Navy Plan for Littoral Ships Is Winning Support, Despite Lack of Price Tag
By John M. Donnelly, CQ Staff
Lawmakers are suddenly voicing new support for a Navy plan to acquire cutting-edge warships, despite continuing apprehension about not being given enough information or time to consider it.
By Michael Brenner (Senior Fellow, the Center for Transatlantic Relations) – Huffington Post – December 2, 2010
There is one celebrity with the makings of a national hero, someone who has the qualities that might carry him right into the White House. It is David Petraeus. He is almost universally credited with the brilliant achievement of saving American honor and gaining an approximation of ‘victory' in Iraq. President Obama himself is in awe of this warrior-intellectual to whom he defers on all matters in the Greater Middle East. Petraeus' mythic standing is a perfect example of how the compelling demand for a hero creates the illusion that indeed a savior has arrived.
Iranians (Persians) have viewed Russia (Soviet Union) with distrust and as a menace or outright threat for hundreds of years, at least since the Russian Tsars cemented their expansion into Turkestan (or the Turkic countries in what is now called Central Asia). The fact that Iran sits on top of one of the world's largest reservoirs of oil and gas adds to their fears. Russia is also much closer to Iran than the United States. So from a Russian perspective, the emergence of an Iranian nuclear delivery capability would be a far more dangerous ramifications for Russia than for the US, at least in raw geopolitical terms.
With this in mind, the attached report by Gareth Porter begs the question: Why are the Russians less concerned about the so-called Iranian ballistic missile/nuclear threat than the United States? Why would the Washington Post and New York Times bias their reporting in a way that downplays the Russia's more moderate view?
To ask this question is to answer it. (hint: Simply ask what other country is most obsessed by Iran?) Chuck
December 1, 2010
Documents Show NYT and Washington Post Shilling for US Government on Iran Missile “Threat”
A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.
In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.
But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.
The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles – supposedly called the BM-25 – from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.
Phi Beta Iota: More than six minutes–a special with decisive commentary on the government's failure to save the economy, choosing instead to save the financial super-parasites that fund the campaigns of the political parasites. Junk math, junk derivatives, junk politics…. Defense Budget & the Deficit: A Comparison of Reduction Scenarios
Several plans for cutting back the defense budget are floating around Versailles on the Potomac. These have taken the form of unsolicited proposals made to the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission. In this important CP report, Winslow Wheeler, a former staffer on the Senate Budget Committee cuts through the rhetoric surrounding these plans and places their budget scenarios in an apples versus apples comparison. Chuck
In some respects, the anguish exhibited by Ahmed Rashid in the attached report (Rashid is a supporter of the Afghan intervention) suggests that the situation in Afghanistan is beginning to look a little like Vietnam in 1963 before the assassination of Diem. We are faced with an escalating rural guerrilla war, where the guerrillas have the initiative. Our strategy to regain the initiative by winning the hearts and minds of a disaffected predominantly rural population focuses again on controlling urban areas. In a xenophobic society that traditionally picks its leaders and evolves its patterns of governance from the bottom up, we have maneuvered ourselves into a position of outsiders trying to redesign that traditional society from the top down by imposing our choices for leaders and our visions for building “democratic” institutions. Metrics of success in this kind of conflicted effort, naturally, devolve into a reflection of the lack of success in overcoming the insurmountable contradiction.
Inevitably, once again, we focus on our inputs rather that outputs — as can be seen in an increasing reliance on Taliban body counts, the number of Afghan troops we have trained, the size of the “surge,” etc.
Local security forces are corrupt and incompetent, and they are led by rapacious leaders and warlords more interested in feathering their own nests than in building a viable nation. Violence is escalating almost everywhere, yet that violence is itself being being touted as a sign of progress. In short, like Vietnam, the tunnel of Afghanistan is getting longer and darker. Like Vietnam, the political urge to find a neat, clean solution to an intractable problem made worse by the arrogance of our ignorance is increasing.
It is against this backdrop that political pressures are building to dump the corrupt stooge we put into place and replace him with a more pliable corrupt stooge, if only to justify a the war's continuation by providing a patina of progress to an increasingly war-weary Americans on the home front.
