Tuesday, September 22, 2009

McChrystal Does a Paulson …

Time flies when you are having fun, but it’s been a little over a year since then- Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson staggered over to Capital Hill from the warrens of the Treasury building and threatened fire and perdition unless he received $700 billion dollars – immediately – from the taxpayers’ grandchildren.

It’s important to consider the context: Lehman, AIG, the GSE’s were bust and much of the world banking business had stopped. Paulson was confused about what to do, so he panicked:

At the time of the votes on the $700-billion bailout bill, which finally passed Oct. 4, there were dire warnings of calamity if the bill failed. Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., said martial law would have to be enacted to keep public order if it didn’t pass. Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Ala. said the aftermath would be comparable to the scenes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., revealed on “The Pat Campbell Show” on 1170 KFAQ, a talk radio station in Tulsa, Okla., where some of these ideas in Congress may have originated. He divulged details of a conference call with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson from mid-September, which may be behind why some members of Congress were warning of catastrophe.

“We had a conference call early on,” Inhofe said on Nov. 18. “It was on a Friday I think – a week and half before the vote on Oct 1. So it would have been the middle … what was it – the 19th of September, we had a conference call. In this conference call – and I guess there’s no reason for me not to repeat what he said, but he said – he painted this picture you just described. He said, ‘This is serious. This is the most serious thing that we faced.’”

According to Inhofe, Paulson said this would be far worse than the Great Depression – a time when unemployment was at 24.9 percent and U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) suffered steep declines.

So it goes. Now comes the US military commander in Afghanistan before the US and demands … a large bailout … a commitment of resources presumably from the taxpayers’ grandchildren or else!

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

This is how the greatest nation on Earth makes policy. The leadership cadre is blackmailed by the cadre’s employees! Here we go again.

As with Paulson and his pet TARP, the redoubtedly clever and conniving McChrystal will get his allotment. By leaking his report to the press – as did Paulson during the firestorm last September – the General ties the President’s hands. Nobody in America will tolerate failure and the media conspires to paint the leadership into a corner.

Unurprisingly, the same media is filled with news stories of Al Qaeda terrorists in America. The big fear button that President Bush left behind in the Oval Office is pushed by the ‘change agent’ who refuses to surrender the perk of any predecessor.

Keep in mind that all the resources that any combat expansion in landlocked Afghanistan will have to be borrowed from the future. Our grandchildren cannot deny us this loan, just as they did not deny the funding for TARP. They certainly can refuse to pay for it.

The American war in Afghanistan will go on until it becomes prohibitively expensive. Ironically, the prosecution of the war accelerates the economic pressures that result in that prohibition taking root. Our entire establishment is in denial. Call it the ‘Federal-Reserve-I-Zation’ of the American administrative mind. The Fed believes in magic. It can endlessly create more and more of its ‘product’ at near- zero cost. Certainly all other aspects of productive American society can do the same?

If we and the president don’t absorb these revelations and learn from them, the salutary effects of the drama’s denouement, however triumphant for Obama in the short run, will be for naught.

There were few laughs in the 36 hours of tumult, but Jon Stewart captured them with a montage of cable-news talking heads expressing repeated shock that an interloper from a rock ’n’ roll magazine could gain access to the war command and induce it to speak with self-immolating candor. Politico theorized that Hastings had pulled off his impertinent coup because he was a freelance journalist rather than a beat reporter, and so could risk “burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.”

That sentence was edited out of the article — in a routine updating, said Politico — after the blogger Andrew Sullivan highlighted it as a devastating indictment of a Washington media elite too cozy with and protective of its sources to report the unvarnished news. In any event, Politico had the big picture right. It’s the Hastings-esque outsiders with no fear of burning bridges who have often uncovered the epochal stories missed by those with high-level access. Woodward and Bernstein were young local reporters, nowhere near the White House beat, when they cracked Watergate. Seymour Hersh was a freelancer when he broke My Lai. It was uncelebrated reporters in Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, not journalistic stars courted by Scooter and Wolfowitz, who mined low-level agency hands to challenge the “slam-dunk” W.M.D. intelligence in the run-up to Iraq.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Nincompoops Running Amok …

I love it when highly- trained, experienced professional people come up with the same conclusions I do.

This is from Tom Engelhardt, author and a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Speaking about the inflating Afghanistan bubble and the games being played by the military, Tom highlights the Petraeus factor; I’d forgotten about Petraeus, who disappeared into Centcom the minute Bush was defeated last fall.

Bush loved Petraeus, he looked like a general with all of his decorations – to me he looked more like a Christmas tree with too many ornaments. Ulysses Grant was a real general who won a war who never bothered with the seaweed … but then, he never had to lobby the American people and their leadership for bailouts.

