Opinion-Columns.com

SUNNIS LAYING LOW IN IRAQ AND WAITING FOR THE PULLOUT

A changing of the guard, in the form of General Petraeus handing over the keys to General Odiermo, presages by a couple months the changing of the guard in American politics. No one can really know, in either case, what the outcome will be and/or whether it will be good for the nation.

Take your pick, the political weather is cloudy and tending toward storms in both Iraq and America.

(Reuters) BAGHDAD: General Raymond Odierno took command of U.S.-led forces in Iraq on Tuesday, faced with the challenge of ensuring that security gains do not unravel at a time when American troop levels are being reduced.

Odierno replaced General David Petraeus at a ceremony presided over by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said the two generals had formed an "incredible team" during the deployment of 30,000 extra U.S. troops to Iraq last year in the so-called "surge."

Odierno served as the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq for 15 months until February.

"He knows that we are at a pivotal moment, where progress remains fragile and caution should be the order of the day," Gates said of Odierno. The ceremony took place in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces, now part of a sprawling U.S. military base.

Handovers are a time of reflection and I aim to reflect on a war I’ve never supported and criticized for nearly a year prior to the Bush plunge from the high-board.

My gut tells me we have been on the wrong side of strategic decisions from the get-go, because our president and vice-president saw this as an awarding of democracy, rather than a Yugoslav style imbroglio. Strong-men (as heads of state) leave bitter rivalries and we need not look to dictatorships for example. Our own near-shattered civic condition is the result of a near-dictatorship on the national political scene.

Near enough. Nearer than we need ever be again, if we are to prevent the unraveling of our national fiber. Much lip-service is given to coming together, to being the nation’s uniter rather than divider. But the fact is that ‘deciders’ are not all that likely to unite.

So, we came with a flawed strategy to Iraq and that complicates our decisions over what is best for that nation, as well as our own. I reflect, I opine. I am an opiner. Everyone seems to be these days . . . no license required.

Odierno and Petraeus came together last year to implement a new counter-insurgency strategy that helped drive violence down, allowing Iraq to begin seeking foreign investment to rebuild after decades of war and UN sanctions.

Petraeus leaves behind a very different Iraq from the one he faced when he took over in February 2007, when Iraq was on the brink of civil war.

Or not. We tend to see things as we would see them instead of as they are, especially from the outside of cultures, the inside of which we know very little. My personal view, standing bravely in opposition to my president and his four-star general, is that violence has gone down in Iraq because it suits the purposes of the Sunni population to get us the hell out so they can climb back in the saddle.

The Sunni minority ran Iraq until we overthrew Saddam Hussein and ushered in the majority Shiites. Remember our American Civil War? You can free the slaves, but you damned well better not walk off the stage after having done so. Exactly what we did in Lincoln’s time and it spawned a hundred years of lynchings, carpetbaggers, Jim Crow and segregation.

We somehow feel Iraqis are different in their ethnic ambitions because we don’t speak their language, move them like pawns on a chessboard and fail to understand their culture (which outdates ours by 4,000 years). Winston Churchill famously (and accurately) said, “America always makes the right decision…. after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

The coming confrontation between Sunni and Shiite is inevitable, but it will be bloodier and more destructive of the national fabric because of decisions we made in desperation.

We were desperate to show progress—any kind of progress to slow the troop deaths and injuries. Those were described as ‘insurgent attacks,’ because it was politically untenable to call them what they were. What they were was the Sunni army (which we had sent home and pauperized) showing their anger at being sent home and pauperized. Additional anger accrued to street hatreds against the new guys in power—those Islamists who followed a different rightly-guided caliph fourteen centuries ago.

How do you understand that, when you sent everyone home over at the State Department who knew what the hell was at risk?

That’s a hatred of some proportion, an aging cheese of a hatred or, as Saddam himself might have said (before the trap was sprung at his hanging) the mother of all hatreds. Those who harbor that hatred have very little interest in George Bush or his war, but every interest in his weaponry. And therein, the plot thickens.

In order to satisfy our desperation for progress, we didn’t actually make progress, but redefined the enemy instead. A paper-victory worthy of a paper-tiger. We took the guys from the streets that were bombing us, renamed them Awakening Councils, armed them to the teeth and suddenly they were no longer counted as insurgents, but became partners against al Qaeda. No wonder deaths went down, we partnered with the insurgency. That’s an easy thing to do when you don’t actually have a definition of al Qaeda forces and can move them around at will on the chessboard that the Middle East has become.

