Bush Holds Cocktail Hour to Raise War Funds

So today we can only wish that were the truth as Bush demands we shell out $46 Billion More in War Funds. And he's demanding it by the end of the year. The rate Bush is going of course, his little foreign adventures are going to cost a total of $1 trillion dollars by the time his term is up. Yeah, that's more than the total of Vietnam and Korea. The total for this year alone in appropriations will be the highest year since the "War on Terror" began in 2001: $196.4 billion. As Pelosi points out, for the cost of 40 days in Iraq, we could provide health care to 10 million children for a year. Even though Bush insists the war contractors need the money to buy nonexistent troops Christmas trees and pudding, we know the Pentagon doesn't need a penny more until after February and the primary elections. Bush made his announcement at the White House while surrounded by the family of a dead Marine, and exorting Democrats to prove they support the troops. Political theater much? Does this family have granite countertops?

Meanwhile, with the border between Iraq and Turkey heating up, we are faced with yet another Bush lie: that by staying in Iraq we reduce the chances for regional war. Undoubtedly, the presence of US troops gives courage to Kurdish insurgents, who dart into Turkey and back out to Iraqi strongholds which are technically within US borders. The surge of refugees out of Iraq continues to destabalize the societies and governments of countries that surround it, placing an enormous economic and social strain on allies in the region. Relief from them is likely never to come, as Iraqis displaced by ethnic fighting become the new international Palestinians, forever holding an identity with a country to which they can never go home. And after all of the reconstruction efforts in Iraq, the aggregate of the lives of Iraqis is worse than before the invasion of 2003. Far from reducing terrorism, the one last goal clung to by the Bush administration, Iraq has become a proving ground for terrorism tactics, and the successes are exported to Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.

What does Bush plan to do with this windfall if we give it to him? Get it stolen. Let's take a little peak into the $44.5 billion Iraqi reconstruction effort, and the auditing of just one $1.2 billion contract:

In a January audit of DynCorp's work under the INL contract, [auditors] found that the State Department paid $43.8 million for manufacturing and temporary storage of a residential camp that had never been used. The audit also questioned the State Department's payment of $36.4 million for weapons and equipment, including body armor, armored vehicles and communications equipment that couldn't be accounted for because "invoices were vague and there was no backup documentation." [Auditors] raised questions about INL's payment of business-class travel expenses for DynCorp officials. After INL questioned the charges, it said DynCorp re-paid $108,000. INL officials, according to Bowen's report, "have no confidence that the government has paid for only valid expenses under the contract."

Meanwhile, we find out that Blackwater ducks payroll taxes by calling it's employees "private contractors." Which might go a long way to explain why Blackwater takes no interest in their conduct. Who thinks Bush should get money to pay for this $H!T??!!

Twelve Angry Soldiers and the Iraq We All Know

12 Army Captains spoke out in public today on the 5 year anniversary of the authorization of force in Iraq and the fiasco that has been Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the thousand "Operations this or that" which have followed. Bush's administration and the vaunted neo-conservative movement which brought him to power failed to rebuild a capitalist, foreign-owned, democratic and pro-West puppet. While the military found Saddam in a hole in the desert, and the Iraqi judicial court found him guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death, we stayed in Iraq for the dreams of Wall Street.

Within months, our own brutal military tactics and the irresponsible outsourcing that allowed in mercenaries sparked the rise of a bloody insurgency. Bush winked and nodded while American contractors sailed off to the Caribbean with $9 billion in stolen Iraqi oil money we had been entrusted with by the U.N. And three thousand soldiers died, more than half from weapons constructed out of munitions the Bush administration failed to secure during the invasion, so sure the only dangerous thing to be found would be the still invisible WMD. (We'll find it on Nov. 1, 2008, wait and see!!)

U.S. forces, responsible for too many objectives and too much "battle space," are vulnerable targets. The sad inevitability of a protracted draw-down is further escalation of attacks -- on U.S. troops, civilian leaders and advisory teams. They would also no doubt get caught in the crossfire of the imminent Iraqi civil war.

Iraqi security forces would not be able to salvage the situation. Even if all the Iraqi military and police were properly trained, equipped and truly committed, their 346,000 personnel would be too few. As it is, Iraqi soldiers quit at will. The police are effectively controlled by militias. And, again, corruption is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very elements that will battle each other after we're gone.

This is Operation Iraqi Freedom and the reality we experienced. This is what we tried to communicate up the chain of command. This is either what did not get passed on to our civilian leadership or what our civilian leaders chose to ignore. While our generals pursue a strategy dependent on peace breaking out, the Iraqis prepare for their war -- and our servicemen and women, and their families, continue to suffer.

There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.

America, it has been five years. It's time to make a choice.

The Jawa Report claims the 12 Captains are actually anonymous WaPost staffers who paid the soldiers for the use of their names. Blackfive spins the usual "your opinion doesn't matter unless you served in the military" to "veterans are idiots." Interesting that Uncle Jimbo dodges the draft (lol) proposition by the Captains, with the emotional plea of "victory **(see conditions, updated and revised, subject to further pie-in-the-sky reevaluation)." The Captains also get smeared as dirt by FloppingAces, who are betraying better soldiers who had the guts to stay. One commenter on Confederate Yankee said that the only reason they were no longer on active duty was because they were losers. Looks like the Republican congressional leaders need to burn some midnight oil about not saying meanie things about our soldiers.

In the October 22 edition of Time Magazine, Samantha Powers notes the erosion of America as the world's superpower in an article noting Bush's complete inability to lead the world towards ending human rights violations and creating true democracy in Sudan and Burma, just as he claims he has been trying to do in Iraq.

"The U.S. has raised its voice on Darfur and Burma louder than any other country. George W. Bush has regularly denounced the Sudanese campaign of destruction as "genocide," Washington has spent $2.5 billion on humanitarian aid to keep Darfur's refugees alive, and the Administration has spearheaded creation of a 26,000-person, U.N.-led peacekeeping force. When the Burmese regime cracked down on protesters, it was Bush who used his appearance before the U.N. General Assembly to announce that the U.S. would freeze the assets of Burma's repressive leaders and deny them visas.

Yet when he urged "every civilized nation" to use its diplomatic and economic leverage to "stand up" to the regime, his appeal was largely ignored. Many countries acted as if they agreed with Burma's self-serving claim that the crackdown was simply an "internal matter." Not withstanding the U.S.'s $500 billion military budget and $13 trillion GDP, its summoning power has dwindled.

The inaction is partly backlash against the discredited American messenger. Torture, "black sites," extraordinary rendition and the bungled, bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq have all made U.S. human-rights appeals ring hollow."

America's time as the world's only super power began with one President Bush and ended tragically with the presidency of his son. Castro may even live see Bush pack it up and move out. What sort of world will we face in 2009, when the idea of a world safe for democracy has become a punchline, and communism finally eclipses us on the international scene? When the U.S. finally faces our $9 trillion debt, what sort of military will we be able to afford? And how many more genocides will we have to categorize and memorialize?

