"When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war." Gen. McChrystal

As reported by various media outlets this morning, President Obama is apparently suffering an executive snit over “some people’s” obsession with his promised 2011 deadline for starting troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. His bad mood is somewhat justified, I suppose, having spent the week canning The Runaway General and the weekend with the panic-stricken international victims of the New World Order’s fiscal misadventures. Not only was there the indoor commotion and clamor about the relatively miniscule (compared to the US, of course) national debts and deficits keeping the rest of the Free World awake at night, but outside, at the gates, were the vocal hordes of anti-capitalists turning the usually decorous streets of downtown Toronto into a three-ring ugly pageant. Not a great week by any standard . . .

Nevertheless, as one of the aforementioned “obsessives,” I must take issue with the President’s short temper over the withdrawal date. I did not, as some did at the time, take the President to task for taking his own sweet time to come up with this formula. While some were depicting Obama as weak on terror (whatever- TF that means?), or indecisive, or dithering, I remained steadfastly supportive in the camp that characterized Obama’s excruciatingly meticulous assessment as the reasoned, rational and conscientious deliberations of a judicious Commander-in-Chief. Until, of course, I heard the disappointing outcome which could have been just as easily arrived at if the President had, instead, put his head together with the Martial Arts Triumvirate (John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham) over a six-pack in the Rose Garden.

Evidently, the President likes to “control the message” but he also needs to understand that controlling the message in the Internet Age is less like actual “control” and more like herding cats. A perfect example is the McChrystal Affair: Obama had to know, when he went along with DoD’s McChrystal nomination to lead in Afghanistan, that pulling a SpecOps guy off of his assassination detail might result in some slightly unconventional doings coming out of ISAF HQ for a while.

As a matter of fact, McChrystal’s reputation preceded him, and had a few folks scratching their heads, at the time. First of all, Special Operations soldiers are used to operating on the fringe with minimal to no oversight and they know, going in, that whatever happens during a “special operation,” the record will be sealed and marked with a big “Classified” stamp forever after. Such people inhabit a parallel universe and most, I’d guess, consider themselves pretty much above the law because they are.

Clearly, that sense of “untouchability” prevailed during Michael Hastings’ month long sojourn in Team America locker-room. Media types who “broke the news” that McChrystal’s problem was that he acted as a “Lone Wolf” were missing the point – that’s why he was chosen in the first-place; and the journos that insisted that McChrystal was “hand-picked” by Obama to lead in Afghanistan are so “on message” that they might as well be stateside embeds.

My point in all of that is that when you are truly curious about the truth you have little choice but to consult the foreign press where being “on message” is of far less consequence. For example, so far no one outside of the British have made any mention of the trainwreck of a briefing that McChrystal delivered to the NATO Defence Ministers a few days before the Rolling Stone trainwreck – and probably had just as much, if not more, impact on Obama’s decision than a boys-will-be-boys expose in a Pop Culture mag. The NATO briefing was, in my opinion (and the opinions of a handful of furriners and “old school” DoD types) far more damaging to the Afghan War PR campaign than the Rolling Stone article, and came at the worst possible moment in time vis-à-vis an impending Congressional vote to approve additional defense funding for the already bad-news surge in Afghanistan.

* * *

I urge all those interested in such “outside opinions” to read all of the gory details of McChrystal’s Last Post as reported by Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady for this Sunday’s edition of The Independent. Despite the US media’s skepticism over the newsworthiness of reporting on McChrystal’s pessimistic confessional to the NATO Defence Ministers, I found it quite interesting; in fact, some might read it as McChrystal’s desperate plea to outside forces to prevail upon his own government to cut their losses and get out of Afghanistan. Pretty ham-handed politics, in retrospect, but probably the only way left that McChrystal could see to put pressure on Obama to give him more time; or, maybe, he simply wanted out without dishonor – something along the lines of “if the allies crap out on you, it’s not your fault that the war was lost.”

At any rate, here are a few snippets from The Independent article, to pique your interest:

“Sacked US General Stanley McChrystal issued a devastatingly critical assessment of the war against a ‘resilient and growing insurgency’ just days before being forced out.”

“Using confidential military documents, copies of which have been seen by the IoS, the ‘runaway general’ briefed defence ministers from NATO and the International security Assistance Force (ISAF) earlier this month, and warned them not to expect any progress in the next six months. During his presentation, he raised serious concerns over levels of security, violence, and corruption within the Afghan administration.”

“But the ‘campaign overview’ left behind by General McChrystal after he was sacked by President Barack Obama last week warned that only a fraction of the areas key to long-term success are ‘secure’, governed with ‘full authority’, or enjoying ‘sustainable growth’. He warned of a critical shortage of ‘essential’ military trainers needed to build up Afghan forces – of which only a fraction is classed as ‘effective.’”

“He pinpointed an ‘ineffective or discredited’ Afghan government and a failure by Pakistan ‘to curb insurgent support’ as ‘critical risks’ to success. ‘Waning’ political support and a ‘divergence of coalition expectations and campaign timelines’ are among the key challenges faced, according to the general.”

“General McChrystal’s presentation to NATO defence ministers and ISAF representatives provided an uncompromising obstacle to Mr. Obama’s plan to bring troops home in time to give him a shot at a second term, according to senior military sources. The general was judged to be ‘off message’ in his warning to ministers not to expect quick results and that they were facing a ‘resilient and growing insurgency.’”

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, while various players are distracted by accounting exercises (i.e., Defense Budgets, political capital, etc) the maverick-y President Karzai is doing his damnedest to incite civil war via his backroom machinations with Pakistan’s ISI and the Haqqani Network:

“Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, and the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha, are due to arrive in Kabul tomorrow for their third meeting with Karzai in recent months. Frosty relations between the two sides have thawed in recent months; about 10 days ago reports emerged from Pakistan that the ISI was offering to “deliver” the Haqqani network, which is based in North Waziristan in the tribal belt.”

“But the very notion of Pakistani-sponsored talks has sparked consternation among Afghanistan’s ethnically fractured opposition, who fear the rapprochement with Islamabad will see them excluded from any future political settlement.”

“’None of the players believe in the current strategy,” opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah told the Guardian. “Karzai is going down the drain and taking the international community with him.’”

“If he thinks he can give [the Taliban] a few ministries and a few provinces, they will simply take those provinces and then force him out.”

“Abdullah said he was appalled that the Afghan president had recently referred to the Taliban with the affectionate “jan” suffix. ‘Talib-jan is how you would refer to your dearest young son – it would be considered too soft to use on a teenager.’”

“Three weeks ago Karzai’s intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, and his interior minister, Hanif Atmar, quit in protest at the new Pakistan policy. Both men are Tajiks; Saleh was previously a leading member of the Northern Alliance that helped topple the Taliban in 2001.”

I’m no strategic genius but I think that for the reasonably intelligent observer the writing is pretty much on the wall.

Obama wants something (anything) good to happen in Afghanistan before the 2012 election so that he can bring a token number of troops home, all the while being careful that the militarized Circle (around Iran) Be Unbroken.

Hamid Karzai wants to take advantage of the deep-pockets Western invaders for as long as he can, without ticking off his homeys too much, so that he and his tribe live through these tricky times long enough to be reunited with their war-swag and live like royalty in a more developed, more hospitable environment. According to the Wall Street Journal, approximately $3 billion a year (25% of Afghan GDP), some of it undoubtedly your tax dollars, are leaving Afghanistan. In pockets, boxes, suitcases and shrink-wrapped pallets cash flies out (literally) of Kabul on a daily basis – and that’s only the declared cash flow! Somebody’s going to have quite the retirement plan and I’m not talking about Social Security. Wonder how the Tea Party will react to that brand of socialism . . . ?

