Super-Spies Agree: United States To Surrender Control Of World

The National Intelligence Council (i.e., all above-ground government spooks) issued a report today predicting how the world would look by 2025 (AP/AFP/BBC/WaPo). I find these exercises entertaining, but you needn't bother reading a fairly standard novocaine-laced acronym-strewn litany of bureaucratically paranoid woe telling us what we already know.

The good: the world, apparently, will still have people left on it to fight each other. The bad: the US will not have enslaved everyone in McFreedom Fry Camps and make them keep buying plastic-electric thingies or else undergo the re-application of microwave blasters. The folks paid $100 billion or so per year to think about Complicated International Shit foresee more resource wars, a strong possibility of dramatic climate change, global instability (as in, umm, war), more WMD use by the bad people, and China will of course kill us all, perhaps after joining up with India, which will then be killed, too, after totally running out of water and starting to die on its own.

The US share of global production at the end of WWII was 75-80%. Not much way to go but down after that, and when it became obvious the world would be multi-polar (at the fall of the Soviet Union, circa 1990), we could have started using a temporary windfall of pre-eminence to craft treaties, international standards, alliances, back-room deals, and legal language which would grant a most-favored status, both economically and culturally, to the US for 50+ years. If you've ever watched Star Trek, you will have noticed that they speak English in space.

Instead, the power structure here tizzed out, ignored the real opportunity and over-reached in the worst possible way. It truly sucked to watch them do this, and know. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) surmised it could leverage a temporary military technology advantage (or in their inflationary terms, a Military Revolution) into a hegemony set in re-bar. If India or China got out of line, we could simply step on a pipeline or two and cut off their blood. Amongst the many things the PNAC crowd, which is to say Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their coterie failed to notice was that the real military revolution was occurring not with lasers shooting from the sky, but with citizen-soldiers (a.k.a. terrorists) using prepared positions, cheap explosives, sophisticated evasion/cohesion, and disposable cell phones.

The United States, in all likelihood, will be one nation amongst many. An ideology of exceptionalism will have trouble clutching up to that world, but there is reason to think it can happen. Other nations, as they've matured, have done it. I mean, look at Germany. And of my god, the Japanese, the Swiss. You will find few nations with a more innate, quiescent sense of superiority than the French, but they live rather peaceably these days, secure in the knowledge they're living better than anyone else. I can imagine far worse outcomes for my nation of birth and conscious choice, and am reconciled to the fact that the refrigerator in our kitchen was built to the standards of the European Union.

Dennis Kucinich: The "Wake Up America" Speech

Holy cow. Dennis Kucinich isn't a name you associate with rabble-rousing. But that's what the wonky congressman from Ohio did when he gave a barn-burner of a speech at the Democratic Convention. As he went through his familiar talking points, he kept getting hotter, and by the halfway point he was looking and sounding like Tony Clifton (comedian Andy Kaufman's alter ego) chewing through raw sirloins. Half of the audience had gotten to their feet by then and were egging him on. He was tossing out lines like, "This Administration can open our mail, but they can't open our economic opportunities." Then he completely wins over the crowd by 2/3rds through and audience close-ups showed mystified looks on their faces which said, "Is this for real? Where the hell has this guy been?" From there on out, he turns into a jumping pentecostal preacher.

Seriously, it's like he's tripping on acid or something. He was absolutely on fire, it was a dynamite speech, and whether you're familiar with Kucinich or not, it has to be seen to be believed.

(Research creds to HopeSpringsATurtle.)

Opium Crops Started In Iraq

Should have predicted this one. It will no doubt be used as proof of close al-Qaeda ties between Iraq and Afghanistan:

The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops.

Afghans with experience in planting poppies have been helping farmers switch to producing opium in fertile parts of Diyala province, once famous for its oranges and pomegranates, north- east of Baghdad. (via Patrick Cockburn, The Independent UK.)

At this point, Al-Qaeda is the least of Iraq's problems. It's only logical that farmers are getting into opium, which if I think about it, is actually a positive step: people who live in failed states need money and jobs, and opium is a great cash crop. It does give some indication of how bad things have gotten for people in the Sunni Triangle. Michael Massing reviewed a book about the Iraqi journalists who work and write for the McClatchy Newspapers, which set up a blog they run called Inside Iraq. He summarizes that Iraq is what the end of the world looks like:

The overwhelming sense [from the McClatchy journalists' blog] is that of a society undergoing a catastrophic breakdown from the never-ending waves of violence, criminality, and brutality inflicted on it by insurgents, militias, jihadis, terrorists, policemen, bodyguards, mercenaries, armed gangs, warlords, kidnappers, and everyday thugs. "Inside Iraq" suggests how the relentless and cumulative effects of these vicious crimes have degraded virtually every aspect of the nation's social, economic, professional, and personal life.

Despite all the mortuary work and make-up, all the sartorial wonders of The Surge, the country formerly known as Iraq is a corpse. As in dead country, not walking. BushCo and Congress, the corporate media and the chattering classes regularly pull up a dolly and pop back a coffin lid, they point out that the thing inside has finely rouged cheeks, a nicely pinned-back business suit, that its limbs (lifted with a complex array of monofilament lines) move so as to appear amazingly life-like, and that it even plays pre-recorded speech. Two non-trivial problems: it's still frigging dead, and it makes everyone who looks too closely at it puke.

As soon as the Shiite and then the Sunni extremists who we paid to fight other Sunni extremists stop getting paid, they'll start blowing up Western troops with greater enthusiasm. Our crusaders are not welcome in Iraq, where opium production now looks like a smart way out. In context, it probably is. At least something is growing.

(With thank-you credits to Empire Burlesque, Inside Iraq, and Cryptogon.)