So, we face the same question we faced in Vietnam in the fall of 1963: If we dump our stooge because he is becoming uncooperative, who do we put in his place? The only comfortable options for our political leaders are once again the leaders (warlords) of the corrupt and rapacious groups we have promoted. Rashid ends his essay by saying that the US and Karzai will not not part ways. I am not so sure. But whatever the case, the name of the game is to buy time in a guerrilla war where time is on the side of the guerrilla. Like Sir Douglas Haig's decision to pour in reinforcements and continue the battle of the Somme for four months after taking 60,000 casualties the first day, a strategy to buy time by promoting more of the same is a strategy to reinforce failure that will eventually sputter out ineffectually at very high cost. Chuck
British-based men of Afghan origin are spending months at a time in Afghanistan fighting Nato forces before returning to the UK, the Guardian has learned. They also send money to the Taliban.
A Taliban fighter in Dhani-Ghorri in northern Afghanistan last month told the Guardian he lived most of the time in east London, but came to Afghanistan for three months of the year for combat.
“I work as a minicab driver,” said the man, who has the rank of a mid-level Taliban commander. “I make good money there [in the UK], you know. But these people are my friends and my family and it's my duty to come to fight the jihad with them.”
“There are many people like me in London,” he added. “We collect money for the jihad all year and come and fight if we can.”
Dowd says it pretty well. My guess is that because CIA connsiders ISI an “asset”, they insist that no one including themsleves target the ISI. This of course means that ISI can continue using CIA and the U.S. as pawns in thier undeclared cold war against India.
Op-Ed Columnist
And we wonder why we haven’t found Osama bin Laden.
Though we’re pouring billions into intelligence in Afghanistan, we can’t even tell the difference between a no-name faker and a senior member of the Taliban. The tragedy of Afghanistan has descended into farce.
. . . . . . .
Just as with Saddam and W.M.D., or groping and the T.S.A., we get no satisfaction for the $80 billion a year we spend on intelligence. Or we get fake information like Curveball that leads us into spending trillions more on a trumped-up war. Last year, seven top C.I.A. officials were fooled by a Jordanian double-agent who got onto an American base in Khost and blew all of them up. Our agents in the “wilderness of mirrors” may not be up to le Carré, but can’t they learn to Google, or at least watch “The Ipcress File”?
Who knows? Maybe we’ve been dealing with bin Laden all along. Maybe he’s been coming and going under a different moniker. As far as our intelligence experts are concerned, a turban and beard are just a turban and beard.
Phi Beta Iota: What is not properly emphasized above is that most of the budget is spent on technical collection and beltway bandit vapor ware, with no one held accountable for massive failures, be they by Lockheed, SAIC, CSC, or what-have you. CIA is at best $10 billion, of which at least 75% is sheer waste, fraud, and abuse. What it does in the way of “intelligence” we could do for $100 million a year, and we could do it faster, better, cheaper and for 1000 times more individual consumers. Neither are intelligence officials held accountable for failure (96% of the time) by Congress or the White House because both the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon are nothing more than pork gone rancid. Leon Panetta could have been the greatest director of CIA in history with his unique background as White House Chief of Staff, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Representative. Similar Jim Clapper could have been the first real Director of National Intelligence. The lack of vision, initiative, accountability, and productivity at the top of the US secret world is quite extraordinary. This is how the White House and Congress want it to be. This is “blessed dysfunctionality” profitable for those who feast at the taxpayer's expense, and most assuredly not in the public interest. That's how it is. That is how it will remain absent President Obama choosing to remake himself, or America demanding Electoral Reform, a Coalition Cabinet, and a Balanced Budget in 2010. We are in the Dark Ages of modern American faux-governance.
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 15, 2010; 12:24 AM
KABUL – Gen. David H. Petraeus, the coalition military commander in Afghanistan, warned Afghan officials Sunday that President Hamid Karzai's latest public criticism of U.S. strategy threatens to seriously undermine progress in the war and risks making Petraeus's own position “untenable,” according to Afghan and U.S. officials.
Officials said Petraeus expressed “astonishment and disappointment” with Karzai's call, in a Saturday interview with The Washington Post, to “reduce military operations” and end U.S. Special Operations raids in southern Afghanistan that coalition officials said have killed or captured hundreds of Taliban commanders in recent months.
Phi Beta Iota: There are clearly alternative realities at play here. On balance we believe Karzai is closer to ground truth. Petraeus is out of synch with both Karzai and Obama. His position was untenable before he got there.
