Shame The Bigots But Address The Fear

Republicans have long proven their genius for exploiting fear for political gain, using bigotry and cheap slogans to project an aura of toughness.  Aided by a feckless media, they have long been perceived as better able to protect Americans from harm than Democrats, who are thought to be more concerned with political correctness than national security.  And so, we have GOP leaders, like Jeb!, using alarmist rhetoric about an existential threat to western civilization and agitating for all out war.  In response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, Republicans are calling for the shutting down of mosques in the U.S., permitting only refugees who can establish their Christian bona fides, and closing our borders to Syrian toddlers trying to escape the ravages of civil war and terrorism. (Mostly) Republican Governors seek to deny resettlement of refugees in their states.  Even the purportedly moderate (by comparison) presidential candidate John Kasich has proposed the creation of a new federal agency that would promote Judeo-Christian beliefs.

It is critical to call out these bigots and moral cowards, to shame them for their xenophobia and ignorance.  President Obama was right in mocking them when he said: “At first they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three year old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me.”

But Democrats also have to acknowledge that Republicans are tapping into a real fear, that they understand it, and -- in contrast to the hateful rhetoric and simplistic clichés used by Republicans -- that they have the far better approach for keeping Americans safe.

And so, it is important to repeatedly emphasize the fallacy of condemning Islam and all Muslims based on the violence and repression committed by individuals and states in the name of Islam.  As Reza Aslan put it, in a remarkable exchange on CNN in which he repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to move the talking heads off their narrative that Islam is a repressive, violent religion:  "The problem is that you’re talking about a religion of one and a half billion people, and certainly it becomes very easy to just simply paint them all with a single brush."

It is important to explain that the screening process for accepting refugees is an arduous one that can take 18 to 24 months before a refugee is approved for admission to the U.S.  Refugees are vetted by several different agencies, including the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, and the Departments of State, Defense and Homeland Security.

Fingerprints are taken, biographical information is collected. They are then each individually interviewed by U.S. officials trained to verify that they're bona fide refugees.  Refugees from Syria are then subject to additional screening that looks at where they came from and what caused them to flee their home, stories that are checked out. All of this occurs before a refugee is allowed to set foot in the country.

It is also important to stress that condemning Islam and refusing to accept refugees who aren't Christian will actually make us less safe.  As President Obama explained:  “I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the (Republican) rhetoric that’s been coming out here during the course of this debate. ISIL seeks to exploit the idea that there's a war between Islam and the west. When you start seeing individuals in positions of responsibility suggesting that Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims in a wartorn land, that feeds the ISIL narrative.”

Democrats will play right into the old GOP playbook that portrays them as arrogant elitists detached from real world concerns unless they are able to assure Americans that they get it -- that they take the fear of ordinary Americans about safety and security seriously and don't consider everyone who expresses concerns about the influx of refugees to be cold-hearted bigots. 

Washington Governor Jay Inslee has provided a primer on how to do just that:

“We’ve got to beat these guys in hearts, as well as U.S. Air Force,” he said. “We also have to win the moral battle. And that’s a battle of hope, and a vision for the future where we can live together, and I think this is part of that.”  Inslee said he was sensitive to “very legitimate and real” fears that ISIS militants could pose as refugees in order to sneak into America and commit more crimes. But, he said, “Leadership calls for people to recognize it’s real [and] act responsibly — in this case that means insisting on a robust, multi-layered screening process before they’re allowed in this country.” “I think that our nation is tested from time to time, and I think this is one of those times to really dig deep and see what kind of character our nation and my state has,” he added. “I’ve always believed my state and the country has always been a place of refuge from those who are persecuted. Right on the Statue of Liberty, they talk about the wretched refuge of your teeming shore, and I don’t know where we’ve had more people who fit this classification of victim.”

A large swath of the American public clings to false narratives about the nature of Islam and the steadfastness of Republicans when it comes to national security.  It won't be easy, but to change that narrative we need to not only shame GOP leaders for their ignorance and bigotry, but must also assure the American public that Democrats understand and can address their fear. 

Tell Me Why I Don't Like Military Mondays

What's with the Mets' camouflage uniforms and caps?  Given their excellent play of late I don't think it is in anticipation of a frontal assault by disgruntled fans.  And they aren't much of a running team, so I don't think it is a strategic move to hide their baserunners to make stealing bases easier. 

No, it's Military Monday.

Beginning with the 2014 season, the Mets decided to honor U.S. servicemen and servicewomen at Monday home games by giving them free tickets and retail discounts, and sponsoring community outreach events   And, for those games, Met players and coaches don military-themed uniforms.  (The San Diego Padres do something similar for Sunday home games and all teams do it on Memorial Day.) 

Now, given the marketing prerogatives of major league teams who now sport a ridiculous number of uniform color combinations in order to sell more shirts, caps and jerseys to fans, it is hard to make an argument about the purity of the game.  But, putting players in battle fatigues takes things too far.

There is a difference between honoring members of the armed services and glorifying the military.  Mets ownership already does the former.  They have demonstrated their sincere and deep commitment by supporting the Wounded Warrior Project, arranging for players to visit VA hospitals, and helping found the Welcome Back Veterans, a program that provides treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. 

Players wearing faux military uniforms with American flag decals prominently displayed on the shoulder doesn't feel like it is about supporting our troops; it feels jingoistic.  This is particularly unseemly given that more than a quarter of Major League players are from countries other than the U.S. of A.-- some of which have been invaded by our military and exploited by our government.

And I'm not sure it does honor to the military, anyway.  If anything, baseball players looking like make-believe soldiers trivializes military service and feels more like a marketing ploy.  Sure it is a brave act to face a 90-plus mile per hour fastball with nothing more than 32-ounce wooden bat.  But it is hardly analogous to facing the enemy in a war zone.

