I'll be taking some time off to get over the flu. Talk to you soon.Jeff' [...]
edited by: Scott White,
Hampton Roads Editor
I'll be taking some time off to get over the flu. Talk to you soon.
Iran has announced that it will build 10 new nuclear facilities. Big deal.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the facilities are necessary to meet the country's goal to one day generate up to 20,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, a grand ambition.
[...]
President Obama’s Dec. 1 speech about his decision on the Bananastans (Afghanistan and Pakistan) is unlikely to surprise anyone. The sanctioned leaks have been coming fast and furious the past few days, and it appears that Gen. Stanley McChrystal will get what he asked for. Maybe.
[...]
President Obama will announce his big decision about Afghanistan on Tuesday. The sanctioned leaks about what he’ll say are coming fast and furious.
According to various reports, he’ll commit somewhere between 30,000 and 34,000 extra U.S. troops to the region. When he announces that, [...]
Are we going to escalate the war in Afghanistan for the sake of saving face? Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have to stay the course in Afghanistan to deny al-Qaeda a “propaganda win.”
A propaganda win, as best I can tell, is a condition where [...]
President Barack Obama is about to make the biggest mistake of 21st century by sending 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
We currently have 68,000 troops in Afghanistan. NATO countries supply an additional 42,000. There are maybe 100 al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and maybe 300 in Pakistan. [...]
Michael O’Hanlon, a war-hawk tank thinker with the Brookings Institution who encouraged us to invade Iraq, says we should “remain hopeful” about Afghanistan. Even though the news about Afghanistan has been “dispiriting,” O’Hanlon tells us, “Most foreign and Afghan officials and officers who I encountered on [...]
Reptilian former presidential candidate Fred Thompson says that President Obama’s delay in making a decision of Afghanistan is “evidence” that the war is already lost. “Our enemies are emboldened,” says Thompson, “our allies are discouraged.” He says Obama’s “heart’s not in it” and that he is too obsessed [...]
“It really boils down to one of two decisions, getting out or getting in.”
--President Lyndon Johnson, speaking about Vietnam.
“Soldiers came to school today,” announced the Kindergarten kid. "They only kill bad people. They don't kill good people." This is story comes' [...]
“It really boils down to one of two decisions, getting out or getting in.”
--President Lyndon Johnson, speaking about Vietnam.
“Soldiers came to school today,” announced the Kindergarten kid. "They only kill bad people. They don't kill good people." This is story' [...]
The mainstream media’s coverage of Iran continues to suck. Joe Klein of TIME magazine just posted a short piece that mentioned “the discovery of the nuclear reactor at Qom, a secret facility that seems to have been built for research into weaponization. The Russians were as surprised by this [...]
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on the Sunday gab circuit that rooting al-Qaeda out from Afghanistan is [...]
The Independent posted a Nov. 15 story regarding allegations of sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers. The Ministry of Defense is investigating 33 new torture cases. Human rights groups caution that the British Army may face hundreds of claims of sexual and physical [...]
It’s tough to tell what’s going to happen with Af-Pak. We get so many conflicting reports.
For a time, we heard that President Obama was leaning toward sending 30,000 additional troops there, and that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, [...]
Our counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine is a sham.
The Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual says “The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.” A pretty good rule of thumb in political science says that if you [...]
Mikhail Gorbachev, head of state of the Soviet Union when it withdrew from Afghanistan, has two words for Barack Obama: get out. Gorbachev, now 78, said in an interview in Berlin that he sees no chance of American success in Afghanistan even with more troops. “I [...]
Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen finally told it like it is. "If we don't get a level of legitimacy and governance [in Afghanistan],” he confessed, “then all the troops in the world aren't going to make any difference."
We’re not going to get legitimacy and governance in [...]
National Security Adviser James Jones says, "Reports that President Obama has made a decision about Afghanistan are absolutely false." That’s maybe good news. It maybe means Obama is coming to his senses and is ready to pull the plug on this Af-Pak madness.
Various reports [...]
