The Battle of Marja about to begin
The press likes short wars. Its audience is never so eager for news as during an armed conflict. The first newspapers date from the wars of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Television likes the melodrama of exploding shells and blazing tanks. And it is this very eagerness to report the fighting that makes it so easy to manipulate. The US army successfully sold the “surge” in Iraq as a military victory so that the American public scarcely noticed that US troops were withdrawing, leaving Iraq in the hands of a government closely allied to Iran.
Patrick Cockburn, laying a few things bare.
The whole enterprise in Afghanistan now just keeps becoming more horrifying and ultimately senseless. A sickening thing.
Michele Quinn:
Mr. Cockburn notes that three months ago Obama was given an assessment by ambassador Eikenberry that no government authority existed in Afghanistan to ensure the plan for Marja would be successful in the long run. Apparently he took notice. Recently, Gen McChrystal said that we have a “government in a box” ready to put in place now. (http://youwillanyway.blogspot.com/2010/02/government-in-box.html)
I guess spreading democracy needed to become more efficient.
I had an elementary school teacher back in the early 60s foisting the Red Scare on us with the admonition that if we were not vigilant, we could go to bed one night free and happy and wake up the next morning communist. We didn’t know what a communist was, but we were scared, because we were convinced it was someone who would shred our Constitution and even torture us.
She was close – the difference is, while watching out for Russians, we didn’t pay attention to our fellow Americans. Our situation today reminds me of that old Walt Kelly comic strip where Pogo says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
14 February 2010, 12:20 pmRazer:
Well there’s already been ‘collateral damage’ in the operation due to our ‘smart’ weaponry, and they just LUV us in Helmand province right now, documented Here
But in response to:
“Recently, Gen McChrystal said that we have a “government in a box” ready to put in place now.”
Yeah yeah… That what Doug Feith told a student of his at Georgetown, who thought Feith was high on ‘crack cocaine’ (as recounted by Juan Cole @ Informed comment a couple of years ago)
It was a delusional thought then, and now.
Professor Cole’s anecdote re-iterated:
Speaking of scams, Neoconservative Douglas Feith is teaching at Georgetown. So in the run up to the 2003 war, I’m told, Douglas Feith was challenged by a State Department official who knows the Middle East about what in the world the US would do in Iraq once it won the war.
State Dept. Official: “Doug, after the smoke clears, what is the plan?”
Feith: “Think of Iraq as being like a computer. And think of Saddam as like a processor. We just take out the old processor, and put in a new one–Chalabi.”
State Dept. Official: “Put in a new processor?”
Feith: “Yes! It will all be over in 6 weeks.”
State Dept. Official: “You mean six months.”
Feith: “No, six weeks. You’ll see.”
State Dept. Official: “Doug.”
Feith: “Yes?”
State Dept. Official: “You’re smoking crack, Doug.”
Feith: “Oh, so you’re disloyal to the President, are you?” [Source]
I had an epiphany shortly thereafter:
“I elaborated a few days back about an anecdotal Doug Feith’s quip that it (the Iraq invasion) would be over in a matter of weeks, not to worry. I commented that it wasn’t some crack fantasy… it sounded like they had people inside Saddam Hussein’s baathist regime, not just in the early 60s as has been documented as “penetrated”, but just before we invaded Iraq as well.
Professor Cole’s anecdote re-iterated:
[Redacted]
This just showed up @ the National Security Archive, Georgetown University:
National Security Archive Update, February 14, 2007
TOP SECRET POLO STEP
Iraq War Plan Assumed Only 5,000 U.S. Troops Still There by December 2006
CentCom PowerPoint Slides Briefed to White House and Rumsfeld in 2002, Obtained by National Security Archive through Freedom of Information Act
PowerPoints Reflect Internal Debates Over Size and Timing of Invasion Force
For more information contact:
Thomas Blanton/Joyce Battle – 202/XXX-XXXX
http://www.nsarchive.org
[...]
“First, they assumed that a provisional government would be in place by ‘D-Day’, then that the Iraqis would stay in their garrisons and be reliable partners, and finally that the post-hostilities phase would be a matter of mere ‘months’. ”
[...]
.
.
