Bob Herbert at the NY Times had an impassioned op-ed last week on the insanity of our forces staying in Afghanistan even as all indications note that we're not making any progress in that country. He calls it "reading from a lunatic's manual."

War is a meat grinder for service members and their families. It grinds people up without mercy, killing them and inflicting the worst kinds of wounds imaginable, physical and psychological. The Pentagon is trying to cope with the surge in suicides, but it is holding a bad hand: the desperate shortage of troops has forced military officials to lower the bar for enlistment, thus letting in people whose drug and alcohol abuse or other behavioral problems would previously have kept them out. And the multiple deployments (four, five and six tours in the war zones) have jacked up stress levels to the point where many just can’t take it.

The G.I.’s have fought valiantly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands have died and many, many more have suffered. But the wars have been conducted as if their leaders had been reading from a lunatic’s manual. This is not Germany or Japan or the old Soviet Union that we’re fighting. But after nearly a decade, neither war has been won and there is no prospect of winning.

And speaking of a lunatic's manual, here's Sven Ortmann to talk about FM 3-24, the Army's counterinsurgency manual, and its waning influence on current operations.

The tragedy is probably that the new COIN theory is likely a fair weather theory. It works if the population is willing to allow it to work. It's nothing that you can enforce.

The proper time for the new COIN theory's application in Iraq was probably 2003 and for its application in Afghanistan was probably 2002-2004. The populations were probably ready to cooperate as envisaged by the COIN theory at that time.

War sows much hate and mistrust. The environment got tainted too much and COIN was obviously unable to deliver convincing results under such conditions.

Given the current trend of things in Afghanistan, if President Obama and SecDef Gates is really serious about reclaiming "efficiencies" in defense spending, maybe they ought to think a little harder about the billions spent every month in that country, not to mention the wisdom of retaining 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Sven appropriately quotes Winston Churchill: "The Americans will always do the right thing ... after they've exhausted all the alternatives."

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Rep. Paul Broun, R-GA, was on Fox and Friends yesterday touting his proposal to have Congress officially designate 2010 "The Year of the Bible", and he had an interesting rationale for it:

Broun: Well, it's all about freedom, actually. The Bible was the basis of our laws, it was the basis of the Constitution of the United States, the Declaration of Independence -- the Bible was the founding source.

Hmmmmm. Well, some of us have heard otherwise, but OK, whatever.

You may remember Rep. Broun. Last November he won lots of friends on both sides of the aisle and in the White House when he warned that Obama was preparing a Hitler-like dictatorship with his civilian-youth-corps proposal: "That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did ... When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

Broun is, of course, asking President Obama to issue this proclamation. And what will Obama achieve by issuing it?

Broun: The Bible was the basis of our nation. And as we look to the future, and as we deal with our economic problems, as we're stealing our grandchildren's future, we need to look at the principles that were taught Biblically. When our Founding Fathers established this country, they established it on freedom. That's what the Bible teaches. Every single one of our laws are based on the Biblical precepts. And we need to turn back to those precepts if our country's going to be strong and great again.

It's absolutely critical for us to understand what freedom's all about, what our own responsibility is all about, and what government's function within our society is supposed to be. And we have forgotten that in Washington. We are heading down a road that's going to destroy our nation. We are headed toward a total government control of everybody's lives -- a loss of freedom, a loss of our money, a loss of our private property -- and it's extremely critical now for us to go back to those foundational principles that this country was founded upon.

That's the reason a proclamation of "The Year of the Bible" will help people understand what the importance of those, um, principles are all about as we go forward to make our nation secure, free, and great again.

Oh. OK. So you want President Obama to issue this proclamation so right-wing nutcases like yourself can hijack the entire text of the Bible to promote your teabagging brand of politics. Whose entire purpose is to undermine the agenda of both the president and the Democratic Congress.

Right. Well, lots of luck with that, Rep. Broun.

You can't make this stuff up.

You'd have thought MoveOn sold a copy of "how to make a nuclear bomb in two simple steps" to undesirables the way the media has treated them, but when the "Kristol Conservative"---Michael Ledeen attacks Gen. Abizaid on the pages of the NRO because he had the audacity to say that we could live with a nuclear Iran because we survived the Soviet Union and...he topped it off by saying that war with Iran would be devastating to everybody but that's just fine by the media...

Digby has the details....

This is why the pearl clutching among the right wingers and their media allies is so laughable. On the right, they treat all Generals and troops who disagree with them like garbage, in the most despicable terms possible. Look what they did to John Kerry. Why any DC liberal takes their little "patriotic" game seriously is beyond me.

