Fighting Wars: Gen. David Patraeus

By Alan Caruba

No one can doubt General David Patraeus’s devotion to America and to the U.S. Army in which he served much of his life. In order to take on the position as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency he had to retire, but his vast experience will serve him and the nation well in his new role.

“All In: The Education of General David Patraeus” by Paula Broadwell with Vernon Loeb is part biography and part an analysis of what went right in the Iraq conflict and what went wrong in Afghanistan, now the longest war in U.S. history.

Patraeus was a classic over-achiever, blessed with intelligence, natural leadership skills, and with great mentors as he made his way up the promotion ladder. His devotion to the U.S. Army and America cannot be questioned. A West Point graduate, Patraeus excelled as a student and, in the course of his later assignments, gained an extraordinary knowledge of the world. He was tapped to write the Army’s manual on counter-insurgency warfare.

The success of his methods is credited with turning around the war in Iraq, using the surge of troops that then-President Bush initiated. Iraq was pacified, but as we now know, it is showing signs of breaking apart as rival Sunnis and Shiites return to their ancient conflict for power. Throughout Iran was a covert participant that armed insurgents to kill American combatants.

A key to understanding Patraeus is his devotion to an oath that requires obeying his commander-in-chief’s orders, advising both Bush and Obama candidly behind closed doors, and defending their decisions in public. This is the way all military operate, for good or ill, as regards the outcome of any war.

Ms. Broadwell graduated with honors from West Point who has had considerable access to Patraeus and his colleagues-in-arms. She has had more than a decade in military service and over a decade and a half of work in counterterrorism and counter-insurgency. Her book is a clear-eyed look at the facts about the general and his commands.

One paragraph says a lot about Afghanistan.

“Since the fall of 2009, Afghan forces had grown in size and capability, financed by billions from U.S. taxpayers. In 2010, the Afghan National Army (ANA), the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the Afghan Air Force (AAF) grew by some 70,000. By the fall, the ANA stood at just under 145,000 and the ANP just above 113,000; the AAF was just over 4,000. The commitment of funds to this enterprise by the United States and its NATO allies was $11.6 billion in 2011, bringing the total for 2010 and 2011 to about $20 billion. Fourteen percent of Afghan recruits were illiterate, and thousands had gone AWOL…”

A recent Wall Street Journal article about the billions stolen and wasted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program in Afghanistan revealed the futility of winning hearts and minds in a nation operating with a seventh century mentality.

Deep into the book Ms. Broadwell notes that “Patraeus never argued that counter-insurgency was the only way America should fight—only that it was the best way to pursue wars at hand in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

At his retirement ceremony, Patraeus said, “it will be imperative to maintain a force that not only maintains the versatility and flexibility that have been developed over the past decade in particular.”

“I do believe that we have relearned since 9/11 the timeless lesson that we don’t always get to fight the wars for which we are most prepared or most inclined.” He called for “the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.” Full spectrum means being able to fight any conflict anywhere, whether because it was thrust upon us or we chose to engage in it.

The U.S. has engaged in conflicts since 9/11 that could not be won in the traditional definition of “victory” despite the courage and sacrifice of our fighting men and women.

Now, just as in Vietnam and Korea, our forces have either been withdrawn or are now withdrawing from present fields of combat.

We have been fighting stalemates for a long time because the era of full engagement, a world war fought until unconditional surrender, appears to be over. In modern wars, our enemies are thwarted from their goals, but they remain in place to fight again.

The current Islamic battles of an asymmetric war against the West will continue and have even reached our shores on 9/11. Preemption will be necessary and the courage to wage it will be essential.

As often as not, a nation has little choice but to wage war and, despite disappointments regarding the conflicts since 9/11, Iran is daring Israel, the U.S. and the world to challenge its intent to acquire nuclear weapons. Had it not openly declared its intention to destroy Israel, there might be mitigating reasons to withhold action, but there is not.

Following a recent, large amphibious U.S. military exercise, the troops involved are being positioned in anticipation of a new Middle East conflict. This time it will be Iran.

This is occurring, however, as the U.S. military is being systematically hollowed out with major reductions in all its forces; flying aging aircraft, having fewer warships, and, incredibly, anticipating the reduction of eight brigades of the Army.

The President and Congress, busy borrowing billions to pay the enormous national debt imposed by their actions, have weakened the nation’s ability to respond to the next war.

Even so, the nation’s armed forces were and are led by men like Patraeus and the best-educated top- ranked officers this nation has ever had. Until the elections of Presidents Clinton and Obama, they had always been commanded by men who had served their nation in uniform.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Grand Panjandrum of Pundits

By Alan Caruba

It’s a little known event, perhaps because its participants want it that way, but as the new year is poised to begin, the Grand Panjandrum of Pundits gathered at an undisclosed location for their annual review of all the predictions they made regarding things that did not occur, all the events that did occur—taking them by complete surprise, and to exchange notes on their thoughts regarding 2012.

The philosopher Aristotle had it right when he said “Stuff happens.”

This particularly applied to the third year of Barack Hussein Obama’s extended vacation as President of the United States of America. He ended the year comparing himself to previous presidents whose shoes he is not fit to shine and whose bathwater he is ill equipped to draw.

On January 2, 2010, I wrote that I thought Obama’s life, at least in the chronology and facts that were presented to the public, was a pure fiction, make believe.  By then Americans had experienced a year’s worth of ineptitude that left anyone paying any attention astonished. It was just one blunder after another.

Even more astonishing is that no court, no one in Congress, and no one in the Republican Party has dared to say that the man was and remains ineligible to be President. Plenty of other people have said it. My friend, Dr. Jerome Corsi, wrote a whole book about it; two in fact.