Now, of course, we’re using that lessening of violence to draw down our troops. We got into this war on false pretenses and are planning to get out by sleight of hand as well. Petraeus is leaving for a promotion. Odiermo is going to oversee our orderly withdrawal, everyone stateside will breathe a sigh of relief, the troops are going to Afghanistan and the fragile Iraqi coalition government is going to get its ass handed to it.

Iraq's Shiite-led government will also soon take control of Sunni Arab tribal units that joined forces with the U.S. military to fight Al Qaeda. Some analysts fear the tribal units, which include many former Sunni Arab insurgents, could turn their guns on the government if their demands are not met.

Which will be ever afterward known in Baghdad as National Getting Our Ass Handed to Us Day.

But America will be out, China will have the first shot at the oil, nearly 5,000 kids will have been killed under false pretenses, Cheney will be either on the rubber-chicken circuit or under indictment, Bush no longer able to chain-saw the Constitution and what’s left of the fabric of America searching for what went so terribly wrong.

But not very hard. There’s a failing economy to deal with. Iraq will quickly become last week’s story—except for Iraqis. They will likely remember for the next fourteen centuries. Islam has a long memory.

My guess is blanket presidential pardons will be served like after-dinner mints on the way out the door.

Can a president do that? Probably. This is a president who gets away with stuff.

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Media comment:

• US News and World Report-Four Challenges Petraeus Leaves Behind for His Successor in Iraq
• New York Times-Odierno Succeeds Petraeus in Iraq
• Associated Press-Bush: 'We are at war with extremists'
• Guardian-UK-The conflict continues
• Irish Times-Ireland-Violence surges in Iraq amid political stalemate as Gen Petraeus departs

 

THE NEXT GREAT IDEA IN THE BUSH DOCTRINE OF PREEMPTIVE WAR

Along comes Walter Pincus, an able enough Washington Post staff writer to disabuse us of any intention by incumbent George Bush to release his death-grip on America’s substitution for preemption over diplomacy. If you thought (or hoped) his eye was on getting back to his cats and favorite pillow down on the ranch, you never counted on Dick Cheney, or Cheney’s attack dog, David Addington.

If one were of a more conspiracy attuned mind than I happen to be, I might would feel the rising hairs at the back of my neck, the hot breath of military coups. An election, a preemptive strike before January 20th and extraordinary measures taken temporarily on a war-footing.

Nah. Couldn’t happen. Troops in the streets? Kent State? Nah.

(Non-Nuclear Warhead Urged for Trident Missile, by Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer, Saturday, August 16, 2008)

A National Research Council blue-ribbon panel of defense experts is recommending development and testing of a conventional warhead for submarine-launched intercontinental Trident missiles to give the president an alternative to using nuclear weapons for a prompt strike anywhere in the world.

In critical situations, such an immediate global strike weapon "would eliminate the dilemma of having to choose between responding to a sudden threat either by using nuclear weapons or by not responding at all," the panel said in a final report requested by Congress in early 2007 and released yesterday.

. . . The panel also said that few countries, other than Russia and perhaps China, would be able to detect a sub-launched missile "in the next five years," and that because of the few warheads that would be involved, "the risk of the observing nation's launching a nuclear retaliatory attack is very low."

In its study, the panel focused on scenarios in which it said the Defense Department in the past "seriously contemplated strikes." These involved the need for an immediate conventional strike to preempt an adversary whose missile system was poised to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States or an ally...

. . . The panel also included John S. Foster Jr., a former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Defense Department director of research and development and chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger;

Ah yes, and our man Foster has been quoted elsewhere as saying "National defense with maximum precision and minimum unintended damage should be an attractive challenge for scientists seeking to improve the human condition.”  Dr. Strangelove rides again.

One can hardly contemplate a more improving influence on the human condition than America's current (Bush declared) Doctrine of Preemptive War, enhanced by maximum precision and minimum collateral damage. Improving the Rumsfeld scorecard. Death to the countries and regimes of choice without killing absolutely everyone. A man who identifies that as an attractive challenge is long past the childhood habits of pulling wings off insects.

