Thursday, January 18, 2007
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (1/18/07)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
Nearly four years after our preemptive invasion of Iraq, the United States finds itself trapped in an unwinnable war. Despite being discredited and rejected in the November election, the President's "stay the course" strategy is now masquerading as a "surge of troops." How did a situation come about in which the most powerful nation on the face of the earth could be frustrated and stymied by a shadowy army of irregular guerrilla fighters who strike suddenly and melt into the shadows of the night? Neither the administration nor the media ever explore the reasons for the impasse, which stems from crucial miscalculations about changes in warfare following the ending of the Cold War in 1989.
During the four decades of our tense standoff with the Soviet Union, planning was for a global conflict largely centering on the clash of massive armies on the plains of Central Europe. To wage such a war, large numbers of ground forces, naval forces and airpower were required. The battle plan of the U.S. and its NATO allies anticipated sustained ground combat against the massed divisions of the Soviet Union and its client states of the Warsaw Pact. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the need for massive combat forces suddenly evaporated. Pentagon thinkers envisioned a changed world in which clashes would involve one country at a time. Combat was anticipated to be over quickly. And the United States would be able to decide or decline to enter such successive combats in according to its national interest. Emphasis shifted from manpower to sophisticated technology. In fact, technology became in Pentagonspeak a "force multiplier" that would make up for the reduced numbers of troops.
Given the on-again, off-again nature of anticipated US involvement around the globe, a lighter, faster, smaller and more easily transportable ground force was seen as preferable to the Cold War's ponderous divisions. Planners bought into this philosophy, and accelerated the transformation of the U.S. ground forces into a highly mobile force that placed great reliance on technology. Stockpiles of supplies were positioned near expected key flashpoints around the globe. From reliance on a large standing force, the Pentagon shifted to dependence on Reserve and National Guard components pressed into service for short tours of duty.
As it turned out, the new force structure proved ideal for handling situations in the 1990s, including the senior Bush's introduction of troops into Somalia, and Bill Clinton's interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. But if recent history has proved anything, it is that Pentagon thinkers created an armed force inappropriate to the preemptive wars the Bush administration has chosen to fight. Instead of being narrowly engaged in one country at a time, U.S. forces found themselves fighting simultaneously in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of being terminated quickly, both wars have become open-ended and unconventional engagements with stubborn, elusive guerrilla forces. And rather than being elective, with September 11, the United States found itself faced with a challenge it did not have the luxury of ignoring.
Modern warfare has three traditional phases: deployment of each country's forces, destruction of the enemy's forces and occupation of the enemy's territory. Civilians in the Pentagon like Donald Rumsfeld saw the third aspect, occupation warfare, as less important than the first two. The now-legendary clash between Rumsfeld and Gen. Erik Shinseki was over this precise issue, sometimes encapsulated in the phrase, "boots on the ground." After a flower-tossing victory parade in Iraq, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz planned for a quick pullout of troops. Regrettably, crucial military specialties that are now in high demand in Iraq and Afghanistan--career-slowing assignments in civil affairs, for example-were delegated almost entirely to units of the reserves.
What the chickenhawk neocon encouragers and enablers never foresaw is that Afghanistan and Iraq would continue to be low-intensity guerrilla conflicts in which counterinsurgency and sectarian civil war negated pacification programs and threatened the American military's very control of the ground. Guerrilla forces understandably avoid direct clashes with superior forces and are less susceptible to defeat by advanced technology. Such combat requires the presence of large numbers of widely dispersed ground forces exposed to hit-and-run attacks and to lethal improvised explosive devices planted along major routes used by the occupiers. Victory, in the accepted sense of the term, is always impossible to measure or even to achieve.
Late in 2003, it became clear that the U.S. force that defeated the Iraqi army was too small to pacify the country in the face of resistance from insurgent tribal and religious groups, and that the mix of technology to manpower was dangerously disproportionate. The Bush administration's solution was to dip more heavily into Reserve and National Guard components. But not only was the military created after the close of the Cold War ill adapted to the task it faced in Iraq, a long, drawn-out, inconclusive war more resembling medieval siege warfare, but the burden shared by the active duty and Reserve forces was unfairly out of balance.
Made up of older, more-experienced troops, this country's Reserve and National Guard have a larger proportion of higher noncommissioned ranks, heads of families who have wives, children and responsibilities. Many are in the process of buying homes and have mortgages they cannot pay for on military pay. Some are proprietors of small businesses that will fail without their owners present to operate them. Ignoring these realities, the Bush administration is coldheartedly destroying lives and families by repeatedly calling up Reserve and National Guard units for service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A crisis exists that is not being addressed. During World War II, troops served for the duration." As it turned out, this was to mean service for as long as four years. But long continuous service was mitigated by the sense that sacrifices were being made by everybody in and out of uniform. During the Vietnam War, the grossly unfair draft was compensated for in part because an overseas tour of duty lasted one year, and draftees were discharged in two years. No small part of the growing unrest among soldiers and their families, not to mention most of the country, over the way the Iraq War is being conducted stems from the failure of the Bush administration to adapt to the reality of the unsustainable conflict into which they have plunged the country.
Recognizing the dangerous repercussions in the 2008 elections of the President's headstrong determination to prolong the blood letting at all costs, Republicans in Congress are becoming jittery. Military strategy is now being driven solely by the President's callous determination to dump the inevitable withdrawal of American troops in the lap of his successor in the White House two years from now. In the meantime, Osama bin Laden, who touched off the conflagration in 2001, chuckles to himself in his mountain fastness somewhere inside Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. We have indeed become a nation of sheep.
Nearly four years after our preemptive invasion of Iraq, the United States finds itself trapped in an unwinnable war. Despite being discredited and rejected in the November election, the President's "stay the course" strategy is now masquerading as a "surge of troops." How did a situation come about in which the most powerful nation on the face of the earth could be frustrated and stymied by a shadowy army of irregular guerrilla fighters who strike suddenly and melt into the shadows of the night? Neither the administration nor the media ever explore the reasons for the impasse, which stems from crucial miscalculations about changes in warfare following the ending of the Cold War in 1989.
During the four decades of our tense standoff with the Soviet Union, planning was for a global conflict largely centering on the clash of massive armies on the plains of Central Europe. To wage such a war, large numbers of ground forces, naval forces and airpower were required. The battle plan of the U.S. and its NATO allies anticipated sustained ground combat against the massed divisions of the Soviet Union and its client states of the Warsaw Pact. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the need for massive combat forces suddenly evaporated. Pentagon thinkers envisioned a changed world in which clashes would involve one country at a time. Combat was anticipated to be over quickly. And the United States would be able to decide or decline to enter such successive combats in according to its national interest. Emphasis shifted from manpower to sophisticated technology. In fact, technology became in Pentagonspeak a "force multiplier" that would make up for the reduced numbers of troops.
Given the on-again, off-again nature of anticipated US involvement around the globe, a lighter, faster, smaller and more easily transportable ground force was seen as preferable to the Cold War's ponderous divisions. Planners bought into this philosophy, and accelerated the transformation of the U.S. ground forces into a highly mobile force that placed great reliance on technology. Stockpiles of supplies were positioned near expected key flashpoints around the globe. From reliance on a large standing force, the Pentagon shifted to dependence on Reserve and National Guard components pressed into service for short tours of duty.
As it turned out, the new force structure proved ideal for handling situations in the 1990s, including the senior Bush's introduction of troops into Somalia, and Bill Clinton's interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. But if recent history has proved anything, it is that Pentagon thinkers created an armed force inappropriate to the preemptive wars the Bush administration has chosen to fight. Instead of being narrowly engaged in one country at a time, U.S. forces found themselves fighting simultaneously in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of being terminated quickly, both wars have become open-ended and unconventional engagements with stubborn, elusive guerrilla forces. And rather than being elective, with September 11, the United States found itself faced with a challenge it did not have the luxury of ignoring.
Modern warfare has three traditional phases: deployment of each country's forces, destruction of the enemy's forces and occupation of the enemy's territory. Civilians in the Pentagon like Donald Rumsfeld saw the third aspect, occupation warfare, as less important than the first two. The now-legendary clash between Rumsfeld and Gen. Erik Shinseki was over this precise issue, sometimes encapsulated in the phrase, "boots on the ground." After a flower-tossing victory parade in Iraq, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz planned for a quick pullout of troops. Regrettably, crucial military specialties that are now in high demand in Iraq and Afghanistan--career-slowing assignments in civil affairs, for example-were delegated almost entirely to units of the reserves.
What the chickenhawk neocon encouragers and enablers never foresaw is that Afghanistan and Iraq would continue to be low-intensity guerrilla conflicts in which counterinsurgency and sectarian civil war negated pacification programs and threatened the American military's very control of the ground. Guerrilla forces understandably avoid direct clashes with superior forces and are less susceptible to defeat by advanced technology. Such combat requires the presence of large numbers of widely dispersed ground forces exposed to hit-and-run attacks and to lethal improvised explosive devices planted along major routes used by the occupiers. Victory, in the accepted sense of the term, is always impossible to measure or even to achieve.
Late in 2003, it became clear that the U.S. force that defeated the Iraqi army was too small to pacify the country in the face of resistance from insurgent tribal and religious groups, and that the mix of technology to manpower was dangerously disproportionate. The Bush administration's solution was to dip more heavily into Reserve and National Guard components. But not only was the military created after the close of the Cold War ill adapted to the task it faced in Iraq, a long, drawn-out, inconclusive war more resembling medieval siege warfare, but the burden shared by the active duty and Reserve forces was unfairly out of balance.
Made up of older, more-experienced troops, this country's Reserve and National Guard have a larger proportion of higher noncommissioned ranks, heads of families who have wives, children and responsibilities. Many are in the process of buying homes and have mortgages they cannot pay for on military pay. Some are proprietors of small businesses that will fail without their owners present to operate them. Ignoring these realities, the Bush administration is coldheartedly destroying lives and families by repeatedly calling up Reserve and National Guard units for service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A crisis exists that is not being addressed. During World War II, troops served for the duration." As it turned out, this was to mean service for as long as four years. But long continuous service was mitigated by the sense that sacrifices were being made by everybody in and out of uniform. During the Vietnam War, the grossly unfair draft was compensated for in part because an overseas tour of duty lasted one year, and draftees were discharged in two years. No small part of the growing unrest among soldiers and their families, not to mention most of the country, over the way the Iraq War is being conducted stems from the failure of the Bush administration to adapt to the reality of the unsustainable conflict into which they have plunged the country.
Recognizing the dangerous repercussions in the 2008 elections of the President's headstrong determination to prolong the blood letting at all costs, Republicans in Congress are becoming jittery. Military strategy is now being driven solely by the President's callous determination to dump the inevitable withdrawal of American troops in the lap of his successor in the White House two years from now. In the meantime, Osama bin Laden, who touched off the conflagration in 2001, chuckles to himself in his mountain fastness somewhere inside Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. We have indeed become a nation of sheep.
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (1/11/07)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
If you've never met a neuralgian, you are about to meet one now. Me.
Neuralgians are members of a small group that suffers from trigeminal neuralgia, a disease of the trigeminal nerve. Physicians describe it as the most excruciating condition known to medical science, and sufferers can attest to that. It has been called the suicide disease because of the number of suicides attributed to it before effective treatment was available. The stabbing pain comes on suddenly without warning, almost like a bolt of lightning streaking down the side of the face. It repeats itself at intervals of a few seconds or a few minutes and then is gone as abruptly as it came, only to return unexpectedly.
Despite its intensity, trigeminal neuralgia (also called TN) isn't very well known. In 1990, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., analyzed medical records of that city and found that the disease affected about one in 25,000, mostly those over the age of 50. Other medical statisticians believe that because it is often misdiagnosed and is not required to be reported to government health agencies, TN may be more common than suspected, affecting as many as one in 15,000 persons.
TN is not a new affliction. First-century Greek and Roman physicians called it cephalalgia. French surgeon Nicolaus André described five cases of it in 1756 and called it tic douloureux (painful spasm), a name by which it is still known today.. It was also called Fothergill's disease in 1773, after the doctor who described 14 cases to the Medical Society in London. Other medical terms for it are trifacial neuralgia and epileptiform neuralgia. Early treatments included bloodletting and exorcising of demons, the use of bee and cobra venom, opiate drugs and purgatives. Surgeons tried injecting boiling water, alcohol, chloroform and other chemicals into the face.
When all else failed, they cut the facial nerve, sometimes paralyzing the patient's face. Confederate President Jefferson Davis suffered from it. So did Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff. After suffering for 20 years, he finally achieved relief at the hands of a French dentist and hypnotist in 1930. Author Gloria Steinem has been treated for TN pain since 1994. The late actor Norman Fell (who played the landlord, on TV's popular "Three's Company") underwent neurosurgery to get rid of his TN, and Norma Zimmer, Lawrence Welk's "Champagne Lady," has waged a constant battle against TN pain since 1981.
TN almost always strikes one side of the face in areas served by one or more of the three-branched trigeminal nerve. There are two trigeminal nerves--one for each side of the face. These nerves exit the base of the brain in a region called the "pons" and fan out in three main branches supplying sensation to the face. The lower, or mandibular branch, serves the lower jaw; the middle, or maxillary branch, serves the cheek and upper jaw; the upper, or ophthalmic branch, serves the forehead and eyes. TN pain is usually provoked by a light touch on the face or a breeze or a movement of the face, as in talking, eating or yawning. This sensitive area is called the "trigger zone."
Diagnosis of trigeminal neuralgia is often difficult. Because they see TN rarely, some doctors and dentists may be unfamiliar with the disease. As a result, it is not uncommon for a patient to visit a succession of doctors and dentists, having root canals, tooth extractions, sinus surgeries and other medical procedures. A study of more than 7,000 TN patients showed that nearly 90 percent had pain for more than a year before being correctly diagnosed; 13 percent went for ten years or more before an accurate diagnosis was made.
No cure exists for trigeminal neuralgia, but it can be treated successfully with anticonvulsant drugs used to treat epilepsy. Ever since it was first used on patients in Scandinavia in 1962, carbamazepine (Tegretol, Carbatrol) has been the TN drug of choice. It is still the most used TN drug, although its popularity is now being challenged by oxcarbazepine (Trileptal), which has fewer side effects. Aside from life-threatening allergic reactions, carbamazepine can bring on serious blood disorders, including irreversible aplastic anemia damaging to bone marrow and other blood deficiency conditions. Patients being treated with carbamazepine must have frequent blood tests. A variety of other antiepileptic, antidepressant, muscle relaxant, and autopsychotic or tranquilizing drugs also are used alone or in combination to treat TN.
Medication is the only therapy that about half of all TN patients will ever need for their pain. Occasionally, TN goes away spontaneously. For most patients, however, TN is a progressive disorder, with more frequent attacks and more severe pain. When medicines become ineffective, patients often seek relief through surgery. Five types of surgery are in use today, three involving insertion of a long needle through the cheek to reach the trigeminal nerve. In one procedure, radiofrequency lesioning, heat is applied to the nerve to damage it and reduce the number and intensity of the transmitted pain signals. Ever since the 1800s, surgeons have been injecting various chemicals into the trigeminal nerve to stop the pain of trigeminal neuralgia. The substance most used today is glycerol, a viscous alcohol with the consistency of honey.
The glycerol injected through the needle damages the nerve and interferes with pain signals. A third through-the-cheek procedure, called balloon compression, uses a larger-diameter needle and deposits a tiny balloon alongside the nerve. When inflated, the balloon squeezes the nerve against bony tissue and damages it, disrupting the pain signals. Another type of surgery--radiosurgery, also called gamma-knife surgery--makes no incision; carefully focused beams of radiation cut off circulation to the nerve, causing it to scarify and die. If pain recurs, a second radiosurgery can be done.
The ultimate surgical procedure--and the most expensive--is microvascular decompression. Developed by Dr. Peter Janetta at the University of Pittsburgh, this now widely accepted operation offers the best chance of long-term pain relief. A half-dollar-sized hole is opened in the skull behind the ear, exposing the brain. Using a microscope, the surgeon searches for the trigeminal nerve root. When it is found, a small piece of Teflon surgical sponge is placed between the offending artery or vein and the nerve. Although patient risk is higher than in other procedures, the success rate of this complicated operation can range between 85 and 95 percent. Unfortunately, facial numbness may result from surgical procedures, with slurred speech or even accidental burning of the mouth from hot liquids.
As a disease, TN is unique in the varieties of facial pain in which it manifests itself and in its response to a diversity of treatments, including chiropractic upper cervical spinal adjustment, acupuncture and nutrition therapy. In my own case, I experienced my first TN attack in 1982--like one's first kiss, the first TN episode is never forgotten. After several years of prescription drug treatment, I undertook a search of the medical literature about trigeminal neuralgia. In an obscure paper from Sweden I found reports of success with massive daily doses of Vitamin B-12 over a ten-day period that gave marked relief to patients. I showed this paper to our family physician, Dr. Saleem M. Mir of Croton, and I am forever in his debt. He agreed that it was worth trying since B-12 is essential to the health of the myelin sheath that surrounds nerves. If the damaged myelin sheath of the trigeminal nerve causes the nerve's short-circuiting pain, perhaps B-12 would repair damage to it.
To my surprise and relief, by the fifth day of injections, the pain had diminished to tolerable facial twinges; by the tenth day pain entirely ceased. Eureka! I had found a magic bullet. Vitamin B-12 is now part of my armamentarium. Paradoxically, it does not work for every TN sufferer. With trigeminal neuralgia, no treatment can be counted on to be effective for everyone. Neuralgians must discover through experimentation what works for them.
If you've never met a neuralgian, you are about to meet one now. Me.
Neuralgians are members of a small group that suffers from trigeminal neuralgia, a disease of the trigeminal nerve. Physicians describe it as the most excruciating condition known to medical science, and sufferers can attest to that. It has been called the suicide disease because of the number of suicides attributed to it before effective treatment was available. The stabbing pain comes on suddenly without warning, almost like a bolt of lightning streaking down the side of the face. It repeats itself at intervals of a few seconds or a few minutes and then is gone as abruptly as it came, only to return unexpectedly.
Despite its intensity, trigeminal neuralgia (also called TN) isn't very well known. In 1990, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., analyzed medical records of that city and found that the disease affected about one in 25,000, mostly those over the age of 50. Other medical statisticians believe that because it is often misdiagnosed and is not required to be reported to government health agencies, TN may be more common than suspected, affecting as many as one in 15,000 persons.
TN is not a new affliction. First-century Greek and Roman physicians called it cephalalgia. French surgeon Nicolaus André described five cases of it in 1756 and called it tic douloureux (painful spasm), a name by which it is still known today.. It was also called Fothergill's disease in 1773, after the doctor who described 14 cases to the Medical Society in London. Other medical terms for it are trifacial neuralgia and epileptiform neuralgia. Early treatments included bloodletting and exorcising of demons, the use of bee and cobra venom, opiate drugs and purgatives. Surgeons tried injecting boiling water, alcohol, chloroform and other chemicals into the face.