General Petraeus? I’d guess he’s desperately seeking Scotty to “beam him up” before he has to lie in that lumpy, flea-infested bed he made.

Last but not least, the American Public – the old Tea Party slogan about “wanting our country back” is sounding less flaky, every day. We’re not looking for much; just some jobs, some truth, some justice and maybe getting our boys and girls home safe from these godforsaken, ill-advised, expensive and abysmally mismanaged wars.

[tags]Afghanistan, Gen. McChrystal, Gen. Petraeus, President Obama, ISAF, NATO defense briefing, Rolling Stone, Pakistan, ISI, Haqqani Network[/tags]

"Vietghanistan" from Michael Moore's website

Quite a lot of print and airtime have been expended recently on “managing expectations” regarding our excellent adventure in Afghanistan. If any of you have experienced qualms about any item, or combination of items, on the following list, I’m fairly certain that the latest news cycle has done nothing at all to allay your fears or clear up your doubts. Here’s my personal list of still-unanswered questions regarding the US’ nine year military presence in Afghanistan; answers to some, preferably all of these questions would, I believe, greatly enhance my understanding, as a voter and taxpayer, of what the hell our leaders think they have accomplished/hope to accomplish by continuing along their merry, globally destabilizing way:

• Why have our military leaders changed strategy after nine years in Afghanistan?
• Why is our new counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan better than other strategies? What does COIN success look like? Did our previous strategy/-ies fail?
• How much have our total military expenditures in Afghanistan contributed to our overall objectives there?
• How well-trained in counterinsurgency strategy and tactics are our troops? How well outfitted are they for the same?
• How many successful counterinsurgency campaigns have been executed by the US military? By any world military power? How many of those successful campaigns were executed in eighteen months?
• Do Afghans want us to help them fight against the Taliban? How many Afghan civilians have we killed/maimed by “accident?”

* * *

That list of questions is by no means comprehensive but, rather, represents my current reality-based heavyweight questions specific to the US role in Afghanistan. The remainder of the list is somewhat more “existential:”

• What would happen to the US economy (ergo global economy) if there were a worldwide moratorium on “military and/or quasi-military incursions/interventions?”
• Once Afghanistan is “stabilized,” what then?
• Are we safer? Or are we in more danger than ever before?
• Are we about to become bankrupt? Financially? Morally? Both???

So. Those are my questions . . . and I’m willing to wait . . . but, if the Sunday Hot Air Fest is any indication, answers are not forthcoming any time soon.

Part of the breakdown in communications about our latest strategy in Afghanistan, I believe, stems from the very nature of Counterinsurgency (or COIN, as our acronym-loving DoD prefers to streamline it) which is that COIN is simply a glorified PR campaign, with bombs and bullets rather than 3-color brochures. To be successful at COIN is to successfully manage perceptions and expectations. Due to the circumstances of some of my past employment, this is very familiar ground for me – I could bore you silly (but won’t) with a comparison of the finer “nits and gnats” that inform the practices of public relations operatives and the agents of COIN.

In fact, COIN is so thoroughly imbued with the mystery and magic of Big Business that I was not at all surprised to find a vintage 2005 document entitled “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency” that had been whipped up by one Kalev I. Sepp, Ph.D., for counterinsurgency mavens at Military Review.

For whatever arcane reason (perhaps a mischievous sense of irony?), Dr. Sepp chose an epigraph for his Best Practices . . . paper taken from the wit and wisdom of Gen. Earle Wheeler. For those of us who lived through/paid attention to the Vietnam War Era, Wheeler’s name bangs a gong, to say the least. Wheeler was Lyndon B. Johnson’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff throughout most of the juicy parts of the Vietnam War, and a right old warlord he was. I’m still scratching my head over this quotation heading up an article on counterinsurgency but here it is, maybe you can make sense of it:

“It is fashionable in some quarters to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the problem in Vietnam is military.”—General Earle Wheeler, 1962

Dr. Sepp dances deftly around the fact that very few, if any, of the “counterinsurgency” efforts of the past century can be truthfully designated unqualified successes (especially among those that are dreamed up by outside forces (Us) for an indigenous population (Them) to sign up for). Lucky for us, as the good doctor points out, more can be learned from mistakes and failures than from success because few will argue, I’m sure, with my opinion that Counterinsurgencies resulting from outside intervention are historically abysmal failures both in the military and social senses (see US in Vietnam — and in any number of other third world locales; USSR in Afghanistan; Britain in US – 1776, etc., etc.).

Although delineating Best Practices in Counterinsurgency is, by its very nature, a dubious project, I have to trust to Dr. Sepp’s empirical purity in all of this and, since the subject matter is topical and close to hand, I thought it might be an interesting exercise to see how our erstwhile Agents of COIN stack up against Dr. Sepp’s “best practices” model.

* * *

Of primary importance, per Sepp, is that the people of the insurgency-challenged nation, in our example Afghanistan, are the “center of gravity” of the counterinsurgency:

“Winning their hearts and minds must be the objective of the government’s efforts. Because this is a policy objective, it must be directed by the country’s political leaders.”

Uh, oh. Houston we have a problem . . . Dr. Sepp appears to be working off an assumption that counterinsurgencies are always “by, for and of the people” directly affected by insurgents in their midst, rather than by foreign instigators who come armed with their own agenda. Let’s assume, for a moment, that the Afghan people had actually been desperate to overthrow their government; that would have made them “insurgents,” against their own active government. If the US were to lend them a hand in achieving that end, while we happened to be in the neighborhood, some might call that “regime change” (an apt description, IMO).

Instead, what actually happened, as we know, is that the US decided to take its War on Terror on the road and by virtue of militarily deposing the acting Afghan (Taliban) government, the US fomented an Afghan insurgency where there previously was none. Who knew that the Taliban would try to regain control after being deposed by Righteous Americans? Everyone knows that deposed leaders are supposed to accept their “just deserts,” dealt out by the Forces for Good, and go off to become novelists or darkside celebrities elsewhere.

When the “newly liberated” but war-weary Afghan people showed little gratitude or organized interest in keeping the Taliban out of power permanently, the US found itself with a virtual “pig in a poke.” The Pentagon took “fifteen minutes” to depose the Taliban and nine years to try to persuade the Afghans to own the counterinsurgency and to keep the Taliban, Al Qaeda and anyone else on our shit list off of their turf.

From the get-go, this is already no classic “insurgency/counterinsurgency”scenario, nonetheless, we can play along and perhaps discover that all of the makings of a happy ending are in place, despite the eccentric origins of the US’ “counterinsurgency of convenience” in Afghanistan.

Ergo, here are the operational practices necessary for COIN success in Dr. Sepp’s estimable opinion:

Human Rights The security of the people must be assured as a basic need, along with food, water, shelter, health care, and a means of living. These are human rights, along with freedom of worship, access to education, and equal rights for women. The failure of counterinsurgencies and the root cause of the insurgencies themselves can often be traced to government disregard of these basic rights.

So. It would appear that, in order for counterinsurgency to succeed in Afghanistan, roughly 400 years worth of human rights reforms (that often run counter to indigenous religious and cultural tastes) must be enacted in the next eighteen months . . . i.e., “government-in-a-box?

Law enforcement Intelligence operations that help detect terrorist insurgents for arrest and prosecution are the single most important practice to protect a population from threats to its security. Honest, trained, robust police forces responsible for security can gather intelligence at the community level. In turn, an incorrupt, functioning judiciary must support the police.