If anything might chill the reader's blood, then giving this particular president another, easier, less confrontational, less ambiguous way to attack the world, certainly fills the bill.

Promising a 'new direction for America,' Pelosi flim-flammed us into giving her the keys to the Congress. Her obscure, misunderstood and unconstitutionally ‘off the table’ argument for impeachment and against this kind of clap-trap weaponization, is that this president is on his way out. "Oh, he'll be gone in a few months, what’s the point?" The point is preserving our republic as a nation of laws. What we give or allow this president, we give or allow all presidents to come, by precedent.

Remember, without the impeachment of Bill Clinton, all presidents would have been encouraged to solicit oral sex in the halls of the White House.

The claim that in critical situations, this newest weapon of choice in the Pandora Box "would eliminate the dilemma of having to choose between responding to a sudden threat either by using nuclear weapons or by not responding at all," is bogus on its face. It tempts presidents to respond by poll (something they do entirely too much already), promotes reckless and ill-advised presidential shots from the hip to juice their numbers and discourages the hard, slogging, necessary work of diplomacy.

Presidents, due to their four-year report cards, are as short-sighted as business executives in pursuit of the ever-elusive quarterly earnings statement. The difference is that presidents cook the nation’s books, often with horrendous consequences.

This administration in particular, but perhaps all modern administrations, have apparently thrown diplomacy (and the Department of State that administers it) into the dustbin of history. I argue that such successive presidential policy has pretty much destroyed American influence on the international stage. It has been recently claimed that we have more members of military bands than total employees in the State Department.

Ruffles and flourishes, the substitute diplomacy of the new century.

That shortfall in expertise is what ties the hands of Secretaries like the thoroughly beaten Colin Powell and the current abuse victim, Condoleeza Rice. They become mere firemen, dashing around the planet, stamping down insurgencies and smoldering paper bags on the porch in Darfur, Georgia, China, Israel, Palestine--and elsewhere--too many elsewheres to list.

We don't need a quicker way to strike, we need less tendency to strike and a calmer, more resolute method by which to negotiate. In a properly run government (let alone an administration) the situation in Georgia would never have been allowed to fester. GWB found himself surprised by what everyone else saw coming, but had no mechanism to prevent. Echoes of 9-11 and Condi Rice thrown to another lion.

A well organized Department of State would have (and once had) 'sections' devoted to every nation and region of the world--long term departments devoted to in-depth knowledge of an area's history, economics, world view and political persuasion. That legacy was available from secretary to secretary, president to president. A proper Department of State would have more than ten Arab-speakers in a workforce of 34,000.

Ten Arab speakers. Can you believe it? We have plunged ourselves into the darkness and expected, demanded, smashed all the furniture seeking illumination. The Middle East is in flames and America has ten people who can speak Arabic in their diplomatic service and probably fewer qualified in Farsi (the language of Iran).

How 'bout packing in the missiles, John Foster (all that's missing is the Dulles) and beating the drum for a diplomatic service fluent in Arabic, Persian, Pashtu, Albanian, Azerbiajani, Cantonese and Mandarin? You are the living embodiment of Martin Luther King’s prescient statement that ‘we have guided missiles and misguided men.’ Spending mercilessly on weaponry, we don't have the money to speak the language of our adversaries.

We can kill, but we can't communicate.

Instead of more thoughtful approaches to getting what we want politically and economically (the goals of all diplomacy), we have presented to us on behalf of the current crew of war-profiteers, yet another study that recommends an increase in weapons. The signatories to that study are (no surprise) heavily into the weapons promotion business.

Witness The Committee for Present Danger (nearing its 60th anniversary of perceived and ever-present dangers) as an example.

After sixty years of looking for present dangers, what the hell did we expect these nit-wits would find? Peace? Look a some of the signatory members:

They include, in addition to the aforementioned John Foster, we have Norman Podhoretz (advocate of attacking Iran) and associates of the American Enterprise Institute (Richard Perle), Heritage Foundation (Richard Mellon Scaife), AIPAC (a shadow American government) and Boeing.

Boeing? Yeah, Boeing, the ‘we know why we’re here’ people. As for the rest of the weapons contractors, McCain advisor Joe Lieberman is available to haul their water.

Being the last of the major powers still standing is tough work. So is policing the world. And for those who think we shouldn't be policing the world, I would suggest it has always fallen to the powerful--Rome, England, France, Spain, now us. The Pax Americana.