When all else failed, they cut the facial nerve, sometimes paralyzing the patient's face. Confederate President Jefferson Davis suffered from it. So did Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff. After suffering for 20 years, he finally achieved relief at the hands of a French dentist and hypnotist in 1930. Author Gloria Steinem has been treated for TN pain since 1994. The late actor Norman Fell (who played the landlord, on TV's popular "Three's Company") underwent neurosurgery to get rid of his TN, and Norma Zimmer, Lawrence Welk's "Champagne Lady," has waged a constant battle against TN pain since 1981.
TN almost always strikes one side of the face in areas served by one or more of the three-branched trigeminal nerve. There are two trigeminal nerves--one for each side of the face. These nerves exit the base of the brain in a region called the "pons" and fan out in three main branches supplying sensation to the face. The lower, or mandibular branch, serves the lower jaw; the middle, or maxillary branch, serves the cheek and upper jaw; the upper, or ophthalmic branch, serves the forehead and eyes. TN pain is usually provoked by a light touch on the face or a breeze or a movement of the face, as in talking, eating or yawning. This sensitive area is called the "trigger zone."
Diagnosis of trigeminal neuralgia is often difficult. Because they see TN rarely, some doctors and dentists may be unfamiliar with the disease. As a result, it is not uncommon for a patient to visit a succession of doctors and dentists, having root canals, tooth extractions, sinus surgeries and other medical procedures. A study of more than 7,000 TN patients showed that nearly 90 percent had pain for more than a year before being correctly diagnosed; 13 percent went for ten years or more before an accurate diagnosis was made.
No cure exists for trigeminal neuralgia, but it can be treated successfully with anticonvulsant drugs used to treat epilepsy. Ever since it was first used on patients in Scandinavia in 1962, carbamazepine (Tegretol, Carbatrol) has been the TN drug of choice. It is still the most used TN drug, although its popularity is now being challenged by oxcarbazepine (Trileptal), which has fewer side effects. Aside from life-threatening allergic reactions, carbamazepine can bring on serious blood disorders, including irreversible aplastic anemia damaging to bone marrow and other blood deficiency conditions. Patients being treated with carbamazepine must have frequent blood tests. A variety of other antiepileptic, antidepressant, muscle relaxant, and autopsychotic or tranquilizing drugs also are used alone or in combination to treat TN.
Medication is the only therapy that about half of all TN patients will ever need for their pain. Occasionally, TN goes away spontaneously. For most patients, however, TN is a progressive disorder, with more frequent attacks and more severe pain. When medicines become ineffective, patients often seek relief through surgery. Five types of surgery are in use today, three involving insertion of a long needle through the cheek to reach the trigeminal nerve. In one procedure, radiofrequency lesioning, heat is applied to the nerve to damage it and reduce the number and intensity of the transmitted pain signals. Ever since the 1800s, surgeons have been injecting various chemicals into the trigeminal nerve to stop the pain of trigeminal neuralgia. The substance most used today is glycerol, a viscous alcohol with the consistency of honey.
The glycerol injected through the needle damages the nerve and interferes with pain signals. A third through-the-cheek procedure, called balloon compression, uses a larger-diameter needle and deposits a tiny balloon alongside the nerve. When inflated, the balloon squeezes the nerve against bony tissue and damages it, disrupting the pain signals. Another type of surgery--radiosurgery, also called gamma-knife surgery--makes no incision; carefully focused beams of radiation cut off circulation to the nerve, causing it to scarify and die. If pain recurs, a second radiosurgery can be done.
The ultimate surgical procedure--and the most expensive--is microvascular decompression. Developed by Dr. Peter Janetta at the University of Pittsburgh, this now widely accepted operation offers the best chance of long-term pain relief. A half-dollar-sized hole is opened in the skull behind the ear, exposing the brain. Using a microscope, the surgeon searches for the trigeminal nerve root. When it is found, a small piece of Teflon surgical sponge is placed between the offending artery or vein and the nerve. Although patient risk is higher than in other procedures, the success rate of this complicated operation can range between 85 and 95 percent. Unfortunately, facial numbness may result from surgical procedures, with slurred speech or even accidental burning of the mouth from hot liquids.
As a disease, TN is unique in the varieties of facial pain in which it manifests itself and in its response to a diversity of treatments, including chiropractic upper cervical spinal adjustment, acupuncture and nutrition therapy. In my own case, I experienced my first TN attack in 1982--like one's first kiss, the first TN episode is never forgotten. After several years of prescription drug treatment, I undertook a search of the medical literature about trigeminal neuralgia. In an obscure paper from Sweden I found reports of success with massive daily doses of Vitamin B-12 over a ten-day period that gave marked relief to patients. I showed this paper to our family physician, Dr. Saleem M. Mir of Croton, and I am forever in his debt. He agreed that it was worth trying since B-12 is essential to the health of the myelin sheath that surrounds nerves. If the damaged myelin sheath of the trigeminal nerve causes the nerve's short-circuiting pain, perhaps B-12 would repair damage to it.
To my surprise and relief, by the fifth day of injections, the pain had diminished to tolerable facial twinges; by the tenth day pain entirely ceased. Eureka! I had found a magic bullet. Vitamin B-12 is now part of my armamentarium. Paradoxically, it does not work for every TN sufferer. With trigeminal neuralgia, no treatment can be counted on to be effective for everyone. Neuralgians must discover through experimentation what works for them.
Labels: Nobody Archive, Trigeminal Neuralgia
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (1/03/07)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
'Tis the season to be jolly. It's also a time when pundits of every stripe trot out their predictions. Permit me to try a few. In the coming months, Wall Street will surge to record levels, oblivious to the false prosperity created by our military-industrial economy. We are now spending about $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the total cost of both wars standing at well over $400 billion. These figures do not include the billions spent by the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons, by the Department of Homeland Security for "defense" of the homeland from terrorists or the cost incurred by the Department of Veterans Affairs for the lifetime care of those seriously wounded. A figure ranging between $1 trillion and $2 trillion would be a more realistic projected total cost.
Simultaneously, the U.S. trade deficit reached $782.7 billion in 2005, the fourth year at which this debt set a record. Our trade deficit with China alone stood at $201.5 billion, the highest deficit with any country. So great was the looming debt imbalance that last year Congress was forced to raise the national debt limit to $9 trillion from the previous $8.2 trillion. When George W. Bush took office six years ago the national debt was $5.6 trillion. Since then Clinton's big budget surpluses collapsed into deficits and the national debt has shot up by a whopping 50 percent. Because China and Japan enjoy huge trade surpluses with the U.S., we owe much of this debt to the central banks of the two countries.
So long as the Chinese and Japanese governments are willing to accept U.S. dollars in payment for their exported goods, we can continue to live in our fool's paradise on the brink of national bankruptcy. No wonder gold is close to $650 an ounce. To the nearly $9 trillion of national debt must be added the U.S. economy's nearly $9 trillion in mortgage debt and another $9 trillion in corporate bond debt--the latter up 34 percent since 2001. The U.S. economy also faces about $15 trillion in unfunded Social Security liability and an additional $35 trillion in unfunded Medicare liability. Add the statistic that the US has lost almost 3 million manufacturing jobs in the last six years, and the future looks grim.
Now, about the Iraq War. You remember the war, don't you? It's been in all the papers. Those who like to quote encouraging statistics are fond of pointing out that only four of Iraq's 18 provinces are aflame with resistance. What they don't point out is that the four provinces contain 40 percent of Iraq's population. The policy that American units would stand down as Iraqi units stood up has completely collapsed. Iraqi units have shown themselves to be undependable. The joys of the Christmas season were dampened by the sad news that American military deaths in Iraq had passed the 3,000 mark. In fact, December set a record for the number of casualties in any month in 2006, giving the lie to any claims that we are winning.
Between March 20 and May 1 (the date the “Mission Accomplished" banner was displayed), the period of active military combat, 140 American troops lost their lives. That means that 2,860 soldiers and Marines died unnecessarily because their commander-in-chief did not provide enough troops not only to defeat the enemy but also to smother any insurgency in its crib. The American military, intended to fight two wars simultaneously anywhere on the planet, has been humbled by a ragtag force of determined fourth generation war fighters.
For those unfamiliar with the term, fourth generation warfare is a concept developed by Thomas X. Hammes in his book The Sling and the Arrow. Defined as a war in which one of the participants is not a nation but a violent ideological network, it is similar to terrorism and asymmetric warfare, but is much narrower. The fierce conflicts in which we are embroiled in Iraq and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan are fourth generation wars.
There will be no drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq. President George W. Bush has tabled the face-saving report of the Iraq Study Group co-chaired by James A. Baker, his father's friend, and will actually escalate the war by increasing the number of troops in Iraq under the cover of the term, "surge." His action will generate protests back home and will constitute a slap in the faces of Baker and Bush's father, who has frequently used his influence to assist his wayward son. These include pressure to gain "legacy" admission to Phillips Exeter Academy, Yale University and the Harvard Business School.
During the Vietnam War, the senior Bush got his son into the so-called "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard and helped to cover up his yearlong absence without leave from that unit. Later his name surfaced in the bailout and cover-up of the financial skullduggery at Harken Energy Corp., where the son served on the board of directors while the firm created Enron-type deals that hid debt and artificially inflated its earnings. Ironically, the Harken debacle left George W. Bush's alma mater, Harvard University and its endowment fund, saddled with $20 million in debt.
Look for changes in military strategy that will come in part from the Israeli experience in the five-week midsummer war in Lebanon fought to an inconclusive cease fire between July 12 and August 14, 2006. "The war between Hizbollah and Israel?" you may ask. "What has that to do with Iraq?" Surprisingly, Hizbollah had achieved such a remarkable level of preparedness that it could respond successfully to the massive Israeli incursion. Despite intensive air attacks by the Israeli Air Force, Hizbollah fought one of the worlds most advanced and heavily armed conventional armies so cleverly, and so fiercely that Israel was glad to accept a UN-brokered cease fire. Hisbollah forces were robust, disciplined, well trained and intensely motivated and gave a remarkably good account of themselves, they shocked Israeli military planners.
A key factor in the Israeli campaign was the use of drone aircraft with near-saturation coverage of southern Lebanon. Unmanned drones were employed to detect the launch of medium-range missiles. Within a minute, the site's coordinates were communicated to waiting Israeli planes, making it possible for them to hit the crews and launchers before they could be moved to cover. The Israeli use of drones marked a turning point in unmanned warfare. Unfortunately for the Israelis, Hizbollah's more numerous short-range missile launchers could be brought out of hiding, fired and hidden again before there could be a retaliatory attack. Nevertheless, most military experts now see unmanned drones as one of the most significant developments in modern warfare.
Following the Israeli example, in Iraq there may be greater use of unmanned surveillance aircraft to combat the planting of roadside bombs, plus helicopter gunships and attack aircraft. Look for no major changes in strategy, however, with the departure of the two architects of the failed U.S. policy. Gen. John Abizaid, top U.S. commander in the Middle East, has already put in for retirement; Gen. George Casey, U.S. commander in Iraq, will be relieved in one or two months. Attacks on U.S. troops and bloody sectarian warfare will continue unabated. Expect Saudi Arabia, tired of witnessing the Iraqi Sunni minority being attacked by the more numerous Shiites and their militias, to pour still more funds into Sunni hands. Despite American efforts, there will not be a "victory," simply because what we want--a stable government--will be impossible to achieve in an unruly country riven by religious animosity and with many of its best professional people having left the country.
'Tis the season to be jolly. It's also a time when pundits of every stripe trot out their predictions. Permit me to try a few. In the coming months, Wall Street will surge to record levels, oblivious to the false prosperity created by our military-industrial economy. We are now spending about $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the total cost of both wars standing at well over $400 billion. These figures do not include the billions spent by the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons, by the Department of Homeland Security for "defense" of the homeland from terrorists or the cost incurred by the Department of Veterans Affairs for the lifetime care of those seriously wounded. A figure ranging between $1 trillion and $2 trillion would be a more realistic projected total cost.
Simultaneously, the U.S. trade deficit reached $782.7 billion in 2005, the fourth year at which this debt set a record. Our trade deficit with China alone stood at $201.5 billion, the highest deficit with any country. So great was the looming debt imbalance that last year Congress was forced to raise the national debt limit to $9 trillion from the previous $8.2 trillion. When George W. Bush took office six years ago the national debt was $5.6 trillion. Since then Clinton's big budget surpluses collapsed into deficits and the national debt has shot up by a whopping 50 percent. Because China and Japan enjoy huge trade surpluses with the U.S., we owe much of this debt to the central banks of the two countries.
So long as the Chinese and Japanese governments are willing to accept U.S. dollars in payment for their exported goods, we can continue to live in our fool's paradise on the brink of national bankruptcy. No wonder gold is close to $650 an ounce. To the nearly $9 trillion of national debt must be added the U.S. economy's nearly $9 trillion in mortgage debt and another $9 trillion in corporate bond debt--the latter up 34 percent since 2001. The U.S. economy also faces about $15 trillion in unfunded Social Security liability and an additional $35 trillion in unfunded Medicare liability. Add the statistic that the US has lost almost 3 million manufacturing jobs in the last six years, and the future looks grim.
Now, about the Iraq War. You remember the war, don't you? It's been in all the papers. Those who like to quote encouraging statistics are fond of pointing out that only four of Iraq's 18 provinces are aflame with resistance. What they don't point out is that the four provinces contain 40 percent of Iraq's population. The policy that American units would stand down as Iraqi units stood up has completely collapsed. Iraqi units have shown themselves to be undependable. The joys of the Christmas season were dampened by the sad news that American military deaths in Iraq had passed the 3,000 mark. In fact, December set a record for the number of casualties in any month in 2006, giving the lie to any claims that we are winning.
Between March 20 and May 1 (the date the “Mission Accomplished" banner was displayed), the period of active military combat, 140 American troops lost their lives. That means that 2,860 soldiers and Marines died unnecessarily because their commander-in-chief did not provide enough troops not only to defeat the enemy but also to smother any insurgency in its crib. The American military, intended to fight two wars simultaneously anywhere on the planet, has been humbled by a ragtag force of determined fourth generation war fighters.
For those unfamiliar with the term, fourth generation warfare is a concept developed by Thomas X. Hammes in his book The Sling and the Arrow. Defined as a war in which one of the participants is not a nation but a violent ideological network, it is similar to terrorism and asymmetric warfare, but is much narrower. The fierce conflicts in which we are embroiled in Iraq and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan are fourth generation wars.
There will be no drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq. President George W. Bush has tabled the face-saving report of the Iraq Study Group co-chaired by James A. Baker, his father's friend, and will actually escalate the war by increasing the number of troops in Iraq under the cover of the term, "surge." His action will generate protests back home and will constitute a slap in the faces of Baker and Bush's father, who has frequently used his influence to assist his wayward son. These include pressure to gain "legacy" admission to Phillips Exeter Academy, Yale University and the Harvard Business School.
During the Vietnam War, the senior Bush got his son into the so-called "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard and helped to cover up his yearlong absence without leave from that unit. Later his name surfaced in the bailout and cover-up of the financial skullduggery at Harken Energy Corp., where the son served on the board of directors while the firm created Enron-type deals that hid debt and artificially inflated its earnings. Ironically, the Harken debacle left George W. Bush's alma mater, Harvard University and its endowment fund, saddled with $20 million in debt.
Look for changes in military strategy that will come in part from the Israeli experience in the five-week midsummer war in Lebanon fought to an inconclusive cease fire between July 12 and August 14, 2006. "The war between Hizbollah and Israel?" you may ask. "What has that to do with Iraq?" Surprisingly, Hizbollah had achieved such a remarkable level of preparedness that it could respond successfully to the massive Israeli incursion. Despite intensive air attacks by the Israeli Air Force, Hizbollah fought one of the worlds most advanced and heavily armed conventional armies so cleverly, and so fiercely that Israel was glad to accept a UN-brokered cease fire. Hisbollah forces were robust, disciplined, well trained and intensely motivated and gave a remarkably good account of themselves, they shocked Israeli military planners.
A key factor in the Israeli campaign was the use of drone aircraft with near-saturation coverage of southern Lebanon. Unmanned drones were employed to detect the launch of medium-range missiles. Within a minute, the site's coordinates were communicated to waiting Israeli planes, making it possible for them to hit the crews and launchers before they could be moved to cover. The Israeli use of drones marked a turning point in unmanned warfare. Unfortunately for the Israelis, Hizbollah's more numerous short-range missile launchers could be brought out of hiding, fired and hidden again before there could be a retaliatory attack. Nevertheless, most military experts now see unmanned drones as one of the most significant developments in modern warfare.
Following the Israeli example, in Iraq there may be greater use of unmanned surveillance aircraft to combat the planting of roadside bombs, plus helicopter gunships and attack aircraft. Look for no major changes in strategy, however, with the departure of the two architects of the failed U.S. policy. Gen. John Abizaid, top U.S. commander in the Middle East, has already put in for retirement; Gen. George Casey, U.S. commander in Iraq, will be relieved in one or two months. Attacks on U.S. troops and bloody sectarian warfare will continue unabated. Expect Saudi Arabia, tired of witnessing the Iraqi Sunni minority being attacked by the more numerous Shiites and their militias, to pour still more funds into Sunni hands. Despite American efforts, there will not be a "victory," simply because what we want--a stable government--will be impossible to achieve in an unruly country riven by religious animosity and with many of its best professional people having left the country.
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (12/21/06)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
Two recent events are worth noting as the impending debacle in Iraq worsens. First, Gen. John P. Abizaid, top U.S. commander in the Middle East, testified before the Senate Armed Services committee and acknowledged that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was right when in 2003 he suggested that "something on the order of several hundred thousand troops would be needed to occupy Iraq after victory." Military experts have long contended that American efforts in Iraq have been severely undermined by the Bush administration's decision not to deploy a larger force to pacify the country.
Second, after eight months of labor, on Dec. 7 the bipartisan Iraq Study Group made up of ten political has-beens came up with its long-awaited report. An old joke has it that the camel is a horse designed by a committee. In its report, the Iraq Study Group created not another camel but a veritable smorgasbord of 79 sometimes conflicting recommendations. The report also contained some startling revelations: Of the 1,000-person staff employed at the American Embassy in Baghdad, only six speak Arabic well enough to be called fluent in the language. And a roadside bomb or rocket or mortar attack on U.S. troops is only recorded as an attack if someone gets hurt. On a July day this year, 1,007 such attacks went unreported by the Pentagon.
The doleful ISG report begins with the sentence, "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." It is all downhill from there, culminating in the blunt statement, "Current U.S. policy is not working." No wonder its release was conveniently postponed until after the mid-term elections. So much mismanagement, graft, venality and outright criminality is acknowledged, the report seems like an effort of a drowning establishment to grasp at 79 straws to keep itself afloat. Does any rational person believe that in any foreseeable time period, an undependable Iraqi army of questionable loyalty and dedication will be able to bring order to a country in which our own army, the best-trained and technologically the best-equipped army in the world, has not been able to prevail?
General Abizaid claimed that the U.S. must maintain or even increase current troop levels in Iraq because we have only "four to six months" left to keep sectarian violence from spiraling out of control. The next six months in Iraq always seem to be crucial, a siren song we have heard many times before. Early in 2004, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters after his visit to the British-held city of Basra, "The important thing is to realize we are about to enter into a very critical six months." Since then, U.S. Senators have been frequent predictors of the importance of "the next six months." Among those who have invoked this period have been Chuck Hagel, Joe Biden, John Warner, John McCain and Carl Levin.