I have to trust that there is a reason that the Afghan population fears the Karzai government’s police force more than the Taliban (which has a habit of beheading its offenders). Also, a simple, fiscal fact is that Afghanistan cannot even begin to afford to train, equip, and maintain an “honest, trained, robust police force” not to mention an “incorrupt, functioning judiciary.”

Population control Insurgents rely on members of the population for concealment, sustenance, and recruits, so they must be isolated from the people by all means possible. Among the most effective means are such population-control measures as vehicle and personnel checkpoints and national identity cards.

Dr. Sepp doesn’t specifically mention it, but I suspect that he would agree that said “checkpoints” should not become an occasion of death or dismemberment to the “protected population,” if they are to reasonably contribute to the overall success of the counterinsurgency.

Political process Informational campaigns explain to the population what they can do to help their government make them secure from terrorist insurgents; encourage participation in the political process by voting in local and national elections; and convince insurgents they can best meet their personal interests and avoid the risk of imprisonment or death by reintegrating themselves into the population through amnesty, rehabilitation, or by simply not fighting.

We might actually be able to give this item a C- (for effort), so far. Afghans did, indeed, recently go to the polls (for what it’s worth). On the other hand, Afghans still seem inclined to engage US troops to settle old neighborhood scores by branding their enemies with a “T” while running bomb parts for the Taliban.

Counterinsurgent warfare Allied military forces and advisory teams, organized to support police forces and fight insurgents, can bolster security until indigenous security forces are competent to perform these tasks without allied assistance.

In the U.S. Armed Forces, only the Special Forces (SF) are expressly organized and trained for counterinsurgent warfare and advising indigenous forces. (My emphasis)

Ahhhh, well, that answers one of my earlier questions but gives rise to others, I’m afraid:

So what is the role of the other 120,000 (non-Special Forces) deployed? And why do we always need more of them if they are not trained for the COIN strategy being used, in the first place?

And, if the success of counterinsurgency is so important then why are we allowing private contractors, who hire retired college campus security guards, to train the Afghan security forces when we have Special Forces, far better trained to carry out that supposedly “mission-critical” activity. Perhaps training illiterate police recruits isn’t “special” enough . . . ??

Securing borders Border crossings must be restricted to deny terrorist insurgents a sanctuary and to enhance national sovereignty.

Hmmmmmmm . . . . this one isn’t happening in eighteen years, let alone eighteen months. But, if the Afghans figure it out, maybe they’ll share their findings with Texas and Arizona . . .

Executive authority Emergency conditions dictate that a government needs a single, fully empowered executive to direct and coordinate counterinsurgency efforts. Power-sharing among political bodies, while appropriate and necessary in peacetime, presents wartime vulnerabilities and gaps in coordination that insurgents can exploit.

Tell that to the Warlords attending the Peace Jirga . . . or to the “Mayor of Kabul,” for that matter. Also notice, once again, that according to Best Practices, Karzai should actually be in charge, here; strictly by the book, it’s his job to counter an Afghan insurgency. Lately, he’s showing signs of “getting” that part, at least . . .

So that’s it, in a nutshell – Best Practices in Counterinsurgency. To round things out, Dr. Sepp also threw in a few “Counterinsurgency Don’ts.” Here are a few of the historic counterinsurgency mistakes that Sepp cites as tried-and-true prescriptions for COIN failure taken from real-life examples:

• Indigenous regular armies, although fighting in their own country and more numerous than foreign forces, were subordinate to them. Conventional forces trained indigenous units in their image—with historically poor results. (My emphasis)
• Special operations forces committed most of their units to raids and reconnaissance missions, with successful but narrow results. The Americans further marginalized their Special Forces by economy-of-force assignments to sparsely populated hinterlands.
• In the Republic of Vietnam, the Saigon Government’s leadership was unsettled. Leadership was unequally divided in the allied ranks between the U.S. Ambassador, the CIA Chief of Station, and the senior U.S. military commander.
• Impatience, masked as aggressiveness and “offensive-mindedness,” drove the Americans to apply counterinsurgency methods learned from conflicts in Greece and Malaya, but without taking into account the differences in the lands and people.
• The Americans ignored the French experience in Indochina, particularly the general ineffectiveness of large-unit operations.

Sound familiar? It doesn’t take a military genius to recognize a really awful strategy — heck, even some members of Congress are starting to gag on this one, which means it’s probably way past time to show them some love for their efforts to get us (and Afghanistan) out of this mess.

[tags]insurgency, counterinsurgency, COIN, Military Review, Kalev Sepp, PhD, Afghanistan, War on Terror[/tags]

“Truth only reveals itself when one gives up all preconceived ideas.” ~Shoseki

If you are among the vast majority of Homo sapiens who ascribe to Darwin’s theory of evolution, and therefore believe that you are the unique result of millions of years of genetic mutation, adaptation and natural selection, you will probably agree that our success as a species is in large part due to our endowment with and constant refinement of our forbears most successful survival traits.

For example, it is no longer necessary for many of us to actually scavenge for food or, upon finding some, to quickly determine whether what we have found will make us stronger – or kill us. Nevertheless, we still embody that slow accretion of knowledge and discriminatory skill, encoded in our DNA, thanks to the success of our hunter/gatherer ancestors who “lived to forage another day” – and procreate. A more subtle inheritance from that era might reasonably be a primacy of autonomous thinkers – by that I mean something along these lines: if three hunter gatherers stumble upon the same mushroom patch and two of them partake while one abstains, and, if later, the two mushroom-eaters keel over, we can be pretty certain that the hungry one will have learned a valuable lesson about the “herd mentality.”

Whether we recognize it or not, our hunter/gatherer skills are still relevant and active in the more abstract realm of the “quest for Truth” (for lack of a less hackneyed phrase).

Welcome to the 21st Century

Recently, we have been bombarded by events that require close scrutiny and informed analysis if we are to survive and advance. The 9/11 Attacks, the Invasion of Iraq, collapsing world economies, the long slog in Afghanistan, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs and the general militarization of America, anti-immigration hysteria, Islamophobia, the Gulf Oil Disaster — to name a few — are recent complex developments that challenge our survival in real ways. These types of events are not unique in human history, and, as a species we have surmounted and survived worse; but a key factor in our ability to cope with such challenges, to parse them and pursue successful outcomes is knowing the Truth.

We are told that we live in the “Information Age” which implies that there are vast resources and readily available tools for virtually anyone on the planet with Internet access to learn about or contribute to a body of knowledge on every conceivable topic. But “information” is not always – or even often – true; unfortunately we rely on “information” to make decisions of great consequence about things that we know very little about.

We live in a very advanced and complex society that, in many cases, requires quite specialized training and knowledge to fully understand one small aspect of it. Our brains aren’t currently capable of grasping the entirety of our world so we must rely on each other in a distributive fashion. To revisit my earlier example, that means that we must rely on the fellow who watched his companions eat poisonous mushrooms and die to tell us which mushrooms we should avoid at all costs. That also means that we must put a lot of trust in our erstwhile survivor to give us accurate mushroom information because, if he happens to recall some old grudge or covets your well-made spear, he might conceivably tell you that the poisonous mushrooms are the very ones to eat.

Hundreds of thousands of years later, we humans still seem to carry some ancient, instinctive reverence for truth that leads us to probe and test information until we are satisfied that we have done all we can to arrive at it. We will abide many foibles in our fellow humans but lying still crosses an existential line into taboo. As parents, teachers, partners/spouses, employers and other authority figures we all eventually get around to sending the age-old message “I don’t care what else you do, just don’t lie to me” that we learned as children. We even employ some primitive, animal instincts to discern truth-telling reading “body language,” perspiration, voice characteristics, agitation and eye contact. Evidently, arriving at the truth has been a major contributor to our evolutionary success as a species and is firmly embedded in our DNA as a “keeper” survival skill.

