Thanks to the BBC, the missile defense debate can be greatly simplified.

Here's what Bush proposed and what the neocons are hyperventilating over the ending of plans for:

And here's the coverage of the AEGIS ship-based system proposed by Obama:

As you can see, coverage against actual, rather than imaginary, threats is marginal at best, and under the Bush plan was almost non-existent - unless you're worried about Russian missiles. "A better missile defense for a safer Europe," my ass. Contrary to both Bush and Obama's statements, the Russians were right to be "paranoid" about missile defense all along.

Recall, too, that Iran has no current nuclear weapons program according to both the IAEA and US intelligence. It would take at least three to five years for it to develop a nuclear-tipped missile from the day it kicks IAEA inspectors out, if it ever does.

We should be asking whether we need such a multi-billion boondoggle at all.

Crossposted at Newshoggers

A day after many pundits followed Bill Roggio freaking out about Pakistan's status as a "failed state" because the Taliban were - gasp - only 60 miles from Islamabad, comes this from Reuters.

"Our leader has ordered that Taliban should immediately be called back from Buner," Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan told Reuters. He said there were only around 100 fighters in Buner.

Government and Taliban representatives went to Buner, along with Maulana Sufi Mohammad, a radical Muslim cleric who brokered the Swat deal, to tell the fighters to vacate the district.

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I wrote earlier (at Newshoggers) that there was still an Iraq debate to be had - namely whether the US' word, as set down in the SOFA agreement with Iraq, is worth the paper it's printed on. There's a considerable body of opinion in military and neo-whatever circles that says it isn't.

Bob Fertik emails to note that, five minutes before Obama announced his withdrawal timetable, NBC was quoting commanders as saying it wasn't binding on them. Just before Obama's said "I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011," NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski told David Gregory that military commanders are making plans as if the SOFA and the orders of the Commander in Chief were irrelevant.

Miklaszewski: Secretary Gates, as early as 18 months to 2 years ago, was saying "look, everyone understands that we're going to have to start withdrawing from Iraq." But at the same time, Gates adds this caveat that he believes significant numbers of troops will remain in Iraq for years to come.

And in fact military commanders, despite this Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government that all US forces would be out by the end of 2011, are already making plans for a significant number of American troops to remain in Iraq beyond that 2011 deadline, assuming that Status of Forces Agreement agreement would be renegotiated.

And one senior military commander told us that he expects large numbers of American troops to be in Iraq for the next 15 to 20 years, David.

Gregory: 15 to 20 years, I think that takes a moment to really sink in. With a mission that is primarily what over that kind of time horizon, Mik?

Miklaszewski: Again it would evolve from a day-to-day combat mission, to more of an oversight mission. We mustn't forget the US is providing nearly 100% of all combat air support over Iraq, and the Iraqi military is not going to be ready to assume that mission within the next 18 months to 2 years, it's going to be impossible.

And there are some discussions, I know Richard Engel mentioned the area of Kirkuk up in the north recently, there are some discussions among Iraqis and I know some military commanders to establish what could end up as a permanent air base, US air base, in Kirkuk.

Gregory: Striking.

Which just goes to show that we should be very leary of leaving withdrawal up to those who have a natural inclination not to withdraw. Generations of "surprise" babies will tell you how well that works out. Bob Gates may say that senior commanders are all behind Obama's plan, but there's a lot of reporting says they aren't.

These people are treading a dangerous course, as Marc Lynch explains. He writes that "Iraqis will be watching carefully to see whether the United States honors its commitments" in the months leading up to an Iraqi referendum on the SOFA agreement on July 31st and that if they don't see the right answer then the referendum will be a resounding "no" - at which point the US will have only 12 months to get everyone out of Iraq or occupy the country illegally again.

The argument for a significant, early withdrawal of U.S. combat forces remains overwhelming. Indeed, a failure to deliver on the promise of early U.S. withdrawals is the most likely thing to cause a rapid deterioration in conditions in Iraq....The new administration will get only one chance to demonstrate the credibility of its commitments, and indefinitely leaving troops at current levels will only postpone rather than solve the problems.