We already have the National Anthem before every game -- a tradition that became entrenched during the Second World War to make sure the fans didn't question the patriotism of the players who weren't fighting in the war.  The anthem is often accompanied by the presentation of military colors and a military jet flyover.  And, after 9/11, because one song did not seem sufficient for players and fans to express their love of and loyalty to the United States, Irving Berlin's God Bless America began to be sung during the 7th Inning Stretch, either instead of or in addition to Take Me Out To The Ballgame.  It is still sung at many ballparks on Sundays, holidays and in the post-season. 

Isn't that enough?

If baseball teams are going to celebrate honorable professions, then I would like to see them pay tribute to those who devote their lives to protecting and helping people and improving society in other ways too.  How about we have the players dress up like teachers or public defenders or paramedics or social workers?   

America's Soundtrack of Hysteria

Guest Post by Tom Engelhardt

It happened so fast that, at first, I didn’t even take it in.
Two Saturdays ago, a friend and I were heading into the Phillips Museum in Washington, D.C., to catch a show of neo-Impressionist art when we ran into someone he knew, heading out.  I was introduced and the usual chitchat ensued.  At some point, she asked me, “Do you live here?”
“No,” I replied, “I’m from New York.”

She smiled, responded that it, too, was a fine place to live, then hesitated just a beat before adding in a quiet, friendly voice: “Given ISIS, maybe neither city is such a great place to be right now.”  Goodbyes were promptly said and we entered the museum.
All of this passed so quickly that I didn’t begin rolling her comment around in my head until we were looking at the sublime pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat and his associates. Only then did I think: ISIS, a danger in New York?  ISIS, a danger in Washington?  And I had the urge to bolt down the stairs, catch up to her, and say: whatever you do, don’t step off the curb.  That’s where danger lies in American life.  ISIS, not so much.

 

The Terrorists Have Our Number

I have no idea what provoked her comment. Maybe she was thinking about a story that had broken just two days earlier, topping the primetime TV news and hitting the front pages of newspapers.  On a visit to the Big Apple, the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, claimed that his intelligence services had uncovered a plot by militants of the Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS or ISIL), the extremists of the new caliphate that had gobbled up part of his country, against the subway systems of Paris, New York, and possibly other U.S. cities.

I had watched Brian Williams report that story on NBC in the usual breathless fashion, along with denials from American intelligence that there was any evidence of such a plot.  I had noted as well that police patrols on my hometown’s subways were nonetheless quickly reinforced, with extra contingents of bomb-sniffing dogs and surveillance teams.  Within a day, the leading officials of my state, Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, were denying that they had any information on such a plot, but also taking very public rides on the city’s subways to “reassure” us all.  The threat didn’t exist, but was also well in hand!  I have to admit that, to me, it all seemed almost comic.

In the meantime, the background noise of the last 13 years played on.  Inside the American Terrordome, the chorus of hysteria-purveyors, Republican and Democrat alike, nattered on, as had been true for weeks, about the "direct," not to say apocalyptic, threat the Islamic State and its caliph posed to the American way of life.  These included Senator Lindsey Graham (“This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed here at home"); Majority Leader John Boehner, who insisted that we should consider putting American boots on Iraqi and perhaps even Syrian ground soon, since “they intend to kill us”; Senator Dianne Feinstein, who swore that “the threat ISIS poses cannot be overstated”; Senator Bill Nelson, who commented that “it ought to be pretty clear when they... say they’re going to fly the black flag of ISIS over the White House that ISIS is a clear and present danger.” And a chorus of officials, named and anonymous, warning that the terror danger to the country was “imminent,” while the usual set of pundits chirped away about the potential destruction of our way of life.

The media, of course, continued to report it all with a kind of eyeball-gluing glee.  The result by the time I met that woman: 71% of Americans believed ISIS had nothing short of sleeper cells in the U.S. (shades of “Homeland”!) and at least the same percentage, if not more (depending on which poll you read), were ready to back a full-scale bombing campaign, promptly launched by the Obama administration, against the group.

If, however, you took a step out of the overwrought American universe of terror threats for 30 seconds, it couldn’t have been clearer that everyone in the grim netherworld of the Middle East now seemed to have our number.  The beheading videos of the Islamic State had clearly been meant to cause hysteria on the cheap in this country -- and they worked.  Those first two videos somehow committed us to a war now predicted to last for years, and a never-ending bombing campaign that we know perfectly well will establish the global credentials of the Islamic State and its mad caliph in jihadist circles.  (In fact, the evidence is already in.  From North Africa to Afghanistan to Pakistan, the group is suddenly a brand name, its black flag something to hoist, and its style of beheading something to be imitated.)

Barbara Lee Continues To Speak For Me

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons -- Authorization for the Use of Military Force ("AUMF")

After the attacks of 9/11, Congress gave President Bush carte blanche to use military force.  Only one member of Congress -- one -- had the integrity, the courage and the wisdom to just say "no."  Congresswoman Barbara Lee -- my Congressperson I'm proud to say --warned her colleagues to be "careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target" and explained that the AUMF "was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the September 11 events—anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation's long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit."

Congresswoman Lee, as we now know, was prescient.  Neither President Bush nor his successor, I'm afraid, could be trusted with such authorization, which has been used to justify warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention at  Guantanamo, various and sundry military actions, armed drones and, most recently, airstrikes against our newest terrorist enemy.

Congresswoman Lee has issued a statement expressing grave concern "about the expansion of U.S. airstrikes into Syria and continuation of airstrikes in Iraq." 

It is clear we are rapidly becoming more involved in another war in the Middle East.

President Obama has put together a strong international and regional coalition to address the ISIS threat. We must now leverage this regional coalition to achieve the political solution that will end this crisis. Only a political solution that respects the rights of all Iraqis and Syrians will ultimately dismantle ISIS

I have called and will continue to call for a full congressional debate and vote on any military action, as required by the Constitution. The American people deserve a public debate on all the options to dismantle ISIS, including their costs and consequences to our national security and domestic priorities.

he rapid escalation of another war in the Middle East underscores the danger of the blank check for endless war passed by Congress in 2001. I could not support this blank check for endless war or the 2002 blank check for war in Iraq. I have introduced legislation to repeal the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for the use of military force and continue to build bipartisan support for their repeal.

