Response to Ricks suggesting story of General Braddock's demise at hands of French and their Indian confederates in 1755 ambush contains a lesson for America's military:

 "... you seem to have an agenda here, not sure what it is. Respect the natives? Seems to me America colonized its western frontier, as Europe had colonized the new worlds before it, by generally ignoring that sentiment. Shouldn't that be the true lesson here? Because respecting the ways of your enemy for the purposes of utterly destroying it is different from what you seem to be intimating. Or what exactly are you trying to say? That America's military suffers from a Braddock like arrogance? At this late date in these humbling wars? That I think would be quite a statement, which is why I think that is not your intention... just more liberal blather then... but for the facile edification of what?... or whom?..."

My response to a blogger's support of the idiot Andrew Sullivan's views concerning reform in Iran:

I love how the left likes to base its grandiose arguments on broad assumptions - like the reform movement in Iran is of course a good thing, or even a coherent and knowable thing for that matter, as Robin Wright points out on CFR's website:

"The Green Movement is a coalition of disparate forces who reflect many sectors of society and many different visions of the future. It includes former presidents [Rafsanjani, Khatami] as well as people who've never voted at all. We should have no illusion that they speak with one voice or they want one thing beyond the ouster of this particular president who commands a dictatorial rule. If they succeed in bringing about change, this coalition is almost certain to fall apart as traumatically as the revolutionary coalition did in 1979."

If the 'reformers' manage to topple the little dictator, what then? You can't simply assume it will be good, will lead to a more stable, more amenable, more approachable, more open Iran - in the chaos and disarray of conflicted goals and beliefs and intentions that follows the coming upheaval you want to sanction into being who knows what fills the vacuum? It could be worse, more extreme, more reactionary - Ahmadinejad has his supporters, conservative clerics have their supporters, the Republican Guard has an agenda - these people are not going to just simply fade into the background. Even if a 'reform agenda' manages to win out, given the inchoate nature of the movement we can't know what it will look like - it may not look much different from what exists now, simply absent the little dictator - maybe with a more palatable little dictator in his place.

As bad if not indeed worse than a possible extremist backlash that follows a 'reformist' upheaval in Iran is that should 'progressives' come to power they may prove to be reformers in name only but because the cowardly West will want to see them as 'liberals' we will turn a blind eye to the sham - for instance the supposed reformers could still want to pursue a nuclear program - there's plenty of evidence to suggest that's possible - but because they are viewed as 'progressives' the West won't be able to muster the will to stop them. Sullivan is already using preservation of the reform movement as a reason why a military intervention against Iran's nuclear ambitions is utterly unthinkable.

And then when a potential scenario unwinds of a governing reform coalition inevitably falling apart and the Republican Guard stepping in to re-establish dictatorial control, do they do so now armed with nukes?

If this country is listening to idiots like Andrew Sullivan we're doomed.

No silver lining without a cloud - possible downside of reform movement in Iran succeeding in toppling gov't? Many downsides I imagine, but pointedly this: reformers inchoate, incoherent agglomeration full of mixed signals, mixed intentions, mixed goals, mixed aspirations - a ragged but apparently resilient coalition - very likely to split apart if successful, leaving it to be taken over by elites and power brokers who the world will see or want to see as reformers but in actuality won't be that enthused by much of the 'reform' agenda - specifically, will still want to pursue nukes but because they can work under cover of being seen as 'progressives' we'll have no chance of stopping them - and then, after period of confusion and disarray and infighting, Republican Guard reasserts dictatorial control - but now they have the bomb. That's how something that seems encouraging could end up being quite the opposite.

"... you're a war monger - that's how a liberal answers a quite reasonable call by me in defense of keeping the military option viable viz Iran... not 'I see your point but respectfully disagree', not some logical breakdown of the argument... doesn't even address my very precise criticism that even if one is predisposed to blanch at thoughts of war it's still probably against the dictates of sound reasoning to simply ignore the possible merits of the military option given the threat... no, I must be a war monger and if I love war so much I should head to Afghanistan and join one, that's his response... and this is a fairly high profile analyst writing for a significant foreign policy magazine... and all he has to say in answer to me is that I must be a war monger... fucking liberals... dangerous fucking people..."

Surprising op-ed published in NY Times yesterday - immediately caught ones attention because it argued in favour of American military intervention to stop Iran's nuclear program - which pretty much goes against everything the Times wants to stand for and thus the surprise - the logic of the argument itself not a surprise since is something I myself have defended [not supported understand, defended - I personally don't know what's the right move viz Iran - but feel confident in saying that ruling out the US military means one has not seriously considered the nasty scenarios that could arise if Iran gets the bomb - there is no 'right' answer on Iran, it's rather a problem of figuring out the least bad of the few options available - but even I guess that's not true since there's no way Obama's using the military in Iran - so his choice right or wrong is made - Israel on the other hand...].

So, surprising enough by the Times that liberals everywhere immediately jumped up crying foul of their beloved Grey Lady and expressing aghast wonderment - no level of vigilance is apparently enough if such war mongering conservative bile can seep into the hallowed chambers of liberal enlightenment.

And that's what struck me about their whelping - enlightenment - all their arguments against even considering the possible merits of a military intervention by the US are based on the belief that the folly of such an enterprise would be obvious to a truly enlightened soul and therefore as truly enlightened souls they perforce must reject it - they're absolutely predetermined by sentiment to oppose the offending premise no matter what and therefore cannot, will not be convinced otherwise.

Suppose this is hardly an earth shaking observation on my part - still, it's troubling how much putatively 'objective' political discourse is tainted in this way.

"... your argument makes no sense... the anti-war stuff is driven by emotion and sentiment, no scientific method can elucidate it to a degree that will allow for the transcending of history, so why you dwell on it is beyond me since your main issue seems to be with matters of scientific method concerning 'certainty'... but our whole tradition of scientific inquiry is based on a healthy skepticism towards avowals of absolute truth... failure is fundamental to the game... so again, what's the point of your argument? That regardless of levels of expertise and sophistication and subtlety humans still manage to do stupid things? Ok... but I think we're all pretty clear on that one..."

Question: China is an oligarchy running successfully, for the moment anyway, a state driven and directed form of capitalism - how can such a thing ever become a democracy? Obviously, one assumes, it can, but if it does how problematic would the change be? What I'm thinking here is that a state controlled capitalism must have significant vulnerabilities in comparison to the open market, free enterprise driven form of  entrepreneurial based capitalism found in Western democracies - one doesn't notice the vulnerabilities hidden in China's approach to capitalism because their economy is just too robust right now - it's hard to hear the violin section is out of tune when the horn section is blaring so loudly - but you're gonna hear it eventually - my point being, should that state driven economy ever have to answer to the vagaries of voters, won't those vulnerabilities become a significant problem - won't their bastardized version of capitalism be rendered dysfunctional by inefficiency and waste and lack of innovation once the state has to answer to the whims and needs and wants of voters? Right now, the state sort of acts as an omnipresent CEO - bring voters into the system and that arrangement will struggle to perform [although with so much untapped or unexploited if you will capacity it's hard to know just how much inefficiency the Chinese economy could absorb before it starts to fall apart].

So, the way I see it then, the only way China moves towards democracy is if it first moves slowly towards a free market, private enterprise, an empowered-individual-is-king Western styled economy - but what if it won't or, possibly more telling, can't do that? How or why would the state seek to replace its current economic model that has proved so successful? Why invite that complication for the sake of becoming a democracy? The simple answer is it wouldn't and won't - therefore the only way China becomes a democracy is if something bad happens that upends the status quo and empowers liberalizing forces - and, as with Iran, this prosepctive upheaval could potentially lead to less freedom, not more. As things stand now it seems highly unlikely that China will voluntarily move towards democracy.

Allowing for that then, competing great powers with differing views of society, the individual's place in it and of the means and ways of economic production underpinning it all will dramatically alter, redefine, disturb the current international order over the next 25 years - these competing powers, because of needs and aspirations that will sometimes be complimentary, will seek to find a mutually beneficial equilibrium amongst themselves - history seems to suggest they won't easily find it.

Now, certainly one can argue that just because China can't or won't evolve into a democracy doesn't mean they are destined to become a foe of the West - but of course that's just a guess, there's no way to demonstrate the legitimacy of such a claim - and so me saying we are destined to come to blows at some point in the not so very distant future is an equally valid claim [unless of course Obama wins a second term, in  which case American might will become so hollowed out and emasculated that a significant confrontation between us and them won't even be possible - they'll have to settle on getting into it with India. Brave new fucking world indeed].

This post has been somewhat wandering and incoherent [and poorly written, don't forget that - and now of course the blemish of redundancy] - but the main point I think is fairly clear and not beyond being considered valid [despite me offering no evidence whatsoever in support of it*] - given the facts governing China's economy and its ongoing rise to great power status it's very hard to see why it would choose to embrace democratic reforms - of course one can argue China may be forced, because of various dynamics percolating through the society, to adopt democratic reforms regardless of what its leaders may want or wish - but still it's impossible to predict what those reforms may look like, how successful they may prove or if in the end they don't result in an even more entrenched absolutism among the ruling classes. Assuming then a powerful yet undemocratic China jostling for room and resources with a still powerful US, a rising India, an ineffectual but still important EU etc etc we see that this coming new international order - a mere 10, 20 at most 50 years away - will have to endure, tolerate if you will, some uncomfortable and ungainly arrangements and relations between its competing powers and competing blocs of powers. Finding comity amongst these arrayed powers and their influences will not be easy. It seems reasonable therefore to remain a China sceptic - assuming of course certain liberal elites do not succeed in turning America into Europe's coarse cousin [this is the hidden goal of the liberal agenda, no? To weaken America so it can't disturb this coming new order?].

