Retired Maj. Gen. Tim Haake is a Washington lawyer who served on active and reserve duty in special operations for 36 years. Now he is a lobbyist.
Phi Beta Iota: The article has to be read in the original. Well-intentioned and totally divorced from reality, it is what the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Congressional Complex (MIICC) wants the taxpayer to believe. Missing from this fairy tale depiction are the realities: we cannot afford, nor is there sufficient time, nor can the Air Force carry, nor can the intelligence community inform, such a force, spending $5 million for every $1 spent by asymmetric opponents holding the moral high ground. Furthermore, and Jim Bamford and Will Durant agree on this point, the only infintely expandable resource we have is the human brain–neglecting our investments in global education and national population health as we have been and will continue to do, is the certain death of the Republic.
During an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe today journalist and author Carl Bernstein lamented that the debate over and the writing of health care reform legislation has shown us “Congress at its worst.”
Bernstein harshly critiques the nation's legislative branch as a body that is “responsive only to money and special interests” while ignoring the public and national interest:
The bad news is the really great problem in this country is the systemic breakdown of one of the three branches of government: the Congress of the United States. And until it's repaired, [Obama] and this country are going to be undermined. We could have had health care legislation in a meaningful way that would have gone twice as far at solving our budget and our health care problems, but because of the irresponsibility and the systemic corruption of the United States Congress, we don't.
Phi Beta Iota: Actually, all of our major institutioins have failed–the Executive, the media, the church, the schools. We live in a “cheating culture” in which INTEGRITY is no longer the foundation value. The good news is that there is nothing wrong with America the Beautiful that cannot be fixed by an Electoral Reform Act followed by reform of national intelligence, governance, and then national security.
The below article written by my two good friends Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey is one of the very best case studies describing how the incredible corruption of critical thinking that prevails in the day to day life of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) produces techno trash.
With programs like the F-35 populating the Pentagon's modernization plan, there can be no question of why the defense budget is now at a post World War II high, yet is powering the Defense Department into a Death Spiral, where forces continue to shrink (the AF is now contemplating yet another reduction of its fighter structure by 2 more tactical fighter wings), weapons continue to get older, and there is continual pressure to cut readiness, even though we are fighting two wars. Add in the fact that the Pentagon's planning and budgeting system can not pass a simple audit that identifies and verifies the links between money appropriated by Congress to the money expended by the Pentagon, which is required by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, not to mention the Accountability and Appropriations Clauses of the same Constitution every member of the federal government has sworn to protect and uphold … and you have a prescription for ever increasing disasters at ever higher costs.
Setting aside the not-so-proud history of the P-38, the Lightning II moniker is a poor fit for the F-35. Despite the F-35's whopping (and still growing) $122 million per copy price tag, the Air Force and other advocates pretend it is the low-priced, affordable spread in fighter-bombers. Though horrendously overburdened with every high tech weight and drag inducing goodie the aviation bureaucracy in the Pentagon can cram in, the Lightning II is hardly a pioneer, being little more than a pastiche of pre-existing air-to-air and air-to-ground technology – albeit with vastly more complexified computer programs. The P-38 Lightning of the twenty-first century it is surely not, especially for those who hold the P-38 in undeserved high regard.
In the interests of giving credit where credit is due, a more historically fitting moniker for the F-35 would be “Aardvark II.” Aardvark — literally ground pig in Afrikaans — was the nickname pilots (and ultimately the Air Force) gave to the F-111–and for good reasons. The F-111 was the tri-Service, tri-mission fighter-bomber of the 60s, and also a legendary disaster. The F-35 is rapidly earning its place as the Aardvark's true heir.
There are astonishing parallels between the two programs.
Click A Tale of Two Pigs to read entire story. other references below the fold.
One of the main arguments made by self-proclaimed “liberal humanitarian interventionists” in support of President Obama's escalation of the Afghan War is that a return of the Taliban to power will condemn women to conditions approaching slavery. It is true that women's rights in Afghanistan are almost medieval in character, but the central question of humanitarian intervention is fundamentally one of whether the US escalation will improve things or make matters worse.
The United States has a sorry track record in this regard, and we bear a heavy moral burden for the current state of affairs, including the dismal state of woman's rights.
Chuck Spinney.
Full Story Online
The U.S. intervention has never been and won't become a force for humanitarianism.
ANN FRIEDMAN | December 22, 2009
American Prospect
In the spring of 2008 I wrote a column, “Listening to Iraq,” in which I lamented the lack of access that most Americans had to the voices and opinions of the people most affected by the ongoing war. This made it difficult, I wrote, “for even the best-intentioned anti-war American to see Iraqis as partners, rather than as a political project.”