The glaring truth that no one wants to address is the fact that his father was a citizen of Kenya and, as such, the terms of the U.S. Constitution which require that only “natural born” citizens—those whose both parents are U.S. citizens—can hold the office of President.

When you add in the serious doubts over the authenticity of his birth certificate—declared a fake by document experts and the dubious authenticity of his Social Security number, issued in Connecticut where he never worked a day in his life, and you have enough evidence to send him packing in less than 24-hours.

Even so, the Democratic Party will put him on the ballot again to run for office in 2012. The legality of this is no more likely to be challenged than it was in 2008, though some are trying. The Grand Panjandrum of Pundits was left to scratch their heads and mumble about the strangeness of this.

There was one thing they agreed upon. Barack Hussein Obama is the worst President the nation has ever had to endure.

No other president even comes close. He is the first to preside over the first U.S. sovereign debt downgrade in American history.

He has been responsible for the highest level of federal spending (25% of GDP) since World War Two and, in a comparable fashion, the highest level of federal debt (67% of GDP) since then as well.

Employment is the lowest since 1983 and long-term unemployment (45.9%) is the highest since the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression.

The rate of home ownership (59.7%) is the lowest since 1965 and the percentage of taxpayers paying income tax is the lowest in the modern era. At the same time, the level of government dependency (47%), those persons receiving one ore more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.

Obama and his economic advisors have achieved this in just three years while others in his administration were authorizing millions in loan guarantees to “Green” companies going bankrupt with alarming predictability or producing heavily subsidized products that no one wanted to purchase. Others we’re told were unaware of a Department of Justice program to run guns to drug cartels in Mexico. Plans to shut down Gitmo were quietly shelved. The Bush-Cheney policies were quietly extended.

Within twenty-four hours of the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Baghdad was besieged by bombings while the prime minister was busy trying to arrest and indict the vice president. You cannot make up stuff like this.

We are now mere months away from the Supreme Court hearing a case regarding the constitutionality of Obamacare. It is normal for judges who have had any previous involvement in a case or those close to it to recuse themselves from participating, but the Obama administration is so marked by a lack of ethics that his former Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now an Associate Justice, has still not announced her decision.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Obamacare, the federal government can require you to spend your money on things you do not want and may not need.

This is why the Grand Panjandrum of Pundits ended in a state of mass confusion and despair. Just like it did in 2010.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Leaving Iraq

March 2003, Baghdad, Iraq, Shock and Awe

By Alan Caruba

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. - John Stuart Mill English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873)

Among some foreign policy analysts, the popular conclusion regarding the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is that the U.S. won the war…for Iran.

In practical terms, however, predicting anything about the future of the Middle East these days is likely to leave one looking foolish. Who thought Tunisians would toss out their dictator? Or that Egyptians would demand and get Mubarack to resign? Or that Syrians, after two generations of dictatorship, would turn on the Assad family? Revolution is in the air in the Middle East which is to say that change—rapid change—is the order of the day.

President Obama’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops entirely from Iraq is ignorant of history and dismissive of reality. When the Axis was defeated in World War Two, the U.S. retained troops in Europe to ensure a transition to democracy. Same with Japan. And later, the same with South Korea.

President Obama, so reluctant to admit that the U.S. has ever done anything right and ill-inclined to let it happen, has led to the full-scale withdrawal of U.S. troops and, I suggest, set up a situation in which a newly emerging democracy—a distinct rarity in the Middle East—could be deprived of the time to be fully and securely established.

There were real reasons for invading Iraq twice in recent times; first to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and second to remove him as a dangerous, destabilizing force who threatened all the Gulf States.

Forgotten by most, Iraq under Saddam Hussein engaged Iran in war for eight years from 1979 to 1988. Inasmuch as Iran’s Islamic revolution had taken U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979 and held them for 444 days, the U.S. backed Saddam, though officially it took a neutral position.

U.S. policymakers in the administrations following the Carter years regarded Ayatollah Khomeini as a serious threat to the stability of the region and nothing has changed since them. His successors are nothing but trouble.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki found sanctuary in Iran to avoid being killed by Saddam. He is said to have strong ties to the current regime in Iran which is, after all, a very big neighbor with a long common border to the east of Iraq.

On the occasion of the official end of the war and the withdrawal of U.S. military, Maliki’s close ties to Iran were on display at the White House when he brought Iraqi Transportation Minister Hadi Farhan al-Amiri with him. Farhan had formerly been a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The Guards are suspected by U.S. law enforcement of participating in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen billeted there.

Had the invasion of Iraq in 2003 been a limited mission, Saddam might have been toppled and the Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis would have been left to kill each other in the typical Arab fashion of resolving disputes. Also in the mix would have been the Kurds in northern Iraq whom Saddam persecuted and killed throughout his regime.

Eight years later, the tendency of the media has been to focus on U.S. and Iraqi war dead, but there is little mention of the earlier Iraq-Iran conflict with estimates between 500,000 and a million war dead, 1-2 million wounded, and more than 80,000 prisoners. In one 1985 battle alone when Iran launched an offensive to cut the main highway between Baghdad and Basra, it is estimated that the combined total of dead numbered 40,000.

The U.S. still does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, a situation in place since 1979. Iran has declared the U.S. to be its biggest enemy and makes no secret of its intention to destroy Israel. Much of the world is wondering when Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. The failure of the U.S. to support this would be a strategic mistake on the order of the British PM, Neville Chamberlain’s claim to have achieved “peace in our time” after negotiations with Adolf Hitler.