* an article in FP talks about how China walked away from Copenhagen climate talks because of Clinton insistence on transparency - the writer's point being that China as a matter of state policy lies, distorts, fudges numbers related to its economy - last thing in the world it wants then are teams of climate control inspectors wandering the country opening doors and shining lights.

Is it true that Chavez made outlandish speech at Copenhagen climate fest descrying the twin horrors of capitalism and America and that a ruined planet is the bitter harvest the long suffering masses will reap from those blighted seeds sown? And that this speech was followed by mass murderer Mugabe unwinding with similar invocations of evil? And that the audience cheered loudly for them both?

Of course, possible only crackpots would attend lectures given by crackpots - still, who knows? It certainly raises a very troubling point: I don't know much about the science of global warming - I'd probably classify myself a mild [!] skeptic regarding it - but the politics of it definitely concerns me, and Copenhagen doesn't appear to be doing much to alleviate those fears - and when China refuses to support an American proposal because of Clinton insisting on guarantees of 'transparency' vis a vis reports of actual emissions being cut? That tells me my fears are justified - for some if not many countries this is more about geostrategic politicking [ie let's fuck America] and less about climate control. Just as the UN is farcically inefficient when it comes to 'big' issues because of the free rein given to entirely inappropriate and often delusional agendas and the fantasy of thinking you can drag some workable consensus out of that mire, so to with climate change one fears - how do you unmuddy those waters?

I admit to knowing little or nothing about the science - but I don't think you need to be an expert to see that no matter how sound the science may or may not be the politics underwriting it is decidedly worrisome.

Does the democrats, the hyper ones that is, the progressives, does their insistence on a public option reveal why they can never be allowed to run a powerful country like the US - their sentimentality, their framing everything with emotional imperatives that are largely disconnected from the realities of governing something as unsentimental as a superpower - or does it indicate their extremists have adopted the Machiavellian artifices so ably employed by republican extremists ie the 'public option' would be a great political tool for them in the same way god and guns are great utilities for the GOP? Important difference, I think - but, then again, maybe not? I mean, how useful can the tool be if you don't act in a manner consistent with the ideals associated with it? Which is why, lacking alternatives, better a conservative ideologue than a liberal one?

"... at this point I'd be willing to speculate that the only way to win in Afghanistan is by losing... what I mean is, the initial invasion was a success, everyone agrees on that, with far fewer troops than are committed now and some help from the Northern Alliance, we sent the Taliban running... the mistake made was that we didn't stop them from running and they disappeared into Pakistan where they continue to operate and recruit from today... Pakistan remains the problem since success seems impossible without their help and they won't commit to helping because they don't trust we're actually going to finish the job and they feel the Taliban is a good alliance for them to maintain should Afghanistan devolve into civil war again once we leave... which is why Obama setting a deadline for leaving was such a huge mistake... if Pakistan won't help then chances for victory are thin, if not non existent... so recreate the initial conditions by losing... lure the Taliban back from Pakistan, let them expose themselves by taking over again, secure Pakistan's support in locking down the border, drop thousands of American troops into the mountains to close off escape routes, and then redo the invasion... recreate the conditions on the ground that initially allowed for success but fix the crucial flaw... of course, it could never be that simple and the Taliban may not be the same animal regardless, they may not be as easily displaced this time... still, if you can't draw the Taliban out into the open, win Pakistan's support and shut down that border to a sufficient degree, I can't see how you win anything resembling a lasting victory in Afghanistan, especially with the restrictions regarding time and numbers that Obama has placed on the mission..."

Conservatives have adopted Obama's Nobel speech as if it came from one of their own - hawkish right wing luminary Max Boot called it a masterpiece - I can't agree, even though it was somewhat well crafted [aside from some cloying wobbles into sentimentality, but I suppose you have to appease public tastes with these things], generally free from his usual nebulous idealist effusions and presented a view of American foreign policy that was distinctly moderate and reasonable and unburdened by liberal guilt, realistic if you will [although many now are criticizing the obviousness of some of the points it attempted to make ie the idea of 'just war' etc etc - and George Will has written a nice piece drawing attention to the fact that Obama can't seem to make a speech about anything without the subject of himself coming to dominate it - Will is fascinated by how many times the personal pronoun appears in the Nobel speech even though ostensibly it was supposed to be a defense of American foreign policy]. Nevertheless, I can't share an optimism that wants to believe that the speech represents Obama moderating his liberal ideology, of him growing into the presidency, as I think Boot put it - it could be that, sure, it could also be him throwing red meat to conservatives before heading off to Copenhagen to sell the country down the global warming river [an extreme example of a possible ulterior motive, but not out of the question] - in short, another political calculation - in fact, from what so far has been revealed about Obama and his inner circle and their way of governing, I'd say that without supporting evidence it'd be naive to think the speech anything other than a political calculation - after all, as I've said before, having made the dubious choice to accept the honour what option did he have but to give a speech similar to this? But what if he doesn't actually believe in the rhetoric? What if subsequent actions do not adequately reflect the somewhat realist tone of it? In a wider context then, outside of its political utility, wouldn't the speech end up doing more harm than good if it's only intention was to be a clever speech that conservatives could embrace?

I don't wanna be the constant cynic here [well, I do, actually] but my tendency is to think it very unwise to read too much into the speech. I freely grant that it may represent Obama's world view maturing under the weight of his responsibilities - but my instincts tell me otherwise.

Obama picks up his Nobel Peace Prize today - when it was first announced the farcical absurdity of it was so astounding one quickly turned their back to it like to a bad joke one hopes to get away from - but now that the day is here I think I see what a mistake it was for him to accept the honour - he should have politely turned it down, that was the only honourable and, much more importantly, strategically sound thing to do with such a specious and tawdry attempt at manipulation - although I guess it's emblematic of his idea of leadership that he fancies the supposed brilliance of the coming speech will make everything seem right [regardless of him speaking of war as a necessary evil raised in defense of a common good, which I take it is a theme the speech did in fact broach - I mean, let's face it, for an American president, no matter how liberal he may be, to talk about 'peace' in terms other than that would have been ludicrous] [the honour bestowed is intended as a trap by those that dislike, distrust and disdain America, and even if you walk into it with eyes open, it's still a trap - you can only gain the appearance of twisting it to your advantage - or I should say to the advantage of a reasonable and well founded American foreign policy - which, having now read the speech, clearly seems to have been Obama's intention].

What to make of this deadline that's not a deadline? In the week since Obama announced his Afghan plan all the recognizable 'hawks' involved [Gates, Clinton, Petraeus] have been studiously walking back the idea of a firm deadline, walked it back so far that it now seems less an established boundary and more a vague smudge so ambiguously etched into the sand that its intent is lost - and yet the deleterious effect of it persists. In COIN you don't want a deadline, it sends the wrong message and is not in keeping with the internal logic of the strategy. Regardless, if political necessity forces a deadline upon you then it can't appear arbitrary, detached from a coherent and practical rationale, and for the very same reasons you don't want one in the first place: it sends the wrong message to the target population, props up the sense of inevitability that a revolutionary zeal feeds off of and is fundamentally at odds with the logical assumptions made in support of COIN.

And so, what to make of this deadline that's not a deadline? Yet more evidence of the Obama administration playing politics with the Afghan problem? A mistake, either in conception or presentation [the speech], that inexplicably only appeared egregious after the fact? Candy tossed at the uber left in hopes of mollifying them? Obama going rogue? The manifestation of a doctrinal split in the cabinet muddling policy? No one knows - people are left to draw their own conclusions - which is bad, because the conclusions Afghans and the Taliban and AQ are going to draw work against your long term interests if your goal is to beat down extremism and stabilize the region.

"... you reference Obama's desire to speed up the deployment and don't mention that the purpose of that may well be to better suit the elections cycle? How the putative beginning of the end of the surge conveniently falls right between the midterm and presidential elections? Your own Robert Haddick has asked in these very pages how does it make sense to plan to begin drawing down troops in the middle of the Taliban's fighting season? It makes sense if your main concern is politics. This whole thing has been orchestrated to suit a political schedule and political imperatives - the plan he has settled on could easily have been settled on months ago - many 'experts' I read fearfully believed and predicted months ago that this is exactly what he'd do, choose some compromised middle ground that would offer the fewest political downsides.

The only logical explanations for the plan and its long gestation period are: that Obama really didn't want to go down this road and had to be dragged here by Gates and Clinton and the Generals and thus the odd time line and bet hedging; or it's all part of a political calculation - Obama knew he couldn't just walk away and so the question became how to do this while incurring the least amount of political damage.

This process and resulting plan were not the result of laudable intellectualism or Rumsfeldian micromanaging: they're either a reflection of fear and doubt or of politics at its most cynical. This attempt by some to recast what has happened here as a noble if not heroic effort by Obama to subdue the Afghan beast by means of his lofty and unyielding intellect is vain and delusional at best, sycophantic at worst..."

