The Blaster

Why Geo-Engineering Is Like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

2012-02-09T03:03:00.009-05:00

Climate Science Goes Megalomaniacal

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/09/climate-science-goes-megalomaniacal/

A February 6 report in the Guardian describes budding efforts to displace decarbonizing with geo-engineering as the goal for reducing the predicted catastrophic effects of global warming. At present, these efforts are being funded by mega-wealthy private citizens like Bill Gates, but some traditional environmentalists as well as some decarbonizers are becoming worried that climate theory is setting off in a new direction. Perhaps that is why the story appeared in the Guardian of all places. Instead of its usual uncritical climate gushiness, the Guardian delves into the smarmier side of climate science — its dependence on money.

Their dependence on money is a subject proponents of anthropogenic global warming avoid like the plague, even though they are wont to accuse anyone who disagrees with them as being in the pay of the fossil fuel companies. The Guardian report is important, because it inadvertently shines a light on how the intersection of money and groupthink among insular cohesive groups sharing a common interest is discrediting climate science in particular, but also science in general. (I am not introducing groupthink as a casual buzz word but in the context the distinguished psychologist Irving Janis used in his classic book Groupthink. Anyone who believes groupthink is not a problem in the insular self-righteous climate science community, should read the Hockey Stick Illusion or wade through just a few of the infamous emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.)

Obviously, geo-engineering the earth’s climate would be a big deal, culturally as well as scientifically. It would make the pyramids, the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program look puny and intellectually trivial in comparison. By necessity, indeed by definition, geo-engineering would be forever dependent on analyses of the outputs of computerized global climate models (GCMs), because we can not put anything as complex as the world’s atmosphere on a lab bench or in a wind tunnel for testing. Computer models, like all scientific theories, are mental constructs of reality — really analogies — to represent and cope with that reality. The first point to note is that no model can be perfect or exact in its representation of reality. All models are imperfect and therefore mutable, as the historian Thomas Kuhn, among others, explained in his classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. All scientific models must be continually tested to ensure their predictions match up to external conditions, and as the precision of observations increases, sooner of later, all scientific models become creaky and eventually need to be replaced with a newer construction to better explain a reality that is always receding as one seems to get closer to it by making more precise observations.

The second point to note is that GCMs are complex mathematical constructs made by like-minded or group-thinking minds. They are not the products of individuals. This requires a consensus-based mentality and the intense communal effort required to build these models reinforces that mentality. The need to raise money to pay for these models further intensifies the communal outlook. Consensus building, and especially the invocation of consensual authority, shapes the mentality of contemporary climate scientists in a very different way from the conceptions of physics that shaped the individual mental outlooks during the experiments that produced the models of the atom that competed for acceptance during the first half of the twentieth century. The great physicist who invented the first model of the atom, Niels Bohr, for example, used to introduce his lectures by saying everything he was about to say was wrong. By that he meant no theory is eternal.

You will not hear Bohr’s kind of humility, tolerance, or encouragement of dissent and debate from dogmatic proponents of global warming like Michael Mann or James Hansen, ironically, both physicists, even though the GCMs they are basing their sense of authority on have not been validated with empirical data (or in the case of Mann’s infamous Hockey Stick, have been shown to be statistically flawed). The dogmatic sense of certainty exhibited by goupthinking climate scientists exists despite the fact that the comprehensive data needed to test the GCM models for matchups to the environment simply do not exist. Yet, this uncertainty is not at all unlike that which created the far more open-minded debate among the advocates of different atomic models, like Bohr, Schrödinger, or Heisenberg in the early Twentieth Century. So, the authority of the GCMs needed to justify geo-engineering must be based on unvalidated assumptions about reality — really conjectures which are now stated as dogma, like, for example, the crucial quantification of the sensitivity of the warming response to changes in CO2 levels.

But there is more to the speculative analytical pathway leading climate science into the geo-engineering cul de sac, which brings me to my third point. To justify the huge public expenditures and diversion of resources needed to geo-engineer the world, it will be necessary to perform cost-effectiveness analyses of the predicted benefits in a political context to convince policy makers of the need to undertake such a drastic and costly course of action. Although the Guardian does not mention it, I have met some global warming alarmists (all card-carrying decarbonizers) who are already advocating that we combine the output of the GCMs with econometric models of the global economy to predict the global relationship between the monetary inputs to the economic benefits of global temperature reduction via solutions like carbon sequestration, etc. If you want to know how accurate econometric models are, just ask Alan Greenspan. This kind of operation, clearly, would be like piling a house of cards on top of a house of cards.

Yet, the econometric-GCM mansion of cards is probably inevitable. It is a tiny logical step for advocates of geo-engineering to link their theoretical GCMs to econometric models, and given the money needed (and the sacrifices that would be made elsewhere), cost-benefit analyses will eventually become necessary. A policy decision to launch a “Manhattan Plus” project to geo-engineer the earth’s climate based on analyses of the output of such poorly understood computer models (GCMs and econometric) would go beyond madness and descend into megalomania. The Guardian report inadvertently makes the madness quite clear: some climate scientists are calling for a political consensus to geo-engineer the globe, because the world cannot reach a political agreement on the vastly simpler problem of simply reducing carbon emissions. Such an argument is at once illogical and bizarre. Perhaps this yawning disconnect is why this report appeared in the Guardian, usually the most rabid pro global-warming mainstream newspaper in the world.

But of course, the megalomania implicit in geo-engineering has nothing to do with madness; it is about a group of like-minded intelligent people trying to feather their nest by creating a cash cow to do what they think is right and good. This is something I saw every day in the Pentagon.

Indeed, creating cash cows in the name of the greater good is the essence of the Pentagon’s game. My 28 years experience in the Pentagon made me quite familiar with the steps needed to create the financial equivalent of a self-licking ice cream cone: (1) Inflate a threat to scare the bejeezus out of the people and induce politicians to unleash a torrent of publicly-funded money; (2) then, front-load a solution to neutralize that threat by overstating its benefits, understating its costs, and downplaying the uncertainties surrounding what is at best a poorly understood course of action; and then, (3) politically engineer a social safety net by spreading the money (grants and contracts) around the polity to lock in the constituent dependencies needed to keep the money flowing after the inevitable problems begin to surface.

Incidentally, the geo-engineering game, if publicly funded, will be manna from heaven for the US hi-tech weapons industry, which cannot compete commercially, but is in need of diversification, because of marginal cutbacks in the rate of future growth in the Pentagon’s budget. You can bet what little is left of your IRA that defense mega-giants like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman will be attracted to the cash flow potential of geo-engineering like flies to honey, should a serious geo-engineering effort begin to materialize.

Speaking of the similarities between the advocates of geo-engineering to the inhabitants of the Pentagon and the defense industry — consider, as an example, the resemblance of using computer simulations to cope with the uncertainties of geo-engineering to the use of computer simulations in the now deeply troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. Bear in mind, the Pentagon wrote the script for basing high-cost decisions with long term consequences on highly complex, poorly-understood computer driven simulations, while short-shrifting testing. It has more experience in modeling than just about any organization in the world. It began cost-effectiveness modeling on computers in the mid 1960s and has continued with increasing intensity ever since. Nevertheless, the unfolding debacle of the F-35 has taken these kinds of simulations to a new level of disaster: No less an authority that Frank Kendall, the acting Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition said recently that the F-35 program was started with the idea of putting it into production before it was fully tested under ”the optimistic prediction that we were good enough at modeling and simulation that we would not find problems in flight test.” … He characterized this decision as “acquisition malpractice” … that … “was wrong, and now we are paying for that.” Of course, Kendall’s use of “we” is a wee bit disingenuous, because it is the taxpayer not the Pentagon who is footing the malpractice bill.

It goes without saying that the uncertainties limiting our understanding of our ability to model the future consequences of a decision to design and produce the F-35 are trivial compared to those of geo-engineering the entire climate system. But humility is not in order, because geo-engineers, like milcrats and defense contractors, will be spending other people’s money.

F-35: Out of Altitude, Airspeed, and Ideas — But Never Money

2012-01-30T12:31:00.000-05:00

By CHUCK SPINNEY, Time Battleland, January 30, 2012

http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2012/01/30/f-35-out-of-altitude-airspeed-and-ideas-but-never-money/

The Marines' F-35B lands aboard the USS Wasp during recent flight tests

No program better illustrates the pathologies of the weapons acquisition process as it is currently practiced by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) than the entirely predictable, and in this case, predicted, problems dragging the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter into a dead man’s spiral.

The F-35 in on track to be the most expensive program in the history of the Defense Department, and it has repeated just about every mistake we invented since Robert McNamara concocted the multimission, multi-service TFX — a program conceived with the same kind of fanciful one-shoe fits all imaginings as the F-35.

Technical problems, cost overruns, and schedule slippages caused the TFX to implode into one of the most infamous debacles in Pentagon’s history. The result was the super-costly single-mission (deep strike), single service, swing-wing F-111. Planes were delivered without mission essential avionics and sat on the runway for two years awaiting parts. Production rates were slowed and total production quantities were reduced from 1,500 to 500. That cutback would have worked materially to wreck tactical fighter aviation in the Air Force, had it not been for the intervention of a brilliant iconoclastic band of military officers and civilians, who became known in the Pentagon and industry as the Fighter Mafia (their exploits are described here).

The Fighter Mafia began its operation by saving the F-15 from going down the same pathway to swing-wing oblivion as the F-111, and then conceived the lower cost, high-performance F-16 and the lethal A-10 attack aircraft. Together these three airplanes were produced at sufficiently high production rates to modernize and expand the tactical fighter force in the late 1970s through the mid 1980s — something not achieved by any other major category of force structure. Ironically, the bulk of these airplanes were purchased with money appropriated during the Carter Administration. Costs skyrocketed and production rates declined as soon as the Reagan Administration began to flood money into Pentagon, because the contractors loaded these planes with bells and whistles … and raised prices, sometimes quite arbitrarily, according to official data I assembled while working in the Pentagon in the 1980s.

Today there is no Fighter Mafia to rescue tactical aviation form the predators in the MICC. But the boondoggles remain: Like the ill-fated TFX, the F-35 is planned to be produced in high quantities for all three services. Like the TFX, the future of fighter aviation is dependent on the high F-35 production rates. Like the TFX the F-35 has suffered from chronic requirements creep, technical problems (engineering change proposals are now flooding in like water going over Niagara Falls — an official summary of the current technical problems can be found here). Like the TFX, the F-35 is suffering severe cost overruns, and horrendous schedule slippages as production rates are cut back. And like the TFX, the F-35, now entering its sixth year of low rate production, was put into production way before before its technical/cost problems were solved, a process known as concurrent engineering and manufacturing development that guarantees costly backfits and/or specification relaxations (known in the trade as ‘managing to a rubber baseline).

But the F-35 program is not at serious risk, despite all the hysterical hype in the trade press — not by a long shot. The F-35′s political safety net has been front- loaded and politically engineered (the general practices of the power games are explained here) with exquisite malice of forethought. Domestically, the F-35 employs 130,000 people and 1300 domestic suppliers in 47 states and Puerto Rico. The only states missing the gravy train are Hawaii, Wyoming, and North Dakota. Internationally, there are already cooperative development/production plans involving nine countries, and more are in the offing. Given the intensity of the geographic carpet-bombing of contracts around the globe, can there be any question why the Secretary of the Air Force said in September, “”Simply put, there is no alternative to the F-35 program. It must succeed.” If you think that is an accident, dear reader, I have a Brooklyn Bridge to sell you.

I will be writing more about many of these problems in the future, but today I want to concentrate on the gold-plating process at the front the end — by introducing a remarkable discussion of requirements creep.

At issue is the short take off and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35B for the Marine Corps to replace its AV-8B Harrier jump jets and its F-18C/D fighter/bombers. My friend Bob Cox, a senior reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram posted an amazing entry by a serving Marine on hisblog. Cox has given me permission to reproduce it below.

In addition to being a thoughtful critique, it is an inspiring example of an officer’s integrity on the one hand and a telling discussion of the problems with the basic STOVL requirement the Marine Corps is wedded to, on the other. I have heard many Marines utter similar critiques in hushed tones behind closed doors since the late 1970s, but few have stated them openly. This requirement is not a minor issue, because the STOVL specifications have caused untold compromises in the already heavily compromised F-35 design. After reading it, I urge interested readers to check out commenters’ reaction to the Marine’s assertions at this link. Attached herewith is Cox’s blog entry:

JANUARY 27, 2012

Marine questions value of STOVL jets, Harrier and F-35B

Occasionally someone in the active duty military has the courage to go off the script and say what they really think about their service’s dogma and pet projects.

Here’s a piece by a Marine aviator questioning the value and purpose of the Marine Corps love and commitment to the STOVL fighter-attack airplane, the Harrier and now the costly and complex F-35B.

Other analysts and experts have said it before, probably some Marines too, but in his blog “Boats Against the Current,” Peter J. Munson, an active duty officer and KC-130 commander, lays out much of the case against the F-35B. Marine generals love to argue it gives them the capability to go fight close to the front lines, without air bases, but never bother to add how many truckloads of fuel and supplies and men and defense weaponry will have to be hauled over land to that forward base, and at what cost and vulnerability to enemy attack.

Munson writes:

The Harrier has surely been a large part of Marine aviation since 9/11, but its STOVL characteristics were rarely, if ever, critical to the conduct of operations. If anything, the capability was a liability when it came to the requirement for long on-station times, multiple ordnance options, and tedious scanning of compounds and cities with targeting pods in support of troops on the ground.

While Harriers have conducted some forward rearming and refueling at shorter strips, these were more driven by the Harrier’s limitations and the desire to validate its expeditionary capability than a value added to the fight. That is, while a Harrier was rearming and refueling, a Hornet would be overhead, sensor still on target, refueling from a KC-130, more weapons still on the wing.

So, when the program hits a rough spot again, which I think it will, and when the budget adjusters come knocking, the Marine Corps needs to be honest about how much STOVL capability it really needs to maintain its close air support capability aboard amphibious shipping, how soon unmanned aerial systems can fill that gap, and what the best option is for the rest of our close air support needs.

[Back to Cox:]

One can’t help but suspect that when former Defense Secretary Bob Gates put the F-35B on probation last January that he had some of these same arguments in mind, but didn’t want to fight a war with the Marines in his final months in office. Secretary Panetta last week swooped in and freed the “B,” winning friends in USMC HQ and Lockheed Martin, among othe places.

The extraordinary complexity and demands of the F-35B have undoubtedly hampered the whole F-35 problem, creating technical problems and sucking up limited (in Pentagon terms) development dollars and engineering resources. The need to redesign the whole aircraft (all three models) to take out weight was largely an effort to salvage any combat payload for the B-model. Now, with the airframes of early planes showing cracks and wear and tear early in their lives one has to wonder how much of those and future problems will be due to weight reduction for the F-35B.
- Bob Cox

Diffusing the Iranian Crisis

2012-01-18T08:58:00.000-05:00

Attached herewith is an essay written by William R. Polk outlining a strategy for diffusing the Iranian crisis. I am posting it with his permission. He is a historian and foreign policy expert who specializes in the Middle East and Central Asia. The essay is written from the perspective of foreign policy. Polk lays out parameters to be considered and introduces a possible strategy for diffusing the U.S.-Iran crisis.

Bear in mind, Polk does not address how the US government would would resolve what he acknowledges are ‘tricky’ -- and I would add potentially explosive -- domestic political issues attending to his solution; like for starters the oil and Israeli lobbies the President must neutralize with when designing a solution. An engineer might think of Polk’s proposal as a preliminary design concept that needs to be fleshed out by the limitations of what is possible. I believe it is a good starting point for evolving a cogent national debate at a time when passions, interests, and factions are driving perceptions.

Chuck Spinney

Evolving a Pathway for Defusing the Iranian Crisis

by William R. Polk (bio)

17 January 2012

The only real solution to nuclear weapons in the Middle East is a nuclear free zone. I have been hammering away on that theme for years. In addition to many papers on my website, I wrote about it extensively in my little 2009 book Understanding Iran. However, as I pointed out in that book (p. 209-211) as hard as it would be to achieve regionally, it would be even less likely (or attractive to Iran) so long as America takes an aggressive stance toward Iran. Since "Once a country acquires a nuclear weapon and the capacity to deliver it, it is immune to attack. Thus, I believe, it would be ahistorical and illogical for Iran not to be acquiring at least the capacity to manufacture a nuclear weapon...What restraints are there, or could there be, on such a policy? It is almost certain that threat is not among them. The more Iran feels threatened the more incentive it has to push its nuclear program toward the acquisition of a weapon. Nor have sanctions worked. Particularly against a less organized and therefore less fragile economy, sanctions have little leverage. They were tried by the British against Iran in the 1950s without result." So I laid out (p 211) a three-step policy that i thought (and think) has the best chance as things now stand.

I am less sanguine about helpful intermediaries. Turkey, China, and perhaps Brazil could play a somewhat more than cosmetic role, but the iranians are unlikely to be swayed by them if they continue to feel threatened and if, as I think, they will see the move to acquire a weapon/weapons is what would make an attack on them logically less likely. My rule of thumb is always to imagine myself on the other side of the table: As an Iranian policy planner I would certainly urge my government to keep going as fast and as secretly as possible toward acquisition.

What might change? ironically, it may be that only if Iran actually acquires a weapon will the Israelis agree to a nuclear free zone. The danger, obviously, is that the Israelis will attack during the acquisition period. They keep on saying that they will and I believe them. I have been crying "wolf" for years and while I, like the little boy in the fable, was wrong, the wolf really was there and finally ate the boy. What would invite an attack -- if i were an Israeli hard liner, I would think -- is that Israel doesn't have to win or even to have a chance of winning or even slowing down the Iranian acquisition process. All it has to do is to start the conflict. Then, the US will almost inevitably be drawn in, even if the Republicans don't win the White House. And once drawn in, where could the US stop? The very momentum of conflict and the inevitable burst of short-sighted American gung-ho patriotism would carry it onto the ground. If the Iranians surprise us all and manage to sink a carrier or even a tug, could Obama stop? if they scare the hell out of the oil shippers and gasoline prices leap at the pumps throughout America, could Obama stop? So, the Israelis have their hand on the throttle and no one I can see has a hand firmly on the brake.

There is another, more obscure, factor that i feel strongly: people get jaded at the jumping off place. I remember with real fear and personal shame that when i was a member of the Crisis Management Committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis, there came a moment -- fortunately it quickly passed but it was seductive at the time -- when I thought, "what the hell. We might as well get it over with." I was exhausted. And I assume JFK, Bob McNamara and others were more tired than I. I don't profess to share many human emotions with Bibi, but I could conceive of his jumping across the line when under such (even if largely self-generated) stress.

If Obama were half the man we all thought he was, he could make the difference. I see a fairly simple path for him:

1.) Go back over what you and I know and put on a sort of "fire-side chat" more elaborate than FDR used to do to explain what a confrontation would do, with or without nuclear weapons; in my terms, the fundamental task of a president is to be the nation's teacher. He could and should do that job. He has not. In my moves around the country, I don't get the impression that people really appreciate what a nuclear or even a large-scale conventional exchange -- or even a one-sided attack -- would do. Hiroshima was in the Middle Ages and iraq and Afghanistan don't much frighten anyone. The public must be educated if our government has a chance to lead it.

2.) Either having the US take the lead or following close behind the NATO powers or, better yet, the 2nd tier powers (Turkey, Brazil, China et al), and call for a firm, clear, and definitive renunciation of the 2005 US National Security Paper. It has been somewhat put aside but not really renounced. It must be to make any progress. The US must take preemptive or first strikes off, in that dangerous phrase, "the table." Unless or until that is done, the Iranian government, in my opinion, would be foolish to slow down, much less give up, moves to acquire a weapon. Such a statement must be given reality by the pull back of the massive armaments we have on the Iranian borders.

3.) There must be a universal, or as nearly universal as possible, statement recognizing Iran's sovereign independence and outlawing threats to it. This may not count for much. The international record is not good on such statements, but they are necessary if not sufficient. We should experiment with ways to give them verisimilitude. Perhaps one would be under the "Uniting for Peace" resolution of the UNGA with real penalties for violation even in policy pronouncements.

4) Then the path divides:

a) one would be to create an incentive program to give up the nuclear weapon program. Iran certainly would not do this so long as Israel is both armed and threatening no matter what the US or others proclaimed;
b) a second would be for the US to force Israel to give up its nuclear weapons. I don't think it ever would or even could, so I see this as a non-starter; and
c) the third would be for everyone to agree that Iran be allowed the right have a nuclear weapon or several weapons. Would this, after all, be more dangerous than for North Korea to have them? At that point, Israel might, and I think probably would, find it reasonable to consider giving up its nuclear arsenal if Iran did too. Then Saudi Arabia would have no compelling incentive to go nuclear. And, after all, Israel cannot be much happier to have Saudi Arabia nuclear armed, at least over the long term, when its priorities may change as they have in the past, than Iran.

So, as I say, it seems to me that option ‘4-c’ may ironically be the most productive policy for long-term stability and peace. Fostering or allowing it to happen would certainly be tricky. Tricky domestically as well as internationally. Here is where we need a teacher-president. We are far less sophisticated than we need to be and the Iranians have little reason to trust us and none to trust the israelis. But I don't see any thing better. The path we are now on leads, in the direction of war and my experience, particularly during the 1962 missile crisis convinces me that it is very easy, perhaps even inevitable, to trip on that path.

Descent into Deepest Ignominy

2012-01-09T14:19:00.000-05:00

The Heritage Foundation Then and Now

by THOMAS CHRISTIE, PIERRE SPREY, CHUCK SPINNEY & WINSLOW WHEELER

Counterpunch, 9 Janurary 2012
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/09/the-heritage-foundation-then-and-now/

Almost 30 years ago, in 1983, The Heritage Foundation stepped forward as a thoughtful, independent thinking participant in the then-raging debate over Ronald Reagan’s defense budget increases. In one of its major policy publications, Heritage published an insightful analysis with an unambiguous conclusion: “The increased spending secured by President Reagan should afford significant improvements in force size. It does not.” (See Agenda ’83: A Mandate for Leadership Report, Richard N. Holwill, ed., The Heritage Foundation, 1983; see chapter 4, p. 69 of “Defense” by George W.S. Kuhn.) The analysis was crammed with data and straightforward logic as it made the case for real reform in America’s overpriced, underperforming defense budget.

Since then, Heritage has come a long way in defense policy analysis, all of it downward. On December 26, 2012 the Director of Heritage’s Center for Foreign Policy Studies, Dr. James J. Carafano, published a commentary in the Washington Examiner, “What To Do about Obama’s Pound-Foolish Air Force.” Without saying so explicitly, he implied that the legendary Col. John R. Boyd, “a fighter pilot’s fighter pilot” in Dr. Carafano’s words, would favor what the good doctor wants: to reopen production of the $411 million F-22 and to buy more $154 million F-35s. (Col. Boyd was much more than “a fighter pilot’s fighter pilot.” His revolutionary air-to-air tactics manual changed the way every major air force in the world flies. His brilliant energy-maneuverability approach to fighter design saved the F-15 from becoming a lumbering F-111-like disaster—and created the extraordinarily successful F-16. Read more about him in the Naval Institute Proceedings article Genghis John or better, in Robert Coram’s excellent biography Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.)

Each of us knew and worked closely with John Boyd. Invoking Boyd’s legacy to endorse Carafano’s ideas about the F-22 and the F-35—ideas that would have been anathema to Boyd—profoundly offends us. Demonstrating ignorance about both John Boyd’s thinking and about fighter aircraft fundamentals, the Carafano article’s pervasive disregard for facts provides an excellent example of the ethical bankruptcy that lies at the core of our defense problems and our defense budget debate today. With this editorial by their Director for Foreign Policy Studies, Heritage signals a descent from serious analysis of the nation’s defense needs to contemptible gimmicks for pushing the big-spending agenda of the Foundation’s defense industry funders—specifically, in this case, pushing the agenda of Lockheed-Martin, manufacturer of the F-22 and F-35 and major contributor to Heritage .

The starting point of Carafano’s advocacy of more F-22 and F-35 spending, his spin on Boyd’s profound analysis of why American F-86s outfought Russian MiG-15s in Korea, is both shallow and wrong. He claims Boyd found that the MiG-15’s major advantages in altitude, speed and turn were overcome by the F-86’s “bubble” canopy which enabled its pilots to see the MiGs first. In fact, Boyd’s energy maneuverability analysis of the two fighters showed that the MiG had only small, relatively insignificant turning and accelerating advantages and that there were no speed differences of any tactical consequence. Boyd did indeed believe the superior rear visibility through the F-86’s bubble canopy was an advantage (and insisted on an even better canopy for the F-16), not to see the enemy first but to avoid being “bounced” by surprise from the tail quadrant and to avoid losing sight of the opponent during dogfight maneuvers.

But Boyd’s most important insight into the technical advantages of the F-86 escapes Carafano entirely. Boyd saw that the F-86′s far quicker control response, due to its then-new hydraulic controls, allowed American pilots to transition far faster from one maneuver to the next. And those much faster transitions allowed the American pilots to confront the enemy with increasingly confusing and incomprehensible tactical moves and countermoves—the key to gaining firing position and dogfight victory. And that crucial insight led to directly to Boyd’s seminal OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop concept, the foundation of the innovative and much more encompassing theories of human conflict that made Boyd the most important military thinker of the last century.

Not only did Carafano miss the boat on the technical differences between the F-86 and MiG-15, he ignored the even more important Boydian idea that, to win wars, people come first, ideas (i.e., tactics and strategy) are second, and hardware is a distant third. It was perfectly obvious to Boyd why two hundred F-86s achieved air superiority over 1000 MiGs in Korea and shot down 5 to 10 enemies for every American loss. Our pilots were simply far more skilled than the Chinese and Russians by virtue of better selection, more rigorous and realistic training using better tactics and better exploitation of the skills of experienced pilots, and far more flying hours (the much more reliable F-86 flew 40 hours per month to the MiG’s 10 or 12 hours). Had we changed aircraft with the enemy, our lop-sided victory tally in Korea would have been the same—an insight repeated almost verbatim decades later by the Israeli Air Force commanders after the 1973 and 1982 wars, then again by the U.S commander of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Despite John Boyd’s seminal role in designing the F-15 and F-16, he was always the first to point out that technical differences in friendly versus enemy aircraft are minor compared to differences in people skills—and that applied with equal force to ground and naval weapons.