Infatuation with the next six months not only affects politicians; journalists are also enamored of the magical time period. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has touted its importance so often that in the blogosphere a six-month period is called "a Friedman unit." Anyone with a smattering of knowledge about guerrilla warfare knows that insurgencies are never suppressed in a matter of months. Israel has been battling the Palestinian insurgency for almost six decades.
One of the ISG Report's proposals is downright dangerous, probably the result of the committee's failure to consult anyone in the military below the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Recommendation 39 would increase the present 3,000 soldiers embedded with the Iraqi military by adding up to 20,000 additional trainers, at the same time reducing the number of U.S. battle-hardened combat brigades. Any seasoned non-commissioned officer could have seen this as a recipe for disaster if U.S. trainers must depend upon "incompetent and corrupt Iraqi troops" (the Iraq President's own words) for their protection and defense. The ISG Report also supports "a short-term redeployment, or 'surge,' of American forces to stabilize Baghdad"--but retried Gen. Colin Powell, no slouch at running a war, doubts the wisdom of this.
Such an increase could be achieved in part by further extending the tours of duty of war-weary units already in Iraq or accelerating the arrival of others. Increasing the total numbers of troops, as was done in Vietnam, is simply the reaction of the losing side desperate for a miracle strategy as certainty of defeat looms, a sort of deus ex machina, the unexpected or improbable incident that made everything turn out right in ancient Greek drama. Cavalry charges, Zeppelins, V-2 rockets, kamikaze attacks--history is replete with similar examples. But more troops in the suggested low numbers--even if they could be scrounged from somewhere--will make little difference over a brief period. U.S. forces in Iraq are in an increasingly untenable position, operating now with a siege mentality reminiscent of John Ford movies.
Our troops in Iraq occupy recently constructed Forward Operating Bases, heavily fortified strong points from which patrolling forays are launched into towns and cities. These FOBs are supplied by truck convoys--but patrols and convoys do little more than provide tempting sitting-duck targets for insurgents with an almost limitless supply of bomb-making materials and electronic detonators. The ferocity of the attacks have left U.S. commanders stymied and searching for countermeasures, while the steadily rising toll of dead and wounded U.S. troops attests to the insurgents' skill at this newest variant of guerrilla warfare, called by military experts "fourth generation warfare." Our troops also conduct occasional counterproductive raids on the hideouts of suspected insurgents that turn ordinary citizens against us. More troops cannot now do what more troops could have done in 2003 to keep the insurgency from ever getting started. More troops doing more of the same things we have been doing can only provide more targets for the insurgents and more flag-draped coffins.
At Donald Rumsfeld's farewell ceremony, President Bush, praised him for meeting "the challenges of a new and unfamiliar war"--another of his distortions of history. The U.S. has had plenty of experience with guerrilla wars, including three Seminole Wars, Indian Wars in the West, the Philippine Insurrection, Pershing's punitive expedition into Mexico, and occupations of Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic for extended periods by U.S. Marines. And, of course, the supreme example of how draining guerrilla warfare can be, the Vietnam War.
The time is fast coming for us to admit that the bungled Iraq War has been irretrievably lost and anything resembling victory is out of our hands. There is nothing dishonorable in admitting to a blunder. Despite the fig leaf that the ISG report offered, the Bush administration continues to seek an elusive "victory" in Iraq. Breaking with President George W. Bush, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) expressed the feelings of many when he said, "I for one am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd; it may even be criminal. I cannot support that any more."
And so, as we head into this sacred but festive holiday period, brave young men and women are still slogging on and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan while back home the craven old men in Washington who hunger for conquest enjoy their complacent lives, oblivious to the increasing carnage in which our young people are being sacrificed.
Two recent events are worth noting as the impending debacle in Iraq worsens. First, Gen. John P. Abizaid, top U.S. commander in the Middle East, testified before the Senate Armed Services committee and acknowledged that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was right when in 2003 he suggested that "something on the order of several hundred thousand troops would be needed to occupy Iraq after victory." Military experts have long contended that American efforts in Iraq have been severely undermined by the Bush administration's decision not to deploy a larger force to pacify the country.
Second, after eight months of labor, on Dec. 7 the bipartisan Iraq Study Group made up of ten political has-beens came up with its long-awaited report. An old joke has it that the camel is a horse designed by a committee. In its report, the Iraq Study Group created not another camel but a veritable smorgasbord of 79 sometimes conflicting recommendations. The report also contained some startling revelations: Of the 1,000-person staff employed at the American Embassy in Baghdad, only six speak Arabic well enough to be called fluent in the language. And a roadside bomb or rocket or mortar attack on U.S. troops is only recorded as an attack if someone gets hurt. On a July day this year, 1,007 such attacks went unreported by the Pentagon.
The doleful ISG report begins with the sentence, "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." It is all downhill from there, culminating in the blunt statement, "Current U.S. policy is not working." No wonder its release was conveniently postponed until after the mid-term elections. So much mismanagement, graft, venality and outright criminality is acknowledged, the report seems like an effort of a drowning establishment to grasp at 79 straws to keep itself afloat. Does any rational person believe that in any foreseeable time period, an undependable Iraqi army of questionable loyalty and dedication will be able to bring order to a country in which our own army, the best-trained and technologically the best-equipped army in the world, has not been able to prevail?
General Abizaid claimed that the U.S. must maintain or even increase current troop levels in Iraq because we have only "four to six months" left to keep sectarian violence from spiraling out of control. The next six months in Iraq always seem to be crucial, a siren song we have heard many times before. Early in 2004, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters after his visit to the British-held city of Basra, "The important thing is to realize we are about to enter into a very critical six months." Since then, U.S. Senators have been frequent predictors of the importance of "the next six months." Among those who have invoked this period have been Chuck Hagel, Joe Biden, John Warner, John McCain and Carl Levin.
Infatuation with the next six months not only affects politicians; journalists are also enamored of the magical time period. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has touted its importance so often that in the blogosphere a six-month period is called "a Friedman unit." Anyone with a smattering of knowledge about guerrilla warfare knows that insurgencies are never suppressed in a matter of months. Israel has been battling the Palestinian insurgency for almost six decades.
One of the ISG Report's proposals is downright dangerous, probably the result of the committee's failure to consult anyone in the military below the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Recommendation 39 would increase the present 3,000 soldiers embedded with the Iraqi military by adding up to 20,000 additional trainers, at the same time reducing the number of U.S. battle-hardened combat brigades. Any seasoned non-commissioned officer could have seen this as a recipe for disaster if U.S. trainers must depend upon "incompetent and corrupt Iraqi troops" (the Iraq President's own words) for their protection and defense. The ISG Report also supports "a short-term redeployment, or 'surge,' of American forces to stabilize Baghdad"--but retried Gen. Colin Powell, no slouch at running a war, doubts the wisdom of this.
Such an increase could be achieved in part by further extending the tours of duty of war-weary units already in Iraq or accelerating the arrival of others. Increasing the total numbers of troops, as was done in Vietnam, is simply the reaction of the losing side desperate for a miracle strategy as certainty of defeat looms, a sort of deus ex machina, the unexpected or improbable incident that made everything turn out right in ancient Greek drama. Cavalry charges, Zeppelins, V-2 rockets, kamikaze attacks--history is replete with similar examples. But more troops in the suggested low numbers--even if they could be scrounged from somewhere--will make little difference over a brief period. U.S. forces in Iraq are in an increasingly untenable position, operating now with a siege mentality reminiscent of John Ford movies.
Our troops in Iraq occupy recently constructed Forward Operating Bases, heavily fortified strong points from which patrolling forays are launched into towns and cities. These FOBs are supplied by truck convoys--but patrols and convoys do little more than provide tempting sitting-duck targets for insurgents with an almost limitless supply of bomb-making materials and electronic detonators. The ferocity of the attacks have left U.S. commanders stymied and searching for countermeasures, while the steadily rising toll of dead and wounded U.S. troops attests to the insurgents' skill at this newest variant of guerrilla warfare, called by military experts "fourth generation warfare." Our troops also conduct occasional counterproductive raids on the hideouts of suspected insurgents that turn ordinary citizens against us. More troops cannot now do what more troops could have done in 2003 to keep the insurgency from ever getting started. More troops doing more of the same things we have been doing can only provide more targets for the insurgents and more flag-draped coffins.
At Donald Rumsfeld's farewell ceremony, President Bush, praised him for meeting "the challenges of a new and unfamiliar war"--another of his distortions of history. The U.S. has had plenty of experience with guerrilla wars, including three Seminole Wars, Indian Wars in the West, the Philippine Insurrection, Pershing's punitive expedition into Mexico, and occupations of Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic for extended periods by U.S. Marines. And, of course, the supreme example of how draining guerrilla warfare can be, the Vietnam War.
The time is fast coming for us to admit that the bungled Iraq War has been irretrievably lost and anything resembling victory is out of our hands. There is nothing dishonorable in admitting to a blunder. Despite the fig leaf that the ISG report offered, the Bush administration continues to seek an elusive "victory" in Iraq. Breaking with President George W. Bush, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) expressed the feelings of many when he said, "I for one am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd; it may even be criminal. I cannot support that any more."
And so, as we head into this sacred but festive holiday period, brave young men and women are still slogging on and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan while back home the craven old men in Washington who hunger for conquest enjoy their complacent lives, oblivious to the increasing carnage in which our young people are being sacrificed.
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (12/07/06)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
Last week's column began an examination of the Balkanization of Westchester County. Thanks to the county's fragmentation into a multitude of jurisdictions, we now have a crazy quilt of ambiguous codes that reveal bizarre anomalies. Nevertheless, when it comes to zoning, Westchester communities all seem to go their separate ways. Where you live can actually determine what you may or may not be allowed to do at home by your community's zoning laws.
In six communities in this part of Westchester--the villages of Briarcliff Manor, Croton, and Ossining, the towns of Cortlandt and Ossining, and a city, Peekskill--"customary home occupations" (a term with great potential for conflicting interpretations) are permitted in varying degrees as incidental to residential use of the premises. Sale of goods and display of merchandise are banned everywhere to prevent conspicuous commercial usage and to keep neighborhood values from being affected. All six communities also define permitted and prohibited occupations.
Cortlandt's zoning ordinance is the only law in touch with the times, pointing out that home occupations are increasingly appropriate in the light of new communication technologies. It is also the only law that specifically permits a homeowner to work at home "with connection to office or other persons by computer, telephone or other communications mode," and notes that "such occupations can be environmentally beneficial by reducing commuter trips." Who can argue that computers, monitors, laser printers, scanners, power backup systems, voltage regulators and other electronic equipment now so common in homes everywhere have not quietly become "customary household appliances," a common defining stipulation for home occupations?
Cortlandt allows the following 11 home occupations: "fine arts studio, dressmaking and millinery, mail-order business, preparation of food for sale off-site, office for resident professional, such as physician, dentist, architect, broker or attorney, telephone answering service." By contrast, Briarcliff Manor lists only five "learned professions" as permitted home occupations: architect, dentist, engineer, lawyer and physician. To these, the Village and Town of Ossining both add four: artist, clergyman, musician and teacher, making a total of nine permitted professions.
Croton generously itemizes 16 permitted home occupations, adding eight others to eight of the nine allowed in Ossining: "chiropractor, city planner, insurance broker, optometrist, osteopath, public accountant, real estate broker or ladies hairdressers, but not including veterinarians." Croton's failure to include clergymen and its inclusion of usually excluded ladies' hairdressers seems odd. Exclusion of veterinarians is not unusual; dogs tend to bark. This restriction, of course, does not prevent the use of commercial space by Croton veterinarians.
Peekskill allows 11 professionals to have home offices: "architect, artist, chiropractor, city planner, engineer, insurance broker, lawyer, musician, public accountant, real estate broker or teacher." But the city, which once had a booster group called the Friendly Town Association, is decidedly unfriendly to certain professionals working at home. Its zoning ordinance says bluntly that "a doctor, dentist, optometrist or similar medical practitioner" is excluded from setting up an office at home in Peekskill.
Croton and both Ossining Village and Town prohibit studios in which dancing or music instruction is offered to more than four pupils, and also prohibit concerts or recitals. On the other hand, while it is silent about dance instruction, concerts or recitals, Cortlandt's ordinance permits music instruction, and adds academic teaching and tutoring, also with the same limit on the number of pupils. Weighing in with its own array of prohibitions, Briarcliff Manor's ordinance says, "a clinic, hospital, barber shop, beauty parlor, tea room, tourist home or animal hospital are not deemed to be home occupations." Broad classifications inevitably risk vagueness; thus, in Briarcliff Manor how does a specifically prohibited animal hospital differ from, say, a veterinarian's office?
With specifically prohibited and permitted occupations, the rub comes with a category unanticipated by the framers of a zoning ordinance. Book authorship is nowhere identified as permitted--but why shouldn't the unobtrusive writing of books be considered a "customary home occupation"? What about photography? Or the preparation of tax returns? Home decoration consultants? Can someone offering "phone sex" claim to be operating a telephone answering service?
All six communities control the size of signs, limiting them to an area of one or two square feet. Space for a home-based business in Briarcliff Manor is limited to 25 percent of one floor in the dwelling unit. Croton sees it differently, liberally sanctioning the use of 30 percent of the total floor space of the entire building. Ossining Village increases the allowed 30% of one floor of a building when used by dentists and physicians to a sizable 50 percent. All six communities also set limitations on the number of nonresident workers who may be employed. Briarcliff Manor allows no nonresident employees, which surely works a hardship on professionals with offices in their homes.
Croton allows only one nonresident employee, as do the Village and Town of Ossining--but doctors and dentists in Ossining Village are allowed two. Peekskill and Cortlandt generously permit two nonresident employees. The paradox, of course, is that in any of these communities a homeowner can employ two, or six, or even a dozen servants. Yet a professional author in Briarcliff Manor who hires someone to type a book manuscript in the home is a lawbreaker. Similarly, engaging two such typists in Ossining or Croton also is a no-no.
Zoning ordinances are usually long on definitions and short on enforcement, as witness the widespread failure to control illegal accessory apartments. Today, the trend is toward placing less emphasis on defining acceptable and unacceptable home occupations. Instead, planners prefer to set the conditions under which a homeowner may operate a business or pursue a profession at home. The community sets up a permit process with a clear-cut list of performance standards and a case-by-case evaluation of each application, giving it complete control over the home-based enterprise.
Increasingly invasive regulation of how we may use our homes is a far cry from the time-honored principle affirmed in 1605 by English jurist Sir Edward Coke, usually paraphrased as "a man's house is his castle." The American Planning Association supports a policy of allowing home occupations by special permit as preferable to defining permitted occupations and letting people do whatever they want until someone complains. Admittedly, this imposes another layer of bureaucracy on already overloaded local administrators at a time when the thrust should be toward smaller government. Proponents claim the permit process has the advantage that potential problems are uncovered and solved before the home-based business begins to operate. Complaints by neighbors and the inevitable frictions they engender usually do not arise.
Westchester's regulations on home occupations are wildly inconsistent. Its creaky zoning laws hardly reflect the lifestyles, the needs or even the desires of the respective communities. A logical solution would be modernization and standardization to match the realities of today's economic scene and the swift advances of technology. Now is the time to begin reversing the costly Balkanization of Westchester County. The conflicting, outdated and inconsistent zoning laws of its communities would be a good place to start.
Last week's column began an examination of the Balkanization of Westchester County. Thanks to the county's fragmentation into a multitude of jurisdictions, we now have a crazy quilt of ambiguous codes that reveal bizarre anomalies. Nevertheless, when it comes to zoning, Westchester communities all seem to go their separate ways. Where you live can actually determine what you may or may not be allowed to do at home by your community's zoning laws.
In six communities in this part of Westchester--the villages of Briarcliff Manor, Croton, and Ossining, the towns of Cortlandt and Ossining, and a city, Peekskill--"customary home occupations" (a term with great potential for conflicting interpretations) are permitted in varying degrees as incidental to residential use of the premises. Sale of goods and display of merchandise are banned everywhere to prevent conspicuous commercial usage and to keep neighborhood values from being affected. All six communities also define permitted and prohibited occupations.
Cortlandt's zoning ordinance is the only law in touch with the times, pointing out that home occupations are increasingly appropriate in the light of new communication technologies. It is also the only law that specifically permits a homeowner to work at home "with connection to office or other persons by computer, telephone or other communications mode," and notes that "such occupations can be environmentally beneficial by reducing commuter trips." Who can argue that computers, monitors, laser printers, scanners, power backup systems, voltage regulators and other electronic equipment now so common in homes everywhere have not quietly become "customary household appliances," a common defining stipulation for home occupations?
Cortlandt allows the following 11 home occupations: "fine arts studio, dressmaking and millinery, mail-order business, preparation of food for sale off-site, office for resident professional, such as physician, dentist, architect, broker or attorney, telephone answering service." By contrast, Briarcliff Manor lists only five "learned professions" as permitted home occupations: architect, dentist, engineer, lawyer and physician. To these, the Village and Town of Ossining both add four: artist, clergyman, musician and teacher, making a total of nine permitted professions.
Croton generously itemizes 16 permitted home occupations, adding eight others to eight of the nine allowed in Ossining: "chiropractor, city planner, insurance broker, optometrist, osteopath, public accountant, real estate broker or ladies hairdressers, but not including veterinarians." Croton's failure to include clergymen and its inclusion of usually excluded ladies' hairdressers seems odd. Exclusion of veterinarians is not unusual; dogs tend to bark. This restriction, of course, does not prevent the use of commercial space by Croton veterinarians.
Peekskill allows 11 professionals to have home offices: "architect, artist, chiropractor, city planner, engineer, insurance broker, lawyer, musician, public accountant, real estate broker or teacher." But the city, which once had a booster group called the Friendly Town Association, is decidedly unfriendly to certain professionals working at home. Its zoning ordinance says bluntly that "a doctor, dentist, optometrist or similar medical practitioner" is excluded from setting up an office at home in Peekskill.
Croton and both Ossining Village and Town prohibit studios in which dancing or music instruction is offered to more than four pupils, and also prohibit concerts or recitals. On the other hand, while it is silent about dance instruction, concerts or recitals, Cortlandt's ordinance permits music instruction, and adds academic teaching and tutoring, also with the same limit on the number of pupils. Weighing in with its own array of prohibitions, Briarcliff Manor's ordinance says, "a clinic, hospital, barber shop, beauty parlor, tea room, tourist home or animal hospital are not deemed to be home occupations." Broad classifications inevitably risk vagueness; thus, in Briarcliff Manor how does a specifically prohibited animal hospital differ from, say, a veterinarian's office?
With specifically prohibited and permitted occupations, the rub comes with a category unanticipated by the framers of a zoning ordinance. Book authorship is nowhere identified as permitted--but why shouldn't the unobtrusive writing of books be considered a "customary home occupation"? What about photography? Or the preparation of tax returns? Home decoration consultants? Can someone offering "phone sex" claim to be operating a telephone answering service?
All six communities control the size of signs, limiting them to an area of one or two square feet. Space for a home-based business in Briarcliff Manor is limited to 25 percent of one floor in the dwelling unit. Croton sees it differently, liberally sanctioning the use of 30 percent of the total floor space of the entire building. Ossining Village increases the allowed 30% of one floor of a building when used by dentists and physicians to a sizable 50 percent. All six communities also set limitations on the number of nonresident workers who may be employed. Briarcliff Manor allows no nonresident employees, which surely works a hardship on professionals with offices in their homes.