* * *

Congruent with the Internet revolution in information access, the so-called “corporatization of America” has made great strides to the extent that the US Supreme Court has officially recognized corporations’ “rights” to influence US political campaigns with donations limited only by their corporate “buying power.” So, while we still have a representative democracy, it’s not always so easy to figure out who our elected officials actually represent.

Corporations, now firmly ensconced in the political cat-bird seat, bring along with them their own corporate culture and style of communication, otherwise known as PR – Public Relations. Those elected officials to whom corporations provide patronage, in their turn, are keen to embrace corporate customs to demonstrate how well they might fit into corporate culture once their tenure in government is over.

As anyone who has ever spent any time in the “belly of the PR beast” will tell you, PR is all about image, perception and spin in service of creating mass appeal. Mass appeal in turn can be arrived at from two opposite directions: natural “mass appeal” qualities can be persuasively played up such that the masses readily recognize a product or service as desirable and associate the messenger with the product; or, from the opposite direction, a desire for a specific product or service can be generated in the masses by the same masters of persuasion. The difference, of course, is in the starting point: one approach anticipates what the public wants/needs and supplies it (or alleges it does); the other starts with what the corporation wants/needs and gins up a market for it.

And all of this goes on in the background while American taxpayers struggle to try to make sense of governmental mixed messages, erratic policy-making and rapidly increasing distance from the lives and concerns of ordinary American citizens. We are drowning in a sea of half-truth and downright lies that is every bit as toxic and threatening to life as we know it as the nasty glop that is fouling the Gulf of Mexico.

* * *

What I find interesting, lately, is that nerves are starting to fray on both sides of the truth divide –evidently lying is almost as taxing as being lied to, in the long run.

A great example is the recent commotion caused by the New York Times’ investigative “scoop” revealing America’s discovery of vast mineral wealth lying under the rubble of Afghanistan. I already devoted a good amount of space to the particulars of that story and don’t need to dredge that up as the issue has received ample media play. I’m more interested in the update to the story of the author’s, and the Times’, reaction to the general media outcry that the story was a transparent piece of propaganda, planted in the Times, to distract from increasing public and Congressional uneasiness with the progress of the war in Afghanistan.

The blogosphere and some left-leaning media types immediately objected that the American public was being played for fools that would not see through such a sophomoric example of Pentagon PR. The chief beef was that this was old news in “breaking news” clothing. Most critics questioned the timing of the story, coming as it did at the end of a bad news cycle for the war, the Karzai Government, the Obama administration and the Gen. McChrystal’s Kandahar project. Oh yeah . . . and one day before Gen. Petraeus was scheduled to testify before Congress about the war.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote that the story “suggest[s] a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war.” Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall wrote that “the timing of the revelation is enough to raise some suspicions in my mind.” And Foreign Policy’s Blake Hounshell wrote that “there’s less to this scoop than meets the eye.”

A day later, the Times’ author, James Risen, mounted a fairly tasteless and condescending “defense” of his article in an interview with Yahoo’s John Cook, who characterized Risen as “increasingly hostile.” Evidently, Risen believes that the “best defense is a good offense” because the interview was primarily an attack on bloggers rather than a substantive defense of his article. According to Cook, Risen later phoned back to apologize for his bad behavior but not before stating that “Bloggers should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas.”

As Jason Linkins reported on the Huffington Post, the published statement was Cook’s truncated version of Risen’s actual words which were that the aforementioned bloggers were “j**king off in their pajamas.”

Continuing in that vein, Risen said:

“The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people’s stories.” “Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don’t know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think.”

As John Cook explained about that one:

“Risen and fellow Times reporter Eric Lichtblau shared a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program; this reporter was 33 years old at the time.”

Cook , in an effort to get back on point, asked for Risen’s reaction to claims that his story covered “old news.” Risen’s response:

“If it wasn’t news, then why didn’t anybody write about it?”

As Cook and many others pointed out, the story had been previously reported by McClatchy Newspapers and Agence France Presse and the central claim — that Afghanistan had a vast vein of valuable mineral deposits — was discussed publicly by Hamid Karzai just a month ago. Risen’s response to that was to insist that “no one picked up on it.”

The final question remaining is whether or not Risen’s story was a piece of pro-war propaganda planted by the Pentagon. Risen adamantly denies that the Pentagon “leaked” the story to him (despite ready quotes from Gen. Petraeus.) The “truth” about the sources that Risen volunteered in the interview, though, did little to allay suspicions about the intent of the article. Risen cited Milt Bearden, a retired CIA officer who was active in Afghanistan in the 1980s a source. Evidently Bearden is acting as a consultant to one Paul Brinkley who is a deputy undersecretary of defense in charge of the survey team that is currently appraising the Afghan Motherlode for the Pentagon.

The Bearden/Brinkley connection is quite a story unto itself; Steve Hynd of Newshoggers heard alarms going off in his head when he read of Risen citing Bearden as a source and his reporting on that angle is a must-read.

Leo Tolstoy once said that:

“Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”

Suffice it to say that this story is still in need of a good scrubbing

* * *

As I said earlier, we are swimming in a swamp of lies, from multiple sources and for multiple reasons. We are under constant assault by partisan think tanks and political pundits; military officers masquerading as policy analysts and media experts; “embedded” journalists reporting on what the military lets them see of our wars; political hacks with secret agendas like The Long War or a theocratic America, a news media that hammers us daily for months with frightening reports that America is seething with Anti-Incumbent Rage and Anarchic Fever Dreams, yet when primaries are held 98% of incumbents win (and those who don’t have bigger problems).

Lies, hyperbole and disinformation have become so endemic in our culture that they come marching at us naked, these days, much like the overstatements and false claims of advertisers and spinmeisters.

We are complicit in those lies, too; we know that advertisers are lying to us and we still give them our money. We know that politicians are lying to us and we still give them our votes and our money. We are not less evolved, we know quite well when we’re being lied to but many of us are too weary or jaded to care. As for the corporations and the government they’ve bought, lying is a non-issue, a lesser sin rationalized as expedient for the greater good. As Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine used to say: “We’re the Phone Company, we don’t have to care.”

[tags]truth, information age, New York Times, James Risen, Jason Linkins, John Cook, Steve Hynd, Lily Tomlin[/tags]

There is nothing in the political world quite as melodramatically theatrical as “America at War;” and since America has been “at war” for most of my long life, I’ve had quite a gutful of it. I understand that war news, by its very nature tends toward the melodramatic, especially the bits that are fed to the public who are expected to bankroll military adventures. The thing that I hate the most, though, is the condescending deviousness of war hawks who assume that the majority of taxpayers are not terribly bright pawns with short memories and next to no common sense.

The past week, in the US, provides a colorful real-time example of how very gullible our military and civilian leaders believe us to be (or, if you prefer, how bogged down in epic failure they are in Afghanistan). Ever since the fiasco known as the Marjah Offensive, with its comical “government-in-a-box” mission, the news out of Afghanistan has been unrelentingly awful. Just about every assumption behind our troops’ marching orders has been terribly flawed and delivered abysmal results; unfortunately, those mistakes are measured in the lives of Americans squandered on faulty premises and bad leadership.

By last week, all such bad news had reached a tipping point and some analysts were predicting that the situation in Afghanistan was “Iraq, 2006” all over again, and that public and political support for continuing the war would surely falter, if not collapse, soon.