Well - seems the problem that caused such a long delay in the rendering of Obama's Afghan decision was not the decision itself but rather how to construct a speech about it that would give to some the impression he was rising to meet the challenge and to others the conceit 'I don't really wanna do this, but the only way I can step back is by taking a few steps forward' - because the plan he's announced is exactly what most in the know figured it would be: a Goldilocks solution, a middling compromise, a commitment that's not really a commitment, a message that says to the generals essentially 'I'm gonna give you just enough tools to do something while constricting your ability to blame me should you fail to do that something - in other words, give it the old college try, because when I eventually blame Bush for all this I won't be taken seriously unless it looks like I sincerely tried to fix it - oh, and you've only got a year to do it - but that's enough, right? since the only goal here really is to make me look credible...'

From what I can tell the central problem of Obama's strategy is that it's built around a debilitating contradiction: in essence, as regards COIN the fewer troops you send the more flexible your timeline has to be - and yet Obama has imposed a fixed, limited, and probably in the end unreasonable timeline upon an incongruously modest troop deployment - this works against the logic of COIN as Petraeus and McChrystal understand it and have defined it.

All of which suggests to me that this is will amount to a token effort, the result of either Obama being reluctantly dragged towards action by Clinton and Gates or he and his team figuring the only worthwhile victory to be wrought from this bitter harvest will be a political one for the Obamai.

Robert Haddick over at the esteemed Small Wars Journal seems to agree with me:

The most controversial feature is his decision to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from the country in July 2011. This feature (no doubt aligned with his re-election plans – why else withdraw troops at the start of the Afghan summer fighting season?) is a fatal flaw and makes it very likely that little will go right for his Afghan strategy. Indeed, it negates the point of hastily adding over 30,000 U.S. and European soldiers in 2010.

Over the past three months President Obama and his team have analyzed the Afghanistan problem from first principles. Yet in spite of this effort, their solution is not likely to make the problem go away. Regrettably, the next few years are likely to reveal that America still lacks a winning strategy for modern irregular conflict.

I'm confused - I keep reading from 'experts' that China and Russia can still be convinced to join in a serious rebuke of Iran - just read another article about China being amenable etc etc - but I don't see that at all - the question I pose is: if they're open to joining forces with us, then why haven't they? Obviously they want something, either in return for their cooperation, or as a consequence of drawing out the process with no intention of ultimately cooperating - which suggests they're not so much concerned with Iran getting the bomb as they are with how they can manipulate the situation to improve their position in the world relative to the US. So, again, what are these experts talking about when they speak in positive terms about Russia and China's intentions viz Iran? All I'm seeing are calculations being made that will either result in Iran going nuclear or Israel interceding to forestall such a thing - and I believe both China and Russia imagine that in either case advantages accrue to them, both as concerns the price of oil, which will suit Russia just fine, and the prospect of increased influence in the region, directly and through proxies, and at America's expense, which I take to be China's true objective here.

Iran announces construction of 10 new uranium processing facilities - ok - provocation or feint? Or both? Or simply cavalier bravado? Feint - in order to throw smoke across the network of secret facilities like one revealed at Qom - also, since such a ramp up in production would seem to be overkill, new construction likely for dummy facilities whose sole purpose would be to seriously complicate any plans Israel may have concerning a military intervention. Feint/decoy makes sense I suppose.

But what would be the purpose of a provocation? True, a feint in and of itself amounts to a provocation as well - but if provocation is the main motive, to what end? Don't see it - which means it must be the feint/decoy - could it be the more bravado and disdain they show in the face of Western opposition the sweeter will be their victory when Obama eventually backs down? There's something of a logic there if one has concluded that Obama brings nothing to the table worth fearing.

Still, if we agree that it amounts to a provocation regardless of how one parses it, what would that say about the regime and how it views itself, the capabilities of its enemies and the calculations of its friends, either announced or standing coyly off stage? It's hard to come up with an answer to that question that doesn't cause worry.

I'm curious - I don't know if someone has considered this - they must have, it seems so obvious - I just don't recall reading anything addressing my concern or curiosity here - namely, with all this gaming going on between China and the US re climate change policy, emission goals etc etc, doesn't it seem likely or at least suspiciously not unlikely that China is pulling the US into a trap here, a trap that the US can't back away from without looking bad? I mean, why would China be so interested in environmental concerns? Seems a highly counter intuitive initiative on their part to me - hell, it's not an open society or transparent polity, if they say they plan to reduce emissions by 20% or whatever how will it be possible to confirm the truth of their claims? Everyone knows they lie about military expenditures, about real GDP numbers, about the true state of their banks, about public health concerns, about social unrest - we're suddenly just going to take their word on climate initiatives? Especially, when viewed objectively, it's hard to see why they'd be so interested in putting constraints on their industrial output, the very thing driving their economy? Sure, I'm a sceptic by nature and am always prepared to doubt the sincerity of somthing, but I have trouble understanding why a person wouldn't be sceptical about China's intentions here.

Of course, the problem is figuring out how luring the US into a trap that hobbles its economy is to China's benefit [pushing America increasingly towards enervating European style policy positions certainly comes to mind - social welfare, state intrusion everywhere, high taxes, sentimentality - these things are not helpful if you're America] - given short term economic concerns China trying to drag the US into some kind of statist inertia doesn't seem in their best interests - but as regards long term geo-strategic considerations? I could see how they may think that long term advantages outweigh short term disadvantages. I don't understand the parameters of the global economy well enough to figure out how everything would or could play out here - I certainly hope though that the people who do understand the fine print are as fond of scepticism as I am.

"... the question will be how much wiggle room does he leave himself - how many declarations leave themselves open to substantially different interpretations of intent - how much of what is 'promised' is subject to contingencies - already we read in the Times this morning that he'll approximate McChrystal's troops request by relying on an unrealistic expectation of increased numbers from allies - that suggests to me an announcement on Tuesday potentially compromised by significant presence of smoke and mirrors.

But to even speculate with some optimism as you do here Feaver becomes in the end essentially [to conjure evil spectre of Sarah] the putting of lipstick on a pig - Obama took so long with this decision because ultimately he has no faith in it and he has no faith in it because it suggests a world view he cannot comfortably abide - this is a man who sees himself giving grand, idealistic speeches and cavalierly pushing for a Great Society Redux during the worst economic downturn in decades - but war? C'mon.

My guess is that what we'll see on Tuesday will be the result of a lot of arm twisting by Gates and Clinton and Obama thinking that after interminable deliberation he has managed to reason out an appropriate answer - but an intellectual construct that is not supported by belief, by a faith in one's purpose, will not hold up under pressure, will not endure. It won't - and I'm guessing the Taliban knows it - they've taken their measure of our 'Professor in Chief' and they ain't goin' nowhere..."

Obama suggests in press conference today that he will announce his Afghan decision next week, adding that he 'intends to finish the job' - which seems to imply that he will either be giving McChrystal roughly what he wants - or redefining what 'getting the job done' means. It's not impossible, with his poll numbers dipping and his presidency in something of a funk, it's not impossible that he could seek to transform the narrative and go with the former - I have a hard time believing it's anything but that latter though. That it was a rehearsed answer to a planted question that tried to imply victory but in ambiguous terms leads me to believe they're trying to aggressively sell the positives of an argument fraught with negatives. Still, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they entirely surprised me here.

[yes, but, c'mon - you'd be shocked if he committed to a robust effort to 'win' the war in a manner that conformed with what the generals thought winning to mean - true, and I don't know how exactly I'll account for it if he does make such a commitment - strike that: it will definitely indicate a backroom victory by Gates and Clinton over the skeptics - I've already speculated that such is the very reason Gates thought it important to stay on as SecDef, and that Clinton has fostered a close relationship with both Gates and Petraeus is common knowledge. Still, regardless, I will definitely be shocked if there's not some significant compromise built into the plan as means to mollify the uber left.

And I maintain that it is wrong to view his unending deliberation over the question as a good thing - there's a front page article in the Post this morning basically lionizing Obama as the 'Professor in Chief' - I think this is a naive and fundamentally flawed interpretation of what has happened here - this is a type of decision and responsibility completely outside of his ideological comfort zone - he tried to subdue it with reason but it is not the type of thing that reason can control - he only gets to where apparently he is with a lot of arm twisting from Gates and Clinton - because the answer to the question is pretty obvious: a 'loss' in Afghanistan will generate serious consequences for years down the road and therefore you have to try and 'win' - now, of course there is much to debate concerning how to go about it and I've certainly expressed much skepticism re COIN - but I don't think that's what he was debating, I think it's much more likely he was looking for some credible way to extricate himself from the mess and that Gates and Clinton eventually convinced him that there wasn't - remember, if six months from now things are going badly and the left is feeling betrayed and loudly expressing it, the lauding in the Post as 'Professor in Chief' will prove cold comfort indeed - reasoning and intellect can only take you so far here and it's utterly naive if not delusional to believe otherwise - if Obama has settled his own fears by imaging he's reasoned out the 'right' answer I would expect to see his confidence in the rightness of that answer to quickly fade and his commitment to the 'Afghan problem' to fade with it should things get ugly. I expect the Taliban is thinking the very same thing - ergo, watch for things to get ugly.

