Yesterday the world changed and a new epoch was ushered in with Wikileak’s release of the Afghan War Diary, 2004 – 2010. In case you’ve been vacationing off-planet, Afghan War Diary is a compilation of “raw data” derived from 90,000 leaked ground reports from the war in Afghanistan (approximately 15,000 have been held back for possible redaction before their release). The importance of this event is certainly not that the data uncovers shocking new revelations about how abysmally the war in Afghanistan has been conducted – an epic fail of such proportions is hard to cover up completely no matter how obedient the national media are. The true awesomeness of this development is that, in one brilliant and well-coordinated play, the rules of the game have been changed – forever after – and, not only has the playing field been leveled, it’s been moved out of town – no more home-field advantage.

Part of the genius of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange’s release was his gambit to assure that mainstream media would not obstruct or trivialize the importance of the leak – by giving them the scoop. Wikileaks provided the roughly 91,000 reports dated from January 2004 to December 2009 to three media outlets, The New York Times, the Guardian of London and Der Spiegel of Germany, under agreement to publish their individual coverage simultaneously on Sunday.

The “home team” however seems to be determined to ignore the change in game plan, at least for now. Despite a “heads up” from their loyal friends at The New York Times, the administration’s official flat-footed response was noticeably confused, and confusing. In my opinion, no one did a better job of parsing the White House’ official response than Jay Rosen; here are his reactions posted on NYU’s Pressthink blog:

The initial response from the White House was extremely unimpressive:

This leak will harm national security. (As if those words still had some kind of magical power, after all the abuse they have been party to.)

There’s nothing new here. (Then how could the release harm national security?)

Wikileaks is irresponsible; they didn’t even try to contact us! (Hold on: you’re hunting the guy down and you’re outraged that he didn’t contact you?)

Wikileaks is against the war in Afghanistan; they’re not an objective news source. (So does that mean the documents they published are fake?)

“The period of time covered in these documents… is before the President announced his new strategy. Some of the disconcerting things reported are exactly why the President ordered a three month policy review and a change in strategy.” (Okay, so now we too know the basis for the President’s decision: and that’s a bad thing?)

A great follow-up (that we’ll never see) from the White House would be a comprehensive analysis of how the “revolutionary Obama” strategy addresses shortcomings in the “lackluster Bush” strategy. For example, to the best of my knowledge, American taxpayers are still underwriting billions of dollars to continue the Sisyphean task of training an Afghan National Police Force.

As Tom Engelhardt put it, recently:

The Pentagon . . . hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police – and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again.

Engelhardt then follows up with the questions that lay bare the Coalition’s utter fecklessness in this endeavor:

“And here is the oddest thing of all, though no one even bothers to mention it in this context: the Taliban haven’t had tens of billions of dollars in foreign training funds; they haven’t had years of advice from the best U.S. and NATO advisers that money can buy; they haven’t had private contractors like DynCorp teaching them how to fight and police, and strangely enough, they seem to have no problem fighting. They are not undermanned, infiltrated by followers of Hamid Karzai, or particularly corrupt. They may be illiterate and may not be fluent in English, but they are ready, in up-to platoon-sized units, to attack heavily fortified U.S. military bases, Afghan prisons, a police headquarters, and the like with hardly a foreign mentor in sight.”

“Consider it, then, a modern miracle in reverse that the U.S. has proven incapable of training a competent Afghan force in a country where arms are the norm, fighting has for decades seldom stopped, and the locals are known for their war-fighting traditions.”

And if you think the Afghan Police Academy idea is stupid and wasteful, just go read Tom’s entire article describing the US plan to resurrect the Afghan Air Force (as soon as they can learn English) and procure some reconditioned Russian ‘coptors that the Afghans took a shine to in the last war. The timeline for that project? US Air Force personnel: guestimate 2016 – 2018 depending on how well the Afghans take to English, “the official language of the cockpit.” There are 450 US Air Force personnel tasked with this project @ $1 million/year/flight instructor plus, of course, pay and bennies for the Afghan recruits, and let’s not forget procurement and maintenance of the fleet of Russian helicopters – you do the math . . . .

What has changed, recently, was that the new Afghan “police academy” graduates will eventually be dealing with a possible “conflict of interest” with the freshly minted localized militias (that nobody wants to call militias) that Gen. Petraeus is so proud of successfully lobbying for.

Evidently, Catch-22 is alive and well in today’s army . . .

* * *

The Pentagon, for its part, has harrumphed out a hasty announcement that it is launching a “robust probe” of the Wikileaks matter (to differentiate, I suppose, from the “rather lame probes” that it launches in the event of collateral damage leaks). That development is curious in the face of their much ballyhooed apprehension, months ago, of Bradley Manning, an Army information analyst stationed in Iraq (not Afghanistan), charged with leaking classified information to Wikileaks. The Pentagon is acting suspiciously in this, perhaps they know that there are many leaks in their midst, or, maybe they just already know it’s not Manning but it’s good to have a guy in custody.

And the State Department, on the basis of leaked reports that the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI is aiding and abetting the Taliban insurgents, is threatening to take back the $7 billion aid package that it proudly bestowed on Pakistan a few weeks ago, if the ISI doesn’t cut it out. Of course none of this is “news” and Hillary Clinton knew it when she delivered this money bomb on her latest trip. Ah well, it’s taxpayers’ money, there’s more where that came from . . .

* * *

The real importance of this event is so hard to grasp and appreciate fully that it’s going to take some time to digest. If you look hard enough, though, a number of people have noticed and are scratching the surface in credible ways.

The following are excerpts from the first impressions of respected sources on media and the new news ecosystem; taken together, I believe that their comments comprise a cogent analysis of the unprecedented actions taken by Julian Assange and the possible impact that those actions might have on the future of information distribution, transparency and governmental accountability.

From Jay Rosen of NYU’s PressThink blog:

If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, ‘They didn’t even contact us!