Technorati Tags:
bush, iraq war, darfur, genocide, politics

White House Terror Officials Feed Intel to Fox News

So today we wake up to discover that the recent OBL video overshadowed by sordid tale of how it was acquired early by the Bush White House and then leaked to FOX NEWS. Two senior officials in Bush's Administration were given an emailed link around 10 a.m. to the video on a private intelligence company's website that monitors Islamic terrorists. Those two officials are White House counsel Fred F. Fielding and Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center. The Search for International Terrorist Entities first contacted Fielding, and then emailed the link to Fielding and also to Leitner, at the suggestion of Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Fielding and Bagnal both told SITE that Bush's White House did not yet have a copy of OBL's video.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

At first blush, we are faced with the idea that the Bush Administration is so extraordinarily sloppy with controlling sensitive information, that people began forwarding the emails sent to Feilding and Leitner at-will. As a federal employee, constantly trained in the handling of sensitive information and reminded by marks on every document and email, this innocent excitement seems implausible. Of course, this wouldn't be the first time that analysts in either the CIA or the DIA have used or misused intelligence in order to fight their constant turf battles. How alarming it is that Bush has created an entire security apparatus in order to fight terrorism and it's plagued at the top by people who just want to be the first to leak to their overlords at FOX NEWS.

Conservative bloggers are fighting the notion of a White House Intel Leak tooth and nail. One attempt involves stating that since the transcipts, which include a translation, were done on the 6th, the day before the link was provided to the White House, that is de facto proof that American intelligence had the video the day before... because only American intelligence could have done the translation. However, the Jawa Report is in (deliberate?) error. The "marks" are in fact SITE marks. You can discover that for yourself by hunting down the original posting of the "marks" on FOX NEWS... which shows the same document without the header chopped off. The header clearly shows the translation was downloaded off a SITE website and gives the address.



CounterterrorismBlog also corrects another one of The Jawa Reports inaccuracies, when it claimed that blogger Laura Mansfeild had the video. Laura Mansfeild only knew the video was coming, and released a link to another jihad video which came out the day before. The Jawa Report goes on to claim that it had the video, but check out their actual posting of the OBL video. The time stamp reads as posted By Dr. Rusty "John Doe" Shackleford at September 7, 2007 03:39 PM. That would be after the release on FOX NEWS. One amusing misquote of Jawa's "marks" claim further distorted the claim to the point that the marks proved ABC had the video and transcript on the 6th!!



Other conservative bloggers attempt to make hay with an ABC story on the video after latching onto the date marker for the article, which reads 9:23 AM. The Jawa Report's blog on the marks has found life as a source for this spin. At first blush, perhaps to those who didn't actually read the article, it would seem that ABC had the transcript previous to SITE's emails at 10 AM. However, when you get to the bottom of the article, you find the words "This post has been updated." Which means that the original story of the Blotter, talking about DHS statements on possible terrorist attacks against the US and New York City on 9-11, which you can extrapolate out of the text, was amended later to include the blurb that there was a new video. You would think that they would take this as a chance to scream about how the liberal media is just trying to discredit the DHS and US counterterrorism by making it seems as if the DHS got caught sleeping, but even a chance to scream "liberal media bias" gets sacrificed in the need to defend Bush.

Con-blogs resist document comparison between the ABC and FOX transcripts which leave little room for doubt that they are the same document, and work hard at insisting that ABC posted the video before FOX. The evidence against them would be the comment section for the Blotter's post. Surely, if ABC had posted the actual video at 9:23 as is being claimed, the comments would include references to the contents. Yet the comments contain no discussion of OBL's rant on the state of the mortgage industry in our country. And it is not until 3:37:45 PM that comments on the content of the video begin, including a count on the number of times OBL says "Wake Up."

Technorati Tags:
White House, Bush, terrorism, Al-Qaeda, moonbat, politics

Bush Makes America Filthy On Your Dime

So today we learn that under Shrub, the EPA is pursuing fewer criminal prosecutions against polluters. Surprised?

"The slower pace of enforcement mirrors a decline in resources for pursuing environmental wrongdoing. The EPA now employs 172 investigators in its Criminal Investigation Division, below the minimum of 200 agents required by the 1990 Pollution Prosecution Act, signed by President George H.W. Bush.

The actual number of investigators available at any time is even smaller, agents said, because they sometimes are diverted to other duties, such as service on EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson's eight-person security detail.


Johnson, President Bush's chief environmental regulator, foreshadowed a less confrontational approach toward enforcement when he served as the EPA's top deputy in late 2004. "The days of the guns and badges are over," Johnson told a group of farm producers in Georgia the day before Bush won reelection, according to a news account of the speech.

Prosecutors and agency employees blame the diversion of funds to the war on terror, but 9-11 or not, the funding was promised to banish before that Tuesday. And the result of not being convicted guilty of poisoning Americans?

The Justice Department in August also touted a plea bargain with IMC Shipping Co. that required the Singapore ship operator to pay $10 million in connection with a massive oil spill in 2004 that killed thousands of birds in Alaska's Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.



Prosecutors told the court they had enough evidence to indict the company for criminal negligence under the Clean Water Act and for making false statements early in the investigation. But the deal they reached called for guilty pleas to two counts of violating the Refuse Act and one violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Prosecutors cited the company's cooperation for the leniency.

The decision to drop the negligence charges could be valuable to the company, which as a result remains eligible to seek reimbursement from a special government fund for $77 million of the more than $100 million it has spent cleaning up the spill.




The Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund -- administered by the U.S. Coast Guard and funded by a special oil tax -- can reimburse shippers for all cleanup costs not covered by insurance, but only if the incident does not involve gross negligence or willful misconduct.

Let's see what it costs to spill oil if you cut a plea bargin under Bush. Instead of paying the $100 million in clean up fees and the $10 million in fines, you pay $23 million in clean up costs and $10 million in fines. Which means that Bush just used your tax money to say a loyal oil company $77 million dollars. How sweet, he bought you an oil spill!!. Just another example of Republicans being responsible with money? As Barbie says, "math is hard!"

My wallet just said ouch!!

Technorati Tags:
EPA, oil industry, global warming, pollution, green, environment, save the earth, george w. bush

Passengers Fail to Observe 9-11 Moment of Silence

So today, the vast majority of Americans seem to have chickened out on flying, count that towards what you will: no one believes Petraeus, people have noticed how many Al-Q terrorist cells keep getting arrested trying to make explosives, rainy weather. Those few who trickled through airports local to moonbat overwhelmingly booked flights without realizing what date they were picking, or else flew for business, because heck, gotta make that buck. Several offical attempts were made to observe moments of silence when the first World Trade Center was struck, as passengers rolled their eyes and continued to take off their shoes. Moonbat found herself off eating lentil soup and completely missed the correct time. Headquarters provided nifty little posters for everyone to sign stating that they remembered the reason why they came to work. As a mark of low morale, no one signed.

En route to and from defending the nation from Osama bin Laden, and to and from the one intelligence class at her college there's been enough student interest in to run, moonbat has been listening to tidbits of Petraeus' "I swear I wrote this despite that the White House rewrites everyone else's testimony, but I hid mine in my underwear drawer and Cheyne would never think to look there" testimony. So sectarian violence is down 45% since last December and 80% in Baghdad alone... as long as you don't include car bombs, Diyala province and anyone shot anywhere else than the back of the head. What are we to do with a General who defines the difference between a terrorist and a criminal by how they shoot you?? Under the spit and polish, the truth remains that the surge has failed. Sectarian violence remains above levels in 2004, 2005, and 2006. Ducking under one month in the last twelve by spinning numbers is political manuevering unexpected from General Betray Us.

People should read the ad before swallowing the inevitable attempts at Republican spin and give MoveOn a fair chance. A difference remains between calling someone a traitor for voicing dissapproval of their President's policy and the commendable act of saying the General has no clothes. When numbers given as Congressional testimony are misleading and false, a General who speaks them betrays the trust of the public, and that act is not removed from moral outrage just because even moonbat favors a few of his overall ideas. Nor should Democrats feel the need to return MoveOn's money. You'd think con-blogs would assume Petraeus had any skin at all.