Which brings us to Carafano’s relentless promotion of F-22 spending. His opening focus on the F-86’s bubble canopy is ironic. The F-22 lacks such a bubble canopy and therefore has far less rearward visibility than the F-86—and far less than Boyd’s F-16. The F-22 is an even worse step backwards—a catastrophic one—in the pilot skill dimension. The plane is not just incredibly expensive to buy (now at $411 million per copy in terms of total program cost, it is still growing), it is also far too unreliable, far too unmaintainable and far too expensive in operating cost (at $61,000 per hour and also growing) to provide even minimally adequate training. For four months in 2011, the entire fleet was grounded due to engine cooling air and oxygen system related failures that the Air Force still cannot explain; when it was flying, pilots only flew an abysmally inadequate eight to nine hours per month. This is only one-third to one-quarter of the flying hours that elite air forces use to train truly competent air-to-air fighter pilots. Thanks to the F-22’s ludicrous eight to nine hours per month, our once-premier fighter force is decaying rapidly. To this Dr. Carafano is oblivious.

Moreover, even if technical performance were the dominant factor in air combat, the F-22 is no premier fighter. Its aerodynamic performance—maneuverability, acceleration and range—is a gigantic disappointment. The F-22 purports to compensate with technologies—radar, radar warning and radar missiles—that historically have failed time and time again; technologies that make the airplane more vulnerable to enemy countermeasures, not less. Finally, two of its hyper-touted “Fifth Generation” characteristics—“stealth” and “supercruise”—are, in truth, astonishingly limited. F-22 stealth is a delusion: every VHF (i.e. long wavelength) radar in the world can detect the F-22 at 150 to 200 miles, and the Russians, and others, have built and sold thousands of such radars. The F-22’s “supercruise”, that is, its ability to cruise supersonically, is unusably short in duration (due to inadequate onboard fuel capacity)—so short that current Air Force training missions to exercise supercruising combat actually schedule one tanker refueling just before going supersonic and one more refueling before going home subsonically. Imagine having to schedule two tanker hook-ups for every F-22 sortie in the chaos of a serious shooting war!

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ decision to terminate F-22 production should be appreciated as his single most positive contribution to American air power—and certainly one of the very few issues he would have seen eye to eye with John Boyd.

We say this, not just because of our various backgrounds in combat aircraft design, defense acquisition, weapons testing, defense budget analysis, and defense budget politics, but also because we know what John Boyd, Dr. Carafano’s erstwhile icon, had to say about the F-22. He despised both the F-22’s design and its acquisition program; it violated every idea he fought for in fighter design and every principle he formulated to help American forces prevail on the battlefield. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, before he died, Boyd often expressed his utter contempt for the F-22 to each one of us, always in terms too colorful to print.

It gets worse regarding the F-35. When Boyd died 15 years ago, the inevitable failure of the F-35 as a viable combat aircraft was already clear, though not as crushingly obvious as it is to today. In 2012, with the airplane just 20 per cent through its entirely inadequate flight test plan (over 80 per cent of the airplane’s performance characteristics will remain untested in any planned flight test), we already know we are facing across-the-board failures to meet original specifications. Moreover, if the F-35 lived up to 100 percent of its depressingly modest design specifications, it would still be a complete failure in combat utility: a bomber of shorter range, lower payload and far higher vulnerability than the Vietnam War’s appallingly flammable, underperforming F-105 Lead Sled; an air-to-air fighter so unmaneuverable and sluggish in acceleration that any ancient MiG-21 will tear it to shreds; and a close support fighter that is a menace to our troops on any battlefield, unable to hit camouflaged tactical targets and incapable of distinguishing friendly soldiers from enemies. Individually and collectively, we often fretted with Boyd on the irresponsibility of equipping our people with such foolishly complex weapons designs, so bereft of practical combat effectiveness—and on the deep corruption of acquisition programs, such as the F-35’s, that deliberately plan to buy a thousand or more units long before user testing has fully probed combat utility.

Dr. Carafano is free to pump out baloney that pleases his funders, but to invoke Boyd’s legacy to promote F-22 and F-35 spending goes beyond simple, and perhaps willful, misrepresentation. Here is a paradigm of the moral decay so visible among contemporary Washington defense “intellectuals.” These dabblers in defense pretend to serve seriously the real needs of our national defense and our people in uniform—when, in fact, they are serving the needs of foundations, universities, non-profits or politicians funded by defense mega-corporations seeking to expand their sources of government largesse. And, even in a shrinking economy, these dabblers easily find comfortable home bases and plenty of venues to publish or broadcast their paeans to big ticket programs and budgets.

It was not always like this. In 1983, a very long time ago, The Heritage Foundation courageously undertook some in-depth, independent, pro-defense analyses to strengthen our defenses while reforming spending and easing the taxpayer’s burden. Today, Heritage’s defense efforts are homilies supporting smaller forces, less people in uniform, and more dollars to buy fewer weapons of increasing ineffectiveness. How sad. How pathetic. How destructive to the security of Americans.

All these issues—declining combat effectiveness, increasing acquisition mismanagement, inadequate training and the lack of ethics in defense advocacy—merit serious discussion. If Dr. Carafano would like to engage in a public debate on these questions, we would be happy to accommodate him.

THOMAS CHRISTIE, PIERRE SPREY, CHUCK SPINNEY and WINSLOW WHEELER (Bios) are authors in the anthology “The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It.” The book is available at no cost, and its co-authors have waived copyright protection, so there are no limits on reproduction or distribution.

Have the Super-Rich Seceded from the United States?

2012-01-06T12:21:00.001-05:00

Attached is a dynamite essay by my close friend Mike Lofgren. It appeared in Counterpunch on 5 January

Note: I added some hotlinks to assist readers in sourcing information underpinning Mike’s point and introduced a parethetical statement in [brackets] to clarify his reference to me.

Chuck Spinney

The Joke is on the Rest of Us

Have the Super-Rich Seceded from the United States?

Mike Lofgren, Counterpunch, 5 January 2012

Link to Counterpunch

It was in 1993, during congressional deliberation over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican members of Congress who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. I distinctly remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their own fellow American citizens.”

That was just the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.

At the end of the cold war many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others, like Chuck Spinney, predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation Warfare, and the inability of national armies to adapt to it. [CS Note: The first paper addressing this problem was Col G.I. Wilson and William Lind, et al, “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation” Marine Corps Gazette, October 1989] The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been hundreds of books about globalization and how it would break down borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession in terms of physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens occasionally. [1] It means a withdrawal into enclaves, a sort of internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension – and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call, who cares about Medicare?

To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; for example, their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than one-half trillion dollars in federal, state, and local education dollars into private hands, meaning themselves and their friends. [2] A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to employ Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. Courtesy of Matt Taibbi, we learn that the sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse; Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, says about the views of the 99 percent: “Who gives a crap about some imbecile?”

Steven Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5-million birthday party, believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: “You have to have skin in the game. I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.” But millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive, and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues. In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues; by 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950; by 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent. Who has skin in the game now?

As is well known by now, Schwarzman benefits from the “Buffett Rule:” financial sharks typically take their compensation in the form of capital gains rather than salaries, thus knocking down their income tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent. But that’s not the only way Mr. Skin-in-the-Game benefits: the 6.2-percent Social Security tax and the 1.45-percent Medicare tax apply only to wages and salaries, not capital gains distributions. Accordingly, Schwarzman is stiffing the system in two ways: not only is his income tax rate less than half the top marginal rate, he is shorting the Social Security system that others of his billionaire colleagues like Pete Peterson say is unsustainable and needs to be cut.

This lack of skin in the game may explain why Willard Mitt Romney is so coy about releasing his income tax returns. It would also make sense for someone with $264 million in net worth to joke that he is “unemployed,” as if he were some jobless sheet metal worker in Youngstown, when he is really saying in code that his income stream is not a salary subject to payroll deduction. The chances are good that his effective rate for both federal income and payroll taxes is lower than that of many a wage slave.

The real joke is on the rest of us. After the biggest financial meltdown in 80 years – a meltdown caused by the type of rogue financial manipulation that Romney embodies – and a consequent long, steep drop in the American standard of living, who is the putative front-runner for one of the only two parties allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Mitt Romney, the man who says corporations are people. Opposing him, or someone like him, will be the incumbent president, Barack Obama, who will raise up to a billion dollars to compete in the campaign. Much of that loot will come from the same corporations, hedge fund managers, merger and acquisition specialists, and leveraged buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma fashion during the campaign.

The super-rich have seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened.

——————
Notes

[1] E.g., Erik Price, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved to the United Arab Emirates in 2011.

[2] This stratagem follows the template of Halliburton’s privatized military logistics activities as well as George Bush’s proposed Social Security “reform:” funneling public dollars into corporate hands.
——————
MIKE LOFGREN retired in June 2011 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees.

Who is Israel's Worst Enemy?

2012-01-03T13:21:00.001-05:00

Attached is one of Uri Avnery’s best argued opinion pieces, and that is saying a lot, because Avnery’s writings are always outstanding. Avnery, one of Israel’s most respected peace activists, is a hero of the 1948 war and a former member of the Knesset.

Avnery’s subject is grand strategy -- or more precisely, Israel’s grand strategic incompetence, although he does not use the term. Grand strategy is an often misunderstood term and often is used carelessly in the mainstream media and the sententious renderings of Beltway thinktanks. Readers not familiar with the concept of grand strategy or do not appreciate why grand-strategic incompetence guarantees self-inflicted disaster will find a short introductory primer on the subject at this link.

Shukran, Israel

How Israel Empowers Islamist Movements

by URI AVNERY, Counterpunch, WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 30-32, 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/30/how-israel-empowers-islamist-movements/

If Islamist movements come to power all over the region, they should express their debt of gratitude to their bete noire, Israel.

Without the active or passive help of successive Israeli governments, they may not have been able to realize their dreams.

That is true in Gaza, in Beirut, in Cairo and even in Tehran.

LET’S TAKE the example of Hamas.

All over the Arab lands, dictators have been faced with a dilemma. They could easily close down all political and civic activities, but they could not close the mosques. In the mosques people could congregate in order to pray, organize charities and, secretly, set up political organizations. Before the days of Twitter and Facebook, that was the only way to reach masses of people.

One of the dictators faced with this dilemma was the Israel military governor in the occupied Palestinian territories. Right from the beginning, he forbade any political activity. Even peace activists went to prison. Advocates of non-violence were deported. Civic centers were closed down. Only the mosques remained open. There people could meet.

But this went beyond tolerance. The General Security Service (known as Shin Bet or Shabak) had an active interest in the flourishing of the mosques. People who pray five times a day, they thought, have no time to build bombs.

The main enemy, as laid down by Shabak, was the dreadful PLO, led by that monster, Yasser Arafat. The PLO was a secular organization, with many prominent Christian members, aiming at a “nonsectarian” Palestinian state. They were the enemies of the Islamists, who were talking about a pan-Islamic Caliphate.

Turning the Palestinians towards Islam, it was thought, would weaken the PLO and its main faction, Fatah. So everything was done to help the Islamic movement discreetly.

It was a very successful policy, and the Security people congratulated themselves on their cleverness, when something untoward happened. In December 1987, the first intifada broke out. The mainstream Islamists had to compete with more radical groupings. Within days, they transformed themselves into the Islamic Resistance Movement (acronym Hamas) and became the most dangerous foes of Israel. Yet it took Shabak more than a year before they arrested Sheik Ahmad Yassin, the Hamas leader. In order to fight this new menace, Israel came to an agreement with the PLO in Oslo.

And now, irony of ironies, Hamas is about to join the PLO and take part in a Palestinian National Unity government. They really should send us a message of Shukran (“thanks”).

Israel’s part in the rise of Hizbollah is less direct, but no less effective.

When Ariel Sharon rolled into Lebanon in 1982, his troops had to cross the mainly Shiite South. The Israeli soldiers were received as liberators. Liberators from the PLO, which had turned this area into a state within a state.

Following the troops in my private car, trying to reach the front, I had to traverse about a dozen Shiite villages. In each one I was detained by the villagers, who insisted that I have coffee in their homes.

Neither Sharon nor anyone else paid much attention to the Shiites. In the federation of autonomous ethnic-religious communities that is called Lebanon, the Shiites were the most downtrodden and powerless.

However, the Israelis outstayed their welcome. It took the Shiites just a few weeks to realize that they had no intention of leaving. So, for the first time in their history, they rebelled. The main political group, Amal (“hope”), started small armed actions. When the Israelis did not take the hint, operations multiplied and turned into a full-fledged guerrilla war.

To outflank Amal, Israel encouraged a small, more radical, rival: God’s Party, Hizbollah.

If Israel had got out then (as Haolam Hazeh demanded), not much harm would have been done. But they remained for a full 18 years, ample time for Hizbollah to turn into an efficient fighting machine, earn the admiration of the Arab masses everywhere, take over the leadership of the Shiite community and become the most powerful force in Lebanese politics.

They, too, owe Israel a big Shukran.

THE CASE of the Muslim Brotherhood is even more complex.

The organization was founded in 1928, twenty years before the State of Israel. Its members volunteered to fight us in 1948. They are passionately pan-Islamic, and the Palestinian plight is close to their hearts.

As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict worsened, the popularity of the Brothers grew. Since the 1967 war, in which Egypt lost Sinai, and even more after the separate peace agreement with Israel, they stoked the deep-seated resentment of the masses in Egypt and all over the Arab world. The assassination of Anwar al-Sadat was not of their doing, but they rejoiced.

Their opposition to the peace agreement with Israel was not only an Islamist, but also an authentic Egyptian reaction. Most Egyptians felt cheated and betrayed by Israel. The Camp David agreement had an important Palestinian component, without which the agreement would have been impossible for Egypt. Sadat, a visionary, looked at the big picture and believed that the agreement would quickly lead to a Palestinian state. Menachem Begin, a lawyer, saw to the fine print. Generations of Jews have been brought up on the Talmud, which is mainly a compilation of legal precedents, and their mind has been honed by legalistic arguments. Not for nothing are Jewish lawyers in demand the world over.

Actually, the agreement made no mention of a Palestinian state, only of autonomy, phrased in a way that allowed Israel to continue the occupation. That was not what the Egyptians had been led to believe, and their resentment was palpable. Egyptians are convinced that their country is the leader of the Arab world, and bears a special responsibility for every part of it. They cannot bear to be seen as the betrayers of their poor, helpless Palestinian cousins.

Long before he was overthrown, Hosni Mubarak was despised as an Israeli lackey, paid by the US. For Egyptians, his despicable role in the Israeli blockade of a million and a half Palestinians in the Gaza Strip was particularly shameful.

Since their beginnings in the 1920s, Brotherhood leaders and activists have been hanged, imprisoned, tortured and otherwise persecuted. Their anti-regime credentials are impeccable. Their stand for the Palestinians contributed a lot to this image.

Had Israel made peace with the Palestinian people somewhere along the line, the Brotherhood would have lost much of its luster. As it is, they are emerging from the present democratic elections as the central force in Egyptian politics.

Shukran, Israel.

LET’S NOT forget the Islamic Republic of Iran.

They owe us something, too. Quite a lot, actually.

In 1951, in the first democratic elections in an Islamic country in the region, Muhammad Mossadeq was elected Prime Minister. The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had been installed by the British during World War II, was thrown out, and Mossadeq nationalized the country’s vital oil industry. Until then, the British had robbed the Iranian people, paying a pittance for the Black Gold.

Two years later, in a coup organized by the British MI6 and the American CIA, the Shah was brought back and returned the oil to the hated British and their partners. Israel had probably no part in the coup, but under the restored regime of the Shah, Israel prospered. Israelis made fortunes selling weapons to the Iranian army. Israeli Shabak agents trained the Shah’s dreaded secret police, Savak. It was widely believed that they also taught them torture techniques. The Shah helped to build and pay for a pipeline for Iranian oil from Eilat to Ashkelon. Israeli generals traveled through Iran to Iraqi Kurdistan, where they helped the rebellion against Baghdad.

At the time, the Israeli leadership was cooperating with the South African apartheid regime in developing nuclear arms. The two offered the Shah partnership in the effort, so that Iran, too, would become a nuclear power.

Before that partnership became effective, the detested ruler was overthrown by the Islamic revolution of February 1979. Since then, the hatred of the Great Satan (the US) and the Little Satan (us) has played a major role in the propaganda of the Islamic regime. It has helped to keep the loyalty of the masses, and now Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is using it to bolster his rule.

It seems that all Iranian factions – including the opposition – now support the Iranian effort to obtain a nuclear bomb of their own, ostensibly to deter an Israeli nuclear attack. (This week, the chief of the Mossad pronounced that an Iranian nuclear bomb would not constitute an “existential danger” to Israel.)

Where would the Islamic Republic be without Israel? So they owe us a big “Thank you”, too.

HOWEVER, LET us not be too megalomaniac. Israel has contributed a lot to the Islamist awakening. But it is not the only – or even the main – contributor.

Strange as it may appear, obscurantist religious fundamentalism seems to express the Zeitgeist. An American nun-turned-historian, Karen Armstrong, has written an interesting book following the three fundamentalist movements in the Muslim world, in the US and in Israel. It shows a clear pattern: all these divergent movements – Muslim, Christian and Jewish – have passed through almost identical and simultaneous stages.

At present, all Israel is in turmoil because the powerful Orthodox community is compelling women in many parts of the country to sit separately in the back of buses, like blacks in the good old days in Alabama, and use separate sidewalks on one side of the streets. Male religious soldiers are forbidden by their rabbis to listen to women soldiers singing. In orthodox neighborhoods, women are compelled to swathe their bodies in garments that reveal nothing but their faces and hands, even in temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius and above. An 8-year old girl from a religious family was spat upon in the street because her clothes were not “modest” enough. In counter-demonstrations, secular women waved posters saying “Tehran is Here!”

Perhaps some day a fundamentalist Israel will make peace with a fundamentalist Muslim world, under the auspices of a fundamentalist American president.

Unless we do something to stop the process before it is too late.

URI AVNERY is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

The `K Street Clausewitz’ Remembered

2011-12-31T10:06:00.001-05:00

Karen Tumulty painted a pastiche of mini portraits depicting Newt Gingrich's martial prowess in the 22 December 2011 issue of the Washington Post. Unable to contain my mirth, I forwarded it to my close friend, the noted military reformer, Pierre Sprey, who replied immediately, with his usual rapier wit:

Chuck,

About the only perceptive thought in this entire article is the opener. The rest of Ms. Tumulty's national security observations are as mindless as Newt himself

What no reporter seems to have tumbled to is that Newt is dumb as an old boot. John Boyd and I had several years of "working" with him in the Congressional Military Reform Caucus, years during which Newt found it advantageous to pose as a reformer.
Within a month or so, John and I both realized that Newt had almost perfect recall of other people's intellectual-sounding ideas and phrases--and could barf them back convincingly without understanding a shred of the content. At the drop of a hat he could string together a two hour lecture on anything from concocting new war-winning technologies to optimizing grand America's strategy the 21st century. For the listening layman, the entire two hours would flow seamlessly and every idea would sound newly minted and carefully crafted. But for those of us who knew the sources of Newt's cribs, it was perfectly obvious that not one of those ideas was his, nor did he have the shallowest comprehension of any of them.
You can imagine what an intellectual giant that major general was who found Newt's Flag Officer War Fighting Course lectures so mesmerizing.
Pierre

John Boyd and I also met with Newt a few times in the early 80s, when I worked in the Pentagon. To give a little background: At that time, I was a member of a small group of Pentagon insiders who became known as the "military reformers." Boyd, a retired Air Force colonel, legendary fighter pilot, a noted airplane designer and tactician, was the spiritual leader of our merry crew. Boyd was also one of America's leading strategists and theoreticians on the art of war. Boyd and Sprey were the intellectual leaders of the movement. I was happy enough to be a foot soldier in the effort. A short bio of Boyd can be found here; and Robert Coram's very popular book-length biography of Boyd and the inner workings of the reformers can be found here (it is still in print after 11 years and sales are now approaching 100,000). A compendium of Boyd's famous briefings on the the nature of conflict together with the associated theory of the Observation - Orientation - Decision - Action (OODA) Loop, "A Discourse on Winning and Losing," can be downloaded here.[1]

Newt's propensity for bombastic lecturing on subjects he knew little about was immediately obvious to us all. In fact, I was so impressed by Newt's utterings I nicknamed him Neutrino after a small, almost massless, sub-atomic particle in physics. Like Newt, neutrinos are made possible by decadence -- intellectual in the case of Newt, radioactive in the case of physics; like Newt, neutrinos flit about uncontrollably at very high speeds, while producing even more chaotic reactions that fold back on themselves -- self-destructively in the case of the Newt, or as anti-particles in the case of the physics. So, like Newt, neutrinos are very hard to make sense out of. Of course no analogy is perfect -- neutrinos have no electric charge, whereas it is very clear Newt is highly, if erratically, charged.

Quite unlike Newt, Pierre has substantive defense bona fides: fluent in German and French, as well as English; he is a widely-read polymath with degrees in mechanical engineering, french literature, and mathematical statistics. Pierre's track record has established him as a brilliant engineer and mathematician and he has been a path-breaking pioneer in analyzing the lessons of combat and how to apply them to the design of weapons.[2] Along with Colonels Boyd and Everest Riccioni, for example, Pierre was one of the central intellectual forces evolving the design of the F-16, perhaps the most successful US fighter since the Korean War F-86. Pierre was also the chief intellectual inspiration behind the design of the brilliantly successful and highly-feared A-10 close air support aircraft. He has written widely on military reform as well as design, testing, and weapons acquisition issues, most recently contributing the insightful Essay 9, "Evaluating Weapons: Sorting the Good from the Bad," to the The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It, an anthology written by nine defense insiders with over 500 years of cumulative experience. (Truth in advertising: I am author of Essay 1).

Witty as it is, Pierre's evisceration of Neutrino goes beyond mere entertainment; it is important because it brings into sharp focus a truly scary aspect of the emerging presidential election, not to mention American politics in general -- namely, the dangerous addiction to mindless warmongering that now pervades the defense debate in America, be it explicit in the case of the Republican presidential candidates (Ron Paul excepted) or implicit in the reckless triangulations of a weak, cynical president (discussed in my last posting). Neutrino is one of the America's leading warmongers -- and like most of his brethren, he has never served a day in uniform. Nor has he slugged it out in the trench warfare of fixing Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex, although he slopped in the gravy of its cash flows. Yet as Tumulty pointed out, he is lecturing our generals how to fight wars.

The James Madison, the architect of the Constitution, understood the endgame when political neutrinos short-circuit the synapses of the collective mind:

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. [3]

The fact that US generals invite a mental disarmament specialist like Newt to lecture them on the arts of strategy and warfighting and are then are mesmerized by his lectures says more about the intellectual and professional state of our military leadership as it does about the Neutrino. It goes a long way to explain (a) why our military interventions since WWII are devolving into one of history's longest strings of "incomplete successes" (to borrow Jimmy Carter's immortal reference to the disastrous Iranian hostage rescue mission made at a 29 April 1980 press conference), and (b) why the old reformers went on record for one last time by producing The Pentagon Labyrinth in 2011 and make it available, together with a huge a amount of source information, free of cost on the internet at this link.
----------------------------------
[1] Boyd's works has been written about widely since the late 1970s and has had enormous influence in many fields. If you doubt this, just google "OODA Loop"
[2] I used the descriptor polymath advisedly; Pierre is also the founder and chief engineer of Mapleshade Studios, considered by many audiophiles to be one of the finest and most innovative producers of sound, especially jazz.
[3] James Madison's letter to W.T. Barry (4 August 1822).

Clintonizing Perpetual War

2011-12-26T13:20:00.005-05:00

In the winter of 2002, a close friend, a liberal staffer on capital hill, asked me if I thought the crazy fulminations of the neocons and the tough-guy rantings of an insecure President [1] could result in a war with Iraq? My answer was something like ‘read the Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and you will get a good idea of how these pressures can take on a life of their own and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.'

President Obama -- perhaps inadvertently -- is playing the same game with regard to Iran by trying to neutralize his political opposition at home with a dangerous mutation of Bill Clinton's cynical triangulation strategy. In this case, the goal of the triangulation strategy is to pull the rug out from under the Republican warmongers like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. If he can co-opt the domestic political pressures for war against Iran, Mr. Obama may well think he can better position himself for the upcoming presidential election. But in so doing, he would be running a real risk of starting yet another ill-conceived war, whether he wants to or not. (Patrick Seale explains one way the march to war could spin out of Obama's control at this link.) To make matters worse, Mr. Obama is a man who has demonstrated that he talks a good line but fails to deliver on his promises when under pressure -- just ask the Arabs about his Cairo speech or progressives who believed his promises about health care reform and "change your can believe in." Whether or not triangulating questions of war and peace is a question of Obama's free will is quite beside the point: a malleable man is playing with the most dangerous kind of fire.

My last post, Beating the War Drums in Versailles on the Potomac, described the buildup of domestic political pressures to launch an attack on Iran in the name of prempting Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, notwithstanding the fact that there is no solid intelligence proving the Iranians have embarked on a program to acquire those weapons. This aim of this post is to alert interested readers to another analysis in the same vein, but analyzed from a different angle. In The Winners and Losers of US policy on Iran, an op-ed that appeared in Al Jazeera (English) on 23 December, Jasmine Ramsey provides a useful insight in to the warmongering pressures on a president prone to appeasing his opposition for domestic political reasons.

The new year is shaping up to be a very dangerous one, because appeasing an external aggressor, like Adolf Hitler, is not the only kind of appeasement strategy that leads to war.
-----------
[1] Any president who feels it is necessary to brag about being "The Decider" is insecure by self-definition.

Beating the War Drums in Versailles on the Potomac

2011-12-22T11:55:00.000-05:00

On 12 December, I described a concatenation of warmongering pressures that were shaping the popular psyche in favor of bombing Iran. Now, in a 21 December essay [also attached below], Steven Walt describes a further escalation of these pressures -- in this case, via the profoundly flawed pro-bombing analysis, Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option, penned by Matthew Kroenig in January/February 2012 issue of the influentual journal Foreign Affairs.

One would think that our recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and our growing strategic problems in Pakistan, not to mention our economic problems and political paralysis at home, would temper our enthusiasm for launching yet another so-called preventative war. But that is not the case, as Kroenig's analysis and the growing anti-Iran hysteria in the debates among the the Republican running for president show (Ron Paul excepted) show. Moreover, President Obama’s Clintonesque efforts to triangulate the pro-war political pressures of the Republicans, while appeasing the Israelis, may be smart domestic politics in the short term, but they add fuel to the pro-war fires shaping the popular psyche. Finally, as I wrote last January, lurking beneath the fiery anti-Iran rhetoric are more deeply rooted domestic political-economic reasons for promoting perpetual war -- reasons that have more to do with sustaining the money flowing into the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex in the post-Cold War era than in shaping a foreign policy based on national interests.