There is no military solution to the crisis in Iraq and Syria. In fact, continued U.S. military action will result in unintended consequences. We must remember the roots of ISIS - President Bush’s ill-begotten war.Congress needs to debate the political, economic, diplomatic and regionally-led solutions that will ultimately be the tools for U.S. and regional security.

Barbara Lee was right in 2001.  She is right in 2014.

Reverse Barometers and Perpetual War

General Custer to officer:  Anything that man tells me will be a lie.  Therefore, he will be perfect reverse barometer. . . .

Custer to Jack Crabb:  What should I do, mule skinner? . . . . Should I go down there, or withdraw? . . .  What's your answer, mule skinner?
Crabb:  General, you go down there.
Custer: You're saying, go into the coulee?
Crabb:  Yes, sir. 
Custer:  There are no Indians there, I suppose?
Crabb:  I didn't say that. There are thousands of Indians down there, and when they get done with you, there won't be nothing left but a greasy spot. . . . You go down there if you got the nerve.
Custer:  Still trying to outsmart me, aren't you, mule skinner? You want me to think that you don't want me to go down there, but the subtle truth is you really don't want me to go down there. . . Men of the Seventh! The hour of victory is at hand!  Onward to Little Bighorn and glory!

* * *
Near the close of the movie Little Big Man, General Custer (played by Richard Mulligan) realizes that Jack Crabb aka Little Big Man (Dustin Hoffman) who he hired as a scout, hates him so much that he will purposely give Custer the wrong advice.  Custer therefore treats Crabb as a "reverse barometer," doing the opposite of whatever Crabb tells him.  As the passage above shows, Crabb gets Custer completely flustered to the point where he is able to trick him into making the disastrous decision to attack at Little Bighorn. 

Dick Cheney, John McCain and their fellow War Mongers have much in common with Custer, as he was portrayed in this movie -- arrogant, unfettered by facts, unshakably stubborn and unable or unwilling to reverse a decision or admit a mistake.  They have been wrong about everything, particularly when it comes to terrorism and the Middle East.  But rather than being shamed into silence and appropriately shunned, they continue to seize center stage.  They plague us with their latest ideas for the latest crisis which, invariably, is the same wrong advice that got us into these messes in the first place: perpetual war.

In this way they should provide a useful service as reverse barometers.  Whatever they say, President Obama should enact the reverse.  When they insist that we stay in Iraq, rely less on diplomacy, employ troops on the ground and more bombs from the air in more places, we should do the opposite.  But it seems that, as in the movie, the reverse barometer can sow confusion.  And so after being relentlessly bombarded with the need to act quickly, decisively and, above all, militarily, the President, as William Greider puts it, "is embarking on another Long War in the Middle East."

The fact that we are only committed (for the time being) to air strikes with a limited amount of advisers on the ground is far from comforting.  Greider explains:  "President Obama’s vague assurances are doubtless sincere, but he has left a lot of open space to revise and reinterpret his intentions. If everything does not go well in Iraq, Obama will be pressured to escalate. War enthusiasts in the reserve army of pundits are already clamoring for him to do so. White House sources are already assuring reporters that Islamic State targets in Syria will be bombed. What happens if they don’t fold? The president will be pressed to send more troops—if not in regular uniforms, then as Special Forces, who will use clandestine methods."

Similarly, David Corn notes why it is difficult to "put the case for war back in the box" after commiting us to renewed military action even with a more nuanced approach than his predecessors:  "If US air strikes can make a difference, if other nations join in, if the Iraqi government gets it acts together, if the Iraqi military can do its job, then the United States will use its military might in a limited way to vanquish ISIS. A conditional case for war does not easily sync up with the stark nature of such an enterprise. If any of these ifs don't come to be, will Obama be cornered and forced by his rhetoric to do something? After depicting ISIS as a peril warranting a US military response—and with much of the American public convinced of that—can he then shrug his shoulders and say, "Never mind"? Will he provide the hawks an opening for political attacks and demands for greater military intervention? In his speech, the man who ran for president with the pledge to end the Iraq War declared, "We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq." But what if all else fails?"

Onward to Little Bighorn and glory!

Memorial Day Thoughts On National Defense

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

We can best honor those who have given their lives for this nation in combat by making sure our military might is proportional to what America needs.

The United States spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany put together.

With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting wars is projected to drop – but the “base” defense budget (the annual cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships, and tanks – not including the costs of actually fighting wars) is scheduled to rise. The base budget is already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.

One big reason: It’s almost impossible to terminate large defense contracts. Defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others have made spending on national defense into America’s biggest jobs program.

So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of defense contractors but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat.

For example, the Pentagon says it wants to buy fewer F-35 joint strike fighter planes than had been planned – the single-engine fighter has been plagued by cost overruns and technical glitches – but the contractors and their friends on Capitol Hill promise a fight.

The absence of a budget deal on Capitol Hill is supposed to trigger an automatic across-the-board ten-year cut in the defense budget of nearly $500 billion, starting January.

But Republicans have vowed to restore the cuts. The House Republican budget cuts everything else — yet brings defense spending back up. Mitt Romney’s proposed budget does the same.

Yet even if the scheduled cuts occur, the Pentagon is still projected to spend over $2.7 trillion over the next ten years.

At the very least, hundreds of billions could be saved without jeopardizing the nation’s security by ending weapons systems designed for an age of conventional warfare. We should shrink the F-35 fleet of stealth fighters. Cut the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons, ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. And take a cleaver to the Navy and Air Force budgets. (Most of the action is with the Army, Marines and Special Forces.) 

At a time when Medicare, Medicaid, and non-defense discretionary spending (including most programs for the poor, as well as infrastructure and basic R&D) are in serious jeopardy, Obama and the Democrats should be calling for even more defense cuts.

A reasonable and rational defense budget would be a fitting memorial to those who have given their lives so we may remain free. 

How To Forget On Memorial Day

Crosses of Lafayette

Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires

By Tom Engelhardt, cross-posted from TomDispatch

It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to.  They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death.