After all - he made very quick decisions on the stimulus plan and health care overhaul, both of which seem poorly constructed with the latter also being unpopular with a majority of voters - no endless deliberation there even though those things will have a much more immediate effect on the population's sense of well being - why? - because the emotional elements are already defined for him - he's on ideological terra firma there - but war requires the marshaling of much intellect because he has no ingrained instinct to rely on with such issues - people who see this as a good thing are fooling themselves because an intellectual commitment requires an emotional commitment to sustain it - without the re-enforcing component of faith in ones purpose the intellectual scaffolding will collapse under pressure]

"... of course, the interesting thing about asymmetric warfare is that it's asymmetric... I mean, it doesn't attempt to match the destructive power of the thing it opposes but rather degrade it on an emotional level... to which I answer, subtend the regressive emotion with a more proactive one and utterly destroy the motherfuckers..."

This decision to conduct civilian trials for a group of the worst offenders from Gitmo, including 9/11 mastermind KSM, is troubling - as in it doesn't seem to make any sense, unless one accepts conservative taking point that this is just a way to put the Bush administration on trial by proxy for the purposes of mollifying the uber left - the argument I guess being that in a civilian trial all the torture and other supposed abuses of due process endorsed by Bush will perforce be put on trial too.

If that's the reason then of all the bad decisions Obama has made so far this may go to the top of the list because from what I've read there seems to be a plethora of downside here and very little if any upside - the rationalization that this somehow sends a good message to the wider world viz American ideals of justice and openness seems ridiculous seeing as how KSM has already been prejudged and the outcome predetermined making it but a show trail which, for my money, would seem to discredit the system, not redeem it - hell, Obama himself went public yesterday with the pledge that KSM would certainly be executed which, as one wag put it, so sullies the jury pool that you'll be able to traverse it by walking on the bloated corpses.

Throw in not only the security concerns for New York, but the very real national security concerns since, if KSM chooses to act as his own attorney, he has the right to see all the evidence against him - the fact you're giving a soap box to the guy which, if he's as clever as I imagine he is, he'll be able to manipulate to his heart's content - the truly vexing problem of blurring the line between civilian and military forms of justice to the detriment of the latter - if OBL is captured tomorrow, will he have to be read his Miranda rights? will he have constitutionally protected right to remain silent? will a chain of evidence need to be secured? if we deny him a civilian trail, how can that now be legitimately justified? Lindsey Graham, in questioning the AG yesterday, brought to light two troubling realities: one, breaking down the barrier between military and civilian justice creates real problems on the battle field when it comes to dealing with illegal combatants; and two, the AG had no good answers for the senator - which says to me they haven't really thought this through - which seems to lend credence to the idea that their motivation is strictly ideological, placate the uber left.

I'm hardly an expert on jurisprudence [well, I'm hardly an expert on anything, truth be told] - but I've read nothing that convincingly suggests this is anything other than a reckless and utterly misguided act of blind partisanship that plays fast and loose with real issues regarding national security. 

... you're playing at semantics, being way too delicate - Obama owned this war the moment he decided to run for president - hell, the moment he decided to juice up his political ambitions by opposing the Iraq war he owned it because at that moment he was letting it be known that he understood 'the big questions' and was willing and able to make the big decisions thereof - he compounded this avowal and commitment and responsibility by embracing the war in Afghanistan during the election - if he didn't understand the nature of that responsibility or didn't care to examine it too closely for fear such an examination might undermine the political utility of looking like a guy who could make 'the big decisions', well, who's to blame for that?

The great unknown about Obama [although personally I thought the answer quite obvious] was what would happen when he had to make a difficult decision that fell outside of his ideological comfort zone. Pass a leviathan of a stimulus package, easy! Pursue massive health care reform - can make that choice over breakfast - those things all nicely comply with his ideological imperatives. But war? The cold hard realities of foreign policy? The brutal, visceral cunning of power, of force against force?

Obama's apologists would have that this endless debate is a good thing but I say it's a manifestation of fear - there's no safe refuge of ideological purity here, no quick satisfaction of acting in accordance with a naive world view that has served him well til now but is a template that no longer fits the harsh realities on the ground. He's afraid and wants to believe that an endless appeal to reason or the vanities of an intellectual inertia will subdue the demons waiting in the shadows, will free him from the curse of action.

Obama can deal with health care reform not going as he may have planned because the ideological satisfaction will still be there to sustain him. But a war decision that doesn't go as he would hope? Or a complication or confrontation on the global stage that resists his charms and insists in acting against his wishes? We've seen his response: every foreign policy gesture he has made since taking office has telegraphed a preference for compromise and accommodation - has telegraphed weakness. He did try to play tough with Israel but even backed down from that - wisely, as far as I'm concerned, but still.

His apologists will loudly declaim against such a portrayal, and obviously the man could still prove me wrong - but until facts emerge that suggest otherwise I'll maintain that America has not elected another Jimmy Carter, they've elected someone worse.

My catty response to Walt, a real lefty foreign policy guy, who wrote a critique of COIN [which I myself have certainly done] based on assumptions that were absurdly simplistic. I guess this is his way of saying that Obama wouldn't be making such a mess of his erstwhile commitment to the Afghan effort if there were no Afghan effort to make a mess of - ie if he's making mistakes that's only because Bush created an environment where those mistakes could be made, therefore, in a sense, the mistakes don't really exist. I can't wait to tell my ex-wife that I don't owe her alimony because if we had never been married I could never have cheated on her.

A remarkably fatuous argument. Surely it was constructed as part of an ironical lampoon of the FP analysis community, yes?

So, if I follow the logic of your thinking, if we hadn't foolishly invaded Iraq in 2003, but, given Saddam's predilections and the endemic complications of the region, we had been required to do so a few years latter, of course only in accordance with principles you judged legitimate, that that war, because it wasn't conceived by fools, would have gone swimmingly and no insurgency would have dared arise. In other words, insurgencies only happen to bad people.

Likewise, again, if I grasp your line of reasoning here, if we hadn't screwed the pooch in Tora Bora but rather had delivered unto OBL on those windswept rocks the full reckoning he deserved, then Islamic radicalism and its necessary dependency on asymmetric warfare and adjunct affiliation with Taliban-like fundamentalism would have vanished with him. In other words, jihad and its appurtenances only happen to bad people.

I now understand your enthusiastic embrace of Obama: the comfort of history and human nature re-imagined not to express the things that are but rather the things we wish had been. It's all so simple.

In response to Niall Ferguson essay on how the current economic crisis will perforce cause a change in the rules governing relations between China and US viz dollar valuations and trade and competition etc I ask, possibly in the manner of 'what I know simply, I simply don't know' - is it true that if China stops pegging its dollar, allowing it to rise against US currency and thusly supposedly mitigating trade imbalance between the two countries - won't Chinese consumers then be required to purchase American products and services which in turn will require a lifting of restrictions on the citizenry and engender a need for an embrace of Western values concerning individual rights and freedoms etc etc much in the manner of post war Japan? Since China has benefited a great deal from an artificially valued currency and fears the consequences of liberalization, doesn't that indicate a conflict is brewing here? Simply can't know limited as I am to only knowing it simply - seems like a problem to me though. I imagine there are several reasons why post war Japan was willing to adopt western values - but certainly one of them was that their past had been significantly discredited - can we really expect any significant liberalization in China without a similar discrediting?

Obama bows to Japan's emperor - really bows, gets way down there, practically prostrates self - the optics of it are certainly ugly, and if I had a relative who died on Iwo Jima or Okinawa et al trying to root out a fanaticism embodied by the emperor I'd certainly have trouble keeping the breakfast down waking up to that photo - but aside from the embarrassing optics, is it right to infer a darker more disturbing presence behind the gesture? Can it be seen as emblematic of Obama's view of America and its place in the world? Does it demonstrate an ingratiating naiveté about what it means to be a global power in a dangerous world and the bedrock upon which democratic principles and Western values rest?

Conservatives obviously think so - livid, shamed, repulsed pretty much sums up what I'm hearing from the right regarding the photo - and one cannot deny that since taking office the message Obama has sent out to the world, either explicitly in the Muslim apology speech, or implicitly in various other speeches and actions [Afghanistan, Iran, missile defense, the F-22 etc etc] that telegraphed a chastened America, a humbled America, an America in retreat, an America no longer exceptional or fit to unilaterally lead like-minded nations - the message he has sent out is that America under him will be governed by ideals and priorities possibly not in keeping with or commensurate to its status and role as a great and paramount power.

That may be to put it too harshly - but essentially accurate all the same I think. Still, that being said, I'm not so sure the photo can be taken as a definite expression of this new American persona under Obama - it could just be him trying to impress the Japanese in a way that his handlers thought astute - in which case I'd say their motive may have been reasonable but the way they pursued it was entirely misguided. It's an ugly photo that verges on disturbing.

[it's not possible, is it - is it? - that they stage these things on purpose in order to rile up the right wing base knowing full well that the more animated and vexed the republican extremes are the easier it will be to pass Obama off as a moderate?]