Iraq, Then And Now: The Evolution Of A Revolt

Then...T.E. Lawrence writes from the perspective of a successful Iraqi insurgent against the Ottoman Empire:

"It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts. It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent. active in a striking force, and 98 per cent. passively sympathetic. The few active rebels must have the qualities of speed and endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply. They must have the technical equipment to destroy or paralyse the enemy’s organized communications, for irregular war is fairly Willisen’s definition of strategy, “the study of communication” in its extreme degree, of attack where the enemy is not. In fifty words: Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

Now...PFC Damien Corsetti, nicknamed "The King of Torture" and "The Monster" by his compatriots for his enhanced interrogations in Kabul, gave an interview to the Spanish paper El Mundo, describing part of the repertoire:

"They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of their children, where they live, we show them satellite photos of their houses. It is worse than any torture. 98% of the prisoners had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In Abu-Ghraib and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them."

T.E. Lawrence was tortured and sodomized in Daraa, Syria while in Turkish custody there. His claim has been disputed by people focused on his unknown sexual practices, yet the treatment he reports was commonplace. Lawrence said his captors were so inept and and sadistic they didn't realize his significance, and let him go. He later assaulted the Turkish-held port of Aqaba from the rear, capturing it in 1917, then was instrumental in throwing them out of Damascus in 1918. He was given every medal in the Empire, but refused a knighthood.

The map pictured above is of Lawrence's personal design, submitted by him to the British War Department at the end of World War One. It hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London. It was drawn with the subtle realities of local topography, history, tribes, trade routes, and cultural peculiarities uppermost in mind. Armenians have their own state, for example, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria are given to Feisal, Irak to Abdullah, with a second Arab state to Zeid. Things might have worked out differently had the Brits paid any attention to it.

Charlie Wilson's War & The Beauty Parlor Reaganites

Former Reagan officials are angry about the new Tom Hanks movie, Charlie Wilson's War. They say it aggrandizes how much a mere Texas Rep, a Democrat!, helped the Afghanis to forcibly eject Soviet occupiers. They dispute how much credit "the Avocado," CIA agent Gust Avrakatos, deserves for devising effective insurgency tactics. They claim Wilson and Avocado actively resisted sending Stinger missiles to the tribes, finally being overruled by Cap Weinberger, certified Cold War Hero. A blog called "Libertas" is one of many piling on the trope:

Sorry, Hollywood, THIS (Ronald Reagan) is the man who won the Cold War you wanted us to lose, not some cocaine-snorting, whore-mongering, alcoholic liberal… It was this man, the people who served him, Pope John Paul, Margaret Thatcher, the people in Eastern Europe who rose and followed the likes of Lech Walesa, our brave military, and a man named Ollie North who also sent covert arms to freedom fighters, but there will be no movies about him…

I'd love to see a movie about Ollie North! One which depicts a moral compass Heinrich Himmler would've loved, although of course the pic would have nothing to do with defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan. That's why there's a movie about a cocaine-snorting, whore-mongering alcoholic liberal who delivered enough money to a wholly insubordinant, down-and-dirty CIA agent to blow up every Russian in the country, an agent whom the Republicans hated, feared, and tried to get rid of. At one point, Avocado controlled 70% of the CIA's discretionary budget for the entire world. On top of that, Wilson and Bill Casey got the Saudi government to match the US funding buck-for-buck.

The bad liberals begged for Stinger missiles to give to the mujahedin, and it was the Reagan Administration which wouldn't send them. It was the Reagan Administration which held up the shipment of sniper rifles for nearly 5 years on fears they would be used to target Russian generals. (Finally the rifles were sent, but without the night vision goggles needed to make them effective.) It was the Reagan Administration which held back the good stuff, fearing it would offend Gorbachev.

Wilson and Avrakatos were flawed bit players who thought up a solution and pursued it with single-minded determination. Just pawns, really, of Zbigniew Brzenski's 1980 plan to stick Afghanistan up the same Commie ass which took his native Poland and killed family members and friends. (Z-Big was Carter's national security advisor.) Still, the grasping and whining from people widely praised for engineering a "Morning in America" (which, if it existed at all, was made possible by hard policies of their predecessors), is beyond unbecoming. It's yet another unfortunate confirmation that duplicitous, perpetually insecure glory-whores rarely change. Reagan's whores claim the movie is liberally biased, a low blow to conservatives because the screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin, the creator of two Liberal Wet Dream White Houses portrayed on television series "The West Wing" and in Michael Douglas movie "The American President." Clearly, Aaron Sorkin wants all Republicans to be lined up against a wall and shot, ergo speaks with forked tongue.

That the Reaganistas are not remembered for treating Afghanistan like a snotty Kleenex while basking in political glory is too bad. Once the Russians pulled out, the Tough Guys were too timid and dim-witted to maintain any presence and funding. In their stupidity, they did not rebuild Afghanistan, preferring to create a power vacuum into which were sucked the spores of the Taliban. Kool-Aiders will claim stability wasn't their responsibility, they couldn't have known it would go bad, the Cold War was won anyway, the Taliban wasn't formed until the Clinton years, yadda yada. Of course, that's also saying ignorance of basic statecraft is wonderful. In keeping with Republican style.

Meanwhile, after the Russkies hauled ass, a rich Saudi national named Osama bin Laden (OBL) stayed on in Afghanistan to build roads, dams, and schools, to further promulgate the Muslim reformation (Al-Qaeda), and to build a network so loyal to him that he hasn't been turned in despite a $40 million reward. Again, the tropes proclaim no connection between the CIA and bin Laden, that he never got any direct US funding, and the events in Afghanistan and Pakistan had nothing to do with 9/11. The rabid Puggies don't seem to realize the dreaded librul Sorkin adapted the bothersome movie's screenplay from a book, one funnily enough called Charlie Wilson's War. And they're missing the central plot point:

What if, instead of Osama bin Laden, we were the ones who stayed on to build the roads, dams, and schools?

"There's so much more to flying than just flapping around from place to place! A... a... mosquito does that! One little barrel roll around the Elder Gull, just for fun, and I'm Outcast! Are they blind? Can't they see? Can't they think of the glory that it'll be when we really learn to fly?"

"I don't care what they think. I'll show them what flying is! I'll be pure Outlaw, if that's the way they want it. And I'll make them so sorry..."

