More on the Meltdown Men in the Theater of the Absurd

Yesterday I posted Andrew Cockburn's withering review of the farce of financial reform that is being played out in the theater of Versailles on the Potomac.  Included in Cockburn's portrayal was the free ride given to the self-serving testimony of Mssrs Greenspan, Rubin, and Prince before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee.  The FCIC is Congress's faint shadow of the 1930s Pecora Commission, which ran the legendary inquiry into the causes of the 1930s economic meltdown.  

Of course, the farcical  testimony of today's Meltdown Men was entirely predictable.  Indeed, farce is now a central part of the political culture in Versailles the Potomac.  Much like the bloody spectacles in the Roman Colosseum, political theater and soundbytes, abetted by a compliant mass media, both entertain and dumb down the masses, while enriching the very charlatans who are leading them into ruin.  

A neat bookend to Cockburn's piece was written a few days before the hearing by my friend Jeff Madrick (below).  Jeff proves that the self-serving performance of the Meltdown Men was an entirely predictable reflection of the inner workings of our broken government.  Madrick also provides a clear albeit brief history of how unbridled greed unwound the regulations that evolved out of the Pecora Hearings to create our current condition.

Chuck Spinney

The Meltdown Men: Greenspan, Rubin, & Prince to Testify before Financial Crisis Commission

Jeff Madrick, New Deal 2.0, Monday, 04/5/2010

http://www.newdeal20.org/2010/04/05/the-meltdown-men-greenspan-rubin-prince-to-testify-before-financial-crisis-commission-9410/

The men who stoked the financial meltdown will testify before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Don’t expect any mea culpas.

This week, Robert Rubin, Chuck Prince and Alan Greenspan will testify before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. We know that they will duck blame and likely slip past the courteous questions of their inquisitors. ... more

Financial Reform Collapses into Farce

A first rate tubesteak by my friend Andrew Cockburn ... I urge you to read it carefully

As Rahm Eyes Exit

Financial Reform Bids Collapse Into Farce

By ANDREW COCKBURN, Counterpunch, 8 April 2010

http://www.counterpunch.org/andrew04082010.html

Word from the White House is that Rahm Emanuel is still fishing around for a lucrative berth in the financial industry (“money first, then the deal” he reportedly barked at a recent industry caller discussing business possibilities in the private sector) so we needn’t hold our breath too hard waiting for the administration to bring law enforcement, or even its emasculated sibling “regulation reform,”  to Wall Street anytime soon.  Not that the banks have ever really felt threatened, given the contemptuous ease, which I described here last December,  with which they were able to gut the reform bill spawned last in the House of Representatives. ... more

Greenwashing the War on Terror & the Seven Sisters

In the preceding blaster (here), I raised a question of whether the Israelis were trying to hijack the Green Lobby or whether they were ready for the rubber room.  This was made in response to a report by Jonathan Cook that contended Israel was greenwashing war the on terror.  It turns out that I may have phrased this question in naive, simplistic terms, if my good friend Pierre Sprey (a justifiably well known weapons analyst, mathematician, and recording entrepreneur -- just google him) is correct, Israel's motives for  trying to hijack the Green Lobby can be viewed in a larger, longer range context.  Attached below is his most interesting analysis of Israel's motives for greenwashing the war on terror:

-----[Comment by Pierre Sprey follows]-----

Chuck,

I totally agree that the currently faddish alternate energy sources are ludicrously uneconomical and, for the most part, environmentally harmful. The only alternate source that could almost completely supplant oil and that actually makes economic and environmental sense, natural gas, is currently among the most unfashionable. [CS Note: Robert Bryce has an excellent discussion of natural gas in his important new book, Power Hungry: The Myths of Green Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, Public Affairs Press, April 2010.] 

Nevertheless, there's an important larger perspective to Israel's dead serious push to raise huge amounts of capital (guess where?) to produce non-oil based energy from trendy green sources in large enough quantities to reduce worldwide oil demand significantly. 

That perspective is simple: unbeknownst to most, the absolute highest priority objective of Israeli foreign policy, from 1949 to today, has been to break the Seven Sisters oil cartel's stranglehold on world oil production in order to collapse the world price of oil. From Israel's point of view, that's a perfectly rational strategic objective--and, almost certainly, the only Israeli objective I know of that would be a major benefit to the world. 