Six years later.... our military tetters on the edge of an abyss and meets it's recuitment goals only by large cash payments. We still can't translate most of our intercepted SIGINT. Our country got milked by almost $60 billion in wasted contracting dollars by Republican election donors pretending to "work" in Iraq. Electricity production in Baghdad remains 2 hours a day. The Taliban are just about as popular as ever in Afghanistan. Al-Q's mobile terrorist training camps still churn out bomb-makers from international schools in Pakistan. China spends it's time on a Marshal Plan for Africa. Osama bin Laden finds the time to die his beard and follow the real estate mortage crisis in the United States. What has the Republican party done for you lately??

Lessons of the Matrix for "the War on Terror"

So today moonbat shall expound on how Osama bin Laden uses The Matrix (1999) to plot his global jihad and recruit otherwise luckless young people to go blow themselves to pieces in foreign countries. You see, it's one thing to declare war on the United States, fast food and the Jerry Springer Show, and quite another to have a clue. Now, OBL got schooled in the usual Saudi customs and road construction, yet neither provide a road map for how to organize a global network of terror without potential recruits laughing in your face and going back to the Arab version of moonshine. And then OBL got his lucky break: a movie came out in America. A movie about a young man waking up to the corrupt system that keeps his true nature a prisoner and the soulless machines whose power must be challenged and whose citadels can be destroyed. That evil liberal Hollywood; don't those directors ever think about how their movies could be emboldening the enemy? So OBL hops on Ebay and snags a pirated copy from a Chinese seller, leaves some positive feedback and an exhortation to read the Koran, and throws a bag of black market Pop-Secret popcorn in the microwave. And Morpheus expounds to him all the secrets of how to recruit idiot young men:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it....What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad... What is the Matrix? Control.

If there's anything young people want it's to be the ones in control, to be outside the system, to be above the powers that be. And all that Morpheus tells Neo, all that he promises Neo he will become if he swallows the Red Pill, that my dear readers, that's what OBL tells his recruits into Al-Q. Step outside the system, your actions are for a higher cause, accept no boundaries and no limitations, you will find glory. Of course, not everyone can be the chosen one, even if you tell everyone that they will be the chosen one. Running a terrorist cell in a Western Country, staying under the radar, and reaching your target do take at least a few braincells, and not all your "Neos" have enough to suffice? So you have to get rid of them, and what better form of euthanasia than someone else's occupation? Like... an occupation by a certain Western Country in an Arab land. Iraq. You hardly need persuade your not-quite graduates to the worthiness of their target, since from a distance everything American looks the same.

Moonbat found cause to desire pills for several hours herself today, listening to the debate on the floor of the House in Congress. Republicans denied funding for the troops, of course. Republican after Republican took to the floor, not to admit that 4 previous surges have failed, not to admit that they spent years hiding the total cost of the Iraq War in six other supplemental funding bills, but to insist they were right about investing in an endless war for the mere sake that such a pursuit is fundamental to being American. Meanwhile, the total cost of the Iraq War soon shall surpass $500 billion. Calculate out how many millions and hour that is. And how much did moonbat contribute in taxes for 2007? $3,900. Did moonbat literally pay for a nanosecond of our occupation in Iraq? For the dry erase markers used by defense contractors to teach Iraqi Security Forces to yell "Drop your weapons!!" .. in English? If I insist I would rather have paid for something besides dry erase, of course, that would be emboldening the enemy. Not that they don't laugh about dry erase markers already...

Back to the Matrix. So OBL got the point clean off, that the heart of the movement should have an ethereal city away from the war with the "West" and should strike by slipping in and out of the false world, removing recruits and eliminating targets. Show recruits that the false world can be used to defeat it's own masters, and that by having secret knowledge and faith, an individual could become stronger than the weapons of war, and transcend them, even if only in death. The glamorous image of the warrior that the villains fail to see, touch or stop, destroying even those central artifices of power which reason holds as impenetrable. Shut down the system built to ignore you and your anger at it, again and again and again.

Of course "Zion" is not Iraq. The point of having a "Zion" is so that no matter where you fight you cannot be defeated, your source of fighters will not be lost, your flag is never in jeopardy. Yet out on that House floor, the Republican Party tried to cling to a world without computers, a world without cellphones, a world without globalization. A world where war is a seige of a castle, or a capital, or a country. And as always, appearances for appearances sake. The pure wish that if everything looks good, then everything is good. That the presence of American troops on every street corner in Iraq stops training camps from being set up in Pakistan-when it does not. That the existence of the Green Zone prevents Islamic extremists from a hostile takeover of other countries- when it did not. Republicans hiss and spit over Beruit and Somalia, and neglect to mention that when al-Q assisted the radical Islamic takeover of Somalia last year... the Republicans left that to Ethiopia. Oh yes, but we can't have a second Somalia, they plead. Don't they mean a third?

So long as we humor Bush and his elephant friends by calling this a "war on terror," the longer we remain caught in that loosing equation of energy expenditures that Morphous demonstrated to Neo: takes twice as much energy to swing and miss, as it does to swing and hit. No matter how many "Al-Qaeda operatives" go down in Iraq, the West always misses Al-Q. Anytime Al-Q carries out a terrorist attack on a Western target, they strike us. How can they loose? As long as you can't hit Morpheus, and he can hit you, he always wins. And instead of seeing this, the Republicans lower their heads and flail away at a target that remains always out of reach, only to get blind-sided time and again. Four other times, four other surges, all promised to work. Meanwhile, the monstrous appeal of being at war against an evil enemy keeps debate over not getting our fanny whomped time and again constrained to the classical idea of war: battlefields, generals, tanks, soldiers. But like Morpheus, OBL pursues targets not in the "desert of the real," but in the false cities of the Matrix, in the West.



Democrats like the shine of the term "war on terror," that much is true. Obama and Clinton remain on very romantic terms with GWOT, and so far, only Edwards perceives the relationship might be a little.. limiting. "I also think it suggests that there's a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don't think that's true." Not true in Britain, where investigative work uncovered and stopped a 2003 Al-Q bombing plot and just netted 5 life imprisonments. No weapons of mass destruction were found, however, just plant food. Such a point finds itself hard to be understood. Democrats everywhere who seek to broaden efforts to combat international terrorist networks will be accused of trying to abandon the use of military force and being irresponsible. And people do understand what our "war on terror" means; it's something for which no one has to be responsible. A broad catch-phrase for whatever your chosen politician advocates, from sound environmental policies to the highway robbery that gets itself called cost-plus defense contracting. Want funding? It's for the "war on terror." Don't support tax cuts for the rich? By golly- you must be one of those terrorists!!

War remains the ultimate defense, even ones of last resort and even pre-emptive ones. You find war an appealing choice because you were lazy or too proud to deal with the five thousand things that led up to the war itself. You never will hear conservatives admit they should have listened when liberal American call for intervention in Afghanistan and the ousting of the Taliban... in 1997. Never. You will hear continued Republican refusal to intervene in Darfur (including Bush's "I really mean I might think about doing something about you" speech to Sudan) used by the Republicans to support as many surges as it takes to surpress an insurgency in a country where everyone and his brother has a weapons cache. From old Iraqi Army munitions depos. Which Bush and his cronies failed to secure. Too busy printing up that "Mission Accomplished" banner, eh? As long as we see this only as a war, all we focus on as a nation is the art of war. Not homeland security, not airline security, not international security. Not the black market, not passports and visas, not how much plant food Muhammad is buying on Aisle 5. Not of course, all the future Timothy McVeighs out there either. But I digress.