While it is easy to whip up popular enthusiasm for launching a new war, our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that successfully prosecuting wars of choice are quite another matter. Nevertheless, as my good friend Mike Lofgren explains in his recent essay, Propagandizing for Perpetual War, devastating rebuttals like Walt's are likely to have little effect on the course of events.

One final point ... a surprise attack on Iran would trigger a far tougher war to prosecute successfully that either Iraq or Afghanistan. If you doubt this, I suggest you study Anthony Cordesman’s 2009 analysis of the operational problems confronting Israel, should it decide to launch a surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Yet, the beat goes on.

The worst case for war with Iran

Posted By Stephen M. Walt , Foreign Policy.com, Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - 4:39 PM

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/12/21/the_worst_case_for_war_with_iran

If you'd like to read a textbook example of war-mongering disguised as "analysis," I recommend Matthew Kroenig's forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs, titled "Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option." It is a remarkably poor piece of advocacy, all the more surprising because Kroenig is a smart scholar who has done some good work in the past. It makes one wonder if there's something peculiar in the D.C. water supply.

There is a simple and time-honored formula for making the case for war, especially preventive war. First, you portray the supposed threat as dire and growing, and then try to convince people that if we don't act now, horrible things will happen down the road. (Remember Condi Rice's infamous warnings about Saddam's "mushroom cloud"?) All this step requires is a bit of imagination and a willingness to assume the worst. Second, you have to persuade readers that the costs and risks of going to war aren't that great. If you want to sound sophisticated and balanced, you acknowledge that there are counterarguments and risks involved. But then you do your best to shoot down the objections and emphasize all the ways that those risks can be minimized. In short: In Step 1 you adopt a relentlessly gloomy view of the consequences of inaction; in Step 2 you switch to bulletproof optimism about how the war will play out.

Kroenig's piece follows this blueprint perfectly. He assumes that Iran is hellbent on getting nuclear weapons (not just a latent capability to produce one quickly if needed) and suggests that it is likely to cross the threshold soon. Never mind that Iran has had a nuclear program for decades and still has no weapon, and that both the 2007 and 2011 National Intelligence Estimates have concluded that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran is pursuing an actual bomb. He further assumes -- without a shred of evidence -- that a nuclear-armed Iran would have far-reaching geopolitical consequences. For example, he says that other states are already "shifting their allegiances to Tehran" but doesn't offer a single example or explain how these alleged shifts have anything to do with Iran's nuclear program.

He also declares, "With atomic power behind it, Iran could threaten any U.S. political or military initiative in the Middle East with nuclear war." Huh? If this bizarre fantasy were true, why couldn't the former Soviet Union do similar things during the Cold War, and why can't other nuclear powers make similar threats today when they don't like a particular American initiative? The simple reason is that threatening nuclear war against the United States is not credible unless one is willing to commit national suicide, and even Kroenig concedes that Tehran is not suicidal. Nuclear weapons are good for deterring attacks on one's own territory (and perhaps the territory of very close allies), but that's about it. They are not good for blackmail, coercive diplomacy, or anything else. And if Kroenig is right in warning that an Iranian nuclear weapon might lead others to develop them too, then Iran would end up being deterred by the United States, by Israel, and by some of its other neighbors too. (As I've noted before, Iran's awareness of this possibility may be one reason why Tehran has thus far stayed on this side of the nuclear threshold.)

Kroenig also declares that a nuclear-armed Iran would force the United States to "deploy naval and ground units and potentially nuclear weapons across the Middle East, keeping a large force in the area for decades to come." But why? Iran's entire defense budget is only about $10 billion per year (compared with the nearly $700 billion the United States spends on national defense), and it has no meaningful power-projection capabilities. Thus, contrary to what Kroenig thinks, containing/deterring Iran would not add much to U.S. defense burdens. The Persian Gulf is already an American lake (from a military point of view), and Washington already has thousands of nuclear weapons in its own arsenal. Given how weak Iran really is, containing or deterring them for the foreseeable future will be relatively easy.

The key point is that Kroenig offers up these lurid forecasts in a completely uncritical way. He never asks the probing questions that any security scholar with a Ph.D. should axiomatically raise and examine in a sophisticated manner. Instead, his article is a classic illustration of worst-case analysis, intended to make not going to war seem more dangerous than peace.

When he turns to the case for using force, however, Kroenig offers a consistently upbeat appraisal of how the war would go. (Needless to say, this is not the kind of analysis one would expect from a Georgetown professor.) He knows there are serious objections to his proposed course of action, and he works hard to come up with reasons why these concerns should be not be taken seriously. What if Iran has concealed some of its facilities? Such fears are overblown, he thinks, because our intelligence is really, really good. (Gee, where have we heard that before?) What about facilities that are hardened or defended? Not an insurmountable obstacle, he maintains, and in any case there are plenty of other facilities that are aboveground and vulnerable.

Isn't there a danger of civilian casualties? Well, yes, but "Washington should be able to limit civilian casualties in any campaign." What if Iran escalates by firing missiles at U.S. allies, ordering its proxies to attack Israel, or closing the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipments? Not to worry, says Kroenig, "None of these outcomes is predetermined," and the United States "could do much to mitigate them." (Of course, none of the scary outcomes that Kroenig says would accompany an Iranian bomb are "predetermined" either.) Doesn't starting a war increase the risk of regional conflict, especially if Iran retaliates and Americans or Israelis die? Maybe, but not if the United States makes its own "redlines" clear in advance and if it takes prudent steps to "manage the confrontation." To do this we have to be willing to "absorb Iranian responses that [fall] short of these redlines" and reassure the mullahs that we aren't trying to overthrow them (!). Bombing another country is a peculiar way to "reassure" them, of course, and it's a bit odd to assume that those wicked Iranians will be cooperative and restrained as the bombs rain down. Won't Iran just reconstitute its nuclear program later, and possibly on a crash basis? It might, but Kroenig says that we would have bought time and that whacking the Iranians really hard right now might convince them to give up the whole idea. Or not.

You see the pattern: When Kroenig is trying to justify the need for war, he depicts an Iran with far-reaching capabilities and dangerously evil intentions in order to convince readers that we have to stop them before it is too late. But when he turns to selling a preventive war, then suddenly Iran's capabilities are rather modest, its leaders are sensible, and the United States can easily deal with any countermeasures that Iran might take. In other words, Kroenig makes the case for war by assuming everything will go south if the United States does not attack and that everything will go swimmingly if it does. This is not fair-minded "analysis"; it is simply a brief for war designed to reach a predetermined conclusion.

And let's be crystal clear about what Kroenig is advocating here. He is openly calling for preventive war against Iran, even though the United States has no authorization from the U.N. Security Council, it is not clear that Iran is actively developing nuclear weapons, and Iran has not attacked us or any of our allies -- ever. He is therefore openly calling for his country to violate international law. He is calmly advocating a course of action that will inevitably kill a significant number of people, including civilians, some of whom probably despise the clerical regime (and with good reason). And Kroenig is willing to have their deaths on his conscience on the basis of a series of unsupported assertions, almost all of them subject to serious doubt.

Kroenig tries to allay this concern by saying that the main victims of a U.S. attack would be the "military personnel, engineers, scientists, and technicians" working at Iran's nuclear facilities. But even if we assume for the moment that this is true, would he consider Iran justified if it followed a similar course of action, to the limited extent that it could? Suppose a bright young analyst working for Iran's Revolutionary Guards read the latest issue of Foreign Affairs and concluded that there were well-connected people at American universities and in the Department of Defense who were actively planning and advocating war against Iran. Suppose he further concluded that if these plans are allowed to come to fruition, it would pose a grave danger to the Islamic Republic. Iran doesn't have a sophisticated air force or drones capable of attacking the United States, so this bright young analyst recommends that the Revolutionary Guards organize a covert-action team to attack the people who were planning and advocating this war, and to do whatever else they could to sabotage the forces that the United States might use to conduct such an attack. He advises his superiors that appropriate measures be taken to minimize the loss of innocent life and that the attack should focus only on the "military and civilian personnel" who were working directly on planning or advocating war with Iran. From Iran's perspective, this response would be a "preventive strike" designed to forestall an attack from the United States. Does Kroenig think a purely preventive measure of this kind on Iran's part would be acceptable behavior? And if he doesn't, then why does he think it's perfectly OK for us to do far more?

Democracy & Truth in the Post-Information Era

2011-12-21T05:42:00.000-05:00

My close friend Mike Lofgren writes an important essay describing the nature of 'truth' in the Orwellian echo chamber that is closing the American mind in the 21st Century.

Chuck Spinney

The Blaster

DECEMBER 20, 2011

Are Our Rulers Stupid, or Do They Think We’re Stupid?

Propagandizing for Perpetual War

by MIKE LOFGREN, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/20/propagandizing-for-perpetual-war/

According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has appropriated $806 billion for the direct cost of invading and occupying Iraq. Including debt service since 2003, that sum rises to approximately $1 trillion. The White House estimates the number of U.S. military wounded at 30,000; the web site icasualties.org states that U.S. military fatalities from the Iraq war now stand at 4484. It is impossible to estimate precisely the numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths, but they are frequently cited as being in excess of 100,000. There are now around two million internally displaced Iraqis in a country of 30 million inhabitants. As United States armed forces (but not up to 17,000 State Department employees, contractors and mercenaries) leave the country, Iraq is plunging into a sectarian and ethnically-fueled political crisis. Even if it survives that crisis and remains a unitary state, it will almost certainly be pulled closer to the orbit of Iran, our bogeyman du jour.

In view of the crippling costs both human and financial as well as the strategic and moral disaster the invasion of Iraq precipitated, what sort of verdict do you think our leaders – leaders representing a presidential administration ostensibly opposed to the invasion and promising hope and change – bother to offer us? While junketing in Turkey on December 17, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the press the following:

"As difficult as [the Iraq war] was, I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world."

One’s only reaction to this statement is to blink in disbelief and wonder: is Panetta that stupid, or does he think that we, the supposedly self-governing citizens of this country, are that stupid? The kindest thing one can conclude is that this is some sort of throw-away line intended to provide solace to the families of those killed, or consolation to survivors who were maimed. But that is pretty thin gruel; one imagines those people, and their kin, have formed their own opinions about what happened and do not require a patronizing justification. And, in any case, if it was “worth it,” why shouldn’t we keep doing it, not only in Iraq but all over the world? Perpetual war for stable government, one might call it.

Another explanation that comes to mind is the propaganda aspect of it: some government hacks really do believe if they repeat something over and over, no matter threadbare or false, a large number of people will believe it. Republicans have used this technique for years, and it appears Democrats are well on their way to equaling them in mastering it. It seems to be at least a partially successful tactic: after all the bloodshed and the waste, a plurality of 48 percent of Americans still believes invading Iraq was the right decision, according to a Pew Research survey.

But, as Honest Abe said, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. That same survey showed 46 percent, almost as many, believed it was the wrong decision. But even here, Panetta’s statement, and countless other ridiculous statements by government officials, are not without their utility. Most of us think of propaganda as brainwashing – as convincing people to believe something they would otherwise disbelieve. But we may underrate another, more subtle, utility of political propaganda.

In one of his wartime essays, George Orwell remarked on some of the patently ridiculous claims of totalitarian propaganda. In his view, the point wasn’t whether it was believable or not; in fact, the more ridiculous the better. The point was that government functionaries got to make the statement knowing full well it was ludicrous; news organizations dutifully printed it as if it were fact; and the public sphere was blanketed with the absurd propagandistic claim. As Orwell said about the goosestep march of totalitarian armies: yes, it looks ridiculous, but you dare not laugh.

That is the underrated objective of false government claims: even when they do not convince, they demoralize. Panetta’s statement will receive respectful coverage in the mainstream media; satraps of the establishment like David Gregory or Bob Schieffer will not argue with him on the Sunday morning talk shows beyond at most a very polite demurral; for all intents and purposes he will get away with it. And no ordinary citizen will ever be in a position to get in his face and tell him he’s shilling for destructive policies that are bankrupting us.

Because that’s how democracy, and truth, work in the United States these days.

MIKE LOFGREN retired in June 2011 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees.

Will Germany Kill the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg?

2011-12-18T08:51:00.001-05:00

Since the middle of the 19th Century, the central questions in European politics have been been have been the closely connected questions of nationalism and the rise of German power. As my good friend and eminent historian Gabriel Kolko shows in the brilliant essay attached below, the post war solutions of NATO and the European Union, together with the exigencies of the Cold War, put these questions on hold, but their fundamentals remained, sleeping beneath the surface, and today, the conflicting questions of nationalism and German power are again coming to the fore to create ominous problems for Europe and the world.

There can be no question that, until 2007 or so, the European Union -- particularly the opening of borders, the free flow of labour and capital, the disappearance of tariffs, and diminution of non-tariff trade restrictions, etc. combined to make life better for the mass of average Europeans. Standards of living rose steeply and social services improved in parallel. This was particularly evident in the poorer EU countries on the southern rim. I saw and experienced this astounding improvement in the quality of life on a very personal level, living on a sailboat in southern Europe since the summer of 2005. I will never forget the comment made to me by an Italian psychologist in Calabria in 2006, which is the heart of the provincial south of Italy, "It is a great time to be a European." To be sure, he was an educated member of the upper middle class, and not representative of the average Calabrian, but it struck me that this Calabrian saw himself as a European. It was not very long ago, that such a person would only loosely consider himself to be an Italian, not to mention a European.

But the EU also benefitted the richer countries of northern Europe, especially Germany, which became the world's largest export economy, in part due to the industriousness of the German people, but also in part because of the advantages bequeathed to Germany by the world's largest duty free zone. German banks, among those of other countries, also benefitted enormously from the debt-driven, global hyper-capitalism.

That achievements in Germany, as well as Europe, are now at risk, in part because the contradictions implicit in the rise of neoliberal economics created the worldwide debt crisis and are now distorting the response to that crisis, but also because of hubris in the European project itself. As Kolko shows below, it is becoming clear that, within this context, Germany is again evolving a hegemonic policy that, in effect, is struggling to 'have its cake and eat it too.' The most outward manifestations of this evolution can be seen in the effort to save the Euro by attempting to intensify the EU's integration by increasing reliance on a kind of German neo-Calvinist economics. One irony in the integration crisis not mentioned by Kolko is that the proximate cause of the political rigidity aggravating the debt crisis -- the Euro -- was adopted just when advances in electronic banking were drastically reducing, if not eliminating, the practical advantages of a common currency, yet the adaption of the common currency placed member governments in fiscal straight jackets. Had the Euro not been adopted, and everything else remained the same, Spain could have devalued the Peso, Italy the Lira, etc, but then those devaluations would have increased value of the Mark and created discomfort in Germany -- which brings us back to Kolko's analysis.

Chuck Spinney

WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 16-18, 2011

Lessons from the 20th Century

Why Euro Plan Is Doomed to Fail

by GABRIEL KOLKO, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/why-euro-plan-is-doomed-to-fail/

There are extremely important differences between this decade and the period after the First World War and through the early 1930s.

The most crucial is that no fascist or Communist or revolutionary threats exist now if the great economic powers do not meet the economic challenges before them. Today the political and economic contexts are fundamentally different in crucial regards but still inordinately complex and dangerous. Now, nations will only face the unpredictable political consequences that always arise when economies break down. But fascism and bolshevism were a catastrophe for the status quo and led to World War Two. For a time the Nazis aborted the threat of the left in Germany and this won them a great deal of business support. Although there are many right-wing nativist movements today that may very well benefit from economic turmoil, there are important differences between contemporary yahoos in the U.S. and Europe and the fascists.

But today the world economies are in a crisis, nominally involving the “euro” nations but even more the nature and future of world economic power. This crisis involves the United States—which was crucial in the interwar period—but also China, India, Brazil, and other nations which had no economic clout whatsoever in the world economy between the two wars. The 1920s were complex in unique ways, which the draconian Versailles Peace Treaty of June 1919 guaranteed it would be both politically and economically, especially for Germany, which ultimately went Nazi, which in turn led to the Second World War. But today’s Middle East owes a great many of its problems to the settlements reached at Versailles—which broke up the Ottoman Empire and drew the borders of the new states capriciously and with almost no regard for the region’s ethnic and religious character.

Stephen V. O. Clarke was a research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—which has a uniquely important responsibility for many official U. S. foreign economic transactions—and then became a quite conventional professor of economics at Princeton. His most notable work was a 1967 monograph on the New York Fed, “Central Bank Cooperation, 1924-1931.” Its circulation must have been very small; its prose and charts do not lend themselves to easy reading.

It caused few waves in the world–whether academic or larger—when printed, and Clarke never became known as a great economist, as did John Kenneth Galbraith (Galbraith’s thesis dealt with the bee industry in California). Clarke was not, by Ivy League standards, productive or a “star” academic.

His esoteric monograph is now very relevant and timely because the powerful nations of the world are today being called upon to cooperate to save the euro currency; they share a common need to solve a critical economic problem. They were also asked to resolve many similar issues in the 1920s, but each has distinctive differences, the most important being that Germany was very weak and in a defensive position by virtue of having lost the First World War; today it is economically the strongest nation in Europe. In both periods the stakes were very high.

Clarke’s work is based on the papers, phone conversations, and records of the principals involved; in this regard alone it is unique because he had access to these sources, which makes him especially insightful and authoritative. The New York Fed did not publish it thinking they had a potential best-seller in this extremely technical monograph but because it believed it would learn something about the genesis of one of the world’s great economic–and political—failures, and therefore how to avoid another like it. It makes its intent very clear in the bank president’s foreword to the work. While conceding that the differences between the 1920s and the present were great, he still believed Clarke’s study contained much that was of contemporary relevance, especially how each of the men involved in the 1920s negotiations had to balance his nation’s objectives and interests with the needs of an international system. In my opinion, this conflict of national and internationalist goals is also the way to understand today’s crisis in the euro bloc.

If the euro collapses the results will be far-reaching in terms of its failure leading to more dire economic consequences, and this may in turn make European domestic politics nastier as well. Right-wing parties are very likely to grow stronger. Clarke discusses, in great detail, how the major economic powers negotiated during the 1920s–and how and why they ultimately failed by 1931, when exchange controls were imposed on the franc, pound, mark—and the world economy broke up and stayed that way until the U. S. defined the postwar rules. America too was mired in the Great Depression. Clarke states, correctly, that domestic politics played a crucial role in the United Kingdom as well as Germany, in making cooperation even more difficult after 1929. He also concedes that New York wanted to replace London as the financial capital of the world.

Even taking into account the crucial differences between the period he covers and our own—above all the political context–it is extremely interesting to see how and why nations relate to each other when they have shared problems. They did so very badly during the interwar period and they are very likely to do so now—and for many of the identical reasons. Domestic politics are very likely to play a crucial role in the current crisis in the nations that have the biggest deficits, and Europe’s political leaders, whether from poorer or wealthier nations, are not likely to commit political suicide if they can avoid doing so –which the German plans for reform are effectively asking the leaders of Greece, Portugal, and other nations to do.

So far, the euro’s fate remains unclear until some indefinite time in the future, even though I believe that the present role it plays is highly unlikely to continue, but the European Union may fail. The euro crisis is complex in unique ways, and the Germans are playing a very convoluted nationalist game, but it requires nations to lose an important measure of their economic sovereignty, and the evidence from the interwar years—indeed, from much of recent history for that matter–suggests they are very unlikely do so.

Since Clarke’s monograph is the only account of this crucial period we have that is based on the private papers or records of many of the principals, we are compelled to consult this obscure record if we want some inkling how, and why, the men and women negotiating the fate of the euro bloc are likely to behave. If precedent gives any insights then they are likely to fail; the rulers of the world’s leading economies simply did not realize the horrors that would ensue because no one could predict them; nationalism and the notion of national interests blinded them in the inter-war period; and it blinds them today in much the same manner. The major difference is that Germany, unlike after the First World War, is now the most powerful country in Europe and we must consider the extent to which Germany is using the euro crisis to advance its own power by hiding it behind a pan-European façade that mobilizes and disciplines Europe’s nations on behalf of its interests and gives it leverage in dealing with the rest of the world.

The New York Fed was optimistic, hoping that knowledge would lead to an avoidance of the same errors occurring again. The United States never learned, politically, militarily, or economically, at least to the extent that it affected actual action, the lessons of past errors. After the Korean war, many American leaders resolved never again to fight a land war in Asia, but they did exactly that in Vietnam and Afghanistan, where they lost outright or failed to win a decisive victory. In Iraq, at best, they have stalemated, perhaps even lost a decade-old war. We shall see.

The process whereby the men who rule the United States, Great Britain, and other powerful nations make the same mistakes over again can be gleaned, to some great extent, from Clarke’s now-ignored work. Forgetfulness, misjudging the risks in action or inaction, peer pressures, national hubris and interests above all…. all, to varying degrees play some role. The important point is that states have sought to cooperate on crucially important economic matters in the past and they have failed to do so, and often “succeeded,” as in the cases of the United States and NATO and the now defunct SEATO and CENTO alliances, only to eventually find that its organizational schemes can also be encumbrances as well as tying up nations that might wander from U. S. control.

For Germany the euro crisis is an opportunity to undo the economic results of defeat in two World Wars and use a pan-European ideology to create a Europe that is susceptible to German domination. But most nations in Europe will likely eventually resist this effort to be led, and the European Union is likely to disappear; what will follow after is anyone’s guess. In the process of going for broke, the Germans are using their formidable ability to raise demands on the various nations in the European Union, and they are also likely to see the euro disappear. A period of uncertainty, if not chaos, will then follow.

Germany goes for broke.

Germany lost two world wars and it now has the most powerful economy in Europe, and Angela Merkel wants it, de facto and probably intentionally, to undo the onus of losing two world wars, thereby establishing Germany in a position of economic supremacy capable of dictating to the rest of Europe how to manage its internal economic affairs. The legacies and fears of the past will have to be overcome, and the nation-state and nationalism are not likely to disappear, the events that traumatized europe over the past decades are not forgotten by some countries—no matter how weak and small they are. It is true that most nations’ leaders, nominally at least, say they want to go along with the German project, although France is also likely to see a good part of its electorate refuse to implement what the Germans demand as desirable economic policy. Indeed, even Sarkozy may not be able to follow the strict, conservative economic conditions the present german government is now demanding.

Merkel says “if the euro fails, europe fails.” but she assumes that the Germans will define success or failure. This is a form of blackmail because the failure of the euro, which is highly likely to have negative consequences, is not necessarily going to be the catastrophe Merkel implies. Many nations suffered economically with the euro, which is not a magic economic wand or sacrosanct. Pan-european ideologies as a façade for Germany asserting national power, in the long run, is the greatest danger now confronting Europe. Merkel is using Germany’s economic clout, and if Europe adopts the measures to implement her program–they have already accepted them in principle—Germany will be able to deal with other powerful nations much more as an equal by citing its ability to define for most other European states the course they should take.

So far, Merkel has gotten nominal agreement for her plans from all the 27 nations that are members of the European Union who are members save Great Britain, but too many crucial specifics remains unresolved for me to say she has attained victory. The British, anxious to preserve the key role of the “City” in world finance, stayed out of the new agreement even though it nominally is in the European Union but does not use the euro as a currency. The British government also dislikes foreigners dictating their economic objectives and the means to attain them, as the Germans are doing. Prime Minister David Cameron has slight control over his Conservative Party, and the same will be true of other political leaders in democratic countries—ranging from France to Greece and Italy or Sweden–who cannot simply dictate rules to their parties or people. The problem is that there is too much democracy within Europe for technocratically-minded schemes. If a national law violates the new fiscal discipline, the Germans want the European Court of Justice, which sits in Luxembourg, to declare it illegal. Abstractly, this means that national parliaments and key legislative bodies can no longer make economic policy.

Unfortunately for the Germans, wherever a nation requires they somehow ratify something as far-reaching as this transfer of the right to define legitimacy, time will be lost and the public of that nation may not approve the new rules.

Besides, there are so many existing debts in Europe to refinance—1.1 trillion euros in 2012 alone—and no one is sure where the money will come from or who has the authority to loan it, that Merkel won time—perhaps a year—for the continuation of the euro. (Even Germany and France are in debt; Moody’s just downgraded its ratings of the three largest French banks because they own too many Italian and Greek government bonds). The agreement reached the weekend of this past December 9^th is essentially to return to the fiscal rules agreed upon at Maastricht in 1991 and which were never enforced in the first place–and are unlikely to be applied now. For political reasons—too much democracy—they are likely to fail again. The euro crisis is scarcely over and Ms. Merkel has won a pyrrhic victory. That her real objective is to rebuild Germany’s power through, and via Europe, will become more evident as time goes on and the members of the coalition of nations that now support her, France especially, will fall apart.

There are many sources of opposition to the new European Union treaty, ranging from most of the Conservative Party in Britain to Leftists in Greece, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere, who will oppose the austerity measures the new European accord now calls for. Cameron is concerned about the City of London maintaining its dominance over finance, and anti-foreign sentiment also motivates many Conservatives; Leftists see no reason why social welfare benefits, from hospitals to education, should be slashed just to meet Merkel’s demands. And of the 17 nations that ratified measures conforming to Merkel’s criteria, nine insist on their national parliaments or legislative bodies being consulted before they give the final approval to her proposals. Italy or Greece are not among these nine and large demonstrations against the new agreement have already occurred in both places.

Merkel is unlikely to succeed, and here Clarke’s discussion is instructive. There were essentially four major players in the 1920s, but the European economic union is far larger and more complex. Nominally, it has 28 members. Nation-states may not be the ideal form to organize the world but they are a fact we probably can do nothing about now. Attempts to impose supranational authority–ranging from central bank cooperation in the 1920s to the United Nations–have generally failed or have been used by nations, such as the U. S. and NATO, to impose their hegemony on others. NATO was also established to allow West Germany to rearm, creating a framework that looked able to control the rebuilding of Germany in the immediate post-war era, when in the name of fighting Communism the U. S. shipped Hitler’s rocket scientists and torture experts to the U. S. and had the intelligence network under General Reinhard Gehlen, who had worked for the Nazis as chief of intelligence on the Eastern Front, go to work for it. Allegedly, he received a pension from the CIA when he retired.