Whether it's achievable is, of course, another question, given the huge, always-underestimated economic and political power of the oil cartel. In any case, the oil companies recognized the Israeli threat even before 1949 and, so far, have been successful in countering every Israeli move to break Big Oil's grip on the world's oil spigot. Superficially, but more or less correctly, the following paragraph's from Cook's article summarize the Israeli strategic interest in fomenting the Iraq war--and Israel's use of their neocon puppets to implement that strategy:

"There are strong indications that Israel's green technologies drive is related to plans developed by US neoconservative groups in the build-up to the attack on Iraq. Netanyahu is known to have maintained close ties to neoconservatives in the US.

Some of these groups lobbied the previous administration of George W. Bush to invade Iraq so that its oil fields could be privatized and the international markets flooded with oil.

According to the reasoning of officials at one influential think-tank, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, privatization would drive down oil prices, break up the Saudi-backed Opec oil cartel, and drain money away from "terror groups" and radical Islamic education.

Some neocons regarded this policy as particularly beneficial to Israel, because it would starve Hamas and Hizballah of funds and take the pressure off Tel Aviv to end the occupation."

Needless to say, the actual implementation of Israel's strategy to foment the Iraq War and then to use the fruits to tear down the world price of oil was far subtler and far more treacherous than the above simple-minded outline. The chronology is the following:

1. In June 1997, the neocon Project on the New American Century (PNAC)--fronting for Israel--published their manifesto calling for an Iraq invasion to overthrow Saddam. Quite brilliantly, they enlisted the support of the oil majors, as evidenced by getting Cheney and Rumsfeld to co-sign. The lure was the argument that Clinton's Gulf War I oil embargo was sure to end soon and then Saddam, overburdened with debt, would start selling oil and oil leases (to Seven Sister enemies like France, China and Russia, God forbid) as fast as he could. That, in turn, would collapse the world price of oil. So, according to PNAC, it was obviously in the interest of the US and the oil companies to invade Iraq, dump Saddam, and install a tame leader more amenable to leaving the US (read Exxon/Chevron) in control of Iraqi oil fields. Cheney, Rumsfeld and the oil companies went for it. 

2. At the first meeting of Bush's cabinet, end January 2001, President Bush, duly programmed by his oil company constituents, made it clear that invading Iraq was a foregone conclusion.

3. In late April 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, implementing the neocon-Israeli agenda, wrote a policy directive for the rapid privatization of all Iraqi state-owned enterprises including the oil sector. Masking this obvious back-stabbing of the neocons' erstwhile oil company allies, Wolfowitz sold the whole package as a principled free market approach to occupying Iraq and reforming the Iraqi economy--and Rumsfeld blithely signed off on this bombshell as the official DoD guidance to the new occupation government. The idea, of course, was to sell at open auction all the Iraqi oil fields piecemeal, thereby enabling all the non-cartel, oil-hungry countries to buy out a large percentage of the huge Iraqi reserves. These cartel enemies, of course, would do the opposite of the Seven Sisters' long-standing policy of keeping as much Iraqi oil off the market as possible. And thus, with one stroke of the Rumsfeldian pen, the world price of oil would crash and Israel would have achieved their coveted goal of strangling the flow of oil money to its Arab enemies.

4. Unlike Rumsfeld, the oil majors were not bamboozled. Moving very fast indeed, by May 6, 2003, they had arranged to have Philip Carroll, recently retired CEO of Shell, appointed as chairman of the occupation government's oil advisory committee. That was five days before Paul Bremer replaced Jay Garner as proconsul of Iraq. And Phil Carroll promptly arranged the demise of any piecemeal auctioning of Iraq's oil fields. Bremer's Coalition Provisional  government Order 39, directing the privatization of the entire Iraqi economy, specifically exempted oil extraction and refining. Score: Israel 0, Big Oil 1. 

Since that disappointing defeat, it appears that the Israelis have focused on the campaign to get the wealthiest supporters of Israel to finance anything that looks like a major non-oil producer of energy. You can imagine how delighted they are to have Obama financing huge expansions of nuclear electric power. And, as just one example of direct involvement, the Israeli government itself has given sizable seed money (apparently several hundred millions) to an American entrepreneur (a Zionist, of course) who is starting an ambitious venture  to establish a US-wide software-controlled network of super-quick battery charging stations for electric cars that his startup company would also design and manufacture.