We had all recently digested such news as:

• Afghan President Hamid Karzai threatening to defect to the Taliban;
• NATO support falling apart — the Dutch government collapsed over the issue of supplying troops, Germans were revolted over the notion the fight was to protect the free market, the British are sending up distress signals that costs of continuing are unsustainable for them, and the Poles demanded a withdrawal schedule a few days ago;
• More American troops committing suicide than being killed by their enemies;
• Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s admission that the US is killing a “shocking number” of innocent civilians in its efforts to “protect” them;
• Lack of any Afghan support for the Kandahar Offensive Operation Process; Karzai’s recent Peace Jirga turned into such a resounding mandate for an immediate cease-fire that Karzai had to leave most of the proceedings out of the official report that would go to his US handlers;
• President Karzai has announced his intention to release prisoners being held in Afghanistan if there is insufficient evidence (per Afghan law) to hold them (good for him) plus he has petitioned the UN to remove Mullah Omar from their terrorist “blacklist”;
• The Taliban has undergone a resurgence due in part, it turns out, to generous donations from the US; evidently a goodly portion of the shrink-wrapped pallets of US dollars that were meant to purchase Afghan “hearts and minds” wound up rearming the Taliban who are now carrying out audacious attacks on US military installations and cutting a murderous swathe through the ranks of local officials that they deem collaborators;
• Recent reports allege that the Pakistani Intelligence Agency, ISI, has been training and arming the Taliban in Pakistan. Pakistan, of course, denies this but, in his efforts to network with Pakistan, Karzai has been making decisions that seem to be pointedly directed at courting them;
• One of the most recent of such moves by Karzai was the removal/forced resignation of two cabinet ministers who were considered Western pawns by some (and valuable assets by others). One of those ministers was Amrullah Saleh who headed the Afghan Intelligence Agency (NDS) and was allegedly despised by Pakistan’s ISI.

Needless to say, things are not shaping up the way that the White House and the Pentagon dreamed they would, in Afghanistan; so it is, therefore, not terribly surprising that the White House had its feelings hurt when the New York Times published a critical report on our deteriorating position in Afghanistan. I read the Times report when it first came out, and, given the hubbub that ensued, I read it again several times afterward, to make sure I hadn’t missed something. At no point did I experience a “well, blow me down” moment. As a matter of fact, the article only served to make better sense of some “inconvenient truths” that have been emerging over the past six months or so.

Nevertheless, the report obviously hit an administration “nerve” because, within hours, Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, was leveling some pretty incendiary charges at the New York Times, calling the information inaccurate “if not fallacious.” By Sunday Rice had cooled down some and shared with the Fox News Sunday audience that:

“We don’t have any basis for seeing it as the New York Times portrays it.” We have every confidence that the U.S. and NATO, working with our Afghan partners, will defeat the Taliban. Hamid Karzai remains an important partner in the Afghan government.”

If those words truly represent Susan Rice’s viewpoint on our prospects of success in Afghanistan, that puts her in an ever-shrinking minority of neocon war boosters, old-guard military hacks and Tea Party Pollyannas – and someone might want to seriously reconsider her foreign policy cred. Speaking for the White House, David Axelrod steered clear of any such “blue skies” storyline stating that:

“As to this issue, understand that Mr. Saleh [formerly director of the Afghan intelligence service] was fired by president Karzai so that may help color some of his interpretations. And Mr. Karzai rejected his interpretation of this, at the end of the day, however we have always said the future of Afghanistan will involve political solutions, just as it did in Iraq, and ultimately if the Taliban is willing to lay down arms… that would be part of the solution. Meanwhile we are putting pressure on them everyday.”

What a difference a day makes! According to a report in The Nation a few days ago:

“Saleh has been a favourite of the CIA, even as he drew fire from the Pakistanis. The agency is said to have pressured Karzai to keep Saleh in the intelligence post last year after he won re-election. Saleh had openly expressed his support for Karzai’s political rival, Abdullah Abdullah, who like Saleh is a Tajik and was mentored by the charismatic militia leader Ahmed Shah Masud. Indeed, Saleh is said to have a portrait of Masud displayed prominently on the wall of his office at the National Directorate of Security, as the Afghan spy service is known.”

In 24 hours, Amrullah Saleh was demoted from valuable US asset, well-positioned within the Afghan administration, to disgruntled employee, willing to lie to discredit his boss.

Dear New York Times: All is Forgiven

Can We Be of Service?

What with a looming double-dip recession, further erosion in Obama’s approval ratings, and a Secretary of Defense threatening to take a poleax to the Defense budget, things were not looking very promising for the Empire on Sunday night. But never fear, come Monday morning the Pentagon pulled a remarkable, game-changing rabbit out of its helmet and now everything is looking much, much better.

Ironically it was, once again, the New York Times bearing the glad tidings that dusty old, worthless Afghanistan, riddled with graft, corruption and drugs, with a crackpot hoodlum at the helm is sitting on a gold mine (literally) and has been elevated, overnight to international “player” and coveted prize.

This revelation was timely, to say the least, since the increasingly shrill criticism of US efforts, both at home and abroad, has been that it is decidedly not worth it and that the Afghans are decades, if not centuries, away from being able to manage their own affairs – one of our ostensible objectives. Just when all was looking inescapably grim, the discovery of untold, untapped mineral wealth provided Afghanistan with a ticket to the 21^st century – and a reason for the Pentagon to hang tough.

James Risen started his article for the Times with this breathless lead-in lest anyone miss the enormity (or the point) of his earth-shattering news:

“The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.”

“The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.”

One can almost hear cries of “Stop the Presses!” and Extra! Extra! Read all about it . . . except that some of it is “inaccurate if not downright fallacious. The United States did not “discover” the deposits — the Russians did; the $1 trillion dollar number is an educated guess, at best; and these are undeveloped resources in an undeveloped country so any actuaql impact on the Afghan economy probably won’t occur in our lifetime.

Blake Hounshell, of Foreign Policy, did some heavy-lifting to put the Pentagon’s Eureka! into perspective by plowing through the actual geological reports that provided source material for the Times article. According to Hounshell:

“The story goes on to outline Afghanistan’s apparently vast underground resources, which include large copper and iron reserves as well as hitherto undiscovered reserves of lithium and other rare minerals.”

“Read a little more carefully, though, and you realize that there’s less to this scoop than meets the eye. For one thing, the findings on which the story was based are online and have been since 2007, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. More information is available on the Afghan mining ministry’s website, including a report by the British Geological Survey (and there’s more here). You can also take a look at the USGS’s documentation of the airborne part of the survey here, including the full set of aerial photographs.”

“Nowhere have I found that $1 trillion figure mentioned, which Risen suggests was generated by a Pentagon task force seeking to help the Afghan government develop its resources (looking at the chart accompanying the article, though, it appears to be a straightforward tabulation of the total reserve figures for each mineral times current the current market price). According to Risen, that task force has begun prepping the mining ministry to start soliciting bids for mineral rights in the fall.”

As it turns out the original, original surveys were conducted by Russian occupation forces who obviously decided that neither the minerals nor Afghanistan were worth it, because they left the surveys with the Afghans who, distracted by other things, have been sitting on them for decades. Evidently, some Afghan under-secretary-of-something-or-other thought the Americans might take the bait and sure enough, the Americans came with their high-tech geological gizmos that measure the mineral veins and – if we are to believe Risen—spit out an appraisal real-time. Evidently the topic came up during Karzai’s most recent face-to-face with Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, in May; when Karzai delivered his own back-of-the-envelope valuation of the Afghan mineral deposits claiming that the value is more like $3 trillion. Whatever . . .