Obama’s “diplomatic” efforts with Iran have been a total failure. The latest embarrassment was his “request” for the return of the drone spycraft that the Iranians brought down, apparently without firing a shot. Obama has worried out loud that U.S. diplomats would be targeted for assassination in Iraq…after bargaining away force protection.

It is no stretch to say that President Obama has been a global diplomatic disaster, routinely offending and insulting other nations out of pure ignorance and indifference. His successors will be mending fences in the Middle East and elsewhere for decades.

In the course of three years in office, Obama has only succeeded in fleeing what he regarded as a “dumb” war. He was elected largely on his opposition to it.

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial warned that the failure of the Obama administration to consolidate an alliance with Iraq ignored the Middle East’s upheavals and, in particular, in Iran’s longtime ally, Syria. In the best of outcomes, Iraq could have become an outpost of stability in the Middle East, but Obama’s indifference may contribute to its falling “prey to Tehran’s encroachments.”

In an analysis by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, published in Beirut’s The Daily Star, he anticipates that most of the future violence in Iraq will be between “political factions, even those of the same ethnic and religious group.” The Sunnis are the predominant Islamic sect in most of the Middle East, but the Shiites are the largest sect in both Iraq and Iran.

Al-Maliki heads a loose confederation of many different political parties, but seems to have asserted a very strong level of control over government policies at this point. Ironically, both Saddam and now Al-Maliki must contend with a semi-autonomous Kurdish faction that is pushing for resolution of territorial boundaries, seeking to reverse changes made by Saddam in Arab-Kurdish areas.

Ultimately, everything in the Middle East involves who controls oil revenues.

Iraq’s 2005 constitution promised a hydrocarbon law that would settle issues related to who had the final say of various oil deals. No such law has been legislated to date and the Kurds have pretty much gone their own way. Al-Maliki’s government has declared Kurdish contracts with oil companies illegal, banning companies that have signed them from bidding on oil business in the rest of Iraq.

In the recent history of the Middle East, dating from the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, its nations have been ruled by dictators and monarchs. Such “democracy” as exists is mostly one in which the ruling regime stuffs the ballot boxes and the military determines the winner. Egypt’s recent turmoil is an example. Syria’s ruthless suppression of its people is another. Iran remains a prison state intent on imposing its hegemony over the region.

Can Iraq sustain its fledgling democracy? Nobody knows. If history is any guide the prospect is not good. Only a strong America could have played a role and Obama has chosen to leave.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

WAPO Slanders U.S. Military in Iraq

By Alan Caruba

I rarely read The New York Times or Washington Post because the reporting is so biased it sickens me. Pick any topic, from politics to science, these and other liberal mainstream newspapers are divorced from the most basic standards of honesty and accuracy.

On Sundays, however, I visit their websites to get a sense of the latest liberal themes and, on the Washington Post site, I found “Civilian killings created insurmountable hurdle to extended U.S. troop presence in Iraq” by Liz Sly. It made me very angry and it should make anyone who lost a father, a brother, a sister or mother who served in Iraq, not just to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, but since 2003 to depose him from power and see him brought to justice in Iraq by Iraqis.

Thanks as well to those who served, but returned with grievous injuries, often from improvised explosive devises—many of which were made in Iran, along with all the others who returned home from the nightmare of fighting an enemy who looked like every other Iraqi.

The point of Ms. Sly’s article was to defame all who served in Iraq and, of course, those who died there. Quoting an Iraqi who lost family members, she encapsulated the theme of her article. “They are barbarians,” he said. He went on to say, “We wish they never had come.” One Iraqi hardly speaks for all Iraqis, of course, but in the context of Ms. Sly’s article, he did.

By the second paragraph, she was citing “a group of Marines (who) went on a shooting spree in which 24 Iraqi civilians were killed” on November 19, 2005. You had to read nine more paragraphs into the article to learn that charges were brought against seven Marines and dropped against six of them. A seventh was acquitted while an eighth will stand trial in January.

You had to read even further before Ms. Sly cites a U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan regarding the period of 2005-2007. Gen. Buchanan is not directly quoted, but Ms. Sly notes that “The vast majority of civilian deaths were the result of Iraqis killing Iraqis.” No kidding!

Iraqis killing Iraqis was endemic to the Saddam Hussein regime. The history of Iraq after he came to power in 1979 until his fall in 2003 is one of mass murder, summary and arbitrary executions, rape, and torture.

For example, in March 15-19, 1988, Saddam authorized the use of poison gas against the citizens of a Kurdish town, Halabja, killing thousands. That same year, he launched an Al-Anfal campaign of extermination against Kurds living in Northern Iraq. Their crime was siding with Iranians during the Iraq-Iran war that had lasted from September 1980 to August 1988. The attacks resulted in deaths estimated to be between 50,000 and 100,000, many of whom were women and children.

Saddam repeated this in April 1991 after having been driven out of Kuwait by allied forces led by the U.S. Uprisings in northern Iraq resulted in estimates of civilian dead ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 Kurds and between 60,000 to 130,000 for Shiites.

When U.S. troops invaded in 2003 several mass graves were found, believed to have been a response to a 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein.

None of this information was unavailable to the Washington Post reporter who quoted a lawmaker, Sami al-Askari, identified as “a close aid to Prime Minister Mouri al-Maliki.” He said, “The image of the American soldier is as a killer, not a defender. And how can you give a killer immunity?”

American troops were and are always subject to U.S. military justice, but those troops often found themselves in fire fights with an enemy that did not wear uniforms. Civilians were killed in the fog of war.