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.

And I can’t resist including a reader’s comment on Rosen’s article, because it says so much:

we enter an era now where we begin to be conscious of “collective consciousness” and its role as “prime mover” of the “world” and its events …”

analysis of the various parts and components proceeds only fitfully, because we do not yet have a language of whole …

the problem? adjusting to a pre-existing global reality larger than the individual thinking mind can grasp …

consciousness itself, however, has no problem with any of this … it is our limited self-concept that does …

solution? easy. identify with the whole…

inescapable and unavoidable, by the way … not if, but when

Posted by: gregorylent at July 26, 2010 2:56 AM | Permalink

From Alexis Madrigal, senior editor and lead technology writer for TheAtlantic.com:

The rogue, rather mysterious website provided the raw data; the newspapers provided the context, corroboration, analysis, and distribution. ‘Wikileaks was not involved in the news organizations’ research, reporting, analysis and writing,’ Times editors said in an online note. ‘The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today.

The New York Times’ David Carr may have nailed the issue when he tweeted that it was the “asymmetries” that Wikileaks introduces into the equation that have the government spooked. An administration official told Politico, ‘[I]t’s worth noting that Wikileaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan.’ But the truth is that we don’t really know what Wikileaks is, or what the organization’s ethics are, or why they’ve become such a stunningly good conduit of classified information.

In the new asymmetrical journalism, it’s not clear who is on what side or what the rules of engagement actually are. But the reason Wikileaks may have just changed the media is that we found out that it doesn’t really matter. Their data is good, and that’s what counts.

From Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

Whatever else is true, WikiLeaks has yet again proven itself to be one of the most valuable and important organizations in the world. Just as was true for the video of the Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, there is no valid justification for having kept most of these documents a secret. But that’s what our National Security State does reflexively: it hides itself behind an essentially absolute wall of secrecy to ensure that the citizenry remains largely ignorant of what it is really doing. WikiLeaks is one of the few entities successfully blowing holes in at least parts of that wall, enabling modest glimpses into what The Washington Post spent last week describing as Top Secret America. The war on WikiLeaks — which was already in full swing, including, strangely, from some who claim a commitment to transparency — will only intensify now. Anyone who believes that the Government abuses its secrecy powers in order to keep the citizenry in the dark and manipulate public opinion — and who, at this point, doesn’t believe that? — should be squarely on the side of the greater transparency which Wikileaks and its sources, sometimes single-handedly, are providing.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40251.html#ixzz0utLuIynG

And finally, for those who claim this is “old news” and “no big deal,” ponder this from Politico:

Whether WikiLeaks uncovered anything new isn’t actually important — it’s on the front page of every newspaper in the country; the media is now focused on Afghanistan, and that makes it a big deal,” said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on India and Pakistan.

The public is now more skeptical about the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan than they were last week, and that makes it real, said Markey, who was a South Asia analyst during the Bush administration.

[tags]Wikileaks, Afghan War Diary 2004 – 2010, Julian Assange, Alexis Madrigal, Glenn Greenwald, Jay Rosen[/tags]

If you don’t quite recognize the smug little pug in the photo here, don’t feel bad – he’s nobody important and I promise you can go right back to ignoring him as soon as you’re finished reading this post. He’s Dan Gainor, a staffer at the Media Research Center (MRC), and just another member of Brent Bozell’s Cabal of Conservative Wrath. Gainor holds the totally awesome title of MRC Vice President of Business & Culture and The T. Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow. As if that isn’t impressive enough, Gainor has racked up kudos from Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich and makes frequent appearances (as an expert witness) on Fox News, the last bastion of fair and balanced news coverage – in the WORLD!

In other words, Gainor is a mainstay on the front lines of the battle against the diabolical lefty-liberal media bias and a modern-day Sir Lancelot of principled, ethical journalism. Gainor’s usual strategy in this noble struggle appears to be a “fight fire with fire” and to root out liberal media bias and plant conservative media bias in its place. Like so many of his colleagues, Gainor fails to see the hypocrisy in this approach and goes on his merry way fairly unnoticed save by those who share his stunted views.

Today, however, Gainor is enjoying his “fifteen minutes of fame” because, yesterday he indulged his inner passive-aggressive child and tweeted this offer (complete with misspelling):

As The Church Lady would say: “Isn’t that special?”

The occasion that so enraged Dan Gainor was Grayson’s speech, in Congress, prior to the vote on the emergency extension of unemployment benefits. Grayson aptly anticipated a GOP united attempt to deny passage and ended his speech with the words “May God have mercy on your souls” if they did that. Grayson’s emotional indictment of obstructive Republicans obviously rubbed Gainor the wrong way; evidently the GOP is feeling a little proprietary about political grandstanding these days, since it has become their sole contribution to the legislative process.

When a fellow journalist twittered anxiously over the notion of publicly soliciting violence, Gainor backed off just a smidge, said it was all in jest, but still allowed that if it happened he’d “love to see a video of it.”

Ah, that classic and classy conservative sense of humor . . .

For his part, Rep. Grayson (who is twice the man that Gainor is – in size and other things that matter) brushed the silly little weenie aside with a reminder that “I hit back.” Put that in your video, Gainor. Ah, but then, I’m forgetting, this is an arch-conservative – he doesn’t do his own intimidation, he pays someone else to do his dirty work. He doesn’t get up in Congressional representatives or fellow journalist’s faces when he doesn’t like how they conduct themselves, he writes smarmy, whiny little rants from the safety of Fort Conservative on the Potomac.

In a recent lamentation about journalism going to hell in a handbasket, Gainor offered this little gem in a Congressional hearing:

“The Society of Professional Journalists, to which I belong, has a detailed Code of Ethics. At its heart, it says journalists should provide “a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.” They do neither. It’s fitting, then, in a hearing to discuss the “diversity of voices,” that everyone here grasp a key point. Diversity of voices in print isn’t about news, it’s fiction.”

