I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism. . . .
Mr. Obama's economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen. . . .
On the foreign front he has been given much credit for his new policy on the Afghan war, and especially for the “rational” and “earnest” way he went about arriving at the decision to surge 30,000 new troops into battle. But here also were three months of presidential equivocation for all the world to see, only to end up essentially where he started out.
And here again was the lack of a larger framework of meaning. How is this surge of a piece with America's role in the world? . . .
I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world
With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. . . .
It is different today, there is a cold-bloodedness to American foreign policy. “Ideology is so yesterday,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed not long ago, giving voice to the new sentiment. . . .
History and its furies have their logic, and they have not bent to Mr. Obama's will.
Comment: This is pathetic.No one now serving in the White House is capable of telling the President the truth–that our $75 billion a year is wasted, that the agencies are suffering from 1950's mindsets with 1970's technology and security and legal blinders that are the operational equivalent of castration.Until the President, General Jones, and Admiral Blair are willing to recognize reality, this will continue to be a national disgrace.Condi Rice has a chance to fix all this (IC Memo, DHS Memo), as did Admiral McConnell (One Pager), the pathos is that until the President is willing to break some china and cut some budget whiile launching a multinational multifunctional information-sharing and sense-making network that defaults to NOT SECRET, the USA will continue to be Stupid Nation as opposed to a Smart Nation as we proposed in 1995.Within DoD, they keep doing the wrong thing righter instead of the right thing faster, better, cheaper. This is a tragedy of historic proportions.
Thomas Lipscomb is a fellow of the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future (USC). as published in Huffington Post.
It isn't the terrorists who have created the morass of asinine travel restrictions. They are thoughtlessly piled on by CYA-schooled public servants willing to do anything but really seriously think about what they are doing.
Incompetent State Department consular officials and poor enforcement of visa procedures that have been in place long before the personal computer, the Xerox machine or even the jet airliner are the problem here. And we aren't hearing a word about it.
Better the American public should be forced to endure another blizzard of press releases announcing another round of ridiculous indignities by dazzling Rube Goldberg technology rather than have our press and our government demand an accounting from the employees at a government bureaucracy who can't even comply with their own time-tested procedures.
1. No existing search procedures will find virtual diapers full of explosives.
2. US blew it–they approved the individual by name in advance of take-off from The Netherlands. Had the US had its act together, it had enough information to warrant a full body search “with significance” as the Spanish like to say.
Full Story Online
Spy Agencies Failed to Collate Clues on Terror
By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC LIPTON December 31, 2009
The National Security Agency intercepted discussions of a plot by leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen, but spy agencies did not combine the intercepts with other information.
. . . . . . .
In some ways, the portrait bears a striking resemblance to the failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, despite the billions of dollars spent over the last eight years to improve the intelligence flow and secret communications across the United States’ national security apparatus.
WASHINGTON — The finger-pointing began in earnest on Wednesday over who in the alphabet soup of American security agencies knew what and when about the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up an airliner.
. . . . . . .
Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint Congressional inquiry into Sept. 11, called the emerging story “eerily similar to the disconnects and missteps we investigated.”
“There seems to have been the same failure to put the pieces of the puzzle together and get them to the right people in time,” Ms. Hill said.
In the wake of the latest terrorist incident (the ‘underpants bomber’) President Obama has identified the U.S. National Security Establishment as flawed and singled out the U.S. Intelligence System for failing to “connect the dots” in spite of having significant information about the alleged terrorist before he tried to execute his plan. Of course the talking head counter-terrorism “experts” have also taken up the hue and cry that the U.S. is in mortal danger because of what President Obama called “systemic failures” within the National Security Establishment. This is rather troubling since much the same litany was heard after the East African embassy bombings in 1998, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and of course the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Indeed the publicly available facts suggest that yet again the U.S. Intelligence System failed to analyze the available information, identify a clear threat and to produce an assessment of this threat.
Phi Beta Iota: Chuck Spinney's flagging of the below piece supports the point we were making with the post on dynamic planning. For fifty years the USA has been throwing its weight around on the basis of partisan, ideological, and often illegimiate purposes, and it has been able to get a way with it because in an Industrial Era, might does make right. We are no longer in an Industrial Era. We've entered an era in which information asymmetries are being extinguished, while power asymmetries are emergent–demographic power trumps everything else when you get right down to it. This entire web site makes that point in the aggregate. On a sidenote, Kashmir is about water but no one seems to acknowledge that. Water is one of the things we are going to have to figure out how to do in a non-zero fashion. Hence, for the USA to dig itself a grave in Central Asia without giving any thought to the ten high-level threats to humanity as a whole, and the twelve policies, and the eigth demographic challengers, and to calculate a non-zero course through this maze, is nothing more than idiocy on steriods.
Full Story Online
The Afghan Triangle: Kashmir, India, Pakistan
Graham Usher
Graham Usher is a writer and journalist based in Pakistan and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.