The US must make a substantial down payment on withdrawal now, or suffer later. Not just in Iraq, although the problems there would be bad enough, but on the world stage.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

This Sunday, Steve Croft of 60 Minutes reported on the state of the insurgency in Pakistan, explaining it as a concerted attempt by Islamists to take over that nation. He even spoke to President Zardari:

Asked how important it is to stop extremism, President Zardari told Kroft, "It’s important enough. I lost my wife to it. My children's mother, the most populist leader of Pakistan. It's important to stop them and make sure that it doesn't happen again and they don't take over our way of life. That's what they want to do."

..."Right now, you have a situation in the Swat area. It’s only three hours from Islamabad where the Taliban is very strong there," Kroft remarked. "How did that happen?"

"It's been happening over time. And it's happened out of denial. Everybody was in denial that they're weak and they won't be able to take over. That, they won't be able to give us a challenge. And our forces weren't increased. And therefore we have weaknesses. And they are taking advantage of that weakness," Zardari explained.

Also on Sunday, news came of Pakistani attempts to sign a truce with the Taliban, one that would involve Sharia supplanting Pakistani national laws there. Pakistani officials deny any disconnect between Zardari's warning of an existential threat and the peace deal: "We are not compromising with militants, instead trying to isolate the militants, and for that I do not think America will have any objection," said Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi - but previous such truces, which were meant to end Islamist terror attacks which have plagued Pakistan, have swiftly collapsed because the Taliban know they are winning and can keep demanding concessions. Large chunks of Pakistan are now in Taliban control, and there seems to be no will in the ruling Pakistani feudal elite to seriously contest that.

Indeed, the will of the Pakistani elite may well be largely in favor of Taliban control. A disconnect between word and action exists whether Pakistani officials want to admit it or not and it shouldn't be forgotten that the Taliban and other regional Islamist militant groups are largely the making of Pakistan's ISI spy service and army in the first place. Pakistan has long conducted its foreign policy in the region by the use of these proxies and may now have "gone native", casting in their lot with their creations while pretending otherwise to ward of Western anger and to gain US military aid. Chair of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen thinks he's building trust with Zardari - the most corrupt politician in a land rife with them - and Army chief Kyani - who was the head of the ISI while their Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out a 2006 bombing spree in Mumbai and planned the 2008 attacks. One wonders how someone so gullible could rise to his position.

Even so, reaching for the military as the right hammer for every nail, especially every Pakistani nail, is unwise. Over 80% of Pakistanis see the "War on Terror" as a Western concern, one their feudal leaders have un-necessarily enmeshed themselves in. Poking the hornets nest with a stick accomplishes nothing except stirring up hornets and if the US keeps poking Pakistan, intelligence analysts have warned, its most likely just to turn that disaproval into outright anger and hasten an extremist takeover.

Meanwhile, across the border in Afghanistan, the hawks' plan for a generations-long occupation there is hitting some snags too. President Karzai has lost patience with Western leaders who talk about caring but don't seem to care enough to stop causing civilian casualties. He's indicated that he'd like to see a timetable for withdrawal and in return the Obama administration has indicated it would like to see him gone, replaced by someone more malleable and (hopefully) less corrupt in the wrong ways. Karzai said Sunday that he believed rumors about his alleged drug-lord brother were being circulated by the US to drive Karzai himself from office and he's doing some outreach to the Russians instead.

The Af/Pak knot isn't getting any easier to unentangle, but one thing is for sure - saying "trust us, we're the good Romans", as Admiral Mullen and others advocate, isn't going to help cut it.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

In an op-ed in Sunday's WaPo, CJCS Admiral Mullen advanced the theory that America is a reluctant Empire, a hegemon only because its allies trust it and want it to rescue and protect them...just like ancient Rome. To accomplish this slight-of-hand, he kicks off with a lengthy quote from Thomas F. Madden's book "Empires of Trust: How Rome Built - and America Is Building - a New World" in which vassals of Rome are shown by a Roman account as trusting Rome as a whole even while Rome's appointed overlord is robbing and enslaving them.