Giuliani's idea that a Democratic President would mean a return to pre-9/11 mentalities on the reach of global jihad is more than "plain wrong" as Edwards replied, it's plain hysteria. Guiliani remains the kind of politician who believes there are no cockroaches if you stamp on all the ones you see. That sort of mentality leads to the idea that if you make war on the Al-Qaeda network you can see, there is no other network in the world. While the U.S. made war on Al-Q in Afghanistan, and later after the fall of Saddam and the entry of Grand Viceroy Bremer, in Iraq, Al-Qaeda merrily trained the bombers of the "Operation Crevice" intercepted 2003 plot and the successful 2005 "7/7" bombing of our allies, in London. Two years of occupying Iraq failed to prevent, by some form of magic, the ability of Al-Qaeda to target and strike a Western City. Perhaps that is why the Republican Party stood up on the floor of Congress today and declared that "Europe was lost."

Moonbat gets it. Iraq we can't loose, but our Allies can fall to the enemy. What does a dusty little desert country have that our time-honored and true Allies don't? Oh wait, we didn't go into Iraq for oil. So it must be goat meat!!



Whatever we are there for, the pentagon has made a few moves to keep America from ever ever knowing. Opinions about
the surge perhaps:

Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Based on what I read and the soldiers with whom I communicate, it's my view that military personnel in Iraq are deeply divided over whether the "surge" will work. There seems to be far more support among officers, even junior officers, than there is among enlisted personnel. That may well be because enlisted personnel are often the ones at the greatest risk over there because they are the ones running convoys, going on patrols, etc. They also are able to see how Iraqis on the street level relate to them and whether the presence of additional U.S. forces is changing Iraqi attitudes.

The reporter in question would be the author of "Imperial Life in the Emerald City." Reporters may soon be our only source of info out of Iraq, whatever your stripe, besides the rare Iraqi blogger. On April 19th the U.S. Army issued a directive prohibiting all unauthorized blogging or personal e-mail, including one imagines, anything criticizing your CO or anything NC-17 for the wife.

Army Regulation 530--1: Operations Security (OPSEC) (.pdf) restricts more than just blogs, however. Previous editions of the rules asked Army personnel to "consult with their immediate supervisor" before posting a document "that might contain sensitive and/or critical information in a public forum." The new version, in contrast, requires "an OPSEC review prior to publishing" anything -- from "web log (blog) postings" to comments on Internet message boards, from resumes to letters home.

No resumes? No Monster.com? A ploy to increase retention, by limiting job-hunting? Not all bloggers always went unscathed before, though now anyone seems fair game for telling the truth. Of course, while this may be the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging, there's little talk about this "emboldening the enemy." Only that it would cut down on PR for the U.S. military, keep the real glory of war and the success stories from getting through the MSM and countering the bleak accounts given by the anti-war crowd of misery and death. Of course, all of OBL's little Neos won't be fooled into thinking that just because they've gone silent, there's been a withdrawal of the American military....

Neo: I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

Technorati Tags:
Bush, Iraq, troop surge, war, war on terror, global jihad, matrix, osama bin laden, afghanistan, homeland security

Counterinsurgency in the American Military

So fine the line between bravery and domestic counterinsurgency when one ventures an opinion on the American military's conduct in Iraq. Especially if you accuse your boss generals of 'intellectual and moral failures.' Yet, a young and snappy Lt. Col. Paul "Beergoggles" Yingling roars to the world about 'a failure in generalship' in the American Forces Journal. "Beergoggles" fails to be uncivilized enough to name names, so the gossip's pretty mild, and well-warmed over by several New-York Times Bestsellers. Yingling snarks at these "tell-all books" where generals speak of private concerns they failed to speak of publically before the invasion. The author of one of the said tell-alls, Thomas Ricks of 'Fiasco', wrote the glowing WaPost coverage of Yingling's expose. The main of the Lt. Col.'s beef begins:

"For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.

These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress."

Does it surprise you to learn that Yingling graduated from the University of Chicago with a Master of Arts in Political Science?

....After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America's generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency theory prescribes providing continuous security to the population. However, for most of the war American forces in Iraq have been concentrated on large forward-operating bases, isolated from the Iraqi people and focused on capturing or killing insurgents. Counterinsurgency theory requires strengthening the capability of host-nation institutions to provide security and other essential services to the population. America's generals treated efforts to create transition teams to develop local security forces and provincial reconstruction teams to improve essential services as afterthoughts, never providing the quantity or quality of personnel necessary for success....

"....The need for intelligent, creative and courageous general officers is self-evident. An understanding of the larger aspects of war is essential to great generalship. However, a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities. Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army's senior generals speaks another language. While the physical courage of America's generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long."

Yingling plugs "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife" by one John Nagl and On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War," by Col. Harry Summers. In November of 2006, Yingling cowrote with Nagl an essay New Rules for New Enemies in... Armed Forces Journal. Within they argue:

"To win the Long War, the Army must develop a more adaptive organizational culture. To create such a culture, the Army must change its focus from a centralized, specialized focus on major conventional wars to a more decentralized and less specialized focus on full-spectrum operations. This shift in organizational culture cannot occur within existing organizations — indeed these organizations can be an impediment to change. The best way to change the organizational culture of the Army is to change the pathways for professional advancement within the officer corps. The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion."

Moonbat thinks Beergoggles wants a promotion, eh? John Nagl was on the writing team that produced the Army's new Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Who also wrote that? Petraeus!! Who got a Teddy Award from Time Magazine last December for his leadership in encouraging institutional change in the Army towards effective counterinsurgency tactics at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Guess who also spent that year assigned to Fort Leavenworth? "Beergoggles!!" Who in turn got interviewed by the Combat Studies Institute, a military think tank run by Petraeus' CAC. {The CSI gets described as an 'academic department' of the CAC by this private contractor, who creates "virtual staff tours" to help train officers about Iraq, but I digress.} Oh, Yingling's 2006 interview:

"The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building host nation institutions-building security forces, building local government capacity- and yet all our organizations are designed around thelear important line of operations: combat operations. There is a real danger in over-determination based on the organization's design. There's the old saying, "If you give a man a hammer, he sees every problem as a nail." Similarly, if you give a unit tanks and Bradleys, they see every promblem as a movement to contact. That's an oversimplification, but it is a problem. I've now had two combat tours where I was involved in developing ISF and I've been to every Army school you can go to as an officer, and no one has ever talked to me about that challenge. No one has ever given me classes on how to do that...

....The institutional Army.. has not caught up in either professional education or organizational design with the challenges of counterinsurgency. So as I go into battalion command, I'm going to focus my troops on those tasks and give them the mental models that will allow them to anticipate those problems and solve them. (That he has just learned from... Petraeus. You guessed it!) Eventually the institutional Army will catch up and they'll get that stuff into schools and there will be MTOE positions for security force development and civil-military operations; but until that day I think individual commanders will have to solve that problem on their own, because when we get into theater we certainly have to solve it...

...I do think that having organic to our institutions the ability to develop intelligence- to collect on our friends, if you will; to be able to find our friends- is extremely important. Because once you find your friends, finding the enemy is very easy. In a city of 200,000, there are people who know who's complicit with the insurgency. So I guess if I had to condense this into a pithy little bullet it would be: don't train on finding the enemy; train on finding your friends and they will help you find your enemy."