They are essentially bureaucratic notices designed to draw little attention to themselves.  Yet cumulatively, in their hundreds over the last decade, they represent a grim archive of America’s still ongoing, already largely forgotten second Afghan War, and I’ve read them obsessively for years.

Into the Memory Hole

May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan.  It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways.

Quiz Americans and a surprising number undoubtedly won’t have thought about the “memorial” in Memorial Day at all -- especially now that it’s largely a marker of the start of summer and an excuse for cookouts.

How many today are aware that, as Decoration Day, it began in 1865 in a nation still torn by grief over the loss of -- we now know -- up to 750,000 dead in the first modern war, a wrenching civil catastrophe in a then-smaller and still under-populated country?  How many know that the first Decoration Day was held in 1865 with 10,000 freed slaves and some Union soldiers parading on a Charleston, South Carolina, race track previously frequented by planters and transformed in wartime into a grim outdoor prison?  The former slaves were honoring Union prisoners who had died there and been hastily buried in unmarked graves, but as historian Kenneth Jackson has written, they were also offering “a declaration of the meaning of the war and of their own freedom.”

Those ceremonies migrated north in 1866, became official at national cemeteries in 1868, and grew into ever more elaborate civic remembrances over the years.  Even the South, which had previously marked its grief separately, began to take part after World War I as the ceremonies were extended to the remembrance of all American war dead.  Only in 1968, in the midst of another deeply unpopular war, did Congress make it official as Memorial Day, creating the now traditional long holiday weekend.

And yet, when it comes to the major war the United States is still fighting, now in its 11th year, the word remembrance is surely inappropriate, as is the “Memorial” in Memorial Day.  It’s not just that the dead of the Afghan War have largely been tossed down the memory hole of history (even if they do get official attention on Memorial Day itself).  Even the fact that Americans are still dying in Afghanistan seems largely to have been forgotten, along with the war itself.

As the endlessly plummeting opinion polls indicate, the Afghan War is one Americans would clearly prefer to forget -- yesterday, not tomorrow.  It was, in fact, regularly classified as “the forgotten war” almost from the moment that the Bush administration turned its attention to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and so declared its urge to create a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.  Despite the massive “surge” of troops, special operations forces, CIA agents, and civilian personnel sent to Afghanistan by President Obama in 2009-2010, and the ending of the military part of the Iraq debacle in 2011, the Afghan War has never made it out of the grave of forgetfulness to which it was so early consigned.

How Energy Drives The World

The Energy Wars Heat Up

By Michael Klare, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Conflict and intrigue over valuable energy supplies have been features of the international landscape for a long time.  Major wars over oil have been fought every decade or so since World War I, and smaller engagements have erupted every few years; a flare-up or two in 2012, then, would be part of the normal scheme of things.  Instead, what we are now seeing is a whole cluster of oil-related clashes stretching across the globe, involving a dozen or so countries, with more popping up all the time.  Consider these flash-points as signals that we are entering an era of intensified conflict over energy.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Argentina to the Philippines, here are the six areas of conflict -- all tied to energy supplies -- that have made news in just the first few months of 2012:

Poor, Poor, Pitiful Colin Powell And The "Blot" That Will -- And Should -- Always Be Attached To Him

By Meteor Blades, cross-posted from Daily Kos

Former Bush era Secretary of State Colin Powell has a new book out May 22. As with so many political celebs, it's a book written "with" a professional person who does the actual writing. But it includes quotations from the guy who was once seen as potential presidential or vice presidential material. Based on uncorrected proofs released in advance, what we get once again is Powell lamenting the stain he can't get rid of because of the dead-wrong 85-minute speech he gave to the United Nations Feb. 5, 2003. There he declared convincingly that the United States had irrefutable evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Within five months, that claim had been convincingly refuted.

“Yes, a blot, a failure will always be attached to me and my UN presentation,” the former U.S. secretary of state writes in a new book of leadership parables that draws frequently on his Iraq war experience. “I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me.” Powell, 75, laments that no intelligence officials had the “courage” to warn that he was given false information that Iraq had such weapons during preparations for his February 2003 speech before the U.S. invasion the following month.

We've been hearing this crap from the guy for seven years now. It's tedious. It's sickening. It's self-serving. It's bullshit. It's the same old, same old.

Except, not quite. Because Powell keeps changing his story about his interactions in the White House. In 2005, he told Barbara Walters that he was "right there with" the president on the use of force in Iraq. In 2007, he told a group of heavyweights at a conference in Aspen, Colo., that he had spent two-and-a-half hours trying to talk Bush out of using force.

This latest iteration isn't the first time Powell has tried to lay the blame for his bogus U.N. speech on intelligence failures well down the chain of command. Not only has he never held his bosses to account for intentionally distorting what they knew to be untrue, he hasn't owned up to his own distortions.

For instance, he knew full well from his own intelligence source that the aluminum tubes Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice were claiming as proof of Saddam Hussein's intent to make a nuclear weapon couldn't be used for that purpose. But he didn't pass that information along in his U.N. speech. Or anywhere else.

Most of all, for somebody so concerned about his reputation now, he didn't resign in protest when he learned that what he had said at the U.N. was false. In fact he said in the Walters' interview:

"I'm not a quitter. And it wasn't a moral issue, or an act of a failure of an active leadership. It was knowing what we were heading into, and when the going got rough, you don't walk out."

Fabricating evidence to start a war is not a moral issue? Better to be the good soldier than to be good, eh? Hundreds of thousands dead or maimed, millions exiled, trillions of dollars spent. For lies. How about a lament for that from the secretary?

All we get from Powell is a rancid woe-is-me sidestep from responsibility. As he enters his dotage, he claims it was all due to the lack of courage on the part of lower-downs and the failure of his normally good instincts that caused him to make an uncharacteristically bad judgment call.