It's significant that Mullen chooses as his historian-of-choice a man who appeared in many rightwing venues in the wake of 9/11 explaining how the War on Terror was to be a "defensive war"...like the Crusades, according to Madden. But when it comes to Rome, Madden's revisionist thesis is that Rome, like the United States is so mistakenly believed to be, was an isolationist culture that preferred alliances to the use of force, and was pushed reluctantly into empire building by the desire to defend itself and its friends...because they were just trying to help the poor blue-painted barbarians by crucifying them. (To do this, he has to rely pretty much solely on Roman accounts, almost never hostile ones.) Note he doesn't deny America's empire exists - just the obvious reasons for it. It's simply a retelling of the British Victorian "White Man's Burden" fable for a New American Century. British Imperials compared themselves favorably to Rome too, and often depicted themselves as new, more noble, Romans just like Mullen is now doing.

Neoconservatives loved Madden's version of Empire. David Frum, for instance, noting glowingly how understandingly civilized Rome must have been to have waited 50 whole years before finally burning Carthage, enslaving its populace and ploughing the ground with salt. Others weren't so happy, especially with Madden's conclusion:

If you think the insurgency in Iraq is bad, Madden writes, then you should have lived in Jerusalem in the first two centuries and dealt with Jewish terrorists who believed that their allies the Romans represented an evil that must be destroyed at any cost.

The Romans, after much bloodshed, finally dealt with Jewish factionalism with brute force - legions retook Jerusalem, destroyed the Holy Temple and forced Jews to focus their religion more on synagogues and rabbinic studies than the Temple itself, blunting some of the messianic zealotry responsible for the violence.

Madden believes that the lesson for America from this ancient insurgency is that the war on terror must be fought on the religious front as well. The only way to win both militarily and politically is to modernize Islam as the Romans changed Judaism to fit into their empire.

That is, by sword, flame and exile.

That the senior uniformed officer of America's military is a fan of Madden's feeble excuses for the cruelties of war and empire is worrying. That Mullen is writing neocon-style "Hoo-ah! we're the Roman Empire - and we're proud of it!" op-eds is downright scary.

(Nicole): It's odd to me that these historical analogies seem to stop before their logical conclusion. Doesn't Mullen know that the Roman Empire didn't end so well for the Romans? Is that where he thinks we should go?

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Tom Ricks, hagiographer to generals and much-lauded fellow of the Obama administration's "counterinsurgency HQ" at the Center for a New American Security, finally comes out and says it: the US has accepted the White Man's Burden from previous colonial empires and will be meddling in the Middle East for centuries, "following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British".

For thousands of years, it has been the fate of the West's great powers to become involved in the region's politics. [as if they had no choice - C] Since the Suez Crisis of 1956, when British and French influence suffered a major reduction, it has been the United States' turn to take the lead there. And sitting on that wall, it struck me that the more we talk about getting out of the Middle East, the more deeply we seem to become engaged in it.

President Obama campaigned on withdrawing from Iraq, but even he has talked about a post-occupation force. The widespread expectation inside the U.S. military is that we will have tens of thousands of troops there for years to come. Indeed, in his last interview with me last November, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told me that he would like to see about 30,000 troops still there in 2014 or 2015.

...So, to address the perceptive question that Petraeus posed during the invasion: How does this end?

Probably the best answer came from Charlie Miller, who did the first draft of policy development and presidential reporting for Petraeus. "I don't think it does end," he replied. "There will be some U.S. presence, and some relationship with the Iraqis, for decades. . . . We're thinking in terms of Reconstruction after the Civil War."

He goes on to explain that, no matter when the US eventually leaves, there'll be a civil war in Iraq.

Toby Dodge, a British defense expert who was an occasional adviser to Petraeus, "the current Iraqi government is full of Iranian clients. You'll almost certainly end up with a rough and ready dictatorship . . . that will be in hock to Iran."

...Maj. Matt Whitney, who spent 2006 advising Iraqi generals, predicted that once U.S. forces were out of the way, Iraqi commanders would relapse to the brutal ways of earlier days: "Saddam Hussein taught them how to [suppress urban populations] and we've just reinforced that lesson for four years," he said. "They're ready to kill people -- a lot of people -- in order to get stability in Iraq."