Croton allows only one nonresident employee, as do the Village and Town of Ossining--but doctors and dentists in Ossining Village are allowed two. Peekskill and Cortlandt generously permit two nonresident employees. The paradox, of course, is that in any of these communities a homeowner can employ two, or six, or even a dozen servants. Yet a professional author in Briarcliff Manor who hires someone to type a book manuscript in the home is a lawbreaker. Similarly, engaging two such typists in Ossining or Croton also is a no-no.
Zoning ordinances are usually long on definitions and short on enforcement, as witness the widespread failure to control illegal accessory apartments. Today, the trend is toward placing less emphasis on defining acceptable and unacceptable home occupations. Instead, planners prefer to set the conditions under which a homeowner may operate a business or pursue a profession at home. The community sets up a permit process with a clear-cut list of performance standards and a case-by-case evaluation of each application, giving it complete control over the home-based enterprise.
Increasingly invasive regulation of how we may use our homes is a far cry from the time-honored principle affirmed in 1605 by English jurist Sir Edward Coke, usually paraphrased as "a man's house is his castle." The American Planning Association supports a policy of allowing home occupations by special permit as preferable to defining permitted occupations and letting people do whatever they want until someone complains. Admittedly, this imposes another layer of bureaucracy on already overloaded local administrators at a time when the thrust should be toward smaller government. Proponents claim the permit process has the advantage that potential problems are uncovered and solved before the home-based business begins to operate. Complaints by neighbors and the inevitable frictions they engender usually do not arise.
Westchester's regulations on home occupations are wildly inconsistent. Its creaky zoning laws hardly reflect the lifestyles, the needs or even the desires of the respective communities. A logical solution would be modernization and standardization to match the realities of today's economic scene and the swift advances of technology. Now is the time to begin reversing the costly Balkanization of Westchester County. The conflicting, outdated and inconsistent zoning laws of its communities would be a good place to start.
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (11/30/06)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
Time to end the Balkanization of Westchester County? With an area of 450.5 square miles, Westchester follows a governmental plan adopted in 1788. The county now boasts six cities, 16 towns (down from an original 20) containing 23 incorporated villages plus some 93 unincorporated hamlets, such as Chappaqua, Scarborough or Montrose. To complicate the picture, two villages, Mount Kisco and Scarsdale, also are towns. In the southern part of Westchester, cities and villages are so cheek-by-jowl that motorists can pass from one community to another unaware of the change in political geography unless they get a citation for a traffic violation. Residents of villages also have the unenviable privilege of paying taxes to three levels of government: county, town and village. In some, sewer taxes have been added to the mix disguised as "usage fees," enabling the village administration to tout this fast shuffle as a reduction in taxes.
Each unit in this bewildering array of cities, towns, villages and hamlets also may have its own zoning ordinances, planning boards and zoning boards of appeal, creating a veritable crazy quilt of contrasting legislation. Differences in interpretation and application vary so widely they can have a significant impact on businesses wishing to establish themselves in Westchester. Also within Westchester are 40 separate school districts, 58 separate community fire departments, and 39 separate public libraries under community or local library association control. The sheer redundancy of staff, equipment and facilities is staggering. One can only wonder how many taxpayers' dollars could be saved if these separate entities were consolidated or even if they merely pooled their buying. Imagine the economies of scale that would result from combined purchases of everything from school books and library books to school buses, garbage trucks and fire engines.
A bad bargain. The cost of the war in Iraq is rapidly approaching $600 billion, threatening such domestic priorities as the expansion of Medicare prescription drug coverage, and making it more costly than the longer Vietnam War, which cost $536 billion in today's dollars.
Show me the money. An urban legend now making the rounds claims that next year the IRS will refund excise taxes on telephone calls collected by telephone companies. Most urban legends turn out to be untrue. But, wonder of wonders, this one happens to be absolutely right on the money. For years, telephone companies collected excise taxes on long-distance calls, based on distance and time spent talking. When flat-fee service was introduced, consumer groups sued to stop the practice. After a series of court battles, the IRS agreed to stop collecting this tax. The IRS now will refund or credit businesses, nonprofit groups and individual taxpayers for the excise taxes on long-distance calls added to their telephone bills during the period between Feb. 28, 2003, and July 31, 2006.
The refund procedure is simple: You may claim credit on Line 71 of Form 1040 or on Short Form 1040A for a standard refund ranging from $30 for single persons to $60 if there are four or more dependents in your household. If you have all you phone bills for the 41-month period, you may elect to total the taxes paid and attach Form 8913 to your return. Persons who are not required to submit an income tax return can use Form 1040EZ-T to apply for the standard refund or attach Form 8913 to Form 1040EZ-T if you have your telephone bills and calculate the amount to be refunded. The Treasury Department estimates that about $10 billion will be returned to individuals. Interestingly, when this column pointed out in February of this year that Croton had been short-changing seniors over the years by miscalculating their tax exemptions, Croton officials claimed that they were prevented from offering seniors refunds or credits against future taxes.
Washington fine tunes the definition of hunger. In the fall of each year the U.S. Department of Agriculture issues a report that measures Americans' access to food. The report has consistently used the word "hungry" to describe those who cannot put food on the table. But not any longer. The Agriculture Department's new thinking reflected in this year's report is that "hungry" is a word to be shunned. The 35 million Americans who weren't sure last year where their next meal was coming from were merely suffering from "low food security." People who are worse off and sometimes had no food at all were labeled as having "very low food security."
This year's report had failed to appear in October, as usual. Instead, release was delayed until after the election. Could the reason have been the report's bad news that the number of hungry Americans who are starving in the midst of plenty has risen over the first five years of the Bush administration?
When is a civil war not a civil war? Answer: When the administration says so. According to the White House, the upsurge in sectarian killings in Iraq is merely "a new phase." It's a new phase, all right--a new phase in the administration's continuing denial of reality. It was so impossible to guarantee President Bush's safety in a proposed visit to Baghdad this week that a scheduled meeting with Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had to be arranged in neighboring Jordan. The two words that have not been heard in all the talk about America's intentions for Iraq and the Middle East are "statecraft" and "negotiations." After fighting an Irish nationalist insurgency in Northern Ireland since the 1920s, Britain finally woke to the fact that meeting and talking with opposition groups could induce the I.R.A. to disarm and start down the road to peace.
Instead of being a statesman and leader in seeking a solution, Mr. Bush has been little more than a cheerleader, talking up "victory" without ever defining how we will recognize it when it happens. Let's face it, Iraq can never be put back together as it was before our invasion. After World War I, the region known as Mesopotamia was created as a nation despite the bitter animosities and frictions between its religious and ethnic groups--Shia, Sunni and Kurds. The only person who was ever able to control these unruly groups now sits in a cell in Baghdad under sentence of death by hanging.
President Bush, the Pentagon and Sen. John McCain are all talking about committing 20,000 more troops to Iraq, straining the already thinly stretched American military even more. The White House has never revealed what measure will be used to determine when the long-sought but elusive victory has been achieved. Yet we are being asked to continue sacrificing additional American lives because of the administration's failure to provide enough troops initially to guarantee the postwar stability of Iraq.
The White House argues that if we leave now, a full-fledged civil war will break out. Yet if we stay another six months and then decide to leave, a full-fledged civil war will still break out. Forget about the dollar cost of staying longer. In the past six months, a total of 416 U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq. Will we sacrifice another 416 American soldiers to make up for our botched occupation and lack of planning? That means, too, another 416 graveside ceremonies ending with grieving parents or spouses presented with 416 carefully folded flags with Purple Heart medals pinned to them. As sportswriter Jimmy Cannon would say, betting another 416 American lives in a war that Henry Kissinger has already pronounced unwinnable is a sucker bet whose payoff can only be 416 even more bitter and vocal Cindy Sheehans.
Time to end the Balkanization of Westchester County? With an area of 450.5 square miles, Westchester follows a governmental plan adopted in 1788. The county now boasts six cities, 16 towns (down from an original 20) containing 23 incorporated villages plus some 93 unincorporated hamlets, such as Chappaqua, Scarborough or Montrose. To complicate the picture, two villages, Mount Kisco and Scarsdale, also are towns. In the southern part of Westchester, cities and villages are so cheek-by-jowl that motorists can pass from one community to another unaware of the change in political geography unless they get a citation for a traffic violation. Residents of villages also have the unenviable privilege of paying taxes to three levels of government: county, town and village. In some, sewer taxes have been added to the mix disguised as "usage fees," enabling the village administration to tout this fast shuffle as a reduction in taxes.
Each unit in this bewildering array of cities, towns, villages and hamlets also may have its own zoning ordinances, planning boards and zoning boards of appeal, creating a veritable crazy quilt of contrasting legislation. Differences in interpretation and application vary so widely they can have a significant impact on businesses wishing to establish themselves in Westchester. Also within Westchester are 40 separate school districts, 58 separate community fire departments, and 39 separate public libraries under community or local library association control. The sheer redundancy of staff, equipment and facilities is staggering. One can only wonder how many taxpayers' dollars could be saved if these separate entities were consolidated or even if they merely pooled their buying. Imagine the economies of scale that would result from combined purchases of everything from school books and library books to school buses, garbage trucks and fire engines.
A bad bargain. The cost of the war in Iraq is rapidly approaching $600 billion, threatening such domestic priorities as the expansion of Medicare prescription drug coverage, and making it more costly than the longer Vietnam War, which cost $536 billion in today's dollars.
Show me the money. An urban legend now making the rounds claims that next year the IRS will refund excise taxes on telephone calls collected by telephone companies. Most urban legends turn out to be untrue. But, wonder of wonders, this one happens to be absolutely right on the money. For years, telephone companies collected excise taxes on long-distance calls, based on distance and time spent talking. When flat-fee service was introduced, consumer groups sued to stop the practice. After a series of court battles, the IRS agreed to stop collecting this tax. The IRS now will refund or credit businesses, nonprofit groups and individual taxpayers for the excise taxes on long-distance calls added to their telephone bills during the period between Feb. 28, 2003, and July 31, 2006.
The refund procedure is simple: You may claim credit on Line 71 of Form 1040 or on Short Form 1040A for a standard refund ranging from $30 for single persons to $60 if there are four or more dependents in your household. If you have all you phone bills for the 41-month period, you may elect to total the taxes paid and attach Form 8913 to your return. Persons who are not required to submit an income tax return can use Form 1040EZ-T to apply for the standard refund or attach Form 8913 to Form 1040EZ-T if you have your telephone bills and calculate the amount to be refunded. The Treasury Department estimates that about $10 billion will be returned to individuals. Interestingly, when this column pointed out in February of this year that Croton had been short-changing seniors over the years by miscalculating their tax exemptions, Croton officials claimed that they were prevented from offering seniors refunds or credits against future taxes.
Washington fine tunes the definition of hunger. In the fall of each year the U.S. Department of Agriculture issues a report that measures Americans' access to food. The report has consistently used the word "hungry" to describe those who cannot put food on the table. But not any longer. The Agriculture Department's new thinking reflected in this year's report is that "hungry" is a word to be shunned. The 35 million Americans who weren't sure last year where their next meal was coming from were merely suffering from "low food security." People who are worse off and sometimes had no food at all were labeled as having "very low food security."
This year's report had failed to appear in October, as usual. Instead, release was delayed until after the election. Could the reason have been the report's bad news that the number of hungry Americans who are starving in the midst of plenty has risen over the first five years of the Bush administration?
When is a civil war not a civil war? Answer: When the administration says so. According to the White House, the upsurge in sectarian killings in Iraq is merely "a new phase." It's a new phase, all right--a new phase in the administration's continuing denial of reality. It was so impossible to guarantee President Bush's safety in a proposed visit to Baghdad this week that a scheduled meeting with Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had to be arranged in neighboring Jordan. The two words that have not been heard in all the talk about America's intentions for Iraq and the Middle East are "statecraft" and "negotiations." After fighting an Irish nationalist insurgency in Northern Ireland since the 1920s, Britain finally woke to the fact that meeting and talking with opposition groups could induce the I.R.A. to disarm and start down the road to peace.
Instead of being a statesman and leader in seeking a solution, Mr. Bush has been little more than a cheerleader, talking up "victory" without ever defining how we will recognize it when it happens. Let's face it, Iraq can never be put back together as it was before our invasion. After World War I, the region known as Mesopotamia was created as a nation despite the bitter animosities and frictions between its religious and ethnic groups--Shia, Sunni and Kurds. The only person who was ever able to control these unruly groups now sits in a cell in Baghdad under sentence of death by hanging.
President Bush, the Pentagon and Sen. John McCain are all talking about committing 20,000 more troops to Iraq, straining the already thinly stretched American military even more. The White House has never revealed what measure will be used to determine when the long-sought but elusive victory has been achieved. Yet we are being asked to continue sacrificing additional American lives because of the administration's failure to provide enough troops initially to guarantee the postwar stability of Iraq.
The White House argues that if we leave now, a full-fledged civil war will break out. Yet if we stay another six months and then decide to leave, a full-fledged civil war will still break out. Forget about the dollar cost of staying longer. In the past six months, a total of 416 U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq. Will we sacrifice another 416 American soldiers to make up for our botched occupation and lack of planning? That means, too, another 416 graveside ceremonies ending with grieving parents or spouses presented with 416 carefully folded flags with Purple Heart medals pinned to them. As sportswriter Jimmy Cannon would say, betting another 416 American lives in a war that Henry Kissinger has already pronounced unwinnable is a sucker bet whose payoff can only be 416 even more bitter and vocal Cindy Sheehans.
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (11/16/06)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
Vox populi. The people have spoken. After last Tuesday's emphatic rejection of the unwinnable Iraq War, there should be no shilly-shallying about leaving the Iraqi people to their own devices. Our bungled attempt at democratization of that troubled country has been shown to be a purgative rather than a remedy.
After 9/11 it was widely argued that the landscape had changed drastically, and the world had entered a new and frightening "age of terror." Terror was no longer something that happened in some remote part of the world. For the first time a state with enormous power had been successfully attacked at home. President Bush immediately announced that America was engaged in a War on Terror and proclaimed himself "a wartime president." He declared ominously, "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland."
But the "war on terror" did not suddenly come into existence with that 9/11 event. And the four-pronged terrorist attacks on domestic targets were hardly unexpected. A month earlier, the CIA's Presidential Briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, had specifically warned that Bin Laden intended to attack in the United States. The FBI had taken note of individuals from the Middle East who had applied for flying lessons but expressed no interest in learning how to take off or land. Plane hijackings by individuals and groups of terrorists had been singularly successful for several years.
Millions who had lived through World War II could recall that during the Battle for Okinawa in 1945 Japanese suicidal kamikaze pilots had decimated the U.S. Seventh Fleet by flying through a curtain of antiaircraft fire and crashing their explosive-laden planes into naval vessels Any reader of newspaper headlines or listener to TV or radio broadcasts--the "celebrated man in the street"--was well aware that attacks like the 9/11 hijackings might occur.. An eight-year-old with a Crayola could have connected the dots.
A now almost-forgotten event that telegraphed to the nation that the World Trade Center was a target did occur on Feb. 26, 1993, when groups related to those who succeeded on 9/11 drove a rental van containing 1,500 pounds of explosive into the North Tower's parking garage. The resulting explosion came very close to toppling the North Tower, sending it crashing into the South Tower, toppling both landmarks and killing or maiming thousands of people. It was even widely known that these groups had even more ambitious plans that were nipped in the bud. As early as 1981 U.S. and British intelligence agencies were well aware of the existence of a network of radical Islamist groups. In that year, element of al-Qaida assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. A year later groups related to Hezbollah drove a truck bomb into the U.S. Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport in Lebanon, an act that forced President Ronald Reagan to withdraw U.S. troops from Lebanon.
What went wrong in Iraq? It had been widely predicted by analysts that an invasion of Iraq would inspire terrorism. What was not anticipated was the rapid increase of radical fundamentalism all over the world. Not only did our invasion cause a rise in recruitment by radical groups, the war created a new terrorist haven--Iraq itself. Even the destruction of al-Qaida will do little to improve the prospects for the future if the underlying conditions that caused the group's popularity--political oppression and lack of economic opportunity--persist in the Middle East and elsewhere. Equally troubling is Washington's backing of grilled heavily repressive and corrupt governments, which bolsters al-Qaida’s claim that the U. S. supports the oppression of Muslims.
It would be too easy to call what has taken place in Iraq a comedy of errors, but this glib phrase overlooks the more than 2,800 American lives already sacrificed there. Ironically, that number approximates the number of lives lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A grim trade-off, indeed.
You can't make this stuff up. In a recent interview, Martha Stewart is quoted as saying, "I honestly don't remember exactly what I was prosecuted for." This from someone who spent five months of her life in the federal low-security slammer at Alderson, West Virginia--and she can't remember why? Give me a break.
Your tax dollars at work. For almost six years, the U.S. Army has tried to lure recruits with the advertising slogan "An Army of One." Adopted in January 2001 to replace the "Be All You Can Be" campaign, which had lasted nearly 20 years, "An Army of One" was introduced to overcome what consultants felt was a view among young people that the Army was dehumanizing. It received heavy criticism because it de-emphasized the basic need for teamwork in any military organization. "If you want to be an `Army of One' you probably want to join the Hell's Angels, not the U.S. Army," observed Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute research group.
After struggling through a disappointing recruiting year, the Army hired the communications firm McCann Worldgroup last December to develop the new slogan. The overall five-year contract is valued at $1 billion, with the first two years guaranteed at $200 million each year. The new slogan was featured in a multimedia ad campaign launched Nov. 9, timed to coincide with Veterans Day weekend, Saturday, Nov. 11.
Sloganeering by the military services isn't something new. The other services also rely on catchy slogans to spearhead their advertising. Just last month the Air Force switched its slogan from "Cross into the Blue" to "Do Something Amazing." The Navy has used "Accelerate Your Life" since January 2001, and the Marine Corps has long relied on "The Few. The Proud." And what might this new Army slogan be? Are you sitting down? Developed in numerous tests with focus groups and interviews with soldiers, the $200 million slogan consists of two words: "Army Strong." It is meant--get this--"to convey the idea that if you join the Army you will gain physical and emotional strength, as well as strength of character and purpose."
Militaria. It made eminent good sense for the founding fathers to ordain that the person elected president would also be commander in chief of the nation's armed forces. After all, who could better fill that role than George Washington, the military leader who had made the nation's independence possible? Sadly, they did not foresee the pitfalls inherent in that arrangement. Today we have a stubborn president with little military experience who refuses to face the reality of the situation in Iraq. How many more Gold Star mothers will be created before General Dubyah acknowledges that his strategy has resulted in defeat? In the cemetery at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point is an imposing white pylon marking the grave of another stubborn general: George Armstrong Custer, who graduated last in the West Point class of 1861, enshrined himself in history by electing to do battle against a superior of Indians at the Little Big Horn River in Montana in 1876.
Future imperfect. In his 1950 book Unpopular Essays, philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell expressed skepticism about chances for world peace: "After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Nero’s, Genghis Khans and Hitler’s. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will again be incapable of supporting life, and peace will return."