It wasn’t the battle plans, tactics, and strategy that fell apart on them, the WHOLE DANG THING fell apart on them because they were deluded enough to think that a ‘herd of Chalabis’ could just… take… over… and run the show. [Source]
…and here we are again.
14 February 2010, 5:41 pmStan Moore:
Not being a military tactician, I am not sure what to make of expending the resources to pit 10,000 to 15,000 Amero/Afghan forces against 100/300 insurgents.
I think that the whole purpose of warfare now that setpiece or even largescale face to face battles are (essentially) a thing of the past, is to intimidate the population and bystanders and kill enough people to let them know you are serious about taking over their lives/resources.
The Taliban seem to be able to withdraw pretty much at will, though their worldview leads them to accept death in battle as “martyrdom” and not with the trepidation by Judeo-Christian forces and their commanders.
Why doesn’t the public bother to calculate the fiscal cost of all these military control efforts and excercises, including basing soldiers in 700+ facilities around the world, operating military aircraft and ships, etc. and wonder if we are better off just purchasing the resources on the open market and maintaining skeleton home-based forces on a shoestring military budget with neutrality in international affairs.
That to me makes sense, but I don’t get a cut of the warmonger/investment profits.
Stan Moore
20 February 2010, 1:35 amStan:
I suspect that the recapture of Marja and environs is a fairly serious undertaking. The US/NATO have to show some progress in taking back zones that are under the governance of the Taliban. Folks at home need to be reassured that the Taliban can’t set up adjacent governments, because the cumulative impression these days is that the US/NATO have completely lost the initiative.
Going after 100-300 fighters in an urban area is no joke, and the offense-defense ratio is not surprising. Defenders start with significant and multiple advantages. The Taliban will, of course, assess what they see, and conduct an orderly and tactical retreat, leaving a screen of forces to atrit the US/NATO enough to slow them down a bit.
Once the US/NATO establish themselves on this terrain, it is a fairly easy matter to pick away at their outmost and most vulnerable positions, forcing the new defenders to stretch the lines, then finally start sending patrols outside the wire, so to speak, which is the ratchetup phase… deeper and deeper they will dig that hole.
Obama and McChrystal. Meet Johnson and Westmoreland.
20 February 2010, 3:16 pmStan Moore:
reference = http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175208/
an interesting perspective from a retired USAF lt. colonel on the American fascination with WWII German Wehrmacht as relates to Marja, etc.
20 February 2010, 4:33 pmDeAnander:
@stan moore: I noticed that one and am also intrigued by it. The Wehrmacht is painted so vividly as the Ultimate Bad Guys in the mainstream (civilian) pop culture that it’s quite a radical cultural break/schism for the US military to be their fan club. Serious dissonance.
21 February 2010, 12:18 amCurt:
Stan Moore,
21 February 2010, 5:34 amThat was really a good post, a real symbolic insult to the American military. I would be willing to bet that the people in the military today think that they are still citizens soldiers. My guess is they believe they have just combined the best of both the Minuteman tradition and the Samurai tradition. I do not know any people in the American military to make that judgment I base it only on their propaganda. Based on their propaganda they are at the stage that if you vote you are a good citizen. If you vote Republican you are a great citizen.
Curt
Curt:
PS, I do not think that there is anything good what so ever about the Samurai tradition in the first place but based on the writings on military people that I have seen, they do. I just wanted to make sure that there is no confucian about that.
21 February 2010, 5:41 amStan:
Back when I was a fledgling writer, not a year out of the army yet, I visited the Dixie Kinfe and Gun Show, where Wehrmacht paraphernalia was everywhere. Here were my impressions.
21 February 2010, 8:22 amDeAnander:
It suggests to me that — no big surprise — no matter what flags may be waved, the primary loyalty of professional militaries is to the cult of heavily armed, uniformed, disciplined (civilised, in the literal sense) warrior masculinity… a kind of secret society to which they *and* the Wehrmacht belong. The Wehrmacht in this light is like an elite sports team, highly admired and renowned — snappy uniforms, great ritual and theatre, great moves on the court. In this light also, the contempt and hatred for “irregular” forces makes sense: they don’t play by the rules (also they are “native”, brown-skinned, and therefore supposed to be inferior), they don’t wear uniforms and brandish standardised, fetishised violence-objects (they improvise their own out of plebeian commodity items), and they don’t immediately quail and grovel and admire breathlessly the soi-disant manly superiority of the invaders. They aren’t in the club, and yet they’re playing the game — and dammit, not always losing! No fair. Where’s the ref?