That difficult work should never depend upon a single president's perceptions, because no single man or woman is up to a detailed, up to date and unbiased world-view. Condi Rice is a Russia expert and yet she screwed up the presidential advice leading to the Georgia conflict, because she had no depth on the bench to assist her diplomacy.

As a nation, we are increasingly shying away from the hard work in favor of the easier (quicker, quarterly maximization of profit) route of intimidation, conflict and bipartisanship. It's not working. That's the conclusion of the 'Freeman Study,' for which no professionals were engaged and no cost incurred.

Having said that, the smart money is on new submarine armaments.

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Media comment:

• Washington Post-Non-Nuclear Warhead Urged for Trident Missile

ONE MAN'S STRANGLEHOLD IS ANOTHER MAN'S MARKET-SHARE

Here we go again, reprising the old cold-war language of strangleholds and us against them communist-capitalist comparisons. Except for the fact that they no longer (if indeed they ever did) hold water.

Some very bad stuff has just transpired in Georgia and I’m not writing about Atlanta, but rather Tbilisi. Seem a long way from home? Yeah, five or six thousand miles, but surely I need not remind you the world is becoming smaller, if not more hospitable.

Russia's Strike Shows The Power Of the Pipeline, by Steven Pearlstein

It was surely not lost on Russia's bully in chief, Vladimir Putin, that the oil giant BP decided to shut down the pipeline that runs through parts of Georgia controlled by Russian troops. Indeed, that was one of the aims of the cross-border incursion.

Putin understands better than anyone that oil and gas are the source of Russia's resurgence as a military and economic power and his own control over the Russian government and key sectors of its economy. It is oil and gas that provide the money to maintain Russia's powerful military, along with a vast internal security apparatus and network of government-controlled enterprises that allow the president-turned-premier to maintain his iron grip on the levers of political and economic power.

Iron grips and who is bully to whom are a matter of definition. Steven Pearlstein seems not to feel that the illegal and vilified hounding of Iraq into a destroyed sovereignty is the result of anything other than Iraq's thirst for democracy satisfying itself at the well (or possibly wellhead) of American ideals. 

One could hardly call George Bush America’s bully in chief, at least not without a major helping of irony. It’s amazing and not a little unsettling that these similarities continue to be lost in the translation from Eastern (push) belligerence to Western (push, push) belligerence.

. . . Nabucco (a Western intervention pipeline) also became a top priority of the Bush State Department -- in particular, of Matt Bryza, a deputy assistant secretary of state, and C. Boyden Gray, a Bush family confidante who was named a special envoy for Eurasian energy, who began actively courting the leaders of Azerbaijan. (the plot thickens--these are my parentheticals)

. . . Putin, quite correctly, viewed Nabucco as part of a larger campaign by Washington to contain and isolate Russia and limit the expansion of its burgeoning energy empire. With Gazprom, the state gas monopoly, Putin launched his own competing proposal called South Stream to build a new pipeline to the Caucasus.

Well Steve, certainly no offense taken when, shortly after the boat ride and fishing in Kennebunkport, George Bush moved to isolate and limit Russia’s energy interests.

A campaign by Washington.

I’ll be that wasn’t on the agenda over hot dogs and hamburgers. How is it that George could look into Vladimir’s eyes, see into his soul and miss South Stream? And there was Dad, right there on the boat, grinning and baiting hooks.

Ah, those baited hooks.

. . . What we've been reminded once again is that Vladimir Putin is perfectly willing to sacrifice the rule of law and the good opinion of others to protect the Russian empire and the energy monopoly that sustains it. The techniques he used to bring Georgia to heel, while more lethal and destructive, have the same thuggish quality as the techniques Putin uses to silence domestic opposition and to expropriate the energy assets of Yukos, Shell and BP.

Ouch. Steven, you are my most admired economic writer, but the references here sound as though they came directly out of the administration media-machinery. It's becoming more apparent every day that Bush and Cheney encouraged Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to lean out over the abyss, whispering in his ear that they wouldn't let go of his hand. And, like countless U.S. promises to countless dissident groups, we were not there when they got nudged from behind.

C. Boyden Gray can put that in his diplomatic bonafides when he next represents Bush in Eurasian energy circles. George Bush's thumb on the scales suddenly seemed very evidently up an embarrassing part of his anatomy. And there he was, enjoying himself so much in China--another country he works overtime to alienate.