WaPost's Thomas Ricks, author of Fiasco and Yingling's shining write-up for his expose, interveiwed Yingling on this very subject, later in November of 2006, Flaws Cited in Efforts to Train Iraqi Forces: where Yingling again gets a chance to showcase how much he has learned at Fort Leavenworth.

"Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, a staff officer with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 who worked with Iraqi units, came away thinking that the Army fundamentally is not geared to the task of helping the advisory effort.

"The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building host-nation institutions," he told the interviewers, "yet all our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations: combat operations."

Yingling came to a broader conclusion. He recommended an entirely different orientation in Iraq, both for trainers and for regular U.S. units. "Don't train on finding the enemy," he said. "Train on finding your friends, and they will help you find your enemy. . . . Once you find your friends, finding the enemy is easy."

SmallWarsJournal blogged to promote Yingling's expose, stating that "In this morning’s Washington Post Tom Ricks reports on an Armed Forces Journal article that should be required reading for anyone who cares about our nation’s capability to successfully prosecute the LONG WAR." Their About page states that Small Wars Journal is a private site. It is run by Small Wars Journal, LLC, a private company formed in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Its principals are Dave Dilegge (Editor-in-Chief) and Bill Nagle (Publisher). SWJ in turn gets listed as an item of particular interest on the official Marine website, Small Wars Center of Excellence. But that probably has nothing to do with Petraeus helping the Marines with their own version of a counterinsurgency manual. Surprising the flack Yingling's getting from con-bloggers of all stripes, eh?

Yingling popped up in The Wall Street Journal's December 2006 article Despite $168B Budget, Army Still Faces Cash Crunch:

"At Fort Hood, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which returned from Iraq in March and will go back in fall 2007, is already worried about time to prepare. The regiment will spend most of the winter receiving new soldiers, fielding new equipment and learning to use it. The regiment left most of its tanks and Humvees in Iraq for follow-on units.

That means troops won't have much time to train for other critical tasks. Junior leaders need to know everything from how to assess a water plant to the tribal politics of the area where they are deploying, says Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, the unit's deputy commander. They must know enough Arabic to interact with locals.

"It is incredibly frustrating for combat veterans to return to Iraq for the third time with only minimal training on the skills we know are essential, like language, culture, intelligence and local security force development" Col. Yingling says. "Army units don't fail to train on these tasks because we're stupid or lazy; we fail because we don't have the time to do it right"."

An article in which we hear something familiar:

"Junior officers know that success in these wars is about a lot more than killing the enemy. It depends on providing security for the people, finding friends and fixing infrastructure," says Maj. John Prior, who served as a company commander in Baghdad. "A lot of senior officers just don't get it."

And again Yingling (as in Rick's Nov. 2006) gets tapped for the last say:

Some question how quickly the Army will be able to shift its thinking. "All our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations in these fights -- combat operations," says Col. Yingling. "If you spend your whole career in tanks, you tend to see the solution to every problem as a tank."

Yingling cut his teeth on counterinsurgency PR way back in 2004, in an official Army article called Training the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. Here with Julian Urquidez, Yingling presents an 8-step training program for Iraqis, which they developed and implemented in Iraq. {I digress again: Julian Urquidez ran the 'Honolulu Marathon in Iraq' this year in 4:05:16. Useless trivia, hooray!} Yingling's been working on his counterinsurgency credentials for far too long not to be getting any credit. What do I mean?

Paul Yingling's Wikipedia entry currently stands in stunning dissarray, containing factual errors and conservative bias as regards Yingling's supposed political opinions on continued U.S. involvement in Iraq: assumed as against. In Paul Yingling's "Also See" section, a link exists to Ehren Watada, who is "also against the Iraq War" and to Ann Wright, who is incorrectly described as having resigned from the U.S. Army in protest of the invasion of Iraq. No external links exist to any military writings of Yingling's other than his current expose. The Masters in Political Science mentioned; not mentioned would be his education at the Command and General Staff College and the School of Advanced Military Studies... at the same time as General Petraeus resided there, expounding about the neccessity of counterinsurgency training and institutional change in the Army. Not mentioned also: Tal Afar. Yingling gets quoted in March 2007 for his part in the successful elimination of the insurgency in Tal Afar, just before he publishes his expose. Someone passed his number on to the reporter. President Bush praised Yingling for his conduct in Tal Afar. Of course, who listens to Bush. Heh.

Now moonbat ponders the worth of Yingling's counterinsurgency operations. Hook himself to Petraeus' rising star and if Petraeus shines in Iraq and continues up that ladder of promotions, so will "Beergoggles." Inch too far out, and those boss generals who Petraeus stands to dethrone use you for target practice. Work this spin wrong, and have your name tarnished too much for future quotations for journalists. Will this growing domestic counterinsurgency succeed or will the old Army regime remain dominant over it's military institutions. Bush promises by the Fall we will know which side shall fall.

Technorati Tags:
war on terror, Iraq, Petraeus, Paul Yingling, troop surge, Bush, Wikipedia, conservative, liberal, counterinsurgency, Combat Studies Institute, american military, moonbat

Let's Withdraw From Iraq Down to Real Soldiers

So today someone actually struck up a political conversation with your favorite moonbat. At work. This may be a first. And it was even international politics, even if it was just about Iraq. Now I live in a Democratic state where it's a rare Republican who supports the troop surge with any language stronger than "can we please not talk about politics today?" So it's no big surprise that the Iraq veterans I work with are.. gasp... Democrats and think withdrawal is spot on. One of them felt like venting a bit, at length, about an article which otherwise would have gone unnoticed, about those American mercenaries- oh sorry, private security contractors, in Iraq. There's nothing that annoyed my veteran friend than the subject of someone who got paid about 100% more than himself with his own tax dollars, payable today, April 15th.

And you know, my good veteran has a point. How have we gotten to the point in our love affair with all things privately contracted that Rambo gets paid more than GI Joe when they ride on the same convoy and guard the same checkpoint? How have we gotten to the point when we think all of these mercenaries are free, and accept that so many of our soldiers are on food stamps? For those who snarl that people spit on soldiers, isn't this ... worse? Here you have guys getting paid $600 a day to drive around as guards, even for Bremer himself, and my good veteran doesn't make enough in the reserves to keep his cellphone turned on 6 months out of twelve. Isn't how much you value a soldier measured by how much you value his service on payday? Or just parade day?

Moonbat became highly irked with Petraeus over this particular issue given that he likes mercenaries even when they are 'compromised.'

"Beyond that, tens of thousands of ministry security forces and tens of thousands of civilian (often third country) contracted guard forces protect key sites in Baghdad (including, for example, the US Embassy, MNSTC-I HQs, the Ministry of Oil, etc.) that MNF-I and the Iraqi government would otherwise have to detail soldiers or police to protect. These forces, again, number in the tens of thousands – and although by no means all are of high capability and some are undoubtedly compromised, they do secure hundreds of sites that otherwise would require coalition or Iraqi military or police forces."

Why does that make accountability sound like an accounting hat-trick?

How about we add a string to this supplemental bill to withdraw foreign mercenaries from Iraq- especially if they happen to be American or be employed by America. And oh we have them there and we have almost no control:

"In November of 2005 a disgruntled Aegis ex-employee posted a so-called "trophy video" on the Internet depicting Aegis contractors—Tim Spicer's men—shooting at Iraqis in civilian cars. In one sequence, the Aegis team opens fire with an automatic weapon at an approaching silver Mercedes. The Mercedes rams a taxi, sending the taxi's occupants running. In another sequence, an Aegis employee fires at a white sedan, running it off the road. Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train" provides the soundtrack. Aegis subsequently conducted an investigation and concluded that the actions represented "legitimate operations" undertaken in compliance with the rules of engagement. Aegis argued further that the video was "taken out of context" and noted that there was no evidence that civilians had been killed. The Pentagon looked into the video and declined to take further steps.