Fair enough. Here’s a random samling of Gainor’s recent contributions to the world of professional journalism . . . you be the judge:

In the lead-up to the recent World Cup, Gainor offered this tidbit about the politics of soccer:

“Soccer is designed as a poor man or poor woman’s sport, the left is pushing [soccer] in schools across the country.”

Gainor must have impressed himself with that stupefying insight because he pulled it out of his bag tricks while visiting his conserva-buddy, G. Gordon Liddy on his radio program (June 10, 2010), and added further insight, while he was on a roll:

“the problem here is, soccer is designed as a poor man or poor woman’s sport” and that “the left is pushing it in schools across the country.” He added: “generally football games in this country don’t devolve into riots or wars.” He later added that the sport of soccer “is being sold” as necessary due to the “browning of America.”

Charming . . .

* * *

Here’s a little report from Media Matters on Gainor’s crusade against Dave Weigel:

“From Politico, in an article about David Weigel’s resignation from the WashPost, where he wrote about the conservative movement [emphasis added]:”

“Starting last month, Dan Gainor, vice president for business and culture at the Media Research Center, the conservative media watchdog group, went on something of a crusade.”

“Angered by a joke that David Weigel made about Matt Drudge on his Twitter feed, Gainor contacted conservative groups asking them to stop cooperating with Weigel, who had recently taken his blog about the conservative movement to the Washington Post.”

“We encouraged conservatives not to deal with him,” he said. “We contacted other conservative organizations and said, ‘This guy is no friend of the conservative movement. We recommend that you deny him access.’ Some did.”

“Got that? A right-wing group that ostensibly monitors the media, contacted like-minded, right-wing organizations and urged them not to cooperate with a Washington Post reporter because the reporter was, supposedly, not a “friend” of the conservative movement.”

Gainor’s permanent snit about the unworthiness of Barack Obama to have taken up in the Oval Office, along with his mandatory adoration of Ronald Reagan, of course leads Gainor to compare Obama unfavorably with the Gipper; unfortunately, Gainor doesn’t have enough of a grip on the history required to do that very well. Gainor offered an assessment of Obama’s first year in office, which, of course, featured poor Obama falling deplorably short. At least that’s the point Gainor attempted to make — for the record, Gainor fumbled:

According to Gainor, when Obama increased defense spending in his first year it was somehow the exact opposite of Reagan’s first year increase in defense spending. Likewise, Obama’s stated goal of a “world without nuclear weapons”, and proposals to bilaterally reduce our nuclear weapons arsenal by 30 percent is somehow totally different from Reagan’s “ultimate goal” of “eliminating all nuclear weapons.”

As Christine Schwen of Media Matters put it:

“So, Gainor claimed that “Barack Obama’s no Reagan,” but it’s pretty clear that Gainor’s Reagan was no Reagan either.”

“Sarah Palin would be proud.”

* * *

When the Right invented the ACORN crisis, Gainor was beside himself that only Fox News had the courage and journalistic integrity to cover the story the way that it should be covered (24/7 with screaming headlines and lots of tsk-ing and finger-wagging). Like a voice crying in the wilderness came Gainor’s lament that the story had everything the media could possibly want in a blockbuster story (really, he thought that) “and yet no one, NO ONE, I say” in the lamestream LIBERAL media is covering it. This, of course, is proof that the liberal media are protecting Obama.

Except, as usual, Gainor was looking at the thing through elephant-colored glasses. According to Nexis/Lexis, these were mainstream media outlets that, prior to the publication of Gainor’s piece, had covered the ACORN story out of Baltimore. They were: Baltimore Sun, New York Post, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Grand Rapids Press, Kansas City Star, Newsday, Newark Star-Ledger, Washington Post, Washington Times, CNN.com, Washingtonpost.com.

Yup, those lousy lefties buried the story rather than tell the truth . . .

With that hole plugged, Gainor took on network TV and accused them of the same media bias because, I guess, the networks didn’t suspend normal programming to provide 24/7 coverage of ACORN.

* * *

So, that, in a nutshell, is the pathetic little puke that would like to pay one of the big kids to punch Alan Grayson’s lights out. Now you can go back to ignoring him . . .

DISCLOSURE: I am a totally unscrupulous old fart of a blogger with no ‘ethical journalist’ constraints and a liberal mean streak. I am also sick to death of the whining and social pathologies of the far Right. So sue me . . .

P.S. I’ll give a free 3-day pass to Dollywood to the first Republican who eats Dan Gainor’s lunch.

[tags]Dan Gainor, Rep. Alan Grayson, Media Research Center, Brent Bozell, G. Gordon Liddy[/tags]

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself,
And falls on th’other. . . .

Macbeth Act 1, scene 7. 25–28

Hail to the Chief

If Sarah Palin and her “political machine” ever hope to see the business end of a run for POTUS, they’d all better stop thinking of this job as a nine-to-fiver. It’s going to take world class political handlers, policy wonks and spinmeisters, on a 24/7, basis to ever render this spectacularly silly woman even remotely ready for prime time – in our lifetime, let alone by 2012.

I don’t enjoy reading (or writing) ad hominem attacks on public figures. That said, if Sarah Palin was just another ditzy ex-beauty queen, with delusions of grandeur, making an embarrassing spectacle of herself on the national stage, it would be one thing. But, against all odds (and conventional wisdom), the woman is gathering serious momentum on her hell-bent, careening runaway train bound for glory and thereby merits some serious observation.

Example: on Sunday, La Palin, flying solo on the Twitter Machine, managed to expose her Islamaphobic dark side, her substandard facility with her native tongue, and a troubling lack of clarity and decisiveness — all while claiming parity with William Shakespeare – in the space of a couple of tweets.

The subject that had La Palin all-atwitter was the Right’s most recent obsession – the Mosque at Ground Zero.