My immediate reaction to Obama administration announcing it is now going to adopt an attitude of budgetary discipline after indulging in a near Bacchanalia of spending? I'd say that operatives are so convinced of the efficacy of Obama's putative charms that they have come to believe that good policy is merely the result of effective stagecraft - that no matter how stupid, wrong-headed, ill-advised, ill-considered, ideologically tendentious, shamefully superficial, cynically preened, pandering, driven by a shallow concern for optics something they may do may be they don't care - they obviously believe that as long as they can get Obama up in front of a camera to declare solemnly that whatever he chooses to do must be right and good and beyond reproach then enough suckers will buy into it to indeed make it appear to be exactly that.

"... personally, he's lauded for having masterful political skills but what I see comes across as superficial and vain... though I'm entirely aware that the two states need not be mutually exclusive... but I just don't think the man gives a good speech... the delivery is too studied, the language over wrought, the aesthetics too self conscious... it's as if Pericles, following the success of the funeral oration, had tailored every subsequent speech after it to the effect that his style became cloying and mawkish, with the original as consequence being demeaned and drained of value... thankfully, Thucydides was a better writer than that..."

Former General who was once in charge of Afghanistan and presently is US ambassador to that wretched place has come forward - rather, it has been made known that he has strongly advised Obama that he thinks an upping of troops to be a bad idea. A resource I trust says, and I guess it makes sense, that the secret counsel was leaked by someone in the White House - not likely a military operative loyal to McChrystal and Petraeus out to get Eikenberry [the general] for opposing their plan - Eikenberry's position as ambassador now probably untenable since in leaked cables he shat all over Karzai in particular and the whole Afghan gov't in general - no, the suspicion is it was leaked by someone opposed to an Afghan surge who either wanted to put pressure on Obama or, more likely as far as I'm concerned, did so as means of preparing the ground of public opinion for a rejection of McChrystal and Petraeus by Obama. Regardless, the consensus seems to be that the leak will serve only to make a bad situation worse.

There's an alternative theory that Eikenberry leaked the material himself in order to short dick McChrystal - apparently they have a jaundiced relationship - and promote a plan of his own that accentuates more non-military aid to Afghanistan - in which case I guess he would be the one trying to sway Obama's position with public pressure, not some insider [I was thinking Rahm baby]. Remember, McChrystal, or someone close to him, leaked his recommendations in a similar attempt one assumes to pressure Obama - it appears someone figured turn around was fair play - but to what end and with what consequences?

If Obama himself is the source of this end around in attempt to curry favour with a public that may be troubled by a break with the generals - and if indeed the end result of the ploy is a bad situation has been sorely aggravated - well, then my prediction that Obama and the military could be on a collision course starts to look plausible. If, on the the other hand, Obama had nothing to do with it, that it was Eikenbarry acting alone or someone close to Obama [like Emanuel] who went rogue thinking it was a clever maneuver - does that then mean Obama has lost control of the process? I once hypothesized that I could see an over matched Obama bringing an academic-like inertia to difficult policy decisions, that when action and cold calculation were required regarding a decision fraught with peril and representing a threat to his ideological purity and the well crafted persona thereof, I speculated that faced with such a dilemma he would seek refuge in trying to reason away the unpleasantness, burying the uncompromising facts in endless debate until ambitious underlings stepped forward and settled the issue for him - could that be what's happening here?

Of course it's impossible to know if what's happening is part of a deliberate strategy or the result of a dysfunctional process - but reagrdless I think it's safe to say that increasingly eyes are narrowing and brows are furrowing on the military side of things.

Max Boot over at Contentions shares my bewilderment cum despair [rather more appropriately since he's someone and I'm not - I share his]:

One would think that the merits of this position would have been hashed out long ago (like, say, back in March, when the results of the last Afghan policy review were announced) and that President Obama would have concluded by now that we can’t simply write off Afghanistan because of the “corruption and ineffectiveness” of its government. But, no, Eikenberry’s cables seem to have landed with the impact of a mortar round in the White House and, if leaks are to believed, they have further reinforced the president’s tendency toward hesitation and doubt.
It does not exactly inspire confidence to read this account of the latest NSC meeting, from the New York Times:

A central focus of Mr. Obama’s questions, officials said, was how long it would take to see results and be able to withdraw.
“He wants to know where the off-ramps are,” one official said.

So the president is already looking to leave Afghanistan before he has even committed more forces? He’s more interested in an exit strategy than a strategy for success? What a terrible message to send to our troops and what a heartening message to send to our enemies.

It’s hard to know, of course, if this is an accurate reflection of what the man in the Oval Office is thinking — or simply a reflection of what the aides who are providing all these quotes for the media are thinking. Whatever the case, this bespeaks an extraordinarily chaotic and undisciplined White House decision-making process, with the president’s most senior advisers playing out their disagreements in public even after Gen. Stanley McChrystal had been chastised for making his own views known.

Although there is clearly a liberal bias in the media, and an adjunct adoration of the Obama child following close behind - indeed, each is fuel to the other's flame - although this is clear, I tend to avoid commenting on it because such seems a bit petty - a lot of the vitriol on the right regarding it comes off sounding like small minded excuse mongering - I tend to want to believe the bias is beside the point and not worthy of scorn, even though one could easily imagine scenarios where that decidedly would not be true.

But then an example so brazen jumps out at you and starts you thinking maybe you've entirely underestimated the insidious nature of it - case in point: Anita Dunn resigns as White House communications director, the same Anita Dunn who in a summer speech extolled the virtues of Mao's teachings and then tried to pass this praise off as a bad joke gone awry - I read about her resignation on CNN's website - they chose not to mention in any way whatsoever why she's gone, instead simply quoting her as saying 'it was never my intention to stay long'. That's a pretty blatant tailoring of the news to suit a political agenda - or is it simply a business agenda spilling over into a political one?

CNN has fallen to the bottom of the news ratings pile and consequently have increasingly slanted leftward in an attempt to gain market share - it's embarrassing, unseemly, possibly insidious - but is it dangerous? And at what point can one distinguish a business imperative from a politically biased one?  [is there a consoling irony in a private media company selling its soul for market share by suppressing truth re socialist Obama's Mao loving operative in order to gain favour with Dear Leader partisans in hopes they'll grease wheels of capitalism by choosing Coke over Pepsi? Ah, there's a twisted something in there - don't know about salubrious effects of irony]

Ricks, and many of his readers, parried my thrust and thusly went my riposte:

Well, Mr Ricks, I entirely disagree. I read you often at the Post and read your books as well because, even though one could sense a bias influencing your writing, it was sufficiently hidden away, which allowed me to suspend judgment long enough to give you the benefit of the doubt and properly consider your point of view. I don't read you much anymore because your prevailing 'sentiments', as Zathras would have it, are too forward and consequently get in the way - but I suppose if you're only writing to please the people already predisposed to share your opinion then a gauze of sentiment is not an issue - in fact, for the Zathras-like out there in the mawkish blogsphere, it's no doubt a necessity.

Personally, if I read Descartes, I accept he's highly motivated to prove the existence of a God, but as an agnostic I'm not going to give his Meditations the time of day if he can't win my trust that his arguments will be fair and evenhanded. I understand you Obamaphiles are anxious to demonstrate the godliness of Dear Leader, but still I wonder how it is you expect your devotion to be taken seriously by nonbelievers when you can't even proffer a simple but legitimate criticism of the man without at the same time feeling the need to apologize for it as if you feared a fall from grace.

Yet another rebuke of Ricks - don't know why this guy bothers me so much, seems he's come to symbolise for me the unhealthy nexus of Obama hagiography and press bias - suppose because I used to read him a lot in early days of wars when he was at the Post - latest offense: tries to upbraid Obama for endless debate of Afghanistan policy but can't bring himself to do so without offering salve of "but I still love you!" Unseemly shit. 

Still an Obama fan? One can argue he has failed in all his first five foreign policy tests: bungled response to putative coup in Honduras; naive approach to Iran; mishandling of missile defense in Poland; confusion and mixed signals viz Israel; a credibility undermining farce with Afghanistan [has anyone in the Oval Office read Galula on the importance of not showing a weakness that may cause a target population to question your commitment if you want a COIN strategy to work?].

But I'm not going to dwell on Obama's many failings. My beef with you Ricks is why do you feel the need or think it's legitimate to make known your political bias and declare which insufferable pol you're a 'fan' of? Ostensibly, you're an analyst, you're supposed to be objective - if your opinion is to have any value whatsoever one has to be able to believe it's not vitiated by a bias! What is wrong with you people?

One is either a well reasoned commentator or a political hack, you can't be both. Of course people have their sympathies, but you wanna be taken seriously as a critic of something you better make an effort to keep yours stifled - you certainly don't proudly proclaim like a giddy school girl what a fan you are of the Obama - you should be bloody well embarrassed for saying something like that.

I remember thinking when the BBC welcomed that anti-immigration racial extremist on their most popular political talk show that it's too bad the guy's a bit of a nut job cause not everything he's saying is nuts - and then I remember thinking but of course you have to be an extremist nut job to say these things because no mainstream politician would dare say these things - and then I remember thinking that that's the real problem here, isn't it? Not the nut job per se but the fact that everyone's too busy being outraged to consider the possibility that maybe the guy is making some good points?

Well, sure enough, polls show that a significant portion of the British electorate weren't too busy acting outraged to listen since many seemed to agree with him, in part at least - meaning, yes, the real news was being missed by politically correct pundits and politicians: a significant number of non-nut job native born Englanders are not happy with immigration policy.