Vox populi. The people have spoken. After last Tuesday's emphatic rejection of the unwinnable Iraq War, there should be no shilly-shallying about leaving the Iraqi people to their own devices. Our bungled attempt at democratization of that troubled country has been shown to be a purgative rather than a remedy.
After 9/11 it was widely argued that the landscape had changed drastically, and the world had entered a new and frightening "age of terror." Terror was no longer something that happened in some remote part of the world. For the first time a state with enormous power had been successfully attacked at home. President Bush immediately announced that America was engaged in a War on Terror and proclaimed himself "a wartime president." He declared ominously, "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland."
But the "war on terror" did not suddenly come into existence with that 9/11 event. And the four-pronged terrorist attacks on domestic targets were hardly unexpected. A month earlier, the CIA's Presidential Briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, had specifically warned that Bin Laden intended to attack in the United States. The FBI had taken note of individuals from the Middle East who had applied for flying lessons but expressed no interest in learning how to take off or land. Plane hijackings by individuals and groups of terrorists had been singularly successful for several years.
Millions who had lived through World War II could recall that during the Battle for Okinawa in 1945 Japanese suicidal kamikaze pilots had decimated the U.S. Seventh Fleet by flying through a curtain of antiaircraft fire and crashing their explosive-laden planes into naval vessels Any reader of newspaper headlines or listener to TV or radio broadcasts--the "celebrated man in the street"--was well aware that attacks like the 9/11 hijackings might occur.. An eight-year-old with a Crayola could have connected the dots.
A now almost-forgotten event that telegraphed to the nation that the World Trade Center was a target did occur on Feb. 26, 1993, when groups related to those who succeeded on 9/11 drove a rental van containing 1,500 pounds of explosive into the North Tower's parking garage. The resulting explosion came very close to toppling the North Tower, sending it crashing into the South Tower, toppling both landmarks and killing or maiming thousands of people. It was even widely known that these groups had even more ambitious plans that were nipped in the bud. As early as 1981 U.S. and British intelligence agencies were well aware of the existence of a network of radical Islamist groups. In that year, element of al-Qaida assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. A year later groups related to Hezbollah drove a truck bomb into the U.S. Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport in Lebanon, an act that forced President Ronald Reagan to withdraw U.S. troops from Lebanon.
What went wrong in Iraq? It had been widely predicted by analysts that an invasion of Iraq would inspire terrorism. What was not anticipated was the rapid increase of radical fundamentalism all over the world. Not only did our invasion cause a rise in recruitment by radical groups, the war created a new terrorist haven--Iraq itself. Even the destruction of al-Qaida will do little to improve the prospects for the future if the underlying conditions that caused the group's popularity--political oppression and lack of economic opportunity--persist in the Middle East and elsewhere. Equally troubling is Washington's backing of grilled heavily repressive and corrupt governments, which bolsters al-Qaida’s claim that the U. S. supports the oppression of Muslims.
It would be too easy to call what has taken place in Iraq a comedy of errors, but this glib phrase overlooks the more than 2,800 American lives already sacrificed there. Ironically, that number approximates the number of lives lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A grim trade-off, indeed.
You can't make this stuff up. In a recent interview, Martha Stewart is quoted as saying, "I honestly don't remember exactly what I was prosecuted for." This from someone who spent five months of her life in the federal low-security slammer at Alderson, West Virginia--and she can't remember why? Give me a break.
Your tax dollars at work. For almost six years, the U.S. Army has tried to lure recruits with the advertising slogan "An Army of One." Adopted in January 2001 to replace the "Be All You Can Be" campaign, which had lasted nearly 20 years, "An Army of One" was introduced to overcome what consultants felt was a view among young people that the Army was dehumanizing. It received heavy criticism because it de-emphasized the basic need for teamwork in any military organization. "If you want to be an `Army of One' you probably want to join the Hell's Angels, not the U.S. Army," observed Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute research group.
After struggling through a disappointing recruiting year, the Army hired the communications firm McCann Worldgroup last December to develop the new slogan. The overall five-year contract is valued at $1 billion, with the first two years guaranteed at $200 million each year. The new slogan was featured in a multimedia ad campaign launched Nov. 9, timed to coincide with Veterans Day weekend, Saturday, Nov. 11.
Sloganeering by the military services isn't something new. The other services also rely on catchy slogans to spearhead their advertising. Just last month the Air Force switched its slogan from "Cross into the Blue" to "Do Something Amazing." The Navy has used "Accelerate Your Life" since January 2001, and the Marine Corps has long relied on "The Few. The Proud." And what might this new Army slogan be? Are you sitting down? Developed in numerous tests with focus groups and interviews with soldiers, the $200 million slogan consists of two words: "Army Strong." It is meant--get this--"to convey the idea that if you join the Army you will gain physical and emotional strength, as well as strength of character and purpose."
Militaria. It made eminent good sense for the founding fathers to ordain that the person elected president would also be commander in chief of the nation's armed forces. After all, who could better fill that role than George Washington, the military leader who had made the nation's independence possible? Sadly, they did not foresee the pitfalls inherent in that arrangement. Today we have a stubborn president with little military experience who refuses to face the reality of the situation in Iraq. How many more Gold Star mothers will be created before General Dubyah acknowledges that his strategy has resulted in defeat? In the cemetery at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point is an imposing white pylon marking the grave of another stubborn general: George Armstrong Custer, who graduated last in the West Point class of 1861, enshrined himself in history by electing to do battle against a superior of Indians at the Little Big Horn River in Montana in 1876.
Future imperfect. In his 1950 book Unpopular Essays, philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell expressed skepticism about chances for world peace: "After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Nero’s, Genghis Khans and Hitler’s. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will again be incapable of supporting life, and peace will return."
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (11/09/06)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
Former House Speaker Tip O'Neill's often-quoted observation that "all politics is local" was totally ignored on Tuesday. Voters confounded that wisdom by making the election a searing referendum on the Iraq War and on George W. Bush's performance as president. Demanding course change, they repudiated the Republicans' embrace of neo-conservatism and its aggressive policy of American global domination. Hegemony, from a Greek word meaning supremacy, had been advanced by the neocons as the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. In practice, our abortive Iraq adventure became the spark that ignited a fast-moving worldwide conflagration of anti-Americanism.
Overambitious neocons saw the preemptive invasion of Iraq as the first step in a policy that would induce rogue states to fall into line and accept American domination. The swift "easy win" promised in Iraq soon proved to be illusory as the post-combat occupation deteriorated into an unending and bitter civil war. American troops found themselves to be unwanted interlopers caught between two warring factions. Long-echoed as a mantra, "stay the course" was suddenly jettisoned last month. In a typical Bush act of denial, and despite at least 29 filmed occasions in which he used the phrase, the President told ABC interviewer George Stephanopolous: "Listen, we've never been ’stay the course.’ We have been--we will complete the mission, we will do our job and help achieve the goal, but we're constantly adjusting the tactic. Constantly."
His signature phrase about staying the course was thus peremptorily consigned to the dust bin of history, joining his other failed slogans--gems such as "his of evil," "shock and awe," "bring 'em on," and "mission accomplished." Within a few weeks, the Bush family's consigliore, James A. Baker, his father's secretary of state, will provide the current Bush administration with a face-saving exit plan for cutting and running and the entire debacle will be treated as though it never happened.
For six years, neocons in and out of the Bush administration have set the tone of its public voice. Tough-talking neocon Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, was blunt in his advice: "We need to be more assertive and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia." Neocon Michael Ledeen, perhaps having read too many Mickey Spillane novels, put it even more crudely: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small, crappy country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
But the current focus of the public's unhappiness is George W. Bush himself. What really drives this man and what is he like? "Bush has a poor memory for facts and figures," said former Bush speechwriter David Frum, who coined the phrase, "axis of hatred"--polished to "axis of evil" by chief speechwriter Michael Gerson. Frum also said of Bush, "Fire a question at him about specifics of his administration's policies, and he often appeared uncertain. Nobody would ever enroll him in a quiz show." Frum resigned after his wife naively committed a cardinal Washington sin by boasting of her husband's authorship of the phrase. He later wrote a fawning paen to Bush entitled The Right Man. Neocon Richard Perle, dubbed the "Prince of Darkness," minced no words. “The first time I met Bush, two things became clear," he said. "One, he didn't know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much."
Bush has been surrounded by advisers who also didn't know very much. Dick Cheney, another neuron, contended that deficits don't matter. As a result, the nation has experienced almost six years of unbridled spending by a government totally under GOP control, compelling Congress to raise the debt ceiling to almost $9 trillion--nearly double what it was when Bill Clinton left office. Cheney has continued to assert, as he did in 2002, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction."
Neocon Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of defense, said before the invasion, "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." But anyone in the international oil industry could have told him that because of sanctions and Saddam's neglect, Iraqi oil facilities were in dismal shape. Even today Iraqi drivers queue up at gas stations for gasoline that still must be imported.
Desperate to give the impression of change, some Republican candidates in this year's election put daylight between themselves and the president by shunning joint "kiss-of-death" public appearances. Others publicly called for the removal of neocon defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the military architect of the Iraq debacle. The authoritative London magazine The Economist charged that Rumsfeld was "responsible for having needlessly alienated more friends of the United States than any other instrument since the invention of the B-52 bomber."
Rumsfeld shortsightedly decided that wars could be won by using technologically superior weapons and less manpower. Retired Gen. William Odom, the Reagan administration's National Security Agency director, has called Iraq "the greatest security disaster in American history." Rumsfeld's gaffes of deploying too few troops and imposing morale-shattering consecutive tours of duty in Iraq were compounded by his unwillingness to concede that his policies had failed.
In his traditional meeting with the incoming President-elect in January 2001, Bill Clinton pinpointed al-Qaida as the nation's most important foreign policy challenge. The warning went unheeded. When Condoleezza Rice, a specialist in Russian-German relations, became national security advisor at the start of George W. Bush's first term, Richard Clarke, holdover Clinton White House counterterrorism advisor, was surprised to discover that she had never heard of al-Qaida. In her role as national security advisor, she would later tell the president at his Crawford, Texas, ranch not to read too much into the August 6, 2001, CIA report entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S."
To understand George W. Bush, we must examine his actions for clues to what makes him tick. In six years as president, he has revealed a multilayered personality characterized by many conflicts. We are all familiar with his problems with the English language--an amusing succession of perplexing malapropisms, gaffes and dyslexic spoonerisms. More alarming for the nation, however is his lack of intellectual curiosity, often exhibited as overt anti-intellectualism.
Totally uninterested in details and impatient with debate, if offered a choice of options, he decides quickly and never looks back--even if the nation has been left with a series of paradoxes by his rash, unthinking decisions. He is not above publicly insulting foreign leaders with unfeeling remarks or imperious threats. He is also intellectually lazy. When Calvin Hill, star running back of the 1968 championship Yale football team, discovered that George W. Bush was in a class he was considering, Hill called out to his teammates, "Hey, George Bush is in this class. This is the one for us."
Psychiatrists have raised the possibility that George W. Bush may suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, defined as "arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes; sense of entitlement, preoccupation with grandiose fantasies; need for excessive admiration; a grandiose sense of self-importance; inability to recognize or identify with feelings of others; exploitation of others; envy." In the two years remaining to the Bush administration, the president's reaction to the nation's repudiation of his conduct of the Iraq War and his performance as president may confirm whether this suggested diagnosis is correct.
Former House Speaker Tip O'Neill's often-quoted observation that "all politics is local" was totally ignored on Tuesday. Voters confounded that wisdom by making the election a searing referendum on the Iraq War and on George W. Bush's performance as president. Demanding course change, they repudiated the Republicans' embrace of neo-conservatism and its aggressive policy of American global domination. Hegemony, from a Greek word meaning supremacy, had been advanced by the neocons as the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. In practice, our abortive Iraq adventure became the spark that ignited a fast-moving worldwide conflagration of anti-Americanism.
Overambitious neocons saw the preemptive invasion of Iraq as the first step in a policy that would induce rogue states to fall into line and accept American domination. The swift "easy win" promised in Iraq soon proved to be illusory as the post-combat occupation deteriorated into an unending and bitter civil war. American troops found themselves to be unwanted interlopers caught between two warring factions. Long-echoed as a mantra, "stay the course" was suddenly jettisoned last month. In a typical Bush act of denial, and despite at least 29 filmed occasions in which he used the phrase, the President told ABC interviewer George Stephanopolous: "Listen, we've never been ’stay the course.’ We have been--we will complete the mission, we will do our job and help achieve the goal, but we're constantly adjusting the tactic. Constantly."
His signature phrase about staying the course was thus peremptorily consigned to the dust bin of history, joining his other failed slogans--gems such as "his of evil," "shock and awe," "bring 'em on," and "mission accomplished." Within a few weeks, the Bush family's consigliore, James A. Baker, his father's secretary of state, will provide the current Bush administration with a face-saving exit plan for cutting and running and the entire debacle will be treated as though it never happened.
For six years, neocons in and out of the Bush administration have set the tone of its public voice. Tough-talking neocon Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, was blunt in his advice: "We need to be more assertive and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia." Neocon Michael Ledeen, perhaps having read too many Mickey Spillane novels, put it even more crudely: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small, crappy country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
But the current focus of the public's unhappiness is George W. Bush himself. What really drives this man and what is he like? "Bush has a poor memory for facts and figures," said former Bush speechwriter David Frum, who coined the phrase, "axis of hatred"--polished to "axis of evil" by chief speechwriter Michael Gerson. Frum also said of Bush, "Fire a question at him about specifics of his administration's policies, and he often appeared uncertain. Nobody would ever enroll him in a quiz show." Frum resigned after his wife naively committed a cardinal Washington sin by boasting of her husband's authorship of the phrase. He later wrote a fawning paen to Bush entitled The Right Man. Neocon Richard Perle, dubbed the "Prince of Darkness," minced no words. “The first time I met Bush, two things became clear," he said. "One, he didn't know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much."
Bush has been surrounded by advisers who also didn't know very much. Dick Cheney, another neuron, contended that deficits don't matter. As a result, the nation has experienced almost six years of unbridled spending by a government totally under GOP control, compelling Congress to raise the debt ceiling to almost $9 trillion--nearly double what it was when Bill Clinton left office. Cheney has continued to assert, as he did in 2002, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction."
Neocon Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of defense, said before the invasion, "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." But anyone in the international oil industry could have told him that because of sanctions and Saddam's neglect, Iraqi oil facilities were in dismal shape. Even today Iraqi drivers queue up at gas stations for gasoline that still must be imported.
Desperate to give the impression of change, some Republican candidates in this year's election put daylight between themselves and the president by shunning joint "kiss-of-death" public appearances. Others publicly called for the removal of neocon defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the military architect of the Iraq debacle. The authoritative London magazine The Economist charged that Rumsfeld was "responsible for having needlessly alienated more friends of the United States than any other instrument since the invention of the B-52 bomber."
Rumsfeld shortsightedly decided that wars could be won by using technologically superior weapons and less manpower. Retired Gen. William Odom, the Reagan administration's National Security Agency director, has called Iraq "the greatest security disaster in American history." Rumsfeld's gaffes of deploying too few troops and imposing morale-shattering consecutive tours of duty in Iraq were compounded by his unwillingness to concede that his policies had failed.
In his traditional meeting with the incoming President-elect in January 2001, Bill Clinton pinpointed al-Qaida as the nation's most important foreign policy challenge. The warning went unheeded. When Condoleezza Rice, a specialist in Russian-German relations, became national security advisor at the start of George W. Bush's first term, Richard Clarke, holdover Clinton White House counterterrorism advisor, was surprised to discover that she had never heard of al-Qaida. In her role as national security advisor, she would later tell the president at his Crawford, Texas, ranch not to read too much into the August 6, 2001, CIA report entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S."
To understand George W. Bush, we must examine his actions for clues to what makes him tick. In six years as president, he has revealed a multilayered personality characterized by many conflicts. We are all familiar with his problems with the English language--an amusing succession of perplexing malapropisms, gaffes and dyslexic spoonerisms. More alarming for the nation, however is his lack of intellectual curiosity, often exhibited as overt anti-intellectualism.
Totally uninterested in details and impatient with debate, if offered a choice of options, he decides quickly and never looks back--even if the nation has been left with a series of paradoxes by his rash, unthinking decisions. He is not above publicly insulting foreign leaders with unfeeling remarks or imperious threats. He is also intellectually lazy. When Calvin Hill, star running back of the 1968 championship Yale football team, discovered that George W. Bush was in a class he was considering, Hill called out to his teammates, "Hey, George Bush is in this class. This is the one for us."
Psychiatrists have raised the possibility that George W. Bush may suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, defined as "arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes; sense of entitlement, preoccupation with grandiose fantasies; need for excessive admiration; a grandiose sense of self-importance; inability to recognize or identify with feelings of others; exploitation of others; envy." In the two years remaining to the Bush administration, the president's reaction to the nation's repudiation of his conduct of the Iraq War and his performance as president may confirm whether this suggested diagnosis is correct.
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (11/02/06)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
Come Election Day, Nov. 7th, America's preemptive war in Iraq will have demanded our uneasy attention for a period only 17 days less than the duration of World War II. No wonder the administration's conduct of this conflict is almost the sole focus of a vexed electorate's attention. The main sticking point, of course, is the question of how and when this country can extricate itself from the impossible situation it created in Iraq. The Iraq war we launched in 2003 was a badly planned invasion of dubious legality, based as it was on intelligence that had been "fixed" to suit the desired objectives of neocon operatives.
The true reason, of course, was to guarantee continued U.S. access to Iraq's oil reserves, the second largest on the planet. A secondary consideration was to remove Saddam as a potential threat to our ally, Israel. Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction was the official reason offered at the U.N. by a duped Colin Powell with a tissue of lies woven by this administration. And the invasion had nothing to do with the face-saving reason cobbled together later that we were "bringing democracy to the Iraqi people."
The number of U.S. troops assigned to the invasion was surprisingly small. Notably lacking were linguists, military police and civil affairs specialists. Planners who questioned how occupation duties--interception of across-border infiltrators from neighboring countries, suppression of looting and the inevitable insurgency--would be managed were quickly silenced. The war itself was conducted in a most peculiar fashion with a much smaller force than Army planners had originally projected.
It is not generally known, but American units in battle had orders to move to and seize preselected targets. They could only fire upon regular Iraqi military units if they were first fired upon. As a result, most Iraqi units emerged from the war intact--without having fired a shot and without having been engaged by U.S. troops. Iraqi units simply melted away and returned with their weapons to their homes or joined the growing Iraqi insurgency. It was a scenario for the eventual disaster that would engulf our inadequate occupying force.
The poorly planned occupation of Iraq has since morphed into a singularly unsuccessful pacification effort, with high troop losses in killed and wounded. In 2003, during the 41 days of major combat in Iraq preceding "Mission Accomplished," American forces lost 140 killed (at the average rate of 3.7/day); during the 31 days of the month just past, 103 soldiers and marines were killed. Thus, losses during the month of October 2006 were about as high as they were during the most intensive fighting of the initial invasion effort. Such losses belie administration claims that "We are winning." Winning what?