It goes without saying, of course, that the “Mosque at Ground Zero” is neither a mosque nor is it to be located at “Ground Zero.” It is a Muslim community center (along the lines of a YMCA) that will include a 500-seat auditorium, swimming pool, restaurant, and bookstore as well as a prayer room that might technically be considered a “mosque” room. The site for this community center is two (city) blocks away from Ground Zero in an unassuming fifteen story building. No one is planning to build the world’s tallest minaret on the ruins of the World Trade Center.

As Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs mused:

“Suppose the community center was five blocks away instead of two blocks away.”

“Would that be OK?”

“How about if it was in midtown?”

“Far enough?”

“Maybe it needs to be in Queens?”

Without further ado, here are La Palin’s ruminations and refinements on the the Mosque at Ground Zero.

First Tweet:

“Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate”

Lucky for Sarah, she appears to have a few “guardian angels” keeping watch over her Twittery to tip her off when she tweets something stupid, because yesterday’s tweeting required a couple of do-overs before it was fit for the “campaign trail.” Lucky for the rest of us, we have a few “guardian angels” who like to save the essence and evolution of such cultural artifacts for posterity.

Revision #1: in which the author excises the imaginary word “refudiate” replacing it with an actual, albeit improperly used, word “refute.” And while she’s at it with the red pen, “Peaceful Muslims” morphs into “Peaceful New Yorkers,” to wit:

“Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real”

Far be it from me to plumb the depths of Palin Profundity, however these changes do raise questions like:

Could “refudiate” have resulted from an unfortunate typo on Palin’s teeny, tiny blackberry keyboard?

Probably not; it’s not like “f” and “p” are close to each other – even on a phone. Besides, as Charles Johnson pointed out, Palin recently used “refudiate” on a Fox News program; moreover, the use of this signature coinage also serves, as Johnson points out, to prove that these tweets were almost certainly composed by an “off-leash” Palin rather than some political flunky assigned to handle Palin’s Twittery.

The thornier issue is actually Palin’s dropping of the incendiary “peaceful Muslims” tag in favor of the more inclusive “peaceful New Yorkers.” Perhaps Palin’s new gal-pal, Pamela Geller persuaded her that “peaceful Muslim” was an oxymoron? Geller, who can be counted on to laud Islamaphobia wherever she finds it, was quick with the kudos for Palin’s standing up for the Ban the Mosque mob.

Geller tweeted the following:

“Sarah Palin Opposes Ground Zero Mega Mosque: Gd, I love this woman! She is not afraid of the jackals, hyenas, a..”

Also, I’m sure that it did not escape Geller’s attention, back in April, when Palin was one of the few who voiced a defense of evangelist Franklin Graham after he was uninvited to chair a major Pentagon event in May, in light of his inflammatory remarks against Islam.

On that occasion, Palin wrote on her Facebook page:

“It’s truly a sad day when such a fine patriotic man, whose son is serving on his fourth deployment in Afghanistan to protect our freedom of speech and religion, is dis-invited from speaking at the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer service.

What this “fine patriotic man” had to say about Islam was:

“We’re not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He’s not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It’s a different God and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion.”

That’s fairly straightforward . . . no quibbling over who’s a peaceful Muslim and who isn’t.

* * *

I suspect that, whatever thinly-veiled, paranoiac, low opinion Sarah Palin might have of Muslims (peaceful or otherwise), “New Yorkers” are probably a close second. After all, Manhattan pols and pundits have, over time, offered some of the sharpest criticisms of Palin’s most heartlandish notions. Nevertheless, she alleges to know a lot about New Yorkers “too raw, too real pain” and what should and shouldn’t be done about it.

Predictably, New York did not take Palin’s exhortations sitting down; in fact, a policy aide from New York Mayor Bloomberg’s office strafed Palin and Geller’s meeting of the minds, in the shallow end, with these tweets:

“@SarahPalinUSA mind your business”

Followed up with this:

“@SarahPalinUSA whose hearts? Racist hearts?”

In short order, the aide’s survival instincts kicked in and she deleted both tweets (more’s the pity).

Later, last evening, the same aide added the following tweets, as explanation:

“Deleted post bc I regretted curt response. But fact is, I believe this city belongs to everyone – and no one more than another”

“Unlike @SarahPalinUSA, I was born here grew up here. Was showing off to a visitor today – look at how beautiful and diverse my city is.”

“I felt pain of 9/11, the trauma. I got through it by believing in my city. Not through fear and hate.”

At least Sarah can’t complain about the do-over . . .

Once Palin got the high-five from Geller, she was back to the appeal to the “peaceful Muslims” with her closing gambit:

“Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing”

Aside from Palin’s breathtakingly patronizing insinuation that Muslims have to asked to be understanding of the human emotion of feeling stabbed in the heart, there is that odd UNNECESSARY provocation line. If I venture to paraphrase, all that I can come up with is that Palin believes that a) Muslims have quite enough mosques already, thank you very much and that b) Americans find the building of mosques by American Muslims, on the American land that they purchase for that purpose, somehow provocative.

If that’s the case, I would like to point out to Ms. Palin that individual Americans could just as easily find the building of a synagogue, an A.M.E. church, a Mormon tabernacle, a Shinto temple (or a Dominionist Megachurch, for that matter) an “UNNECESSARY provocation;” but because we are Americans, those individuals will have to learn to live with their “provoked” feelings because that’s who we are – we all agreed, a long time ago, that any American citizen can build, attend or support any church that s/he is inclined to.

Ironically, it goes without saying, of course, that the “Mosque at Ground Zero” is neither a mosque nor is it to be located at “Ground Zero.” It is a Muslim community center (along the lines of a YMCA) that will include a 500-seat auditorium, swimming pool, restaurant, and bookstore as well as a prayer room that might technically be considered a “mosque” room. The site for this community center is two (city) blocks away from Ground Zero in an unassuming fifteen story building. No one is planning to build the world’s tallest minaret on the ruins of the World Trade Center. As Charles Johnson mused:

“Suppose the community center was five blocks away instead of two blocks away.”

