Finally a non-biased think tank (although some of you may say it is a biased think tank because it doesn't back up your belief system) has forcefully stated that reality that military might alone will not win the war in Iraq or more importantly the War on Terrorism. In fact, these enhanced efforts to further militarize the theaters could have (and I would argue have had) an adverse affect on our stated goals. This is an assertion I've mentioned many times in the past and hold on to today more than ever.

From this mornings International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) general press release:

The IISS in the 2007 Military Balance again analyses the challenges of complex irregular warfare, this time assessing the psychological component. Our judgement is that military planning procedures need to incorporate so called ‘influence activities’ as an integral part of pre-deployment preparation for complex warfare missions. Without this deeper perception of the mission environment, operations will lack the necessary ingredient for long-term success.

Reuters reports:

"But Western militaries have shown insufficient capability in their own attempts to carry out information and psychological operations, its annual report, "The Military Balance," said.
...
"The psychological effect at home is one of military success and may generate political support. In the theater of operations the opposite may be true, with every publicly announced kill delivering more willing recruits to the cause."
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The IISS said more attention needed to be paid to finding out what really mattered to the local population, and using cultural and psychological understanding to undermine support for insurgent movements.

"Units being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan are not being provided with the training to enable them to have a real, positive psychological impact on the population in their area of operations," it said.

In short, we need to understand the enemy, we need to appeal to the people, and we need to quit placing military might above politics as soon as possible. We will loose the battle for the hearts and minds and the War on Terrorism if we ignore the realities of blowback and the adverse effects of our foreign policy. You can say that you will not give up cheap oil, or bow to the terrorists, or whatever talking point you want to use...

But I want to limit the recruitment and appeal terrorists have currently. I want to win this war. You are not going to win this war with military might, but you will prolong it. And ultimately you will be an accessory to failure.

Posted by Geoff

- The battle for the 'Hearts and Minds' took a shot (although unavoidable) yesterday.

Fourteen members of one family have been killed in a US air strike that destroyed a house in northern Iraq, an Iraqi official has said.

- The Israeli-Palestinian dispute in Gaza and over the elections remains ripe. The Senate has expressed concern and 'ordered' Abbas to refuse Hamas eligibility in Palestine. It's a funny thing how American Democracy works. We said nothing as the Muslim Brothers and Hezbollah gained in recent elections in Egypt and Lebanon. But Israel, and her thirst for more space in Palestine, holds strings in American politics, enough for Senators to call for the exclusion of Hamas and with it the credibility of the coming democratic cycle. Why the Israeli or American politicians think meddling will soften support for Hamas, PIJ, et cetera is beyond me. Seems they should trap them into democracy and begin to solve the problem with words rather than assignations, car bombs, bulldozers, and walls.

- A new book looks at the 'cherry-picking' of info that mislead the public and congress into Iraq. (Never once did they even come close to misleading me. To me it was a no-brainer. Few believed me. Me. Me, me. Me)

- The Iraqi oil minister who was given a vacation to pave the way for Chalabi to hold some power (and self-respect) in the new Iraqi government submitted his official resignation yesterday. He was troubled by the new policies and how they failed to benefit the poor. With Chalabi in, the poor can expect some price gouging and, unless someone wishes to argue otherwise, unexplained disappearing funds.

- Units in the SC National Guard had to leave $50 million worth of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, heavy transport trucks, Humvees, radios, weapons, tools and other equipment in Iraq. it is unclear whether it will be returned in any way.

- Bush was against governing based on poll numbers, before he was for it. Flip-flop???
Before, 13 December 2005:

QUESTION: So what does that say about the hill that you have to climb?

MCCLELLAN: A couple things. Let me first correct you in terms of saying that we don’t ever look at polls. We don’t govern based on polls. The president does not govern based on polls. The president governs based on a clear set of principles and a clear set of beliefs. [WH Press Briefing, 12/13/05]

Today, responding to why Bush is justified in continuing to conduct an illegal wiretapping program:

MCCLELLAN: I think that clearly the American people strongly support the efforts that we are undertaking to save their lives. I think there actually was a poll last week that said 60 percent — more than 60 percent of the American people support the actions the president is taking to prevent attacks from happening in the first place. That is what this president is committed to doing. This is about saving lives.

And the right still doesn't get it. Most people have no problem with legal wiretapping, it's the illegal, above the law wiretapping that is a problem. Reword the question correctly and I'll bet a lunch at the local restaurant of your choice that the results would be a lot different.