A pair of recent stories by Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad suggested that Hillary Clinton had cut a big league dope deal with Pakistan’s military and intelligence services to negotiate with the Taliban and give the U.S. a face-saving path to exit Afghanistan. The story was [...]
Afghanistan has become a Mel Brooks movie.
President Hamid Karzai handpicked an election commission that threw the election his way. UN overseers declared the election was crooked and decreed that a runoff was required. Karzai didn’t want to face a runoff, but John Kerry and other [...]
Adnkronos International (AKI), the Italian news agency, reports that the U.S., in the person of Hillary Clinton, pressured Hamid Karzai rival Abdullah Abdullah to drop out of the presidential race. The way AKI describes it this was the biggest foreign policy coup of the Obama administration to date.
[...]
Daniel Ellsburg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers that revealed Lyndon Johnson went along with a war he knew was unwinnable, says we’re repeating Vietnam in Afghanistan. In an interview with The Real News, Ellsberg remarks “No victory lies ahead in Afghanistan” and “they’re not going to get effective [...]
So this platoon comes back to an Afghan village it hasn’t visited in three months. One of the village elders tells the platoon commander, Lieutenant Thomas Goodman, "We ask you not to come here. It is better for us, and better for you." As the platoon leaves the village, [...]
As Colonel Tim Reese noted in July, “The ineffectiveness and corruption of [Iraqi government] Ministries is the stuff of legend.” Of Iraq’s security forces, Reese reported that “Corruption among officers is widespread, Cronyism and nepotism are rampant in the assignment and promotion system,” and “Laziness is endemic.”
[...]NATO ministers were hot to trot for Gen. Stan McChrystal’s Afghanistan escalation scheme, but Europe isn’t likely to send any more troops to the fray. Opinion polls in most European countries show clear majorities in favor of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso says, [...]
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton makes one pine for the doltish Condi Rice. Rice was a bumbling tool of Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives. Hillary, on the other hand, is a full partner in the warmongery.
She’s told the Iranians they have to accept the [...]
Who’s the bigger fraud: Hamid Karzai or the phalanx of western toads who are hailing him as the “legitimate” president of Afghanistan?
To review the bidding: Karzai appointed a gang of crooks as election officials who threw the original election in his direction. [...]
Abdullah Abdullah says he won’t participate in Afghanistan’s run-off election because it will be too crooked, so crook Hamid Karzai wins. Everything we do in AfPak from now on, counterinsurgency-wise, will be in support of what is likely the most corrupt government on earth. It will be a [...]
In an Oct. 26 op-ed piece, David Ingatius of the Washington Post tells us everything we need to know about why mainstream media war coverage is so tainted. The article is 750 words worth of war pornography, verbal sex performed on Gen. David Petraeus, who gives Ignatius [...]
President Obama met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday Oct. 30 for another skull session on Afghanistan. Another reason not to escalate: long term consequences on personnel and equipment of land warfare services that have been strained by eight years of dual wars.
Obama [...]
Author Victor Sebestyen notes in a recent New York Times editorial that in 1988, then deputy director of the CIA Robert Gates bet $25 that the Russian army would not leave Afghanistan. Now, Gates is assuring our NATO allies that the US “has no intention of pulling [...]
Missing from the debates regarding our wars these days is their moral and legal aspects.
UN human rights investigator Philip Alston says the U.S. needs to explain the legal basis for assassinating suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan with drone strikes. That’s an explanation I’d like [...]
Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s insistence on a total of 650,000 counterinsurgency troops—including NATO and Afghan forces—is based on a ratio in the military’s new counterinsurgency manual. Isn’t that convenient?
Rupert Murdoch’s TIMESONLINE reports that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff are preparing to persuade President Barack [...]
The New York Times tells us that Obama’s advisers are curling themselves around a strategy that will protect “about 10 population centers” in Afghanistan. The debate is no longer over whether to send more troops but over how many more to send. Obama hasn’t made his mind up yet, [...]
“I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan.”
--Matthew Hoh
Foreign Service Officer Matthew Hoh’s resignation letter is a stunning refutation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s proposal to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Hoh, [...]