The world shall probably never know how many Iraqis died in Saddam Hussein’s prisons or as the result of campaigns carried out against Kurds and tribes in the south. He had already used weapons of mass destruction, poison gas, and it was widely believed he retained the capacity to use them if invaded. The intelligence agencies of several Western nations were convinced of this, though few were found in the wake of the invasion.

It is a wonder to me that Ms. Sly took the time to report that, according to the Department of Defense, 4,474 American service members died in Iraq, 3,518 of whom were killed in action.

Our military is withdrawing at long last from Iraq. I will not engage in an analysis of the decisions that were made to invade, but the best one was to rid Iraq of a monster called Saddam Hussein who killed far more Iraqis than the American military ever did.

It should not escape anyone’s notice that, in the wake of the Iraq war, the citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and currently in Syria, rose up to rid themselves of dictators. Were they encouraged by the U.S. military campaign and the result in Iraq? Yes.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The News from Iraq (as Usual) is Bad

By Alan Caruba

In the 1960s and throughout the 1970s it seemed that all I read or heard every day was about Vietnam. It dominated the news as its forces took on the colonial French in an effort to liberate the nation. The effort was led by Ho Chi Minh, a man who would have been regarded as a patriot had he not been a communist.

Ho was determined to unite both northern and southern Vietnam and, if he had to fight the French and take on the United States, so be it. You could have asked just about every general in the Pentagon if getting involved in a war there was a good idea and the only one who would have thought so would have been Gen. William Westmoreland who was willing to fight until the last dead American. Going to war in Asia is always a bad idea.

The problem at the time was the “domino theory” that said that a loss of any nation in Southeast Asia meant all the others would go communist as well. The result was that the U.S. lost the war and it would be a long time before it regained its fighting spirit. By then, the Draft was history and we had an all-volunteer military.

Vietnam slipped from the news pages and we began to read a lot about Iran after our diplomats were taken hostage in 1979 during the course of what would be called the Islamic revolution there. Bordering Iran is Iraq and it was the satrapy of Saddam Hussein, the local dictator. Iraq sat atop a lot of oil that generated a lot of money, but Saddam wanted more. He invaded Iran to grab off some oil fields. At the time, the U.S. was his ally. The war became an eight-year stalemate.

We stopped being his ally when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. President George H.W. Bush put together a coalition that drove him out in 1991.Then came September 11, 2001 and this time it was George W. Bush in office. After driving the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, Bush43 and his neocons turned their attention to Saddam Hussein. Largely unmentioned in the war that followed was the very long border Iraq shares with the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, a presumptive ally. The rest, as they say, is history.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a great success militarily, but a total disaster from the point of view of having no plans and not enough troops to deal with the chaos that almost immediately followed. Typical of the Middle East, everything is about one’s tribal and/or religious affiliation. When you add in the vast oil revenues at stake, the Shiites were soon fighting the Sunnis and the Kurds were fighting anyone trying to take over their province. It was a classic SNAFU, everything was FUBAR.

Bush43 finally put enough troops into Iraq to assert control, but the politics of the place is like herding cats or sticking your hand into a basket of snakes. That’s why headlines such as the one in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “Iraq Factions Spar Over Security Force” are, no pun intended, the writing on the wall.

I can’t think of many Americans who want to stay in Iraq as a military occupying force and you can include me. President Barack Hussein Obama made getting out of Iraq a 2008 campaign theme and we are, in 2011, getting out.



Nouri al-Maliki

 And that’s the problem. Without the U.S. as a stabilizing, balancing force, Iraq is just going to go to hell. Yes, they have had elections there and a parliament, but Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is also running the ministries of defense, interior, and national security. Somewhere in Hell, Saddam Hussein is laughing…a lot.

For those who have not been paying attention, there is NO democracy in the Middle East; at least not the kind that doesn’t need an army and police to make sure the people don’t get restive.

When they do, as in the case of Egypt, the current dictator is deposed or in Libya he is chased, found, and then shot in the head. In Tunisia the dictator was forced to flee, while in places like the Sudan and Yemen, chaos reigns. In Syria, the dictator is busy killing protesters in the streets.

The odds that Iraq will devolve either into a dictatorship or break apart in some fashion or be run as a puppet state of Iran are very good.

The odds that we and/or the Israelis are going to turn parts of Iran into giant craters are also very good.

Sometimes you fight a war and discover the effort was a huge waste of money, men, and time. Curiously, they always seem to be a good idea at the time.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Middle East Goes South

By Alan Caruba

They’re rioting in Yemen and have been for eight months, trying to get rid of their president who, it appears, cannot take a hint. It shares a border with Saudi Arabia.

They’re rioting in Syria. Its president says he is going to have a new constitution drafted, presumably to meet the demands of the crowds in the street, but in the meantime his forces will just shoot as many of them as possible.

The troubles in Syria have caused Turkey to park a large number of its troops on its border and Jordan has done the same. Turkey already has lots of Syrian refugees who wisely fled when they could. Turkey, once one of the more rational nations in the region and an ally of the U.S., has been tilting toward Islamism in recent years and that has got to be bad news for everything, but especially Israel.

They’re rioting again in Egypt. Having gotten president Mubarack removed, the problem now seems to be the military that—surprise—have no intention of giving up power. They have also made it clear that any peace treaties with Israel are kaput; the first thing to go, a demilitarized Sinai between them and Israel.

In Tunisia they are preparing for an election after having rid themselves of a long time dictator. And that may be the only good news from the region.