What's so nutty about Israel propagandizing American Zionists into paying for gambles that might have a chance of taking a chunk out of Big Oil's market? Who cares if the ventures are a long shot, as long as Other People's Money is footing the bill?

Pierre  

Are AIPAC & Israel trying to hijack the Green Lobby ... or ... Are they Ready for the Rubber Room ... or Both

My guess is the answer is "both."  But read the attached article by Jonathan Cook and judge for yourself.

One thing that is becoming clear, however:  Global Warming can be used as a canonical fear to justify just about anything -- from Obama's plan to resurrect the nuclear power industry (while at the same time, he punts on the nuc waste issue by caving into political pressure to close the Yucca Mountain waste depository, after spending $17 billion since the 1980s) to Israel's crackpot plan to win the so-called war on terror by impoverishing the petro-states via the weaning the industrial world off hydrocarbons (see below).  If you want to get a realistic idea of the size of the energy numbers as well as the socio-economic implications of the policy transformations implied by displacing the West's reliance on hydrocarbons, I urge you read my good friend Robert Bryce's important new book, Power Hungry: The Myths of Green Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, Public Affairs Press, April 2010.  You do not have to agree with his specific recommendations to accept the value of his important work.

Israel greenwashing "war on terror" 

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 30 March 2010 

Under cover of a sudden interest in developing new green technologies, the Israeli government hopes to weaken the Gulf states by making their oil redundant and thereby defeating "Islamic terror."

Uzi Landau, the national infrastructures minister, outlined a vision of a world without oil this week to Israel's most loyal supporters in Washington as he searched for wealthy American-Jewish investors and White House support for the strategy.

His message was that: "The West is addicted to oil, and so is bound by states that support terrorism ... Whoever wants to fight radical Islam and terrorist organizations should know that by purchasing gasoline, he's giving terrorists increased motivation."

Analysts say the plan's chief goals are to cripple the large oil-producing Gulf states, particularly Iran, which is seen as Israel's main rival in the region, and resistance groups that oppose Israel's long-term occupation of Palestinian land.

"Israel hopes that by repackaging the 'war on terror' in this way it can gain sympathy in the West and deflect increasing expectations that it make concessions to solve the conflict with the Palestinians," said Avner de Shalit, a politics professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Thousands of delegates at last week's annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in the US, heard Landau describe the Israeli strategy as the best way to win the "war on terror."

The conference was also attended by many senior US politicians, including administration officials such as Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state.

Without Arab money from oil, Landau argued, Iran would fade as a regional power and "terror groups" like Hamas in Gaza and Hizballah in Lebanon would cease to exist. Instead Israel could serve as an alternative "powerhouse" in the Middle East for environmentally friendly energy sources.

Both Israel and the US are determined to isolate Iran, which they claim is trying to develop a nuclear warhead to rival Israel's own large nuclear arsenal. The White House is seeking to impose stiff sanctions, whereas Israel is believed to favor a military strike.

Israel failed to crush Hamas and Hizballah, two resistance groups that are backed by Iran, during attacks on Gaza last year and on Lebanon in 2006.

In a session entitled "Breaking the habit: Can US-Israel cooperation reduce our oil dependence?" Landau appealed to the US to join Israel in eradicating oil dependency as a way to defeat terror.

As he left Israel for the conference, he told local reporters he would try to persuade his audience that "by taking away its primary source of funding, we can defeat terrorism without firing a single bullet."

Landau is known to be acting on the direct instructions of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who announced back in October a "national project" to end the world's reliance on oil within a decade.

At the same time Netanyahu gave responsibility to the National Economic Council, a think-tank inside his office, to develop "breakthrough" inventions that would eradicate the world's need for oil and coal-based electricity.

"Dependence on fossil fuels strengthens the dark regimes that encourage instability and fund terror with their petrodollars," Netanyahu told the cabinet as he unveiled the plan.

Gideon Bromberg, head of the Israeli green group Friends of the Earth, said Israel had a very poor record on environmental issues, but that he welcomed Netanyahu's belated interest "even if it is for the wrong reasons."

"He is an opportunist and recognizes that oil brings power," said Bromberg. "If you can find an alternative to it, you make yourself more powerful and make your enemies weaker."

Haaretz has reported that Netanyahu also hopes that new green technologies will allow Israel to strengthen its ties with China, which the government believes is the rising global power and less interested in the Palestinians and Israel's occupation than the US and Europe.