Reconstructing Germany’s dominant role in Europe is very much an integral part of the debate on the euro. Many nations, Great Britain excepted (and Switzerland, of course), nominally go along with Merkel’s threats and visions for the moment, and many non-German businessmen find having a common currency good for their exports. What she advocates is an established aspect of all conservative economics: balance the budget. Hungary and Sweden, which do not use the euro, are lukewarm at best. Poland, as well, is skeptical of the German approach, which is very conservative. The U.S. government immediately declared that the German-inspired principles were good but the problems that the euro faced had to be confronted in the next days, which was certainly not the case. President Obama himself, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the problems the euro faced had to be dealt with immediately, not next year, and there was, as the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it, a risk of “civil unrest and the breakup of the union” in the abstract approach it was now taking.

Merkel is not going to attain her objectives if the U S opposes her, but even if it is neutral her plans simply will not overcome the obstacles in her path.

No sooner than the European Union members met in Brussels on December 8, declaring an agreement, crucial people—like MarioDraghi, the new head of the European Central Bank, began disputing what the bank will and can do, clarifying his earlier statements in ways that looked like a reversal. Whether existing European Union institutions are sufficient to deal with a much broader spectrum of financial needs and issues must now resolved., Else the EU must also create new ones,. Germany and France say the existing institutions will suffice, but whether or not other nations in the EU agree is not clear. The British, led by a Conservative government, in any event, refuses to go along with the new deal and it remains to be seen how many existing European political leaders are ready to lose elections just to implement the draconian economic rules the Germans and French want to impose. Britain will have no voice in drafting a new agreement among EU members and, indeed, may get out of the EU entirely.

Like most accords dealing with such complex matters, the details are crucial. Those agreed upon in Brussels the weekend of December 9 simply leave too many questions of implementing an agreement hanging. In nine of the 17 national parliaments of the governments involved, parliamentary votes are required (Ireland. for example), a time-consuming process likely to be very contentious—basic economic questions and the welfare of nations will be involved. As even Nicholas Sarkozy admits, “Time is working against us,” but states ratifying the new agreements will take time doing so. There is still democracy to thwart the dreams of technocrats in Brussels. France and Italy, from the Left as well as the Right, have been places where strikes and protests abound when the European Union imposes its diktats..

The British, in any case, will not go along with the new European accord—they never entered the euro bloc anyway—and the I M F has raised the question whether it, despite its experience telling poorer countries how to run their economies if they want I M F loans, has the power or the resources to help save the euro bloc. Britain may no longer have a veto power over E U decisions–it may not be a member of the Union at all. Cameron has to work this out with his divided government bloc, and it may fall too on this question. Politics can decide matters in the U K as well.

Nations talked to each other throughout this past century but in the final analysis, as the Clarke monograph shows, they acted with the national interest foremost in their calculations and motives. They did so in the 1920s and the Germans are doing so now. Some things never change, especially in world affairs

European Union members have often reached agreements but these accords have generally not been honored—in a word, they come apart and do so fairly quickly. Germany now has the leverage to get most of them to go along with a formula–which is mainly old-fashioned economics—that defines it. It assumes wealth is a sign of virtuous behavior, if not, in its Calvinist version, God’s grace, and which many Europe’s leaders are for, in theory if not practice. But will Europe’s political rulers honor this agreement any more than they have honored past ones? The U. S. government, for reasons that are dubious, also thinks the German approach is too shortsighted, but Ms Merkel had her way in Brussels and asserted German power.

What is more than likely is that the euro crisis will continue for a very long time and the accord reached at Brussels will soon come apart because fear of Germany is still strong in many countries of Europe. National policies and the legitimate desire of nations to define their economic needs based on their own priorities and the institutions of democracy—which Ms. Merkel’s solution flouts as if they are no longer relevant compared to the fiscal conservatism that underlies the German approach. Moreover, the German formulae for ending the crisis by balancing budgets and the like may not work on its own terms and the framework for it succeeding may not exist, as Draghi and others have warned. Creating a new one will take a great deal of time..

Europe’s nations have agreed on an ostensibly new framework of principles–one that in fact is very much like the one agreed upon 20 years ago—and which also did not agree on concrete methods to implement it or a time frame. Even Merkel admits that formulating tangible measures to put her proposed solutions in force may take years. There is the rub.

In any case. the new agreement has so far failed to assure the financial markets on which Merkel is relying. After the new agreement, stocks fell, the value of the euro fell, and borrowing costs to Spain and Italy continued to rise. The rating services–such as Standard & Poors, Moody’s, and the like—were not impressed by the Brussels agreement and plan to re-examine their ratings of the 27 members of the European Union. France is likely to lose its AAA rating and Sarkozy’s reelection chances have been hurt, probably badly, by supporting the German view on the future of the euro. Sarkozy expects all the European Union members, save Britain, to ratify the new accords by next June. That is consummate optimism. A great deal can and will happen before then.

Ms. Merkel is playing a very high stake game—and nominally won this round—but the British and American governments disagree with both the means and ends of her effort, and the people of much of Europe have yet to be heard from. History is still very important.

Ms. Merkel is more than likely to fail in her ambitious plans.

GABRIEL KOLKO is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another Century of War? and The Age of War: the US Confronts the World and After Socialism. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is World in Crisis

Is Iraq Headed for a Crackup?

2011-12-12T11:05:00.000-05:00

The attached report by Patrick Cockburn, one of the best reporters now covering the Middle East, describes the growing tensions in Iraq over the question of sharing its oil wealth among its constituent regions. Specifically, Exxon is cutting an independent oil drilling deal with the Iraqi Kurds in northern Iraq despite the objections of the Iraqi central government in Baghdad. Although Cockburn's report is important in its own right, and I urge you to read it carefully, the implications become even more ominous when they viewed in a larger historical context:

The long view of history is likely to record the greatest 'sins' of Iraq, Iran, and Libya prompting interventions by the West have been related to the control of oil -- not nuclear weapons; not any communist leanings during the Cold War; not support of worldwide terrorism.

Each country committed the unforgivable sin of being governed at one time by nationalistic leaders who believed the oil under each country belonged to that country and should be controlled by the government of that country -- therefore, these leaders had to be removed:

Iran - Mohammed Mosaddegh, a popularly elected Prime Minister of Iran, and a modernizer and social reformer, removed by a CIA/MI6 coup in August 1953.
Iraq - Saddam Hussein, a murderous neo-Stalinist dictator, but also a modernizer and social reformer (e.g., major achievements in women's rights and education), removed by military force in 2003.
Libya - Muammar Qaddafy, a quirky tribal dictator, but also a moderniziner and social reformer (e.g., major achievements in women's rights and education) removed by military force in 2011.

One short-term common denominator in these imposed regime changes was that, regardless of how the regime change was justified or rationalized, the nationalist leader was replaced by a more compliant government that agreed to an opening of that country's oil fields to exploitation by privately owned western oil companies.

While history does not repeat itself, memories of the past do condition events in the future. Over the longer term, perceived wrongs are not forgotten, and such interventions can provoke blowbacks, which in turn provoke counteractions that further enmesh the intervening party in a growing welter of increasingly complicated conflicts.

In the case of Iran, for example, the 1953 coup eventually backfired in 1979, when Reza Shah Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamic revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini then established a regime retook control of Iran's oil fields, among other things. But the Iranian game is not over, and the historical pattern of move and countermove is in play, with the nationalist (Islamic) regime of Iran again in the West's crosshairs, allegedly because of its nuclear ambitions and support of international terror. Nevertheless, the glittering temptations of re-privatizing Persian oilfields are lurking in the background, attracting the private oil interests of the West like flies to honey.

It is too early to tell if or how blowback will unfold in Libya or Iraq, and the histories, cultures, and the unfolding conditions in these countries are very different from those in Iran. The privatization of Libya's oil fields is just beginning. On the other hand, as Cockburn points out, a process of divide-and-conquer privatization is well underway in Iraq; and it is already creating potentially explosive ramifications.

Furthermore, in Iraq, the potential for a regional blowback from the privatization of Iraq's oilfields is complicated by the unique detritus left over from the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, including the hypocritical colonialist assumptions implicit in 1919 Versailles Treaty, the empty promises of Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, and the nationalist assumptions implicit in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne (see summary & text) which established the boundaries for the modern Turkish nation -- which in fact were a fait accompli imposed on the Allies by the stunning military accomplishments of Kemal Ataturk. In so doing, Ataturk (1) nullified the cynical Anatolian partition plan envisioned by the Allies in their stillborn 1920 Treaty of Sèvres and (2) forced the British to renege on their promise to give the Kurds an independent nation in what is now southeastern Turkey (but significantly the British did not include the oil rich Kurdish regions in Iraq in their promise of Kurdish nationhood), among other things.

Thus the Exxon maneuver has the potential for inflaming the still unresolved Kurdish Question is all sorts of ways. The the map hints at this complexity by telling use Kurds live, and interested readers will find a short but excellent historical summary of the Kurdish question here.

There are 20 million or so Kurds, and they are probably the world's largest ethnic group without their own nation. While they are a tribal based society, and are by no means unified, their nationalist aspirations and minority rights have been ignored -- sometime brutally -- since the Treaty of Lausannne nullified the question of Kurdish statehood. This has been true especially for the areas now encompassed by eastern Turkey and northern Iraq, but oppression has also occurred in Syria and Iran.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq reinvigorated the Kurds' separatist ambitions once again. But this time, the ambitions are being fueled by the oil wealth described below by Cockburn. The emergence of an economically viable Kurdish nationalism changes the separatist game fundamentally. Moreover, the increased the restiveness of the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey despite Turkeys recent efforts to accommodate itself Kurdish demands, threatens to spill over to destabilize and provoke violent reactions in Turkey as well as Iraq (see here for a recent example of this dynamic in action) -- and perhaps even Iran and Syria. Interested readers can go here for a contemporary Turkish point view or here for a contemporary Kurdish point view on the separatist question.

If there is one thing the Wars of the Yugoslavian Succession ought to have taught the sclerotic elites shaping US foreign policy in the post-cold war era, it is that breaking up an ethnically diverse country previously held together by an iron hand does not necessarily improve protections of minority rights. Just ask the Serbs in Northern Kosovo who have roots roots in the region reaching back a thousand years whether or not Kosovo's independence has improved their lot in life.

My guess for the future of Iraq and its immediate environs: Add oil to this volatile Kurdish Question, and we ain't seen nuttin yet. And that, dear reader, is why, if you have not already done so, you ought to read Cockburn's report.

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Published on Friday, December 9, 2011 by The Independent/UK

Exxon's Deal with the Kurds Inflames Baghdad

The oil giant has defied Iraq's government by signing up to drill in disputed territory

by Patrick Cockburn

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/exxons-deal-with-the-kurds-inflames-baghdad-6274452.html

The great Iraqi oil rush has started to exacerbate dangerous communal tensions after a major oil company ignored the wishes of the central government in Baghdad and decided to do business with its main regional rival.

The bombshell exploded last month when Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, defied the instructions of the Baghdad government and signed a deal with the Iraqi Kurds to search for oil in the northern area of Iraq they control. To make matters worse, three of the areas Exxon has signed up to explore are on territory the two authorities dispute. The government must now decide if it will retaliate by kicking Exxon out of a giant oilfield it is developing in the south of Iraq.

Political leaders in Baghdad say the company is putting the unity of their country at risk. Hussain Shahristani, the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of energy matters, told The Independent in an interview in Baghdad that any oil or gas field development contract in Iraq "needs the approval of the federal government, and any contract that has not been presented to the federal government has no standing and the companies are not advised to work on Iraqi territory in breach of Iraqi laws".

Baghdad has had oil disputes before with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), but the present row is far more serious because it is the first time "Big Oil" has moved into Kurdistan, showing that at least one of the major oil companies is prepared to disregard threats from the government of Nouri al-Maliki. Previously, only small independent foreign oil companies, without other interests to protect in the rest of the country, have risked signing contracts with the Kurds.

"Exxon Mobil was aware of the position of the Iraqi government," says Mr Shahristani, a former nuclear scientist who was tortured and imprisoned by Saddam Hussein. "We hear from the American government that they've advised all American companies, including Exxon Mobil, that contracts should not be signed without the approval of the federal government."

Whatever the prospects of finding oil in the north of Iraq, observers are surprised that Exxon is prepared to hang its future in Iraq on the outcome of the power struggle between Iraqi Kurdistan and the central government. Control of the right to explore for oil and exploit it is crucial to the authorities on both sides since they have virtually no other source of revenue.

The Kurds have won a degree of autonomy close to independence since the fall of Saddam, and the ability to sign oil contracts without reference to Baghdad will be another step towards practical independence and the break-up of Iraq. A parallel would be if the Scottish government were to sign exploration contracts in the North Sea without consulting London.

What makes the Exxon-KRG deal particularly inflammatory, says Mr Shahristani, is that three of the six blocs where Exxon is planning to drill are understood to be "across the blue line – that is outside the border of the KRG". This means they are in the large areas in northern Iraq disputed between Arabs and Kurds since 2003, but where the Kurds have military control.

The government must now decide if it will make good on its threats and replace Exxon at a mammoth oil field called West Qurna 1 at the other end of the country, north of Basra. Iraqi oil officials hint that Royal Dutch Shell might replace the American company.

Both sides have much at stake. The Iraqi government is totally reliant on its oil revenues to pay its soldiers, police force and civilian officials. It needs vast sums to rebuild the country after 30 years of war, civil war and sanctions. In 2009, it began to expand its oil industry by signing contracts with firms such as BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon to boost production in under-exploited and poorly maintained fields.

These companies thereby gained access to some of the largest fields in the world, each with reserves of more than five billion barrels. Vast sums are being invested, mostly around Basra in the south of Iraq. Oil output, now at 2.9 million barrels a day, is due to rise to a production capacity of 12 million b/d by 2017, potentially putting Iraq on a par with Saudi Arabia as an oil exporter.

Mr Shahristani is pleased with progress so far, saying that what "we are doing in Basra is at least five times larger than the largest oil projects in the history of the oil industry so far."

Sitting in his vast office in a cavernous palace originally designed for one of Saddam's senior lieutenants, he holds up a chart showing the surging production from the Rumaila oilfield of 1.4 million b/d, more than Britain's entire current output of crude from the North Sea.

Iraqis are split on whether Exxon is being cunning or naive.

One explanation is that the oil company feels so powerful, or so essential to Iraqi oil development, that it can disregard the Iraqi government.
An alternative argument is that Exxon is dissatisfied with the West Qurna 1 deal and so does not mind walking away from it and looking for oil elsewhere.
A third is that the company got suckered by the Kurds.

Iraqi Arabs know that the Iraqi Kurds want to control as much of Iraq's oil reserves as possible to buttress their independence. Less easy to understand is why Exxon should willingly make its activities a central issue in the Arab-Kurdish confrontation which has for so long destabilised Iraq.

Flashpoint: Iraqi military bases

The transfer of Iraq's military bases [as US leaves] to local control is another flashpoint between the Kurdistan Regional Government and Baghdad, and some fear the dispute may boil over when US forces pull out at the end of the year.

Last month saw a tense standoff between the Iraqi army and local Kurdish forces at a US airbase in the northern city of Kirkuk, an oil-rich area long a point of dispute. The Kurdish police force reportedly blocked an army team from entering the base for an official handover from the US, unhappy that it was being transferred to Baghdad.

In an effort to calm the drama, the US ambassador, James Jeffrey, met Kirkuk's Governor, Najmaldin Karim, and Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, in the capital.

"We did not want a situation where we ended up shooting at each other," said Mr Karim.

The situation was defused when the central government made assurances that the base would be used for civilian aircraft only, a key demand of the Kurds.

However, once the base is handed over to Iraqi control, Washington will have little control over whether Baghdad sticks by its verbal agreement. Indeed, Ali Ghaidan, the commander of Iraq's ground forces who led the army team that eventually entered the base, has since publicly ruled out the possibility of the base being turned into a civilian airport – saying it is of too much strategic importance to Iraqi forces.

Reports of Kurdish security forces, known as peshmerga, bolstering their presence in Kirkuk have raised questions over how long the lid can be kept on this simmering conflict.

Why the US & Israel May Agree to Bombing Iran

2011-12-12T08:28:00.006-05:00

Shaping the Popular Psyche in America's Post-Information Era

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, 12 December 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/12/why-the-us-israel-may-agree-to-bombing-iran/

The arguments for attacking Iran are crazy, like those for attacking Iraq in response to 9-11. But that does not mean such an attack by the American and/or the Israelis will not occur.

Indeed, I think the political pressure for such an attack is increasing. My reasons for saying this are as follows:

On 11 October, Patrick Seale wrote a very important essay, Will Israel Bomb Iran. Seale described secret internal deliberations in the Israeli government over the twin questions of (1) how short a time window existed for Israel to launch a sneak attack on Iran and (2) how to suck in the United States into supporting such an attack, even if an Israeli attack was launched without US approval or if the US was kept in ignorance beforehand? Seale, who is extremely well connected and very knowledgeable on the Middle Eastern affairs, also reported the Americans knew of the Israeli discussions, and the idea of Israeli decision makers thinking their window of opportunity was closing was causing alarm in Washington.

Seale did not address the speculative question of whether or not Israel, motivated by the opportunities implicit in the US election cycle, was running a ‘perception shaping’ operation on the Obama Administration and/or Obama’s opponents in the Republican party.

Also on 11 October, the US Attorney General Eric Holder held a spectacular press conference announcing the FBI had uncovered an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on US soil and to attack embassies of unnamed third countries. But the story was full of holes, and as I argued here, it smacked of a botched sting operation or, even worse, a false flag operation, perhaps by the Israelis or the Saudis. The story quickly lost its traction and vanished, but the impression was planted in a sound-byte-addicted popular psyche.

In November, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released what Paul Pillar, a retired high-ranking CIA officer, characterized as a yawner of a report. The report vaguely described Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb, and it included an explosive claim that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist helped Iran construct a detonation trigger that could be used for a nuclear weapon. But, as the independent and enterprising investigative journalist Gareth Porter reported in CounterPunch, it turned out that this so-called foreign expert, who was not named in the IAEA report, had never worked on nuclear weapons. He was identified as Vyacheslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian, who is one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives. This finding lead Porter to question whether the Israelis had provided the IAEA with false information. Nevertheless, despite Porter’s industriousness, the IAEA’s yawner had planted another subtle impression in the popular psyche, which like the aforementioned plot to kill the Saudi ambassador can be regurgitated repeatedly, when needed for stoking passion with the faux news cycle.

Now, in another important essay, Feeble Pushback From the Prowar Crowd, Paul Pillar describes how, in early December, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta tried to inject a dose of reality into the irrational ‘let’s bomb Iran’ debate at the pro-Israel Saban Center for Middle Eastern Policy [1]. Piller describes in detail how Panetta thoroughly demolished the arguments for launching a preemptive attack on Iran with the aim of destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons program, whatever that is. Of course, Panetta’s dissection of this foolishness does not make for snappy soundbytes and is likely to disappear in the electronic ether.

Not surprisingly, Pillar ended his argument on a pessimistic note by saying the power of Panetta’s analysis may not make a difference.

While Pillar did not say so explicitly, he implied the reason why Panetta’s logic may not prevail is one Joseph Goebbels would have recognized instantly: The name of the game is to condition the public mind: By repeating an outrageous narrative loud enough and often enough, the pro-war faction may succeed in getting their war. That is because people will begin to absorb the false and misleading narrative into their subconscious Orientation (i.e., the filter through which they interpret their Observations of unfolding and often ambiguous and sometimes threatening circumstances), and when this subliminal shaping operation is successful, the desired Decisions and Actions will follow naturally and spontaneously, without coercion.

That is how you use what Hitler called ‘good wholesome fear’ to hijack popular OODA loops in the irrational electronic echo chamber of Amerika’s irrational post-information culture [2].

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

Notes.

[1] The Saban Center was founded by the Haim Saban who has retained very close ties to Israel even though he has lived in the United States for the past thirty years. According to a 10 May 2010 profile in the New Yorker, Saban says his greatest concern is protect Israel by strengthening the US-Israeli relationship, and his strategy for achieving this is threefold: making large donations to political parties, establishing thinktanks, and controlling media outlets.

[2] The process, power, and effectiveness of ‘hijacking’ OODA loops is explained here.

Why the President Obama Should Study Sun Tzu

2011-12-09T09:36:00.001-05:00

While Obama worries about appeasing Israel and Jewish votes at home, as well as being pressured by the neocons to support threats of an Israeli attack on Iran, the government of Israel beavers away as usual, creating new facts on the ground in the occupied territories.

Here (portions of which are quoted below) is an editorial in Ha'aretz, one of Israel's leading newspapers, describing one way the Israeli government continues to plant seeds for the eventual cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem and the West Bank by exploiting the paralysis it created in what is absurdly known as the "peace process."

Without peace talks, Israel must leave East Jerusalem alone
Discussions on Jerusalem were postponed to a later stage of the final-status negotiations, but it was never agreed that this interlude be exploited to create facts on the ground.

Haaretz Editorial, 7 December 2011

As the diplomatic process has sunk deeper into hibernation, acts whose sole purpose is to tighten Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem have multiplied. Thus even as the Palestinians have given the Quartet a proposal on security arrangements and permanent borders in the West Bank, Israel is advancing proposals to change the master plans of neighborhoods over the Green Line.As the diplomatic process has sunk deeper into hibernation, acts whose sole purpose is to tighten Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem have multiplied.

Thus even as the Palestinians have given the Quartet a proposal on security arrangements and permanent borders in the West Bank, Israel is advancing proposals to change the master plans of neighborhoods over the Green Line.

... All this activity in East Jerusalem is being accompanied by claims that throw sand in the public's eyes. A good example is ... The King's Garden plan, which entails demolishing 22 houses to create a new tourist attraction, is similarly wrapped in a veil of innocence. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat claims that the plan benefits Palestinian residents because it includes granting permits to 66 illegal buildings in the neighborhood. But Barkat is presumably aware of the tensions in this neighborhood due to the ongoing effort by right-wing organizations to "Judaize" the Old City and its environs. ...

At the Israeli government's request, discussions on Jerusalem have been postponed to a later stage of the final-status negotiations. But at no point was it ever agreed that this interlude should be exploited to create facts on the ground and exacerbate tensions.

If the President thinks doing is more important than being, which I doubt, he ought to study Sun Tzu's Art of War, particularly the passages on Cheng and Ch'i operations, with the goal of determining who is being played for the sucker. [1]

--------------------
[1] My favorite translations of Sun Tzu's classic are Thomas Cleary's for a political/phlosophical orientation and Samuel B. Griffith's for a military orientation. Readers interested in a modern application of Sun Tzu's ideas, and especially the art of using Cheng and Ch'i operations to unravel an adversary's decision cycle, will find them embedded throughout Col. John Boyd's seminal study of conflict, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, especially Patterns of Conflict and The Strategic Game.

Pentagon Maneuvers to Trump the Budget Sequester

2011-12-02T13:47:00.000-05:00

The China “Threat” Rises Again

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, 2-4 December 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/02/the-china-threat-rises-again/

When the Cold War ended in 1991, the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) was left high and dry, floundering like a beached whale, because there was no superpower threat to sustain its bloated existence. But the MICC is a self-organizing adaptable cultural organism, and when one looks back on the 1990s, it becomes clear that the early 1990s became years of experimentation in the MICC’s struggle to evolve a new threat (what the Pentagon lovingly calls a peer competitor) or a combination of threats (in Pentagonese, ‘near-peer’ competitors) to justify a continuation of high budgets and hi-tech business as usual.

The initial focus in the early 1990s was to build up China as a peer competitor, but that could not stand even casual scrutiny, and the China threat quickly petered out. It turned out that the Wars of the Yugoslavian Succession, especially Kosovo, provided the decisive pivot by establishing and legitimating the illegal warfighting theories of Humanitarian Intervention and Regime Change. These models solved the ’threat problem’ by establishing the paramountcy of perpetual small wars, or the threat of small wars, as the planning and budget justification models for the post-cold-war MICC, as I explained in greater detail last January (here).

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, which were not an act of war but a horrendous crime perpetrated by a stateless gang of fundamentalist ideologues, provided the the MICC with an excuse to lock in the Kosovo planning model. The MICC, spearheaded by the neocons, succeeded in transforming what should have been an international law enforcement operation into an open-ended global war on terror. The hype surrounding this so-called war resulted in a continuing succession of relatively small ‘hot’ wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yeman, Somalia, Libya).

Unfortunately for the MICC, the hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down, and the two most likely new wars to continue the sequence of perpetual war — hot wars in Syria and/or Iran — are beginning to take on the appearance of a ‘bridge too far’ for either the humanitarian intervention or regime change paradigms. Moreover, public opinion polls indicate that a substantial majority of the American public is now tired of perpetual war and want their government to turn inward to solve economic problems at home.

To make matters worse for the MICC, the Super Committee, as many predicted, just collapsed, and the automatic across-the-board spending cuts of the sequester are now scheduled to commence in 2013. Under the constraints of the sequester, the Pentagon’s budget would revert to the level that existed in 2007, before growing thereafter. According to an analysis of the Congressional Budget office’s August update of the federal government’s baseline budget, a sequester would reduce future growth in the Defense budget between 2012 and 2021 from 26% to 16%. Nevertheless, this reduction in future increases of the defense budget has the MICC terrified.

The Pentagon, led by Defense Secretary Panetta, for example, has been predicting a doomsday scenario if the sequester takes effect, alleging that the looming defense cuts would create a hollow military and 1.5 million people would lose their jobs, thereby increasing the national unemployment rate by one percent. Former Defense Secretary Bill Cohen, a former Republican senator, recently penned an op-ed in the 21 November issue of New York times parroting the Pentagon’s estimates of the carnage to force structure that would occur under a sequestration.

Yet only one day after Cohen’s op-ed, Elizabeth Bumiller of NYT reported on 22 November that the Pentagon has refused to make any contingency plans to deal with the sequester. That means the hysteria promoted by Secretary Panetta and Cohen and the generals/admirals Cohen so obediently parroted, is baseless hype and no one in the Pentagon has a clue about what could be done to mitigate the ‘damage’ caused by these potential ‘cutbacks’ described above.

Of course, the Pentagons cluelessness is understandable and predictable. As I explained in my last statement to Congress (June 2002), the accounting system and the program planning system underpinning the Pentagon’s management information system is an unauditable shambles. Decision makers at the top don’t have, and based on their refusal to fix this problem over the last 29 years, clearly don’t want^⁠ to have,¹ the information they need to link their strategic policy choices and force structure outputs to budgetary levels. There is a solution to this problem, as I went to great lengths to explain in the 2002 statement: The solution is to synthesize a new management information/decision-making system built around the central idea of contingency planning.