This man and his so-called foreign policy is unable to do other than stride the world in very muddy seven-league boots, staining diplomatic carpets and muddying up the international landscape for decades to come.

Oil--the obsession of this administration and the subject of still secret energy policy constructed in the silence and darkness of Dick Cheney's office--continues to

• stoke an American with-us-or-against-us belligerence,
• triple the cost of crude,
• depreciate our currency by half,
• spiral the nation into unending debt
• and set the stage for an American economic crash second to (possibly) only one.

This administration and (I would suppose by this article) Steven Pearlstein seem to think that sovereign Russia is incapable of protecting its interests in the sphere in which those interests reside.

That's a very dangerous bit of foolishness.

America has encouraged Georgia to shove a stick in the eye of the Russian bear a time too often. What in the name of god are American military advisors doing in Georgia--smack bang up against the border of Russia?

It's no surprise Russia reacted militarily. It's no surprise that thousands died and lost their homes because of our encouragement. It's no surprise (except perhaps to a very shaken Saakashvili) that we left him holding that stick and looking stupid. It's no surprise that this poisonous and dangerous administration continues to risk American blood, treasure and reputation for their own narrow self-interest and that of their crony war-profiteers.

It's no surprise that John McCain would fall into step and march to the same sad, failed, disproven and ignorant tune.

The worst of it is that it's no surprise to find a large part of the country feeling good about itself by following in those same muddy prints.

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Media comment:

• al-Jazeera-Qatar-Russian forces sink Georgian ships
• Reuters-Russian troops not going to Tbilisi: ministry
• United Press International-Georgian troops pull back
• Guardian-UK-Georgian villages burned and looted as Russian tanks advance
• ABC News-Georgia-Russia Shaky Cease Fire

ROBERT GATES, THE RIGHT MAN AT A VERY LATE TIME IN THE GAME

Bob Gates has done a great many things right in his brief tenure as Secretary of Defense. Not the least of those services has been to bring a sense of appropriate mission to the Pentagon, where once the Rumsfeld mission seemed in danger of replacing the Department of State.

War, as is correctly said, is failed diplomacy. Or was it ‘diplomacy by other means?’ No matter, the result is mostly the same, except for the profit to the military-industrial chaps, who are mostly living quietly at home, shooting a few quail and musing upon the assured future of their offspring.

(David Ignatius, Washington Post, Aug 7th) Defense Secretary Bob Gates has been talking recently about how to rebuild America's national security architecture so that it fits the 21st century. The next president should think about assigning Gates to fix what he rightly says is broken.

Gates is an anomaly in this lame-duck administration. He is still firing on all cylinders, working to repair the damage done at the Pentagon by his arrogant and aloof predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. Gates has restored accountability in the military services by firing the secretaries of the Army and Air Force when they failed to respond forthrightly to problems. And he has been an early and persuasive internal administration critic of U.S. military action against Iran.

Ignatius is right on. Either cause worthy enough to secure the man an honored place in the history of a dishonorable administration. One would hope that, if the Democrats nail down the next presidency, the thrown-out bathwater will not include this particular public servant.

Amazingly for a defense secretary, Gates has been arguing against the "creeping militarization" of foreign policy. In a speech last month, he urged more funding for the State Department and other civilian agencies, saying they have been "chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long." In Washington, that's almost unheard of -- sticking your neck out for the other guy -- and it's one reason Gates' reputation has been steadily rising.

Allowing that Obama (presume, presume) will be the incomer and that he will want his own choice of Defense Secretary, Ignatius makes the intriguing suggestion that Bob Gates would be the perfect man to overhaul the raggedy, shopworn, patched-together national security apparatus.

Why not appoint Gates to head a special commission to revise the basic framework of the National Security Act of 1947? He knows all the pieces of this puzzle -- having run the CIA and worked at the National Security Council earlier in his career. A hypothetical Gates commission would have two basic missions.

• Fix the NSC structure so that it is designed to deal with today's "soft power" challenges rather than the old Cold War problems. Specifically, a Gates commission should think about how to focus money and expertise on the nation-building problems that now fall between the cracks of the interagency system.