Jonathon Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach (h/t to Naj at Iran Facts, link on right)

Meet Michael Francis Wiley: American

While browsing through a Car & Driver magazine at the drug store on a prescription run, I saw a little filler-story about a triple amputee who led police on a chase through New Port Richey, Florida. Police claim thhey broke off pursuit of the white male's Ford Explorer after 8 minutes because "it could have put others in danger." Other sources say the chase ended because Wiley out-ran the chase vehicles. An arrest warrant is sought for one-legged, no-armed methamphetamine dealer Francis Wiley on charges of fleeing to elude. In 2006, he led police on a 120-mph chase down I-75 in a Corvette until one tire came off and the aluminum wheel rim began to burn. Here was the money quote:

"He is one of the best drivers I've ever seen in my life ," said Lee Michie, a longtime acquaintance. "But he's the worst person I've ever met."

Now...you just know there has to be more to that story, right? I put down the Car and Driver, vowing to follow it up on The Google later, and sure enough. There's more. More than can be casually communicated. I can't allow an inability to communicate to stop me. So. Imagine a crazily unequal triangle. On one point is abhorrence. On another is pathos. On the last is breakthrough. That's a triangle of Michael Francis Wiley's personality.

It is a felony for him to merely sit in a driver's seat. According to court records, Wiley, aged 40, is a felon capable of physical violence. He repeatedly assaulted his wife, decked a state trooper twice, and tried to attack others. He has a steady string of violations, 47 of them (most involving driving) stemming back to 1984, when he stole his first car, drove for the first time with no license, and got into his first police chase. And first crash. He has spent at least 3 years in prison, where he was so good at provoking detention officers he was beaten and sprayed with mace like an unwanted pole-cat. After he got out, fellow ex-con murdered a woman in his living room while he and his family slept. His mother no longer morally supports him, and his wife has left him.

As a child, Wiley's father was a mechanic for the Transit Authority in his native New York City. His grandfather was a mechanic, too. His first sentence was "Daddy fix car." When he was 13, while playing with other truants, he fell off an elevated train platform onto power lines, and, searching for a foothold to get down by, found one made of metal. His body made a temporary circuit-breaker for 12,000 volts before it was blown dead to the pavement 25-30 feet below. The impact revived him. Three limbs were damaged too badly to save, and were removed at Bellevue hospital. One month later, he escaped the hospital by hopping through a utility tunnel. Here is a report by Stanley Portnow, the forensic psychiatrist who treated him in 1981:

. . . classic post-traumatic neurosis:

. . . attempts to keep up a rather tough guy facade which is meant to say that nothing can really hurt him;

. . . not only out to prove that he is as good as but rather better than he was before the accident;

. . . his continued denial of his realistic state will produce more and more social adverse effects;

After the accident, his parents moved to Florida. He stole the car, then later bought a black-on-black Monte Carlo SS with the injury settlement he got. He starts cars by gliding the key into the ignition with his mouth, then turns it with his toes. He shifts with his knee, and bites the headlight switch and turn signals. He turns by jamming his left arm stump into the wheel spokes and whipping it around. He put 50,000 miles onto the window-rattling V-8 in one year, traveling all over the country while dreaming of becoming a race car driver. Needing friends to pop the tops of beer cans, he became popular, and went to a Halloween party as a shark attack victim. He got married. Had a daughter. Drove like a burning wounded bat out of hell. He piled up speeding tickets until his license was taken away. He keeps driving, police see him, and he gets into more car chases. Both his lawyer and mother believe he needs regular access to a private race track.

"I'm an excellent driver," he says. "If I could just get my license back, I'd never be in here again."

That is unlikely. His license is suspended for a considerable period of time. When a dog is hit by a truck, when a bug gets stepped on, when a reptile loses its fore-limbs, when a seagull breaks a wing, they die or do the best they can. They compensate. If they can crawl away, they do so. But they'd probably greatly prefer to drive. Even to fly. Asked what he'd do to get his license back, Michael Francis Wiley said this:

"I'd give my right leg."

The Threat To Our Credibility Is Extremely Serious

As reported by Pravda on the Potomac, "Bush Aides See Failure in Fight with Al-Qaeda in Pakistan:"

WASHINGTON, July 17— President Bush’s top counterterrorism advisers acknowledged today that the strategy for fighting Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan had failed, as the White House released a grim new intelligence assessment that has forced the administration to consider more aggressive measures inside Pakistan.

More aggressive? Yeah. Storming the Red Mosque and blowing it up was like the Marx Brothers were throwing custard pies. Time to get tough and bring in The Three Stooges. In secret:

In weighing how to deal with the Al Qaeda threat in Pakistan, American officials have been meeting in recent weeks to discuss what some said was emerging as an aggressive new strategy that would include both public and covert elements. They said that there was growing concern that pinprick attacks against Al Qaeda targets are not enough, but that some new American measures might have to remain secret to avoid embarrassing General Musharraf.

Ms. Townsend declined to describe what may be alternative strategies for dealing with Al Qaeda’s threat in Pakistan, but acknowledged frustration that Al Qaeda had succeeding in rebuilding its infrastructure and its links to affiliates, while keeping Mr. bin Laden and his top lieutenants alive for nearly six years since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Finding a world-famous, wealthy six-foot-six Muslim trailing his kidney dialysis machine from hovel to hovel in one the poorest, most mountainous regions of the world? Who's also the spitting image of the Shroud of Turin? No wonder they can't find him. I have a little suggestion for Ms. Townsend: try looking for him in Riyadh. Right under the declination of your mendacious nose.

Quadrillagerie a la Arabienne, Denouement a la Baghdad

Above is the medieval city of Cordoba, Spain, walled as it was when it still had Moslem rulers. They're building walls around and between various ethnic neighborhoods in Baghdad, and this is the final state of the execution of quadrillage, the historical counter-insurgency practice of walling the women who support the insurgents into camps and gain control over them, so as to strangle the insurgency. It's not looking good for the walls, first for their connotations to the Israeli wall erected in Gaza, but more importantly because Al-Sadr is strongly against them in concept. If Sadr City is walled, Iraq's Sadrist PM Maliki will lose his core support, and he and his lieutenants will be quickly removed from power.

Continued application of force does not work in the Mid-East. Never has. Diligent maintenance of a byzantine network of treaties and developing a stretchy fabric of stability is what has always worked there.