Had this proposal (or something like it) been implemented, it would be easy for Panetta, Cohen, and the generals and admirals to make a rationale assessment of how to mitigate the ‘damage’ caused by a sequester, but of course, it would be apostasy for the MICC’s leadership to entertain the possibility that it might be possible for the Pentagon survive with less.

Bringing this together: The people are sick and tired of perpetually fighting small hot wars; Syria and Iran are two small and not so small wars ‘too far;’ and there is a real threat of marginal budget reductions is in the offing, but the Pentagon refuses to do rational contingency planning. So what is the MICC to do?

There is only one answer: Find a peer competitor and start a new Cold War. That would generate the requisite amount of fear to unleash the purse strings, but at the same time, Pentagon could pump more modernization money to defense contractors (the industrial wing of the MICC) without having to pump up the operations budget (which mushrooms in hot wars). But what nation fits the bill?

Only China — and it looks like President Obama has swallowed the MICC’s bait. As Michael Klare skillfully lays out, Obama has chosen to commence a buildup aimed at isolating China. The Pentagon will deploy 2500 Marines to northern Australia on the Timor Sea, expand the Naval presence in the South China Sea (which is on top of major oil and gas deposits), and strengthen its alliances with Indonesia and the Philippines on China’s Pacific periphery. It is virtually certain that these moves will be perceived by China as a dangerous encirclement, and the will, therefore, trigger some kind of countermoves by China.

Voilà! With any luck, the MICC will be off to a new cold war arms race, the sequester will be quashed, and increased spending as usual will continue unabated.

That, dear reader, is how the bookkeeping shambles, threat inflation, and the politics of fear are the MICCs budget multipliers that will trump Social Security and Medicare in the coming budget debate.

------------------------

Notes

¹It is not as if this is a new problem in the Pentagon. I described the program planning aspect of bookkeeping shambles in testimony to joint hearing of the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 1983. That testimony was described in a cover story of Time Magazine that appeared on 7 March 1983.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. Notes.

What's Next for Pakistan

2011-11-28T22:22:00.004-05:00

Attached is a very important essay analyzing the political aspects of the current crisis with Pakistan, written from the point of view of leftist Pakistani intellectual. For those readers who are unfamiliar with the author, Tariq Ali graduated from Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics, and was President of the Oxford Union. He is now based in London, writes widely, has published many books, and is a frequent contributor the London Review of Books, The Guardian, and Counterpunch. While he writes from the perspective of the left, he is a well-recognized authority on the history, politics, and culture of Pakistan, and has been particularly critical of the ubiquitous corruption in its military and civilian government. He has many sources inside the Pakistani government, military, and even the ISI. In other words, Ali's views are both learned and important, and should be studied by anyone interested in this part of the world, regardless of his/her political orientation. The editors of Counterpunch have graciously given me permission to post his essay, and I urge you to read carefully this very important essay.

What's Next
NATO vs Pakistan

by TARIQ ALI, Counterpunch, 28 November 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/28/nato-vs-pakistan/

The Nato assault on a Pakistani checkpoint close to the Afghan border which killed 24 soldiers on Saturday must have been deliberate. Nato commanders have long been supplied with maps marking these checkpoints by the Pakistani military. They knew that the target was a military outpost. [CS note: I don think one should dismiss the possibility of a screw up, but even if was a screw up or some kind of false flag operation, it does not change essence of Ali's argument.] The explanation that they were fired on first rings false and has been ferociously denied by Islamabad. Previous such attacks were pronounced ‘accidental’ and apologies were given and accepted. This time it seems more serious. It has come too soon after other ‘breaches of sovereignty’, in the words of the local press, but Pakistani sovereignty is a fiction. The military high command and the country’s political leaders willingly surrendered their sovereignty many decades ago. That it is now being violated openly and brutally is the real cause for concern.

In retaliation, Pakistan has halted Nato convoys to Afghanistan (49 per cent of which go through the country) and asked the US to vacate the Shamsi base that they built to launch drones against targets in both Afghanistan and Pakistan with the permission of the country’s rulers. Islamabad was allowed a legal fig-leaf: in official documents the base was officially leased by the UAE – whose ‘sovereignty’ is even more flexible than Pakistan’s.

Motives for the attack remain a mystery but its impact is not. It will create further divisions within the military, further weaken the venal Zardari regime, strengthen religious militants and make the US even more hated than it already is in Pakistan.

So why do it? Was it intended as a provocation? Is Obama seriously thinking of unleashing a civil war in an already battered country? Some commentators in Islamabad are arguing this but it’s unlikely that Nato troops will occupy Pakistan. Such an irrational turn would be difficult to justify in terms of any imperial interests. Perhaps it was simply a tit-for-tat to punish the Pakistani military for dispatching the Haqqani network to bomb the US embassy and Nato HQ in Kabul’s ‘Green Zone’ a few months back.

The Nato attack comes on the heels of another crisis. One of Zardari and his late wife’s trusted bagmen in Washington, Husain Haqqani, whose links to the US intelligence agencies since the 1970s made him a useful intermediary and whom Zardari appointed as Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, has been forced to resign. Haqqani, often referred to as the US ambassador to Pakistan, appears to have been caught red-handed: he allegedly asked Mansoor Ijaz, a multi-millionaire close to the US defense establishment, to carry a message to Admiral Mike Mullen pleading for help against the Pakistani military and offering in return to disband the Haqqani network and the ISI and carry out all US instructions.

Mullen denied that he had received any message. A military underling contradicted him. Mullen changed his story and said a message had been received and ignored. When the ISI discovered this ‘act of treachery’, Haqqani, instead of saying that he was acting under orders from Zardari, denied the entire story. Unfortunately for him, the ISI boss, General Pasha, had met up with Ijaz and been given the Blackberry with the messages and instructions. Haqqani had no option but to resign. Demands for his trial and hanging (the two often go together when the military is involved) are proliferating. Zardari is standing by his man. The military wants his head. And now Nato has entered the fray. This story is not yet over.

TARIQ ALI’s latest book is The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad.

Afghan Dunkirk: Exiting Afghanistan UK-Style ... or

2011-11-27T10:33:00.005-05:00

... How the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) Will Win By Losing

My previous posting, discussed some of the implications of our looming grand-strategic defeat in Afghanistan. Here, we address the narrower logistics question of how to bring our forces home.

The old adage that it is easy to get into Afghanistan but painful to leave is true for many reasons -- a big one is described in the 27 November issue of the Daily Mirror [see attachment 1 below] -- the British army plans to use Russian railways, built by the Tsars 140 years ago, to return hundreds of millions of pounds worth of equipment in Afghanistan via a landroute to the English Channel.

If you think the horror described in the Daily Mirror report is bad, think about the US options: Given our deteriorating relations with Pakistan, the long, highly vulnerable land route out of Afghanistan, thru the Bolan and Khyber passes, and then down the road system of the Indus Valley in Pakistan to the teeming and potentially violent port of Karachi, is becoming increasingly problematic.

An alternative exit strategy for redeploying the far larger US forces would be an agonizing variation of the Dunkirk option described in the Daily Mirror report plus a sea lift, perhaps via transshipment points in Black Sea ports, like Batumi in Georgia, or Novorossiysk or Sochi in southern Russia, or even Odessa in the Ukraine (which at least would avoid the intermediate transshipment problem posed by the different railroad gauges between Poland and Germany).

A more remote option would be to repair relations with the mullahs of Iran and exit overland, westward thru transshipment ports in that country; but that unlikely option would require, at a minimum, we kiss and make up with the Iranians, lift sanctions, and tell our so-called allies, the Israelis, to shut up and stop threatening to bomb Iran.

By process of elimination, therefore, the fourth and most likely exit option is the time-honored US strategy of leaving mounds of expensive equipment behind when it flies away from a war. Moreover, from the perspective of the MICC, this option has the added added advantage of increasing the demand for larger budgets in the future, because it would make it easier to sell a "reset" program to replace the losses with newer, even more-expensive, more-complex, logistics-intensive weapons and equipment that are ill-suited for neutralizing the likely threats of the 21st Century.

So, as the Aussies say, 'no worries, mate,' because 'tomorrow is another day,' and besides, the MICC is likely to win by losing, after Afghanistan is gone with the wind.

------------------------

Attachment 1:

The 'new Dunkirk' - British forces to use Tsars' railway to travel 3,500 miles home by train from Afghanistan

By Christopher Leake and Will Stewart , Daily Mail 27 November 201

After a decade of war, they face the awesome task of shifting a colossal mass of hardware more than 3,500 miles across Europe to bases in Germany and the UK by the time British troops pull out in 2014.
The tally of goods used in the war against the Taliban since 2001 includes armoured vehicles, trucks, aircraft, helicopters, artillery, mortars, temporary buildings and medical centres.

British military commanders are planning to use Russian railways, built by the Tsars 140 years ago, to bring home hundreds of millions of pounds worth of equipment from Afghanistan.

To prepare for one of the biggest logistics exercises they have ever undertaken, Army, Navy and RAF chiefs have been visiting former Soviet states bordering Afghanistan to draw up a masterplan for what has been dubbed the ‘new Dunkirk’.

The idea being discussed with military and political figures in the Russian states envisages using the world’s most powerful cargo locomotives to pull up to 170 wagons along railway lines first used by the Tsars and later by Stalin. ... continued

The Good, the Bizarre and the Ugly

2011-11-25T13:14:00.000-05:00

AF-PAK Sitrep

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, Weedend Edition November 25-27, 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/25/af-pak-sitrep/

It is becoming increasingly clear that the AF-PAK war will end in yet another grand strategic defeat for the United States. To date, President Obama, has been able to distract attention from this issue, but given the stakes in 2012, that dodge is unlikely to last. Get ready for an ugly debate over “who lost the Afghan War.”

To those readers who disagree with my opening line, I urge you to study Anthony Cordersman’s most recent situation report on the AF-PAK War, THE AFGHANISTAN- PAKISTAN WAR AT THE END OF 2011: Strategic Failure? Talk Without Hope? Tactical Success? Spend Not Build (And Then Stop Spending)? It was issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on November 15. Reading the report is heavy slogging but I urge readers to download and examine it — at the very least, take a few minutes to read the executive summary.

Now compare Cordesman’s systematic, detailed, and workmanlike analysis to the bizarre obscurantism peddled one week later, on 22 November, co-authored by Michael O’Hanlon (Brookings Institution) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (American Enterprise Institute) in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, entitled Defining Victory in Afghanistan.

O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz posit the bizarre thesis that the admittedly less than successful outcome against the FARC guerrillas in Columbia is a favorable model for justifying continuing business as usual in Afghanistan. Viewed through the refractions of their Columbian lens, O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz conclude, “Our current exit strategy of reducing American troops to 68,000 by the end of next summer and transferring full security responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014 is working. In a war where the U.S. has demonstrated remarkable strategic patience, we need to stay patient and resolute.”

Are O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz living on the same planet as Cordesman or do they live in some kind of parallel universe?

I submit it is latter. Here’s why -

Einstein showed how reasoning by analogy can be a very creative way of thinking, but it is also very dangerous, because bad analogies, if not rigorously tested against reality, can capture the imagination and cause one to see what one wants to see. This problem has been particularly evident in the case of understanding the highly evolved complex tribal cultures of Afghanistan, as Jonathan Steele shows in his just released book, Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground (Counterpoint, Berkeley, October 2011). Steele explains how one of the enduring features of America’s 30 year adventure in Afghanistan is a policy-making decision cycle, [ i.e., what military reformers refer to as the collective Observation - Orientation - Decision Action (OODA) Loop], grounded in an outlook [i.e., Orientation] that is shaped by false assumptions and mythical beliefs. The distorted Orientation causes decision makers and policy wonks to filter information in a way that causes them see what they want to see. When this happens, as I explained here, decisions and actions become progressively disconnected from reality and decision-makers become overloaded by confusion and disorder — a process we in the Pentagon used to call incestuous amplification.

The only innoculation against incestuous amplification is to destroy the “model” shaping the orientation with a blunt dose of cold reality, like the Cordesman Report — yet as O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz have so convincingly demonstrated, the minds of some people are beyond saving. A problem, of course, is that more people will read silly fantasies peddled in the Wall Street Journal than heavy tomes produced by serious analysts.

Cordesman’s report is also important for another reason. Notwithstanding the last ditch fantasies of O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz, an atmosphere of gloom is descending on Versailles, and the inevitable hunt for scapegoats to blame for the looming failure is in the offing. While Cordesman is unlikely to be a part of any finger pointing game, analyses like his (and others like Steele’s) will add fuel to the fire heating up the emerging political debate over “who lost Iraq and AFPAK?” We can expect that debate to go from the bizarre (like the O’Hanlon/Wolfowitz thesis) to the really ugly, given the unscrupulous know-nothing scorched-earth atmosphere currently so much in evidence in our contemporary politics.

Polls suggest withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan are more in tune with the majority wishes of the American public, which after ten years of costly futile war is understandably tired and is turning inward because of economic troubles at home. Yet polls also suggest the military is now the most “respected” institution of government–far more so than it was in the early 1970s; this is true despite (1) the fact that DoD is now the only federal agency that cannot pass at least part of the annual audit required explicitly by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 and implicitly by the Constitution and (2) that after ten years, its wars are sputtering aimlessly into an morass.

On the other hand, the military — really the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex or MICC — is also far more politicized and influential in domestic politics than it was in the 1970s; its PR machine, abetted by ubiquitous advertisements by defense contractors in the printed and electronic media, is also far more sophisticated today than it was 40 years ago, and militarism has insinuated itself far more deeply into our popular culture. Indeed, as I have written elsewhere, Eisenhower’s nightmare is upon us.

To wit: the recent debate over deficit reduction effectively took serious reductions in defense spending off the table. In fact, even though the Super Committee on deficit reduction just collapsed as many predicted it would, Pentagon officials have refused to even make contingency plans to cope with defense cutbacks caused by a sequester, and have decided instead to push back on Congress, in effect passing the pain onto social programs and Social Security and Medicare. Evidence is mounting that defense spending and “no tax increases” are now eclipsing Social Security and Medicare as third rails in American politics.

My advice, dear reader, is to get ready for another Vietnam-like “stab in the back” argument like that of the late 1970s when the generals blamed their strategic/grand-strategic defeat in Vietnam on politicians at home. That drumbeat in the 1970s, abetted by phony claims that budget cuts after Vietnam created a “hollow military,” when in fact the hollowness was a self-inflicted wound [1]⁠1, together with fantastical promises that new technologies would revolutionize the nature of war, plus the spreading of contracts to more and more congressional districts, fueled a political atmosphere that unleashed the huge and wasteful spending spree of the 1980s.

This time, a re-run of the stab-in-the-back argument is also likely to be abetted by an unstated racist undertone of being ‘stabbed by a black socialist president,’ (a totally phony charge) fueled discretely behind the scenes by the MICC. This kind of inuendo will very likely to gain traction, particularly among the Limbaugh/Beck crowd on the hard right, but more generally among angry blue collar white men who have seen their standard of living stagnate or decline and their social status diminish.

Obama and the Democrats will be targeted for the bulk of blame, although in the case of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama certainly bears a major part of the responsibility for Afghanistan, given his reckless decision to escalate the ground and air war in 2009. But the problems cited in Cordesman’s report did not build up in just three years, and its information helps us understand why blaming Obama and Democrats for ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’ is a phony charge — there is plenty of blame to go around. Nevertheless, it is a almost certain this charge will be a campaign plank of the Republicans in 2012.

Combine the likely intensification of the MICC’s ‘stab-in-the-back politics with the growing popular rage against austerity economics in the US and Europe, the increasing prospect of a double dip global recession or even a debt-driven deflation, and 2012 is shaping up to be a very dangerous year for the United States — particularly if Israel tries to take advantage of this mess by attacking Iran in the middle of an election year.

Notes

1 As I explained in my 1980 report, Defense Facts of Life (see Part I of Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch, Westview Press 1985) the so-called “hollow military” was a self inflicted wound caused by explicit internal decisions to cutback on readiness inorder to pay for modernization with increasingly costly and complex weapons. My report proved this point by showing how the Air Force’s tactical fighter force suffered from the same readiness problems as the rest of the military, even though the budget for the tactical fighter mission area increased dramatically in inflation adjusted terms after 1975.

The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade

2011-11-14T12:47:00.001-05:00

On 11 November, my friend Andrew Feinstein authored an op-ed in the New York Times entitled Arms and the Corrupt Man. Andrew gave the reader a tantalizing glimpse of the dynamite packed into his important new book, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. His is a sordid story of corruption, money, and the impulse toward perpetual war that is engendered by the global arms trade across the global spectrum from the white through the grey and into the black markets.

By way of introduction, Andrew was a member of the African National Congress when, under the leadership of Nelson Mandella, the South African government made one of most profound transformations in human history. But after becoming a member of the new South African parliament, Andrew discovered that some things never really change. Although he rose swiftly in influence, his disillusionment grew as he sought unsuccessfully to investigate the corruption surrounding a huge arms deal. Isolated from his former comrades, Feinstein was forced to choose between the party he had so admired and his principles. He had come to the fork in the road made famous by the American strategist Colonel John Boyd, where the choice became “To Be” or “To Do.”

To Andrew's credit, he chose the latter and wrote After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC, a best-selling memoir of his time as an African National Congress Member of Parliament in South Africa. A brief introduction to that important book can be found in a TV interview he did for BBC Hard Talk. Andrew has recently been an Open Society Institute International Fellow and is the founding co-director of Corruption Watch, an anti-corruption NGO, and chairperson of the Aids charity FOTAC. Andrew's latest book, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, expands his earlier work on corruption in the South African arms trade to a truly global scale. A video summary by Andrew can be seen here.

[Truth in advertising: I was a minor source for Andrew in his research for “The Shadow World.]

Chuck Spinney

The Blaster

We Need the Money and We Need It Now

2011-11-08T22:49:00.000-05:00

The Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) is in panic city over what promises to be cosmetic cutbacks in the growth of the defense budget. The courtiers in Versailles on the Potomac, like the obedient editors of the Washington Post, are dutifully pumping out baloney about how dangerous it will be to cut the defense budget. The fact that the Pentagon cannot even account for all the money it receives is unimportant; after all, cutbacks in social security and medicare will pony up enough money to keep the MICC's party going, while the so-called deficit hawks impose austerity economics on the people (in the name of reducing federal debt -- think of this as 'not letting them eat cake') so the Federal Reserve can continue propping up the toxic private debt of the insolvent financial sector. And besides the Post needs the advertisement money from Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Northrup-Grumman.

My good buddy Mike Lofgren, who just retired with his sanity intact after working on Capital Hill as a Republican staffer for 28 years -- no small achievement I might add -- does not think much of the whining in the Georgetown salons. Here's why (see his Counterpunch essay below):

Chuck Spinney

BTW ... The war between the MICC and Social Security and Medicare that is now being joined has very little to do with the so-called War on Terror -- In fact, it is occurring right on schedule, if you doubt this, read the Op-Ed I wrote on this subject, in Sept 2000, one year before 9-11.

NOVEMBER 08, 2011

The Washington Post Boards the Pentagon Gravy Train

Defense Cuts Hysteria

by MIKE LOFGREN, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/08/defense-cut-hysteria/

Over the last five years, we’ve spent money on the military – in real, inflation adjusted dollars – at a higher rate than at any other time since World War II. That includes the late 1960s, when the United States simultaneously faced a competitor with 10,000 nuclear weapons and sent a half million troops to Vietnam. The Pentagon is spending recklessly at a time of fiscal crisis when America’s debt has been downgraded for the first time since formal credit ratings began in 1917.

Yet the Washington Post has joined the hucksters of the military-industrial complex in forecasting imminent doom if one cent is cut from Pentagon budgets. Supposedly, the Defense Department has already cut $465 billion from its budget, and further cuts would be ruinous. But those $465 billion in cuts are fake, mostly paper “savings” pocketed by the president from adjustments to unrealistic past projections of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and from other baseline manipulations.

Despite what Secretaries Gates and Panetta have claimed, the DOD budget has been, next to the Bush tax cuts, the single greatest contributor to the drastic swing from surplus to deficit since 2001. Including debt service costs, the wars have cost about $1.7 trillion. Additionally, the Pentagon has spent about $1 trillion above inflation on its non-war budget. Adding debt service makes that about $1.3 trillion, for a grand total of roughly $3 trillion added to the debt, courtesy of DOD.

As for the military’s doom-saying, such rhetoric has been standard procedure for service chiefs testifying to Congress for at least the past three decades that I served as a congressional staff member. Deliberate threat inflation, such as the hyperbolic overestimation of Soviet military capabilities in the 1980s, was the genesis of serious intelligence failures and billions wasted on weapons designed for imaginary threats.

China-as-military-threat is now in vogue at the Pentagon and in Congress. There is a threat, but it comes not from the rust-bucket aircraft carrier China bought from Russia. China now owns about one trillion dollars in U.S. Treasury securities – 36 per cent of all foreign holdings. According to the IMF, China is poised to pass the U.S. in gross domestic product by 2016. That is the real threat we face, not death rays and stealth air fleets. If you want to gaze upon the threat China poses, not because of any inherent evil on its part, but because of our own tax policy, spending priorities, “free” trade ideology, and general indifference of our elites, go to Youngstown, or Toledo, or some other post-industrial wasteland.

The U.S. spends about as much on its military as all other countries in the world combined. It could shave a trillion off a projected $6.1 trillion in spending over the next decade and still be miles ahead of the next power or any conceivable combination of powers.

But what about another 9/11, ask the Cassandras? In 2001, the U.S. already spent as much on its military as everyone else in the world, but that was irrelevant to preventing 9/11. That disaster was an intelligence failure: a failure of our intelligence agencies to some degree, but even more a failure of the cognitive intelligence and good judgment of our elected so-called leaders.

The Post cites figures from biased DOD-funded sources (think tanks, trade associations, contractors) claiming that a million jobs would be lost. But national defense is not supposed to be a jobs program, and in any case, if creating publicly-funded employment were the objective, a dollar spent on infrastructure would produce more jobs than a dollar spent on the military.

The United States is now a bloated military empire on the cusp of economic decline. Historically, the danger in such cases is that when the fiscal stability of the empire begins to weaken, the governing elites double down on the very policies of military profligacy that caused the fiscal crisis in the first place.

History is littered with powers that followed this ruinous path: the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Republic, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union. Chest-pounding rhetoric to the contrary, our military policies of the last decade have left us less prosperous, less secure, and less free. A course correction is desperately needed, regardless of what entrenched Beltway elites like the editorial board of The Washington Post think.

Will a Keynesian Restoration Save Us?

2011-11-06T09:13:00.002-05:00

Twenty-first century economics and questions of wealth are about money: where it comes from and were it goes. One thing the financial meltdown and the ensuing economic crisis have made indisputably clear is that the market adjudicating these questions is not free, dispassionate, or rational, but is shaped by clashes of interests, passion (greed and fear), manipulation of information on a gigantic scale (e.g., hidden agendas, influence peddling, deception, ambiguity, all aided and abetted with computers creating what one Pentagon wag called the post-information era), and lawless behaviour — that is to say, the 21^st Century political economy is game that operates with a very big “P” and a little “e.” Yet neoliberal and Keynesian economics are premised on the same fallacious dogma that the 21^st Century market economy is a natural phenomenon with a little “p” and a big “E.”

So, despite the undeniable political essence of the factors creating the current economic crisis, the debate over how to resolve the crisis does not question the “p-E” vs. “P-e” distinction. Instead, it has been framed as an intellectual contest between neoliberal economics and Keynesian economics. The dogmatic constraint shaping this contest is taking on the odor of a mediaeval religious dispute where highly educated protagonists are arguing scholastically about the number of faeries on the head of pin. The dominance of austerity economics in the US and EU may indicate the ideas of neoliberalism are winning the debate, but is the only alternative a restoration of Keynesianism? Or is it time to address the P-E distinction itself? Perhaps it is time for an emergence of a Galileo to introduce the inconvenience of reality into a sterile debate that has become disconnected from reality.

This Blaster presents a penetrating analysis of these questions. The author, Professor Ismael Hossein-zadeh, an Iranian-born Kurd, has been a professor of political economy at Drake University since he received his PhD at the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1988. Hossein-zadeh gets at the deeper questions by debunking two central myths propping up the illusions implicit in the economic theory of Keynesianism and the proposition that economic experts can fine tune the economic through the application of theory and dispassionate reason.

Since this P-E distinction is very much Professor’s Hossein-zadeh’s subject, let’s see what he has to say about the question of whether a Keynesian Retoration will save us.

Chuck Spinney

WEEKEND EDITION NOVEMBER 4-6, 2011

Race to the Bottom

Keynesian Myths and Illusions

by ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/04/keynesian-myths-and-illusions/

The Keynesian view that the government can fine tune the economy through “appropriate” fiscal and monetary policies to maintain continuous growth at or near full employment is based on the idea that capitalism can be controlled by the state and managed by professional economists from government departments, that is, capitalism run by “experts” in the interest of all. Economic policy making according to this view is largely a matter of technical expertise or economic know-how, that is, a matter of choice.

The effectiveness of the Keynesian model is, therefore, based largely on a hope, or illusion; since in reality the power or control relation between the state and the market/capitalism is usually the other way around. Economic policy making is more than simply an administrative or technical matter of choice; more importantly, it is a deeply socio-political matter that is organically intertwined with the class nature of the state and the policy making apparatus.

The Keynesian illusion has been nurtured or masked by two major myths. The first myth stems from the perception that attributes the implementation of the New Deal and Social Democratic economic reforms that followed the Great Depression and WW II to the genius of Keynes. This is a myth because those reforms were more a product of the fierce class struggle and overwhelming pressure from the grassroots than that of the brains of experts like Keynes. The harrowing socio-economic turbulence of the 1930s generated momentous social upheavals and extensive working class struggles. The ensuing “threat of revolution,” as FDR put it, and the “menacing” pressure from below prompted reform from above—independent of Keynes.

As a relatively well-known academic/economist, however, Keynes provided the theoretical or intellectual rationale for the badly-needed reforms in order to save capitalism by fending off revolution. The auspicious coincidence of the publication of his famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), with the implementation of the New Deal-type economic reforms in the US and Western Europe provided Keynes with much more credit for those reforms and the subsequent economic recovery than he deserved.