Although Israel has developed new solar energy and water technologies, Netanyahu is reported to want a revolution in fuels used in transport, which accounts for a large proportion of oil use. Israeli companies are already involved in researching battery technologies for cars.

There are strong indications that Israel's green technologies drive is related to plans developed by US neoconservative groups in the build-up to the attack on Iraq. Netanyahu is known to have maintained close ties to neoconservatives in the US.

Some of these groups lobbied the previous administration of George W. Bush to invade Iraq so that its oil fields could be privatized and the international markets flooded with oil.

According to the reasoning of officials at one influential think-tank, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, privatization would drive down oil prices, break up the Saudi-backed Opec oil cartel, and drain money away from "terror groups" and radical Islamic education.

Some neocons regarded this policy as particularly beneficial to Israel, because it would starve Hamas and Hizballah of funds and take the pressure off Tel Aviv to end the occupation.

In practice, however, the occupation of Iraq did not help Israel. Funding to Hizballah and Hamas instead appears to be provided by Iran.

The influence of neoconservative think-tanks on Landau has been indicated in recent weeks by the decision to share the stage with leading neoconservatives such as James Woolsey, a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

At a debate on ending global oil dependency at Israel's annual "national security" convention in Herzliya in February, attended by most of the Israeli cabinet, Woolsey urged the destruction of Opec, claiming that Saudi Arabia controlled 90 percent of Islamic education.

He said that when people filled up their cars "you are helping to finance the people who finance hatred, incitement and terror."

That view was echoed by other participants.

In December the United Nations criticized Israel for its poor record on using renewable energy sources. It ranked bottom for using solar sources to generate electricity, behind countries such as Senegal, Eritrea and Mexico, as well as Western countries with only a few hours of sunlight.

A government watchdog, Israel's state comptroller, issued a report the same month arguing that Israel had not taken even basic measures to address climate change.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi. 

The Howling Wilderness of the Neocon Mind

My good friend Werther analyzes the raging neural lightening storm that is frying what is left of the synapses in Max Boot's head. Enjoy ...

The Stupidest Argument about Health Care Reform Ever

The Neocons Weigh In

By Werther*

http://www.electricpolitics.com/2010/03/the_stupidest_argument_about_h.html

After a year of listening to health care hyperbole on both sides of the partisan abyss one would have thought the reservoir of far-fetched arguments must have been exhausted. But the neoconservatives, the cabal that brought us "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, are more than up to the task. Max Boot, neocon sachem and contributor to the various publications of the far-flung Rupert Murdoch empire, is sure to win the championship for idiotic commentary on health care legislation by virtue of his latest effort in the Wall Street Journal. [1]

By adding to entitlements, Boot says, the health care bill will squeeze military spending and thus endanger America's superpower status. Boot marshals some meretricious evidence to imply that DOD budgets have somehow been going down. But using military spending-to-GDP ratios as he does is highly misleading and is a favorite tactic of Pentagon hucksters to create the illusion of declining budgets — a circumstance (wholly fictitious) which must, in their minds, be rectified by ever greater future spending. Percentage-of-GDP calculations, however, would probably show every country on earth, with the exception of North Korea, has declining military spending trends over time.

In terms of actual inflation-adjusted dollars spent, nevertheless, the United States now spends more on its military than at any time since World War II: more even than at the peak of the Korean war and Vietnam war. [2] Remarkably, it spends more than the rest of the world put together.

Boot bemoans the shortage of his beloved weaponry: why does the Navy only have 283 ships, and why will it have severe trouble replacing even this small number? But it has been obvious for years that the numbers of major weapon systems in DOD's inventory have declined — and will decline further still in the future — because DOD's leadership is perfectly content that this should occur. Why else do they procure (and the word "procure" aptly suggests an element of prostitution to the military contractors) $5 billion destroyers and $10 billion aircraft carriers? Isn't it patently clear that one cannot replace older systems on a one-for-one basis if the new system costs two to five times as much on a per-unit basis?

This doesn't just apply to the Navy. The decline of the Air Force, which Boot laments, is equally the result of such technological filibustering. The F-16, a perfectly serviceable low-end fighter which could be produced in volume at about $30 million each, is intended to be replaced by the F-35 at $131 million per copy, according to the Government Accountability Office. [3] It is plain that the Air Force cannot replace the 1,200 F-16s in the total active inventory with F-35s at anything approaching a one-for-one rate. Nor is it altogether certain that the F-35, a seriously overweight air frame stuffed with immature software and possessing the flight dynamics of a brick, is capable of replacing the F-16 even qualitatively.