I guess that might be why Scotty's mommy is running back towards the left.

Posted by Geoff

I mentioned yesterday that I had reservation with the much anticipated Petraeus/Crocker report on the situation in Iraq. I feel that the information present will be spun in such a way to wash away the bad points while enhancing or fabricating the positive points. We should all consider what is presented in the GAO as an apolitical report when compared to the July and September reports. I'm going to briefly expand on this argument below with two LA Times articles published this morning.

We learned today that the Administration has quit reporting to Congress the availability of electricity in Baghdad. The likely reason being that it is not going well. But an ThinkProgress points out, Ryan "Crocker told CBS News that electricity "is more important to the average Iraqi than all 18 benchmarks rolled up into one." It's the hearts and minds argument I've been arguing all along. We'll see if this figure makes into the assessment and if it isn't spun or discounted.

Next, dropping US fatalities in Iraq. Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno attempted to flatter the President's surge strategy by citing an otherwise normal occurrence as proof positive of success. To be fair, he points out that the cited trend really isn't a trend, yet. We'll have to look back and see if he was prophetic or just spinning appealing statistics, and whether or not he notes this error if things don't pan out as he insinuated. I'll have a visual blog tomorrow about what I'm talking about here...

Posted by Geoff

In front of the VFW, our President bush said:

one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields."

We'll we've seen the killing fields of Fallujah, Baghdad and Kurdistan.

We've seen 21^st century version of boat people in the 2 million displaced Iraqis.

And now we have our very own re-education camps:

The U.S. military has introduced "religious enlightenment" and other education programs for Iraqi detainees, some of whom are as young as 11, Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, the commander of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, said yesterday.

Stone said such efforts, aimed mainly at Iraqis who have been held for more than a year, are intended to "bend them back to our will" and are part of waging war in what he called "the battlefield of the mind." Most of the younger detainees are held in a facility that the military calls the "House of Wisdom."

Hearts and minds, stay the course, victory, return on progress, religious enlightenment .....

You people are fucking retarded.

Posted by Geoff

Labels: Bush, Conservatives, Iraq, Republicans

Cal Thomas: With what you know now, what might you have done differently in Iraq?

Donald Rumsfeld: I don't think I would have called it the war on terror. I don't mean to be critical of those who have. Certainly, I have used the phrase frequently. Why do I say that? Because the word 'war' conjures up World War II more than it does the Cold War. It creates a level of expectation of victory and an ending within 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera. It isn't going to happen that way. Furthermore, it is not a 'war on terror.' Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and (through) a small group of clerics, impose their dark vision on all the people they can control. So 'war on terror' is a problem for me. [link; h/t ThinkProgress]

Well, a pretty large consensus agreed with you before the neocon pipe-dreamers sold their unverified ideological plan and the war on Iraq to the President as a way of fighting the War on Terror. Now, few disagree that the war in Iraq is a part of the War on Terror, more will disagree that it is the main front of that war. Include me there, Iraq is but a part of the whole dynamic. Recent destabilization in North Africa and the Horn of Africa point to an emerging front of a level comparable to today's Iraq (think: failed states in Somalia and Sudan and then the failed state of Afghanistan in 2001). Additionally fighting the battle of hearts and minds (limiting anti-Americanism) should be given more thought and effort. It is a shame that the level of anti-Americanism hasn't budged do in large part to our governments arrogant, misinformed, and misguided policies in the region.

This statement from this discredited Sec. of Defense is "remarkable." But would, as the question asked, this remarkable revelation have changed the course to war one bit had it occurred to Rummy or whomever prior to March 2003? I doubt it. These people were sitting on top of cherry picked Intel and a nation of traumatized citizens who had let world events cause them to set aside facts and reason in order to monger a war of perceived retaliation. It is a bit of dark historical irony that this action actually made the problem worse and that the War on Terror has become more difficult to win due to this administrations policy and the support they received from large parts of their traumatized constituency.

Posted by Geoff

A Senate committee, in a bipartisan rebuff to President George W. Bush, approved military tribunal legislation that would give more legal protection to suspected terrorists than the administration wants.

Four of the 13 Republicans on the panel joined the 11 Democrats to pass their version of the measure, rejecting Bush's proposal to bar defendants from seeing classified evidence prosecutors may want to use in court. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed the Senate approach, warning that the Bush administration is risking the safety of U.S. troops and worldwide opinion by permitting harsh treatment of detainees.
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"We are not going to win the war by killing every terrorist with a bomb or a bullet," South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham told reporters before the committee met. "You win the war by persuading those people in the Mideast to reject terrorism." [link]

A reemergence of the war for the hearts and minds would be a good step forward amid all the many steps back. Of course this statement has nothing to do with the illegal actions commited in our name and the request by the Fuehrer to have that continue.