The second myth is based on the view that attributes the long economic expansion of the 1948-1968 period in the US and Europe to the efficacy or success of Keynesian policies of economic management. While it is certainly true that expansionary government policies of the time played a big role in the fantastic economic developments of that period, other factors contributed even more to the success of that expansion. These included the need to invest and rebuild the devastated post-war economies around the world, the need to supply the vast post-war global demand for consumer as well as capital goods, lack of competition for US products and capital in global markets—in short, the fact that there was enormous room for growth and expansion in the immediate post-war period.

Harboring these myths and illusions, many Keynesian economists envisioned a silver-lining in the 2008 financial meltdown and the ensuing economic crisis. For, in the “crisis of Neoliberal economics,” they saw an opportunity for a new dawn of Keynesian economics, or the coming of a second New Deal. Well-known Keynesians such as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Dean Baker wrote (and continue to write) passionately on the need to revive Keynesian policies, to implement extensive stimulus packages, to reinstate the Glass Steagall Act and other regulatory measures that were put in place in response to the Great Depression. The excitement on the part of many Keynesians about the prospects of what they perceived as an almost automatic switching of policy gears from Neoliberal to Keynesian economics led George Melloan of the Wall Street Journal to write (sarcastically) “We’re all Keynesian’s Again.”

More than three years later, it is abundantly clear that Keynesian policy prescriptions are falling on deaf ears, as Neoliberalism continues to keep Keynesianism at bay. Indeed, even the nominally socialist and Social-Democratic economies of Europe have adopted the unbridled austerity policies of Neoliberalism.

Shunned, Keynesian hopes and illusions have turned into disappointment and anger. For example, using his New York Times’ column, Professor Paul Krugman frequently lashes out at the Obama administration for ignoring the Keynesian policies of economic expansion and job creation and, instead, following policies that are not very different from those of Neoliberal Republicans. “The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. . . . Think about it: Where are the big public works projects? Where are the armies of government workers? There are actually half a million fewer government employees now than there were when Mr. Obama took office.”

Let me repeat the essential part of Professor Krugman’s statement: “The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing.” This is exactly what I call Keynesian illusion: the belief in the ability of government to control and/or manage capitalism; the perception that government “could and should” invest in job creation but, somehow, does not do it now. Yes, a government could and should invest in job creation; but that would be a different government, a disinterested government independent of special interests, not the Obama administration (or the US government more broadly) that is beholden to the big money for its election/reelection. It is true that a capitalist government may occasionally invest in economic growth and job creation; but those would be occasions when such policies are perceived to be also serving the interests of the ruling class (as in the aftermath of the Great Depression and WWII).

It is obvious that the Keynesians’ disgust with the Neoliberal policies of the government of big business is misplaced. At the heart of their frustration is the unrealistic perception that economic strategies and policies are largely intellectual products, and that policy making is primarily a matter of technical expertise and personal preferences: economists and/or policy makers who are far-sighted, good-hearted, or better equipped with “smart” ideas would opt for “good” or Keynesian-type capitalism; while those lacking such admirable qualities would foolishly or misguidedly or heartlessly choose “bad” or “Neoliberal capitalism” [1].

As I have pointed out in an earlier critique of Keynesian economics, it is not a matter of “bad” vs. “good” policy; it is a matter of class policy. Keynesians are angry because they tend to be oblivious or shy away from the politics of class, that is, the politics of policy making. Instead, they seem to think that economic policy making results mainly from a battle of ideas and theories, and they are disappointed because they are losing that battle.

Professor Krugman passionately writes, “Where are the big public works projects? Where are the armies of government workers?” What he fails to mention is that those “armies of government workers” were put to work not courtesy of FDR, or because of Keynes’ brilliant ideas (in fact, when the FDR administration initially embarked on the implementation of the extensive public works projects it did not even know Keynes was alive), but because much larger armies of workers and other grassroots threatened the capitalist system by persistently marching in the streets and demanding jobs. It is interesting that many Keynesian economists admirably fight (of course, in the realm of ideas) for the rights of workers but shy away from calling on them to rise up to demand their rights.

It is not enough to have a good heart or a compassionate soul; it is equally important not to lose sight of how public policy is made under capitalism. It is not enough to repeatedly bash Ronald Reagan as a wicked king and praise FDR as a wise king. The more important task is to explain why the ruling class ousted the wise king and ushered in the wicked one. Government policy makers are certainly not stupid. Why, then, did they switch from the policies of Keynes and New Deal economics to those of Reagan and Neoliberal economics?

The US capitalist class pursued the Keynesian-type policies in the immediate post-war period as long as political forces and economic conditions, both nationally and internationally, rendered those policies effective. Top among those conditions, as mentioned earlier, were nearly unlimited demand for US manufactures, both at home and abroad, and the lack of competition for both US capital and labor, which allowed US workers to demand decent wages and benefits while at the same time enjoying higher rate of employment.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, both US capital and labor were no longer unrivaled in global markets. Furthermore, during the long cycle of the immediate post-war expansion US manufacturers had invested so much in fixed capital, or capacity building, that by the late 1960s their profit rates had begun to decline as the capital-labor ratio of their operations had become too high. In other words, the enormous amounts of the so-called “sunk costs,” mainly in the form of fixed capital, or plant and equipment, had significantly eroded their profit rates [2].

More than anything else, it was these important changes in the actual conditions of production and the realignment of global markets that precipitated the gradual abandoning of Keynesian economics. Contrary to the repeated claims of the liberal/Keynesian partisans, it was not Ronald Reagan’s ideas or schemes that lay behind the plans of dismantling the New Deal reforms (in fact, steps to hammer away at those reforms had been taken long before Reagan arrived in the White House). Rather, it was the globalization, first, of capital and, then, of labor that rendered Keynesian or New Deal-type economic policies no longer attractive to capitalist profitability, and brought forth Ronald Reagan and Neoliberal austerity economics [3].

Karl Marx argued long ago that dreams of an egalitarian socialist society to supplant capitalism could not be realized unless (a) conscious political actions are taken toward that end (i.e., there is not such a thing as automatic collapse of capitalism), and (b) such actions are carried out on a global level. In light of the relentless Neoliberal austerity race to the bottom that globalization has unleashed in recent years and decades, it is obvious that Marx’s provisos for meaningful social change applies not only to radical socialist ideals but also to reformist capitalist programs a la Keynes.

References.

[1] Many progressive/Keynesian economists call the protracted crisis that started in 2008 the crisis of “Neoliberal capitalism,” not of capitalism per se—see, for example, David M. Kotz, “The Financial and Economic Crisis of 2008: A Systemic Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism,” Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2009), pp. 305-317.

[2] For a relatively thorough discussion of this issue see Anwar Shaikh’s “The Falling Rate of Profit and the Economic Crisis in the U.S.”; in The Imperiled Economy, Book I, Union for Radical Political Economy, Robert Cherry, et al. (1987).

[3] For an informative analysis of this transition see Harry Shutt’s The Trouble with Capitalism: An Enquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure, Zed Books (1998).

Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. He is the author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave – Macmillan 2007) and the Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt (Praeger Publishers 1989). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.

Iranian Plot: Sting, False Flag, or Both?

2011-10-15T07:43:00.002-04:00

US Attorney General Eric Holder held a press conference on 11 Oct where he claimed Federal authorities had foiled a plot by men linked to the Iranian government to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States and to bomb the embassies of Saudi Arabia and Israel in Washington (NYT). The vagueness and innuendo in the language of the complaint filed with the federal court reek of a half-baked sting operation. For example, attacking the embassy of Saudi Arabia is mentioned as merely a “possibility” of bombing foreign government facilities of Saudi Arabia and “another country” located “within and outside of the United States." Israel is not even mentioned in the complaint; the closest reference being the aforesaid reference to "another country." And the plot hinged on the information supplied by a supposed assassin for hire, who was in reality a confidential source of the DEA, posing as a member of than international drug cartel, and who had agreed to work for the DEA after being convicted on an unrelated narcotics charge. While the possibility that this was another hokey FBI/DEA sting operation has been covered widely in the mainstream press, the idea of this plot being a false flag operation, taking the form of a half-baked plot designed to be uncovered, has been conspicuous by its absence.

A false flag operation occurs when party ‘A’ attacks party ‘B’ while engineering the blame for the attack to be hung on a third party ‘C.’

It is the exposure of "C" in the plot that is important in a false flag operation, and understanding a false flag operation turns on the question of who, (what country or organization) stands to gain from an exposure of "C's" involvement in the plot -- and exposure, which in this case, would precipitate a US-Iranian crisis that might possibly lead to a war?

The following three attachments provide information that may help you orient yourself to this ominous possibility:

Attachment 1 is an email from Ray Close now circulating widely on the internet. Mr. Close served in the CIA operations side of the house at high levels, including being assigned as the CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. Close explains why he thinks whoever concocted this plot wanted it to be exposed in order to precipitate a major U.S.-Iranian crisis.

Attachment 2 is an essay by scholar/writer Esam Al-Amin that, in effect, builds on Close's argument by identifying potential beneficiaries. I do not know if Al-Amin had access to the Close email.

Some defenders of the complaint may be tempted to dismiss the arguments of Close and Amin as mere speculation -- and to an extent they represent speculations, albeit by knowledgable men. But to dismiss such arguments on these grounds would be to apply a double standard, because Attachment 3 reports that US officials, speaking on background, have admitted that the evidence supporting the allegation of high-level Iranian involvement is both scanty and wildly speculative, to put it charitably. It says unnamed US officials have acknowledged their confidence in the allegation of high-level Iranian involvement was derived inferentially from analysis and understanding of how the Iranian Quds Force operates, and that it was "more than likely" that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Quds Force commander Qasem Suleimani knew about and approved the plot. They insisted that it was not a rogue operation, but acknowledged that other parts of Iran’s factionalized government, including President Amadinejad, may not have know about it. However experts on Iran and the Quds force, like Gary Sick of Columbia, Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Office, and Alireza Nader of the RAND Corp., say the details of the plot just don't make sense and are entirely out of character for either Khamenei and Suleimani.

In other words, the allegation of high-level Iranian involvement is based on speculative possibilities that deviate from observed patterns of behaviour, not facts. Moreover, the claim is that these speculative possibilities were derived from analyses and appreciations of the inner workings of post-Shah Iran made by the US intelligence community. Not doubt that shakiness of this allegation is one reason why the complaint filed in the New York court only names the obscure Mr. Shakuri as the only co-conspirator in Iran.

So ... the Obama Administration wants the American people and the world to believe the same Intelligence community that (1) disgraced itself in Iraq and has performed so poorly in Afghanistan and (2) failed utterly to predict the beginning of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 (when Iran was our close ally and was flooded with US operatives), now has a far more reliable cultural appreciation of the inner working of the Iranian revolutionary regime, with which the US has had only limited relations. The inferences are so reliable, in fact, that Mr. Obama, Mr. Holder and Ms. Clinton, lawyers all, would have the American people believe their inferences are sufficient to dismiss any legal limitations of circumstantial evidence and reasonable doubt surrounding a question relating to war or peace for a country that is already over-extended in wars in the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.

The absurdity and danger implicit in this kind of thinking, coupled with the government's track record of fixing intelligence to fit its pre-concieved policies, elevates the question of a false flag to a level of legitimacy that should but won't be investigated.

Chuck Spinney

Barcelona

--------- Attachment 1 ------------

From: Ray Close
Date: October 13
Subject: Questions about alleged Iranian plot

Because it is a PDF document, I have to ask you to download the attachment, which is a true copy of the Amended Complaint written and signed by FBI Special Agent Robert Woloszyn and filed before the judge of the Southern District of New York on 11 October 2011 concerning the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States in Washington, D.C. It is not a long document.

Please read paragraphs 22, 23 and 24, for starters. Note: "CS-1" is the FBI's Confidential Informant, presumably a Mexican, who is described by Special Agent Woloszyn as a man "posing as an associate of a sophisticated and violent drug-trafficking cartel". As far as I can determine, neither the FBI nor Attorney General Eric Holder has provided any evaluation of this man's reliability or trustworthiness. It seems that the accuracy of the entire account depends solely on the assessment of this confidential source by one FBI Special Agent -- unless we are being asked to accept a radically abbreviated and simplified version of the case history.

The scum-bag that this murder was being requested and was going to be paid for by a secret group in Iran?
Then ask yourself a very simple question, please: If you were an Iranian undercover operative who was under instructions to hire a killer to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington, D.C., why in HELL would you consider it necessary to explain to a presumed Mexican scum-bag that this murder was planned and would be paid for by a secret organization in Iran?

Why identify yourself at all? If (for some implausible reason) an explanation of some kind was absolutely necessary, why not employ a very simple cover story that the ambassador had violated the honor of your sister, and you were willing to pay a high price to avenge this dishonor?
Why give the intended murderer incriminating information that could be enormously damaging to the government of Iran if the agent betrayed you or if he were apprehended and chose to confess? Isn't that something that any ten-year-old would know instinctively?

Conclusion: This was not a professional murder-for-hire operation.
The Iranians are certainly not idiots. Also, no faction in Iran today, as far as I can see, would have anything to gain at this time from taking such a risk. Who ever concocted this tale wanted the "plot" to be exposed, and for only one simple purpose that I can surmise: to precipitate a major crisis in relations between Iran and the United States. It seems to me that our analysis of the case should, therefore, start with a simple calculation: what other government in the Middle East would benefit most from a serious deterioration in Washington's relations with Teheran? Who, in fact, would like nothing better than to see those relations take a big step in the direction of military confrontation?

Until all the answers are known, it is my frank opinion that the Obama administration made a very serious error by blowing this incident up into a major international crisis.
Considering the multitude of other critical problems that America presently faces, and the utter impossiblity of even contemplating any level of military conflict in another Muslim country in the Middle East, it should OBVIOUSLY be the objective of U.S. national policy at this point in time to AVOID destabilizing incidents, not to stir up confrontations like this. EVEN IF THE ALLEGATIONS PROVE TO BE TRUE, it was a mistake to make such a spectacular accusation without being prepared at the same time to present irrefutable evidence to the world to prove the case, and then to be prepared to take carefully-considered counter-action that is consistent with our calculated national security objectives with regard to Iran.
As it is, we have made a huge issue without any apparent plan to manage the consequences or to turn the situation to our advantage. There is a time-honored and proven rule of defense and security policy: if you are not in a position to control and manage a situation to your advantage, then keep your mouth shut and play your cards close to your chest. DO NOT WALK STICKLY AND CARRY A BIG SOFT, as some wise national leader once advised.

--------- Attachment 2 ------------

Who is really behind it?

The implausibility of an Iranian plot

By Esam Al-Amin

Opednews.com, 14 Oct 2011

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-implausibility-of-an-I-by-Esam-Al-Amin-111014-560.html

On October 11, Attorney General Eric Holder, flanked by the FBI Director and the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, accused the government of Iran, specifically the elite Quds battalion of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), of plotting to assassinate the ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the U.S, Adel Al-Jubeir.

So what do we know about this alleged conspiracy? And what are the facts pertinent to this explosive charge?

1) The alleged conspirator, Mansour Arbabsiar, is a 56 year old naturalized American of Iranian descent. He has been living in several Texas communities since the late 1970s when he arrived to the U.S. as a student. By all accounts, Arbabsiar led a disorderly life marked by constant failure, whether as a student, husband, father, or businessman.

For over two decades the alleged “mastermind” left behind a trail of successive failed businesses, including a used car lot, a restaurant, a convenience store, and a finance company. One of his friends told the Washington Post that he is “a goofy guy who always had a smile on his face.”

Arbabsiar was neither an ideologue nor religious. His nickname among his close friends was “Jack” because of his affinity for Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Last year, he was arrested for felony possession of a narcotic. According to public documents, his former wife accused him of spousal abuse and filed a protective order against him in 1991.

2) The complaint (so far it is not even an indictment by a grand jury) charges that Arbabsiar allegedly conspired with a high official of the Quds battalion of the IRGC. According to the complaint he was recruited by this official - who is also supposedly his cousin - when he visited Iran earlier this year.

There is plenty of evidence that the Quds Force has been involved in many militant anti-Western operations in Iraq. It has also been publicly supporting the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance organizations in their struggle with Israel. These activities have earned it the label of “supporter of terrorism” by most Western nations, including the U.S.

But according to Robert Baer, a 21-year veteran CIA operative and analyst, the Quds Force is one of the most professional and disciplined (though deadly) organizations in the Middle East. As reported by CNN, the Quds Force “has never been publicly linked to an assassination plot or an attack on U.S. soil.”

Baer confirmed this fact when he said that “in its 30-year history of attacking the West, the Quds Force went out of its way never to be caught with a smoking gun in hand. It always used well-vetted proxies, invariably Muslim believers devoted to Khomeini's revolution.”

He then questioned whether the plot was genuine by asking, “Why didn't the Iranians use tried and tested Hizbullah networks and keep Iranian nationals, much less unknown Mexican narcos, out of it?”

3) We know from the complaint that the U.S government was actually directing the plot (target, location, method of attack, setting the price of the assassination, bank account information, etc.) Pete Williams, NBC’s DOJ correspondent, said that the plot was in fact “a sting operation” directed by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the FBI. A recent report published by New York University Law School showed that in the past decade federal agencies have relied heavily on sting operations, not only in drug busts, but also most significantly in dozens of national security cases “that were planned, financed and executed by the FBI.”

4) According to the official story, we are to believe that, although the price set for the Saudi Ambassador’s assassination by a member of a Mexican drug cartel (who was actually a DEA informant) was $1.5 million, the Iranian handlers expected the assassin to carry it out by advancing him only $100,000 (less than 7 percent of the total amount.)

Moreover, as Baer argued in Time magazine, in three decades of external operations in many countries, the IRGC fingerprints or money transfers were never traced back to Iran, but that Iran has always “enjoyed plausible deniability.” Baer further told CNN that, “it would be completely uncharacteristic for Iran to be caught red-handed.”

Therefore, such sloppy behavior through traceable money transfers and phone intercepts is simply not credible. It appears to be a deliberate attempt to leave behind as many clues as possible to pin this alleged egregious act on Iran.

5) Another hole in this puzzle concerns the possible motive Iran could have by sponsoring such a provocative act. Strategically, Iran has never been stronger in the region. It has been the greatest beneficiary of the U.S. debacle in Iraq and its difficulty in Afghanistan. Furthermore, despite the successive international sanctions imposed on Iran, its nuclear and other military programs have been progressing at an increasingly steady pace, while asserting a growing and dominant role in the region.

Hillary Mann Leverett, an adviser on Iran in former President George W. Bush's administration, told CNN that this act made no sense, and contradicted Iran’s national security strategy. She stated, “There's no benefit; there's no payoff in them pursuing this kind of hit against Adel Al-Jubeir. And it runs contrary to their entire national security strategy.”

If Iran wanted to punish Saudi Arabia it had a plenty of targets in the region, including in Saudi Arabia itself, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Persian Gulf region in general. If it wanted to target a diplomat, the worst choice would be on U.S. soil where such an act would be easily uncovered and would not go unpunished. It is not clear why Iran would even target a small functionary of the Saudi diplomatic core. Al-Jubeir is neither royalty nor a significant player in Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy.

Since at least 2003, the Iranian national security strategy has been to de-escalate regional tensions and avoid any confrontation with the U.S. or its regional allies, especially Saudi Arabia. It has been in the middle of unprecedented build-up of its military power, especially its navy, nuclear power, and long-range missile programs. Experts believe that it needs at least five more quiet years to finish this phase of its build-up.

6) Ironically, in 2004 the U.S. uncovered an alleged assassination plot by another U.S. national against King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia himself, not his ambassador. In that plot, the U.S. asserted that it confiscated more than $340,000 payoff from former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddhafi for the killing of the Saudi monarch.

The Bush and Blair administrations, which were in bed with Gaddhafi at the time, negotiating the surrender of his nuclear programs, did not threaten or impose any sanctions on the former Libyan regime because of the plot. Although the U.S. sentenced the alleged U.S. conspirator to 23 years in prison, the Saudi king pardoned the alleged assassin who was arrested in Saudi Arabia.

However, this time the reaction by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia was not only swift and harsh, but threatening and escalating.

7) Since the inception of the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia has been very nervous. It has sent its army to Bahrain to crack down on the popular protests, while bribing its citizens and inviting the monarchs of Jordan and Morocco to join the GCC alliance in order to halt any movements in these countries towards a constitutional monarchy.

Meanwhile, throughout this year the Saudi media has been relentless in its attacks against Iran, presenting it as a “Shi’a” nation and a “Persian” power set on taking over the Arab Sunni countries in the region. It is an old tactic used by authoritarian regimes to focus the public’s attention on an external enemy to deflect from the popular demands for democracy and civil rights and against repression and corruption as demonstrated by the Arab uprisings throughout the region. This alleged plot plays into the hands of those who want to escalate the confrontation with Iran inside Saudi Arabia.

8) But the clear winners of any escalation with Iran are those who want to attack Iran militarily in the region, namely Israel and Saudi Arabia. In one of the Wikileaks documents released recently, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia cabled back to the State Department that King Abdullah wanted a U.S-led military confrontation with Iran. He said that the Saudi monarch wanted to “cut the head of the snake” in the region.

Moreover, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who resigned a year ago, described the current Israeli government as “dangerous and irresponsible.” Last spring he told the Israeli Haaretz newspaper that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu would attack Iran and that doing so would be “the stupidest thing.” When asked about what would happen in the aftermath of an Israeli attack, Dagan, said that: “It will be followed by a war with Iran. It is the kind of thing where we know how it starts, but not how it will end.”

According to The Forward, twelve of the eighteen living ex-chiefs of Israel's two security agencies (Mossad and Shin Bet), have been opposing an open war with Iran and are “either actively opposing Netanyahu's stances or have spoken out against them.”

So the trick for the right wing Israeli government has been how to drag the U.S. into this war and make it an American-Iranian confrontation rather than an Israeli-Iranian conflict.

To sum up, this alleged plot actually raises more questions than it answers. It’s supposedly led by a “goofy”, unsuccessful U.S-Iranian dual citizen, who is neither religious nor ideological; manipulated by an informant of a U.S. law enforcement agency fronting as an assassin for a Mexican drug cartel; recruited without vetting by one of the most elite and disciplined organizations in the world, while paying only 7 percent of the contract to assassinate the ambassador to a country (Saudi Arabia) with which Iran is trying to have a good relationship, in a country (the U.S) with which it is trying to avoid any confrontation, while leaving money transfers, telephone intercepts, and clues behind.

If this sounds illogical, then who is behind this amateurish plot?

It is unlikely that there are so-called rouge elements within the IRGC that want to drag the U.S. into a confrontation with Iran. That would amount to virtual suicide within the Iranian establishment. There is no history of such behavior even when the country was militarily much weaker and politically unstable.

Thus, to best answer the question is to identify those who would benefit the most from a confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. Clearly those who have the most to gain from such a clash are Israel and the Iranian opposition, particularly the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO).

While the former seeks to cripple Iran’s nuclear program, the later has been in a deadly confrontation with the Islamicly-oriented government for decades, and wants to weaken the regime so it could be toppled. Both entities have tried over the years to sponsor terrorist operations and covert actions within Iran and outside to damage the regime or implicate it in external terrorist acts.

It is not beyond the realm of possibilities that the Israeli Mossad or the MKO were able to recruit an idiot or his cousin or both in a plot that involved assassinating the Saudi Ambassador, while leaving a trove of evidence behind to be found in order to implicate the Iranian government.

But assuming the U.S. was not privy to it, despite the plot being a sting operation, the more important question is then why the U.S. government took the bait and escalated the incident to a dangerous course with uncalculated consequences?

The U.S, Israel, and Saudi Arabia can certainly start a war with a more assertive Iran. But they certainly cannot end it. One only has to look at the recent U.S. adventures on either side of Iran’s borders to learn that lesson.

Esam Al-Amin can be reached at alamin1919@gmail.com

--------- Attachment 3 ------------

Excerpts
Officials concede gaps in U.S. knowledge of Iran plot
By Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria
WASHINGTON | Wed Oct 12, 2011 7:52pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/12/us-usa-iran-plot-idUSTRE79B7VO20111012
(Reuters) - Iran's supreme leader and the shadowy Quds Force covert operations unit were likely aware of an alleged plot to kill Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, but hard evidence of that is scant, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
The United States does not have solid information about "exactly how high it goes," one official said.
The Obama administration has publicly and directly blamed Iran's government for seeking to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, and has warned Tehran it will face consequences. The accusation has heightened tensions in the volatile, oil-rich Gulf.
...
The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said their confidence that at least some Iranian leaders were aware of the alleged plot was based largely on analyses and their understanding of how the Quds Force operates.
They said it was "more than likely" that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Quds Force commander Qasem Suleimani had prior knowledge or approved of the suspected plot. They insisted it was "not a rogue operation in any way," and was sanctioned and directed by Quds Force operatives in Iran.
But other parts of Iran's factionalized government may not have known, they said. That included President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who "didn't necessarily know about this," one said.
...
"We would expect to see the Quds Force cover their tracks more effectively," said one official. Another said a plot to launch a violent attack inside the United States was "very outside the pattern" of recent Quds Force activities.
Kenneth Katzman, an Iran specialist at the Congressional Research Service, said there were elements of the alleged plot that did not make sense.
"The idea of using a Texas car salesman who is not really a Quds Force person himself, who has been in residence in the United States many years, that doesn't add up," Katzman said.
"There could have been some contact on this with the Quds Force, but the idea that this was some sort of directed, vetted, fully thought-through plot, approved at high levels in Tehran leadership I think defies credulity," he said.
The U.S. officials said Quds Force operations until now had principally involved providing covert Iranian support to anti-American and anti-Israeli militants and insurgents in the Middle East and South Asia.
But the officials also noted a history of antagonism between Iran's theocratic Shi'ite government and Saudi Arabia's Sunni monarchy. That hostility manifested itself in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, a Saudi residential complex housing U.S. servicemen, in which U.S. officials say the Quds Force played a significant role.
Officials said the poor tradecraft and loose talk by Arbabsiar left open a strong possibility that officials in Tehran believed the U.S. government would not necessarily view an attack on Saudi Arabia's ambassador as an attack on the United States itself.
...
After his arrest, Arbabsiar confessed that a cousin in Iran, whom U.S. officials identified as Abdul Reza Shahlai, was a senior Quds Force official, the indictment against him said. Federal authorities say that under their supervision after his arrest, Arbabsiar discussed the alleged assassination plot on the phone with Gholam Shakuri, whom one U.S. official identified as a Quds Force "case officer," or agent handler.
A U.S. official said Shahlai in the past had come to the attention of U.S. security officials responsible for monitoring Quds Force activities. Another official said that after his arrest, Arbabsiar identified photographs of two Quds Force operatives that had been provided by U.S. intelligence.
U.S. officials said apart from their historical knowledge about how the Iranian leadership and Quds Force interact, they believed high-level Iranian government support for the plot was corroborated by the fact that Arbabsiar allegedly managed to arrange a $100,000 wire transfer to fund the plot.
The money passed through at least one Asian financial haven, one official said, adding the Iranians were relatively sloppy in concealing the funds' origin.