The reason these projects are conceived as they are and burst into postulant fruition is because that is how the Military Industrial Congressional Complex likes them. Present day military contractors would be completely incapable of producing utilitarian weapons at one-tenth the rate they were produced in World War II. But they don't have to: as long as they provide lucrative board memberships and consultancies to retiring generals they can crank up their profits by conceiving monstrously expensive programs that remain in research and development for years, if not decades, and require very little "touch" labor but a lot of billable overheard. A program, having already been pitched to and approved by the strangely amenable generals, is then locked in by a shower of political contributions to the right committees on Capitol Hill. When the whole rotten scheme is finally revealed to be 100 percent over budget and years behind schedule, it is either canceled at the convenience of the government (meaning no harm to the contractor, who bids on the very next project), or is so reduced in quantity that the unit cost skyrockets and the military service disingenuously decries the result as an inventory shortfall because of alleged "budget cuts."

Such is the system Max Boot so gloriously miscomprehends, that he thinks should spend ever increasing sums, in perpetuity. And for what? So that lap-top bombardiers like himself can vicariously experience the thrill of other Americans tromping about various pieces of unpleasant third world real estate playing "globocop," as he himself puts it without apparent irony.

We have thus far endeavored to avoid the use of the term "defense" to describe the spending and resultant activities that Boot requires. Indeed, his own use of the term "globocop" suggests that legitimate defense has very little to do with what he advocates, as invading the wrong country in 2003 abundantly made clear. The military establishment, and the elites in Washington and Wall Street who direct its use, have anything in mind but the defense of what have traditionally been construed as legitimate American interests. Michael Lind says, quite rightly, that the American political establishment has deliberately traded away the prosperity of U.S. citizens — shipping their jobs overseas — in order to maintain an increasingly meaningless military supremacy. [4]

Apparently the establishment also seeks to trade away the public's health. Regardless of what one thinks about the specific health care legislation that passed, the idea that the health of Americans should be sacrificed — when U.S. life expectancy is already near the bottom of the list among OECD countries — so that neocons like Boot can repeat criminal mistakes like the invasion of Iraq, shows the depth to which political discourse in this country has sunk. If health care legislation creates spending that is unsustainable in the long term, by all means amend it to make it less expensive. But any savings should either pay down the debt or be remitted to the taxpayer. Giving the proceeds to the Department of "Defense" would be worse than flushing the money down the drain: it would create more rapacious criminal corporations like Halliburton, more sinister private armies like Blackwater, and more interventions with a potential for lethal blowback.

From 1948, at the dawn of the Cold War, through the Obama administration's pending budget request for 2011, the Department of "Defense" has spent or will spend $28.4 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

This is the same organization that couldn't even defend its headquarters on 9/11 — and it wants even more funds to perpetuate the status quo?


* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] "ObamaCare and American Power," Max Boot, the Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2010.

[2] "Department of Defense Budget FY2011 [.pdf], see pp. 61-67.

[3] "Is This Fighter Jet Worth $131 Million?", AOL News, March 12, 2010.

[4] "The U.S. is stuck in the Cold War," Michael Lind, Salon.com, March 30, 2010.

Dissecting the Israeli Claim to East Jerusalem

Much has been made of President Obama being blindsided and humiliated by the announcement of new settlement construction in East Jerusalem, made by Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu's government during the visit to Israel by Vice President Biden, on the eve of the so-called proximity talks with the Palestinians, negotiated so painstakingly by George Mitchell.

Netanyahu insists all of Jerusalem is the indivisible capital of Israel and therefore not subject to negotiation.  His claim to East Jerusalem (and by implication most of the land in the West Bank) derives from a theory of historical precedence that says the original inhabitants of that troubled land have an exclusive right to ownership of that land, and that the Palestinians, being more recent inhabitants, have no equivalent right, even though they may have legally owned that land prior to 1967 and have resided on it for many generations.  

Professor Juan Cole thoroughly debunks this preposterous theory in the blog entry: The Ten Top Reasons East Jerusalem does not Belong to Jewish-Israelis (also attached below).