Stunningly laughable for a guy whose "instincts" led to this remarkable fantasy recounted in the new book:

Powell, who served as national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, recalls a morning in 1988 when he went to see Reagan and described a problem that needed to be solved that day. Reagan gazed past him at squirrels picking up nuts he had put out for them in the morning by the Rose Garden. It was a lesson in delegating authority and trusting his team to make the right decision, Powell says. “The president was teaching me: ‘Colin, I love you and I will sit here as long as you want me to, listening to your problem. Let me know when you have a problem that I have to solve,’” Powell writes.

He can perhaps be excused for believing that a quarter-century ago. But knowing what we know now about the health of Reagan's brain, Powell's continuing view that he was being mentored by a squirrel-gazing president is as ludicrous as the rest of his tales about what put that unerasable blot on his reputation.

Quagmire Accomplished

 One Year After Bin Laden's Death, Bring The Troops Home Now

By Kevin Martin and Michael Eisenscher, cross-posted from Common Dreams

Today marks one year since the death of Osama bin Laden. The CIA estimates there are fewer than 100 al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Since ‘getting Bin Laden’ and defeating al Qaeda were the stated reasons the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, President Barack Obama should use the anniversary to announce the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Instead, his administration has negotiated an agreement with President Hamid Karzai’s government for a U.S. presence in that country until at least 2024, ten years past the supposed date for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops. The U.S. and its NATO allies are supposed to commit to ongoing training of the Afghan military, as well as development aid. Obama swept into Afghanistan in the middle of the night to sign the agreement, but full details of the agreement remain secret.

U.S. troops would also still have a limited combat role, namely Special Forces counter-insurgency operations, according to a draft proposal described by Admiral Bill McRaven, the head of U.S. special operations. A more detailed security plan will surely be discussed at the upcoming NATO Summit in Chicago.

If the agreement covers a ten year period, commits U.S. military forces for training and counter-insurgency (which means inevitable combat), obligates the U.S. to continue providing billions of taxpayer dollars annually in aid (essentially bankrolling the entire Afghan government and military), and posits support for any number of "nation-building" measures, isn't this in fact a treaty, subject to U.S. Senate ratification, rather than an intergovernmental memorandum of agreement?

Karzai apparently feels obligated to take the agreement to his parliament for approval.  Doesn’t Obama have a similar obligation - one imposed by the U.S. Constitution?It’s not clear what the year since the killing of Bin Laden has done to improve U.S. or Afghan security. It’s even less clear what staying for another dozen years will do for either country.

Quite apart from these legal, “process” questions, does anyone think our staying until 2024 is going to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan? We’ve already been there for eleven years – the longest war in our country’s history.  What do we really have to show for it?  We’ve spent almost $523 billion.  Almost 2000 Americans have been killed and another 15,300 wounded.  1000 NATO troops have lost their lives.

Obama Plays The Republican "Macho" Game

As Peter Bergen reported in the Sunday Times, President Obama is "one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades."

Mr. Obama decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership. He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Nevertheless, the "American public and chattering classes continue to regard the president as a thinker, not an actor; a negotiator, not a fighter."  So, I understand why Obama believes that he needs to tout his national security chops.  And the one-year anniversary of bin Laden's death provides the perfect opportunity to do so.  This may be good politics, but it is nonetheless distasteful.

As Digby puts it:

I get why the Democrats are doing it. I'm sure it's extremely satisfying to land those punches on the right wing blowhards after all the years of taunting and jeering about liberal cowardice. To be able to say they killed the evil mastermind where the swaggering codpiece failed is probably too much of a temptation for them to pass up. I get it.

But I hate it. I hated it when the Republicans did it and I hate it now. I don't believe the most powerful nation on earth should be running its democracy via schoolyard power plays. This is how we ended up stuck in Vietnam and how we have found ourselves floundering about in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It's why we can't stop spending trillions on useless weapons systems, why we "have" to continue to fund ridiculous programs like Star Wars and why everyone in the political establishment assumes that the only answer to budget problems is to cut the so-called "entitlements."

I know we live in a dangerous world. But this nation is extremely rich and extremely powerful and its most important assets are morality and mystique. I'm not going to argue about the morality of killing Osama bin laden, but it should be remembered that our unilateral wars,torture regimes and insistence on imperial prerogatives have already taken a toll on America's reputation for moral behavior.

As for mystique, well let's just say that schoolyard taunts and manly chest beating doesn't leave much to the imagination. I don't expect the macho worshiping conservatives to ever change this. It's fundamental to their very identity. I was hoping for something a little bit more sophisticated and a little bit more mature from the so-called "reality-based community."

That said, Romney's response -- that he or any other President, even Jimmy Carter for Gawd's sake, would have done the same thing with regard to bin Laden -- was not only asinine but contravenes earlier remarks that he wouldn't focus on hunting down bin Laden and that candidate Obama was misguided in asserting that he would unilaterally go into Pakistan to get bin Laden.

And hey, shouldn't the media be all over Romney for criticizing our foreign policy successes?  Shouldn't they be asking why he hates America? 

As Greg Sargent points out:

Back in 2004 and 2006, when Republicans were showcasing George W. Bush’s war-on-terror routine as central to their case for reelection, and Dems were responding by attacking Republicans for politicizing national security and pointing to Bush’s failures, Dems were widely described as the ones taking the big political risk then, too.

We were told again and again during the 2004 and 2006 campaigns that Dems risked coming across as not rooting for American military success; there was little discussion of any danger for Republicans in playing up Bush’s “war president” routine. Now the situation, roughly, is reversed — and this time we’re talking about the Obama administration’s successful targeting of America’s number one global arch-enemy — yet again it’s Dems who are seen to be playing with political fire here.

This remains the Republican's game.  As Sargent concludes, "there’s still a strong built-in presumption of political dominance for Republicans on national security, and [] any gains Dems have made on the issue are not deeply felt by Beltway establishment types."

For better or worse, that's not going to prevent Obama from trying.

The Whistleblowers' Club

What We Lost In Iraq And Washington, 2009-2012

By Peter Van Buren, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

People ask the question in various ways, sometimes hesitantly, often via a long digression, but my answer is always the same: no regrets.