And of course not soon after the poll release you then get the Labour Immigration minister admitting that mistakes have been made - but, and this is interesting, only by referencing unemployment problems - in other words, decidedly avoiding the 'clash of cultures' question - in other words, out of fear or political correctness or under the influence of a blinding liberal ideology, they chose to interpret the poll results in a way that explicitly attempted to avoid what may be the most pressing and significant question raised by the poll: does England, and all of western Europe for that matter, have a Muslim problem?

I don't know the answer to that question - I do know that it is a legitimate question and that it's curious if not telling how anxious some are to avoid asking it.

Do I have a point other than finding it 'curious'? Well... probably that we're being told that in order to get along with foreign cultures you need to respect them, but isn't that putting the cart before the horse? Isn't that to falsely acclaim an idealised notion of the nature of open societies, of liberal democracies, over a more reality based notion of such? ie isn't it the foreign culture's responsibility to accept, to adopt, to respect the tenets guiding our way of life before they can hope for respect in return? And when a foreign culture is governed by an ideology that resists change, rejects such an acceptance, don't you have a problem? There are no Athens in Islam, no Romes, no Magna Cartas, no revolutions Glorious, French or American - when Islam moves it steps backwards, not forwards. Of course, on a pragmatic level, it's all about numbers and a problem only becomes a problem when the numbers become too big to ignore - but isn't it naive to think that there's nothing wrong with a Western Europe that will be 20% Muslim by 2050? [possibly the tactful, more respectable way to put this is to ask: if you have a large Muslim population and a significant portion of that population is frustrated by their lives in the West and come to blame the West for that frustration and as a consequence openly oppose integration according to Western norms while adhering to a religion that not only endorses and validates such an opposition but is apt to preach that only the violent overthrow of the offending infidels can effectively ease the pain of association with them - well, then, isn't that a problem? Seems like a problem]

What I find curious is how Western Civilization [to speak in general terms] seems to want to act as if it's ashamed of itself, as if there's something wrong or inappropriate with thinking that there is no parallel offered by the species to match that line traced in history from Athens to Washington. Are we doomed now to belittled ourselves by jumping back and forth between arrogance and acquiescence until energy and motive are lost and we fade away? Extremes on the right were outraged by Obama's Muslim 'apology tour' of the Mideast while extremes on the left cheered it as if on the cusp of a new age - the great mass in the middle sat on hands, shrugged shoulders, smiled weakly, mouthed platitudes, watched TV, fell asleep. Must mean something - or does it? An alarmist then, am I? I want there to be a ghost in the cellarage, calling out crimes unseen. Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain time to walk the night.

Ozymandias complex - fear the lone and level sands stretching far away...

Given poor election results which seem to indicate independents moving away from democrats in droves, if Obama wanted to moderate, migrate to a definitive centre a la Clinton, could he? His election was a mirage, a fantasy narrative based on illusion and hyperbole, the result of a gullible and profoundly ill informed electorate suffering from Bush fatigue and reaching out into the darkness for relief, for something new. He moves to the centre, a place that I believe is not at all amenable or propitious viz his rather superficial talents, that may mollify independents but then I think the founding illusion of his presidency is undone or at least marginalized thus exposing a central weakness since a move right will leave his base feeling betrayed, disheartened and potentially hostile: if the founding illusion is sullied and his base abandons him what's left? Clinton could move to the middle because that essentially is where he came from - he didn't owe his political fortunes to the uber left, he won the election running on bread and butter issues, and as a democratic white governor of a southern state the pragmatism of moderation was pretty much in his political DNA. Obama is about as far removed from those conditions as you can get: given his predilections and sympathies I don't see how the fanciful narrative that sustained his presidential run could survive a move to the middle.

Not that Obama is doomed, no, many turns left in the road - but I fixated rather early on the central problem for him: the enthusiasms that carried him into the office were either fed by the vain and illusory hopes of the ultra left or governed by a wishful thinking amongst the electorate in general - what would happen when reality came crashing down on those enthusiasms? We don't have a clear answer to that question yet, but his highly partisan and doctrinaire pursuit of health care reform, his almost flippant willingness to spend money and raise taxes and his dilatory and as far as I'm concerned misguided if not indeed incoherent approach to the twin evils of Iran and Afghanistan and the whole Mideast problem in general seem to be suggesting that the scepticism of non believers like myself was not entirely misplaced.

Studies show that over the last 20 years the number of Americans willing or interested in or not entirely opposed to the idea of serving in the military has fallen sharply - also shown is that of that dwindling pool of candidates the number who are in fact eligible or capable of serving has also fallen sharply - listed causes for disqualification: poor education, outright stupidity, drug use, criminal records - and most damning of all, obesity - the obesity rate among the most desirable age demographic for military service has risen from 12% twenty years ago to 23% today - from report I read a recruitment officer is quoted as being shocked by the number of candidates coming in to enlist who can't even manage one push-up.

Distressing information - I wonder how long before America needs to institute a peace time draft in order to ensure the most powerful military in the world stays the most powerful military in the world? If the culture keeps spitting out a combination of effete, America-hating Europhile liberals, sloven fatties and drugged up high school dropouts can a crisis really be that far removed?

Sidebar - someone must have looked into why people enlist - unemployment, lack of opportunities in hometowns, to pay for education no doubt remain near top of the list - but someone must have looked into contributing cultural incentives - God, love of country, a yearning for adventure that is unique - and likewise culturally induced disincentives - laziness and physical degradation, sure, but also contempt for authority, a growing discomfort with the ideas of force and power and military necessity, a disregard for values commonly associated with patriotism, a splintering of social cohesion and the sense of a unifying national identity - things of this nature. Someone must have done a study like this - I'd be curious what such a study indicated - and be curious to know how political ideology or bias factored in.

Of course it's now taken as a received truth to equate the democrats with a weakening of the military imperative - and possibly for good reason [a recent bipartisan report suggesting Obama's national security team is a mess - that the president has given no guidance to national security matters and the administration seems to be at a loss doesn't help the perception that they lack military bona fides] - but what I'm thinking specifically here is how the foreign policy gestures Obama has made since taking office - apologizing to Muslims for the supposed sins of American hubris, telling the Europeans that there's no such thing as American exceptionalism, shying away from a show of strength in Afghanistan and replacing it with an enervating intellectualism - even, I might add, cavalierly laying all blame for current economic crisis on Wall Street and big business and therefore by inference indicting capitalsim and the American way even though that does not paint an accurate picture of all the contributing factors - I'm wondering how this general ambivalence to the ideal of America and the utility of the projection of American power in the world trickles down and impacts not only the willingness of able candidates to serve. to bear that burden, but also, with possibly more cancerous consequences, impacts the willingness of the abiding society to honour and laud the principles upon which the military stands?

In short I guess what I'm wondering is how do you maintain the greatest military in the world if the population increasingly is of the opinion that the country and the ideals that ostensibly motivate it are no longer great or of especial importance? This is no doubt to put it too simply if not crudely but if China increasingly believes it is and deserves to be a super power, an elite nation, special - and America increasingly believes that such formulations are meaningless and not conducive to leading a happy and contented life - in other words, is increasingly sympathetic of a European view of reality - then China wins, no?

"... sure, there's an arrogance to wealth and power, an accompanying hubris... but there's also a hubris nestled in weakness, the self regard of victim-hood... one's idealogical bias is often a reflection of this search for the 'perfect' self and thusly the exercise of skepticism towards all claims and pleas is strongly advised... but if forced to choose I'll almost always take the arrogant conservative over the aggrieved liberal..."

This from Greg Mankiw, which states with simplicity my point that the current health care debate is not about improving the system, it's about changing the political and cultural landscape in order to better serve an uber liberal agenda:

Behind the healthcare debate is the classic tradeoff between equality and efficiency. Consider the following question: Would you favor a substantial increase in marginal tax rates for millions of middle and upper income Americans to provide more resources for those toward the bottom of the economic ladder?

Your answer to this question cannot be determined by positive economics without some additional normative judgments. But your answer should strongly influence your view of the health reform bill. The bill moves us closer to much of Western Europe by favoring equality and paying the price of reduced efficiency from much higher marginal tax rates.

That may be a policy choice Americans want to make. But before buying the merchandise being offered by Congress, I hope we all take a close look at the price tag.

Europe's a pleasant place. I've lived there, enjoyed living there - but it's a tired entity and completely lacking the qualities necessary for meaningful leadership in the world as it exits today - the US goes down this road, hard to see it ever coming back - and then what fills the void left behind? That's the question these dilettantes have no good answer for.

Suggest in comment threads on liberal blogs the possibly that Obama's coffin salute was a political ploy and watch those peace lovin' lefties turn into rabid vengeance seekers - a lot of HTML threats hurled my way. Pains me. Stigmata.

Still, to be either so naive or so indoctrinated that you can't even consider the possibility that this photo was more political event than legitimate commiseration is... well, I guess I'm not that shocked, actually. Maybe a little scared - not for myself, but if the US is to spend the next 20 years floundering in a sea of ideologically driven hyper-partisanship, well, that won't be good. If Bush was so bad that we end up with a worse Obama, what if his mistakes and missteps lead to Palin [although I still have trouble not liking her for some reason] or worse, Huckabee? Please, not Huckabee - if that god addled former fat boy becomes president, I'm going feral, live in a cave. Fuck it all.

