War & Face of Battle – Page 20 – Public Intelligence Blog

2007/03/222009/12/04

Review: Rumsfeld–His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), War & Face of Battle

Damns the Man, Ignores the Dead and Wounded,

March 22, 2007

Andrew Cockburn

Having read most of the books about the last eight years and the various debacles imposed on the world and on America by Cheney-Bush (see my lists on Iraq After-Action Reports and on Evaluating Dick Cheney), much of this book was not a surprise, but I would also be quick to say that there are a number of gems here not found elsewhere.

Of special interest to me were the reality that the lies and fantasy on the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq were a replay of the Team B lies about Soviet weapons successfully carried out under Reagan. This cabal has a clear pattern of believing that any lie is acceptable, that Congress is to be ignored, that there is no constraint on Executive power.

Gems:

Rumsfeld started talking about bombing Iraq before 3 pm on 9/11.

Rumsfeld built the force that he fought with, back when he was first secretary of defense.

Sadaam Hussein was the only Arab leader that welcomes Rumsfeld in the 1990's.

Novak was a willing accomplice in destroying CIA under Reagan with Team B lies, and again in destroying Plume today.

Rumsfled liked Doug Feith *because* of Feith's notorious stupidity.

Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff was widely viewed as an “abused puppy” avoiding confrontation with Rumsfeld.

CIA won the Afghan war, but Rumseld claimed it for himself. No mention that I noticed of Rumsfeld's disterous mistakes in allowing Pakistan to evacuate 3000 Tlaiban and Al Qaeda, and in refusing to but a Ranger battalion in Bin Laden's path when CIA had “eyes on” for four days (see my reviews of “First In” and “JAWBREAKER” as well as various books on my Iraq After Action list).

After a while I tired of this book. I thought to myself that the author has done a good job on destroying Rumsfeld, but there is a great deal of context that is missing, including Cheney's more active role behind the scenes, and virtually no mention of the thousands of US dead and 75,000 amputees that Rumsfeld created for no good reason.

My bottom line: Rumsfeld was put at Defense because the first candidate irritated the President, the President was a fool and wanted to appoint someone his father hated, and Dick Cheney was happy to have his former mentor over at Defense, which Cheney, as a more recent Secretary of Defense, no doubt felt he could manage from the White House. America chose to allow this cabal to steal two elections in a row, and to go to war on a web of lies denounced in advance by General Zinni,at OSS.Net, and in many other places. SHAME ON US. Rumsfled is our child, and we have to live with what we have wrought on the world.

Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

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2007/03/012009/12/04

Review: The Changing Face of War–Lessons of Combat, from the Marne to Iraq

5 Star, War & Face of Battle

5 stars on its chosen focus, 4 for lack of larger context,

March 1, 2007

Martin van Creveld

Martin Van Crevald is one of a handful of military scholars without peer–others I hold is such regard include Colin Gray, Max Manwaring, Steve Metz, and Ralph Peters.

In relation to its chosen focus, the lessons of combat and the changing face of war, this is a capstone book unlike any other, and it will be a long-standing classic in the field, useful as both a primer for those new to the strategic study of war, and for those long in the tooth wishing to reflect back with what comprises a survey of both the literature and the century of war.

The conclusion is daunting. Like Will and Ariel Durant, and Clauswitz, the author concludes that the primary determinant of victory is not mass or technology, but rather the moral factor. Being “in the right,” being on one's home ground, being supported by many others because of solidarity in “being right,” is to money and technology and hubris at 10 to 1 if not 100 to 1.

The conclusion, and the work as a whole, are also slightly disappointing, not because of any imperfection in what is included, but because the book ends where I wished for it to begin. The author notes that asymmetric opponents can only be defeated by either deep precision intelligence that is by definition non-official in cover and native in capability; or pre-emptive attacks that nail all the key individuals early enough to prevent the insurgency from gaining momentum.

By choice, the author does not address the larger moral issues of global behavior, strategic budget priorities, international alliances, global labor standards, anti-corruption measures to prevent American elites from bribing foreign elites to loot their commonwealths for the benefit of the few and against the interests of the many, and so on. In short, this seminal work is out of today's context and does not address tomorrow's needs. Max Manwaring's The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century and Uncomfortable Wars Revisited (International and Security Affairs Series) as well as his “Environmental Security” are perhaps better foundations for future leaders contemplating the avoidance of war and the proliferation of peace. Colin Gray's point in Modern Strategy that time is the one thing we cannot replace nor buy, has been lost on the leaders from 1990 to date–we have wasted 50 years (see both The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World and The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People and done terrible damage while wasting trillions.