There are attacks on government buildings in Kabul, Afghanistan, but that’s a headline going back decades. The Taliban are the problem, but particularly since they come in over the border from Pakistan.

Pakistan was, is, and will always be a tinderbox and basket-case. Formerly home to the late Osama bin Laden, only the military represent any hope of stability and, if that means shooting a bunch of Taliban every so often, they will do so.

The occasional bombs go off in Baghdad, Iraq, but since President Obama is pulling out all by a relative handful of troops, what could possibly go wrong there, eh? Hint: It shares a long border with Iran.

Oh, did I mention that there is still fierce fighting in Libya and no one knows where Col. Gadhafi is, but a provisional government is going to see if it can keep the northern and southern parts of the nation, highly tribal, together.

There is a reason that the people of these nations have a difficult time getting their arms around democracy and that’s because Islam has a stranglehold on their brains. That’s why the formal name of these nations is usually “the Islamic Republic of” wherever.

The worst of these alleged republics is, of course, Iran. It had a spate of riots in 2009, but Iran is the poster child for a complete dictatorship and, after killing and jailing anyone who even looked like they were protesting something, quiet has returned to the street of Tehran. This has permitted their military to plan operations like assassinating the Saudi ambassador to America in America.

The Supreme Leader of Iran and the lunatics who surround him hate the Great Satan (us) and the Little Satan (Israel) with such passion that, at some point, they will have to be killed to avoid World War Three. Most Iranians love the U.S. and will be greatly relieved if we free them from their bondage.

In Israel, in order to secure the return of a single Israeli soldier, kidnapped five years ago by Hamas, the government has decided to swap a couple of hundred murderers of Israeli citizens that have been in their jails. It’s symbolic, but it is also very, very dangerous. The Israelis value the life of every one of their soldiers. Hamas values no one’s life including Palestinians. They hide behind women and children whenever the Israelis show up to dispense some justice. Then they go back to firing rockets into Israel.

Now, as the rest of us go about our lives, trying to get our heads around why a bunch of spoiled brats and leftover Sixties potheads are protesting against Wall Street in New York and elsewhere, a sizeable portion of the planet, the Middle East, is in a life-and-death turmoil that is, I suggest, going to get a lot worse.

None of this, coming as it does in disparate reports from places many find hard to find on a map, bodes well for the second decade of the 21st century or possibly also the next one.

The so-called “Arab Spring” is rapidly turning into yet another Arab nightmare (and, yes, the Iranians are Persians, but they are doing what they can to influence events to their advantage.)

Complicating the immediate future is the question of whether the European Union will come apart over monetary issues. As for the U.S., we have to get to the 2012 elections and put right the worst mistake this nation has ever made by ridding ourselves of Barack Hussein Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Syrian Horror Show

By Alan Caruba

Name me a country where funeral processions get fired upon and more people die on the way to burying the latest martyrs for peace and freedom? It’s just about any country in the Middle East and on July 19 it was Syria where ten people died in Homs, a place where some fifty have died in the past week protesting the second generation of the Assad dictatorship.

A week earlier an alleged "pro-Assad mob" attacked the U.S. embassy in Damascus after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of Basher Assad that he as “not indispensable” and that the U.S. has “absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power.” So far this has been the position of the U.S. on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarack, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, and just about everyone else in the Middle East short of Abdullah, the King of Saudi Arabia.

It was not the first time the Damascus embassy had been attacked. In December 2006, al Qaeda was credited with blowing up a car bomb outside as a gang of armed men tried to break in. The attack, though, has all the earmarks of an Iranian operation.

Let’s see, when was the last time a U.S. embassy was attacked? It was 1979 in Tehran when the Iranians took its staff hostage and held them for 444 days. The Iranians were behind the 1983 suicide attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241. These days they all but own Syria as they patiently work their way toward possessing nuclear-tipped missiles with which to threaten the Middle East and everywhere else.

After World War I, Syria was carved out of the former Ottoman Empire and ceded to French colonial control. In 1946, the French granted it independence. It then passed through a series of military coups until Basher’s father, Hafez Assad, took control of Syria.

Upon his death, it passed to his son, Bashar in 2000. In May 2007, Bashar was “elected” to his second term.This is not exactly a definition of a democracy, but neither is any nation in the Middle East and never was.

In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Hafez joined with Egypt and, in the process, lost the Golan Heights, a strategic victory for the Israelis who have shown no intention of returning it or the ancient Israeli provinces of Samaria and Judea, won from Jordan, and now commonly but mistakenly called the West Bank. The Israelis do not “occupy” it. They lived there three thousand years ago.

The Egyptians lost the Gaza at that time, but the Israelis have since ceded it to the Palestinians in the hope they might establish a state, but they have never shown the slightest inclination of establishing one except as a base from which to attack the Israelis.

From 1976 until April 2005, the Syrians had occupied Lebanon which is now a base for Hezbollah, a Palestinian terrorist group that has successfully taken control. They take their orders from Iran.

Syria has been a classic police state. Reportedly, Iran has deployed 10,000 troops to Syria to protect the Assad regime and are in effective control of the nation. Iranian troops have been in Syria since 2008 and, not surprisingly, their northern headquarters have been in Homs, the site of the latest killings.

In February 2009, it was reported that President Obama had decided to send a new U.S. ambassador to Syria and lift sanctions against a nation believed to have aided al Qaeda in Iraq and of secretly building a nuclear reactor. The Israelis, as they had done earlier with a reactor Saddam Hussein was building, bombed it to rubble in 2009.

So far, President Obama’s philosophy of talking nicely to our enemies in the Middle East has not worked and anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of the region could have told him that.