"Over the long term, we cannot kill or capture our way to victory," Gates warned last month. "What the Pentagon calls 'kinetic' operations should be subordinate to measures to promote participation in government, economic programs to spur development, and efforts to address the grievances that often lie at the heart of insurgencies.". . a (new) report notes, there are more people serving in military bands than in the entire State Department. Changing that balance will require a different kind of NSC architecture.

If you weren’t noticing (as I was not noticing) that the State Department has shrunk to the size of a band of trumpet-players rather than orchestrating upon the world stage, it’s time to smell the coffee.

No wonder Condi Rice seems to be ever airborne to ever less purpose. She is doing everything other than piloting the plane. Some wags would follow that by saying that piloting the plane of State is her actual job and they would not be far wrong.

• Fix      the half-baked reform of the intelligence agencies. The 2004 law that      created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was meant to      deal with the intelligence failures that led to Sept. 11, but it instead      has created more bureaucracy. Gates understands very well what's wrong; he      turned down the DNI job because he knew the structure was unwieldy. Gates      has cobbled together an interim solution by working with old friends --      DNI Mike McConnell, CIA Director Mike Hayden and Pentagon intelligence      chief James Clapper. But the current arrangement is too dependent on      personalities. A sign of continuing backroom friction is the rivalry over      who will brief the presidential candidates.

The FBI was arguably at its most effective under the iron-fisted and power-mad control of J. Edgar Hoover. A small structure, closely held, with very short reporting structures served Hoover well and the lesson there is not to expand our intelligence gathering community mindlessly, but to find a better man than Hoover.

Currently, in lieu of a ‘better man,’ we have sixteen agencies, 100,000 employees and almost $45 billion annual cost. They stand around, bump into the furniture, point fingers, argue over territory and are unable to get a single agent’s concern up the chain of (?) command in time to stop 9-11 from happening. And that was back in the ‘good old days’ before Mike Chertoff became unlikely head of an agency devoted to overlaying the standing, bumping, pointing and arguing with wondering, fretting, testifying and looking foolish in case after case.

By comparison, Condi Rice’s State Department has about 5,000 stateside employees. They are outnumbered 20 to 1 by the intelligence community’s spooks, which may shine a light on why our foreign policy is so spooky and unable to effect any other than belligerent confrontation.

Bob Gates seems to think that’s an unmanageable proportion in a modern-day world. Many of us eel he’s right and the challenge is to realize that men of his capability, experience, wide-ranging relationships and trust among partisans are few and far between. Far, so far and thus far, is counted in decades rather than years.

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Media comment:

• National Review-Testing Gates
• New York Times-Gates Plans the Post-Gates Pentagon
• Associated Press-Gates: Military's priority is to defeat extremists
• New York Times-Gates Wants to Shift $1.2 Billion to Bolster War Surveillance

The End of War

Not the end of conflict, certainly not the end of fighting . . . but it is worth considering that as we blindly multiply our efforts toward a supremacy-gap between ourselves and the rest of the world in military hardware, the enemy is dissolving before our eyes. What can we possibly be thinking? More to the point, what can the rest of the world possibly think we are thinking?

HAMAS AND THE TALIBAN--WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS ON A BUDGET, WHILE WE PISS AWAY BILLIONS

Just when you think every possible outrage has been committed in the name of George Bush's policy of pre-emptive war, something more comes from the blind-side to knock the wind from an already winded American experience.

Thanks and Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You

Local Iraqi interpreters working with either the State Department, Military or private organizations in Iraq have a limited shelf-life. Their ‘use before’ date has never been very long because they have to live among the ordinary population, while keeping their jobs hidden.

The Year of the Naomis--Wolf and Klein--Both with Great Messages

If you read two books this entire year before election day, make them books by the Naomis—Wolf with The End of America and Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

MAD or NUTS Take Your Pick, It Might be IRRITATE

The opener is pretty much all you need to know in trading off the ‘fair and balanced’ position of this article co-authored by Israelist Louis Rene Beres and his warmongering buddy, Major General Paul (surgical and fast) Vallely, U.S. Army (retarded).

Unprepared in Iran, the Follow-Up to Unprepared in Iraq

I wrote in 2002 (War With Iraq is Not the Problem) that the difficulties apparent in attacking Saddam Hussein had little to do with overcoming Iraq militarily and everything to do with aftermath. Essentially, we had for so long thirsted for the taste of rabbit that we hadn't bothered looking up any tasty recipes.