In any attempt at pacification of an unruly populace, so long as the occupation continues and one exploding roadside bomb takes the life of a single American soldier, we have won nothing. The only realistic solution would be for us to encourage Iraq to form a Swiss-type tripartite self-governing confederation melding Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis under a slimmed-down central government that would collect taxes, distribute oil and gas revenues and defend the country's borders.
Readers may have become tired of being reminded of Santayana's wisdom about learning from the lessons of history, but consider the following written about what Napoleon called "the Spanish ulcer"--the wars in the Spanish peninsula between 1809 and 1814 that led to his abdication: "Napoleon's campaign included a rapid conventional victory over Spanish armies but ignored the immediate requirement to provide a stable and secure environment for the people and the countryside. The French should have expected ferocious resistance. The Spanish people were accustomed to hardship, suspicious of foreigners, and constantly involved in skirmishes with security forces. The French failed to analyze the history, culture, and motivations of the Spanish people, or to seriously consider their potential to support or hinder the achievement of French political objectives. Napoleon's cultural miscalculation resulted in a protracted struggle. The Spanish resistance drained the Empire's resources and was the beginning of the end of Napoleon's reign."
What is remarkable about these words is their source: they are taken from the draft of a field manual, FM 3-24, jointly written by the Army and the Marine Corps, copies of which are now being passed around in military circles. Such interservice cooperation in itself is a giant step forward. Titled Counterinsurgency, the draft embodies lessons learned thirty years ago in Vietnam--and then forgotten. Substitute "Iraqi" for "Spanish" and "Americans" for "the French" and you have described our Iraq experience.
The Iraq misadventure marks the third time that the United States has gotten itself involved in a land war on the continent of Asia against the advice of military leaders. The first was in 1950 when North Korean troops poured into South Korea. Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called it "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." By 1952, the last year of his presidency, Harry Truman recognized that victory was no longer possible. U.S. forces were not losing, but neither were they winning. As in Iraq, they were caught up in a vast, bloody and expensive holding operation. Two thirds of the American public disapproved of the war in which 34,000 Americans died.
We fought another "wrong war" in Vietnam, where the U.S. armed forces contributed to the eventual stalemate by fighting the war they wanted to fight instead of the war they had been thrust into. Similarly, the public recoiled at the carnage in which 58,000 American troops lost their lives. Something like the outcome of these two wars may be the best we can hope for in Iraq now, an opportunity for the United States to withdraw and turn its attention to solving our own problems. The alternatives in remaining can only be an expanding civil war and attendant bloodbath, political fragmentation, a torrent of refugees and surging global terrorist attacks.
We have had years of promises of imminent victory, changed tactics in the conduct of the war and exuberant sloganeering. This week the Pentagon revealed that of more than 500,000 weapons turned over by the U.S. to agencies of the Iraqi government, only 12,128 had their serial numbers properly recorded. Some of these missing rocket propelled grenade launchers, assault rifles, sniper rifles and machine guns are now being used to kill American troops. Coming on the heels of a succession of rigged no-bid contracts and evidence of graft and corruption, this gross error is disquieting. It makes appropriate John Kerry's question to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1972: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
It is regrettable that crucial issues at home involving illegal immigration, factory closings, unemployment, health care, a burgeoning deficit and a decaying infrastructure are being swept under the rug in this election, which has become a referendum on the war. Nevertheless, go to the polls next Tuesday, and vote. Vote as if a life depended on it. Not yours perhaps, but certainly the life of a soldier, sailor or marine yet to be sacrificed in a failed effort to force democracy at the point of a gun on an unwilling people riven by tribal, clan, religious or ethnic differences. Thirty-four years later, I would paraphrase John Kerry's question to, "How does this country hand a reverently folded flag to a family and tell them that their daughter or son was the last one to die defending a lie?"
Come Election Day, Nov. 7th, America's preemptive war in Iraq will have demanded our uneasy attention for a period only 17 days less than the duration of World War II. No wonder the administration's conduct of this conflict is almost the sole focus of a vexed electorate's attention. The main sticking point, of course, is the question of how and when this country can extricate itself from the impossible situation it created in Iraq. The Iraq war we launched in 2003 was a badly planned invasion of dubious legality, based as it was on intelligence that had been "fixed" to suit the desired objectives of neocon operatives.
The true reason, of course, was to guarantee continued U.S. access to Iraq's oil reserves, the second largest on the planet. A secondary consideration was to remove Saddam as a potential threat to our ally, Israel. Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction was the official reason offered at the U.N. by a duped Colin Powell with a tissue of lies woven by this administration. And the invasion had nothing to do with the face-saving reason cobbled together later that we were "bringing democracy to the Iraqi people."
The number of U.S. troops assigned to the invasion was surprisingly small. Notably lacking were linguists, military police and civil affairs specialists. Planners who questioned how occupation duties--interception of across-border infiltrators from neighboring countries, suppression of looting and the inevitable insurgency--would be managed were quickly silenced. The war itself was conducted in a most peculiar fashion with a much smaller force than Army planners had originally projected.
It is not generally known, but American units in battle had orders to move to and seize preselected targets. They could only fire upon regular Iraqi military units if they were first fired upon. As a result, most Iraqi units emerged from the war intact--without having fired a shot and without having been engaged by U.S. troops. Iraqi units simply melted away and returned with their weapons to their homes or joined the growing Iraqi insurgency. It was a scenario for the eventual disaster that would engulf our inadequate occupying force.
The poorly planned occupation of Iraq has since morphed into a singularly unsuccessful pacification effort, with high troop losses in killed and wounded. In 2003, during the 41 days of major combat in Iraq preceding "Mission Accomplished," American forces lost 140 killed (at the average rate of 3.7/day); during the 31 days of the month just past, 103 soldiers and marines were killed. Thus, losses during the month of October 2006 were about as high as they were during the most intensive fighting of the initial invasion effort. Such losses belie administration claims that "We are winning." Winning what?
In any attempt at pacification of an unruly populace, so long as the occupation continues and one exploding roadside bomb takes the life of a single American soldier, we have won nothing. The only realistic solution would be for us to encourage Iraq to form a Swiss-type tripartite self-governing confederation melding Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis under a slimmed-down central government that would collect taxes, distribute oil and gas revenues and defend the country's borders.
Readers may have become tired of being reminded of Santayana's wisdom about learning from the lessons of history, but consider the following written about what Napoleon called "the Spanish ulcer"--the wars in the Spanish peninsula between 1809 and 1814 that led to his abdication: "Napoleon's campaign included a rapid conventional victory over Spanish armies but ignored the immediate requirement to provide a stable and secure environment for the people and the countryside. The French should have expected ferocious resistance. The Spanish people were accustomed to hardship, suspicious of foreigners, and constantly involved in skirmishes with security forces. The French failed to analyze the history, culture, and motivations of the Spanish people, or to seriously consider their potential to support or hinder the achievement of French political objectives. Napoleon's cultural miscalculation resulted in a protracted struggle. The Spanish resistance drained the Empire's resources and was the beginning of the end of Napoleon's reign."
What is remarkable about these words is their source: they are taken from the draft of a field manual, FM 3-24, jointly written by the Army and the Marine Corps, copies of which are now being passed around in military circles. Such interservice cooperation in itself is a giant step forward. Titled Counterinsurgency, the draft embodies lessons learned thirty years ago in Vietnam--and then forgotten. Substitute "Iraqi" for "Spanish" and "Americans" for "the French" and you have described our Iraq experience.
The Iraq misadventure marks the third time that the United States has gotten itself involved in a land war on the continent of Asia against the advice of military leaders. The first was in 1950 when North Korean troops poured into South Korea. Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called it "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." By 1952, the last year of his presidency, Harry Truman recognized that victory was no longer possible. U.S. forces were not losing, but neither were they winning. As in Iraq, they were caught up in a vast, bloody and expensive holding operation. Two thirds of the American public disapproved of the war in which 34,000 Americans died.
We fought another "wrong war" in Vietnam, where the U.S. armed forces contributed to the eventual stalemate by fighting the war they wanted to fight instead of the war they had been thrust into. Similarly, the public recoiled at the carnage in which 58,000 American troops lost their lives. Something like the outcome of these two wars may be the best we can hope for in Iraq now, an opportunity for the United States to withdraw and turn its attention to solving our own problems. The alternatives in remaining can only be an expanding civil war and attendant bloodbath, political fragmentation, a torrent of refugees and surging global terrorist attacks.
We have had years of promises of imminent victory, changed tactics in the conduct of the war and exuberant sloganeering. This week the Pentagon revealed that of more than 500,000 weapons turned over by the U.S. to agencies of the Iraqi government, only 12,128 had their serial numbers properly recorded. Some of these missing rocket propelled grenade launchers, assault rifles, sniper rifles and machine guns are now being used to kill American troops. Coming on the heels of a succession of rigged no-bid contracts and evidence of graft and corruption, this gross error is disquieting. It makes appropriate John Kerry's question to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1972: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
It is regrettable that crucial issues at home involving illegal immigration, factory closings, unemployment, health care, a burgeoning deficit and a decaying infrastructure are being swept under the rug in this election, which has become a referendum on the war. Nevertheless, go to the polls next Tuesday, and vote. Vote as if a life depended on it. Not yours perhaps, but certainly the life of a soldier, sailor or marine yet to be sacrificed in a failed effort to force democracy at the point of a gun on an unwilling people riven by tribal, clan, religious or ethnic differences. Thirty-four years later, I would paraphrase John Kerry's question to, "How does this country hand a reverently folded flag to a family and tell them that their daughter or son was the last one to die defending a lie?"
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (10/26/06)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
One might think from all the politically inspired fear generated in Washington that something inconceivable happened when North Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion. Having a nuclear device is not the same as having a compact, efficient bomb or warhead that can be delivered on a missile. North Korea still has a long way to go. Let's put the test--a low-yield, inefficient device--into realistic perspective.
The world is a veritable nuclear-armed camp today. Consider how many nuclear warheads exist on the planet, who has them and when that nation first tested a nuclear weapon; the numbers are estimates from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: United States (1945), 5,735-9,960; Soviet Union/Russia (1949), 5,830-16,000; U.K. (1952) >200; France (1960), 350; China (1964), 130; India (1974), 75-115; Israel (1979), 75-200; Pakistan (1998), 65-90; North Korea (2006), 1-10. Portions of North Korea's technology came from A. Q. Kahn's secret nuclear bomb program in Pakistan. After Pakistan revealed that it had The Bomb, the U.S. called it a rogue nation for making it in secret. Pakistan has since become our great ally because of its commitment to our ill-defined war on terror.
And how many nuclear weapons tests have occurred over the last 61 years, particularly test in the atmosphere that spread contamination? The United States leads in such testing, having conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests, including 217 in the atmosphere. The Soviet Union/Russia conducted 969 tests, including 219 in the atmosphere; France, 210, including 50 in the atmosphere; the United Kingdom, 45, with 21 in the atmosphere; China, 45, with 23 in the atmosphere; India and Pakistan, 13, all underground; South Africa (with Israel) one atmospheric test in 1979. Three states, India, Israel and Pakistan declined to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty to which 190 other nations are signatories. On Jan. 10, 2003, following the U.S. accusation that it had started an enriched uranium program, North Korea withdrew from the treaty.
For the moment, however, North Korea should be the least of our worries. A U.S. Department of Energy task force has warned of the vast number of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, "poorly controlled and poorly stored." One of the first acts of the Bush administration was to cut back a modest program to assist Russia in safeguarding these weapons and providing alternative employment for nuclear scientists, a decision that increased the risk of the weapons falling into the wrong hands.
What we should be worrying about are the ticking bombs in our own midst--more than 100 aging, outmoded and obsolete nuclear power plants, prone to accidents and of doubtful security. What we should perhaps fear from North Korea is the sale of weapons or technology to terrorists. North Korea already sells much of its limited military technology to other countries. But let us not forget that the world's largest arms merchant is the United States. Recently, we supplied the weapons used in Lebanon by Israel, loathsome flesh-mutilating cluster bombs indiscriminately dropped on unarmed civilians and still littering the landscape.
The implications of North Korea's test are disturbing for other reasons. First, hostilities in the Korean peninsula have never formally ended; what we have is an armed truce. American troops would be vulnerable to a nuclear device, however primitively delivered. Second, the North Korean test came at a time when George W. Bush was exploring military options to end Iran's nuclear program--even though we have no proof that Iran intends to create nuclear weapons. There's no denying its fear of nuclear-armed countries it sees as hostile. In 2003, defense analyst Harlan Ullman warned prophetically that a country like Iran, feeling threatened, "might hurry its nuclear weapons program after seeing the United States lead an assault on Iraq." The mess we made of Iraq and lack of available troops makes it virtually impossible for Bush to stage the invasion of Iran advocated by neocons now thoroughly discredited by their wrong guesses about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
Some form of air attack on Iran's deeply buried nuclear facilities by the U.S. or Israel cannot be ruled out, but traditional bombs and cruise missiles would be ineffective. A few military theorists have advocated using ICBMs with nuclear warheads--but these would arouse violent worldwide protests. The Pentagon may be considering use of non-nuclear ICBMs--arming a portion of the U.S. fleet with non-nuclear warheads to achieve deeper penetration underground. However, Russia's anti-missile forces are on high alert against the launch of even a single American ICBM, and we can ill afford a Dr. Strangelove hair-trigger scenario that increases the danger of nuclear destruction by accident.
Thus, an unexpected outcome of the North Korean test may be that aerial bombardment of Iran is now more unlikely. How can the U.S. justify an attack to prevent the development of nuclear energy in Iran when we have done nothing about North Korea, which actually has nuclear weapons? Moreover, Iran is an Islamic nation; our relations with the rest of the Islamic world are already in disarray. The way to allay our fear of nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea is through negotiations. The U.S. must abandon its arrogant refusal to talk and deal with other countries. Our adamant silence works against our own vital interests.
However much we may wish that nuclear weapons had never been devised, at this uneasy period efforts leading to nuclear disarmament are almost certainly doomed to failure in a world heavily armed with nuclear weapons. Why would any nuclear power give up weapons that magnify the influence and prestige of the nation that has them. And why should other nations, facing both the immense power of the United States and its often-bullying tactics, not want to have them? The entire Western world looked the other way as Israel went about developing nuclear weapons. Why does little Israel need them? Why did the Soviet Union, which spent so much on armaments that its economic system collapsed, keep its costly nuclear arsenal?
If Western nations can understand the uneasy fear that drove Israel to want atomic arms, why can't they understand why North Korea might want them? For years, the United States has refused to talk and threatened and punished North Korea in many ways. President Bush has treated the North Koreans with the same dismissive contempt and intimidating attitude he has displayed toward other countries. How could this approach ever achieve anything but what it has now produced?
Editorial writers are fond of calling North Korea irrational and unstable, but such descriptions are wrong. Soviet-style regimes have been extremely stable. Any regime that has lasted for more than half a century can hardly be called unstable. Only when Soviet-style governments experimented with reforms and loosened their absolute hold on people's lives were they toppled. In North Korea, there is little likelihood of a Gorbachev emerging to assume power.
North Korea may have acted bizarrely at times during the last fifty years. In turn, the United States has pointedly isolated and ignored North Korea. From its point of view, its actions have not been irrational. In fact, it is U.S. policy toward other nations that has been irrational.
How else to explain more than forty years of trying to ignore the existence of Castro's Cuba so close to our shores or our foolish attempt to unseat its leader with the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion and assassination?
How else to describe the vicious war in Vietnam that cost more than 58,000 American lives?
How else to characterize the ill-advised invasion of Iraq and the resulting trillion-dollar war without end?
Irrational is indeed the only word that fits these reckless adventures.
One might think from all the politically inspired fear generated in Washington that something inconceivable happened when North Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion. Having a nuclear device is not the same as having a compact, efficient bomb or warhead that can be delivered on a missile. North Korea still has a long way to go. Let's put the test--a low-yield, inefficient device--into realistic perspective.
The world is a veritable nuclear-armed camp today. Consider how many nuclear warheads exist on the planet, who has them and when that nation first tested a nuclear weapon; the numbers are estimates from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: United States (1945), 5,735-9,960; Soviet Union/Russia (1949), 5,830-16,000; U.K. (1952) >200; France (1960), 350; China (1964), 130; India (1974), 75-115; Israel (1979), 75-200; Pakistan (1998), 65-90; North Korea (2006), 1-10. Portions of North Korea's technology came from A. Q. Kahn's secret nuclear bomb program in Pakistan. After Pakistan revealed that it had The Bomb, the U.S. called it a rogue nation for making it in secret. Pakistan has since become our great ally because of its commitment to our ill-defined war on terror.
And how many nuclear weapons tests have occurred over the last 61 years, particularly test in the atmosphere that spread contamination? The United States leads in such testing, having conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests, including 217 in the atmosphere. The Soviet Union/Russia conducted 969 tests, including 219 in the atmosphere; France, 210, including 50 in the atmosphere; the United Kingdom, 45, with 21 in the atmosphere; China, 45, with 23 in the atmosphere; India and Pakistan, 13, all underground; South Africa (with Israel) one atmospheric test in 1979. Three states, India, Israel and Pakistan declined to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty to which 190 other nations are signatories. On Jan. 10, 2003, following the U.S. accusation that it had started an enriched uranium program, North Korea withdrew from the treaty.
For the moment, however, North Korea should be the least of our worries. A U.S. Department of Energy task force has warned of the vast number of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, "poorly controlled and poorly stored." One of the first acts of the Bush administration was to cut back a modest program to assist Russia in safeguarding these weapons and providing alternative employment for nuclear scientists, a decision that increased the risk of the weapons falling into the wrong hands.
What we should be worrying about are the ticking bombs in our own midst--more than 100 aging, outmoded and obsolete nuclear power plants, prone to accidents and of doubtful security. What we should perhaps fear from North Korea is the sale of weapons or technology to terrorists. North Korea already sells much of its limited military technology to other countries. But let us not forget that the world's largest arms merchant is the United States. Recently, we supplied the weapons used in Lebanon by Israel, loathsome flesh-mutilating cluster bombs indiscriminately dropped on unarmed civilians and still littering the landscape.
The implications of North Korea's test are disturbing for other reasons. First, hostilities in the Korean peninsula have never formally ended; what we have is an armed truce. American troops would be vulnerable to a nuclear device, however primitively delivered. Second, the North Korean test came at a time when George W. Bush was exploring military options to end Iran's nuclear program--even though we have no proof that Iran intends to create nuclear weapons. There's no denying its fear of nuclear-armed countries it sees as hostile. In 2003, defense analyst Harlan Ullman warned prophetically that a country like Iran, feeling threatened, "might hurry its nuclear weapons program after seeing the United States lead an assault on Iraq." The mess we made of Iraq and lack of available troops makes it virtually impossible for Bush to stage the invasion of Iran advocated by neocons now thoroughly discredited by their wrong guesses about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
Some form of air attack on Iran's deeply buried nuclear facilities by the U.S. or Israel cannot be ruled out, but traditional bombs and cruise missiles would be ineffective. A few military theorists have advocated using ICBMs with nuclear warheads--but these would arouse violent worldwide protests. The Pentagon may be considering use of non-nuclear ICBMs--arming a portion of the U.S. fleet with non-nuclear warheads to achieve deeper penetration underground. However, Russia's anti-missile forces are on high alert against the launch of even a single American ICBM, and we can ill afford a Dr. Strangelove hair-trigger scenario that increases the danger of nuclear destruction by accident.