According to a February 2006 Government Accountability Office report, there were approximately 48,000 private military contractors in Iraq, employed by 181 different companies. There may now be many more. These are the kinds of people Tim Spicer and Aegis are supposed to coordinate. The bulk of the military contractors are American and British, with a sprinkling of other nationalities. Formal oversight is lax, to put it mildly. Many are retired from elite units such as the British Special Air Service or the U.S. Special Forces. According to a report in The Economist, a former British official who now heads a trade association for private military companies estimates that mercenaries are Britain's largest export to Iraq. Not food, medicine, or construction material—mercenaries."

So it's remarkably idiocy for the spokesman for the United States Central Command to reply to the armed joyrides of our mercenaries, saying "This is not a Centcom issue. It's whoever was running that contract. We're fighting a war here." Did someone spend too much time watching March Madness and miss that we have a new strategy in Iraq?? Time to withdraw the mercenaries from Iraq, and make a lot of soldiers happy on payday. Too bad Bush and his cronies would rather enrich their friends than actually support our troops.

Technorati Tags:
Iraq, troop surge, Bush, Middle East, liberal, conservative, democrat, republican, war on terror, Iraq War

McCain Takes Photos, Leaves Bloodshed In Iraq

So just a few merry months ago everyone figured McCain the front runner for the Republican ticket in 2008. Till he took a little saunter in a market in Baghdad to try to fake progress in the troop surge in Iraq. McCain held a photo-op in which he mishandled the press and dodged questions on a possible invasion of Iran. McCain smiled big for the American audience and said, "things are getting better in Iraq." The next day, 21 Shia market-workers from that same market were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Sunni insurgents provoked by his little stunt. Snipers also made an appearance to show how impressed they were with this particular candidate. McCain's definition of "improvement" entails a whole 4% drop in civilian deaths, although the insurgents should feel free to kill as many Iraqi police as they desire. America surely can find a military contractor somewhere to train more.



McCain lies about these very numbers in a conference call with con-bloggers. "One of the key elements which has given us dramatic hope is the amount of dead bodies they’re finding in the streets each morning. It’s down from 100 to as much as about 20 each day. That’s still horrible, but it’s a sign of progress." McCain also remarks on the Democratic Congress's push for a withdrawal date, that "if they want to cut off funding - fine!"


McCain defended his shopping trip with Petraeus in an op-ed to the WaPo:

"For the first time, our delegation was able to drive, not use helicopters, from the airport to downtown Baghdad.....Today the market still faces occasional sniper attacks, but it is safer than it used to be. One innovation of the new strategy is closing markets to vehicles, thereby precluding car bombs that kill so many and garner so much media attention....The new political-military strategy is beginning to show results. But most Americans are not aware because much of the media are not reporting it or devote far more attention to car bombs and mortar attacks that reveal little about the strategic direction of the war. I am not saying that bad news should not be reported or that horrific terrorist attacks are not newsworthy. But news coverage should also include evidence of progress....This is not a moment for partisan gamesmanship or for one-sided reporting."

Ah... the old, if there isn't good news, it's because the evil liberal media oppresses the good news. No good news must be a lie. Heh. For someone who claims Americans aren't getting the full picture, funny that McCain leaves out his chaperons for the day: 100 infantry soldiers, 3 Blackhawks, 2 Apache gunships and 1 bullet-proof vest. Who can say that constitutes "walking freely" through the market with a straight face?

McCain admits that he lied to Wolf Blitzer that "General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee" after he himself tooled around Baghdad in Petraeus' armored Humvees. McCain remarks that obviously there are no unarmored Humvees, as if anyone who had believed that statement was a fool, and then absolves himself by saying: "I’m trying to make the point over and over and over again that we are making progress."

McCain then linked his presidential bid to the success of the surge strategy in Iraq. Curious. Having done so, McCain then argues for patience, as the surge will take longer than Pelosi's September 2008 end to combat funds. So McCain predicts the surge will work by October '08? November 1st, 2008? Just in time to swoop him into the White House. Now that doesn't leave much of a margin for error, and certainly, should Petraeus retire early due to stomach ulcers, McCain ends up having run for two years as the champion of failure. Nowhere will you find that McCain defines what success in Iraq will look like, aside from the complete destruction of Al-Qaeda, which can be achieved in Iraq even though the U.S. military failed in that mission in Afghanistan. Sure.

Trying to look presidential after the debacle of his press conference last week, McCain gave an extended remix of his op-ed at the VMI:

I just returned from my fifth visit to Iraq. Unlike the veterans here today, I risked nothing more threatening than a hostile press corps. And my only mission was to inform my opinions with facts. We still face many difficult challenges in Iraq. That is undeniable. But we have also made, in recent weeks, measurable progress in establishing security in Baghdad and fighting al Qaeda in Anbar province.

McCain risked nothing, because the Marines who swept the market before he arrived, and the 100 infantry soldiers in a giant ring around him, they risked it all for him. Onward. Do we really want a President who decides how the situation really is and then selects those facts that support his opinion and disregards those that do not help him out? Given that such a very mindset is regarded as how the intelligence community erroneously concluded that Saddam had WMD in the first place? Yikes. Do we want a President so openly contemptuous of the American public that he chides politicians who might "take advantage of the public’s frustration" as if we were drunk women on a date whose honor was a stake. Do we?

McCain just can't help lying again, or else he's completely off his rocker:

Before I left for Iraq, I watched with regret as the House of Representatives voted to deny our troops the support necessary to carry out their new mission.....Responsible political leaders — statesmen — do not add to the burdens our troops carry. That is what Democrats, intentionally or not, have done by failing to provide them with the resources necessary to succeed in their mission. Everyday that passes without the necessary funds appropriated to sustain our troops, our chances of success in Iraq dwindle and our military readiness declines further. We have sent the best Americans among us to fight in Iraq, at the least, we must give them the tools they need to do their job.

McCain... McCain... McCain... that would be your party that has them over there right now without the tools they need to do their job. This is an emergency supplemental spending bill, which means, it's like a moneygram to the irresponsible college kid who spent his textbook money on pizza. Yeah, Bush screwed up for 4 long years, but he was your party's candidate and you were part of the majority, and you've already wasted hundreds of billions groping around in the dark. The 2007 bill passed, and the money's there for the taking, but oh my gods... Petraeus only has a year to show us what he's got. Yeah, if he's your sunshine boy there McCain, you'd think you'd show a little love. But all Petraeus gets from McCain is doubt and backpedaling. Bush asked for one more chance. No backing out now.

Technorati Tags:
Bush, Iraq, McCain, war, Iran, war on terror, politics, 2008, republican party, democratic party

'Air Traffickers' Can Carry Cocaine, Just No Guns

So today's gridlock giggle comes via a White House Press Conference where Bush floated a new anti-terrorism initiative that should please just about everybody. Passengers no longer will be screened getting onto airlines, only drug traffickers. As long as the drug traffickers don't have any weapons on them and submit to the inconvienence of a search, they can bring as much contraband as they can pack into the regulation size carry-on. Drug traffickers in turn promise to no longer use the boarder between Mexico and the real America, tropping across the lawns and flower beds of all the citizens in those border states. Together, we all is safer when we all is safer. Bush really means this:

"We do everything we can here at the homeland to protect us. That's why I've got a Homeland Security Department. That's why we are inconveniencing air traffickers, to make sure nobody is carrying weapons on airplanes. "

Bush also confesses that he's apparently lost $70 billion in the White House, which should make for a really great egg hunt this year. Said money was the bridge fund for the Iraq War passed by Congress last fall, which contained more than enough money for operations for the surge. Since Bush lost the money, and the last-quarter of the Pentagon's fiscal budget has equally vanished into thin air, that's the real reason we need that emergency supplimental funding in the first place. So with a whole lot of money still "available" on the books, no wonder Congress went home to spend Easter with their families and left Bush standing there with his hand held out like a dork. Might be that or the fact that the Republican-led Congress of 2006 took till June last year to approve the last 'emergency' supplimental funding bill. So if Democrats don't do it two months faster they are lazy pack-mules??