"The political divisions which prevail in the Near East today should not blind us to the underlying cultural and psychological unity of the region as a whole....the far-reaching interdependence of the local states and territories imposes on the interested foreign power the obligation to approach the entire region as a unit...any foreign policy in the Near East which is not a comprehensive regional policy is an invitation to bankruptcy...."
E.A. Speiser, The United States and the Near East (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), pp. 226-227.

Professor Efraim Speiser was professor of semitics at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously he served as Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad and was an authority on Mesopotamia, and was Head of the Near East Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS during WWII. (Book quote courtesy of Professor Kiracofe.)

As Kiracofe points out, "Americans have been in the region since the early 19th century and there are no excuses at all for current US policy. Most certainly not the excuse 'If we had only known...' We did know, we do know."

"Et Tu, Reality?"

If the leaders, command structures and minions of The Greatest Country Ever would look up to stop pleasuring themselves for a minute, they might realize the appealing little light bobbing and playing down in the dark trench we're is connected to a gaping, tooth-filled maw which is about to tear us in half. Not being a watcher of the Sunday Talking Head shows, I don't know what kind of coverage or treatement this story will get. But it's a Big One. After a long period of silence and official acquiescence, Iraq's leading Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr has called for Iraqi unity, and for attacks, against US forces there. The Mahdi Army and various other groups Al-Sadr has influence over will attempt to de-escalate their reprisal and ethnic cleansing efforts against Sunni minorities and turn their considerable energies to making life harder for American troops. His clarion call includes the Iraqi Army and Police:

"You, the Iraqi army and police forces, don't walk alongside the occupiers, because they are your archenemy," the statement said. Its authenticity could not be verified.

In the statement, al-Sadr -- who commands an enormous following among Iraq's majority Shiites and has close allies in the Shiite-dominated government -- also encouraged his followers to attack only American forces, not fellow Iraqis.

"God has ordered you to be patient in front of your enemy, and unify your efforts against them -- not against the sons of Iraq," the statement said, in an apparent reference to clashes between al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters and Iraqi troops in Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad. "You have to protect and build Iraq."

Al-Sadr is the single most powerful man in Iraq, and the erstwhile Prime Minister (Al-Maliki) is his follower by blood, by loyalty, and by inclination. The deal they cut between themselves was to use American forces to perform the finishing touches on Sunni ethnic cleansing in and around selected areas of Baghdad. Al-Sadr agreed to stand down and shut up while it kicked into high gear, which he did. I've spared regular readers of this blog the first-person reports of what this project felt or looked like on the ground, but there was nothing clean and little ethnic about what went on. It was grisly, and the fact US troops were forced to participate in it is, mark my words, a disgrace which will come back to haunt the families, cities, and streets of this country all too soon. The other shoe of the unholy Shia deal engendered by an illegal, craven US occupation is now dropping. Moqtada Al-Sadr is stepping forward to make Nouri Al-Maliki his Pinnochio and take power through him.

The best thing that can be done about this statement is to get out some rose-colored beta-blockers and say "its authenticity could not be verified," which the article endeavors to do. Let the pink scales fall from your eyes, clean the wax out of your ears. The statement carries Al-Sadr's official seal, and really, this development is not exactly coming out of left field. Military analysts capable of preserving a little objectivity, including the amateur Yours Truly here (one thing in my favor, nobody's paying me nuthin'), have said from its outset that "the Surge" offensive would probably generate a few months of relative quiet by displacing insurgents into safe areas. It also coincided with Winter in Iraq, with cold weather naturally helping to keep Sunni guerilla activity levels down. Now Spring has arrived, and Al-Sadr has sprung an attack on the Surge's rear.

It doesn't take too much reading between the lines of the quotes above to figure out that Al-Sadr is saying the Iraqi Army should actively support Shia insurgents against US forces. In fact, it takes none at all. He's saying it loud and clear. He's telling them to take their guns and training and turn them on US troops. Who trained these troops? Who paid them? Who gave them guns? Money withheld from me and mine called "Social Security" did. Bonds issued in our names called "Treasuries" did. Collective delusions called "Katie Couric" did.

Monumental stupidity is easy to deal with, because, well, it's monumental. In one spot. You can go around it, if you choose. You can pull a monument down. The kind of stupidity America has erected and has now institutionalized is infinitely worse. It's everywhere. It's as pervasive as a cloud of roiling poison gas which stupefies everything in its toxic range, and tries to kill everything outside it. It makes wastelands, and calls them democracies. How long can the filters in our gasmasks last? How long before our despotic leaders are forced to turn and say, "Et tu, Reality?"

Strolling To Cafes On Balmy Nights In Baghdad

Below is a snippet of Wolf Blitzer interviewing CNN's Michael Ware in the wake of John McCain saying Iraq is getting hap-hap-happy, video courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

BLITZER: Michael, when Senator McCain says that there are at least some areas of Baghdad where people can walk around and -- whether it's General Petraeus, the U.S. military commander, or others, are there at least some areas where you could emerge outside of the Green Zone, the international zone, where people can go out, go to a coffee shop, go to a restaurant, and simply take a stroll?

WARE: I can answer this very quickly, Wolf. No. No way on earth can a westerner, particularly an American, stroll any street of this capital of more than five million people.

I mean, if al Qaeda doesn't get wind of you, or if one of the Sunni insurgent groups don't descend upon you, or if someone doesn't tip off a Shia militia, then the nearest criminal gang is just going to see dollar signs and scoop you up. Honestly, Wolf, you'd barely last 20 minutes out there. I don't know what part of Neverland Senator McCain is talking about when he says we can go strolling in Baghdad.

In Case You Missed This

Crack U.S. Marine Unit Recalled After Afghan Deaths

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An elite U.S. Marine Corp unit accused of killing at least 10 Afghan civilians has been called home early after commanders decided they could no longer operate effectively, a spokesman said on Saturday.

The order to remove the 120-member unit came from Maj. General Francis Kearney, who commands U.S. Special Operations forces in the Middle East and central Asia, after local anger over the March 4 fighting hampered their mission.