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander in Afghanistan, has put on quite a show of insubordination in the past month or so in an attempt to cram his escalation plan down the throat of the America public. He has waged open information warfare in the media, right wing and otherwise, against President [...]
Despite the public relations campaign that has so many folks convinced the surge in Iraq was a success, the country is still a zoo. It has been almost three years since the surge strategy was announced and David Petraeus was installed as commander in Iraq. As Professor and retired [...]
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has supposedly cautioned his generals against publicly challenging the White House, but it looks like Stanley McChrystal didn’t get the memo. McChrystal’s unrestricted information warfare against President Obama continues.
The rift between the Pentagon and the administration has grown so wide it may [...]
Tom Shanker of the New York Times tells us that NATO defense ministers have given their “broad endorsement” to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s plan to escalate the Afghanistan war into a full-Monty counter insurgency effort. NATO defense ministers love Afghanistan; it justifies their phony-baloney jobs.
Like [...]
It’s high time we adopted the isolationist policy recommended by our founding fathers. I’m not talking about withdrawing from the world as an economic and diplomatic superpower. I’m suggesting that we just say no to strewing our military strength far and wide every time we have a temper [...]
Iran has agreed to a draft agreement to send reactor-grade, low-enriched uranium to Russia for further refining in order to produce medical isotopes. That’s good news, a major step in Iran’s willingness to make its nuclear program wholly transparent and assure the world it has no interest in [...]
We have come to expect right-wing wind from the Wall Street Journal, especially from its editorial department. The Oct. 21 edition contains a op-ed piece by Thane Rosenbaum titled “Evening the Score in Afghanistan” argues that we need to escalate that war for one reason: revenge. Rosenbaum, a professor [...]
The long war generals are still trying to shoehorn President Obama into going along with their agenda, and they’re not being a bit subtle about it.
Gen. Ray Odierno, U.S. commander in Iraq, says he may not be able to meet President Barack Obama’s promise to [...]
It appears that the only reliably non-fraudulent vote in Afghanistan’s election was the one sitting president Hamid Karzai cast for himself. A picture in the Guardian of Karzai holding up his purple finger makes him look like he’s flipping off the universe. We haven’t seen a smirk like that [...]
John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says it’s a bad idea to send more troops to Afghanistan until it shows it has “good governance.” When does Kerry, or anyone else, think Afghanistan will ever have good governance? It never has before.
"It" [...]
Professor Austin Long of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs has a good article in Foreign Policy that argues a light foot print counter-terror effort in Afghanistan would work better than the massive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign that Gen. Stanley McChrystal is proposing.
He’s [...]
Arianna Huffington upped the ante. In a Sept. 18 McClatchy article that launched the Pentagon’s propaganda campaign to elbow President Obama into surrendering to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s demands to super-escalate our cross-purpose war in Afghanistan, unnamed senior military officers suggested that McChrystal might resign if he doesn’t get [...]
Stars and garters, I agree with Tom Friedman of the New York Times about something--sort of. In an Oct. 13 opinion piece titled “Not Good Enough,” Friedman argues that, “when you are mounting a counterinsurgency campaign, the local government is the critical bridge between your troops and your goals. [...]
Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that further sanctions against with Iran about its nuclear program would be “counterproductive.” Good for Sergey. I can’t tell where Hillary thinks she’s going with her approach to Iran. From the sound of her rhetoric, you’d think [...]
Say what you will about President Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, but the last person on earth suited to criticize Obama vis-à-vis peace is John Bolton, the least diplomatic diplomat in American history. On FOX News, Bolton said the Nobel is a political tool that “high [...]
How is it that a United States president who just won the Nobel Peace Prize is having such a tough time telling one of his generals that he doesn’t want to escalate a war that doesn’t enhance America’s national security?
Pouring more blood and national treasure into Afghanistan [...]
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who has become the point man for the long war mafia, delivered his ultimatum to President Barack Obama on Friday, Oct. 9. As has been his practice over the past several weeks, McChrystal proxy-leaked details of his demands through the Wall Street Journal, the New York [...]