In some 24 years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back. In most cases, the gap was filled with scared little men and women, and what was left unsaid just hid the mistakes and flaws of those anonymous functionaries.

What I saw while serving the State Department at a forward operating base in Iraq was, however, different. There, the space between what we were doing (the eye-watering waste and mismanagement), and what we were saying (the endless claims of success and progress), was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis, not scaredy-cat bureaucrats.

That was too much for even a well-seasoned cubicle warrior like me to ignore and so I wrote a book about it, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the War for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. I was on the spot to see it all happen, leading two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in rural Iraq while taking part up close and personal in what the U.S. government was doing to, not for, Iraqis. Originally, I imagined that my book’s subtitle would be “Lessons for Afghanistan,” since I was hoping the same mistakes would not be endlessly repeated there. Sometimes being right doesn’t solve a damn thing.

By the time I arrived in Iraq in 2009, I hardly expected to be welcomed as a liberator or greeted -- as the officials who launched the invasion of that country expected back in 2003 -- with a parade and flowers. But I never imagined Iraq for quite the American disaster it was either. Nor did I expect to be welcomed back by my employer, the State Department, as a hero in return for my book of loony stories and poignant moments that summed up how the United States wasted more than $44 billion in the reconstruction/deconstruction of Iraq. But I never imagined that State would retaliate against me.

In return for my book, a truthful account of my year in Iraq, my security clearance was taken away, I was sent home to sit on my hands for months, then temporarily allowed to return only as a disenfranchised teleworker and, as I write this, am drifting through the final steps toward termination.

Panetta, Polls, And The Afghan Quagmire

By Matthew Rothschild, cross-posted from Progressive.org

It’s disgusting to watch Defense Secretary Leon Panetta trying to justify the ongoing war in Afghanistan long after it’s proven unwinnable and now after the public has decisively moved against it.

A recent poll showed that 69 percent of the American people are against the war.

But Panetta doesn’t care. “We cannot fight wars by polls,” he said. “If we do that, we’re in deep trouble.”

But it’s the people who are supposed to decide whether we wage war or not. That’s why our Constitution requires Congress, the elected officials closest to the people, to make this fateful decision, not the President, nor the Secretary of Defense, nor the brass.

And the lesson of Vietnam, the lesson of Iraq, is that when the American public clearly doesn’t support the way anymore, the war can’t be won.

The pathetic and inexcusable thing is that Panetta must know that himself. The generals must know it. And Obama must know it.

But like Robert McNamara, and General Westmoreland, and Lyndon Johnson before them, they keep fighting the war because they are unwilling, for political reasons, to come clean to the American public that hired them.

It’s shameful that they keep sending our soldiers to fight and die in a useless cause.

And a government that continues to wage war without the support of its people forfeits the right to call itself a democracy.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine, which is one of the leading voices for peace and social justice in this country.  He is the host of "Progressive Radio," a syndicated half-hour weekly interview program, and does a two-minute daily radio commentary, entitled "Progressive Point of View," which is also syndicated around the country.  Rothschild is the author of You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression (New Press, 2007)

Afghanistan: The New Endgame

The alarming pace of events in Afghanistan is forcing United States and NATO strategists to adjust their strategy and timetable to end the war. But they cannot acknowledge the flaw at the heart of their efforts.

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

A number of recent columns in this series has reflected on the interplay of military and political dynamics in the "greater middle east", from Iran to Afghanistan. to Syria. Several have examined the possibility that a process of crisis escalation involving "accidents, incidents or mavericks" - a combination summarised in the acronym "AIM" - would trigger war over Iran (see "America, Israel, Iran: mediation vs war", 16 February 2012).

A subsequent column assessing the conflict in Afghanistan concluded that United States policy there is unlikely to change much even if Mitt Romney defeats Barack Obama in the presidential election in November 2012 (see "Afghanistan: the endgame drama", 1 March 2012). But in Afghanistan as in Iran, the AIM effect may now be having an impact in a way that has implications for the future of western military power.

A political retreat 

The argument for continuity in Afghanistan draws on evidence that President Obama has decided on a timetable ^↑ for withdrawal of American troops there, hoping both that Afghan government forces can assume responsibility for security and that any Taliban role in a post-withdrawal government would be very limited. Romney's election rhetoric (and that of any plausible Republican rival) might scorn Obama's approach as "defeatism" or worse, but the next US president would follow a similar course - precisely because the western ^↑ predicament in Afghanistan is now becoming unsustainable.

The response to such acts ^↑ by American soldiers as urinating on dead Afghans and burning ^↑ copies of the Qur'an (both of which led to widespread fury and retaliatory attacks ^↑ on American targets) strengthen ^↑ the case that strategic reality in Afghanistan is becoming inexorable.

The massacre of sixteen Afghan civilians on 11 March by (it seems) a lone American soldier ^↑  confirms in bleak fashion that the "AIM" concept can shed light on the Afghan endgame as much as it does the twisting Iranian crisis. This might yet be attributed to a "maverick", but it is certainly also an "incident" in the tripartite schema - and its sheer horror, especially the killing of children, makes it one of special extremity that also betrays a deep problem within the US military.

But in combination with the earlier outrages, the massacre may come ^↑ to acquire importance as a rare example of an AIM element that will - by clarifying options on both sides - have the effect of ratcheting a conflict down rather than up. Its impact is already significant. In Afghanistan it has intensified antagonism ^↑ to the foreign military presence, as evidenced ^↑ on 15 March both in the Taliban's statement that it is suspending ^↑ preliminary talks with the US and in the demand of Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, that American forces retreat to their bases from villages and patrols.

Nine Years After We Were Lied Into War With Iraq

Those Who Objected Deserve Some Praise

By Meteor Blades, cross-posted from Daily Kos

Rep. Pete Stark

Monday marks the ninth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war and occupation.

The rationale for that war was fabricated in the highest reaches of the U.S. leadership.

First came the lies, so many it was impossible to keep up. Then came the shock and awe, the crudely invented Iraqi jubilation, the torture, the renditions, the secret prisons, the indefinite detentions, the deluge of unaccounted-for cash, the no-bid contracts, the flaccid media, the spectacle of "mission accomplished," the smug claims that there was no insurgency, the lousy armor ...