Posted by Geoff

So now we are softening our approach to improve our image in our various wars?

In Iraq we hope to pacify Ramadi without leveling it; the "anti-Fallujah strategy".

In Afghanistan we hope to regain the publics trust and support by handing out "toys, food, supplies."

Does all that go out the window with our outright support for Israeli aggression against all of Lebanon and did we have a choice?

[UPDATE] It has been alleged that the US military may have pushed for the torture of Iraqi prisoners. This is based on "interviews with military personnel and sworn statements in declassified documents" and begs the question, how far up the chain did this go?

Two steps forward, two steps back.

Posted by Geoff

It's about time. Lang has more and is certainly more qualified to comment.

Now for some excerpts...

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.
...
While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion.
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Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
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The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one
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There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.
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Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient.
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Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.

The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries.
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We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and — yes, unfortunately — terrorism.
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If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.
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Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world — ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.

Francis Fukuyama is an old neoconservative; he has 2 degrees of separation from Leo Strauss himself.

I wonder what Palmetto Neocon thinks? Oops! Blog for sale...

Posted by Geoff

I mean just pounded.

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds accuses me today of "degrad(ing) the blogosphere" because I wrote a post at Crooks & Liars observing that Reynolds had done nothing to denounce the violence-advocating and epithet-spewing remarks of Ann Coulter at last week's highly prestigious Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and I encouraged C&L readers to e-mail Reynolds and ask why this was. As I documented here, the CPAC is one of the most important Republican events of the year, and its invited speakers along with Coulter included Dick Cheney, Ken Mehlman, Bill Frist, Newt Gingrich and Reynolds himself.

As I explained in the C&L post, my belief that Reynolds has an obligation to either denounce or defend Coulter's comments is largely based on the fact that Reynolds routinely lectures Democrats on what he claims is their obligation to denounce "extremists on the Left" – even when the extremists in question are totally fringe and inconsequential figures who have nothing to do with Democrats, and – unlike Coulter here – don't have huge throngs of followers and aren't invited to be the featured speaker at the most important political events of the year. I specifically cited this post from Reynolds self-righteously taking Democrats to task for their grave moral failure in remaining silent about that oh-so-significant, long-standing icon of the Democratic Party, Ward Churchill.
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Republicans have been playing this game for years. They wildly inflate the importance of fringe, extremist figures and then -- every time one of those individuals makes an intemperate remark or comment that can be wrenched out-of-context and depicted as some sort of demented evil -- they demand that Democrats ritualistically parade before the cameras and either condemn those individuals or be branded as someone who is insufficiently willing to stand up to the extremists "in their party."
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Republicans have spent the last five years courting the most extreme and radical elements of their party, while the media allows them to present a mainstream and moderate face to the public. While we were given John McCain, Rudy Guliani, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the prime-time speakers at the GOP Convention, Republicans cowtow in the dark to figures like James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Coulter. It is time that they either embrace those alliances in the open or repudiate them.
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Now, having said all of that, Reynolds' condemnation of Coulter, once he was finally prodded into making it, is quite potent and clear. He says that Coulter inflames the divide between Muslims and the West and therefore, because winning hearts and minds is our most important objective in the war on terrorism, Coulter is "objectively pro-terrorist." I can't quibble with that.

But that leads to a rather glaring question, which is this: why is someone so extreme, hateful, and destructive so wildly popular among Bush followers; why is she continuously treated as a respectable and important figure among "conservatives"; and why have so few of the prominent Republicans who participated at the CPAC not condemned her, ever? If one is a supporter of Bush, as Reynolds is, aren't those rather pressing questions?

Go read...

Reynolds' record

Posted by Geoff

bushCo. must apologize for their militaries desecration of the Koran right Fucking now! Things are starting to get bad in Arab countries all over the Globe. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia... This pause is worse than the quiet the world experienced after the tsunami.

[UPDATE]
Links:
U.S. must apologize over Koran report-Afghan paper
President, PM demand punishment to perpetrators
Indonesian Muslims denounce US over alleged Koran desecration
Afghan clerics back Koran protests, shun violence
Karzai demands action on Koran abuse

So much for winning the hearts and minds.