``General Kearney assessed that the relationship was damaged to the point that the unit could not as effectively conduct counterinsurgency operations, so he moved them out,'' said spokesman Lt. Col. Lou Leto.

Afghan officials say U.S. Marines shot dead at least 10 people during fighting outside Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan near Pakistan. New York-based Human Rights Watch says between eight and 16 civilians were killed.

Hundreds protested against the U.S. military after the violence and President Hamid Karzai condemned the incident.

The U.S. military at the time cited a "complex'' Taliban ambush involving a suicide car bombing and gunfire in a populated area.

The military said the Marines, members of a highly trained special operations force, fired in self-defense and that 16 civilians died in the suicide raid and subsequent fighting. The group was several months into a six-month deployment.

The U.S. military has since opened an investigation into the deaths. Leto said that an investigating officer had visited the area to interview local people.

No provincial or central Afghan government official has confirmed the U.S. military's account that the convoy came under rebel attack.

Predicting The Anti-Surge

Quadrillage, the counterinsurgency theory subscribed to by commanding General David Petraeus in Iraq and which puts the purge into "the Surge," relies on a system of outposts, each manned by a small core of US troops backed by a larger domestic garrison. If an outpost comes under attack in a vicinity which has been previously "purged" of insurgents, cavalry from the a Regional HQ will ride in to relieve the fort, the insurgents will be killed or driven off, and the inhabitants of the sector will be punished and re-pacified as appropriate.

If the population isn't sufficiently pacified in the first place, however, pacified enough to deny tacit or active support to insurgents, and the insurgents manage to survive or elude the house-to-house sweeps, you've got trouble in Quadrillage. All available data indicate that's precisely what has happened. The number and intensity of Sunni/al-Qaeda attacks has started to increase again, and many of them have benefitted from either amazing luck or startlingly good intelligence. 9,000 unemployed Sunni males reach combat age in Iraq every month, and the insurgency does not suffer from a lack of fresh manpower, weapons, or funding. Even while the Mahdi army, SCIRI, and Dawa stand down to observe the surge, the violence has increased.

Here comes the denouement. The Sunni insurgency will scout Coalition outposts and catalogue how to attack each and in what sequence; they will previously ensure that, at the appropriate time, a domestic garrison either provides lackluster support or doesn't show up at all; they will then attack the squad in the outpost and either overwhelm them or melt away, and then focus on their primary objective: ambush the column sent to relieve the outpost. This will probably occur at night and the story will likely go unreported in the US media, which will only see one part of the operation, not the coordinated whole. Initially it'll just look like unconnected chaos. Then when garrisons are overrun, only the delusional die-hards will deny what's going on.

Over time, all the insurgents have to do to win militarily is to keep pressure upon the outposts and provoke relief responses over and over. The responses alone will grind the Coalition forces down through operational pressure (i.e., without heavy casualties) because 2 or 3 guys in a pickup truck can tie down a platoon-sized force, plus maybe a helicopter or two, for most of a night. They can use dispersion as a force multiplier and equalizer. Eventually, the sheer asymmetry of cost effects will exhaust the occupying force, and the insurgency will graduate into a guerilla status, able to win back sectors and return in daylight to dish out reprisals on collaborateurs. This is how Quadrillage failed in Vietnam and Algiers, and this is how it will fail in Iraq. If Native Americans had cell-phones, they probably could've defeated it, too. Just like before, the pros will keep saying, "Well, we were never defeated militarily."

The Achilles heel of Quadrillage is that armies truly stink at pacifying populations. In fact it's difficult to imagine a task armed fighting forces are less suited to; it's like asking child molesters to run a kindergarten. Meanwhile, each mini-fort is static and exposed, and unless the population it covers is truly pacified, they will betray it.

Who amongst us thinks it's not too late to pacify the Sunnis in Iraq?

The Warden Of Fallujah

Marine Captain Mike Carson, back from Iraq, is now a creative writing student at the University of Central Florida. Here is the last section of 12 which he wrote about his 7 months in Fallujah, running its jail. His creative writing made it into the LA Times opinion page. Mike Carson can write, as in exceedingly well, and you will want to read his other 11 sections.

You will return to civilian life.

You will be jumpy and vaguely unsatisfied, disconnected from the civilians around you who care only about text messages and gas prices and catty e-mails. Navy doctors will find Iraqi sand trapped in the innermost pathways of your ear canals. Your wife now snores, and all her unfamiliar noises combine to drive you from your bed.

On one such night, you will turn on the television news and see that Anna Nicole Smith's death has trumped the coverage of America's 3,118th fatality, 31-year-old Petty Officer 1st Class Gilbert Minjares Jr. You will note that, at 39, Smith was younger than most of the helicopters flying in Iraq. You will turn off the TV and sit in the dark and feel your eyes water as you think about how you took 55 Marines and sailors into a combat zone and brought all 55 back home, and that no one in America besides you and those 55 really cares or understands what you went through.

You processed 1,230 detainees, without a single incident of abuse, while America sat on the couch and watched girls go wild. As far as you know, you killed no one. This used to bother you, because killing is what Marines are trained to do. But now, after viewing documentaries and reports that paint American forces as Redcoat invaders, you take some comfort in the fact that you never pulled the trigger.

Those numbers — 55, 1,230 and 0 — will allow you to sleep tonight, and the next night, and the next. But each night you will insert a mouth guard made of silicone before you go to sleep, because your dentist informs you that you are always, always, always unconsciously grinding your teeth.

Cheney OK after Afghan blast; 23 killed

Damn.

Video Of Blackhawk Downed North Of Baghdad

A Blackhawk crash which fits the description of the 8th chopper lost in a one-month period in Iraq was put up on Live Leak today. It was released by Jaish al-Mujahedin, a salafist insurgency group. The group which previously released videos of shooting helicopters down with SAMs was the Islamic State of Iraq, so this is different set of characters. This Blackhawk was forced down by massed machine-gun fire, not by a lucky RPG hit as Spokes-General Caldwell claimed in a press conference last week.