But back to that photo - shouldn't be surprised but I am - no reporter feels the need to ask Gibbs if permission to photograph that coffin was sought and given prior to Obama leaving for Dover? He took a lot of camera people with him - no one thinks that warrants a question? Wouldn't the truly respectful thing have been to not trouble the families with intrusive requests? You gotta think so since only one family out of twenty some odd agreed. I dunno - Denmark, something rotten - there's a smell and you gotta be motivated by bias or olfactorily challenged not to notice it.

Understand, I'm not suggesting that Obama invented the cynical and unseemly political calculation - as the saying goes, politics ain't bean bag, and that's fine - I don't care that much per se that Obama saw fit to use dead soldiers as a political tool, probably par for the course in many ways - what I'm interested in is what the act says about him, his ideological pathology and, if what has been revealed does not sit well with Petraeus et al, how the consequences of that will play out in the civilian/military dynamic and the formulation of strategy.

Well, that only took forever - following observations from Brooks in today's Times after he talked to several military professionals regarding Obama's much fretted over review of his review of his position on Afghan policy - observations I made, conclusions I reached on Obama's war rhetoric, what, a year and a half ago? I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've seen any of the major players in the MSM get to the heart of the matter in this way.

... they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.

Their second concern is political. They do not know if President Obama regards Afghanistan as a distraction from the matters he really cares about: health care, energy and education. Some of them suspect that Obama talked himself into supporting the Afghan effort so he could sound hawkish during the campaign. They suspect he is making a show of commitment now so he can let the matter drop at a politically opportune moment down the road.

Finally, they do not understand the president’s fundamental read on the situation. Most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable. They do not think it will be easy or quick. But they do have a bedrock conviction that the Taliban can be stymied and that the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be strengthened. But they do not know if Obama shares this gut conviction or possesses any gut conviction on this subject at all.

This also confirms my belief, my concern that many in the military are looking at Obama and seeing the same thing I'm seeing - hell, Petraeus is a lot smarter than me, if he and his cohorts are viewing the Obama administration with increasing scepticism one has to wonder about, maybe worry about the consequences of that.
 

Why did Obama take a late night flight to Dover AFB to salute dead soldiers and meet with their grieving family? This is a delicate one, you don't want to impugn the president for showing reverence and respect to those that have paid 'the ultimate price' - still, my scepticism stirs - because of the delay re Afhganistan, the recent rhetoric coming from the White House trying to suggest this delay serves the interests of the soldiers who will be asked to bear the burden - and most importantly because there's a photo of him saluting a coffin. This used to be illegal, but new Pentagon rules allow for the photographing of coffins if the grieving family oks it - which immediately gets an evil cynic like me wondering: since photographers accompanied the President they must have had ok from the one family that agreed before they left - so would he have gone without approval of the photo op from the family? If not and this was all about the photo op doesn't that seem to indicate that he's about to announce a decision that the military is unlikely to be thrilled by?

You could also say that he's trying to send a message to a liberal base that is about to be pissed off ie this decision is not made lightly. But I have trouble buying that - I think it's the other way around.

[are you suggesting that Obama is trying to circumvent the generals by going directly to the troops, essentially saying 'the brass don't agree with what I'm proposing, but it's in your best interests - I care about you'? Or are you suggesting that Obama is sending a message to voters who, if they see him at odds with the generals, may infer that he is weak and afraid of the consequences of difficult military decisions? One does not exclude the other]

"... a despairing view for sure, but there could be an upside, a silver lining... if California is indeed a failing or already failed state, it may in that fallen condition act as a cautionary tale delineating the awful fate of a society left to the mercy of an untrammeled liberalism... of course I don't mean that in the pentecostal sense of evil sinners receiving their just deserts... though I can't entirely insist that that is not the case at all... but in a broader and less end of days light you can certainly see the outlines of a story that seems to want to say that a wise liberal would beware of what he wished for... but then I guess a cynic might ask where are you gonna find a wise liberal?... wisdom being by its very nature unaligned, ideologically speaking... so forget what I said, no silver linings..."

With Press Secretary Gibbs attacking Cheney re Bush administration's supposed dropping of ball in Afghanistan does that then indicate that Obama will be taking McChrystal's advice and commit to undropping the ball? Or does it mean they will be forging an opposing or alternative strategy which they will defend by saying Bush mismanagement left them with few options? Given the continuing delay in rolling out a decision hard to believe it's anything but the latter - though possibly Gibbs, in effort to fill dithering void, simply said too much.

I continue to believe Obama's sole purpose here is to look like his campaign rhetoric wasn't simply campaign rhetoric and that he's not the one who lost Afghanistan if indeed he ends up losing Afghanistan, both of which could conceivably doom his chances in 2012. In other words, everything Obama has said and done or will say and do regarding Afghanistan, and Iraq for that matter, has and will continue to be all about serving limited domestic political ends.

What will be curious to see, among other things, is if the military leadership see Obama and his actions or lack thereof in the same light I do, how will they respond? In this regard, I wonder if Gates, a conservative, was acting as a true public servant when he chose to stay on and serve a very liberal president? Maybe he saw what was coming and realized that without a reasonable counterweight operating in the oval office bad things could happen.

I don't have any overwhelming desire to hammer on the 'Obama is a communist/socialist' meme [even though I do invoke the charge often - out of a sense of fun of course] but this note from Fund in the WSJ does jar the sensibilities a wee bit:

Anita Dunn, the White House's communications director who has declared war on Fox News, came under scrutiny herself last week when it was discovered she had told an audience that Mao Tse Tung was one of her favorite political philosophers and quoted Mao on how to "fight your war." In her speech last June, after she joined the Obama White House, Ms. Dunn said the "two people I turn to most" were Mother Teresa and Mao Tse-Tung. She barely discussed the late nun, but waxed at length about the lessons Mao had taught her. To call Mao a "political philosopher" is a stretch. As Roger Kimball of the New Criterion reminds us, the great Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski properly labeled the Chinese revolutionary "one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, manipulator of large masses of human beings in the twentieth century." Indeed, the Mao revelation prompted William Ratliff, an expert on China with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, to call her statement "outrageous and pathetic" given that Mao's role in the deaths of some 50 million people "makes it impossible for any serious person" to view him as a great philosopher.

Certainly any administration has its share of wackos and deviants and enthusiasts with inappropriate affiliations - but there does seem to be too many roads leading from the ultra left into Obamaland - enough to accommodate the long march home of a lost generation of uber liberals? So far he's done little to dispel the notion - the press seems to want to continue to prop up the idea or mere perception or outright lie that he's tracking a moderate course but I don't see it at all.

Report circulating that Iran has agreed to send LEU [lightly enriched uranium] to Russia for processing, with indications that this retards their progress towards developing the bomb by about a year and this all hailed as possible 'diplomatic' success in attempt to thwart Iran's nuclear aspirations - to which I say 'are you people fucking crazy?'.

One, there's probably, in fact there's almost definitely no way to tell that if Iran actually follows through on this [huge if as far as I'm concerned] that the amount of enriched uranium they end up sending off to Russia represents a significant dent in their stockpile, enough to impede development of the bomb - and there's a good reason for this ie we have no idea how much EU they have! Whatever they end up shipping to Russia could just be a token amount - in fact, if they're really clever they could have been planning for this deception all along, carefully making it seem like they had a certain amount of EU when it fact they have more. And let's not forget that there are rumours that problems exist with some of Iran's LEU, problems that make it unsuitable for bomb making - I read this in technical journal and the details of it were beyond my understanding - but if true, if that compromised LEU is what they end up sending to Russia, then such an act would be pretty useless, no?

Two, the current regime in Iran is under siege, vulnerable, supposed progressive forces want to see it unseated and brought to shame - what on earth would be the advantage to them of looking weak on an issue they have staked a great amount of their credibility and prestige on? The whole focus of their anti-Western, anti-Israel international position has been buttressed up by the threat of a nuclear inevitability - how the fuck would it serve their purposes to now cave in on that? One would have to indulge the belief that they are at peace with accepting their demise as a political power and willing to admit to being ideologically flawed - pretty selfless acts for revolutionary autocrats. What next, the leader of Hamas is going to proffer a hand of friendship across the bomb scarred border of Gaza and say to Israel: 'enough is enough - let's embrace a better future together'. I mean, c'mon people.

Fact is, the Persian sense of superiority over Arabs and how that impacts their regional strategy combined with the political utility the bomb represents to the current regime combined with the anti-Western logic of the '79 revolution and the ties of all the big players in Iran to that logic - Khamenei, A--- and the Republican Guard - these things all point to Iran wanting the bomb, needing the bomb and probably being willing to do just about anything to get it. Furthermore, it is also a fact that the current regime knows China and Russia will back them because all their respective interests dovetail on this issue - and without China and Russia you've got nothing - so you're telling me you think Russia and China are going to act against their perceived interests and by doing so substantially empower Obama, a leader they no doubt read as enticingly weak? Again, are you people outta your fucking minds?

World, here's a hand-basket and if you look just over there you'll see the road to hell - have a nice trip.

China apparently tells Israel it will not support sending the Goldstone report to the UN Security Council - proof positive that China will not be backing sanctions against Iran? Make the shallow pro-Israeli gesture now to provide cover for the deeper anti-Israeli move to come? Personally, I don't need further demonstration of what the logic of China's actions so far lead one to believe concerning their intentions - but since China has already in another forum supported the Goldstone report I'd say the game they're playing here is pretty obvious.