The endless flow of blood.

There is now a long list of the dead who would not be dead were it not for this war initiated out of bravado, rancid ideology and doctored "evidence." Thousands of dead Americans and allied troops. And, at the very least, 120,000 dead Iraqis, perhaps several hundred thousand. Deaths in any war are terrible enough. Deaths in a war of choice, a concocted war, an illegal preventive war, count as nothing short of murder. The list of the maimed, the widowed, the orphaned is far longer, the list of the psychologically impaired longer still.

Before George W. Bush was voted 5-4 by the Supreme Court into the presidency, those who lied us into this war were already plotting their justification for sinking deeper military and economic roots into the Middle East—petropolitics and neo-imperialist sophistry interlaced with arrogant disdain for Iraqis and Americans alike. When they stepped into office in the footsteps of the mediocrity they had chosen to manipulate, terrorism gave them no worries, as Richard Clarke later explained to us. They focused, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later informed us, on finding the right excuse to persuade the American people to go to war with Saddam Hussein. This they perceived and planned as a prelude for going to war with some of his neighbors. Less than nine months later, the excuse dropped into their laps in the form of Osama bin Laden's kamikaze crews.

From that terrible day forward, Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and their fellow rogues engineered the invasion with eager nods from Bush. They saw the chance to carry out their invasion plan and moved every obstacle—most especially the truth—out of their way to make it happen.

It didn't have to. They could have been blocked. Due diligence and some spinal fortitude in Congress might have stopped the war in its tracks. But in October 2002, the Senate and the House voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution. Five months and one week later, the bombs began falling on Baghdad.

The blame for that is widespread. But we typically forget those who voted against it.

On this ninth anniversary of the beginning of that atrocity, that series of atrocities, the 156 Congresspeople and Senators who voted against the AUMF deserve to be remembered. This isn't meant as praise for everything they ever did, before or since, merely acknowledgment that, on this, they were right when so many were so very, very wrong.

Quote Of The Day

"Why is it that when an American soldier slaughters people, he’s considered possibly mentally ill and suffering from PTSD, but when an Afghan villager who suffered through three decades of unimaginable violence, perhaps losing family members and friends, commits an act of horrific violence he’s considered a terrorist?"

Robert Dreyfuss, Sergeant Massacre, The Nation

Republican Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

Being self reflective, expressing remorse, apologizing for causing harm.  These are characteristics of an evolved, mature person.  Right?  We certainly would want our political leaders to have the strength and confidence to be able to admit their own and the nation's mistakes, shoulder blame when warranted, and change course when necessary.  Wouldn't we?  Unfortunately, these qualities are not a part of the Republican DNA.  For them they are signs of weakness, hewing too close to what Jeanne Kirkpatrick criticized as the unforgivable sin of "blaming America first."

The last Republican Administration lied and manipulated us into a war based on grounds that proved illusory, approved torture and other human rights abuses, unnecessarily cost our country billions of dollars, caused untold numbers of casualties, and undermined their own avowed goal of thwarting the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  Did they ever admit their mistakes much less apologize for their monumentally destructive conduct?

On the contrary, since leaving office Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice have bragged and boasted about their policies, and have tried to take credit for whatever success President Obama has had.  And when they were still in power we were treated to this, um, awkward moment:



It doesn't get any better with the current crop of Republican leaders.  Mitt Romney's book is actually called "No Apology," in which he falsely accuses President Obama of going around the world apologizing for America, a dubious claim he repeats often on the campaign trail.  ("Never before in American history has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined.")

President Obama did apologize for the burning of copies of the Koran by American personnel at a NATO military base in Afghanistan.  In the wake of increasing violence over the incident, Obama  expressed "deep regret," extended his "sincere apologies" to Hamid Karzai and the Afghan people, and promised "to take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, to include holding accountable those responsible."

This was too much for the GOP. 

Newt Gingrich is not one to apologize for anything.  (Recall his rationalization for an extra-marital affair -- that it was due to his excessive patriotism.)  He said Obama's apology was an “outrage,” and  later gave this advice to the Afghans, “You know, you’re going to have to figure out how to live your own miserable life… Because you clearly don’t want to learn from me how to be unmiserable."

Mitt Romney was also troubled, saying that for many people the apology "sticks in their throat."  According to Romney, since we have done so much for the Afghan people in helping them "achieve freedom," to "apologize at a time like this is something which is very difficult for the American people to countenance."

And then there was Rick Santorum, spewing his typically illogical and sanctimonious claptrap

I don’t think the president should apologize for something that was clearly inadvertent. What you should lay out is the president saying this was inadvertent. This was a mistake and there was no deliberate act, there was no meant to disrespect. This was something that, that occurred that, that should not have occurred, but it was an accident and leave it at that. I think you highlight it when you, when you apologize for it. You, you make it sound like it was something that you should apologize for. And there is not—there was no act that needed an apology. It was an inadvertent act and it should be left at that and I think the response has—needs to be apologized for by, by Karzai and the Afghan people of, of attacking and killing our men and women in uniform and, and overreacting to this, to this inadvertent mistake. That, that is, that is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did.

I'll leave it to Amy Davidson to expound:

Maybe Santorum and his fellow-candidates have been trapped in the kindergarten-delinquent classroom of the Republican primaries for so long that they think the same rules, and illogic, that help decide who the not-Romney of the week is apply everywhere. But Afghanistan is a real and dangerous place; more than two dozen people have died in the violence, including two Americans, who were assassinated in the Interior Ministry. (The Afghan government reportedly did apologize for that.) The senselessness of the response does not take away from the necessity of an apology, or from its grace.

U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, stated what should be obvious:  "We admit our mistake, we ask for forgiveness, we seek to move on."  And, as Amy Davidson concludes:  

In apologizing, we remind ourselves who we are. We also learn more about where we are, who we are talking to, and our circumstances. Having done so—done the right thing—we may reasonably conclude that we can make our apologies, and leave.