Truth is, Democrats are in fact lazy when you measure 2007 vintage pork with what the Republicans call PORK. The aforementioned 2006 'emergency' supplemental bill: $20 billion in Gulf Coast Hurricane Recovery, $2.3 billion for bird-flu, $2 billion to chase lettuce-pickers, and $500 million for the agri-industry. The 2005 vintage: $104 million for watershed projects (mostly Utah), $70 million to former Soviet satellites struggling to be democratic over a decade later, and a measly $24 million for the Forest Service. The real gossip to be had concerns Bush's charge that Pelosi bought votes: the $3.4 billion in the 2007 bill got inserted long before timetables and benchmarks. Democrats are apparently so lazy that people decide what their votes are going to be bought with before the Democrats figure out they need to buy votes. Hilarious. Meanwhile having gone from tens of billions in pork to a mere few billions, Pelosi has once again shown Congress how to cut a fine looking figure. Give her a show on BRAVO.

Technorati Tags:
Bush, Iraq, Congress, security, homeland security, war on terror, politics, immigration, liberal, democratic party

War of the Worlds v. Global War on Terror

So Martians provide the best view as "completely neutral observer(s)" in deciding between Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Charles Krauthammer's blog on the question: "which is the real war?? Afghanistan remains a failed state ruled by heroin warlords riding ponies with black market weapons seven years after the U.S. dethroned the still-around-and-coming-back-in-style Taliban. Iraq remains a hotbed of Sunni insurgency and Shia paybacks, and is far and away more populated of the two. Charlie is right about one thing though... ask your Martian: Which is the more important battle? He would not even understand why you are asking the question. Iraq certain has more blood-bags per acre and it's a hell of a lot easier to bury your spaceships under the sand for a millennium of waiting to arise and chow down. Cheery.




So let's not ask then. That leaves us with the question as to why Afghanistan remains more important in the conflict of ending Al-Q style operations. Afghanistan... Al-Q training camps... Propaganda aside Charlie, Al-Q isn't in the business of running states and hasn't the infrastructure to take over Iraq. Al-Q lived in Sudan and Afghanistan because they were failed states, and so there was no dominant army to feel challenged by their armed operations. Or possess the ability to evict them. "Strategic realities" point to any failed state in which Al-Q should find sanctuary and a place to train. The only "centrality" Iraq possesses is that as an unresolved and non-uniformed conflict where eager recruits either prove their merit or get turned into dogchow. Al-Q isn't in Iraq for the view.

Fast comes the accusation that liberals point to Afghanistan because they don't have the spine needed for a real fight:

It is useful to the Democrats to claim that Afghanistan is important (to Al-Qaeda) to cover themselves when the claim is made their all a bunch of wimps when it comes to fighting a war to its conclusion.

Oh yes, because... the Republicans fought the War in Afghanistan to a conclusion? Oh wait... Bush and his cohorts proved too ditsy to fight that war to it's conclusion, and NATO had to step in and prop that war up. How are things going?

A UN Security Council report released mid-March said the number of insurgency related incidents in January 2007 was double that of the same month last year.

Meanwhile, the Taliban returns to some of it's favorite government functions by hanging men accused of being NATO spies.

What lies beyond refute is that the days of the 'war on terror' are numbered. The Republicans love the line that "we fight them over there so that we won't have to fight them here" and love to smirk in front of television cameras that since we went to Iraq, there hasn't been a terrorist attack here. Does that mean if there is one, Republicans will suddenly support withdrawal? What about the two years between 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq? And why are the Republicans suddenly abandoning the international community and it's own allies in the "coalition of the willing" who have suffered Al-Q attacks despite the occupation of Iraq? Now those are some questions that beg answers. As for calling this the "war on terror:"

Democrats allegedly saw anti-terrorism as police work. The Bush administration, by contrast, would unleash the military. Lurking behind this dichotomy was the assumption that jihadist terrorists were mainly creatures of their state sponsors. If the real threat was not terrorist networks but governments, then of course war, rather than crime, was the correct prism.

We invaded Afghanistan because they were the state sponsor of Al-Q and 9-11, or as close to that definition as anyone is going to get. Of course, that gets brushed aside as soon as conservatives seek to justify the Iraq War in terms of Al-Q. This definition is indeed doomed, since one can hardly place Iraq as the state sponsor, for all that Al-Q uses it's cities and roads as one big jungle gym. So many conservatives leap to label Iran or Syria as the new state sponsor of Al-Q, despite the sheer ridiculousness that either would share power or esteem with that dirty and homeless private army.

Ever yet ditsy, the focus of the Bush Administration has drifted away from viewing the defeat of Al-Q in Iraq as the primary focus of the occupation and to preventing the ascendancy of Iran. No longer do we remain in Iraq to contain the possibility of Al-Q taking over it's oil fields, which was laughable from the start. Now the focus of the "war on terror" is poised to become a war against a natural foe of Al-Q, despite the will and growing friendship between the Tehran and the supposedly-free one in Baghdad. Sometimes democracy gives you something you don't want: the will of the majority. Time to put this so-called "war on terror" out on the curb. And trade reactionary grandizements for progressive policy. Here comes 2008.

Technorati Tags:
war on terror, Iraq, Iran, Al-Qaeda, terrorism, GWOT, Bush, democrat, liberal, conservative, Iraq War

Has Al-Qaeda Jumped the Shark?

So WaPost threw out an interesting expose on the war on terror: do we all buy the mantra of the Bush Administration that all aspects of every citizen's life should be filtered through the question of "does this encourage the bad guys?" We now know that OBL's father traveled to America and returned home with a deep disgust over our immorality... because of suburban lawns. Does this excuse me from all counterinsurgency tactics against dandelions? Are lawns now to be considered anti-American? Or a patriotic duty not well understood by urban liberal Democrats? Seriously. Aptly noted is that FDR, on entering America into WWII, extolled to the public that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And the summers of the odd numbered year.

Even my conservative coworkers blinked at me today when I broached the issue at lunch. What's with odd years? 2001. 2003. 2005. Now it's 2007. 2001. What happened those other years? You're kidding. We haven't experienced a terrorist attack since.... Madrid. London. Those Al-Qaeda bombings. Oh. Not here. Our allies, yeah. Them. Europe has too many Muslims now, so they can't be our allies. Interesting. I'm just saying. So... you think there is some kind of a pattern? Three odd years in a row. Major attack on a Western City. So.. if 2007 passes by and there isn't one... has Al-Qaeda jumped the shark?