..."When you got to know them and they'd be honest with you, every single one of them thought that the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq was absolutely ludicrous," said Maj. Chad Quayle, who advised an Iraqi battalion in south Baghdad during the surge.

So can someone explain to me how squandering "blood, treasure, prestige and credibility" for decades to simply delay the inevitable is better than getting out now? And if that explanation is forthcoming from military-enamoured liberal COIN hawks, maybe while they're at it they can explain why, in extolling the virtues of their new and improved war-fighting and nation-building formula, they keep neglecting to be specific about the generations-long colonialism it entails.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

ONE THIRD of all the weapons procured for the Afghan security forces are missing and can be presumed sold onto the black market. Worth roughly $40 million at wholesale cost (and weighing in excess of 200 tons) to the Pentagon, would anyone like to guess at the black market value? The report has been compiled by congressional auditors, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

It found that, in the four years up to June 2008, the US military failed to keep complete records on some 222,000 weapons entering the country.

The report will be discussed in the US House of Representatives on Thursday.

It states that weapons supplied by the US to the Afghan military "are at serious risk of theft or loss".

The report says:

• US military officials failed to keep proper records on about 87,000 rifles, pistols, mortars and other weapons sent to Afghanistan between December 2004 and June 2008 - about a third of all the weapons sent
• There was a similar lack of management of a further 135,000 light weapons donated to Afghan forces via the US military by 21 countries
• The military failed even to record the serial numbers of some 46,000 weapons, making it impossible to confirm receipt of weapons or identify any which had fallen into the hands of militants
• The serial numbers of 41,000 weapons were recorded, but US military officials still had no idea where they were

"Lapses in accountability occurred throughout the supply chain," concludes the report, which is due to be discussed on Thursday at a panel hearing of a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee.

In response, the Pentagon agreed that it needed more people to help train the Afghanistan government to track the weapons, the AP news agency reported.

Which is to say the Pentagon didn't figure that much out after the first time this happened.

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There's a new poll out from Gallup and USA Today which one is headlining as showing there's "no mandate for criminal prosecutions" and the other is headlining as showing that "most want an enquiry" into whether Bush's anti-terror policies broke the law.

Those headlines aren't mutually incompatible. There's a hard core of around 30% of Americans who still cleave to Bush as a hero, an unsung genius who can do no wrong and think that a president can just declare actions legal and be done with it. There's a slightly larger core of those who want America to return to the fold of the rule of law, presidential accountability and humanity. They've done some homework and realise that anti-terror tactics during the Bush Years were built upon the kind of deliberately twisted legal reasoning that got Nazi lawyers hanged at Nuremberg. And there's a group - the undecideds - who want to know more before they make their minds up, and would understandably prefer the evidence to come from official governmental sources rather than liberal blogs and human rights groups. They want to trust their government and want that government to bring the facts out in the open. That's just human nature and trying to spin the two different headlines about results of this poll as some liberal conspiracy is just being dishonest.

So give the people a Truth Commission. Let the evidence be made public in official hearings rather than tucked away in little-read reports from human rights groups about the Defense Department's co-operation in running CIA secret prisons or in obscure blog posts citing studies showing the military have "disappeared over 24,000 video tapes of detainee interrogations. Let's not rely on whether foreign officials and judges bow to blackmail in hoping to get details of why someone had his penis repeatedly sliced because he once read a satirical article online. Let's get those Bush officials who have admitted their administration engaged in torture up on the witness stand, under oath.

We need to send an overwhelming and clear message to Obama and those among his cabinet who don't want to see justice served. Two thirds of America want this. Give it to them if that's the people's will - that's called "moving forward". Then as the evidence unfolds we'll see how America feels about prosecutions, and about making sure such inhuman acts can never again by perpetrated wholesale by a White House under cover of blanket secrecy and legal lies. I'm betting that America will overwhelmingly want to see those guilty have their day in court.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Thank you, Glenn Greenwald, for taking Marc Ambinder out to the woodshed in respect of his shameless stenography, and granting of anonymity, on the Obama administration's weak excuses as they try to justify perpetuating their continuance of Bush's blanket state secret defense.