“Would that be OK?”

“How about if it was in midtown?”

“Far enough?”

“Maybe it needs to be in Queens?”

* * *

To some, this may seem to be merely a semantic tempest in a teapot but, as long as this ridiculous woman appeals to a dismayingly growing cross-section of disenchanted Americans, we have a problem that we can’t afford to ignore. It is a symptom of just how stressed and dysfunctional American society is, right now, that the notion of Sarah Palin in the White House is anything more than a cartoon nightmare. A Palin presidency would put the last nail in the coffin of American credibility, worldwide, and would represent a dangerous step toward a theocratic totalitarianism where yesterday’s tweets become tomorrow’s policy (among other, equally frightening possibilities).

Surely this is not the last of Sarahbelle’s Twittermania; she obviously finds Facebook and Twitter totally awesome because their “hit and run” format allows one that precious freedom of speech without having to get bogged down in annoying explanations and/or defenses of what is said – perfect for the attention- or fact-challenged politico. As a commenter on Huffington Post this morning incisively pointed out: “Giving Sarah Palin a Twitter account is like giving a monkey a machine gun.” That says it quite nicely, IMO.

[tags]Sarah Palin, Pamela Geller, Mosque at Ground Zero, Mayor Bloomberg, refudiate[/tags]

Imagine this: you’re a fifty-something four-star general in the US Army; you have achieved that lofty summit largely by laboring in the relatively peaceful halls of military academe. You spend 1970 – 1974 learning to be an officer and a gentleman at West Point during the death throes of what the Vietnamese people call “The American War” – which is really too bad, in a way, because the timing robbed you of the chance to see, up close and personal, just how horribly wrong things can go for a military that finds itself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong strategy. Not for you the “fragging, the drugs, the widespread AWOLs and outright mutiny that occurs when young men are asked to risk death for absurd reasons against insurmountable odds.

Nevertheless you are young, smart and enthusiastic so your lack of first-hand experience doesn’t keep you from weighing in on the “lessons learned” from “The American War” when it comes time for you to tender your doctoral dissertation at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International affairs; your thesis, “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era,” is a hit and you are duly awarded your Ph.D.

Now you are on the fast-track for brainy soldiers with political skills that will undoubtedly land you at “Ground Zero” (aka The Pentagon) or – who knows, maybe the Oval Office, someday. So it is that you eventually find yourself a general who has never seen combat – until Iraq. Unfortunately, you don’t get your hands on that command until things are so thoroughly screwed up that all the sensible people are looking for the exits and making their escape plans. But, as you are fond of saying: “just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s hopeless.” Iraq in 2007, however, is more than hard, it’s a disaster – and a disaster of our own making so the US can’t exactly declare it all a big mistake and walk away.

The All-American solution for such situations? – throw more money at it. In this case, more money equates to more troops, along with their fabulously expensive trappings, as a last ditch effort. And we will call it a “surge” which has a confident, manly sound to it and we will give this surge a fresh commander to give it that “whole new ball game” feel. Maybe then the naysayers will shut up about being lied to and Geneva conventions and bad strategies; maybe they won’t notice that having to do a surge means that you underestimated to begin with in order to sell your war; maybe they won’t be so angry that their kids died for Poor Planning more than Iraqi Freedom . . .

Enter “Super Dave” Petraeus to save the day; surely this military brainiac, with the impressive string of degrees, who’s running out of “shirt” to hang his merit badges on, will be able to make some sense out of the mess his less gifted colleagues have made of Iraq. Long story short, due to a very favorable confluence of external events (and Petraeus’ own extraordinary ability to recognize an “out” and capitalize on it while spinning a compelling yarn about what a great idea he had) – The Miracle of Iraqi Freedom ensued complete with stirring taglines like The Anbar Awakening and the Sons of Iraq to remind disgruntled Americans of our sacred duty to impose democracy on every hamlet, shtetl, village and outpost in the world – whether they like it or not.

No doubt about it, Super Dave is one smart cookie who understands, among other things, the value of dodging bullets. He certainly knows, as well as many of the rest of us, that timing, the existence of an Iraqi government and national infrastructure, society and internal politics played a huge role in the precipitate drop in violence that occurred in spite of, not because of, the “surge” of American troops in Iraq. Petraeus knows that he went through barrels of cash to underwrite field trips to Anbar for Awakening therapy, he knows that he quelled some urban sectarian violence by establishing and enforcing apartheid in Baghdad, he knows that he used Stan the Man’s JSOC death squads to eliminate rabble-rousers but, most of all, I’m sure that the general knows that the “center will not hold” for long. And sure enough, Iraq is steadily devolving into Civil War. Super Dave managed to get out of Iraq before that could happen, though, and collected his reward – CENTCOM command in sunny Tampa – only inches away from a happy and lucrative retirement as a military mentor for broadcast media, a lobbyist for Raytheon or some such MIC concern, maybe even POTUS?

Unfortunately, the general’s superhero status has landed him back in the soup (i.e., Afghanistan) where he is now expected to “do that voodoo that he does so well.” Obviously, “Stan the Man” McChrystal is no dummy himself, because he managed to take a flamboyant shortcut to retired-military fame and fortune, with pension intact, whilst his hapless CO gets a POTUS-designed demotion to salvage another US military fiasco.

In his desperation to pull another rabbit out of the helmet, Super Dave appears to have come up with a particularly hare-brained idea to save our hash in Afghanistan. At least it seems hare-brained, at first glance; but after some careful consideration, I’m coming around to believe that Gen. Petraeus’ new idea has more than a little genius about it. Not that I expect Super Dave’s plan to result in Victory in Afghanistan (whatever the hell that might look like) but I think that it has a damned good chance of getting Super Dave and the rest of us out of that godforsaken dust bowl in short order.

Let me explain myself . . .