Sprey-Cockburn Report

2011-08-19T04:54:00.000-04:00

Did Fukushima Meltdown Increase Infant Death Rates in the United States?

Attached below is an extremely important report written by my friends Alexander Cockburn and Pierre Sprey. They describe on the ramifications of the still unfolding Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan — specifically, its impact on infant death rates in the United States, and in so doing they also discovered the disastrous state of radiation monitoring by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Alexander needs no introduction, nor should Pierre, but for those who do now know of him, Pierre is a brilliant statistician/engineer. He was a key member of the design teams that shaped the enormously successful F-16 and A-10 combat aircraft and he is founder and key sound engineer of the innovative Mapleshade recording studio, renowned for the quality of music among audiophiles. Pierre approaches statistics in the exploratory empirical tradition that allows the universe of data observations help to shape the hypothesis under test. Moreover, he does this in a rigorously unbiased way that ends up milking the maximum real (as opposed to spurious) information out of the data. His analyses are not only elegant and brilliantly simple, they can be awe-inspiring to the analytically inclined. [Pierre's technique is very similar the Exploratory Data Analysis philosophy pioneered by the renowned statistician John Tukey, an accessible description of which can be found here.]

In this case, Pierre constructed a simple statistical test (the Mann-Whitney U Test — explained in the technical addendum I have appended to the end of the Sprey-Cockburn Report) to determine if and how infant death rates in the United States changed after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.

I urge readers to study this very important report carefully, especially those of you who are infatuated with the idea of building a carbon-free economy, because a carbon-free economy means many more nuclear power plants.

The Sprey-Cockburn Report appeared in the subscriber edition of Counterpunch. The editors kindly gave me permission to distribute it. While the free Counterpunch website is a source of much useful information on an incredibly wide range of subjects, the juiciest morsels of investigative journalism are usually reserved for paid subscribers … I strongly recommend that readers subscribe, it will be worthwhile, even if you are interested in only one article out of every six.

Chuck Spinney

Nice France

Where did the Radiation Plumes from Japan Touch Down?

The Fukushima Disaster and Infant Death Rates in the U.S.

· At Least 19 Cities in Harm's Way

· Why EPA Monitoring is a Joke

By Pierre Sprey with Alexander Cockburn

CounterPunch, Volume 18 no 13, July 1-31, 2011

[Subscriber edition — distributed with permission of editors]

CounterPunch has established that in the eight weeks after the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima complex in Japan on March 11, infant mortality in 19 U.S. cities increased by 35 per cent.

In the course of this review, conducted by CounterPunch's statistical consultant, Pierre Sprey, it also became clear that the Environmental Protection Agency's monitoring system, known as RadNet, is hopelessly inadequate to assess the effect on U.S. public health of a nuclear accident either overseas or here in the Homeland. EPA's routine sampling is laughable, with sampling frequency and geographic coverage that are hopeless for tracking radiation exposures of concern to public health. EPA's extra sampling following disasters like Three Mile Island or Fukushima can, at best, identify only a tiny fraction of the significant touchdowns of the concentrated radiation plumes from an accident site.

This past June, to check on a Sherman and Mangano piece on the CounterPunch website showing elevated infant deaths in eight cities in the Pacific Northwest post-Fukushima, we asked CounterPunch's statistical advisor Pierre Sprey to review data available from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the form of weekly deaths of infants of one year or less in 122 reporting cities across the U.S.A. This is the only available database where one can get numbers bearing on very recent mortality trends within a week or so after the deaths occurred. Most other mortality databases are not published within a year or more of the events covered.

In June, Sprey reviewed data from all eight cities mentioned in the Sherman/Mangano article, as well as the three remaining Pacific area CDC-reporting cities to the north of these eight: San Jose, Santa Cruz, Fresno, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane and Boisie. Sprey found that the four northernmost Pacific Northwest cities of these eleven- Portland, Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane - showed remarkably significant results.

During the ten weeks before March 11 the four cities suffered 55 deaths among infants less than one year old. In the ten weeks after Fukushima 78 infants died - a 42 per cent increase, one that is statistically significant. To confirm once again that these results were not due to seasonality, Sprey compared the infant deaths in the ten weeks after Fukushima to the deaths in the equivalent ten weeks a year earlier. The results were almost identical with the ten weeks before Fukushima in 2011. Within the equivalent ten weeks of 2010, 53 infants died in these four cities.

The post-Fukushima deaths are 47 per cent higher than they were in the same period a year before - once again, statistically significant. If you add the equally far north city of Boise, Idaho, to the four-city sample, the results remain almost unchanged.

Such results are not as surprising as they seem: Chernobyl was associated with similar spikes in infant mortality at various distant locations in Europe. Even though our northern Pacific coast is 4,500 miles from Fukushima, significant localized concentrations of radioisotopes are to be expected because the meltdown's radiation plumes carried by the Pacific's westerly winds, much like pollution plumes and ash plumes elsewhere, did not disperse uniformly with distance - contrary to the equations used by all atmospheric computer modelers. In fact, actual observations of radiation dispersal after Chernobyl or volcanic ash dispersal after any notable eruption, including the recent Icelandic eruptions, always show that the particles disperse in unpredictable and surprisingly concentrated plumes, which touch down occasionally and with high concentrations at great distances from the source.

In his June review on our website, Sprey pointed out that an important line of inquiry would be to correlate the sampled cities' infant death results with contemporaneous measurements of radiation levels in the drinking water, and possibly the milk supplies in nearby areas. In that review, Sprey selected the four Northwest city samples because he was trying to analyze the data from all CDC-reporting cities within a geographically consistent area that might have been exposed to Japanese radiation.

Now Sprey, with the help of CounterPunch researcher Jed Bickman, has widened his purview and sharpened his selection criteria to include more cities. He looked for cities specifically defined by elevated radiation levels near them, using EPA iodine-131 measurements as the indicator of a nearby plume touchdown. Locations in the EPA RadNet database showing significantly raised iodine-131 in any air, rain or drinking water sample (or significantly raised strontium-89 in a milk sample) within the 20 days following Fukushima were selected. If any of the 122 cities reporting weekly mortality to the CDC was nearby or within 100 miles or so downwind of one of these RadNet locations, this was taken as an indicator that the reporting city could have been exposed to a radioactive plume touchdown. Note that, as discussed at greater length below, the EPA RadNet samples are so sparse in time and space - days or weeks apart and often hundreds and hundreds of miles between monitoring sites - that the vast majority of actual plume touchdowns across the country almost certainly remained undetected.

Using this approach, Sprey selected 19 cities showing evidence of being near a touchdown within 20 days of the Fukushima disaster. Five proved to be Portland, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma and Boise, the cities already examined in the June analysis. Five more from the Sherman/Mangano study also met the criteria: Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose and Berkeley. New cities added were Long Beach, Las Vegas, Ogden, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs, Denver and, surprisingly, three cities in Florida - St. Petersburg, Tampa and Jacksonville.

Sprey took infant deaths during the eight weeks after the Fukushima disaster on March 11 (weeks 11 through 20 of 2011) and compared them to two control samples. One control sample was the deaths during the identical eight-week period from a year earlier (weeks 11 through 20 of 2010), and the second was the eight-week period in 2011 just before Fukushima.

Sprey found that, when compared to 2010, infant mortality in the 19-city sample increased by a statistically significant 35 per cent. The raw numbers are 305 infant deaths in the eight weeks after Fukushima and 226 deaths for the same eight-week period in 2010. Comparing the 305 post-Fukushima deaths to the 259 infant deaths in the eight weeks just before the meltdown yielded a statistically significant 18 per cent increase.

The percentages are not quite as large as the percentage increases for the four-city sample of the June review, but statistical reliability has increased considerably, because the sample almost doubled the number of cities and quadrupled the number of deaths included.

As Sprey reviewed the data available, he was astounded at the sampling inadequacy of EPA's RadNet, all that the United States has available to monitor the exposure and health risks of large masses of people during a nuclear accident - most importantly during a domestic power plant accident where far more Americans would be at risk than from Fukushima.

Radiation does not disperse according to any model. Plumes move unpredictably. Thus, the only way to monitor is to have a network which is geographically dense enough, and to sample often enough that it doesn't miss a lot of plume touchdowns. And the sampling frequency needs to be adequate for each of the ways in which the public could be exposed to harmful radiation: through drinking water, milk, rain, and airborne particles.

As stated at the outset, EPA's RadNet is hopelessly inadequate. For an example, Sprey looked up what the RadNet database had collected for the decade 2001 to 2010 in the most populous state in the union, California.

Air: first, consider airborne isotope results across 10 years for the entire state of California, measuring six isotopes of concern for public health: iodine-131 and five others (in EPA lingo, these are called air filter samples). Across the entire decade, there were only 11 readings, all of them conducted on one day, December 31, 2009 - and only one sample for each of 11 cities on that day.

Milk: in a decade, EPA took only six readings for all of California, one in Los Angeles, and five samples in San Francisco.

Rain: EPA measured only gross gamma radiation and a short list of isotopes, which doesn't include iodine-131 or strontium-89, both of prime interest for public health after a nuclear power plant accident. Over the decade, rain sample readings were taken only once a month, and only at one site in all of California: Berkeley till March 2004, then Richmond from March 2004 to June 2010. After June there are no readings, because either EPA failed to update the database or lost interest.

Drinking water: this is a major health concern because a city's drinking water exposes citizens to radioactive particles washed into the system from across an entire watershed. Only three cities received any drinking water readings at all. In Los Angeles, EPA took one isotope reading a year but only for iodine-131, cesium-137 and tritium. Tritium measurements of interest only to detect if a thermonuclear explosion has taken place, are useless, and iodine has an eight-day half-life, so it disappears long before the next one-a-year sample is taken. In Richmond, EPA measured drinking water once a year, but only for seven years of the decade. Berkeley made do with three years.

In New York State the situation is just as bad. In all of New York, air filter isotope readings were taken on just one day, December 31, 2009. For drinking water isotopes, EPA measured one sample per year in only three cities: Albany, Niagara Falls, and Syracuse. New York City had no drinking water readings for the entire decade.

For rain, there were monthly readings at two places in New York State: Yaphank and Albany. New York City's rain remained unmonitored.

For milk: over the decade, three milk samples were measured for Buffalo and two for Syracuse; New York City milk drinkers were left to fend for themselves.

Amid these appalling deficiencies, EPA thumps its chest proudly for its small network of about 125 "near-real time," continuously monitoring stations across the U.S.A. - stations that measure gamma radiation as continuous graphs (at infrequent intervals, these stations also send in air sample filters for the conventional laboratory air-isotope readings discussed above). Typical continuous gamma graphs from these stations provide little or nothing of public health interest, because they consist only of very small perturbations above a steady background level. EPA claims, however, that slightly atypical perturbations can alert EPA scientists that something unusual is happening. Then, by comparing the recorded gamma particle counts in each of ten bands of energy levels, trained technicians are said to get good indications of what radioactive isotope may be the source.

The catch? EPA's continuous gamma monitoring database doesn't disclose when scientists have determined that an unusual event has occurred, what isotope was identified, or what action was taken. In other words, EPA's years and years of stored gamma graphs yield nothing of interest to anyone outside EPA, neither public health officials nor the public. CP

Pierre Sprey has been a consulting statistician for EPA studies in air and water quality monitoring and related health effects and a principal member of the Pentagon's concept design teams for the F-16 and A-10. He is now running Mapleshade, his record label that sets new standards for sound quality and manufactures pioneering cables, vibration control devices and other upgrades for perfectionist audio systems.

—————

Technical Addendum

CS Note: I asked Pierre Sprey for a technical description of the statistical test used to determine the significance of his results. For the statistically inclined, attached below is Pierre’s description of the Mann-Whitney U test. Used properly, it is an extremely powerful non-parametric or distribution free test [a good textbook explaining the power and use of these kinds of statistical tests is James Bradley's classic Distribution-Free Statistical Tests ]:

“The appropriate distribution-free test is the Mann-Whitney U test for comparing the medians of two different samples (the samples can be of different size and don't even have to have the same underlying distribution). It tests the hypothesis that the median week's death count for the 19 cities during the 10 weeks after meltdown is to the median week for the 10 weeks before (or, alternatively, the same 10 weeks one year earlier). The alternate hypothesis is that the "after" sample is greater.

The test works by rank ordering all 20 weeks taken together, then looking at T, the sum of the rank positions only in the "after" sample of weeks. From this you calculate U as follows:

U = n₁ n₂ + {n₁ (n₁ + 1)/2} – T , where n₁ and n₂ are the sizes of the first and second samples respectively.

In this case, the two sample sizes to be compared are equal (i.e., 10). The distribution of U is known (as long as you know the two sample sizes) so you can look it up in a table of the U-statistic to get the significance level. The reason the distribution of ranks (properly normalized) is known and invariant is because ranks are a distribution-free measure. Think of it this way: the chance of the second sample value you draw having the 5th largest rank doesn't in any way depend on the distribution of the actual sample value itself.”

How the GOP Became a Death Cult

2011-07-19T01:24:00.000-04:00

My good friend Werther provides some high octane fuel to get you through the day.

Zombies on the March

How the GOP Became a Death Cult

By Werther*

Electric Politics, 18 July 2011

http://www.electricpolitics.com/2011/07/zombies_on_the_march.html

Does anyone still remember the GOP of the chowder and marching society, Jell-O salads, Buicks, and cloth coats? Is it conceivable that a Republican could have written the following? —

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.

But the Republican Party of 2011 is not your grandfather's GOP, not by a long shot. To be sure, the party always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King! Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well)! Paul Broun! Patrick McHenry! Virginia Foxx! Louie Gohmert! The Congressional Directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

The Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets (the rest of their platform is essentially window dressing):

1. They solely and exclusively care about their rich contributors, and have built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash, intended to con the booboisie. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family (net worth: $86 billion) or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses.

2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging war, they can never match GOP stalwarts such John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia — a nuclear-armed state — during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? — "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts" who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. If we are to believe Eric Cantor, a majority of House Republicans will not vote to raise the debt ceiling; yet these are the same people who just passed a defense appropriations bill that increases spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.

3. Gimme that old time religion. Pandering to religious nuts is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the Religious Right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith" in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did this toxic stew of beliefs come completely to displace Eisenhower Republicanism?

It is our view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of empiricism in America) is the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes — at least in the minds of followers — all three of the GOP's main tenets.

Televangelists have long-espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some downscale whites vociferously defend the prerogatives of billionaires.

The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter — God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass — and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely-inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell writing that God is Pro-War.

It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an immanent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist, and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there is no debt ceiling problem is Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? — we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.

But while the rank and file of the faithful believe, deludedly, in whatever nonsense they believe, their tactical allies and paymasters may be playing a more cynical game. Behind a lot of crazy movements in history there were rational actors who made money off them (Krupp and I.G. Farben vis-à-vis the Nazis, etc.). We may be wrong to blithely assume the "business community" is unanimously supporting an increase in the debt ceiling. There could be vultures who are pushing a default so they can buy up the pieces at a fire-sale price. What else could explain all the money the Koch brothers are pumping into Michele Bachmann's campaign?

The sleep of reason breeds monsters.
----------* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

Posted by Werther on July 18, 2011 4:34 PM

Obama's Game: Inflating Expectations but No Follow Thru

2011-07-15T07:20:00.003-04:00

President Obama is in trouble at home and around the world. The common denominator in his problems is his failure to follow through on the expectations (promises of change) he recklessly excited. The threat of an expectations/reality mismatch unravelling his presidency was always implicit in his election strategy (see my last paragraph of "How Obama Won."). Today the effects of this mismatch are coming home roost, as can be seen in the mounting alienation of his domestic political base in the United States by continuing the Clinton/Bush neoliberal politicies. But, those effects are also coming home to roost grand strategically, as can be seen his plummeting popularity abroad, particularly in the Arab World, as shown in the attached survey by Zogby International for the Arab American Institute Foundation, where he has done nothing to change the Three Pillars of Middle East Policy.

ARAB ATTITUDES, 2011

Conducted by Zogby International, Analysis by James Zogby

Arab American Institute Foundation

The full report can be downloaded from this link:

http://aai.3cdn.net/5d2b8344e3b3b7ef19_xkm6ba4r9.pdf

Executive Summary

After improving with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, U.S. favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush Administration, and lower than Iran's favorable ratings (except in Saudi Arabia).
The continuing occupation of Palestinian lands and U.S. interference in the Arab world are held to be the greatest obstacles to peace and stability in the Middle East.
While many Arabs were hopeful that the election of Barack Obama would improve U.S.-Arab relations, that hope has evaporated. Today, President Obama's favorable ratings across the Arab World are 10% or less.
Obama's performance ratings are lowest on the two issues to which he has devoted the most energy: Palestine and engagement with the Muslim world.
The U.S. role in establishing a no-fly zone over Libya receives a positive rating only in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, but, as an issue, it is the lowest priority.
The killing of bin Laden only worsened attitudes toward the U.S.
A plurality says it is too early to tell whether the Arab Spring will have a positive impact on the region. In Egypt, the mood is mixed. Only in the Gulf States are optimism and satisfaction levels high.

Why the Big Green Spending Machine Keeps Spending

2011-07-05T14:37:00.012-04:00

Perpetual Motion

Why the War Machine Keeps on Running

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, 5 July 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney07052011.html

Villefranche, France.

The United States has always meddled in other people's affairs. For those readers who think this statement is an exaggeration, I urge them to peruse the chronology of interventions compiled by the Congressional Research Service. This historical predilection for meddling, however, grew enormously in depth and breadth during the Cold War, and to make matters worse, it is now clear that it exploded after the end of the Cold War.

The Bush-Obama perpetual war on terror is now the longest and second most expensive war in US history, exceeded only in cost by WWII, even if one removes the effects of inflation from the comparison. And this war comes on top of the incessant warmongering during the 1990s, including the bombing of air defense sites in Iraq, the drive by shootings with cruise missiles in the Sudan and Afghanistan, and the bombing in Bosnia and Kosovo during the Wars of the Yugoslavian Succession. Anyone who opposes the meddling and warmongering is labeled an isolationist by the defenders of the status quo, like Senators McCain, Graham, and Lieberman. But this is absurd name calling, as Sheldon Richmand cogently explains in this essay. This absurdity of the isolationist label has a long lineage dating back to the misrepresentations by so-called 'internationalists -- ironically,by mostly liberal democrats -- of the foreign policy views of Senator Robert A. Taft in the 1940s and 1950s.(here)

Today, the United States is locked in a throes of perpetual war, and our politics are dominated by its political handmaiden, perpetual fear. If you doubt this, just think about the recent expansion of drone assaults to Libya and Somalia or your next invasive pat down in an airport or the continuation of the onerous Patriot Act. Some critics believe perpetual war is driven primarily by the lust for empire. No doubt, empire lusting is a factor, but for the reasons I explained in The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War, I believe perpetual war is primarily the issue of a deadly mutation of domestic politics, particularly the imperative to prop up a sclerotic Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) -- a political-economic faction that lost its raison d'être when the Cold War ended, and now needs the perpetual threat of war, to pump money through it, if it is to survive and flourish on its own terms, at the expense of others.

The distorting powers of domestic political faction (described elegantly by James Madison in Federalist Paper #10) and executive warmongering were the two great fears of the Framers of the Constitution. The Constitution's system of checks and balances was designed around the idea of preventing the rise of an all-powerful domestic faction and curbing the power of the executive to unilaterally declare war. The emergence of the Cold War, especially with Truman's signing NSC-68 in August 1950, which established the political template for equating military strategy to arms production and economic policy to Military Keynesianisim, institutionalized the MICC as a permanent player in the US political economy.

It is clear the Framers of the Constitution would have considered the MICC to be the most dangerous of all factions, because the MICC has seamlessly synthesized both of their fears: It is an all-powerful domestic faction whose self interest is to promote war or the perpetual threat of war.

Why do I use the modifier "all powerful"?

One need only to consider the conditions surrounding the current paralysis in our government to sense the MICC's ubiquitous power: Today, what's left of our constitutional system cannot muster the political will to stop the ongoing succession of wars, despite polls suggesting a majority of Americans want these wars to stop. Nor will Congress make a significant reduction in the defense budget, even though it is at a post-WWII high, there is no superpower threat to justify this level of expenditure, only a small part of the defense budget is funding the ongoing wars, and there is now a political majority in favor of cutting federal spending to reduce the deficit. Moreover, the President and Congress cannot or will not stop either the war or the defense spending binge despite the facts that (1) there is widespread knowledge of horrendous waste and excessive profiteering in the defense budget; (2) it is a well established fact that a dollar of defense spending creates fewer jobs than just about any other kind of spending, yet job creation is the central need of a stagnating American economy poised on the cusp of a double dip recession; (3) the fact that the members of Defense Department hold the Accountability and Appropriations clauses of the Constitution in contempt, because they can not and will not account for how they spend the money Congress appropriates for it -- a refusal that occurs despite the fact that every member of the Defense Department has taken a sacred oath to uphold and defend the Constitution; and (4) the members of Congress either refuse or are afraid to exercise their duty to enforce that accountability under the powers assigned to it under Article 1 of the Constitution.

And why is the government paralyzed?

The political system is paralyzed for the simple reason that the gamesters in the MICC have deliberately paralyzed it by playing the defense power games which I have explained here and here. On the other hand, the iron triangle of a large standing military, an outsized industrial base of defense contractors, and their network of wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress is less of a simple conspiracy than an emergent complex adaptive system that self organizes its order by processing the flow of money through itself and expels disorder -- taking the form of paralyzing those trying to control it -- into its environment. The MICC in its current form (i.e., a large standing military, a large contractor base, and its widespread congressional patronage network) cannot survive without war or the threat of war to lubricate the continuing money flow it requires like a body requires food for energy. The entire structure in its current form cannot survive or reform itself for the simple reason its defense contractor wing knows full well it cannot convert to the production of commercially viable products at competitive prices. So without a paralysis of the larger governing system system, the MICC could not protect and add to the money flowing through it, and without that continuing money flow, the whole self-organizing edifice of the MICC -- a large standing military, a huge contractor base, and hundreds of wholly owned legislators to dutifully shovel money to their districts -- would collapse into chaos, which some believe would bring down the US economy, which brings us full circle to the political entropy flowing out of the military Keynesianism that has grown and prospered since 1950, when President Truman signed NSC-68.

NSC-68 portrayed itself as a strategic blueprint for a long term confrontation with the Soviet Union. But it was first and foremost a plan for a huge weapons development and production program, and while its authors, led by arch cold warrior Paul Nitze, claimed to have compared the military and economic capabilities to the Soviet Union to the United States, NSC 68 rested on the intellectual bedrock of military Keynsianism.

In fact, language of NSC-68 asserted that increases in Pentagon spending would "increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes," In effect, the authors of NSC-68, generalized the peculiar experience of WWII, by making an unconstrained claim that the defense build up would create so much economic stimulus that it would pay for itself -- in effect, promising a free lunch.

NSC 68 was more a marketing document than a strategy; it did not even contain any specific cost estimates or economic analysis to justify its claim of a free lunch. But by equating strategy to a weapons buildup, NSC 68 established the template for strategic planning that transformed George Kennan's political theory of containment into a military strategy grounded on weapons R&D and production. Such an approach to "strategy" was realistic in one sense: it fit the domestic economic needs of the defense-dependent manufacturers, like the aircraft companies who needed federal subsidies to survive, as a hand fits a glove.

While Truman did not reject NSC-68, he sat on it. Then, on June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea and gave Truman the opportunity to approve NSC-68, and the MICC was off to the races.

-----------------

Cross-posted from Counterpunch.

Errata: The attached essay is slightly different from the one published in Counterpunch. It contains a few minor editorial changes. More importantly, the second reference to George Kennan in the penultimate paragraph was incorrect and has been deleted. A change that has no effect on the argument. Finally, urls for supporting information are included. CS.

The Myth of Precision-Guided Coercion

2011-06-24T02:01:00.000-04:00

Cross posted from Counterpunch

June 22, 2011

From Serbia to Libya

The Myth of Precision-Guided Coercion

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney06222011.html

Vieux Port, St Raphael, France

At the end of May the British press was filled with stories headlined "Gaddafi to be told to stand down or face Apache attack." As of this writing, the Apaches have attacked, but Gaddafi has not stood down.

The Apache threat is a case study in the sterile but financially lucrative marriage of coercive diplomacy to surgical strikes by precision guided weapons. What passes for a war strategy in Libya is now a comic opera starring NATO as an understrength, self-referencing techno bully, who acts as if he is now so fearsome that he does not even need a carrot to go with his stick.

In effect, the British press said NATO forces were telegraphing their punch. NATO was about to deploy eight attack helicopters, four British Apaches and four French Tigers, armed with Hellfire precision-guided missiles, like those fired from US Predator drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya. The Hellfires were to be targeted against Qaddafi's forces besieging the Libyan city of Misrata in a desperate hope that that Qaddafi's forces would crumble or withdraw their support from him.

The psychology described in these reports was not an aberration; it reflects a techno-dependency that comes straight out of the US playbook. In fact, the US version of technological supremacy eliminates the need for cleverness in a military strategist. The mental labors of a Sun Tzu, Napoleon, Grant, or a Manstein are no longer needed, because they can be displaced by silver bullets spit out by machines. All that is needed in a 'strategist' is the ability to construct coarse threats, even when, as in the case of Libya, the bullies making those threats are manifestly out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas.