As Glenn, a lawyer, points out to ( self-confessed Halperin-wannabe) Ambinder:

If, as Obama's Atlantic spokesman claims ... the Obama DOJ needed more time to review what they wanted to do -- then the solution is easy and obvious: you ask the court for more time. You don't march into court and explicitly advocate a Bush weapon that you've spent the last several years excoriating as a dangerous abuse of power.

...the alternative to Bush's lawsuit-killing use of the privilege is not to waive the privilege entirely. Everyone -- including the ACLU -- acknowledges that the Government should have the right to assert the State Secrets privilege on a document-by-document basis. The controversy was and is only about one thing: the use of the privilege to compel the dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance -- in other words, to convert the State Secrets privilege from what it always was (a focused evidentiary privilege) to what it was never intended to be (full-scale immunity for government lawbreakers from all judicial accountability).

...Obama has banned rendition to countries (such as Egypt and Jordan) where torture is likely. If there are still specific rendition agreements that the Obama DOJ thinks are secret and need to be protected, then they can and should assert the privilege as to those documents. That has nothing to do with demanding that the entire lawsuit be dismissed in advance.

As Wizner told me this morning, there is no reason why the ACLU would even need those supposedly secret documents to make their case. Whether the U.S. has rendition agreements with Jordan or Morocco, or what the content of those agreements are, is irrelevant. Besides, other countries -- such as Sweden, which already investigated these claims and fully disclosed their involvement in the CIA's rendition program when awarding the victims compensation -- have already made certain that many of these facts are disclosed.

Them's the facts, unspinnable.

But unfortunately Ambinder is only one among several who seem to be vying to become the next generation of stenographers with access, and thus secure their places among the journalistic elite alongside Thomas Ricks, David Sanger, George Will and Mark Halperin. They know from those previous alumni's examples that the only way to get seriously good insider access is to faithfully copy down and report the news in exactly the way unofficially officials ask them to - no attribution required. They've been called "lapdogs" of democracy rather than the watchdogs they should be, and they are a bipartisan breed.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

April 2008: BBC's Newsnight interviews US Judge Advocate Diane Beaver about the Bush administration's legallese cover-story for war crimes.

I truly loathe the notion of torturers and those who ordered torture getting away with it.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called for the commission as way to heal what he called sharp political divides and to prevent future abuses.

He compared it to other truth commissions, such as one in South Africa that investigated the apartheid era.

"We need to come to a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past," Leahy said in a speech to the Georgetown University law school.

"Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened," he said. "And we do that to make sure it never happens again," Leahy said.

I'm unclear on how just saying "now we know" will stop any of it happening again. Trials and prison sentences would surely accomplish far more as a deterrent to possible future copycats - that's partly why we don't just slap the wrists of abusers or rapists and say "we know what you did!"

Leahy said he had not yet begun to promote the idea with the administration of President Barack Obama or with the Democratically controlled Congress. But he suggested it could be formed by both Congress and the White House, and said the panel must have credibility across the political spectrum.

Issues to investigate would include the Justice Department's firings of several U.S. attorneys, which Leahy said may have been motivated by a White House aim to influence elections, policies on the treatment of terrorism suspects and other areas "where (congressional) committees were lied to."

This included the war in Iraq, he said. "There were lies told to the American people all the way through."

Screw bipartisanship and "credibility across the political spectrum". When one party's senior leadership for eight years has deliberately broken international and US laws while their supporters make excuses for them, they should be treated as having given up any right to respect or to having a voice in how their crimes are handled. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party's leadership seems divided into two camps. One cannot shake off its fear of the GOP's noise machine and its fear of losing elections to do what is right. The other apparently has no intention of looking too hard into crimes they might want to commit themselves.

I firmly believe America can handle the truth - my experience as an ex-pat living here is that Americans are mainly good and just and I believe that if all the secrets are revealed in courts of law then Americans will be outraged and demand justice - but its political leadership either cannot or will not.

Crossposted from Newshoggers