It has become obvious that the Pentagon and its supporters are waging information warfare against the commander in chief, President Barack Obama. Right-wing echo chamberlain John L. Perry of NewsMax.com escalated the conflict in a Sept. 29 article in which he states that [...] 
There is no such thing a "victory" in the kinds of wars we’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The best one can hope for in these types of conflicts – counterinsurgency efforts in far-flung corners of the globe with fuzzy objectives and vague necessity – is [...]
The world is witnessing a contest to see who can act more stupidly: the Iranians or us. The sides are evenly matched. Iran has Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a president and we have Hillary Clinton for a Secretary of State. Hillary doesn’t seem to know a nuclear [...] 
Time magazine’s Joe Klein observes that the leak of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s report on Afghanistan to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post was “a serious breach of conduct by someone, possibly in the military (or a supporter the military's position). This was an [...] 
This Polish missile defense system walks into a bar at noon and says, “Give me six shots of Vodka.”
“How can you afford to get drunk in the middle of a business day?” the bartender asks.
“Easy,” the Polish missile defense [...]
As journalist Robert Dreyfuss recently remarked, “The hawks, neoconservatives, and Israeli hardliners are squealing” over the fact that we’re going to have high-level talks with Iran. Neocon poster-child Bill Kristol calls the arrangement “Obama’s message of weakness.” It’s actually a show of strength [...]
I keep finding further proof that our ever increasing but directionless escalation of the Bananastan* conflict is the maddest military misadventure in human history. A former colleague recently sent me information regarding the newly formed Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell (PACC). From the looks of things, PACC [...]
The long war just got longer, by fiat of Minister of Peace Robert Gates. In an interview with al Jazeera’s Abderrahim Foukara, Gates said, "both Afghanistan and Pakistan can count on us for the long term." To paraphrase the punch line to a joke [...]
"Strategy is fundamentally about identifying or creating asymmetric advantages that can be exploited to help achieve one’s ultimate objectives despite resource and other constraints."
– Andrew Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts, Regaining Strategic Competence,September 2009
The problem with retired Army light colonel [...]
We’re going through Bananastan* war strategies like they’re Pez candies. As Jason Ditz of Antiwar.com has noted, General Stanley McChrystal’s new report on Afghanistan "admitted that the current strategy, which was itself a new strategy presented only five months ago to replace" [...]
In golf and other sports, a "mulligan" is a second chance to get something right, sometimes referred to as a "do-over." In most sports, one do-over is all you get, and sports are just games. In war, humanity’s deadliest undertaking, the folks in charge [...]
A singular absurdity of the 21st century is that the nation that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined needs to hire mercenaries to fight wars against enemies who have no defense budget at all.
An [...]
Those of you still hoping for “change” can forget it. Young Mr. Obama is working the same number that young Mr. Bush pulled on us. In Obama’s address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, Arizona on August 17, he made [...]
Iraq is back in the commode mode. Violence there is on the rise again. According to Colonel Timothy Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, the political goals of the surge have not been met and never will be. Iraq’s government [...]
by Jeff Huber
Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London has set a new standard in canard journalism. The headline of an Aug. 3 story exclaims, “Iran is ready to build an N-bomb—it is just waiting for the Ayatollah’s order.” The first sentence reads, “Iran has perfected [...]
The Bananastans, the banana republic-style tar pits in Central Asia that we’ve stumbled into, have rapidly become a bigger cluster bomb than Iraq ever was.
At his Senate confirmation hearing, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said the “measure of effectiveness” in Afghanistan “will not be [...]
“If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” -- Sun Tzu
The New York Times reports that those wily guerillas in Afghanistan are throwing a curve ball at us. They’re fighting [...]
The demonizing of Iran has become the lamest running gag in the history of international relations.
A July 17 article at The Guardian leads with “In preparation for a possible attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, two Israeli' [...]
I tend to regard Dick Cheney the way most of us divorced folks probably think of our ex-spouses. The ex-spouses are going to hell and revenge is already ours, so why waste our breath on them? It’s likewise with Cheney. He’s out of power, his next [...] 