This kind of primitive thinking proves again the extent to which NATO has bought into the flawed US ideology that its technological advantage gives it the ability to coerce all opponents into doing their bidding, even though NATO's European forces can not afford to waste money on a scale remotely approaching that of the US. You would think a European planner would understand this economic limitation, if not the fallacy of ideology itself. After all, the European planners in NATO have seen this nonsense before -- in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, not to mention Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The central idea in the compound theory of precision-guided coercion is a marriage of the military theory of techno-war, especially the use of high tech surveillance systems and precision-guided weapons, to the political theory of coercive diplomacy. This marriage is more a product of the Pentagon's advocates of techno-war than the go-along bureaucrats in Foggy Bottom. The Pentagonians sold the succession of Presidents after 1990 on the idea of combining the cold-war inspired theory of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) with post-cold war foreign policies. The RMA (not to mention the Apache attack helicopter) was originally conceived for fighting the tank-heavy forces of the Warsaw Pact on the North German plain, although the roots of using precision guided weapons and surgical strikes can be traced back to the disgraced theory of gradual escalation in Vietnam and the theory of daylight precision bombing in WWII.

Its contemporary reincarnation was spearheaded by William Perry over a twenty year period between the mid 70s and mid 90s. Perry, a quintessential military-industrial operator, equally at home in the Pentagon, the boardroom, or in the lecture halls at Stanford University, got the ball rolling during the height of the Cold War when he was Director of Defense Research and Engineering in the late 1970s during the Carter Administration, and then he sealed it into the post-cold war mindset when he was Deputy Secretary and Secretary of Defense during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s. The Reaganauts merely followed his script during the interregnum in the 1980s by blindly pouring money into high-cost programs he worked so hard to start during the 1970s.

In the 1990s, when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact evaporated, the threat of a peace dividend terrified the Pentagon, the contractors, and their wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress. Perry helped save the day by twisting old cold-war ideas into their contemporary form by combining the military theory of precision strikes to the political theory of coercive diplomacy that had become so attractive to the self-styled foreign policy elite housed in think tanks and academia, awaiting their calls to government service. Most of these 'elites' are trained in political science (itself an oxymoron), have little or no military experience, are technological illiterates, and lust after the policy jobs in the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom -- in short, they are perfect consumers of the fools gold produced by the technically savvy alchemists of the MICC, like Perry and his ilk.

Coercive diplomacy assumes that carefully calibrated doses of punishment (sticks that would sometimes be accompanied by carrots, but not necessarily) will ineluctably persuade an adversary to act in a way that we would deem acceptable. There is, for example, no carrot in the case of Qaddafi, where Nato is trying to coerce him into leaving office, so NATO can send him to the dock in the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity. Some choice! In theory, the precision guidance technologies give the military a capability to carefully calibrate the coercion by surgically striking selected targets with so-called precision-guided weapons, fired from a safe distance, with no friendly casualties, and little unintended damage. Hi-tech surveillance systems would enable target identification and selection and then monitor the effects of the surgical strikes -- thus reducing strategy to a cybernetic negative feedback control system, a conception not unlike
that of a common household thermostat.

This marriage of primitive pop psychology with the simplistic promises of hi-tech weapons makes war look easy, safe, and cheap -- and therefore easy to sell to Presidents with little or no military experience but who are under political pressure to do something 'decisive.' These benefits quickly became evident in the United States' increasing addiction to pointless drive-by shootings with cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs in the 1990s -- e.g., bombing a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, or destroying an Al Qaeda obstacle course in Afghanistan, not to mention the endless attacks on Iraq's air defense sites in the 1990s. This mode of thinking is now clearly evident in NATO's operations against Qaddafi in Libya.

The military dimension of this theory was eagerly adopted by the US foreign policy elite during the 1980s and 1990s, because it mechanized their simplistic theories of coercion by giving them a tool to play their game. Madeline Albright, in particular, as Clinton's Secretary of State, became addicted to coercive diplomacy in the Balkans, backed up by tit-for-tat surgical strikes. According to General Colin Powell's memoirs, she once almost gave him an aneurism by demanding, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about, if we can't use it?" Albright and Perry got their first chance to strut their stuff in Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia in September 1995. While they claimed it was a stunning success, and notwithstanding the uncritical acceptance of these claims by the mainstream media, the results were ambiguous, to put it charitably.

Some might argue I am being unfair. Surely, the damage done in 11 days by the 708 guided weapons striking 48 target complexes forced Slobodan Miloševic to the bargaining table at Dayton. Did that not prove, to paraphrase Richard Holbrooke's remarks to the annual convention of the Air Force Association in 1996, that more bombing leads to better diplomacy?

That argument, however, ignores the decisive effects of Operation Storm, the August 1995 Croatian ground offensive that cleansed the Krajina of more than 200,000 Serbs and changed the situation on the ground in Bosnia by cutting the Bosnian Serb supply lines. It also fails to consider that all the belligerents were exhausted and needed a rest. Nevertheless, the lesson the marriage partners wanted to learn, namely that a weak-willed Miloševic would respond predictably to precision-guided coercion, did have one effect: It set the stage for the gross miscalculation at the so-called Rambouillet peace conference.

This can be seen in an intelligence analysis of Miloševic's psychology in late 1998 and early 1999. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 1998 (quoted in the Washington Post of April 8,1999) said, "Miloševic is susceptible to outside pressure. He will eventually accept a number of outcomes [in Kosovo], from autonomy to provisional status with final resolution to be determined, as long as he remains the undisputed leader in Belgrade." An interagency report coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency in January 1999 (reported in the April 18, 1999 New York Times) went even further, saying "After enough of a defense to sustain his honor and assuage his backers [Miloševic] will quickly sue for peace."

The Rambouillet "Accord" aimed to give Miloševic a chance to defend his honor. That NATO's demands were unacceptable should be no surprise. Like the infamous Austro-Hungarian diktat to Serbia in 1914, they were blatant infringements on Serbia's national sovereignty. The Accord's military implementation annex (Appendix B) proposed to give NATO forces "free and unimpeded access throughout the FRY" [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, i.e., Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo], immunity from "arrest, investigation or detention," and authorized NATO to "detain" Serbian individuals and turn them over to unspecified "appropriate authorities."

The plan backfired. Miloševic did not react predictably like a mechanical thermostat, but chose instead to escalate rapidly by unleashing his forces in Kosovo -- whereupon the "carefully calibrated" limited bombing campaign aimed at changing one man's behavior exploded into a general war against the Serbian people. NATO had expanded the target list to include the Serbian power grid and civilian infrastructure, the war settled into a grinding siege of attrition, and planners worried about running out of cruise missiles. The conduct of the bombing campaign was shaped more by the speed with which targets got through the approval cycle than by any strategy linking a particular target's destruction to a desired tactical or strategic effect. As a result, NATO bombers effectively destroyed the economic infrastructure of a tiny nation with an economy smaller than that of Fairfax County, Virginia.

U.S. military planners had predicted that a "precision" bombing campaign would force the Serbs to capitulate in only two to three days, but the air campaign ground on for seventy-nine days. At war's end, U.S. forces had flown only 15 per cent as many strike sorties as in Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, but had expended 72 per cent as many precision-guided munitions and 94 per cent as many cruise missiles.

When it was over, NATO intelligence determined that only minute quantities of Serbian tanks, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and trucks—all high-priority targets—were destroyed, in part because the Serbs fooled our complex surveillance and precision guidance technologies with simple decoys. There are even reports that they used cheap microwave ovens as decoys to attract our enormously expensive radar homing missiles. Serbian troops marched out of Kosovo in good order, their fighting spirit intact, displaying clean equipment and crisp uniforms, and in larger numbers than planners said were in Kosovo to begin with. Moreover, the terms of Serb "surrender," which the undefeated Serb military regarded as a sellout by Serbian president Miloševic, were the same as those the Serbs agreed to at the Rambouillet Conference, before U.S. negotiators led by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright inserted a poison pill (in the form of the
military annex mentioned above) to queer the deal.

Of course, the weapons makers love the marriage of high-cost precision weapons to coercive diplomacy, because it generates an astronomical need for a never ending flow of money into their financial coffers with orders for new weapons, even when the quantity of those weapons decreases. Congressmen love it because the money and patronage continues to flow to their districts. So, the economic result is what we in the Pentagon used to call a self-licking ice cream cone. And the cone has become particularly tasty in the age of perpetual small wars we have created after the Cold War ended in 1991. [Readers interested in the domestic causes of this perpetual war are referred to my essay, The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War.]

Will precision guided coercion get lucky and eventually work for NATO in its pissant operation in Libya?

Perhaps. After all, Qaddafi's forces are tiny, ill equipped and poorly trained. They can not possibly be compared in terms of effectiveness to the Serb Army in the 1990s. On the other hand, England and France cannot afford to waste money on the scale of the US. Moreover, it is by no means certain that the theory will work in Libya: it did not and has not worked in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the decapitations of Saddam and Osama were done the old fashioned way via lots of detective work coupled with by activities that looked more like those of a police SWAT team than a military combat operation. In any case, it is not at all clear that these decapitations are silver bullets that achieve anything beyond soothing our pride. The Pentagon and its wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress certainly do not want these decapitations to end the perpetual war. Indeed, Buck McKeon, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is madly trying to legislate the
idea that the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda has mutated and the long war will continue for the foreseeable future.

If the marriage of coercive diplomacy to surgical strikes succeeds in Libya, its proponents will trumpet it as a canonical proof of their theory. If it fails again like it did in Kosovo, it won't matter. There will be no divorce in the US, and the union will live on and grow richer. The high-cost of precision guided coercion may bankrupt England and France and reduce the foreign market for US weapons, but that is a small price to pay. It will not affect the money flowing into the coffers of the US Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex. That is because new, more-expensive weapons are always on the drawing board to discount any failures in the present weapons. In this way, the promise of new technology repeatedly washes the inconvenient truth of history from what is left of the critical faculties of the mind.

No one will question what is a patently silly way of thinking, because, as the late American strategist Colonel John Boyd used to say, 'the real strategy is don't interrupt the money flow, add to it' -- and that always works like a charm in Versailles on the Potomac, if not Brussels.

Franklin "Chuck" Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

Obama and Palestine

2011-06-12T14:45:00.001-04:00

Attached herewith is an important essay on the long term implications of the Netanyahu - Obama spectacle of late May. The Author, William R. Polk, has kindly granted me permission to distribute it.
Polk is one of the most knowledgeable observers of the Middle East as well as the general politics of insurrection. He was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East during the Kennedy Administration. Upon leaving government service, he became Professor of History and Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. He was called back to the White House during the 1967 Arab-Israel war to write a peace treaty and still later, at the request of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meyer, he negotiated the Suez Canal ceasefire with the Egyptian government. His short book, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq is one of the very best books on the subject of guerrilla warfare and insurrection that I have ever read.
Polk’s essay is no sound byte, and it should be studied carefully. Essentially, he addresses the question What will it take to get Obama to move decisively on the Arab-Israeli issue?
He takes the reader on a wide ranging, deeply informed, historical journey. He does not end on an optimistic note, but with a suggestive comparison of imperatives implicit in the situation now facing President Obama to those facing President Charles De Gaulle in the 1950s and early 1960s with regard to the crisis in Algeria. To be sure there are many differences, but it is an interesting insight, if not carried too far. Polk clearly recognizes this limitation and does not read too much into it ... his point is limited to the political imperatives on decision makers to change a policy involving occupation that is clearly not in a nation’s interest.
Whereas De Gaulle faced decisive pressure to act, Polk concludes that Obama does not yet face the pressures needed for decisive action, even though a course correction is definitely in US interests. He ends by saying it will take some kind of catastrophic event to jar things loose.
He is probably right, but one lesson 9-11 ought to have taught us is that while catastrophic events do trigger policy changes, those changes do not always place a nation on a salutary pathway into the future.
Chuck Spinney
Bandol, France

Obama and Palestine

What will make Obama willing to move on the issue?

William R. Polk

May 29, 2011

No international problem of modern times has been more studied, commented upon and disputed than the conflict between the Zionist movement and its Israeli successors, on the one hand, and on the other, the Palestinian Muslim and Christian people. The conflict is embedded in deep historical memories, religious beliefs and great power struggles in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Hardly any contemporary issue anywhere in the world is not to some degree affected by it.

Can there be anything new to be said or done about it? If ever there was an issue that has played out the sequence of events predicted from the beginning, it is this one. The British statesman, Lord Curzon put it succinctly in Biblical terms when the creation of a Jewish Home was first discussed in the British Cabinet during the First World War. In response to the hope of one of his colleagues that Britain’s plan would be welcomed by the inhabitants, he retorted dryly that he doubted that they would be content to be merely “hewers of wood and drawers of water" for the incoming Jewish settlers.

Britain did not credit Curzon’s dictum. Its wartime strategic needs overcame all other concerns. Indeed, As Lord Balfour, the author of the founding document of what became Israel, the Balfour Declaration, wrote secretly to the Cabinet, “In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers [that is, Britain itself] have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in letter, they have not always intended to violate."

And, in pursuit of their own objectives, increasing numbers of the Jewish people adopted their own myth. Driven by vicious anti-Semitism, first from Russia and then from other European countries, they saw the danger of extinction nearly realized in Nazi Germany. They did not consider rights of the native Palestinians any more than incoming American settlers had earlier considered those of the Native Americans. Indeed, one of the early fathers of Zionism, Israel Zangwill, coined a description of the Palestine issue that has permeated Zionism and Jewish thought ever since: Palestine was, he said, "The land without people for the people without land." Echoing that assessment more recently, Prime Minister Golda Meir famously said there weren’t any Palestinians except for the Jews. If they existed at all, Palestinians were regarded as simply not comparable human beings.

But the three quarters of a million natives did not, of course, accept this definition of their status. Most were settled villagers whose lives, culture and social organization were rooted in the land. Their identification with land was almost mystical. The terrace walls of one’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather, the fields in which one played as a child and in which one’s ancestors were buried, the localities where saints have been venerated and besought, all these gave rise to emotions virtually impossible for Western urban (and virtually nomadic) man to fathom. Before their diaspora, Palestinian villagers built their genealogies physically into the layout of their neighborhoods so that placement of dwellings corresponded to family trees. Consequently, they had not only the sort of feeling most Americans have about our homes, temporary as they are to many of us, but a more intense, more permanent, more “living” sense of relationship to the earth. Even in the cities, people recreated their villages as autonomous neighborhoods. Over the past sixty years, I have talked with scores of individuals who have described for me rooms, houses, gardens, orchards, streets as vividly as though they were seeing them at that moment. And, in retrospect and in the mind's eye of the refugees, these scenes have taken on a melancholy longing that only loss can bring. The idea that these people did not love their land or were wandering gypsies for whom any place is as good as another is not only nonsense, but is, itself, since the Palestinians are Semites, an ugly variety of anti-Semitism.

For the Palestinians, from the beginning and with increasing intensity, the incoming Europeans were alien colonists intent on taking their land and destroying their society. They were right. Already in 1937, David Ben Gurion wrote, "we must expel the Arabs and take their places.” His voice was not alone. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of “muscular Zionism” and the ideological mentor of Israeli prime ministers Begin, Shamir, Sharon and Netanyahu, told the 1936 British Royal Commission, which was trying to find a way to satisfy both Jews and Arabs, that the Zionists would never be satisfied with anything less than all of Palestine -- "We cannot. We never can. Should we swear to you we would be satisfied, it would be a lie."

Thus, conflict was inevitable from the beginning. The tragic story of a century of increasing danger, conflict and misery is well known. There are not and probably never were any obscurities. But what may be different now is that almost everyone agrees that the problem must somehow be solved. Indeed, even that sense of urgency is not new: the British, having been instrumental in creating the conflict, staked out already in 1936 what has always seemed to outsiders to be the essential element in a solution: dividing the land between the Jews and Palestinians. To the British, division seemed as sensible as the traditional saying, “half a loaf is better than no bread, ” but to both the Arabs and the Jews, partition seemed subversion of their nationhood. Undeterred, the British set up one commission after another to figure out how to accomplish it.

The British efforts were picked up after the Second World War by the newly established United Nations. But nothing anyone thought up made any sense: no matter how the little land was carved up, there were just too many Palestinian natives and too few Jewish immigrants. The best effort proposed a Palestine with an Arab population of 725,000 and a Jewish population of 10,000 while the Jewish state would have 498,000 Jews and 407,000 Arabs. Jerusalem was to be internationalized and would contain 100,000 Jews and 105,000 Arabs. The Jewish state, which had all the best land, was estimated to have revenues about three times that of the Arab state, but with a higher birth rate, the Palestinian population would soon have been a majority even in the Jewish state.

That dilemma was solved by the expulsion of virtually all of the Palestinians in the 1948-1949 war.

Expulsion made Israel possible, but it did not create peace. So, one “solution” after another has been brought forward by American statesmen and their appointees. Some of their plans can be regards as only bizarre, even jejune, but they are worth remembering to show how desperate has been the search for a solution and to get a measure of what President Obama would face if today he tried to reach a solution.

Almost everything has been proposed – dividing the waters of the River Jordan (so the states would not clash over that vital resource, the “Johnston plan”), aid programs to create a labor shortage (so the refugees could be absorbed elsewhere, the “Lilenthal Plan”), state-to-state negotiations (so as to by-pass the Palestinians, the Carter-Begin-Sadat “Camp David Negotiation”), honoring the right of return while making it unattractive (the “Johnson plan”). My favorite among the fantasies was the brainchild of that dour, normally practical and certainly unemotional Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. He decided that since the Arabs and Israelis did not want to step on one another’s territory but needed to go from the various parts of their own, the frontiers should be redrawn in the form of intersecting triangles meeting at a point – over which, presumably, each could jump, taking care not to bumb into one another!

Meanwhile, paying no attention to these flights of fancy, the Israelis steadily took over the land and today have incorporated about 78% of the former British mandate. Additionally, they have effective control, with walls, fortresses, check points, garrisons and settlements over much of what the original UN decision designated as part of the Palestinian state. While the Israeli settlement policy is a direct violation of international law and is in defiance of a number of United Nations resolutions, Israel has created not only a physical presence – with about 650,000 settlers living on the West Bank -- but also a political position that would take great courage to dismantle.

Now, President Barack Obama has waded into the fray. So what is he trying to do and how serious is his effort?

We cannot read his mind, but what we know is that he has made a series of statements. As some of his critics have said, Obama will talk, even talk bravely as well as eloquently, but he will not act. Writing in The New York Review of Books this month, David Bromwich observed that throughout his public career, Obama “has a way of retreating into vagueness at just the point where clarity matters most…and has always preferred the symbolic authority of the grand utterance to the actual authority of a directed policy.” Others believe his inaction is politically shrewd: to win the next election he needs the votes and money of American supporters of the current Israeli government and its powerful lobby, AIPAC. And then there is the prospective charge of anti-Semitism.

American academics, journalists and politicians today fear the charge of anti-Semitism as acutely as they used to fear the charge of pro-Communism.

Not fearing that charge, Israelis evidently are more able to discuss America’s relationship to Israel than are Americans. Reacting to the Congress’ fawning and uncritical response to Binjamin Netanyahu’s speech last week, the prominent Israeli statesman, former Knesset member and peace advocate, Uri Avnery, was revolted by the sight of “members of the highest legislative bodies of the world’s only superpower, flying up and down like so many yo-yos, applauding wildly, every few minutes or seconds, the most outrageous lies and distortions of Binjamin Netanyahu...The most distressing part of it was that there was not a single lawmaker – Republican or Democrat – who dared to resist.” The blogger Mitchell Plitnick, chided that Congress, thoroughly beholden to AIPAC and completely indifferent to the best interest of not only the Palestinians but also Israel and their own country, cheered the home team as it defeated the President of the United States…The home team, in this case, was Netanyahu.” And, on the day after the speech, Ben Caspit of the Israeli newspaper Maariv, wrote that “Those who are scared of peace yesterday got their wish. Those who are scared of war will be a lot more scared today.’

The domestic American political reality, of which Obama is obviously aware, is that Israel is above political discussion. So, regardless of his obvious dislike of Netanyahu and his apparent belief that Israeli policies are not only wrong but dangerous to America, he promised that massive American economic and military aid – regardless of the state of the American economy – will not only be continued but will be increased. So, it appears to me almost certain that Obama will not grasp the Palestine nettle.

Obviously, that is what Netanyahu also believes. So the Israeli response, from an advance copy of Obama's speech, was for Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak to authorize the building of still more settlement housing. In a sense, this was a gratuitous act. Netanyahu/Barak did not need to snub or insult Obama. But, perhaps they felt that they needed to reaffirm the now traditional Israeli strategy -- their predecessors first explained it to me in the 1960s -- of building "facts on the ground." They have now done such a complete job of it that they want Obama to believe, and probably believe themselves, that no Israeli government can change the geography of settlement on the West Bank because Israel's settler population won't let it.

So, what will happen?

To move toward a prediction, I find it suggestive to compare Obama’s position on Palestine today with French President Charles De Gaulle’s position on Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s. While there are obvious differences, there are similarities that cast light on possible policies today, and perhaps tomorrow.

What is similar, of course, is that both men recognized that a situation had arisen that was dangerous to their countries. Obama has been told even by such different and opposing advisers as Secretary Hillary Clinton and General David Petraeus that the Palestine problem is the major cause of the terrorist threat to America. And therefore, that the Israeli refusal to move toward compromise peace settlement is against American national interests. Yet, the President is unwilling to risk moving to enforce a solution. So far, at least, he can afford inaction.

In terms of personality, Obama is no De Gaulle, but De Gaulle was not a determined leader until France came to the brink of civil war and to the edge of losing its civic culture. He saw that his regime risked being over thrown and perhaps himself be murdered if he did not act. Remember that Paris was then ringed by anti-aircraft cannon and De Gaulle feared an army putsch. So he went secretly off to Germany to assure himself of the army and the loyalty of the Paratroop leader General Jacques Massu before he moved. Then, once he made up his mind to get out and was sure of his military base, he sent the army -- with tanks, artillery and bombers -- into "European" Algiers to crush the opposition to his decision.

Simply put, the situation had become so grave that De Gaulle was forced to assert French national interest. Could any aspect of Israeli-American relations reach such a level?

Apparently not, because it did not when in 1967 the Israeli Navy and Air Force attacked and tried to sink an American naval vessel, hitting it with some 821 cannon shells, thousand pound bombs and napalm shells and firing five torpedoes. They killed 34 US Naval personnel and wounded 171 others. If President Lyndon Johnson did not then feel under severe pressure, it is understandable why President Obama does not feel under pressure from events and policies far less damaging to American security today.

However, he may feel about Netanyahu personally or the Israeli suppression of the Palestinian version of the Arab spring – which closely resembles what he so opposes in Libya and Syria, firing into the ranks of peaceful demonstrators – he reverses President Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum by talking eloquently but carrying a small stick.

While I presume Obama believes that America has a compelling national interest in bringing about negotiations, Israel is determined not to heed his warnings. Indeed, Netanyahu and his Likhudniks have given the settlers -- Israel’s version of De Gaulle’s enemies, the Pieds-noirs of Algeria – a veto on negotiations. They have now created an iron wall of "facts on the ground" that they believe Moses himself could not have moved. Thus, Obama on May 13 accepted the resignation of his negotiator, Senator George Mitchell and apparently does not intend to appoint a successor.

Viewing these events, Netanyahu felt strong enough to throw down the gauntlet to Obama, daring him to pick it up – his timing is perfect, his supporters are lined up, his critics in America are scattered and unable to reach a mass audience. It will take, I believe, some really catastrophic event to change the parameters. A speech will not do it.

Afghan Sitrep: A Grunt from the Front Sounds Off

2011-06-08T02:55:00.002-04:00

Inside Versailles on the Potomac, pressure is building on President Obama to reduce his promised withdrawal of combat troops in Afghanistan to a cosmetic level, and perhaps more to the point, to protect the defense budget from efforts to reduce the deficit. The two -- i.e., perpetual war and the defense budget -- are joined at the hip (as I explained here). The Pentagon's mouthpieces in thinktanks are therefore dutifully filling the op-ed pages with fact-free arguments to continuing the ten year war unabated.

Attached below is a more informed, less self-interested view. It is from an email written by an active duty colonel who travels all over Afghanistan. For obvious reasons, he must remain anonymous, but it came to me from a trusted source. This colonel, unlike many of his peers, actually goes on foot patrols with troops to see things for himself. His message, which is only a few days old, is bad Ju Ju, I am afraid.

[I vetted the colonel's email thru a retired Army officer, and he responded: "I talk to Soldiers and Marines of most ranks on a weekly basis, many of whom have just returned from Afghanistan. Not one says we are winning. They think Afghanistan is a waste of our time. Why doesn't anyone listen to the guys that know? Ivory-tower intellectuals in think tanks get listened too, but they are not walking the ground as a grunt or a combat arms dude."]

I urge readers to read the op-ed links embedded in in the colonel's email and then compare their intellectual content the Patrick Seale's essay, Washington Wrestles with Afghan Options. Ask yourself who is better plugged into reality: The colonel and Seale or O'Hanlon and the Kagans?

Chuck Spinney

La Ciotat, France

Email To Col XXX

The mendacity is getting so egregious that I am fast losing the ability to remain quiet; these yarns of "significant progress" are being covered up by the blood and limbs of hundreds - HUNDREDS - of American uniformed service members each and every month, and you know that the rest of this summer is going to see the peak of that bloodshed.

The article by Michael O'Hanlon last week (i.e. Success worth paying for in Afghanistan) and the one in today's WSJ by Kagan and Kagan (i.e., We Have the Momentum in Afghanistan) made me sick to my stomach - especially the latter. Have you seen it yet? It is the most breathless piece of yellow journalism I’ve seen in the entire OIF-OEF generation.

According to the Kagans, "If Mr. Obama announces the withdrawal of all surge forces from Afghanistan in 2012, the war will likely be lost. Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and other global terrorist groups will almost certainly re-establish sanctuaries in Afghanistan. The Afghan state would likely collapse and the country would descend into ethnic civil war. The outcome of this withdrawal policy would be far worse than Nixon's decision to accept defeat in Vietnam, for it would directly increase the threat to the American homeland. Apparently they forgot, "there's a commie behind every bush," "the Russians are coming!" and "if Vietnam falls, all of Asia falls to the Communists!" That logic was absurd in the 1960/70s, and its even more laughable today - or it would be laughable if it didn't cost so damn many American lives to prop up the fantasy.

These people are actually arguing for increased involvement. In fact, they are saying that we should expect high casualties this summer (after which - without explanation - we'll have beaten the TB in the south), then we'll move the troops up to RC-East where there's still a lot of fighting - and as a result, we'll have another spike in the 'fighting season' of 2013, after which (according to the neat schedule the Kagans map out) we'll be ready to hand over control of the country to GoIRA and the ANSF on schedule in 2014.

It’s sheer madness, and so far as I can tell, in the mainstream media and reputable publications, it is going almost entirely without challenge.

Colonel YYY