Warning, there is annoying propaganda music throughout the 11-minute video and and many, many Allaaah-hoo Akhbars, but most of the video time is helpfully devoted to showing the insurgents' tactical set-up. Also, no US troops are said to have been injured in the crash, so this footage is much easier to watch than the others.

The insurgents positioned at least five heavy machine-guns distributed along a skirmish line for a prepared ambush. They did so in broad daylight, with not much attention to concealment, in an unpopulated area not far from a well-traveled highway. Two Blackhawk helicopters fly at very low altitude in front of their positions. The range is difficult to estimate because of frequent use of the camera's zoom lens, but if forced to guess, the choppers probably pass within 300 meters of the insurgents, who open fire. One helicopter slows over a field, nearly completes a half-circle, and seems to lose power while hovering at a height of about 20 feet. The second Blackhawk circles above the site. In footage taken later, the Blackhawk has crashed sunny-side up, but the force of the impact has broken off all its rotors. The cameraman doesn't dare approach closer than 200 meters from the fuselage, and once again makes full use of his zoom function.

The striking features of this engagement are that the insurgents possess large, anti-aircraft grade machine guns, felt bold enough to transport them to a remote area to set up an ambush, and felt confident US helicopters would fly close enough to hit. Some of their gun positions are devoid of any cover, and one is set up in the back of a truck. This would indicate complete confidence in freedom to transport and set up the guns, to not be reported if observed, and to have enough time to withdraw undetected. They must have known the air route was in regular use and decided it was vulnerable. Remarkably, they didn't fear close coordination and rapid retaliation from covering air assets, and thought they had time to disassemble large, cumbersome weapons and safely withdraw. Footage was later taken of the downed helicopter at close range, which tends to confirm those assumptions. Sometime between the crash and now, the area was left unsecured.

The video illustrates the CENTCOM tactical advisory to its helicopter pilots to fly low to avoid missile fire has a bad weakness--it places crews and occupants at risk of lower-tech ambushes with machine guns. Responsible commanders would tell their pilots to get up beyond the range of ground fire and SAMs in unsecured Sunni-held areas. While it would burn more fuel and be hated for its inconvenience, flying at high altitudes would deny the Sunni insurgency its most vulnerable US targets, and save lives.

Un-Equal Time: Marine Captain Jennifer J. Harris

Seven helicopters have gone down in Iraq since January 20th, the most in a month since the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. Most of those I've posted about in connection with a growing SAM threat, but didn't delve much into the human tragedy.

Jennifer Harris was the pilot of the CH-46 Sea Knight which was hit by a missile and crashed near Taji, losing all aboard. Captain Harris was the first female Marine helo pilot to do a tour in Iraq as a member of the elite Purple Foxes unit. She was truly elite, and was one of only three officers chosen for an upcoming Senate mentoring program. She had quite an academic and family background, as related in her local Boston Herald.

She went to Annapolis after high school, and was also accepted at West Point. As an attack pilot, she was a star, yet chose to fly medical rescue missions to US and Iraqi wounded. In a few more days, after the completion of her third tour, she would've celebrated a delayed Christmas with her proud family and taught Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps classes at George Washington University. To quote the news article:

Soon, he will repeat the tender ritual he shared with his daughter. “I loved picking her up at the airport when she’d come home,” Ray said. “I had this special pillow so she could rest her head. Picking her up was always so much better than taking her back.”
In a few days, Ray Harris will proudly drive to Logan Airport to meet “my lovely girl” when she arrives for the last time. “I told the funeral director that I want the hearse to come straight here. This is Jen’s home. This is where her mother and I and all her family and friends will be waiting to welcome her home.”

We can't control when we're born, and don't have much control over when we die. Mostly, the best we can do is strive for excellence and keep picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off. Captain Jennifer J. Harris did that to the last. I saw the video of her Chinook after it was hit by a SAM. Improbably, she somehow held it straight and level all the way down, with the second rotor and the back half of the bird missing. A little less damage, a little more lift, and she might have set it down safely.

Update: Bruce from The River Blog gave me a heads-up on the NPR story about Captain Jennifer Harris:

NPR covered this story. It put a human face on how our potential, collectively, is so casually thwarted by the sick and the power-mad. My heart goes out to the family, and all the families.

Thanks, Bruce. Listened to the NPR story, got choked up, and am now very, very pissed off. She shouldn't have been flying in that area, not below 8-10,000 feet, and they goddamn well knew it was hot with SAMs. She and 6 others paid with their lives to maintain the denials of CENTCOM generals. Those filthy careerist shits.

The Iranian Death Merchants

The Lapdog Media is amplifying the idiot-meme that Iran is supplying shaped-charge projectiles to Iraqi militants. As Jeff Bridges said to Julianne Moore in The Big Lebowski: "It's a very complicated case, Maude. Lotta ins, lotta outs." Here's something uncomplicated about it: Iran would never knowingly send weapons to militants in Iraq which could be traced back to them. Money or food, yes. Weapons, no. Iran isn't that stupid. Oddly, the top-ranking US general agrees, and even more oddly, did so in public:

"Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday that he has no information indicating Iran's government is directing the supply of lethal weapons to Shiite insurgent groups in Iraq.

"We know that the explosively formed projectiles are manufactured in Iran," Pace told Voice of America during a visit to Australia. "What I would not say is that the Iranian government, per se, knows about this."

"It is clear that Iranians are involved, and it's clear that materials from Iran are involved," he continued, "but I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit."

The Iranians are surely enjoying the "failed policy" in Iraq and helping it fail faster and harder where they can. But it's far more likely the mullahs have expressly forbidden their military from providing anyone in Iraq, Shia or otherwise, with weapons. Doing so either risks or detracts from their political objectives. The weapons in question may be from Iran, but could've been bought in any number of places, or slipped from one helpful cousin to another.

In plain language: Iran wants the US in Iraq so long as the net effect is bleeding the Sunnis and suppressing their long-time Baathist enemies. They don't want to screw it up yet, because it suits their purposes nicely. That's why Iraq is most stable in the south, where Iran's surrogates are thickest. For now, it wins by waiting, and by grooming and maintaining a credible victim status in preparation for a US/Israeli attack, a policy it is consistently following. The pre-aggrieved victim status is a political necessity, and trumps any tactical military fun to be had at US expense.