I was reminded of that column after Obama's speech announcing his Afghanistan strategy, In it, he declared, “For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people — especially women and girls.” But he made very clear that he does not see our involvement in Afghanistan as a humanitarian mission. As the American left debates, I'm struck by a desire to know what Afghan women, who have been living under the U.S. occupation for roughly eight years now, think would be best for their country.
The Afghan politician and activist Malalai Joya has warned that “Obama's military buildup will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians.” Another woman, who goes by the pseudonym Zoya, has appeared in various U.S. media calling for “withdrawal of the troops immediately.” She is a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a Kabul-based political group that has fought for human rights and social justice since 1977. And Sakena Yacoobi, who founded a network of underground schools for Afghan women and girls, says “most foreign troops are not primarily focused on protecting women and children. Their focus is on beating the enemy, which is very different, and ordinary citizens become collateral damage in the process.” At least Obama and Yacoobi are in agreement: This mission is not about human rights and democracy. It's about defeating an enemy.
Below the Fold: Balance of Spinney Commentary and Links to Relevant Book Reviews
MOSCOW — The prime minister of Lithuania, a former Soviet republic that broke from Moscow’s orbit and is now a member of NATO, accused the United States on Tuesday of using “Soviet methods” to set up two secret prisons in Lithuania for terrorism suspects.
Iran has emerged as the victor in secret war games that simulated an Israeli attack on one of its nuclear facilities. . . . The exercise, staged by Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies last month, showed that even an Israeli commando raid on Iran’s heavy water plant at Arak would not draw the US into a military conflict with Iran.
Americans today haven't a clue when, where or how their war will end. The Long War, as the Pentagon aptly calls it, has no coherent narrative. When it comes to defining victory, U.S. political and military leaders are flying blind.
“It's especially difficult to remember those episodes that so many would like to leave behind,” said Vladimir Kostyuchenko, a helicopter pilot for three tours in Afghanistan who's now active with an Afghan veterans group in Russia. “These generals at the top, they had no sense of reality. They gave us murderous orders. I still bear a cross because I fulfilled those orders.”
At the same time, there is an element of filling a cup with a hole in the bottom. The Netherlands will withdraw its 2,200 troops in the course of 2010; Canada, with 2,800, will be leaving by 2011. That means as American troop levels rise from 68,000 to 98,000 by next summer, allied troop levels are not likely to go much higher than the present 38,000.
Usama bin Laden’s closest relatives are living in a secret compound in Iran, members of the family said Tuesday. They include a wife and children who disappeared from his Afghan camp at the time of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, John Jay College and the University of Michigan, is the author of the forthcoming ‘Listen to the Devil.'
Confidence is important, but we also have to recognize that the decision to commit 30,000 more troops to a counterinsurgency effort against a good segment of the Afghan population, with the focus on converting a deeply unpopular and corrupt regime into a unified, centralized state for the first time in that country's history, is far from a slam dunk. In the worst case, the surge may push General McChrystal's ”core goal of defeating Al Qaeda” further away.
What binds these groups together? First is friendship forged through fighting: the Indonesian volunteers who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan styled themselves the Afghan Alumni, and many kept in contact when they returned home after the war. The second is school ties and discipleship: many leading operatives in Southeast Asia come from a handful of religious schools affiliated with Jemaah Islamiyah. Out of some 30,000 religious schools in Indonesia, only about 50 have a deadly legacy of producing violent extremists. Third is family ties; as anyone who has watched the opening scene from ”The Godfather” knows, weddings can be terrific opportunities for networking and plotting.
Understanding these three aspects of terrorist networking has given law enforcement a leg up on the jihadists.
In the latest of many shameful lapses, the federal agency in charge of securing the nation’s transportation system approved background checks for a dozen illegal immigrants working in sensitive areas of a busy U.S. airport.
The illegal aliens, from Central America and Mexico, worked in operational areas of Stewart International Airport, a 2,400-acre facility located about 60 miles north of New York City. Stewart is a major passenger airport for the state’s mid-Hudson region that also handles large quantities of cargo and serves as a military field.
The illegal aliens all had security badges approved by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the agency created after the 2001 terrorist attacks mainly to protect airlines. The TSA’s national background check failed to detect the fake Social Security numbers and other bogus documents provided by the illegal immigrants to obtain clearance.
So the embattled 43,000-member Homeland Security agency, which has received hundreds of millions of dollars from Congress to fulfill its mission, granted the undocumented aliens “trusted agent” security badges.