Thus, an unexpected outcome of the North Korean test may be that aerial bombardment of Iran is now more unlikely. How can the U.S. justify an attack to prevent the development of nuclear energy in Iran when we have done nothing about North Korea, which actually has nuclear weapons? Moreover, Iran is an Islamic nation; our relations with the rest of the Islamic world are already in disarray. The way to allay our fear of nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea is through negotiations. The U.S. must abandon its arrogant refusal to talk and deal with other countries. Our adamant silence works against our own vital interests.
However much we may wish that nuclear weapons had never been devised, at this uneasy period efforts leading to nuclear disarmament are almost certainly doomed to failure in a world heavily armed with nuclear weapons. Why would any nuclear power give up weapons that magnify the influence and prestige of the nation that has them. And why should other nations, facing both the immense power of the United States and its often-bullying tactics, not want to have them? The entire Western world looked the other way as Israel went about developing nuclear weapons. Why does little Israel need them? Why did the Soviet Union, which spent so much on armaments that its economic system collapsed, keep its costly nuclear arsenal?
If Western nations can understand the uneasy fear that drove Israel to want atomic arms, why can't they understand why North Korea might want them? For years, the United States has refused to talk and threatened and punished North Korea in many ways. President Bush has treated the North Koreans with the same dismissive contempt and intimidating attitude he has displayed toward other countries. How could this approach ever achieve anything but what it has now produced?
Editorial writers are fond of calling North Korea irrational and unstable, but such descriptions are wrong. Soviet-style regimes have been extremely stable. Any regime that has lasted for more than half a century can hardly be called unstable. Only when Soviet-style governments experimented with reforms and loosened their absolute hold on people's lives were they toppled. In North Korea, there is little likelihood of a Gorbachev emerging to assume power.
North Korea may have acted bizarrely at times during the last fifty years. In turn, the United States has pointedly isolated and ignored North Korea. From its point of view, its actions have not been irrational. In fact, it is U.S. policy toward other nations that has been irrational.
How else to explain more than forty years of trying to ignore the existence of Castro's Cuba so close to our shores or our foolish attempt to unseat its leader with the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion and assassination?
How else to describe the vicious war in Vietnam that cost more than 58,000 American lives?
How else to characterize the ill-advised invasion of Iraq and the resulting trillion-dollar war without end?
Irrational is indeed the only word that fits these reckless adventures.
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (10/19/06)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
"Mugged by reality" aptly describes the reason for the sudden and abrupt shift in public sentiment away from the Bush administration. Beset by scandal and obsessed with pursuing the chimera of victory in the remote sands of Iraq, it has allowed North Korea and Iran to pursue nuclear dreams. Another result is verbose excesses by nervous politicians like Sen. John McCain, who calls his campaign bus the "Straight Talk Express."
Straight talk was not what he was peddling one day after North Korea's nuclear weapon test. At a campaign event in Michigan, he reminded "Senator Clinton and other Democrats critical of the Bush administration's policies that the framework agreement her husband's administration negotiated [with North Korea] was a failure. Every single time the Clinton administration warned the Koreans not to do something--not to kick out the IAEA inspectors, not to remove the fuel rods from their reactor--they did it. And they were rewarded every single time by the Clinton administration with further talks."
Not so fast, Senator. The facts of what really happened after North Korea's secret nuclear weapons program was disclosed in 1993 tell a completely different story. Bill Clinton had been president for little more than a year when North Korea announced it was preparing to remove the fuel rods from their Yongbyon nuclear reactor, withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it had signed in 1985 and expelling the weapons inspectors who had been keeping tab on the rods. Uncontrolled, the rogue country could soon be building about 30 Nagasaki-sized nuclear weapons annually.
Far from rewarding North Korea for its actions, Clinton urged the U.N. Security Council to consider sanctions. North Korea announced that sanctions would trigger war, a threat still echoed today. Although not known for being hawkish, Clinton instructed the Pentagon to draw up plans to meet the threat. These included the dispatch of 50,000 troops to South Korea to beef up the 37,000 stationed there since the 1950s, and over 400 combat jets, 50 warships, and additional battalions of Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, multiple-launch rockets, and Patriot air-defense missiles. Clinton also ordered an advance team of 250 Army logistical specialists to set up headquarters in Korea to manage this massive influx of troops and equipment. His actions sent a clear signal to the North Koreans he was willing to go to war to keep the fuel rods under international control. Clinton let it be known that removal of the fuel rods meant crossing a "red line," and he was prepared to launch an air strike on the Yongbyon reactor even if it provoked war.
Simultaneously, Clinton set up a diplomatic back channel to resolve the crisis peacefully by sending former President Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang to talk with Kim Il-Sung, then the leader of North Korea and the father of the present "dear leader," Kim Jong-il. Carter was an ideal choice for this mission. As president, he had once announced he would withdraw all U.S. troops from South Korea. He quickly backpedaled when the idea met stiff opposition--but it endeared him to Kim Il Sung. After Carter left office, the dictator issued a standing invitation for him to visit. Carter's trip was widely portrayed at the time as a private venture, unapproved by President Clinton.
It is now known that Clinton quietly recruited Carter to make the trip. The Clinton administration was divided over Carter. Those who had served under him--Warren Christopher, Clinton's secretary of state, and Anthony Lake, his national security adviser--opposed the trip. Carter was a loose cannon who would ignore orders and freelance a deal, they warned. Vice President Al Gore was for the trip as the only way out of the crisis. Clinton sided with Gore. As Clinton saw it, Kim Il-Sung needed a way to save face, Oriental style, and Carter might be able to offer that. As it turned out, both sides in the internal debate were right: The dictator backed down, and Carter negotiated the framework of an agreement, announcing its terms live on CNN, only minutes after telling Clinton.
Kim Il-Sung abandoned his threats, the fuel rods were not moved and the inspectors were not evicted. Four months later, on Oct. 21, 1994, the United States and North Korea signed a formal document called the Agreed Framework based on those terms. In it North Korea renewed its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, agreed to lock up the fuel rods and to allow the inspectors to return and monitor the facility. In exchange, with financial backing from South Korea and Japan, the U.S. would provide two light-water nuclear reactors to generate electricity, supply fuel oil, and pledge not to invade North Korea.
This document effectively clamped a lid on North Korea's nuclear program until 2002. Honoring its terms, Pyongyang kept the fuel rods locked up and the inspectors monitored the site. Gradually, Washington and Pyongyang were to set up diplomatic and trade relations. In an annex to the accord, all parties agreed the nuclear fuel from the light-water reactors would be shipped to a third country for recycling--a course President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed recently for Iran's nuclear fuel. The agreement fell apart in 2002--but not for the reasons advanced by Senator McCain. Initially, North Korea kept its side of the bargain. The same cannot be said of our side.
Because the accord was not a formal treaty, Congress did not have to ratify the terms, but balked at the financial commitment. So did South Korea. The light-water reactors were never funded. Steps toward normalization were never taken. In 1996, one of Pyongyang's spy submarines washed up on the coast of South Korea; Seoul reacted by suspending its share of energy aid, and Pyongyang retaliated with typically inflammatory rhetoric. We now know that about this time the North Koreans also secretly started to ship missile technology to Pakistan in exchange for Pakistani centrifuges.
Compare Clinton's decisiveness with wishy-washy George W. Bush. Beginning his first term in office in January 2001, he proclaimed the Agreed Framework to be dead and announced that he had no interest in talking with the North Koreans. A few months later, intelligence revealed that North Korea had been enriching uranium--a much slower method of achieving a bomb than by reprocessing plutonium. (The bomb the North Koreans set off last week was not a uranium bomb but a plutonium bomb--a bomb created on Bush's watch--not Clinton's.) After the discovery of North Korea's uranium enrichment, Bush toughened his stance against negotiations even more.
The North Koreans tried to replay the 1994 scenario, threatening to unlock the fuel rods, expel the inspectors and renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Through former ambassadors Bill Richardson and Donald Gregg, however, they exhibited willingness to back off their threats if the Agreed Framework were reinstated--but George W. Bush wasn't interested in playing the negotiating game. Stymied, toward the end of 2002 the North Koreans unlocked the rods and evicted the inspectors, thus crossing the "red line" Clinton had drawn. Bush, famous for belligerence and saber rattling, took no military action. He called for no sanctions. He tried no diplomacy. It was George W. Bush who did nothing--not Bill Clinton.
And while we're assessing blame for Bush's total inaction, the record shows that soon after George H.W. Bush, the president's father, moved into the White House, the CIA discovered that near their nuclear reactor at Yongbyon the North Koreans were building a reprocessing facility to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium from the fuel rods. Five years later, Bill Clinton stopped the North Koreans from moving the rods into this facility. Eight years after Clinton's decisive action, George W. Bush passively allowed the North Koreans to move them. Welcome to reality, Mr. President.
"Mugged by reality" aptly describes the reason for the sudden and abrupt shift in public sentiment away from the Bush administration. Beset by scandal and obsessed with pursuing the chimera of victory in the remote sands of Iraq, it has allowed North Korea and Iran to pursue nuclear dreams. Another result is verbose excesses by nervous politicians like Sen. John McCain, who calls his campaign bus the "Straight Talk Express."
Straight talk was not what he was peddling one day after North Korea's nuclear weapon test. At a campaign event in Michigan, he reminded "Senator Clinton and other Democrats critical of the Bush administration's policies that the framework agreement her husband's administration negotiated [with North Korea] was a failure. Every single time the Clinton administration warned the Koreans not to do something--not to kick out the IAEA inspectors, not to remove the fuel rods from their reactor--they did it. And they were rewarded every single time by the Clinton administration with further talks."
Not so fast, Senator. The facts of what really happened after North Korea's secret nuclear weapons program was disclosed in 1993 tell a completely different story. Bill Clinton had been president for little more than a year when North Korea announced it was preparing to remove the fuel rods from their Yongbyon nuclear reactor, withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it had signed in 1985 and expelling the weapons inspectors who had been keeping tab on the rods. Uncontrolled, the rogue country could soon be building about 30 Nagasaki-sized nuclear weapons annually.
Far from rewarding North Korea for its actions, Clinton urged the U.N. Security Council to consider sanctions. North Korea announced that sanctions would trigger war, a threat still echoed today. Although not known for being hawkish, Clinton instructed the Pentagon to draw up plans to meet the threat. These included the dispatch of 50,000 troops to South Korea to beef up the 37,000 stationed there since the 1950s, and over 400 combat jets, 50 warships, and additional battalions of Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, multiple-launch rockets, and Patriot air-defense missiles. Clinton also ordered an advance team of 250 Army logistical specialists to set up headquarters in Korea to manage this massive influx of troops and equipment. His actions sent a clear signal to the North Koreans he was willing to go to war to keep the fuel rods under international control. Clinton let it be known that removal of the fuel rods meant crossing a "red line," and he was prepared to launch an air strike on the Yongbyon reactor even if it provoked war.
Simultaneously, Clinton set up a diplomatic back channel to resolve the crisis peacefully by sending former President Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang to talk with Kim Il-Sung, then the leader of North Korea and the father of the present "dear leader," Kim Jong-il. Carter was an ideal choice for this mission. As president, he had once announced he would withdraw all U.S. troops from South Korea. He quickly backpedaled when the idea met stiff opposition--but it endeared him to Kim Il Sung. After Carter left office, the dictator issued a standing invitation for him to visit. Carter's trip was widely portrayed at the time as a private venture, unapproved by President Clinton.
It is now known that Clinton quietly recruited Carter to make the trip. The Clinton administration was divided over Carter. Those who had served under him--Warren Christopher, Clinton's secretary of state, and Anthony Lake, his national security adviser--opposed the trip. Carter was a loose cannon who would ignore orders and freelance a deal, they warned. Vice President Al Gore was for the trip as the only way out of the crisis. Clinton sided with Gore. As Clinton saw it, Kim Il-Sung needed a way to save face, Oriental style, and Carter might be able to offer that. As it turned out, both sides in the internal debate were right: The dictator backed down, and Carter negotiated the framework of an agreement, announcing its terms live on CNN, only minutes after telling Clinton.
Kim Il-Sung abandoned his threats, the fuel rods were not moved and the inspectors were not evicted. Four months later, on Oct. 21, 1994, the United States and North Korea signed a formal document called the Agreed Framework based on those terms. In it North Korea renewed its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, agreed to lock up the fuel rods and to allow the inspectors to return and monitor the facility. In exchange, with financial backing from South Korea and Japan, the U.S. would provide two light-water nuclear reactors to generate electricity, supply fuel oil, and pledge not to invade North Korea.
This document effectively clamped a lid on North Korea's nuclear program until 2002. Honoring its terms, Pyongyang kept the fuel rods locked up and the inspectors monitored the site. Gradually, Washington and Pyongyang were to set up diplomatic and trade relations. In an annex to the accord, all parties agreed the nuclear fuel from the light-water reactors would be shipped to a third country for recycling--a course President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed recently for Iran's nuclear fuel. The agreement fell apart in 2002--but not for the reasons advanced by Senator McCain. Initially, North Korea kept its side of the bargain. The same cannot be said of our side.
Because the accord was not a formal treaty, Congress did not have to ratify the terms, but balked at the financial commitment. So did South Korea. The light-water reactors were never funded. Steps toward normalization were never taken. In 1996, one of Pyongyang's spy submarines washed up on the coast of South Korea; Seoul reacted by suspending its share of energy aid, and Pyongyang retaliated with typically inflammatory rhetoric. We now know that about this time the North Koreans also secretly started to ship missile technology to Pakistan in exchange for Pakistani centrifuges.
Compare Clinton's decisiveness with wishy-washy George W. Bush. Beginning his first term in office in January 2001, he proclaimed the Agreed Framework to be dead and announced that he had no interest in talking with the North Koreans. A few months later, intelligence revealed that North Korea had been enriching uranium--a much slower method of achieving a bomb than by reprocessing plutonium. (The bomb the North Koreans set off last week was not a uranium bomb but a plutonium bomb--a bomb created on Bush's watch--not Clinton's.) After the discovery of North Korea's uranium enrichment, Bush toughened his stance against negotiations even more.
The North Koreans tried to replay the 1994 scenario, threatening to unlock the fuel rods, expel the inspectors and renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Through former ambassadors Bill Richardson and Donald Gregg, however, they exhibited willingness to back off their threats if the Agreed Framework were reinstated--but George W. Bush wasn't interested in playing the negotiating game. Stymied, toward the end of 2002 the North Koreans unlocked the rods and evicted the inspectors, thus crossing the "red line" Clinton had drawn. Bush, famous for belligerence and saber rattling, took no military action. He called for no sanctions. He tried no diplomacy. It was George W. Bush who did nothing--not Bill Clinton.
And while we're assessing blame for Bush's total inaction, the record shows that soon after George H.W. Bush, the president's father, moved into the White House, the CIA discovered that near their nuclear reactor at Yongbyon the North Koreans were building a reprocessing facility to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium from the fuel rods. Five years later, Bill Clinton stopped the North Koreans from moving the rods into this facility. Eight years after Clinton's decisive action, George W. Bush passively allowed the North Koreans to move them. Welcome to reality, Mr. President.
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (10/12/06)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
Dashiell Hammett's now-classic 1929 mystery novel The Maltese Falcon and fledgling director John Huston's 1941 film feature a marvelous exchange between two principal characters: the sinister fat man, Casper Gutman, played by Sydney Greenstreet, and detective Sam Spade, played by Humphrey Bogart. They are about to talk about the elusive "black bird."
Gutman: You're a close-mouthed man?
Spade: [shakes his head] No, I like to talk.
Gutman: Better and better! I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice. [sits back] Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. And I'll tell you right out that I'm a man who likes talking to a man that likes to talk.
Would that President George W. Bush were a man who likes to talk to a man that likes to talk. At a time when the North Koreans were practically begging for discussions, and when their journey down the dangerous nuclear path could have been brought to a halt or reversed, he refused to talk to them. The Bush White House has consistently scorned diplomacy, regarding it as a sign of weakness. When retired Gen. Colin Powell, a few months into his service as Bush's secretary of state, announced that he would pick up where President Clinton left off in discussions with North Korea that had frozen plutonium production and missile testing for years, Bush quickly rebuked him and vetoed that course. He insisted that any negotiations by his administration would have "a different tone" from those of the Clinton administration. Instead of negotiating, the Bush administration has consistently favored bluster, empty threats and tough talk.
At the very moment George W. Bush took the oath of office as president in January 2001, North Korea's nuclear reactor had been frozen for seven years under a 1994 agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration. In fact, toward the end of Bill Clinton's term, U.S. officials were so sure they were close to agreement that Clinton considered emulating Richard Nixon's trip to Beijing by becoming the first American president to visit Pyongyang. Hard-line conservatives had long objected to the deal that froze North Korea's nuclear program, which had been given the unwieldy name of "Agreed Framework." Ironically, their resistance stemmed largely from its provision for the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors that were actually to be financed not by the United States but by Japan and South Korea.
Determined to kill the Agreed Framework, hard-liners in the newly elected Bush administration looked for an excuse to scrap it. They found one when U.S. intelligence discovered a secret North Korean program to enrich uranium. After confronting Pyongyang with the evidence, we cut off delivery of the diesel oil promised under the Agreed Framework. North Korea responded by ordering international inspectors to leave the country, and restarted its nuclear reactor. In order to obtain plutonium for nuclear weapons, they began reprocessing the 8,000 spent fuel rods stored in a holding pool that had been under the control of the evicted inspectors.
The following year in the 2002 State of the Union address came the president's infamous blanket labeling of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the "axis of evil"--a speechwriter's three-nation Frankenstein creation. "The U.S. will not permit the world's most destructive regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons," he promised. The president next added insult to injury with his now-famous intemperate remark to Bob Woodward, then researching his book Bush at War: "I loathe Kim Jong-II," and his description of North Korea's pudgy ruler as a "pygmy" (he is only an inch taller than five feet) and a "spoiled child." Tough talk and personal insult may play well in American politics but indiscreet, undiplomatic cowboy language is especially frowned upon in Asia, where such words are considered pointedly rude, unseemly and threatening.
Unlike the Clinton administration, which had stated in no uncertain terms that it would attack if North Korea attempted to reprocess the plutonium rods, the Bush administration left the consequences of such action purposely vague to keep Pyongyang in the dark about consequences. They also wasted time in trying to include neighboring nations, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, in meetings. For its part, North Korea insisted that it wanted to talk only with the United States. Following President Bush's reelection in 2004, the administration finally hammered out a "statement of principles" that included economic assistance, security guarantees and normalization of relations with the U.S. In return, North Korea would agree to abandon its nuclear program. The new policy also held out the hope that Pyongyang would get the light-water reactors originally promised under Clinton's Agreed Framework.
Like a sleight-of-hand magician, the Bush administration has kept the country's attention focused on Iraq in a calculated attempt to avoid close scrutiny of its lack of a lucid policy toward North Korea and Iran, military or otherwise. Now the chickens have come home to roost, and the blame game begins. This country has known for more than fifteen years that North Korea has been separating plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel for possible use in a nuclear weapon. It should not have come as a surprise that North Korean scientists would be able to test a nuclear device. George W. Bush's ill-defined strategy for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons is now completely in disarray. North Korea has demonstrated that they have created a device that can implode, however imperfectly, and compress a quantity of plutonium into a critical mass, creating a nuclear explosion. Historically, North Korea has now become the ninth nation to test a nuclear weapon.