Mr Coll, author of Ghost Wars and therefore a point of view that should be respected, weighs in on the situation in Afghanistan. His two main points, if I remember correctly, seem to be that those calling for taking the Afghan war offshore or of just focusing on Al queda do not understand the synergistic relationship that holds between the Taliban and AQ and, closely related to that, do not understand how difficult it will be to get actionable intelligence without a significant presence on the ground. His second point was that Afghanistan will remain hostile to our interests until some semblance of a somewhat unifying and relatively competent government emerges - his point being that, contrary to what many are suggesting, this is only difficult, not impossible, that Afghanistan has had a functioning government, army and constabulary before and can again - it may not prove to be law and order according to Western standards but it will be good enough for Afghanistan.

He doesn't talk military details, force size and disposition etc, I suppose he feels, and no doubt rightly so, that the expertise of military professionals has to be trusted here - but he does seem to endorse the idea of COIN and the potential of nation building but states clearly that a commitment must be long term - and he states that forming a national army is only possible if there's a sense of a national government. My impression is he believes there's no workable option that includes accommodating the Taliban and trying to 'limit' it - my sense he feels it needs to be destroyed and that Pakistan will help once they see it on the run in Afghanistan - although he suggests Pakistan can be a productive partner he also clearly states that it hasn't been in the past and there are no guarantees of how it will behave in the future - he seems to say that there is a significant divide within the Pakistani military about what end state viz Afghanistan and the Taliban will best suit Pakistan's interests - he would say that India continues to loom large in a not particularly logical way for many in the Pakistani military - that is certainly a view point I've read elsewhere.

To wrap it in as discrete a package as possible I'd say this: if one applies an extremely loose conception of what a government is or need be then no doubt you can wrest such a thing out of the inchoate mess that is Afghanistan - but because of the lack of money or any monied future and how that restricts potential I think you're never going to be able to get too far away from a warlord driven, clan driven, tribal/theological diffused dispensation that coheres tenuously but neither significantly prospers nor declines - and therefore you're never going to get too far away from corruption - like Mexico, but much worse and without the nice beaches. Coll suggests Afghanistan was a problematic but manageable country before the Russians invaded - possibly - but I might say the Russians invaded because the defining premise is not quite accurate.

To get conciser and more narrow still and thereby broader and more general [art thou there, Truepenny?] I say this: there are wars with short term objectives and ones with long term objectives; long term wars need to be big, you cannot compromise on that; the problem with both Afghanistan and Iraq is that they were long term wars fought as is they were short term ones; it's hard now to go back and correct those mistakes - but you may not have a choice and Afghanistan will prove harder than Iraq; a military mistake left uncorrected or unaddressed will come back to haunt you.

Waiting for the 12th Imam - if the real point of contention between the looming military dictatorship and the putative reformers in Iran is the true role of the clergy in governance while they wait for the 12th Imam - the reformers believing it should be muted, Khamanei and A--- not so much - and not at all about liberalizing the theocracy, then what would that say about what reform would look like should the 'radicals' succeed in unseating the status quo? One's tempted to say any change enacted would be superficial, cosmetic - but the Republican Guard is a wild card - you could see a 'reform' chain reaction that leads then to social upheaval that leads to martial law - I could also see a scenario where the reformers gain control but out of fear of what demons they've unleashed become just as reactionary and repressive as current regime and in likewise fashion crawl into bed with the Guard - but regardless my point is if all that separates the reform from the status quo are protocol questions having to do with the 12th Imam, well then what does that say about the prospects for and nature of some hoped for reform?

Related, I also wonder: if present regime manages to make Iran a nuclear power I imagine that will leave its authority unassailable - does it then follow that the reformers have a deadline if they want to get something done? And if so should we then be more interested in giving them a helping hand?  Of course, since Obama was given the Nobel for being willing to engage with bad people, for apparently being able to engender a brave new world simply by talking about it, I suppose he won't be doing that - besides, as I said, the dynamics involved here are hard to predict - I'm just saying there appears to be an opening there that probably should be examined.

A report in a French newspaper says Israel will soon be deploying covert strike teams into Iran to blow stuff up and assassinate key people in the nuclear program - who knows if this is true but I realized I should have thought of this before - all the talk and gestures aimed at keeping the threat of an air strike alive could really have been about hiding the true tactic of using special forces on the ground. Air strikes were an iffy proposition no matter how you looked at it and best case scenarios guessed at most Israel delays Iran's plans by a few years - it could be Israel has decided that covert operations can do just as well as that but with the added advantage of limiting the ways Iran can retaliate - they obviously could still launch missiles in response but such an indiscriminate act would be more difficult to justify given the discrete nature of Israel's aggression thus possibly limiting Iran to employing its terrorist proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, to exact revenge - which would be bad, sure, but still, a threat Israel understands and has acquired significant expertise in defending against.

On the surface, this kind of makes sense - allowing for the fact that I have no realistic idea of just how much havoc Israeli special forces can unleash. I would imagine that to be successful some, possibly many operatives would already have to have infiltrated Iran.

China reaffirms its 'close' ties with Iran and the mutual benefits thereby derived - which is China's way of saying 'we value this strategic relationship and everything we do or say will be a reflection of that' - which is China's way of saying 'fuck you, America, this is our century: if your own president doesn't believe in American exceptionalism we sure as hell aren't gonna act as if it matters'.

And on cue Putin chimes in with a 'there's no need to rush Iran or get all up in their face with sanctions - everything is cool, man - just chill people' and then throws out tasty bit of info detailing how Russia has changed its rules of engagement concerning defense of the nation to allow for the use of nuclear weapons against threats even if the threat is conventional in nature. Nice.

As absurd as it was giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, what was more disturbing, once one stopped guffawing or laughing outright, was realizing that a great many people actually believed it was deserved, actually believe that the world is fundamentally changed for the better simply because Obama is president, regardless of any manifest accomplishments - that the world is better simply because Obama says it can be. It's shocking, dumbfounding - I'm found dumb by it.

And so it is 'drinking the cool-aid' no longer captures the degree of delusion that follows this man. He's tapped into a willful ignorance that surpasses mere stupidity, surpasses even the abject cretinism of the fatuously naive - it's as if he's accessed some pathological dementia, a vestigial obtuseness, that lurks in the shadows of the species' collective psychology waiting for a perfectly insipid incantation to call it stumbling into the pallid light - yes we can.

Or is it - apropos previous post - is it that the generals are thinking about Vietnam? In the sense, after Abrams took over and COIN employed by '72 you had something that looked like victory in Vietnam - and then, if you believe the history of some, the US congress withdrew support for a functioning and largely pacified south and the north, with the support of China, broke the peace accords and invaded thus leading to the 'defeat' we now associate with Vietnam.

If they do have that in mind, and it's hard to imagine they don't, then I guess my speculation about them angling for a 'token' victory is misguided - they would realize that a loss is a loss no matter how clever you are in trying to reframe it.

I was reading a review of Galula's renowned counterinsurgency tome and one thing Galula stipulates, that seems revealing viz Obama's dithering over what to do in Afghanistan, is that the country sponsoring the COIN action cannot look weak - if the victimized population sees weakness in their ostensible saviours or perceives a reason not to trust their commitment, the cause will be lost. You can see how the military leadership right now is probably none to happy with Obama - they thought they already had a commitment [with good reason] and now are to say the least no doubt discomfited by the knowledge that anything that makes that commitment look tentative could prove fatal, could undermine the whole strategy. They must feel they've been played and betrayed - nothing Obama has said indicates that he is going to give McChrystal what he's requested even though everything he did and said during the campaign and when he first took office suggested he was on board with the strategy - but even if he does sign on the strategy is weakened, possibly beyond salvaging, by the delay in making a decision - at the very least, if one follows the dictates of Galula, a difficult mission has been made much more difficult - it's hard to see a scenario here that doesn't end with the military feeling disappointed - yeah, I'd say Petraeus and the boys are not big fans of the Obama right now.

The other thing that struck me was a flaw in Galula's argument that the reviewer pointed out and is in line with my thinking, namely, just as with the insurgency, the counterinsurgency must be motivated by a cause - but what if the the population the COIN seeks to protect does not share the cause? If our cause is to bring to Afghanistan good governance and other advantages of a modern civil society - and as I've said many times before getting involved in a war like this only makes sense if that indeed is your cause, by definition there has to be a culture changing imperative otherwise what is the point? - but what happens if the target population prefers, as the writer of the review states it, the 7th century? Galula writes about the role fear plays in an insurgency - what if to Afghans the best way to avoid fear is to cling to their medieval tribalism and tolerate their Taliban masters - what if to them that represents the lesser of two evils?

This seems to be the weak link in COIN thinking - at the very least it suggests the need for a long involvement in the victimized society and I just don't see how America can make a commitment like that. I know that McChrystal's plan is to hand things off to a revitalised Afghan military a couple years from now - but that idea sounds pretty shaky to me - Afghanistan doesn't really inspire confidence in that regard. [is it possible Petraeus et al also see that and their whole objective here is to merely create a scenario that looks less like an American loss and more like a failure by Afghanistan to preserve the win? Seems possible to me]