President Bush’s decision to eliminate Saddam Hussein was based on the fact that Saddam was a constant destabilizing factor, having waged war against Iran for eight years in the 1980s, used poison gas to kill thousands of Kurds, and in 1990 attacked Kuwait to seize its oil fields.

The current U.S. policy is to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Expecting the Middle East to act in any civilized fashion or thinking it can be taken over and reformed by sheer military force is clearly a fool’s dream.

Afghanistan has resisted control since the days of Alexander the Great. The Ottoman Empire, run by the Turks from the 1300s until the early 1920s did a fairly good job of maintaining the peace until it collapsed of its own dead weight

As nations such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan did little other than accept various dictators, the prospect of expecting anything but turmoil is utterly futile. What the West wants is access to and through the Suez Canal, along with the oil of the Middle East. The template of Western influence disappeared with both World War One and Two.

Just because those in the Middle East have the outward appearance of modernity, it is an illusion. This is a region of the world dominated by a warrior cult called Islam. As such it will remain an enemy of the West and of each other. It is a huge horror show.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Armed Forces Day

By Alan Caruba

Saturday, May 21, is Armed Forces Day. Unless you are on active duty, a military family member, or a veteran, I suspect this is one national holiday that slips under the radar of most Americans.

I am a veteran, U.S. Army, Second Infantry Division, Second Engineer Battalion, formerly based in Fort Benning, Georgia. If you have ever served in the military, it is highly unlikely you will ever forget the unit in which you spent the most time. Military life indelibly imprints itself on all who have served.

Like my generation and earlier ones, I was conscripted for service by what was called the “Draft”. It ended in 1973, but young men between 18 and 25 must still register for Selective Service in the event a really big war breaks out. I am sure the voluntary military is sufficient, but it worries me that we are taking a great toll on the young men and women in combat zones serving repeated tours of duty.

To my good fortune, I never saw combat, but I look back on the experience fondly because it taught any number of useful lessons. For many it was their first experience with the need to practice a measure of self-discipline. Orders are issued. You obey them. It is the nature of the military that it takes in boys and teaches them to be men.

You have no doubt noticed I have written that it “teaches them to be men.” I do not much care for the creeping feminization of our military. I don’t much like the inclusion of women in the military except in an ancillary capacity exclusive of battle. I understand times have changed, but that doesn’t mean that human nature has.

I don’t believe the military is a place for homosexuals. Bill Clinton tried to integrate homosexuals in the military and was met with such resistance from “the brass” that he saddled it with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, an invitation to hypocrisy. Recently there was a report that Navy chaplains had been told to get ready to perform same-sex marriages, but that idiotic idea was swiftly quashed, presumably in the name of morality and common sense.

If I sound like some cranky old man nostalgic for “the old days”, I would remind you that, for me, the old days were the Cold War that included some hot wars fought in Korea and Vietnam. From the days of General MacArthur onward, American presidents and Congress had been told not to fight a war in the Far East.

Likewise, every empire that proposed to fight a war in Afghanistan, from Alexander the Great to the former Soviet Union, got their butts kicked, but in 2001, instead of a short demonstration of why attacking the American homeland is a very bad idea, we turned that operation in a decade of wasted money, material, and personnel.

“Regime change” anywhere should be short and brutal. Leave it to the survivors to form a new government. Iraq turned into a quagmire because we invaded with too few troops to police the nation and because L. Paul Bremer, the presidential envoy, disbanded the Iraqi army, instantly rendering thousands of men unemployed and very unhappy about it. Billions of dollars and thousands of American lives later, we are still in Iraq. Expecting Arabs to behave in a rational fashion is a fool's errand.

Ask anyone in the military, particularly in the officer class, and you will discover that no one likes war less than those who must fight it for the politicians and too many ungrateful civilians at home.

We no longer fight huge land wars like those of World War Two. The conflict in Korea ended in a stalemate and a truce that exists to this day. At the time, no one wanted to go to war with Red China and that was probably the right judgment. Vietnam was essentially a lost war by the French, a colonial power, followed by a civil war between north and south. Inserting ourselves into any civil war is unwise. Vietnam became a meat grinder for more than 53,000 young men who came home in coffins.

On a recent edition of “Sixty Minutes”, outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates described his job as “leading a department that is organized to plan for war but not to fight a war. And so everything that I’ve wanted to do to try and help the men and women in the field I’ve had to do outside the normal Pentagon bureaucracy.”

That department oversees a military that is deployed in 150 countries around the world with more than 369,000 of its1,580,255 active-duty in foreign nations. We still have 53,951 in Germany as a holdover from the Cold War. Some 28,500 are still in Korea and 32,803 in Japan. Simply put, there are real threats still in these locations that must be defended.

We are the world’s policeman. If we do not maintain this role, it will go to hell even faster than its current pace.

All of which brings me full circle to the worthy reason for Armed Forces Day. I have my arguments with some of the policies affecting today’s military, but hopefully they are transitory.

I have no argument with the courage, the patriotism, and the power our armed forces—yes, our men and women—project around the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Middle East Mess

By Alan Caruba

Anyone such as myself who lived through the long years of the Vietnam quagmire knows that the United States is repeating the same errors in the Middle East that we did with that nation. We seem incapable of recognizing a civil war when we see one and incapable of not inserting ourselves in the midst of it.

I speak specifically of Libya and the inchoate decisions and measures taken by the Obama administration. To suggest that the present White House and State Department have a Middle East “policy” is to vastly overstate and misunderstand their ignorance of that region of the world and the forces at work within it.