Risen admits that it could take years to develop a mining industry, but he also guesses that the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

Continuing on in the “Happy Days Are Here Again” vein, none other than Gen. David Petraeus weighed in with this:

“There is stunning potential here. There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

Risen goes on to speculate that:

“The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.”

And cites Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines as stating that:

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy.”

The Pep Rally continues with similar comments like:

“The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.”

And we all know how hard it is to “astonish” American geologists . . .

The Pentagon (probably with Human Terrain reports in hand) evidently leaked an internal memo to Risen that asserts that:

“ . . . Afghanistan could become ‘the ‘Saudi Arabia of lithium,’ a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberries.”

Way to get those social media types on board . . .

Eventually, though, Risen has to get to the real point and the poor man can’t be over-subtle given the Empire’s low opinion of the average taxpayer’s mental acuity, so here’s the red meat:

“American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House.”

“So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan. Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact.”

“Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.”

“Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts.”

And who better to sort out such “endless fights” and safeguard the infant Afghan democracy? And who’s already on the job? Well, it might take a long time but, by golly, we have to keep this treasure chest out of the hands of the Taliban – or we’re toast.

And if that isn’t compelling enough for you, there’s more, the really, REALLY scary part:

“American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.”

There’s even something for the “Greenies:

“Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. The big question is, ‘can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?’”

That’s rich . . .

* * *

Despite the “Breaking News” feel to all of this, there is a background story that is somewhat less sensational. In January, 2010 the Wall Street Journal carried a somewhat different story on the Afghan Gold Rush from Matthew Rosenberg of their London bureau:

“Afghanistan plans to delay awarding concessions for a major iron ore deposit and sizeable oil and gas reserves as part of a broader effort to stamp out corruption, the country’s finance minister said.”

“Of particular concern, said Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal in an interview Tuesday, is a major iron ore deposit in central Afghanistan that last year attracted bids from smaller Chinese and Indian companies. “We’ve put a hold onto the bidding process; it will have to be re-bid,” he said.”

“Putting the Afghan economy in order is one of the major issues to be addressed at a conference Thursday in London on Afghanistan’s future. Foreign ministers from 56 countries along with representatives from the United Nations and other international organizations involved in stabilizing Afghanistan are to attend, and European diplomats have in recent days said they are keen to hear Mr. Zakhilwal’s economic plans for the coming years.”

“Mining could be a major economic contributor. But the Mines Ministry has long been considered among Afghanistan’s most corrupt government departments, and Western officials have repeatedly expressed reservations about the Afghan government awarding concessions for the country’s major mineral deposits, fearful that corrupt officials would hand contracts to bidders who pay the biggest bribes — not who are best suited to actually do the work.”

“Mr. Zakhilwal said those concerns are shared by many inside the Afghan government, too. ‘I was among those who have been opposed to opening up new bids,’ he said. ‘It was not just the issue of corruption – but that is a real issue. We also need to do a review of how contracts are awarded, what lessons we’ve learned, what kind of transparency is needed to make the next best step.’”

“Still, he said there was no evidence of corruption in the awarding of the one major concession given out in recent years, a copper mine being set up by two Chinese firms, China Metallurgical Group and Jiangxi Copper Group.”

“That project attracted bids from all over the world, and there have been persistent reports of bribes being paid to secure it. Mr. Zakhilwal termed those reports “rumors” and held up the deal – under which the companies agreed to build schools, clinics, markets, mosques and a power plant — as a model for how Afghanistan could award future concessions.”

Memo to Pentagon: it would appear that the Afghans think that they are in charge of the Mother Lode. It would also appear that the Chinese are actively buying up development rights in Afghanistan and, so far, no mushroom clouds. So, if you want to stay in Afghanistan forever that’s your business, just find somebody else to pay for it.

Sincerely,

A Taxpayer

Who could have guessed, only a short year ago, that mid-term elections would be so darn much fun? Yet here we are, five months away from elections that are usually a major snooze, enjoying all the political melodrama of a high school election for Prom King and Queen – and we’re only at the Primaries.

Some credit is due, of course, to the Tea Party’s transformative pseudo-populism that has turned garden variety conservatives into political contortionists trying to fit themselves into the Tea Party’s anti-establishment agenda – at least long enough to bag some of their votes. The Tea Party’s major contribution to electoral politicking, however, has been to legitimize the prospects of some seriously inexperienced, quasi-anarchic radical demagogues that couldn’t have won the proverbial office of dog-catcher in more rational times. But “the times, they are a-changin . . . “

Just as we don’t have a clue how to fix the man-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, neither do we have any idea how to right our seriously listing “Ship of State,” in which our fearless leaders have decided to fire the cannons continuously over the bow, instead of bailing and plugging the leaks, to keep the ship from going down.

If one listens carefully to the campaigning of mid-term candidates (I know, I know, it can be quite disturbing) it becomes very clear that we no longer care very much what our political candidates think (or don’t think) about issues that theoretically impact life in America because, clearly, they don’t live in the same America that we do. Neither do candidates care very much about the general electorate’s thoughts on the issues because the general electorate doesn’t contribute enough to finance 21^st century political campaigns – corporations and PACs do that. The conundrum, for politicians, is that ordinary voters still provide the grease (tax dollars) they need to quiet the “squeaky wheels” that finance their political careers; so ordinary voters must still be courted. And it takes large amounts of money, and political capital, to persuade blocs of taxpayers/voters that the interests of corporate donors coincide with their own public interest.

Voting in America has become very much like playing the lottery – if you are extraordinarily lucky and beat all of the odds, it might pay off in a material way – but no one really expects to win. Meanwhile, for the losers, life goes on very much as usual, without any fortuitous assistance from the gods. Win or lose, millions of people will pony up for lottery tickets, week after week (whether they can afford it or not), because “you have to play to win.” Politics, like lotteries, depend on a certain predictable level of participation and a great deal of hope and trust. Lotteries take your small contributions, which add up to huge amounts of money, and guarantee that someone will win big; all of those contributors who don’t “win big” can be comforted by the fact that their money has provided some amount of feel-good commonwealth, like better schools or assistance for the elderly.

Those are, I believe, some contributing factors to some of the more sophomoric campaign performances we are currently being treated to and, ultimately, the deadly voter apathy that can only make a bad situation worse; but then who cares to carve out a portion of their Tuesdays to go to the polls and choose between Dumb and Dumber?

Whether you choose to vote with a ballot or vote with your feet, it’s quite educational to take a look at the candidates and their efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of American voters . . .

I Only Play a Politician on TV

Rand Paul, who recently won the Kentucky Republican primary for a Senate seat, gave us our first taste of a true Tea Party candidate floundering for a solid platform as spectacularly as the party that he aligns with. Paul came out of the gate, politicking like a pro running for President, ala Scott Brown; national media were only too happy to provide ample high-profile opportunities for Paul to trot out his half-baked ideological ramblings, committing political hari-kari in the process.

If the Tea Party, whose passion is for installing “newbies” in public office, had any misgivings about Rand Paul being the offspring of Congressman, ex-presidential candidate and Libertarian standard-bearer Ron Paul, Rand’s post-Primary victory-lap performance should dispel any notion that he knows what he’s doing in the political arena.