Another reason he was a Bush favorite was that he never publicly embarrassed himself like the other Bush cronies. Also unlike the others, Petraeus was and is clearly ambitious, perhaps positioning himself to make a Giuliani- like run for the Republican presidential nomination as the terrorism pimp du jour.

“Holy hamburger, Batman!” This would be worth living for; the overweening and calculating Petraeus and the looney Sarah Palin on the same ticket! Is America a great country or what? Talk about opening up the insane asylum and letting the inmates escape … to appear over and over on television! I might have to buy a TV for this!

Engelhardt gives Petraeus the largest share of weaseling responsibility:

On taking over, McChrystal, who had previously been a counterterrorism guy (and isn’t about to give that up, either), swore fealty to counterinsurgency doctrine (that is, to Petraeus) by proclaiming that the American goal in Afghanistan must not be primarily to hunt down and kill Taliban insurgents, but to “protect the population.” He also turned to a “team” of civilian experts, largely gathered from Washington think-tanks, a number of whom had been involved in planning out Petraeus’s Iraq surge of 2007, to make an assessment of the state of the war and what needed to be done. Think of them as the Surgettes.

As in many official reassessments, the cast of characters essentially guaranteed the results before a single meeting was held. Based on past history and opinions, this team could only provide one Petraeus-approved answer to the war: more — more troops, up to 40,000-45,000 of them, and other resources for an American counterinsurgency operation without end.

Hence, even if McChrystal’s name is on it, the report slipped to Bob Woodward which just sandbagged the president has a distinctly Petraeusian shape to it. In a piece linked to Woodward’s bombshell in the Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung wrote of unnamed officials in Washington who claimed “the military has been trying to push Obama into a corner.” The language in the coverage elsewhere has been similar.

Engelhardt points to president Obama’s greatest character flaw, his insecurity:

He took up Afghanistan (“the right war”) in the presidential campaign as proof that, despite wanting to end the war in Iraq, he was tough.

It’s good news that Afghanistan can now be considered a mineral-rich country. But no one should think the massively underdeveloped South Asian nation is now going to leap onto the world stage as a well developed country exporting huge amounts of iron ore, copper, lithium and other minerals.

“This is an uphill climb for Afghanistan,” said State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley. In fact, there is no part of making good on the revelation in the New York Times that Afghanistan may be sitting on $1 trillion worth of mineral wealth that is going to be easy. For openers, Afghanistan is now a “hot” war zone and Taliban forces that oppose the U.S. and its allies cannot be expected to allow mineral extraction that would benefit Hamid Karzai’s government – to the Taliban’s detriment – to take place.

It’s a done deal. Drone war is, and will be, us.

A Pilotless Military

If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment.

It’s a moment that could, of course, be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the U.S. as the soul-crushing Skynet), or .as a remarkable tale of how “networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare” (as Christopher Drew recently put it in the New York Times). It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment, or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work “in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk… and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts.” It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice — the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of miles away — or (as Col. Mathewson would prefer) a new form of valor.

The drones — their use expanding exponentially, with ever newer generations on the drawing boards, and the planes even heading for “the homeland” — could certainly be considered a demon spawn of modern warfare, or (as is generally the case in the U.S.) a remarkable example of American technological ingenuity, a problem-solver of the first order at a time when few American problems seem capable of solution. Thanks to our technological prowess, it’s claimed that we can now kill them, wherever they may be lurking, at absolutely no cost to ourselves, other than the odd malfunctioning drone. Not that even all CIA operatives involved in the drone wars agree with that one. Some of them understand perfectly well that there’s a price to be paid.

As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one President Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it’s also distinctly us. In fact, drone warfare fits the America of 2010 tighter than a glove. With its consoles, chat rooms, and “single shooter” death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook, and video games. That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood of the moment.

The Air Force “detachments” that “manage” the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are “detached” from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn’t. If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war.

After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.

As a start, with no draft and so no citizen’s army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families). It occurs thousands of miles away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity. As Pratap Chatterjee reported recently, “[E]very US soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world.” And a majority of those contractors aren’t even U.S. citizens.

If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate among that detached populace. In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones. We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind. The question is: Have we redefined our detachment as a new version of citizenly valor (and covered it over by a constant drumbeat of “support for our troops”)?

In a perfect world the President would pick up McChrystal’s report, glance at it, then toss it into the trash can. All of this could be done on television. The President would then fire McChrystal on the spot. He would order the Pentagon to draft a plan to remove all US forces from Afghanistan in six weeks. The President would inform all and sundry that the efforts begun in 2002 were successful and additional efforts are unnecessary. To outmaneuver the fear mongers, he would propose a large tax increase to pay for added military activities if the public was so inclined.