The United States has been militarily involved in Afghanistan since 2001, shortly after 9/11. What should have been a short sortie to inflict punishment on the al Qaeda and the Taliban has turned into a classic “quagmire”. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 reflects this as well.

Like many, I thought that the application of U.S. military intervention would somehow drag the Middle East into the 21st century, but clearly the region remains subject to the seventh century religion of Islam and its schism between the majority Sunnis and the minority Shiites. Islam, plus a tribalism that reaches back millennia, renders the Middle East intractable to the West’s efforts.

Billions have been squandered in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the real enemy, Iran, has been allowed to go unscathed in its pursuit of regional hegemony and its pursuit of nuclear parity with its “neighbors”, Pakistan, India, and Russia.

As this is written, Saudi Arabia has concluded that the United States will take no action to stop the Iranian nuclear program and is seeking to pull together a Gulf State coalition to end the expansionist ambitions of the Iranian ayatollahs. The Saudis have also consulted with Israel.

Forty years seems to be the limit that Middle Eastern populations will tolerate the various despots that have controlled Islamic nations. In Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt and Syria those in charge have found themselves under siege and, in some cases, removed.

In two cases, Libya and Egypt, the Obama administration has openly sided with the rebels. At the same time, it has incomprehensibly offered a weak defense of Syria’s dictator, Bashar el-Assad, Iran’s strongest ally in the region. Sensing a shift in power, even Egypt’s new ruling body has reached out to Iran to thaw decades of antipathy.

The only consistent Middle Eastern policy of the Obama administration has been its hostility to Israel, the region’s only democracy and America’s traditional ally since its founding just over sixty years ago. For all the caterwauling about the Palestinians, they have long since been abandoned by the Arab nations and are now well within the Iranian orbit of influence and support.

The Palestinians could have had a separate state decades ago but have always pursued an all-or-nothing policy aimed at the destruction of Israel. It is widely believed that they will initiate a new war as Iran’s proxies, from Lebanon in the north and Gaza in the south.

The Palestinians, in fact, have a sovereign nation. It is called Jordan which lost the West Bank, part of ancient Israel, to modern Israel after attacking it in 1947-48 and 1967.

Iraq has made it clear to the United States that it wants to see American troops withdrawn as agreed by the end of the year. Its Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki recently ordered an attack on Camp Ashraf, home to 3,500 Iranian dissidents for the past twenty-six years. That should tell even the casual observer that Iraq is now in the Iranian orbit. This is true as well of Lebanon, first occupied by Syria for decades and now in the grip of the Palestinian Hezbollah.

As to the Iranian people, the Obama administration made it clear they have been abandoned after protests against Mamoud Ahmadinejad’s stolen election last year received no support whatever by a U.S.

America has severely weakened itself since 9/11 with ill-advised military excursions that, like the Vietnam debacle, have proven costly in treasure and lives sacrificed in an area that is resentful of our unwanted incursions, coupled with our addled “nation building” schemes.

There is a massive realignment occurring as the result of the popular uprisings against despots across the North African Maghreb and the heart of Middle Eastern nations, several of which were the artificial creations of Western interests. Resentments against the tyrannies of former despots will likely give way to new despots, not democratic reform.

There is no end to the resentment against America and the West.

Lacking any kind of cohesive policy toward Arab nations except for the oil they provide, the only sensible policy America should pursue would be to drill for our own extensive oil reserves to prevent a severe shock to our economy and security. So long as Obama is President, this will not happen.

There is no perceivable policy in place to stand against Iran and has not been since the Carter administration abandoned the Pahlavi regime in 1979. The fall of Tunisia’s Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Mubarack, Syria’s Assad, and the resistance to Gadhafi, along with unrest in Yemen and Bahrain will be seen, in retrospect, as inevitable.

What remains is a Maghreb and Middle East in a volatile struggle to determine whether it returns to an Islamism reminiscent of the Ottoman Empire or an enlightened embrace of Western values.

There is little reason to hope for a good outcome.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Teeny, Tiny Wars

By Alan Caruba

On the same day that the U.S. had blown up a building on Gadaffi’s compound in Tripoli, the news out of Iraq was as follows:

Baghdad (3/21/2011) – Aswat al-Iraq: Iraqi Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki considered on Monday Iraq as one of the most stable countries in the region. Addressing a gathering attending the third agricultural week in Baghdad, the premier said, “Iraq became one of the most stable countries in the region after a period of violence and divisions.” He urged ministers to speed up solving all problems and improving services to Iraqis. Demonstrations sweep a number of Arab countries, mainly Libya, Syria and Yemen, calling for toppling regimes and achieving political reforms.

THANK YOU, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

How ironic is it that a war that many Americans now regard as a mistake is, from the Iraqi point of view, one that has led to an era of stability?

Military observers and historians regard wars differently than civilians. The terms they use are “high intensity” and “low intensity.” As Sean Linnane, editor of the Stormbringer blog notes, “In the eight years of Iraq, we lost just as many people as we lost in a single day at Normandy. By the same standards, Vietnam was a low-intensity conflict. We lost just under fifty thousand over ten years, whereas we lost that many in three years in Korea and in three days at Gettysburg.”

Linnane explains how the technology of modern war has changed the way it must be understood. “An infantryman with a shoulder-fired weapon negates a 55-ton tank.” Such weaponry allowed Stone Age mujahideen in Afghanistan to defeat the Soviet Union.

“While at the same time,” Linnane correctly points out, “the amplifying effect of the modern media allow tiny symbolic conflicts to gain great meaning.”

I am beginning to think that any action or no action that President Obama took would have satisfied anyone because we Americans feel it is our constitutional right to criticize the President and it is!