In the span of a few short days of peddling his “ideology” on national television Rand Paul has managed to be: unceremoniously excommunicated by orthodox Libertarians; publicly eviscerated by a reluctant Rachel Maddow for his stated support of business owners who have been stripped of their “right to discriminate,” by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, against clientele that they deem “undesirable”; mercilessly lampooned for his “accidents do happen” position on the Deepwater Horizon disaster along with his judgment that President Obama was treating BP in an “un-American” way by holding them accountable; excoriated for his view that the Americans with Disabilities Act is unfair to small business owners; and, last but not least, sued by the Canadian rock band Rush for copyright infringement for misappropriating one of their tunes as his during his campaign.

Someone with a little more political savvy than “The Candidate” finally pulled the plug on the Rand Paul Gaffe Machine and there was a brief quiet spell during which it is easy to imagine Paul being trained, by political handlers, to think before he speaks, because the American public is not as forgiving as loving parents or fraternity brothers who are inclined to indulge and, indeed, provide standing ovations for every pearl of pastoral wisdom that drips from the favored son’s honeyed lips.

Paul’s most recent tentative step back into the limelight is a little Op-Ed apologia that he penned for the Bowling Green Daily News that basically begs the public’s pardon for his excess of wonderfulness and pronouncing himself on an equal footing with Martin Luther King, Jr. That should dispel any rumors that Rand might be racist as well as casting himself in the role of the terribly misunderstood, but no less monumental, idealistic intellectual. Which, according to Rand Paul, is exactly what we’re lacking in American government today . . .

Paul’s “Ode to Himself” Op-Ed starts out like this:

“Kundera writes of a balcony scene in the winter snow of 1948 Prague. Clementis offers his fur cap to the new leader Gottwald. Later Clementis is purged by the Communists and airbrushed from all the photos. All that remains of Clementis is the fur cap on Gottwald’s head.”

Anyone who’s ever attended a pretentious, country club cocktail party knows this guy and also knows how his story ends whether he wins or loses elections. He’s right when he says that he’s not a pragmatist, but wrong when he defines himself as an idealist. He’s a narcissist – pure and simple, and professional politicians are poised to eat his lunch – if he gets a foot in the door.

A recurrent theme that is emerging out of Team Paul is that no matter what cockamamie thing comes out of the candidate’s mouth it’s tangential to the real issues which, I have to assume, he’s keeping “closer to the vest.” Jesse Benton who holds the unenviable position of serving as Paul’s campaign manager made this statement to USA Today regarding the Rush lawsuit:

“The background music Dr. Paul has played at events is a non-issue. The issues that matter in this campaign are cutting out-of-control deficits, repealing Obama Care and opposing cap and trade.”

But, wait a minute Jesse, aren’t Libertarians supposed to be all about respecting others’ property rights?

Then again, at the head of Paul’s Op-Ed piece he reminded readers that:

“I support the Civil Rights Act, but 2010 battles are about government overreach in lives.”

I vaguely remember hearing similar rhetoric, back in the day, from members of my generation who joined the SDS and who subsequently learned (the hard way) that the real world chews up and spits out ideologues for kicks.

The World According to Kirk

In an entirely different vein we have Mark Kirk, candidate for an Illinois Senate seat. Mark Kirk is one of those guys that believe that all you need to be a successful politician is good people skills like the ability to weave a good story – something along the lines of Mark Twain or Will Rogers. And so it is that Mark Kirk’s strategy for connecting with voters is to make stuff up. As a matter of fact, I think it’s safe to say that Mark Kirk finds the truth rather lackluster and lacking in political appeal which is why he doesn’t bother much with it as source material.

Rachel Maddow just did a pretty comprehensive (and entertaining) rundown of those areas in which Kirk has taken some “political license” that is well worth watching.

In the meantime, here’s a summary:

Kirk is now famous for “misremembering” the fact that he did not win the U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award (Instead, Kirk’s entire unit won a privately sponsored, not a Navy, merit award). Undaunted by the need to publicly retract that “mis-rembrance,” Kirk went on to “mis-remember” that it was his staff that caught the error in his official bio, when, actually it was the Department of the Navy that demanded that he correct his record.

Other notable Kirk “mis-remembrances” include having served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as Operation Desert Storm. And then there was the time that Kirk came under fire while flying a plane over Iraq not to mention his stint at “commanding the war room” at the Pentagon. All Flights of Fancy . . .

Clearly, Kirk believes that one’s military service is an important distinction when running for office so he has spared no embellishment in distinguishing his own military record. But Kirk’s “gift of gab” doesn’t stop there. As Maddow says: “He also makes stuff up about the world at large . . .”

Like Kirk’s rationalization that, of course the US should be drilling off its shores for oil, because, after all, the Chinese are drilling off the coast of Cuba and sucking up all the oil that could be ours (which assertion, of course, has no basis in actual fact). And while we’re on the topic of oil, Kirk promises to do his best to persuade the US government to stop getting oil from Iran – he even gives figures of 80 million barrels a day — which should be an easy sell, since the U.S. doesn’t get oil from Iran. Finally there’s the entirely fabricated story regarding the relationship between Somali pirates and France that is so convoluted that it makes me weary to think about it, so you’ll just have to watch the Rachel Maddow clip to hear it in all of its “fabulous” detail.

So. If Rand Paul is “simply a narcissist,” Mark Kirk is simply a liar.

What Happens in Vegas . . .

And, finally, there’s the three-ring Republican primary circus in Nevada, featuring party-backed casino owner Sue Lowden, a former Nevada GOP Party Chair; business executive and ex-UNLV basketball star, Dan Tarkanian; and Tea Party Express-endorsed candidate, Sharron Angle in a three-way extravaganza of Republican-on-Republican disunity. I have to assume that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must be quite delighted by the entire production especially now that the Tea Party’s Sharron Angle is leading the pack and favored to win the primary in voting today.

Of the three Republicans, no one has been behaving particularly like an establishment politician, but then again we have to keep in mind that this is Nevada. The primary campaign has essentially broken down into a catfight with a detached bystander.

According to Brian Seitchik, Danny Tarkanian’s campaign manager:

“Danny’s the only one who’s talking about issues, while Sharron and Sue club each other.”

I guess that’s why Danny was not doing as well in the polls.

Sue Lowden’s has snagged national attention for comments at a recent town hall meeting in Nevada in which she said that patients could barter with their doctors for health care – she suggested chickens as a once acceptable remittance for medical services. Easy for Sue Lowden to say since I’m sure that health care coverage is not an issue for her now and certainly wouldn’t be if she wins the November election and lands in the US Senate.

Sharron Angle, on the other hand, is of a more generous spirit, as Sue Lowden pointed out in her now-viral ad claiming that Angle had supported a program designed to use taxpayer dollars to provide prisoners with massages and spa treatments — a program of “detoxification protocols” attributed to the founder of the Church of Scientology.

Angle, who campaigned as a morally driven Christian crusader all about cracking down on government spending (and thereby securing the blessing of outfits like Tea Party Express and the Government is not God PAC), decided it might be best to purge her website of any whiffs of Scientology, like her fundraising work with celebrity Scientologist Jenna Elfman.

* * *

Elsewhere we have similar shenanigans in what has become known as the Polygraph Primary in South Carolina where Republican Nikki Haley is seeking to replace sex-scandalized Mark Sanford as candidate for Governor. As soon as Haley appeared to “show some legs” in the contest, rumors started to swirl about Haley’s own sex life. Not one, but two, men came forward to allege that they had known the otherwise married Haley “in the biblical sense.”

Both civic-minded champions came forward armed with evidence of the veracity of their claims: one provided text messages and phone logs to make his case; the other brought along polygraph results. Not to be outdone, another of Haley’s Republican opponents, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer jumped on the polygraph bandwagon to prove he had nothing to do with any of it.