I don't think the White House is particularly serious, either, not about inflating these shaped charges into a real casus belli. Focusing on EFPs and shells which are labeled with a Western alphabet and date system, and which were probably bought on the open international weapons market, is appropriately preposterous, true, and fits the distinctive White House style. But there's no harm in a little more tar-slinging, and it opens up a line of defense against actual weapons being sent in the future. The current PR mantra seems pointed less seriously at Iran than at increasing pressure on the most powerful man in Iraq, Moqtada Al-Sadr, to bring him around to a more partition-friendly stance.

Quadrillage & The New "Gated Communities," Pt. III

By announcing Baghdad as the focus of the surge, Bush has given the insurgents ample time to prepare fixed defenses which feature ambush, fluid withdrawal to the next prepared defenses, and then full withdrawal to the countryside. These insurgents also happened to run army units, and their commanders fought the third-bloodiest war in the twentieth century (against Iran, which had about three times the population of Iraq). Their largely Sunni insurgency has demonstrated ongoing cohesion, with the ability to recruit and strike all over central Iraq. Here is all they need to do to defeat the Surge:

1) maintain communication links
2) avoid annihilation or capture
3) inflict casualties on US and Iraqi patrols within "gated communities"
4) sabotage or otherwise disrupt government services financed by the US
5) maintain safe havens outside Baghdad, and continue ambushes there.

One angle on the Surge which might work would be to say to the insurgents, "We don't care about your weapons. Take them. We'll give you safe passage, and find you new housing that's better. But we need you to move out of this area to where your support is." This would be a non-violent ethnic cleansing approach applied to Baghdad with a "Blood Borders" logic behind it (see Ralph Peters, Armed Forces Journal, June 2006 at link) to speed the inevitable partition along. But I doubt such an approach is politically palatable, and thus it's as good as impossible.

The Surge will probably make things look better in the press for a few months. There may well be talk of milestones met and progress made in Baghdad. Meanwhile the insurgency in the country as a whole will likely gather even more centrifugal force, and the atrocities on all sides will become more unforgivable. The Bush Administration's goal is to create a Western-friendly region. (Bush no longer drinks. Notice how he avoids all mention of nitrous oxide?) The Army's goal is to be able to say, "We followed sound strategy, but were saddled with flawed rules of engagement." The MIC's (military-industrial complex) goal is to keep the whole thing going. Two out of three ain't bad.

It is also possible that the Sunnis keenly sense a "Tigris Offensive" in their grasp, with all intentional reference to the Tet Offensive. The insurgents have amply demonstrated their effectiveness and determination, and if they're willing to strap bombs on their bellies, you can guess they're probably willing to blow up an entire building in Baghdad to take out a squad or two of soldiers inside. If they are able to inflict heavy casualties on either the Iraqi Army or US forces, they can break the will not only of Congress, but the Generals running this grisly horror show and the soldiers unlucky enough to act it out. Vietnam wasn't lost because of a sudden realism or humility on the part of US leadership. It was lost because soldiers and their commanders saw no more point to what they were doing. They just started going through the motions. When asked to drive around in Humvees to search the same roads and houses over and over, all the while waiting for an IED to explode next to them, they must be nearing that epiphany in Iraq. Booby-trapping apartment buildings would be technically much easier than booby-trapping roads. It's the sharpening of a decision already made.

The movie "The Battle of Algiers" is the story of quadrillage, and how the French used brutality to quell a stubborn insurgency in the Casbah for a few years. It ends with the insurgent youth Ali La Pointe huddling in the crawlspace of a house with three younger children who trust him. Having learned not to trust the French, they refuse to heed a French colonel's appeals to come out, and soldiers blow the building to the ground. The movie was considered required viewing among the officer elite, presumably for the harsh measures which must be taken to win. They seem to have overlooked a few things: a few years after the events depicted, the insurgents had won and France was putting down a military coup by the officers who ran the counterinsurgency, which claimed upwards of 10% of the population. Decades later, many of the muslim kids burning cars in Paris suburbs were quite literally the children of counterinsurgency, with parents who came from North Africa. They were shouting "Vive Algiers," and writing "Ali La Pointe" on walls. A main street in Algiers is named for a 19-year old girl, Hasiba ben Bouali, who died in the crawlspace with him. A university is also named after her.

Who will the streets and universities in tomorrow's Iraq be named for? My bet is there won't be a David Petraeus Avenue. Quadrillage isn't a model of what to do in Iraq. Based upon many, many outcomes of history, it's a powerfully proven model of what NOT to do.

Quadrillage & The New "Gated Communities," Pt. II

Remember the Vietnam euphemism "Strategic Hamlet?" It's funny how ideas are recycled in different market-ese. Strategic Hamlets refer to counterinsurgency efforts in South Vietnam which relied on massive population transfers. Peasants were relocated into self-constructed walled forts in order to identify, isolate, and kill Viet Minh insurgents. The program enjoyed considerable initial advantages, including almost unlimited funding and expert leadership under Robert Ker Thompson, who had a record of success against communists in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. 8.5 million peasants were re-housed into more than 7,000 hamlets in 28 months, with CIA-trained death squads killing untold numbers of Viet Minh sympathizers. Except the tried-and-true method didn't work, and Vietnam's President Diem was assassinated in 1963.

So now it's called "Gated Communities." This is a big gamble. If the game were Texas Hold 'Em, it's a bet on drawing an inside straight flush on the last card. Long odds. To recap, the idea behind the "Surge" follows classic counterinsurgency doctrine as re-hashed by the new ground commander in Iraq, the intellectually inclined General David Petraeus, whose name oddly befits a Roman prelate. The idea is to cleanse Baghdad of insurgents by sectioning off its neighborhoods, putting gates around them, then going through them house by house to identify insurgent families. Quadrillage is the term the French used for it in Algiers and early South Vietnam. Insurgents will be isolated, then neutralized by shipping them and their supporters to camps, prisons, or graveyards. A mixed local command is set up of mixed Iraqi troops and police backed by a central core of US forces with responsibility over their gated section. The local command begins to employ people to pick up garbage, make repairs, and put snitches on payroll, in this way winning over the populace, who in turn make the insurgents unwelcome. If anything gets out of control, overwhelming firepower will be called down on the trouble.

