Why the US & Israel May Agree to Bombing Iran

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

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

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

¹ It 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

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

... 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

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.

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 atchuck_spinney@mac.com

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

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