According to Alex Pereene, covering the story for Salon, one of the purported lovers is:

“Larry Marchant, a local lobbyist and former strategist for Haley opponent (and dimbulb bigot) Andre Bauer, says he had a one-night stand with Haley at a “school choice convention” in 2008.”

The local Fox affiliate was happy to administer a polygraph test to confirm Marchant’s story; the results – inconclusive.

Pereene goes on to note that:

“Marchant, suspiciously, “admitted” to the indiscretion the day he was fired from the Bauer campaign, less than a week before today’s election.”

“Haley told the local media that all these allegations happened as soon as polls showed her with a lead over her rivals.”

I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in seeing any of these Yahoos in high office. As parents, most of us wouldn’t want them teaching in our schools so why, in God’s name, would we let them run the country? Maybe it’s a lack of viable alternatives . . . ?

[tags]mid-term elections, primaries, Rand Paul, Mark Kirk, Rachel Maddow, Sue Lowden, Sharron Angle, Dan Tarkanian, nikki Haley, Andre Bauer, Mark Sanford, Harry Reid[/tags]

Day One

When I was growing up, my grandmother would put an end to certain situations by accusing us grandchildren of “wanting to have our cake, and eat it too.” That was her way of saying “you’re being greedy, hypocritical and immature, so cut it out!” Usually, we did cut it out, because usually she was right, and we knew it. Besides, if she could see such unattractive behavior, it was likely that others, whose approval we courted, might see through us, too.

With the BP oil disaster in the Gulf heading into its seventh week, a lot of conservative politicians are in a serious state of “wanting their cake, etc . . .” Some have had the good sense to keep their heads down, their mouths shut and their hands busy with other business. Those are the ones smart enough to figure out that if they start mouthing off about “liability caps, Obama’s Katrina, or deregulation” the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate is quite likely to start quivering and pointing to logical inconsistencies in the “small government, free market” gospel that they adhere to.

The rest, most of whom “can see BP from their docks” are squealing like stuck pigs for the “small government” that they crave to be “big” enough, in this instance, to step in and save their bacon. Having said that, let me make it clear that I am not trying to minimize the utter tragedy of the ecocide that is going on in the Gulf right now, or the effect that that tragedy has on hardworking regular folks who live by the Gulf and depend on it for their livelihood. Nor am I trying to reduce the Gulf-states plight to a backdrop for some noisy, nonsensical “political theater.” To me the words “Drill, Baby, Drill” represent everything that is rash and cavalierly careless about American energy policy.

Unfortunately it takes a disaster of this magnitude for our modern society to begin to grasp the old truism about “reaping what one sows.” It also sadly demonstrates the ever widening disconnects, in America, between Representatives and the Represented, between good governance and abuse of power, between accountability and reckless abandon, between public interest and the “free market.”.

What Goes Around, etc.

For a year now, we have had to endure the inconsistent, semi-coherent messaging of the Tea Party as well as the GOP’s on-again, off-again relationship with them. Given the candidates that the Tea Party has fielded, so far, one can safely assume that this is a largely ultra-conservative movement — all for dismantling government, as we know it, and replacing it with something else. Currently, the “something else” is where details get fuzzy. If one must choose a “core value” of the Tea Party, I’d have to say that it’s anti-tax, anti-government spending; that is not to say that the Tea Party is anti-military spending, or anti-Social Security spending. In other words, theirs are not always particularly well reasoned policy points — witness last year’s “Keep your government hands off of my Social Security” tirades. For a political movement, the Tea Party is a tad over-emotional and under-informed.

Politicians, on the other hand, should know better; at least insofar as they are making careers of shaping social events and riding the waves of public opinion. Some things just don’t make sense and should, therefore, be avoided. For example, one should not rail against a stimulus bill then get caught on camera handing out oversized cardboard stimulus checks like Daddy Warbucks (or Bobby Jindal). One should not strip regulatory agencies of any actual accountability or enforcement power, then expect regulated businesses to operate in a well-regulated manner. One should not cut taxes to record lows then spend like there is no tomorrow on military-industrial wet dreams of global domination. One should not try to impose a Puritan Ethic on the masses then get caught groping a stranger in the men’s room or jetting off to Rio for a quickie. Well, I’m sure you can fill in any blanks I’ve left open . . .

Nevertheless, these things are no longer isolated incidents in the US political community, they have become mundane. The electorate, numb to all but the most outrageous offenses, no longer expect honesty, integrity, accountability or even adequate representation from their elected officials. It is a foregone conclusion that members of Congress sell their votes to moneyed interests which may or may not benefit their constituents but will go a long way toward keeping them in office.

Predictably enough, Sen. David Vitter (R-La) has come out in favor of continued offshore drilling as well as a liability cap for drillers that would be based on their profits. Granted, Vitter, like other Gulf-state politicians is up on a high wire without a net on the topic of offshore drilling in a state where offshore leases generate a lot of state revenue. This Sunday on CNN, Vitter defended his position by saying that no one opposes air travel after every plane crash. I suppose he subscribes to Rand Paul’s view that “accidents happen” . . .

The very fact that “accidents happen” is the greatest rationale for risk management and contingency planning (two business practices which, unfortunately, take time and cost money that bottom-line-sensitive executives are often loathe to underwrite adequately, if at all). In a perfect world, BP would have a proven solution (on the shelf) that would effectively and quickly cut off the flow of oil in every type of well that they drill – before they drill them. Suffering through BP’s trial and error efforts to cap the Deepwater Horizon well is one of the best advertisements for contingency planning that I’ve ever seen. Reports just in this morning indicate that the latest effort to cap the well, a risky one with about a 50-50 chance of success and that could possibly make things worse, has stalled. According to the LA Times:

“A diamond-edged industrial saw being used to carve through mangled piping in an effort to cap the well spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico became stuck today midway through its mission, delaying BP officials’ hopes of stanching the worst oil spill in U.S. history.”

And that is only the “fourth best option” for sealing the well . . .

Not that I hold BP entirely to blame; this is also a clear example of “Buyer Beware.” Someone, somewhere along the procurement and contracting arc really should have asked the question “what happens if the thing breaks, or leaks oil into the Gulf?” That same “someone” should also not just accept vague marketing messages that BP has it all under control, in any event.

Dolphin washed up on Horn Island, Gulf of Mexico

It would also be interesting to know how much the local elected officials, who campaigned on bringing offshore leases to their states, planned at all for the kind of eco-emergency that this accident has created. How many environmental impact studies have they done, how many coastal oil spill drills have they carried out, what preventive measures have they taken to safeguard the coastline? if the government gives them the aid that they are asking for, what do they plan to do with it? What about the other offshore wells operating along our coastline; what do we plan to do to prevent this from ever happening again? Or will we just trust the “free market” to make everything whole.

For now, BP is touting the fact that they have deployed 22,000 people on 1,600 vessels in the Gulf to solve the problem. One might reasonably ask if it really takes all of that to not fix something; or if, perhaps, it is illustrative of a culture of bad business decisions in general. Meanwhile, there is no more compelling illustration of the dangers inherent in a deregulated “Free Market” than the very one that we are all witnessing. Our “free market” principles have fallen apart spectacularly over the past few years in many different, painful ways that we will be living with for years to come and, most likely, leaving as our legacy. I wonder if we’ll learn the lesson or if we’ll start to hear the same old “cut taxes, cut spending, deregulate” mantra that is dragged out, by some, every election year?

Maybe, as a sardonic commenter on Huffington Post said, fiscal conservatives ”should privatize the cleanup operation” – and call it job creation?

[tags]BP, Deepwater Horizon, coastal oil spill disaster, risk management, contingency planning, Tea Party[/tags]