Super Dave still had one foot on the tarmac in Kabul when he first met with, and reportedly pissed off, President Karzai. The issue that Karzai is most sensitive to is the Americans’ idea that Afghanistan needs to establish (yet another) police force to protect the population from Taliban intimidation. But the general still has visions of the Sons of Iraq dancing in his head and probably figures it’s worth a shot. These “new” police forces would be localized and therefore, theoretically, more aware of insurgents in their midst, more inclined to protect their own communities from Taliban incursions and less inclined to shakedown, loot, rape or pillage their own neighbors. Standing up an effective national police force, one of the few clearly stated key milestones for eventual withdrawal of Western forces, has, so far, been an abysmal failure in Afghanistan for a myriad of well-documented reasons; this would be a fresh start not to mention the fact that it would distract any Afghanistan-Watchers who are still waiting for the Kandahar Offensive or for things to turn around in Marjah.

It all makes some sense (on paper) and, in the absence of any other bright ideas, it’s at least something that looks different to try. From President Karzai’s perspective, it looks like an invitation to insurrection. Karzai has been solidly against this notion any time that the US has suggested it; he knows that his hold on power is so tenuous that the last thing he needs is a few dozen fractious militias running around in various provinces setting their own agenda. Since the oft-repeated mission of the US in Afghanistan has been to concentrate and solidify power in the Kabul central government, Karzai has a point. No one is going to change the centuries-old provincial and tribal allegiances of ordinary Afghan citizens by deputizing them, arming them and putting them on the government payroll; they may prefer to keep Taliban extremists out of their lives but that doesn’t mean that they are anxious to help Karzai solidify his own bloc and no one knows that better than the Brothers Karzai whose only aspirations are to milk the NATO presence for every last euro and dollar they can before they must depart or lose their heads.

* * *

Despite grave misgivings, Karzai finally caved to Super Dave on this point, most likely because he knows that it’s a fool’s errand. Spencer Ackerman wrote a great brief on how dumb this idea is, just in case it escapes the average taxpayer who continues to underwrite this nonsense; here’s what Spencer says which I totally agree with:

“General David Petraeus has persuaded Karzai to set up a new force to supplement Afghan soldiers and police. It’s not really Anbar Awakening 2.0, since it doesn’t involve insurgents switching sides. And don’t use the M-word, Pentagon officials say. “They would not be militias,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters Wednesday. ‘These would be government-formed, government-paid, government- uniformed local police units.’ Specifically, the new units will be paid by the Interior Ministry — or, rather, the foreign money that bankrolls the Afghanistan government will be disbursed to these new units through the ministry.”

“Except, Morell conceded, they wouldn’t be trained, as police units are. (“We don’t have enough trainers to do the fundamental job here,” Morrell further conceded.) In essence, up to 10,000 fighters — as an initial tranche, according to the New York Times — around the country will be rapidly deputized under the auspices of the Interior Ministry, at the behest of the NATO military command, and then relied upon to keep the peace in places with insufficient amounts of Afghan security forces. ‘A useful bridging mechanism,’ Morrell called the program, until the Afghan army and police can move in.”

So, suddenly, into the already toxic Afghan mix, will be added thousands of untrained, armed local defense forces “free to make it up as they go along.” Of course they will technically be government employees, beholden to Kabul for their paychecks and they will have to answer to the Interior Ministry in Kabul (whose Director resigned last month taking with him Interior’s reputation of being one of the only Kabul government departments that was anything like viable and well run).

The fatal flaw in this plan, as Ackerman cogently points out, is this:

“Only the potential for short-term contingencies to overtake long-term strategy is acute. It’s not like there’s some separate pool of potential recruits for this new “Local Police Force.” They’re the same Afghans that the government’s been trying to recruit for the army and the police. The fighters rallied to this new program are most likely to come from local power brokers, whose hold over remote parts of Afghanistan will be accordingly entrenched. Those power brokers won’t easily give up the source of that expanded power to army and police recruiters. And that means the “bridging mechanism” could easily turn the expansion of the Afghan security services — the U.S.’s ticket out of Afghanistan, according to the Obama administration’s overall strategy — a bridge to nowhere.”

Over time, I’ve grown sort of fond of our plucky general, Super Dave. I think that he’s very smart, especially when it comes to politics; moreover, I think he’s at least as smart as Spencer Ackerman and therefore the fairly glaring, obvious downside potential of the localized police force idea will not have escaped him. And that, I believe, is the beauty of Super Dave’s mind.

By now, most have us have had time to appreciate the awesome dimensions of our military and diplomatic failure in Afghanistan – our total ignorance of the region, our reluctance to leave long after al Qaeda was decimated, our adoption of the Taliban as a new enemy, our destabilization of Pakistan, our appalling choice of Hamid Karzai to head up a new government, etc, etc. More and more of us are clamoring to just “own” that failure and get the hell out before our economy totally craters. Super Dave wants that, too, I suspect; but he’d probably like to get out with his career intact and, especially with his COIN theory vindicated. So what could possibly happen in Afghanistan, next, that would create the space for a graceful exit?

I’m thinking that civil war, if not total anarchy, might be just the ticket. Think of it — emasculated warlords with freshly armed militias joining up with the provincial shadow governments to get rid of the Karzais and their Western patrons, once and for all. If that were to happen, COIN must necessarily be suspended because, by definition, COIN requires a strong central government for the population to gravitate toward. I imagine the “post-mortem” conversation would probably go something like this: “Perhaps COIN might have worked in Afghanistan if internal strife hadn’t toppled the Karzai government; but without a healthy central government, all bets were off.”

That’s when things get interesting for the US because we then have the choice of withdrawing while the Afghans have their civil war which, after all, is nothing to do with us and keeps them busy and distracted from other things like harboring al Qaeda (if they ever consciously did so). Or, we could decide to pick a side, stay on and engage in conventional warfare (probably regional) without any quibbling over who’s who. That would probably please the “bomb them back into the Stone Age” crowd.