This book is most valuable as the epitaph for the military-industrial complex in America, but sadly, this Administration not only does not get it, they are expanding the walking dead model into Homeland Security, with the full acquiescence of the largely witness Democratic majority in the House of the Representatives.

The movie War Games like Gandhi (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition), got it right. The only way to win a war in today's era is to not fight it at all. General Al Gray, USMC, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, got it right in 1988, writing in the American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1988-1989), about the need to focus on revolutionary and terrorist-spawning conditions, the urgency of funding “peaceful preventive measures,” and the importance of open source information.

Twenty years later, the Americans are giving lip service to “stabilization and reconstruction” while making a complete fiasco of both Afghanistan and Iraq. No less than $12 billion in cash courtesy of the Federal Reserve in New York, has gone missing from Iraq.

There are other works that I recommend in addition to this one. On the counter-insurgency side there is The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century as well as Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam; see also my varied lists including the asymmetric war list. At the higher level of making peace I recommend Ambassador Mark Palmer's superb Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025; Robert McNamara's DVD The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara as well as the DVD Why We Fight; and Blight & McNamara, Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century as well as William Shawcross's Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict. One last recommendation: Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future.

Brains, not bullets; belief systems, not weapons systems; are what the current and future conflicts are all about. America is way behind the power curve, and all current public intelligence indicators suggest that America will sink to British levels of non-influence, while Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and Veneuzela–and some Wild Cards such as Malaysia, South Africa, and Turkey, “take off” and leave us behind.

Martin Van Crevald is the ultimate scribe of war, and he has closed the era of big war with this superb overview.

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2007/01/282009/12/04

Review: The Great Turning–From Empire to Earth Community

6 Star Top 10%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Information Society, Justice (Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

People are the new super power–local resilience, global community,

January 28, 2007

David C Korten

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is unquestionably a five-star work of reflection, integration, and focused moral intent. On the other hand, while it introduced a broad “earth-friendly” literature that I was *not* familiar with, it does not “see” a much broader literature that I have absorbed, and so I want to do two things with this review: feature the highlights from this book, and list a number of other works that support and expand on the author's reflections for the greater good of us all.

Early highlights include the continued relevance of Dennis Kucinich and the emerging value of the Case Foundation and Revolution Health as funded by Steve Case, founder of AOL. The author posits early on the choice we have been a great unraveling and a great turning. He describes all our institutions as failing at the same time that we have unlimited potential. He concludes, as have many others, that centralized authority is not working, and suggests that we must confront that which does not work and devise new constructive alternatives (“for every no there must be a yes”).

In the middle of the book he describes the five levels of consciousness as magical, imperial, socialized, cultural, and spirirtual. I would have put socialized ahead of imperial, since the industrial era used schools to socialize us into both factory workers and conscripts for the armed forces. He concludes this section with a commentary on moral autism, which of course reminds us of nakedly amoral Dick Cheney.

The author moves toward a conclusion by pointing out that people are the new super-power, with the Internet and its many new features as the foundation for bringing people together and making people power effective.

A large portion of the middle section is a historical review of America, with its genocidal, slavery, and unilateral militant interventionist nature, and its extreme inequality now, which the literature on revolution clearly identifies (the latter, concentration of wealth) as a precurser to almost inevitable violent revolution).

The book ends with four strategic elements:

1) Awakening of cultural and spiritual consciousness
2) Resistance of the imperial empire's assault on children, families, communities, and nature
3) Form and connect communities of convergence
4) Build a majoritarian political base.

In parting notes he points out that the status of our children is the key indicator of our future, and that today one out of every two children is born into and lives into poverty (one reason why the High Level Threat Panel put poverty above infectuous disease and environmental degradation).

He ends by calling for local living economies at a human scale.

If you have the time to only read one book within the broad literatures of imagination, corporateism, and constructive prospects for the planet, this is probably that book. Below I want to a list quite a few that support this author's thesis, and for which I have provided a summative as well as an evaluative review within these Amazon pages:

The Corporation
WALMART-HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE (DVD/FF/FR-SP-SUB)
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

See also:
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
“The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past”
Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems
Deep Economy

There are many more should you wish to explore via my categorized lists, but the above both lend great credence to the author of this single book, and expand considerably on the reflections that he has distilled into this one book.

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2007/01/042009/12/04

Review: The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Misinformation & Propaganda, True Cost & Toxicity, War & Face of Battle

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Ten Years Ahead of Its Time, Now Part of “True Cost” Meme,

January 4, 2007

Michael Cranna

This book was ten years ahead of its time in relation to the emergent “true cost” meme that is exploding as the public acquires access to more information and the tools to make sense of that information.

