitude with largesse and the dibs of the public purse, where bribery and kickbacks were an accepted part of doing business.

Yeah, right, like the Bush family, right, you get it.

So along comes the foreigner with a poker up his ass and says "No more fucking baksheesh, Ali, get it? No more mordida. Get you fucking hand out of the till and get your fucking cousins off the payroll most rikki-tik."

Would that make you happy? Would you want to be like the foreigner - even if the defenestration of the insiders made it easier for you, the outsider? Or would you be irked because it meant that when you got a shot at being the insider you'd miss out on on the lovely lush?

Thought so.

So it's even simpler than Ackerman or Exum or Cordesman lay out. After eight years we've done nothing but created a self-licking ice cream cone. Every "victory" we shoot out over the locals makes our local "allies" weaker, more dependent on us. We can't "win" because the longer we stay the worse we'll be for our Afghan proxies.

We've given them eight years of "breathing space" and so far they've sucking in Sammy's teat and are giving it all the tongue love they can manage.

It's time to wean this monstrous infant.Before its habits of sucking cash out of the government teat begin to spread even further.

(Cross-posted to MilPub)

The strong do what they can...(Israel-Palestine edition)

The latest "controversy" over Israel appears to concern some remarks made by Helen Thomas about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The McClatchy article quotes her as saying:

"Any comments on Israel," an offscreen voice asks Thomas.
“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” Thomas says.
“Where should they go?” the offscreen voice asks.
She responds that they should go home to Germany, Poland or the United States."

Thomes has been forced to resign as a reporter for the Hearst service (a delightful bit of hypocrisy, given the Hearst papers historic tradition of lying about foreign affairs). She has also been forced to issue the usual boilerplate statment of contrition:

"I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon."

Her sudden disgrace is now so complete that even utterly demolished media whores like Judith Miller can take swings at her, ringing in with her American version of Schindler's Law*: "At least she offered Jews some options other than Auschwitz."OK.

You all know my opinions about Israel in general and our role in its creation in particular. And, in this case, I'm getting a little pissed off about this slagging off on Thomas. She had an opinion and expressed it. That's pretty much the essence of "freedom of speech", one of the fundamental principles of this country. Speaking freely doesn't mean you're senile, it doesn't mean you should retire. Even less does it mean that the U.S. government should apologize for the opinion (Gibbs, the White House flack, had to make sure that We the People know that Obama loves him some Zion: "...those remarks...do not reflect, certainly, the opinion of, I assume, most of the people in here and certainly not of the administration.") Jesus wept, are we THAT spineless and timid?It would appear so.

Thomas' is not a popular opinion here in the U.S., where we've spent pretty much the whole 60 years since Truman's day trying to pretend that the entire business that ended up with a Jewish state on the eastern Med wasn't the result of a bunch of dirty deeds done dirt cheap by the imperialist Brits and ratified by a bunch of Americans all guilt-ridden about the Holocaust.

But to wish the Israeli Jews gone, to wish the entire enterprise of Israel undone, is certainly no more "offensive and reprehensible", no less muttonheaded, than the notion widely expressed in Israel and by Israel-lovers all over the world that the Arab residents of the former Ottoman provinces of Palestine should just "get over it", take their lickings, forget their past and just accept that a bunch of European Jews and their descendants get their and their father's and grandfather's land and all their stuff.I don't have a solution to the problem of Israel. I don't think there IS a solution; two groups of people want the exact same place. But frankly I wish the starting point of this issue wasn't a damn job-lot of head-wagging about how senile and messed up Helen Thomas is because she says straight up how you or I would feel if a bunch of foreigners had invaded our land in our grandparent's day, kicked us out and told us to suck it up and get over it.

We're grownups and need to start acting like it. We live in a world of polities; nations, states, provinces, tribes. Within those groups there are "rights" and "wrongs", laws and agreements that regulate what we can do to each other.

But between polities there are only the collision of values, morals and relative strengths. In a perfect world these would be just and fair. In our real world, the "bad guys" win as often as not.The Normans weren't "better" or "more worthy" than the Saxons, the Europeans than the Aztecs or Shawnee or Inuit, just technically, tactically, or politically more capable.

We need to stop pretending that the people we "like" are always good, decent, just, right and deserving. Just because Israel is a western democracy doesn't mean that its existence is an unmitigated good to everyone, or that its actions are always good and right. If we believe this, or refuse to listen to anyone who tells us differently, or base our actions on that belief, then we are fools and we will act in foolish ways based on our foolery as often as not.

The Israelis - down to the 10th generation - have, and will have, exactly the same "right" to the place that we white folks have to the U.S. We took it from the original owners and keep it by force. So did they. It makes us, and them, strong.It doesn't make us, or them, "right".

Or the Native Americans - or Helen Thomas restating the opinions of the original owners of Palestine - offensive, or reprehensible, or illegitimate, or foolish, or wrong for not liking that.

*(Schindler's Law: "As any discussion on Israel grows longer, the probability of equating dislike of the ideal of, the fact of, or the actions of Israel with the kind of murderous anti-Semitism that resulted in the Nazi extermination camps approaches 1."

Corollary to Schindler's Law: "Once such an observation is made, the discussion is finished and whoever mentioned Nazis, death camps, or the Holocaust has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.")