That’s my idea, anyway. And if it’s Super Dave’s idea, too, well . . . more power to him. At this point, I’ll support just about any program that gets us out of Afghanistan in less than ten years.

[tags]Gen. Petraeus, Hamid Karzai, Gen. McChrystal, Afghanistan, Kandahar, Marjah, local militias, Afghan Ministry of Interior[/tags]

The dust may have settled relatively quickly, following The McChrystal Affair, but that is not to say that the counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) is necessarily back on the tracks in Afghanistan. General Petraeus’ confirmation hearing didn’t disappoint (or surprise). Early on, Sen. Carl Levin, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, tipped his hand to one and all by making the point that it was not a question of “if” but “when” the Gen. would be confirmed, a point reiterated by several inquisitors to follow. The general atmosphere of the hearing was collegially good-natured and congratulatory; there were even a few poignant eulogies for “Stan the Man” McChrystal proving that a general can make a total ass of himself while utterly failing at his objectives and still reap kudos from Congress. In short, there was nothing in the proceedings to give a new commander the vapors . . .

So . . . that was nice of the Senators to make the General (and his wife Holly, over whose patriotism and sacrifice quite a fuss was made) feel right at home. Democrats played their part by serving up a few (fast-pitch) softball questions for which the General was well-prepared despite the fact that he could have said “the Earth is flat and I’m a huge fan of Hannibal Lecter” without fear of derailing his foregone confirmation. Gen. Petraeus was definitely “on-message” just the way the White House likes it . . .

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not, for a second, against confirming Petraeus and handing him a one-way ticket to Kandahar; he started this mess, he should have to own it. One almost has to feel a little sorry for the guy – he’s just coming off that near-career-death experience in Iraq, and was happily settling into CENTCOM headquarters in sunny Florida and — WHAM! déjà vu all over again. Petraeus knows damn well that COIN didn’t work in Iraq, and certainly won’t in Afghanistan, but last summer he stood there in the Oval Office, before God and Obama, and swore not only that it would work but that it would work in 18 months. When pressed, he also promised the President that he would not return, after the aforesaid 18 months had elapsed, hat in hand, and ask for more time/troops/money. Six months later, however, he was only willing to part with a “qualified yes” when asked if he still supported that earlier mission statement.

A few days ago, Fred Branfman wrote a very incisive post published on Huffington Post (that is short, to the point and well worth reading) pointing out that The McChrystal Affair is just as much an indictment of Petraeus (and Obama, I might add) as McChrystal:

“Petraeus is by his own testimony a close personal friend of his protégé, and he was primarily responsible for McChrystal having been appointed to head U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that he did not know how McChrystal felt about his civilian team members, or was unaware of their inability to work together. If the McChrystal cohort talked this way in front of a reporter, can you imagine how good buds Dave and Stan talk about a Holbrooke, Biden or Obama over a cold one with no one else around?”

“Petraeus’ failure to act before the scandal occurred means he failed as CentCom commander. One of his major responsibilities was obviously to assemble and deploy a smoothly functioning team to conduct military and political warfare in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater — one of the most sensitive arenas in which the U.S. has operated since the end of World War II.”

“Petraeus’ failure is matched, of course, by that of Obama and his top advisers. Neither Petraeus nor Obama should have needed a magazine profile in order to reorganize a team that was clearly broken.”

Branfman certainly managed to make me sit up straight for my first “Duh” moment of the day. The elegance of Branfman’s point is that it should be pretty apparent to a large cross-section of Americans to include: parents, teachers, and everyone who’s ever served in a military or civilian government post, read Catch-22, or attended any sort of corporate culture workshop. The McChrystal Affair did not occur in a vacuum, despite its colorful links to Nordic volcanic eruptions and/or Parisian layover beer benders. And who among us can deny the homespun wisdom informing the well-known American truism about gravitational effects on excrement? No matter how sophisticated we become, and no matter how many stars some of us have pinned to our camos, the sh*t comes from somewhere and it ain’t from downhill.

Just like Davy Crockett probably didn’t kill any “b’ar when he was only three” neither did Davy Petraeus waltz into Baghdad, set the gears of COIN in motion and save the day – but he’s stuck with the legend now because the Bush Administration badly needed something resembling a military victory that would make all of its war crimes somehow worthwhile (and forgettable) – think “ends” justifying “means.”

* * *

Inside the Beltway Visionary: 2005

Back in 2003, no one would have considered COIN a sensible strategy option for Iraq. It was to be a quick, straightforward invasion with regime change – a snap. The Bush/Cheney White House game plan for Iraq was to convince the recently terrorized world that 9/11 was only the beginning and that Saddam Hussein was sitting on vast stockpiles of wickedly diabolical WMDs with which he intended to turn The Free World into a wasteland. Besides, the people of Iraq didn’t seem to like Hussein all that much so they probably wouldn’t mind awfully if US SpecOps removed him from power. As a matter of fact, at one point early on, the Administration shared its Norman Rockwellian hallucination of how the invasion would be received in Baghdad. I remember that it was somewhat creepily reminiscent of VE Day in Paris, complete with showers of flower petals, and grateful Iraqis throwing kisses from balconies at their GI liberators rolling through Baghdad in Humvees.

Nobody would need to waste any time going through the motions of hunting for WMDs, either (everyone already knew they weren’t there); we could cut right to the chase and get down to OIL! A prescient Dick Cheney had already procured aerial mappings of Iraq’s oil fields to share his vision for the future of Iraqi Oil with his Top Secret Energy Commission. A key (and perhaps fatal) assumption was that once Hussein was removed and a “clean slate” was provided, the Iraqis (no dummies) would want to immediately set up a Western democracy with free advice and lots of US taxpayer dollars to make the right things happen.