For the last 61 years the fight has been fought, mostly, in and for Indian-occupied Kashmir (IoK): the territory Delhi and Islamabad have contested since the 1947 partition cleaved them into two states—and Kashmir into “Pakistani” and “Indian” parts. Sometimes (1947, 1965, 1971, 1999) the war has been hot. More often it has been waged via Pakistani proxies against a standing Indian military. Since 1989, it has been channeled through a low-intensity, Pakistan-backed separatist-Islamist insurgency that has killed 50,000 people and incurred an Indian military occupation three times the size of America’s in Iraq and three times as lethal.
Will Iraqi democracy be 2010's big success story? Visiting Anbar province several weeks ago and listening to the governor of Ramadi talk about his big development plans, I found myself wondering if maybe the cruel Iraq story might have a happy ending after all. This was the province where al-Qaeda declared its first emirate, just a few years ago, and now the governor is handing out a special Financial Times report on business opportunities there.
When I meet Iraqis these days, they all want to talk politics: Which party is ahead in the March parliamentary elections? Can Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani or Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi unseat the incumbent prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki? It's the kind of freewheeling political debate you can't find anywhere else in the Arab world. I want to believe it's real, even as the terrorist bombs continue to explode in Baghdad and other cities.
Phi Beta Iota: Although pedestrian and myopic in the extreme, courtier Ignatius provides one nugget on Iraq that is repeated above. Despite huge mistakes at home (elective war based on 935 lies to the public, Congress believing Wolfowitz instead of Shinseki) and major opposition in theater (Syria, Iran), Iraq is on the verge of being a success story. Here are the three things NOT happening in Iraq that need to be ramped up from January 2010:
1) Information Operations (IO) getting every success story into the news. Right now all we see in a thin stream of US Army press releases and US military base newspapers. This is not just pathetic, it is a self-inflicted wound.
2) US Whole of Government Operations that are finely calibrated to deliver the maximum amount of peace goods in the shortest possible time. March-July should see us FLOOD Iraq with all the stuff that should have been done during the Golden Hour. Ideally 80% of the money should be spent LOCALLY, not on fat-cat beltway bandit perks.
3) Multinational Engagement with a special focus on Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey providing “neutral” Muslim engineers, while Saudi Arabia pays the bill but is not allowed to send any of its demonizers into the country. Using the Strategic Analytic Model and approaching all of Iraq as a test-bed for a new form of multinational effort guided by a Global Range of Needs Table down to the household level, with every gift (cause and effect) visible online, could create a new Gold Standard for multinational harmonized peaceful preventive and stabilziation measures.
Phi Beta Iota: Read every word. Highlights include:
;1) Every province is difference (see General Zinni's characterization of the six different Viet-Nam wars in Battle Ready)
2) Climate and Ops Tempo, not the Taliban, are the major challenge
3) Taliban losing, resorting more to terror against civilians
4) NATO works–could not have done AF without NATO C4I
5) Not a single word about civilian stabilization & reconstruction assistance, which appears to be dead in the water with AID pulling back
Our Conclusion: Having tried and failed at everything else, we are now at the cusp of the “Brass Hour” in both IQ and AF but the military is failing to do the homework needed to present a compelling case for fur a “Berlin Airlift” into both countries that overwhelms the population with what we should have used the first time around: language-qualified Muslim engineers from Indonesia and Malaysia and Turkey, along with a mini-Marshall Plan that wages peace without end. One Tribe at a Time, Yes, But Bring Peace Goods with You….
Nicht Schwerpunkt as a Prescription for Defeat by a 1000 Cuts
Operation Barbarossa
Recent events like the Fort Hood Massacre and the bungled attempt to fire bomb the airliner bound for Detroit have focused attention on and encouraged our escalating intervention in Yemen, which has been taking place quietly, as if Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were not enough to keep our strategic planners and stretched out military forces occupied. Our reactions to events in the so-called Long War on Terror suggest an aimless spreading of effort throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. This aimlessness brings to mind a comment General Hermann Balck, a highly decorated German officer in WWII, made to a small group of reformers in the Pentagon in the early 1980s. The subject was Operation Barbarossa, or Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Balck pithily dismissed the German strategy shaping that invasion with the words: “Nicht Schwerpunkt.” Balck was saying there was no focus or main effort to the German invasion, and without a focus, there was no way to harmonize the thousands of subordinate efforts. The result was a spreading of effort that led to eventual overextension as can be seen in the following map.
Now the Eastern Front of WWII is very different from the ridiculously misleading label of a Central Front in the Long War on Terror. But the idea of schwerpunkt is germane to both efforts, and the US is showing all the signs of spreading and over extending its efforts which accompany a nicht schwerpunkt.
This is no small thing. As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed in his famous briefing, Patterns of Conflict, the idea of a schwerpunkt is central to organizing all effective military operations. It is far more than a simple question of concentrating forces. According to Boyd, the idea of a “Schwerpunkt represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time in order to generate a favorable mismatch in time/ability to shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances.” Now this is a very compressed statement, pregnant with information, and based on a lot of research, but it nevertheless makes it self evident that there is no comparable unifying medium in America's Long War on Terror. Our failure to form a schwerpunkt is just as much a prescription for paralysis and defeat by a thousand cuts in a guerrilla war as it is in a mechanized conventional war between standing armies.
To see why, consider please the following three attachments:
