Paul Wilson, in his review of Madeleine Albright’s Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937–1948 [NYR, June 7], sensibly puts quotation marks around the word “success” in referring to the seventy-eight-day NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999, hailed at the time by John Keegan as “proof positive that wars can be won by airpower alone.” As Wilson correctly observes, the war “transformed liberal attitudes to military intervention,” its legacy celebrated in subsequent campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and, perhaps in the near future, Syria and Iran.
The Path to War with Iran is an analysis by Robert Merry, editor of The National Interest and a historian. (I reformatted it to highlight its main points but did not change any words or the order of his words.) Merry analogizes the current situation with that facing FDR in the late 1930s, and he introduces a fascinating vignette, which if true, adds substance to those who claim Roosevelt was trying to push the Japanese into war. But the analogy is really beside the point. Merry's focuses the substance of his argument entirely on the nuclear question. At first glance, this appeared to me to be very well argued and important, but for some reason, I was a little uneasy about it. So, I forwarded to my good friend Pierre Sprey and asked him for his take on Merry’s argument. Pierre has a very different view; he thinks a war with Iran is very unlikely for reasons unrelated to the nuclear question. In effect, nucs may be a red herring that keeps populations lathered up and distracted from more fundamental issues. For the record, I agree and am familiar with Pierre’s arguments “a” (about the war weariness) and “b.” — the fact that I needed to be reminded of these more fundamental issues is a yet another example of how nucs can capture one’s thinking.
I urge readers to think about both points of view.
Chuck Spinney
Menton, France
——[Response from Pierre Sprey]——-
Chuck,
Most interesting (and new to me) is Merry's vignette of FDR deliberately moving to lock up all the Japanese-Americans on the same day that he pushed the Japanese government over the brink–just one more testimonial to FDR's boundless lust for power and utter cynicism when it came to right, wrong, justice or causing the death of millions. Reminds you of LBJ, doesn't it?
U.S. veterans have told the Japan Times that the Marine Corps buried a massive stockpile of Agent Orange at the Futenma air station in Okinawa, Japan. This buried stockpile has possibly poisoned the base's former head of maintenance and is potentially contaminating the ground beneath the base, as well as nearby residents. The former mayor of the nearby town of Ginowan said local authorities had never been told of the 1981 Agent Orange find, and that he was worried about the potential level of contamination in the ground water and land, which consists of many caves and natural springs. ‘If the dioxin is still in the soil, then we can confirm its presence with sampling. But the Japanese government won't grant permission to conduct such tests within U.S. installations in Okinawa,' Iha said. 20 schools and 109 more elementary schools are in close proximity to the barrels' location…
. . . . . . . .
Under Japanese law, the U.S. military is not responsible for cleaning up former bases returned to civilian usage, and apparently has a bad track record of polluting its installations in Okinawa.
ROBERT STEELE: Marines like to claim they are the “gold standard” for integrity. This is delusional idiocy. The fact is that the entire US Government, each Cabinet Department, each agency, each service, have devolved into little cesspools of fraud, waste, and abuse. There is neither intelligence nor integrity in the US Marine Corps, or the rest of the US Government. A Director of National Intelligence (DNI) with integrity would insist–demand–and implement an intelligence program that began with “Ground Zero.” Until we get the truth on the table about what, when, where, why, and how of our past crimes against humanity and the Earth, we will not be in a position to deal with it. Absent that truth as a starting point–and absent strategic intelligence that is holistic (ten threats, twelve policies, eight demographics)–the US Government cannot–even with the best of intentions that are nowhere apparent–act in the public interest.
This is where the issue of Phil Schneider comes in. He is a UFO whistleblower who spent his short life saying what was, when he said it, seemed outlandish. We are now putting so many of his 30 year old technologies into use, so many are now public or at least to the advanced defense community that more and more of us accept all of it.
“Toxic Leadership–What Are We Talking About?,” by Lieutenant General (Retired) Walter F. Ulmer, Jr. Article appears in June 2012 issue of Army Magazine, the Army's professional journal published by the Association of the United States Army.<
I think LTG(R) Ulmer generally captured the situation accurately: we know at least generally what toxic leaders are and how to recognize them, we know they exist within the force, and the Army is extremely (perhaps overly) cautious about dealing with them.
From my own experience, I know that toxic leaders abound throughout the Army.
The Summer 2012 issue of Common Defense Quarterly is running my article, “MQ-9 Reaper: Not the ‘Revolution in Warfare' You've Been Told.” To sum it up, I conclude “The proclamation of drones, such as Reaper, to be the future of warfare, a revolutionary transformation, is an empty, data free proclamation. The MQ-9 neither saves money nor improves performance compared to analogous, even primitive, aircraft. Such equipment only has a future in a defense system that prefers to degrade combat performance while increasing cost.”
Barack Obama entered the White House as a savior. But he hasn't delivered. The ideological chasms in the US are as deep as they have ever been, with Republicans blocking the president at every turn. Who is responsible for his failure?
The United States of America, where yet another mammoth presidential campaign is taking shape, makes up less than 5 percent of the world's population. Yet it consumes about 25 percent of the world's oil. It has close to $16 trillion (€12.8 trillion) in debt, its expenditures will exceed its revenues by $1.3 trillion in this fiscal year alone, and the war in Afghanistan is costing it $2 billion. Each week. Many in this country are demanding peace in Syria, even as Washington quietly fights a dirty drone war in Pakistan. Some 169 prisoners are still stewing in Guantanamo. In Washington, D.C., the divide between the two political camps is so deep that it resembles an abyss. Is the current president of the United States really named Barack Obama? Is the era of George W. Bush really over?
Obama's first term in office will end in just a few months time. The giant, many-faceted country, 27 times the size of Germany, needs a new plan — a new project for the staggering global superpower. A president will be elected in November for 314 million citizens. A new president? Perhaps. It is conceivable that the first black president, Barack Obama, hailed as a savior when he came into office, will be replaced by the pale Mormon Mitt Romney, a Republican with somewhat dubious conservative credentials.
The office both men are vying for is the most difficult in the world. The US president's agenda is constantly jam packed with the weightiest and the most trivial of matters alike, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Sometimes major national projects and monumental global tasks are relegated to the periphery of that agenda, because domestic sports scandals or sexual improprieties capture the headlines, because lunatic pastors decide to burn Korans, or because new statistics are released showing that three-fourths of all Americans are overweight, more than 46 million live in poverty and gunshots kill more than 30,000 people a year, suicides included.
The fact that Kim Kardashian's marriage lasted only 72 days can have a longer-lasting impact on the news in America than any environmental policy initiative. High gasoline prices (in the US “high” means that a liter of gasoline costs the equivalent of €0.77, or less than half the price of gasoline in Germany) are so important to so many people that they could decide the election.
The fact that 52 percent of Republicans in Mississippi believe that Obama is a Muslim, or that 46 percent of Americans believe that man was created precisely as is written in the Bible can make political debates extraordinarily tedious.
Impossible? Not in America
Those who believe the above factoids have little to do with each other lack an understanding of the true situation inside the White House. Last year, for example, as Obama was sitting through what he called “the longest 40 minutes of my life,” during the Special Forces operation against Osama bin Laden, he was concurrently embroiled in a debate, instigated by his political enemies, over whether his birth certificate is genuine. Impossible? Not in America.
Obama and his staff are constantly making decisions about what happens to be important at any given moment, based on daily events, click rates and noise levels. They stand in the middle of tornado made up of thousands of tiny news items, Internet discoveries and artificial scandals that a tireless, highly professional media industry is constantly producing — in alliance with the world's busiest web community.