But Netanyahu's claim could be even more ludicrous than Professor Cole so ably demonstrates.  That is because Cole notes but does not address the truly devastating implications of the hypothesis analyzed by Hebrew University Professor Shlomo Sand in the controversial international best seller, Invention of the Jewish People, Verso Press, 2009.  Sand, a scholarly historian with the character and courage to follow his analysis wherever it may lead, contends in this well documented historical study of the Jewish diaspora population that much of that population is really descended from indigenous peoples who converted to Judaism (e.g., Berbers in North Africa and Spain, Khazars in what is now the Ukraine, pre-Islamic Arabs in Yemen, etc.) rather than being descendants of the relatively small number of Jews who were expelled from Palestine by the Romans after the destruction of the 2nd Temple in AD 70.  

Sand's analysis raises raises a fundamental question of  whether Jews should be  defined by religion (like Christians, Moslems, Buddhists, and Hindus, for example) or by racial/ethnic exclusivity (i.e., by genetics) -- a question that is explosive in Israel.  If Sand's hypothesis is correct, the implications are profound: The Palestinians are probably closer genetically to the Jewish expellees from the second temple than the overwhelming majority of non-arab Israeli citizens, who are either descendants of Eastern Europeans (like Netanyahu's Polish forebears) or recent immigrants (especially from North Africa or Russia), like the ex-Ukranian bar room bouncer, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.   And by being the descendants of converts, these Israelis would be about as closely related genetically to the Jewish expellees from the second temple as the descendants of Ivan the Terrible or Sitting Bull, thus turning Netanyahu's theory of historical precedence on its head.

How Successful Was the Marjah Operation?

The winter offensive in Marjah has been portrayed by US authorities as the successful poster child of Nato commander's, General Stanley McChrystal, new counterinsurgency strategy.  Yet some of the information fed to the American public has been misleading, possibly the result of systematic misinformation by the Pentagon designed to convey a false impression of "a large and loud victory" -- the goal of which is to convince the American public of the need for longer war than implied by President Obama's "escalation and then leave" speech.  Moreover, as Gareth Porter pointed out, most reports erroneously depicted Majah as a city of 50-80,000 when, in fact, it is an irrigated rural region made up of scattered farms, hamlets and small villages.  


Bear also in mind that General McChrystal telegraphed his punch into Marjah with a public campaign advertising the looming offensive months before it commenced.  Predictably, Taliban melted away to fight another day, leaving lots of land mines (pretentiously called IEDs or improvised explosive devices by the Pentagon), and Nato forces moved in with relatively light casualties and are now spreading out to occupy the region.  

Marjah is now off the radar screen that governs perceptions in the sound-byte addicted hall of mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac.  Yet over the coming months, the  occupation of the Marjah region -- the "hold" part of the "clear-hold-build-leave" counterinsurgency strategy -- will make our forces dependent on long vulnerable lines of communication for supplies and their outposts vulnerable to attacks in detail.  


Referring the following map below, the green shaded area, which approximates the arc of pacification in McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy, gives an idea of you serious these vulnerabilities will be.  It is made of thousands of farm coumpounds, hamlets, and small villages.  Marjah is in the west,  about 200 miles from Qandahar in the east.

And now .... General McChrystal's headquarters is letting it be known that the next target is Qandahar, a Pashtun majority city of about 500,000 inhabitants (perhaps as many as a million, if one includes the surrounding regions), and remains a violent Taliban stronghold.

Before getting enmeshed in a Qandahar offensive, the scale of which will make Marjah look puny, it might be be wise to have a dispassionate lessons-learned assessment to determine whether or not the outcome of the Marjah operation did in fact provide a stable strategic launching pad for a full blown assault on Qandahar.  

The information in the attached report by Chris Sands in the National (UAE) adds importance to this question.

Operation in Marjah ‘jeopardises peace plan’

Chris Sands, The National [UAE],March 15. 2010

KABUL // When US-led forces launched a major attack on a small corner of south-west Afghanistan recently, the operation was accompanied by a blizzard of military activity and media attention not seen since the war began almost nine years ago.

Weeks later, the true impact on Marjah of Operation Moshtarak is starting to emerge. The hype may have faded away, but ...
... the Taliban were still strong in Marjah and had beheaded seven local men, including an imam, for alleged links to the government in the wake of Operation Moshtarak. .... (continued)