Imagine the Administration’s surprise when things didn’t quite work out that way. The Iraqis were inexplicably fond of the notion of setting up their own government, in their own way, starting with settling old scores and launching aggressive ethnic cleansing campaigns. The New Iraq was definitely not shaping up to be the gratefully subservient proxy government that Bush/Cheney had dreamed of.

Now, if at the time, you were a historian rather than a tank-thinker, you might have fretted that a combination of recent events in Iraq – outside intervention, the precipitate creation of a power vacuum, a history of centuries of regional and sectarian conflict — might make Iraq ripe for a civil war. And, of course, your fretting would have been justified because that’s exactly what happened and, in short order millions of Iraqi citizens were murdered or maimed, forced to emigrate, internally displaced or imprisoned without charge and tortured. Very few are strewing rose petals or throwing kisses . . .

Enter Gen. Petraeus director and producer of a new-fangled type of warfare designed for just such tricky situations. It’s called Counterinsurgency (shortened to COIN for busy, or secretive people) and it’s actually a revival of an old strategy that’s never quite worked out well for military types since time began. COIN has featured prominently in well-known military disasters from Alexander the Great to Vietnam; it seems to be one of those perennially appealing, sounds-good-on-paper ideas that successive generations believe they might somehow pull off despite where others have failed. COIN has the added attraction of presenting well to post-Enlightenment audiences; in theory it is a “kinder, gentler war” that is less about murder and more about fulfilling foreign cultures’ desperate craving to be Americanized.

Dateline Baghdad, 7/4/2006: Winning hearts and minds . . .

COIN, as it has been reincarnated most recently, is warfare for busybodies – hubristic people who like to intervene in world affairs that are none of their business, for fun and profit. In its purest form, counterinsurgency theory is a polar opposite of what the Pentagon is selling these days. Counterinsurgency, as its very name suggests is all about internal domestic affairs; if a government perceives a serious threat from some segment of its own citizens, said government might choose to launch a counterinsurgency to isolate and marginalize the insurgent group, thus encouraging them to return to the herd peacefully.

Even in the Pentagon remake, COIN theory depends on the existence of a relatively stable central government and infrastructure that can effectively be shown to offer the general population more in the way of security, stability and services than the insurgent group attempting to overthrow the government. Thus, the general population becomes the government’s ally in effectively marginalizing and finally defeating insurgency.

So where, exactly, was the insurgency in Iraq that Gen. Petraeus is said to have so remarkably countered via COIN strategy? If the Iraqi people, themselves, had launched an offensive to remove Saddam Hussein from power, I suppose that faction might reasonably have been described as an insurgency. But that didn’t happen. If the Iraqi people take up arms while they are under attack or being occupied by a foreign military, that action is best described as “resistance” against invasion — a defensive, rather than an offensive, action. During the post-invasion chaos we have some people engaging in a sectarian civil war and some people resisting foreign occupation and lots of people being killed, injured or displaced but no real insurgency. One might conceivably label as insurgents a sliver of the population who seize the moment to push their own agenda as long as chaos reigns, but that would be semantically incorrect and hardly worth billions of dollars and thousands of lives to quash.

Still, there’s no denying the fact that once General Petraeus arrived on the scene a seriously out of control Iraq calmed down considerably shortly thereafter. Many observers, including (you can be sure) Gen. Petraeus, know that there was far more going on in Iraq, at the time, than a changing of the guard for the invasionary forces.

Before the famous “surge” was even announced the original US commanders in Iraq, George Casey and John Abizaid (remember them?) had realized some success by assassinating al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which they then followed up with an ingenious scheme to pay off Sunni militants to join the Anbar “Awakening.”

Meanwhile, the US military on the ground responded to the increasingly violent sectarian civil war taking place in the streets by relocating Sunnis and Shiites into separate neighborhoods making it more difficult for them to kill each other but, at the same time effectively aiding ethnic cleansing via segregation. Shortsighted and misguided as those tactics were, they eventually had a noticeable dampening effect on domestic violence.

Inexplicably, in the midst of all of this chaos, Muqtada al-Sadr unexpectedly ordered his radical Shiite Mahdi Army to stand down, probably at the request of an edgy Iran with problems of its own.

It was only then, that President Bush announced a surge of troops under a fresh commander with a new approach. As soon as those troops started to surge there was, predictably, a spike in violence that resulted in 1,000 additional troops deaths (25% of the war’s total). But eventually, the levels of violence decreased again due in large part to Iraqi exhaustion, the physical devastation of war and what amounted to an Iraqi diaspora that separated sectarian groups – not COIN strategy.

Ironically, President Bush might have been more instrumental in solidifying Iraqi peace than Gen. Petraeus, by virtue of the Status of Forces Agreement that he revised in 2008. That SOFA, as it is known, was the US promise, among other things, of a speedy withdrawal of its forces from Iraq starting with the US military presence in Iraqi cities, with an End of Combat provision to be completed by 2011. Perhaps the SOFA might not have had the same impact had it not been for the bloody surge but, as it happened, nothing gave the Iraqi people more hope or resolve for the future than the announcement that all US troops were getting out of their country soon; and the sometimes tense and relapsing peace has held up fairly well for two years as the multi-national force draws down.

Sometimes the stars just line up right and if you’ve had a long run of bad luck, and you’re politically astute – you’ll take it (and take credit it for it). That’s the story that the neocons, generals and think tanks are putting out (and sticking to) and the mainstream media has run with it so effectively that the Petraeus Legend is already writ large in the annals of US military history.

If only it could have ended there but, in a world of simultaneous wars, the general has “lived to fight another day” and has been called on, by a grateful nation, to “work his particular magic” one more time. Would that the poor man could but, barring some extraordinary realignment of his stars, I’d expect that Gen. Petraeus is due to fall on his sword in the not-too-distant future and see COIN theory consigned to its well-deserved place in the Museum of Spectacularly Awful and Costly Ideas.

[tags]Gen. Petraeus, Afghanistan, Iraq, Surge, counterinsurgency, COIN[/tags]