In Part I of this post, I promised to explain why quadrillage probably won't work now. It probably would've worked if employed immediately after the invasion, especially if it relied on the Baathists who had run the country for 40 years. At this point, however, it's going up a steep hill, and alerting the insurgents to the strategy 3 months in advance doesn't help. And I said General Petraeus isn't the genius people think he is; for example, he is fond of holding up Tal Afar as a shining example of successful counterinsurgency. Tal Afar was the patrol area of one of the military's leading lights, Colonel H.R. McMaster, who wrote the provocative book "Dereliction of Duty," and is credited for coming up with the template for taming the bad guys. While Petraeus and McMaster are letting people give them attaboys and manly pats on the toosh, here's what Matt Taibbi quotes the mayor of Tal Afar as saying last summer, in his Rolling Stone article, "Waiter, There's A Surge In My Soup" (hat tip to Bruce of The River Blog for surfacing it):

I was in Tal Afar's "genuine success" story over the summer. It was such a success story that the city's neurotic, hand-wringing mayor, Najim Abdullah al-Jubori, actually asked American officials during a meeting I attended if they could tell President Bush to stop calling it a success story. "It just makes the terrorists angry," he said. At the meeting he pointed to a map and indicated the areas where the insurgents held strong positions.

"Here," he said. "Oh, and here. And here. Here also...."

Due to length, I'll follow up with a Part III. Graphic above is of Afrikaner commandos in the Boer War, just as a reminder that not all insurgents are brown-skinned communists.

Denial Of Sunni SAM Offensive: SA-18s In Iraq

The Islamic State of Iraq, an Al-Qaeda (Saudi Arabian) connected Sunni group, has posted video of the Marine version of a US Chinook helicopter crashing. It's the fourth time they've posted a helicopter going down from a SAM hit in a week. I've been following these developments closely for a few reasons, two of which this latest video confirms. As usual, it is up on Live Leak.

First, the footage shows the Sunnis to the northwest of Baghdad almost certainly have the latest Russian-designed SA-18 "Grouse" anti-aircraft missiles. The missiles may originate from China, Iran, Venezuela, or Russia itself, but do not necessarily indicate state involvement; generals and arms dealers in any of these places could supply missiles for cash, a wink, and a nod. While state involvement from those above isn't precluded, the real suspect here is Saudi Arabia, Al-Qaeda's primary supporter.

I am not an expert in current SAMs or counter-measures against them, but on the video, it is remarkable that no flares (to confuse the missile's heat-seeking cone) come from the Chinook before it is hit, and the pilot apparently does not take evasive action until the missile was very close. The pilot and crew must have known they were flying through a "hot" area, so were probably vigilant and employing what protections they had. Their lack of reaction strongly indicates electronic counter-measures either malfunctioned or were almost completely defeated. Collectively, the Law of Averages previously quoted by the top US command in these crashes is no longer an adequate explanation for cause. We get it. So should they. Sunni militants possess highly lethal shoulder-fired missiles.

Second, the attacks on the helicopters and the videos from the "Islamic State of Iraq" seem to be part of a carefully branded and well thought-out propaganda campaign which indicates the partitioning of Iraq is quickening, with a new Sunni battle plan. The videos are definitely intended as "viral" messaging which supports strategic insurgency aims, and are likely connected to offers yesterday by Sunni Baathist leadership to negotiate directly with the US government for peace. I don't speak Arabic, but would guess the messaging in the videos is consistent with a "Don't Tread On Us" theme. This is a new level of propaganda sophistication, and combined with the ability to control local airspace, it's going to be difficult to ignore. The primary US strategy for isolating and quelling Sunni insurgency has officially switched to using the Iraqi (Shiite) Army as on-the-ground muscle and backing it with tactical firepower, usually from helicopter gunships. The Sunni SAM offensive amply demonstrates that strategy has a readily exploitable Achilles Heel. Drive off the firepower, and the muscles will flee.

The US, of course, will not officially respond to these videos or peace demands, but there's a David vs. Goliath element to them which undoubtedly plays well across the entire Mid-East, and effectively promotes the Sunni cause. Many analysts have dismissed the ability of the Baathist Sunnis to influence or dictate events, but their good organization, experience, and weapons can compensate for much. With their SAM campaign, they have already achieved stunning tactical victories and have begun to translate them into broader strategic momentum. With funding coming from external sources for the most advanced weapons, their insurgency may be morphing into an irregular army.

The operational ceiling of the SAM-18 is thought to be 6,980 feet. No army in the world can afford to lose a helicopter every two days flying over a hundred-square mile area, and it seems like many families lost loved ones through the sheer denial of their commanders. If the pilot carrying these 7 Marines was ordered to fly at least 8,000 feet over the SAM-infested area, they'd probably all still be alive. Why was that precaution too much to take?

Update: An hour later, there's a General commentingsomething like this:

"I think people are making too much about this," Cody said, while stressing that he personally and the Army as an institution take each loss seriously and are constantly looking for ways to avoid combat losses.

The Army's vice chief of staff went on to say, "I see no change in trends," and, "I see no credibility gaps," regarding the rash of helicopter losses. Are you kidding me? "Making too much of this?" Tell the families of the dead they're making too much of this. Nonsense. Denial. Dereliction of duty. This general is knowingly spouting politically motivated damage control, or is an icompetent. Three of these incidents occurred in a very small area of Iraq last week, with video taken of each. Also, CNN story concurrently linked to by Yahoo says there's no way to verify the claim a Chinook was shot down by insurgents. Then who launched the missile which hit it?

This is outrageous. It's telling the enemy they should invest in a lot more missiles, because they'll reap bloody returns. General Cody and the US command are begging to get these weapons sucked into the Sunni heartland: Anbar Province. But then, maybe I'm making too much of these incidents, and mere civilians like me can't grasp military matters.