Responding to last Sunday's event, President Bush focused on the dangers stemming from a spread of nuclear technology. After a hurried phone call to the leaders of China, South Korea, Russia and Japan, he said, "Once again, North Korea has defied the will of the international community, and the international community will respond." Criticizing North Korea for passing missile technology to Syria and Iran, he called the Pyongyang regime "one of the world's leading proliferators." The U.N. Security Council also quickly denounced the North Korean action and began work on a U.S.-sponsored resolution punishing North Korea for violating a moratorium on nuclear testing.
The U.S. proposal also would authorize international inspection of all cargoes moving in and out of the country to prevent Pyongyang from selling nuclear technology to other nations or to terrorist groups. The latter will undoubtedly be a hard sell. China and Russia, until recently North Korea's only friends, are now making noises that indicate a willingness to join in sanctions of some kind. China, which supplies more than 70 percent of North Korea's fuel and 40 percent of its food is deathly afraid of punishing impoverished North Korea so severely that its rickety economy collapses. Already victims of periodic, almost endless famine, its starving population could stream into China in the event of North Korea's complete breakdown and overwhelm the border provinces of Jilin and Liaoning.
There is, of course, more than enough blame to go around and be shared by three major international blunderers who contributed to today's stalemate: George W. Bush, who refused to negotiate with the North Koreans; Chinese President Hu Jintao, who has long avoided a direct confrontation with his immediate neighbor; and the third player in this high-stakes game, Kim Jong-Il, so cut off from reality he had convinced himself that Washington would welcome negotiations.
Dashiell Hammett's now-classic 1929 mystery novel The Maltese Falcon and fledgling director John Huston's 1941 film feature a marvelous exchange between two principal characters: the sinister fat man, Casper Gutman, played by Sydney Greenstreet, and detective Sam Spade, played by Humphrey Bogart. They are about to talk about the elusive "black bird."
Gutman: You're a close-mouthed man?
Spade: [shakes his head] No, I like to talk.
Gutman: Better and better! I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice. [sits back] Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. And I'll tell you right out that I'm a man who likes talking to a man that likes to talk.
Would that President George W. Bush were a man who likes to talk to a man that likes to talk. At a time when the North Koreans were practically begging for discussions, and when their journey down the dangerous nuclear path could have been brought to a halt or reversed, he refused to talk to them. The Bush White House has consistently scorned diplomacy, regarding it as a sign of weakness. When retired Gen. Colin Powell, a few months into his service as Bush's secretary of state, announced that he would pick up where President Clinton left off in discussions with North Korea that had frozen plutonium production and missile testing for years, Bush quickly rebuked him and vetoed that course. He insisted that any negotiations by his administration would have "a different tone" from those of the Clinton administration. Instead of negotiating, the Bush administration has consistently favored bluster, empty threats and tough talk.
At the very moment George W. Bush took the oath of office as president in January 2001, North Korea's nuclear reactor had been frozen for seven years under a 1994 agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration. In fact, toward the end of Bill Clinton's term, U.S. officials were so sure they were close to agreement that Clinton considered emulating Richard Nixon's trip to Beijing by becoming the first American president to visit Pyongyang. Hard-line conservatives had long objected to the deal that froze North Korea's nuclear program, which had been given the unwieldy name of "Agreed Framework." Ironically, their resistance stemmed largely from its provision for the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors that were actually to be financed not by the United States but by Japan and South Korea.
Determined to kill the Agreed Framework, hard-liners in the newly elected Bush administration looked for an excuse to scrap it. They found one when U.S. intelligence discovered a secret North Korean program to enrich uranium. After confronting Pyongyang with the evidence, we cut off delivery of the diesel oil promised under the Agreed Framework. North Korea responded by ordering international inspectors to leave the country, and restarted its nuclear reactor. In order to obtain plutonium for nuclear weapons, they began reprocessing the 8,000 spent fuel rods stored in a holding pool that had been under the control of the evicted inspectors.
The following year in the 2002 State of the Union address came the president's infamous blanket labeling of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the "axis of evil"--a speechwriter's three-nation Frankenstein creation. "The U.S. will not permit the world's most destructive regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons," he promised. The president next added insult to injury with his now-famous intemperate remark to Bob Woodward, then researching his book Bush at War: "I loathe Kim Jong-II," and his description of North Korea's pudgy ruler as a "pygmy" (he is only an inch taller than five feet) and a "spoiled child." Tough talk and personal insult may play well in American politics but indiscreet, undiplomatic cowboy language is especially frowned upon in Asia, where such words are considered pointedly rude, unseemly and threatening.
Unlike the Clinton administration, which had stated in no uncertain terms that it would attack if North Korea attempted to reprocess the plutonium rods, the Bush administration left the consequences of such action purposely vague to keep Pyongyang in the dark about consequences. They also wasted time in trying to include neighboring nations, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, in meetings. For its part, North Korea insisted that it wanted to talk only with the United States. Following President Bush's reelection in 2004, the administration finally hammered out a "statement of principles" that included economic assistance, security guarantees and normalization of relations with the U.S. In return, North Korea would agree to abandon its nuclear program. The new policy also held out the hope that Pyongyang would get the light-water reactors originally promised under Clinton's Agreed Framework.
Like a sleight-of-hand magician, the Bush administration has kept the country's attention focused on Iraq in a calculated attempt to avoid close scrutiny of its lack of a lucid policy toward North Korea and Iran, military or otherwise. Now the chickens have come home to roost, and the blame game begins. This country has known for more than fifteen years that North Korea has been separating plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel for possible use in a nuclear weapon. It should not have come as a surprise that North Korean scientists would be able to test a nuclear device. George W. Bush's ill-defined strategy for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons is now completely in disarray. North Korea has demonstrated that they have created a device that can implode, however imperfectly, and compress a quantity of plutonium into a critical mass, creating a nuclear explosion. Historically, North Korea has now become the ninth nation to test a nuclear weapon.
Responding to last Sunday's event, President Bush focused on the dangers stemming from a spread of nuclear technology. After a hurried phone call to the leaders of China, South Korea, Russia and Japan, he said, "Once again, North Korea has defied the will of the international community, and the international community will respond." Criticizing North Korea for passing missile technology to Syria and Iran, he called the Pyongyang regime "one of the world's leading proliferators." The U.N. Security Council also quickly denounced the North Korean action and began work on a U.S.-sponsored resolution punishing North Korea for violating a moratorium on nuclear testing.
The U.S. proposal also would authorize international inspection of all cargoes moving in and out of the country to prevent Pyongyang from selling nuclear technology to other nations or to terrorist groups. The latter will undoubtedly be a hard sell. China and Russia, until recently North Korea's only friends, are now making noises that indicate a willingness to join in sanctions of some kind. China, which supplies more than 70 percent of North Korea's fuel and 40 percent of its food is deathly afraid of punishing impoverished North Korea so severely that its rickety economy collapses. Already victims of periodic, almost endless famine, its starving population could stream into China in the event of North Korea's complete breakdown and overwhelm the border provinces of Jilin and Liaoning.
There is, of course, more than enough blame to go around and be shared by three major international blunderers who contributed to today's stalemate: George W. Bush, who refused to negotiate with the North Koreans; Chinese President Hu Jintao, who has long avoided a direct confrontation with his immediate neighbor; and the third player in this high-stakes game, Kim Jong-Il, so cut off from reality he had convinced himself that Washington would welcome negotiations.
Labels: Nobody Archive
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Nobody Asked Me, But . . . (10/05/06)
NOBODY ARCHIVE
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results." This wisdom, a favorite of engineers and scientific researchers, is called to mind by the growing resemblance of the Iraq mess to our experience in Vietnam. Who's to blame? Start with a supine Congress's failure to declare that a state of war existed between the United States and Iraq. Doing so would have made it possible for Iraqi forces to formally surrender their units and their arms to Coalition forces instead of melting away with their weapons and munitions. Congress abdicated its responsibility and gave the President the power to wage a pre-emptive war, with all-too predictable consequences.
Our stubborn, incurious frat-boy president lives in a bubble, has a comic book attitude toward the war and a predilection for telling flatulence jokes. Totally unwilling to consider alternative courses of action, for him it's "my way or the highway." His vice president, Dick Cheney, is the power behind the throne, a role he shares with Karl Rove. Cheney has a good reason for wanting to "stay the course"; his former firm, Halliburton, gets richer the longer the occupation persists--and so does he. Those clamoring for the impeachment of George W. Bush would be wise to ponder the implications of a truly frightening thought: "President Dick Cheney."
Then there's defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the arrogant micromanager of all things military at the Pentagon. "Stuff happens" was his comment about the looting of Baghdad's hospitals, universities and museums. When a Tennessee National Guardsman complained about the lack of adequate armor on vehicles, his response was, "You go to war with the army you have." A curious comment coming from someone who had personally created the very army fighting in Iraq. And let us not forget the handmaiden to this triumvirate, secretary of state (and former national security adviser) Condoleezza Rice who cannot remember ever being warned about impending terrorist attacks.
Now it can be told: It seems that Vietnam War dinosaur Henry Kissinger, Nixon's Secretary of State, has met regularly--and secretly--with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Seeing the lack of progress in Iraq through the prism of Vietnam, Kissinger became a behind-the-scenes source of advice on our policy there. He even produced a copy of his 1969 memo to President Richard M. Nixon in which he wrote: "Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded." Obviously fighting the Vietnam War over again, Kissinger reiterated this message in a column last year in The Washington Post: "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy." Now we know the origin of "stay the course."
It is no coincidence that only two days after retired Gen. Jay Garner arrived in Iraq as head of postwar planning, he was notified that L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, a Kissinger protégé, would be arriving to replace him. Among his first acts, Bremer, the presidential envoy and putative Proconsul, signed two disastrous orders. The first prohibited some 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from holding government posts. The other disbanded the Iraqi military, leaving hundreds of thousands of disgruntled, unemployed and still armed troops at loose ends. Bremer was rewarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Much of the blame for our present predicament must be laid at the doorstep of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a veritable Darth Vader and control freak at the Pentagon. When Rumsfeld took over in 2001, he became enamored of a concept that had been circulating in military circles, and made it his own. Called "military transformation," this theory of warfare scrapped old concepts in favor of lighter, faster, more agile--and more lethal--combat forces. In the mid-1990s, the development of "smart bombs," precision-guided munitions capable of destroying enemy targets with a single shot, combined with high-resolution intelligence sensors in drones and rapid communication networks meant a revolution on the battlefield. If enemy forces could be knocked out from the air, less armor and artillery would be needed, and their long and sluggish supply lines could be dispensed with. Unfortunately, the resulting force was unsuited for crucial occupation duty.
Rumsfeld's ambitious plans for reorganizing and downsizing the Army did not sit well with the military brass. Friction quickly developed with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. In retaliation, Rumsfeld's office leaked the name of Shinseki's successor fourteen months before his retirement, thus effectively making him a lame duck. Rumsfeld treated officers of all ranks harshly, and was proud of his practice of "wire brushing" them by asking questions he knew they could not answer and then chewing them out and demeaning them in public. In Rumsfeld's eyes, this is his way of letting them know who's the boss. Experts see the passive acceptance of flawed Rumsfeld battle concepts without protest by senior officers as payback for his callous and insensitive treatment of them.
Transformation was a great idea on paper; its execution by former naval aviator Rumsfeld was something else. Among the wasteful items still carried on the Pentagon budget but better suited to the Cold War are F-22 stealth fighter planes, each costing about $170 million; continued development of the F-35 Joint Strategic Fighter, a smaller version of the F-22; a new souped-up version of the F/A-18 fighter plane--all to be used against enemies whose air forces can barely get their outmoded aircraft off the ground; a new Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine at a time when the Navy already has a surplus of existing submarines.
The administration has followed a calculated plan to keep this nation perpetually in a state of fear for political advantage so the public will be oblivious to the breakdown of our armed forces. Traditionally the three services have shared equally in budgeted funds. The Army has borne the brunt of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet Rumsfeld has limited the Army's budget for fiscal year 2008 to $114 billion. In an act bordering on insubordination, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who came out of retirement to take over as Army chief of staff, declined to submit his budget requests, saying that the Army needed another $17 billion simply to repair equipment or there was no point in submitting a budget.
The statistics are grim: The 3rd Infantry Division is scheduled to go back to Iraq soon on a third tour of duty, yet two of the division's four brigades aren't combat ready, having none of their armored vehicles and only half their troops. Nearly 1,500 Humvees, M2 Bradley fighting vehicles and other vehicles await repair at the Red River Army Depot in Texas. The same situation is true of 500 M1 Abrams tanks at the Anniston, Ala., depot. None of the Army's five largest depots is operating at more than 50 percent of capacity--all because of lack of money.
Drunk on neocon-induced dreams of military glory, George W. Bush has spent astronomical amounts on Iraq as compared with the pittance spent on rebuilding New Orleans. The U.S. is the only democracy in the developed world that does not offer health care to its citizens as a right. We rank 43rd in infant mortality behind such superpowers as Cyprus, a small island in the eastern Mediterranean, Andorra, a tiny country in the Pyrenees, and Fidel Castro's Cuba. As in Vietnam, thousands of brave soldiers have been killed and wounded in Iraq--for what? Insanity indeed is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results." This wisdom, a favorite of engineers and scientific researchers, is called to mind by the growing resemblance of the Iraq mess to our experience in Vietnam. Who's to blame? Start with a supine Congress's failure to declare that a state of war existed between the United States and Iraq. Doing so would have made it possible for Iraqi forces to formally surrender their units and their arms to Coalition forces instead of melting away with their weapons and munitions. Congress abdicated its responsibility and gave the President the power to wage a pre-emptive war, with all-too predictable consequences.
Our stubborn, incurious frat-boy president lives in a bubble, has a comic book attitude toward the war and a predilection for telling flatulence jokes. Totally unwilling to consider alternative courses of action, for him it's "my way or the highway." His vice president, Dick Cheney, is the power behind the throne, a role he shares with Karl Rove. Cheney has a good reason for wanting to "stay the course"; his former firm, Halliburton, gets richer the longer the occupation persists--and so does he. Those clamoring for the impeachment of George W. Bush would be wise to ponder the implications of a truly frightening thought: "President Dick Cheney."
Then there's defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the arrogant micromanager of all things military at the Pentagon. "Stuff happens" was his comment about the looting of Baghdad's hospitals, universities and museums. When a Tennessee National Guardsman complained about the lack of adequate armor on vehicles, his response was, "You go to war with the army you have." A curious comment coming from someone who had personally created the very army fighting in Iraq. And let us not forget the handmaiden to this triumvirate, secretary of state (and former national security adviser) Condoleezza Rice who cannot remember ever being warned about impending terrorist attacks.
Now it can be told: It seems that Vietnam War dinosaur Henry Kissinger, Nixon's Secretary of State, has met regularly--and secretly--with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Seeing the lack of progress in Iraq through the prism of Vietnam, Kissinger became a behind-the-scenes source of advice on our policy there. He even produced a copy of his 1969 memo to President Richard M. Nixon in which he wrote: "Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded." Obviously fighting the Vietnam War over again, Kissinger reiterated this message in a column last year in The Washington Post: "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy." Now we know the origin of "stay the course."
It is no coincidence that only two days after retired Gen. Jay Garner arrived in Iraq as head of postwar planning, he was notified that L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, a Kissinger protégé, would be arriving to replace him. Among his first acts, Bremer, the presidential envoy and putative Proconsul, signed two disastrous orders. The first prohibited some 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from holding government posts. The other disbanded the Iraqi military, leaving hundreds of thousands of disgruntled, unemployed and still armed troops at loose ends. Bremer was rewarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Much of the blame for our present predicament must be laid at the doorstep of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a veritable Darth Vader and control freak at the Pentagon. When Rumsfeld took over in 2001, he became enamored of a concept that had been circulating in military circles, and made it his own. Called "military transformation," this theory of warfare scrapped old concepts in favor of lighter, faster, more agile--and more lethal--combat forces. In the mid-1990s, the development of "smart bombs," precision-guided munitions capable of destroying enemy targets with a single shot, combined with high-resolution intelligence sensors in drones and rapid communication networks meant a revolution on the battlefield. If enemy forces could be knocked out from the air, less armor and artillery would be needed, and their long and sluggish supply lines could be dispensed with. Unfortunately, the resulting force was unsuited for crucial occupation duty.
Rumsfeld's ambitious plans for reorganizing and downsizing the Army did not sit well with the military brass. Friction quickly developed with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. In retaliation, Rumsfeld's office leaked the name of Shinseki's successor fourteen months before his retirement, thus effectively making him a lame duck. Rumsfeld treated officers of all ranks harshly, and was proud of his practice of "wire brushing" them by asking questions he knew they could not answer and then chewing them out and demeaning them in public. In Rumsfeld's eyes, this is his way of letting them know who's the boss. Experts see the passive acceptance of flawed Rumsfeld battle concepts without protest by senior officers as payback for his callous and insensitive treatment of them.
Transformation was a great idea on paper; its execution by former naval aviator Rumsfeld was something else. Among the wasteful items still carried on the Pentagon budget but better suited to the Cold War are F-22 stealth fighter planes, each costing about $170 million; continued development of the F-35 Joint Strategic Fighter, a smaller version of the F-22; a new souped-up version of the F/A-18 fighter plane--all to be used against enemies whose air forces can barely get their outmoded aircraft off the ground; a new Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine at a time when the Navy already has a surplus of existing submarines.
The administration has followed a calculated plan to keep this nation perpetually in a state of fear for political advantage so the public will be oblivious to the breakdown of our armed forces. Traditionally the three services have shared equally in budgeted funds. The Army has borne the brunt of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet Rumsfeld has limited the Army's budget for fiscal year 2008 to $114 billion. In an act bordering on insubordination, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who came out of retirement to take over as Army chief of staff, declined to submit his budget requests, saying that the Army needed another $17 billion simply to repair equipment or there was no point in submitting a budget.
The statistics are grim: The 3rd Infantry Division is scheduled to go back to Iraq soon on a third tour of duty, yet two of the division's four brigades aren't combat ready, having none of their armored vehicles and only half their troops. Nearly 1,500 Humvees, M2 Bradley fighting vehicles and other vehicles await repair at the Red River Army Depot in Texas. The same situation is true of 500 M1 Abrams tanks at the Anniston, Ala., depot. None of the Army's five largest depots is operating at more than 50 percent of capacity--all because of lack of money.
Drunk on neocon-induced dreams of military glory, George W. Bush has spent astronomical amounts on Iraq as compared with the pittance spent on rebuilding New Orleans. The U.S. is the only democracy in the developed world that does not offer health care to its citizens as a right. We rank 43rd in infant mortality behind such superpowers as Cyprus, a small island in the eastern Mediterranean, Andorra, a tiny country in the Pyrenees, and Fidel Castro's Cuba. As in Vietnam, thousands of brave soldiers have been killed and wounded in Iraq--for what? Insanity indeed is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.
Labels: Nobody Archive