The author has done a first-rate job of looking at seven conflicts and their costs or (rarely) benefits. This is precisely the kind of analysis that is needed if Congresses and Parliaments are to be educated and weaned away from the bankers fondness for war and credit for war as a profit harvesting opportunity.

I recommend that in addition to this book, the reader consider General Smedley Butler's book, “War is a Racket,” and the superb book by Cees Wiebes, “Intelligence and the War in Bosnia” (see my review for lessons learned).

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2006/12/272009/12/04

Review: Target Iran–The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change

4 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Congress (Failure, Reform), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

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Critical Piece of the Puzzle, Not the Whole Picture,

December 27, 2006

Scott Ritter

Scott Ritter was proven correct about Iraq not having weapons of mass destruction, and this alone demands our respectful attention to his views of the foolishness of attacking Iran.

There are other reviews of the substance of this book that are excellent, so here I just wish to contribute three supporting observations:

1) Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror by LtGen Thomas McInerney and MajGen Paul Vallely, was published in 2004 and lays out the complete plan for US military domination of the Middle East, with Iran following Iraq, and then Syria etcetera. As lunatic as the plan may be (see my review for more details) it is a plan that will be carried out as long as Dick Cheney remains Vice President and George Bush Junior remains a fool who is clearly in way over his head.

2) Howard Bloom, who understood the coming Sunni versus Shi'ite world war for the soul of Islam, writing about it in The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History, now warns of a likely Iranian masterplan that first used Ahmed Chalabi to lure the American neo-cons into Iraq, and now has lured four carriers, two strike groups and an amphibious group within range of the supersonic Sunburn missile that carried a nuclear warhead, can explode a carrier, and travel at 3.0 Mach straight line, or 2.2 Mach when zig-zagging.

3) In addition to Scott Ritter's excellent analysis of how Iran can turn off the oil supply in Iran, portions of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and Kuwait, it is helpful to consider the extreme vulnerability of the US land supply route from Kuwait to Baghdad. A slide by Webster Tarpley showing this vulnerability is posted above.

Ritter gets a lot of respect from me–his integrity took him from a relatively minor position as a Marine Corps field grade officer, and elevated him to the role of speaker of truth for the public. I think he is right–the US will attack Iran, ostensibly in support of Israel–and this will be the greatest disaster of the 21st century, setting off a true world war between Sunni and Shi'ite in which the Christians are the “collateral damage” while the Jews experience a new form of genocide. I just shake my head, feeling helpless, wondering what it takes to get Scott Ritter's important knowledge in front of Congress.

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2006/10/202009/12/04

Review: Triumph Forsaken–The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (v. 1)

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Strategy, War & Face of Battle

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Revisionist, Questionable, Valuable, and a Starting Point,

October 20, 2006

Mark Moyar

I write this in Lubbock, Texas where historian Mark Moyar presented his conclusions in very summary form to one of the most extraordinary collection of individuals to ever gather on the topic of “Intelligence in the Vietnam War,” an event co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Intelligence (Central Intelligence Agency) and the Vietnam Center (Texas Tech University).

While I came to hear authors like George Allen, whose 50 years of on-the-ground experience are presented in NONE SO BLIND, the definitive work on intelligence in the Viet-Nam war, and C. Michael Hiam, first time author who has done an utterly amazing job in describing, defending, and honoring Sam Adams in Who the Hell are We Fighting?, I have to credit this author, graduate of Harvard, student of Christopher Andrew the singular at Cambridge, with ripping me out of my chair and forcing me to think about the relative merits of documentation versus oral histories versus personal observation (I was there from August 1963 to late 1967).

Here are three bottom lines on the book:

1) It is some of the most erudite, earnest, well-intentioned, and potentially explosive revisionist history directly relevant to the intelligence-policy relationship as well as relations among nations.

2) It is lacking in an understanding of how the veterans of the war actually perceive it, taking both secondary sources and original documents from varied governments including China and Viet-Nam, at face value.

3) It merits the benefit of the doubt, a serious reading by those that were actually there, and inputs, in the form of oral histories, to the Oral History Project Head at the Vietnam Archive (Texas Tech University). If you have substantive comment to make on this book, don't stop here at Amazon–call them at 806.742.9010 and schedule a short telephone interview to add your oral history to the collection.

I read a lot and have had a fortunate life. I have always known that governments lie in the documents and their public statements, that secondary sources are all too happy to bend the truth to make a case, but it was not until this moment that I realized just how very urgent it is to dramatically increase our oral history and direct understanding of every aspect of the Viet-Nam debacle, one we repeat today in Iraq and Afghanistan, where those fighting have no memory of both the successes and failures of the past.