OTOH underneath the heavily-disciplined etc etc of “sporting” theatrical warfare is the promise of some kind of mad Dionysian ecstasy of violence on the battlefield, a purgative/redemptive orgy of killing, rape and general cruelty and destructiveness that is — maybe — the promised reward for all the obedience, discipline, conformity, etc.? The horror of war re-imagined as transcendence — rather than as the godawful brew of miscalculation, error, mess, stench, chaos, courage, fear, confusion, brutality, cowardice, desperation and sheer random luck/chance that it seems to be in practise. I write here not from personal experience, for which I am thankful, but based on my reading of memoir and history by those who “been there done that.”
Writing in haste, probably halfbaked… stray thoughts. All customary disclaimers apply.
21 February 2010, 12:21 pmCurt:
Yet despite decades of amassing all of this weaponry and buy all of these books an tactics which they would not be able to read in the first place there has been no uprising. These people are really not preparing for war they are pretending to be preparing for war. They of course do not admit that to themselves because that would take the fun out of it.
21 February 2010, 1:33 pmFurthermore, even though I have no more expertise in this area than anyone who can read, I imagine 99.9% of the people at these guns shows would not be able to form any sort of organization that would not be infiltrated by the government. That is good because THEIR use of violence is illegal, illegitimate, and immoral. The violence of the Pequots, Thomas Paine, Andreas Hofer, John Brown, Crazy Horse, Jomo Kenyatta, Fidel Castro, Russel Means, and Bobby Seals, and David Carradine is an all together different story.
Curt:
Of course I was only pretending that I was awake when I wrote that.
21 February 2010, 1:35 pmStan:
Unfortunatley, De’s description of Neitzchean masculinity (Dionysian) hits pretty close to the center; and just as unfortunatley, this fringe gun-culture now has an outlet “for those who dare”; and that is contract mercenary work, subsidized by the US government.
21 February 2010, 3:16 pmStan Moore:
Speaking of Marja and the resistance/insurgency and the issues of firepower/offense to defense ratios, I cannot help but think about the recent Invasion of southern Lebanon by the Israelis vs. Hezbollah. Similar military dynamics, I think.
I read Hezbollah leader Hezrallah (or whatever his name is) online this week and it is increasingly apparent that Israel’s insurgents are less and less intimidated by raw force, just as insurgents facing America everywhere are. I think there is probably an “insider” network of communications going on in which world insurgents against US power and empire take information, experience, and comfort from each other as they await the fall of our glorious empire in the foreseeable future.
I think we are sort of like George Foreman, landing heavy blows but no knockout punches even as we gradully exhaust ourselves. The military leadership seems to remain in awe at the raw might of firepower, but forget the resiliency that comes with victimhood.
Stan Moore
21 February 2010, 10:48 pmStan Moore:
I happen to think that a substantial number and percentage of the US armed forces are, indeed, “citizen soldiers” and many of them actually joined the military to serve their country, defend it, and enact revenge on its enemies (of course within the framework of their indoctrination).
The fact that today’s armed forces are voluntary is part of the reason that anti-war resistance has had such a feeble effect compared with Vietnam, when draftees wanted out so badly of an unjust war that they began deserting and fragging their officers on a regular basis. Today’s volunteer soldiers simply do not behave that way, although many know the war is unjust. And some refuse to deploy and others attempt to terminate their service, but in very different ways than draftees would, according to my observation.
The real problem in the whole situation is the indoctrination these people receive, even bofore enlisting. The media told them the nation had been attacked on 9/11 (even though we now know the Twin Towers actually went down from directed internal demolition with military-grade demolitions and not from jet fuel fed fires). But these young men rushed to the defense of their country, even to fight enemies that were not responsible for the attacks, such as Iraq.
And many of the servicemen today are literally willing to risk their lives for the freedom of the occupied, as they perceive it. Many do believe that they are forces for good in the world, and trying to help Iraqis and Afghans and others. Their indoctrination has worked for the benefit of US policy, and these young people are pawns in a global game controlled from above.