A 5 July story by David Sanger of the New York Times typifies how completely our mainstream media have been bulldozed by the warmongery’s propaganda machine. “Despite Crisis, Policy on Iran Is Engagement” states that “the accelerating crackdown on opposition leaders in Iran” will not [...] 
It ran in the Los Angeles Times so it’s official: the key to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s success in the Bananastans will be a “civilian surge.” The thinking apparently goes that if McChrystal stops killing as many Afghans as he used to when he was head [...] 
Contrary to what the most recent U.S. president named George told you, the oceans are “still there” and they still protect America. There is no evildoing navy or air force that can haul enough wild-eyed Islamofabulists here to conquer and occupy us. Another 9/11 will [...] 
“The Art of War for Dummies” discussed how poorly America’s uniformed and civilian leadership understand foreign policy and war’s place in it. “The New Praetorians” explores how we’re about to turn yet another corner on the road to Palookaville.
The MOOSEMUSS principles of [...]
Tom Shanker and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times tell us that General Stan McChrystal has been given “carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans, as he moves to carry out an ambitious new strategy that envisions [...] 
Yet another take on the start of the Art of War series.
Military precision is to precision what Kenny G is to jazz. So it is that the art of war—known in our command and staff colleges as operational art—has a language so vague [...]
Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our new Bananastan war chief, may be more dangerous and even crazier than his boss, Gen. David Petraeus of Central Command. McChrystal reportedly eats one meal a day and sleeps three hours a night. We can’t know for sure if [...] 
Thomas E. Ricks, erstwhile journalist and author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, has become the embodiment of the warmongery’s moral and intellectual duplicity.
Ricks’s most recent 15 minutes of fame involved an appearance at a [...]
The recent announcement of General David McKiernan’s permanent transfer to Fort Palooka is the latest punch line in our Bananastan farce. Defense secretary Robert Gates claims that McKiernan’s relief as commander in Afghanistan merely reflected a need for “fresh thinking,” but even the war [...] 
The U.S. Navy is fumbling a blue and golden opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of its maritime global reach capability (and justify its phony baloney budget) in the age of fourth generation warfare. Admiral Gary Roughead, who as Chief of Naval Operations is the [...] 
Remember when we all thought Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Malachi was just another Ahmed Pyle fresh off the bus from Palookadad? Now look at him: he’s a Machiavelli-class political operative, the head of a propped up state who just told his masters to drive [...] 
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
– Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
A new world order [...]
The late William F. Buckley, political conservative icon and founder of National Review, must be clawing at his coffin lid. The print version of National Review, while Buckley held the reins, was often an over-the-top exposition of the more unsavory facets of the political right, but [...] 
We’re a decade into the new American century, the neoconservatives are still leading the country on a march to the cliff, and most of the citizenry still hasn’t caught on to what’s happening.
I’ve been bumping into a wandering soul at various stops [...]
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -- Voltaire
The propaganda war on the American public appears to have entered a new phase.
In a March 30 post at his Foreign Policy blog, Thomas E. [...]
President Barack Obama’s March 27 announcement of a “new strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan” makes it official. He has no clue what he’s doing in the Middle East. Unless, of course, he’s leading us further down the road to ruin on purpose, in which case he [...] 
If you’re not cheating you’re not trying.
--Anonymous U.S. military officer
As a naval aviator pal of mine once remarked, cadets in our military academies spend the summer before their freshman year learning an arcane honor code and spend the next [...]
Young Mr. Bush and his handlers managed to squander more than two centuries of American progress. Two interminable armed conflicts and the economic collapse they produced left President Obama with the worst combination of foreign and domestic policy disasters in our country’s history. He faces a [...] 
President Obama has committed 17,000 additional troops to Operation Enduring Freedom, our misadventure in Afghanistan. His generals don’t know what to do with those troops when they get there; they’re not even sure what troops to send. Someone on Obama’s sprawling national security team should [...] 
If you know neither your enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
--Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu maintained that proper planning secures victory before the battle begins. Carl von Clausewitz insisted that war must focus on the political aim. How is [...]