I'll give them credit; no one asked me what "jumped the shark" meant. What will it mean if there is no major attack on a Western City this summer? British investigations prove that terrorist cells develop inside their target drawn from individuals recruited at training camps held away from major combat. "Operation Crevice" drew itself from terrorist camps in Pakistan, a country Bush has yet failed to invade, and which appears a bit lower on that lucky list than Iran. British evidence given at trial links the "Crevice" bombers with conventional ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and not a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Crevice bombers also met several times with bomber of the successful 7/7 plot, whose connections were not investigated due to a lack of funding and manpower. Of course, if one has to choose between soldiers in Iraq and police hunting actual terrorist cells in a Western City... well, Al-Qaeda must be defeated in Iraq or they will follow us home! No of course, to any expensive Republican ski-lodges in the Rocky Mountains, just the cities of liberals.

Dick Cheney lectured in Florida (smell 2008 campaign work?) 3/24/07:

"The most common myth is that Iraq has nothing to do with the global war on terror. Opponents of our military action there have called Iraq a diversion from the real conflict, a distraction from the business of fighting and defeating bin Laden and al Qaeda."

Cheney goes on at length to quote OBL propaganda. Truth is, few and far between are the Americans (outside of the anti-all-war protesters) who treat bombings in Baghdad that kill hundreds the way we would treat a similar bombing in a Western City, where we would plaster the site with flowers and candles and teddy bears. How many teddy bears end up outside of the Iraqi Embassy following a suicide bombing in some random dusty town on the Eurphrates? When we are honest, we admit this. When Al-Aaeda plots to incinerate Britons with plant food, they understand this. The global war on terror exists because the global jihad exists, whose sole pursuit is to strike at Western targets. And nothing is more West than the West. Despite the Taliban being routed, and the invasion of Iraq, the formation and execution of the terrorist cell proved enduring, and exportable to the Muslim fighters at war with Mother Russia. Iraq remains one square on the giant checkerboard, and not the only one that makes kings.

"The second myth is the most transparent -- and that is the notion that one can support the troops without giving them the tools and reinforcements they need to carry out their mission."

I like Petraeus. Truth. I supported a vote of no confidence in Bush's troop surge plan. That plan was not Petraeus' as Bush began it before Petraeus was confirmed, something that Cheney selectively avoids. Liberals of course were right, the plan was faulty which Bush proved when he had to send reinforcements for his reinforcements just this month. Petraeus' real COIN operation would have required more soldiers. Enough more to make Bush's surge look like a couple of cops in a squad car. What does happen when a bad war happens to a good general?

Congress does, of course, play a critical role in the defense of the nation and the conduct of this war. That role is defined and limited by the Constitution -- after all, the military answers to one commander-in-chief in the White House, not to 535 commanders-in-chief on Capitol Hill. (Applause.) If they really support the troops, then we should take them at their word and expect them to meet the needs of our military on time, in full, and with no strings attached. (Applause.)

Cheney avoids scolding the dethroned Republican Congress of 2006 for failing to provide adequate funding last year for the troops, making this supplemental necessary in the first place. The vast majority of these funds aren't for the troops being surged, but for more normal combat or military operations which should have been already provided for in full. Cheney also seems not to be a big fan of the Constitution, if he thinks that Congress is limited as he implies above, to merely writing blank checks. How can the audience trust Cheney and Bush to spread democracy abroad when they prefer a lack of democracy at home?

There is a third myth about the war on terror, and this is one that is perhaps the most dangerous. Some apparently believe that getting out of Iraq before the job is done will strengthen America's hand in the fight against the terrorists. This myth is dangerous because it represents a complete validation of the al Qaeda strategy. The terrorists do not expect to be able to beat us in a stand-up fight. They never have, and they're not likely to try. The only way they can win is if we lose our nerve and abandon the mission -- and the terrorists do believe that they can force that outcome. Time after time, they have predicted that the American people do not have the stomach for a long-term fight. They've cited the cases of Beirut in the '80s and Somalia in the '90s. These examples, they believe, show that we are weak and decadent, and that if we're hit hard enough, we'll pack it in and retreat. The result would be even greater danger for the United States, because if the terrorists conclude that attacks will change the behavior of a nation, they will attack that nation again and again. And believing they can break our will, they'll become more audacious in their tactics, ever more determined to strike and kill our citizens, and ever more bold in their ambitions of conquest and empire.

Cheney and his fanclub have amnesia. We won the Cold War, the last long great struggle against an intractable foe, the only adequate comparison. Cheney also fails to mention the other side of the Beruit story.. which would be the French. The French also suffered a bombing a few days after the U.S. and they retaliated... against Iran, with an airstrike. But the French are still wussies. That's public opinion for ya. Depresses me that not only does Cheney expect people to be impressed by this argument, so many people have such undeveloped brains that they are unable to appreciate the effect of spin. Some people will say anything, and that includes Islamofacists. And some people will believe anything. Just look what the National Inquirer can publish. Iraq is not all that important to Al-Qaeda. There will always be another Iraq for them, another Afghanistan, another Sudan. They're global. Like cockroaches.

That leads me to the fourth, and the cruelest, myth -- and that is the false hope that we can abandon the effort in Iraq without serious consequences to our interests in the broader Middle East. The reality is that, if our coalition withdrew before Iraqis could defend themselves, radical factions would battle for dominance in that country. The violence would spread throughout the country, and be very difficult to contain. Having tasted victory in Iraq, jihadists would look for new missions. Many would head for Afghanistan and fight alongside the Taliban. Others would set out for capitals across the Middle East, spreading more sorrow and discord as they eliminate dissenters and work to undermine moderate governments. Still others would find their targets and victims in other countries on other continents.

Cheney forgets how wrong his administration proved going into Iraq. What's given him some new brilliance over the past few years... ah... nothing? Another scenario finds that with reduced American presence, Sunni tribes become less welcoming of foreign fighters. Shite leaders become more confident in their majoritarian governance and form better alliances with the Kurdish population to develop oil production. Iran gets smoozy, sure, and the rising economic fortunes of both countries' urban populations leads to stronger democratic parties and a weaker Islamic fundamental showing in following elections. Saudi Arabia's (mildly fundamental) dominance begins to wain, as Iraq's oil production increases. Jordan's economic fortunes rise with their old friend Iraq, which enables them to better manage their Palestinian refugee population. Increases in regional stability spread to Lebanon and into the West Bank. All equally possible. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to provide air and naval defense to Iraq, combined with training to it's military and police, while maintaining it's boarders against those foreign fighters. Also a possible scenario, but equally not guaranteed. Life gives no such promises.

We can be confident in the outcome of this struggle. America is a good and an honorable country. We serve a cause that is right, and a cause that gives hope to the oppressed in every corner of the Earth. We're the kind of country that fights for freedom, and the men and women in the fight are some of the bravest citizens this nation has ever produced. (Applause.)

Cheney said this holding up a tiny asterisk to indicate all the various places in the world where the U.S. pursues no policy to give hope to the oppressed. In Tibet.

Or in airports. Which leads me to the subject that con-bloggers who don't do my job should shut the frak up:

"If this legislation passes (civil service protections given to every other federal worker extended to federal airport security), the Democrats will be making the TSA’s job more difficult. Passengers will assume a greater risk when flying commercial airplanes as a result of this legislation."

TSA pursues the purposes of it's political appointees who spend lavishly on limos and passing on contracts to their personal friends. None of which has to do with airport security. Or preventing future terrorist attacks. Reducing overtime and reducing customer complaints are the primary concern of the management level. When I have a union to protect me for telling the truth, I'll get back to you on this subject.

I need a picture here to educate this bloody moron:



Don't blame the crew in the boiler room for TSA's design flaws.

Technorati Tags:
Iraq, Bush, Petraeus, war on terror, global jihad, 7/7, homeland security