Why We Know More About War Than Peace

I love stories about military exploits and am a sucker for war movies.  (See Celluloid Nazis.)  But Adam Hochschild makes an important point that in film and virtually every other aspects of our culture we are far better at celebrating those who fight wars than those who courageously oppose them. -- Lovechilde

Going Beyond the Tale of a Boy and His Horse

By Adam Hochschild, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Well in advance of the 2014 centennial of the beginning of “the war to end all wars,” the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives. Stephen Spielberg’s War Horse opened on 2,376 movie screens and has collected six Oscar nominations, while the hugely successful play it’s based on is still packing in the crowds in New York and a second production is being readied to tour the country.

In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, Downton Abbey, has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss.  In seven episodes, its upstairs-downstairs world of forbidden love and dynastic troubles took American viewers from mid-war, 1916, beyond the Armistice, with the venerable Abbey itself turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded troops. Other dramas about the 1914-1918 war are on the way, among them an HBO-BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End quartet of novels, and a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong from an NBC-backed production company.

In truth, there’s nothing new in this.  Filmmakers and novelists have long been fascinated by the way the optimistic, sunlit, pre-1914 Europe of emperors in plumed helmets and hussars on parade so quickly turned into a mass slaughterhouse on an unprecedented scale. And there are good reasons to look at the First World War carefully and closely.

After all, it was responsible for the deaths of some nine million soldiers and an even larger number of civilians.  It helped ignite the Armenian genocide and the Russian Revolution, left large swaths of Europe in smoldering ruins, and remade the world for the worse in almost every conceivable way -- above all, by laying the groundwork for a second and even more deadly, even more global war.

There are good reasons as well for us to be particularly haunted by what happened in those war years to the country that figures in all four of these film and TV productions: Britain. In 1914, that nation was at the apex of glory, the unquestioned global superpower, ruling over the largest empire the world had ever seen. Four and a half years later its national debt had increased tenfold, more than 720,000 British soldiers were dead, and hundreds of thousands more seriously wounded, many of them missing arms, legs, eyes, genitals.

The toll fell particularly heavily on the educated classes that supplied the young lieutenants and captains who led their troops out of the trenches and into murderous machine-gun fire. To give but a single stunning example, of the men who graduated from Oxford in 1913, 31% were killed.

“Swept Away in a Red Blast of Hate”

Yet curiously, for all the spectacle of boy and horse, thundering cavalry charges, muddy trenches, and wartime love and loss, the makers of War Horse, Downton Abbey and -- I have no doubt -- the similar productions we’ll soon be watching largely skip over the greatest moral drama of those years of conflict, one that continues to echo in our own time of costly and needless wars. They do so by leaving out part of the cast of characters of that moment.  The First World War was not just a battle between rival armies, but also a powerful, if one-sided, battle between those who assumed the war was a noble crusade and those who thought it absolute madness.

The Global War On Terror: From Liberation To Assassination

By Andrew Bacevich, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

With the United States now well into the second decade of what the Pentagon has styled an “era of persistent conflict,” the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym WFKATGWOT) appears increasingly fragmented and diffuse.  Without achieving victory, yet unwilling to acknowledge failure, the United States military has withdrawn from Iraq.  It is trying to leave Afghanistan, where events seem equally unlikely to yield a happy outcome.

Elsewhere -- in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, for example -- U.S. forces are busily opening up new fronts.  Published reports that the United States is establishing “a constellation of secret drone bases” in or near the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula suggest that the scope of operations will only widen further.  In a front-page story, the New York Times described plans for “thickening” the global presence of U.S. special operations forces.  Rushed Navy plans to convert an aging amphibious landing ship into an “afloat forward staging base” -- a mobile launch platform for either commando raids or minesweeping operations in the Persian Gulf -- only reinforces the point.

Yet as some fronts close down and others open up, the war’s narrative has become increasingly difficult to discern.  How much farther until we reach the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin?  What exactly is the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin?  In fact, is there a storyline here at all?

Viewed close-up, the “war” appears to have lost form and shape.  Yet by taking a couple of steps back, important patterns begin to appear.  What follows is a preliminary attempt to score the WFKATGWOT, dividing the conflict into a bout of three rounds.  Although there may be several additional rounds still to come, here’s what we’ve suffered through thus far.

The Pentagon's Afghan Basing Plans For Prisons, Drones And Black Ops

By Nick Turse, cross-posted by Tom Dispatch

In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence.  The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.

Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity.  It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation, and dissemination” operations center -- and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars.

Nor is it an anomaly.  Despite all the talk of drawdowns and withdrawals, there has been a years-long building boom in Afghanistan that shows little sign of abating.  In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan.  Today, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs tells TomDispatch, the number tops 450.

The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility at the massive air base in Kandahar is just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has planned or underway in Afghanistan.  While some U.S. bases are indeed closing up shop or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of combat operations slowing or ending next year, as well as a withdrawal of American combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram airfields. The same is true even of some smaller camps, forward operating bases (FOBs), and combat outposts (COPs) scattered through the country’s backlands.  “Bagram is going through a significant transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office recently told Freedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication.  “We’re transitioning... into a long-term, five-year, 10-year vision for the base.”

Whether the U.S. military will still be in Afghanistan in five or 10 years remains to be seen, but steps are currently being taken to make that possible.  U.S. military publications, plans and schematics, contracting documents, and other official data examined by TomDispatch catalog hundreds of construction projects worth billions of dollars slated to begin, continue, or conclude in 2012.

While many of these efforts are geared toward structures for Afghan forces or civilian institutions, a considerable number involve U.S. facilities, some of the most significant being dedicated to the ascendant forms of American warfare: drone operations and missions by elite special operations units.  The available plans for most of these projects suggest durability.  “The structures that are going in are concrete and mortar, rather than plywood and tent skins,” says Gerdes. As of last December, his office was involved in 30 Afghan construction projects for U.S. or international coalition partners worth almost $427 million.