As far as Wehrmacht worship goes, maybe part of it is an appreciation of excellence in military affairs by later generations. I don’t think that admirers of the Wehrmacht are/were admirers of Naziism, for instance. But they perceive a form of military excellence in warmaking that they appreciate in the macabre sense, knowing that military excellence translates into more efficient killing power and nothing more or nothing less. I think it is primal and genetically related in many people.
It reminds me of an essay by the great ecologist Aldo Leopold of the 1940′s when he talked about hunting. Leopold said that a three or four year old boy who saw his first golf ball would hardly get excited. But the same boy, seeing a wild deer or rabbit for the first time, likely experienced a primal feeling that raised the hair on the back of the youngster’s head, the feeling of a young predator glimpsing prey for the first time. Leopold remarked that “there must be something pretty deep at play here”. I think men evolved to exert physical power and those forces are still at play, as evidenced in sports like football, rugby, etc. And a small proportion of females do the same… My mentor in raptor biology, Dr. Frances Hamerstrom was a grad. student of Aldo Leopold’s and a lifelong hunter herself. I once asked her what she liked about hunting: the stalk, the taste of wild game, etc.? I was surprised when Fran told me she hunted because she enjoyed the kill, the bloodlust. She hunted all her life and even traveled to Peru when she was ini her eighties, after her husband died, and hunted with indigenous tribesmen in the Amazonian jungle. One of them had a blowgun and darted a bird, which was not dead, but had a flechette through its body. Fran remembered something she had learned from a Scottish gamekeeper, which mimics what wild falcons do, and she took the bird and used her teeth to bite and break the bird’s neck and it dropped dead. The lead hunter of the tribe looked at her and said: “Fran, you are a tiger”. She loved it and wrote of it in her autobiography.
But the Taliban are skilled warriors themselves and they have guns, resilience and patience. It is just a matter of time before the US will be out of Afghanistan and the Taliban know it, even if some Americans don’t. The standing question will be how many people on both sides will have to die and how efficient will the killing be before equilibrium returns and the invaders have to return home.
Stan Moore
22 February 2010, 1:51 amStan:
Stan, I’ll take issue right off the bat with the man-the-hunter meme and the biological determinism that lurks within it; but I don’t want to hijack the thread for this predictably looong and contentious debate… here. Elsewhere, we’ll make room for it.
On the draft and Vietnam, the majority of the GI resisters came from the ranks of volunteers who were disillusioned. Draftees participated in unorganized, individualized resistance (malingering, eg).
The draft mobilized the 60s/70s equivalent of soccer moms against the war. But the biggest difference, as it relates to GIs themselves, is that there are many, masny more married recruits than there were then.
When one decides to become an activist, a resister, then s/he weighs risks. Activists are always greater risk-takers when their risk extends mostly to themselves. When what they do cna affect their immediate family, who depends on them and a paycheck, then there is a built-in disincentive.
I have two sons and one son-in-law – all married – in the armed forces.
As promised, here is a thread on man-the-hunter.
22 February 2010, 8:03 amStan:
FULL
22 February 2010, 2:01 pmm.c.:
Women register to vote more than men 55-60% compared to 40-45% for men. This also means women make up the slight majority in most jury pools. What leftists need to keep in mind is that the suburban soccer mom/security mom is where much of the fight is. Had Martha Coakley done well among the working class/mostly catholic working class women of Mass. she would have won, maybe not a blowout but a win.
22 February 2010, 3:11 pmm.c.:
I forget who recently wrote that Capitalism controls Science; I forgot the thread name. Samuel Colt invented the revolver in the 1830′s(1st the 4-shooter) so that a single overseer could hold off several angry slaves. Hurray for Connecticut Yankee ingenuity! Maybe Jefferson Davis & Judah Benjamin bought lots of stock in his company.
28 February 2010, 4:11 pmm.c.:
I remember that Nat Turner’s Revolt in southern Virginia was in 1831, the largest U.S. slave revolt before the civil war.
1 March 2010, 3:47 pmTimothy R. Anderson:
Afghanisietnam. Vietraq.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/10/10/101823/iraqi-police-still-struggle-with.html
Timothy R. Anderson
19 October 2010, 5:04 pm