My gravest concern with this important and worthy book is that it plays to what the extremist unilateral militants–including the chicken hawks now serving–want to hear: that imperial adventurism can succeed if one just intervenes a little more harshly, a little sooner, with a bit more cleverness.

I have been an iconoclast, and I now find myself defending and praising an individual for having produced a work that conflicts sharply with my narrow understanding of the reality as I lived it, and that of the many others attending this conference.

I regard this book as a very courageous and intelligent offering, one that must be regarded as a work in progress, and one that will add substantially to our understanding once the author has a chance to write an epilogue that factors in the comments of those now living who were actually there.

Five stars for brave brains. This author must be reckoned with.

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2006/10/072009/12/04

Review: Blind Into Baghdad–America’s War in Iraq

6 Star Top 10%, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

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The ONLY “Before and After” Book on the Iraq Mis-Adventure,

October 7, 2006

James Fallows

James Fallows is unique for giving us the only “before and after” book on Iraq. This book, while it consists of a collection of articles published in the run-up to the war on Iraq, is exemplary for showing what was known before the war, and how a combination of ideological bias, bureaucratic timidity, confusion, and general incompetence actually allowed this Nation to be led to an elective war of devastating consequence and cost.

The author provides both an introduction and a conclusion to the book that are unique to the book and set the articles in harmony as a whole.

There are other books that excel as retrospective reconstruction and finger-pointing, among which I would include HUBRIS, Squandered Victory, The End of Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and most recently, State of Denial, but this is the only book to focus on all that we knew prior to the war about the daunting difficulties facing us in making the peace, and why the political leadership of the Executive did not want us to think about that, and why the political leadership of the Congress refused to play its role as a co-equal branch with the power of both the purse and the declaration of war exclusive to it.

James Fallows documents how virtually every sensible element of the federal government, from the military to the diplomats to the commerce and treasury and agriculture and others, all KNEW that invading Iraq was going to open a Pandora's box of sectarian violence, ethic conflict over resources, a collapse of good order, the failure of infrastructure the US would not be able to repair quickly enough, and on and on and on and on!

Objective observers, including the British, considered the claims of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz with respect to the ease with which Iraq qould be liberated, to be the “ruminations of insane people.”

The author's bottom line is clear: the bureaucracy did its job and anticipated every single reason for not going to war, every single calamity that would befall us in Iraq. Where government failed was at the political level, with Dick Cheney closing out the policy process, spoon feeding the President lies from convicted thief and liar Chalabi, and with a full-court press backed by Wall Street and the media, to declare dissent to be treason–hence General Tony Zinni, former Commander in Chief for the Central Command, being called a traitor for sharing his knowledge.

The author and The Atlantic Monthly did not rely only on open sources. They sponsored a war game that came as close as possible to matching all that the US Government might be doing behind closed doors, using only open sources and overt experts, and here again, well in advance of the war, the conclusion was the same: don't do it!

The author concludes the book with several findings, all of which are completely consistent with the other non-fiction books I have read on Iraq and related blunders:

1) Corporations deciding on how to market a brand of toothpaste are vastly more meticulous and thoughtful that the political leadership in the Executive deciding to go to war on what proved to be whims, lies, and active mis-representation.

2) There was too little friction. The Administration got a “free ride” from the people, Congress, the media. Other than Senator Byrd, who shall long be my personal hero for his 80 speeches against the war (he alone among all the Senators stood fast on the matter of the Senate being equal to the Executive and having the right to question this idiocy–see my review of his book, Losing America), our Congress abdicated its responsibilities and failed the Nation. This was a bi-partisan failure, but the extremist Republican leaders were most to blame.

3) There has been no accountability. I remain shocked by the number of books and DVDs (see my list of Serious DVDs) that document the constant stream of lies and mis-representations from the political leadership and their tame uniformed members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who should be fired for confusing loyalty with integrity). It is a sad commentary on the Nation that the pedophile charges against Congressman Foley seem to carry more weight with the public than our 65,000 amputees.

I like this book very much. It is important for all Americans to understand that good minds working only with open sources of information easily anticipated the reasons why an elective war on Iraq was not a good idea. It is important for all Americans to know that the good people in State, Defense, and elsewhere got it right, but Dick Cheney shut them down, shut them out, and alone, bears responsibility for leading a young President ignorant of national security matters, on a very irresponsible and costly course of action.

Dick Cheney has a great deal to answer for–none of the others could have achieved their ill without him.

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