You'd be amazed how often there's a 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Like creationists, greenhouse doubters really need to stay away from testable predictions.

The conspiracy lovefest that is the extreme Right.

I knew the Grand Obstructionist Party was bad, I didn't know it was this bad.

So let the Republican "rebels" talk about jumping on Iraq, and keep pointing the others at the ever-closer cliff.

How do you get someone charged with a "genocide" while all the "victims" are still alive? Like this.

Yeltsin's P.M. tells the neocon AEI think-tank that Reagan's arms buildup was less important than the Saudi royal family and Deutsche Bank in the fall of the Soviet Union.

Bizarre Idea of the Day: build the Israeli wall on the Mexican border (presumably without immigant labor).

Is this really the kind of "emotion-free crisis management" that's looked for in a President?

Fear in the newsroom makes for a lapdog media.

Guest round up by Cernig @ The Newshoggers (newshog AT gmail DOT com).

The Belgravia Dispatch: Large swaths of the Middle East and South Asia are in turmoil. What follows are (somewhat random) dispatches meant to give a sense of the depth of the multiple crises that are contributing to a destabilization of the wider region.

Amygdala: How did the U.S. come to adopt interrogation techniques copied from the Soviet Union?  And speaking of Russia...

Empire Burlesque: Holy Terror

The Pump Handle: When a man with extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) is told not to board a plane and then does so anyway, you have to expect the public health bloggers to come out in force.

King of Zembla: Rants worth reading...

Angry Bear: Comparing how the various Presidents did according to measures like real growth rates, abortions, national debt, etc. So far, the series show Democrats doing better than Republicans. (A not complete list can be found here.)  Here's an update...

Duncan responds to Josh's question on the seventies. I went to elementary school in the late sixties and junior high and high school in the seventies. The threat of Nukes from the Soviet Union was real and we were constantly reminded about them. Russia was the bogeyman in the closet at night. Glenn Greenwald on Yoo: "Bush followers distort history to justify their radical changes" Arthur writes extensively on torture.

Remember this? Here's some audio by the very dangerous John Yoo. No, it is not a joke.

Download | play -MP3

Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Yoo actually fielded the question like someone asked him what flavor of ice cream he prefers. I was so stunned listening to his response to the question, I had to ask around to see if this was a valid Q&A.

The Black Hole where the press used to be

via Driftglass :

How bad is it? Well, what do you think future generations will make of the fact that with little more than publicly available video clips and clever writing, John Stewart makes better ratings and tell more pure truth in any given four minutes of what is clearly labeled "Fake News" than the Empires of Mainstream Media can manage with a multi-billion dollar budget, a global infrastructure, and a 100,000 Klieg lights, satellites and pairs of hands?

There is nothing in modern history short of the collapse of the Soviet Union with which I can compare it for the scope and speed at which the implosion came, and in the great halls and palaces of Big Media we are left only with trivia and circuses. They have fallen, and they are never coming back....

Would that there was a Free Press who would report it?

On Thursday, Georgia Republican Congressman Paul Broun insisted he would not sit with Democrats during next week's State of the Union address when "Barack Obama spews his venom." That's quite a charge, coming as it does from a man who equated health care reform to the "War of Yankee Aggression", compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx, and warned Democrats would declare martial law.

Broun's latest tirade came in response to a radio talk show caller who requested "you would ask the Republicans in the Senate and House to not take the bait and sit with the Democrats in the State of the Union speech."

"I agree with you wholeheartedly...And sitting together being kissy kissy is just another way to try to silence Republicans and also to show, to keep the American people from seeing how few of them there are in the US House now, and when people stand up to what the Democrats are doing when Barack Obama spews his venom, then if they're scattered throughout the Republicans, it won't be as noticeable if the Republicans sit apart."

As it turns out, it was Broun who began spewing his poison at the President before Barack Obama had taken the oath of office.

Just days after the 2008 election, Politico reported, Broun said "he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist dictatorship."

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may -- may not, I hope not -- but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did," Broun said. "When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

By August 2009, the Tea Party and Bircher favorite and self-proclaimed "freedom fighter" added Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to his warnings about a coming declaration of martial law:

He also spoke of a "socialistic elite" - Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - who might use a pandemic disease or natural disaster as an excuse to declare martial law.

"They're trying to develop an environment where they can take over," he said. "We've seen that historically."

That September, Broun again decried President Obama's supposed authoritarian streak.

He told a meeting of the Morgan County Republicans on Wednesday night that Obama already has or will have the three things he needs to make himself a dictator: a national police force, gun control and control over the press.

"He has the three things that are necessary to establish an authoritarian government," Broun said. "And so we need to be ever-vigilant, because freedom is precious."

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