Obama has been getting a crash course in foreign affairs for two years. Before taking office, he was your average intellectual airhead, full of theories and Marxist dialectics, and having no clue what the job required. By contrast, George W. Bush had grown up around the office his whole life and, if you recall, his father had actually been President.

Surrounded by political advisers, generals from the Pentagon, so-called national security people, State Department folks from Foggy Bottom, and other interested, partisan parties, Obama has had to learn how to become “the decider” like Bush43. For Obama who has basically voted “present” in public life, that has neither been easy nor welcome.

What Obama discovered was that, if he just did what Bush had done for the eight previous years, it would probably be the wisest course of action. So Guantanamo is still open for business and Obama even increased U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The withdrawal schedule for Iraq was already in place when he arrived in the Oval Office, so he cannot take credit for that.

There’s a really good reason for pulling our troops out of both Afghanistan and Iraq and, if possible, sooner rather than later. A lot of them have been rotated in and out of both locations so many times they are just bone tired and thoroughly disgusted with the people for whom they have been trying to provide a shot at freedom, democracy, or whatever passes for life without some dictator or Islamic fanatic trying to kill them.

In a very real way, both Bush’s set in motion the Middle East tumult by demonstrating that dictators can, indeed, be overthrown. The Arab street may say it hates America, but it looks to it to come swooping in to defend and save them.

For many years to come, the whole of the Muslim countries stretching across northern Africa and the Middle East are going to be a working definition of bedlam. To name a few, in addition to the recent demands for less repression in Egypt and Tunisia, plus the present unpleasantness in Libya, the following nations are seeing similar popular discontent—Bahrain, Yemen, the Sudan, and Somalia.

In trouble to a greater or lesser degree, there’s Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Morocco, Pakistan, and the hate-filled denizens of the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Poor Lebanon has labored under the fist of Syria and now Hezbollah.

By comparison, Israel is an island of peace as is Qatar, and, dare we say it, IRAQ!

All of which means a succession of teeny, tiny wars over the years ahead, some of which the U.S. will choose to engage to a larger or small extent. We will not let any ill befall Saudi Arabia because it has a lot of O-I-L. Other oil states will likewise get varying levels of protection. Gadaffi was denied this because of his history of crimes against the U.S.

Americans will, as they always have, hate having to engage in any of these predictable conflicts, but we shall, even if it means that this president and future ones will have to do a two-step around the Constitution and War Powers Act. The dirty secret in Washington, D.C. is that no Congress since World War Two (1941) has actually declared war because they are essentially political cowards who don’t want the blame if anything goes wrong as in Vietnam.

If the U.S. wasn’t totally broke and totally unwilling to cut taxes and spending, we might actually be able to afford some greater effort to help keep the world safe, but for now, we shall have to stick to Tomahawk missiles and other such devices to inform our enemies that we want them dead.

Did I mention that Iraq is stable? No war going on there? A democratic regime in power? I can hear George W. Bush laughing all the way from Houston.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Libya, a Jolly Short War

By Alan Caruba

There’s nothing like a war to either make or break a President. There’s a reason the writers of the Constitution also made the President the Commander-in-Chief because war needs a centralized authority to direct the military. A goodly number of the nation’s presidents were former leaders in war, starting with General George Washington, progressing forward to General Ike Eisenhower.

Few nations have the record of its people being extraordinarily resistant to engaging in combat unless provoked than America. Woodrow Wilson was elected with the slogan “He kept us out of the war” and then, after the Germans had the bad judgment to sink the ocean liner Lusitania, America sent “Black Jack” Pershing to put a finish to World War One.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, having made a thorough botch of the Great Depression, was propelled into war by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Until then, Americans wanted nothing to do with another “European war” or the one being waged in Asia. FDR had the good luck to be guided by Gen. George C. Marshall.

Time and time again, U.S. Presidents have had to engage in war and almost always under circumstances that involved a large part of the population being opposed to it. There is something about “modern” wars that means we end up staying on far too long after we’ve dropped the bombs, let lose the artillery, and sent in the Marines and infantry.

Like the Romans of old, Americans do not like protracted wars and, worse, they tend to weaken a nation or an empire. The irony for the Romans is that, as often as not, they were invited by the host nation to keep the peace. Indeed, that’s how the term “Pax Romana” came about. And just as often the locals got tired of the Romans and revolted against them.

It is common knowledge that it’s easy to get into a war, but hard to end one. We are in Afghanistan, not because we started a war with Osama bin Laden, but because he had declared war against the U.S. in 1996, tried to blow up the Twin Towers in 1993, and then waited until 2001 to do it again. George Bush’s response was to bomb the hell out of Tora Bora in Afghanistan and, initially, to drive the Taliban out of there.

Then, on the theory that democracy could be exported to Iraq and because Saddam Hussein was going to make trouble so long as he drew breath, Bush junior decided to invade, perhaps having drawn the lesson from Bush senior’s decision to leave Saddam in power after the first Gulf War, one he later regretted.

In Afghanistan, “mission creep” set in and Bush stayed on. Now President Obama has stayed on. The United States of America has been an occupying force in Afghanistan longer than the former Soviet Union. That does not suggest a good outcome to me because one of the taunts of the Pashtun tribal members is “You have the watches, but we have the time.”

So let it be said, Obama has probably made the one and only really good decision of his presidency. He has made it clear that no American troops will be among the “boots on the ground” when it comes to ridding Libya of Gaddafi. At a time when the U.S. military is in Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit with timetables to leave, we can quite literally ill afford a third war in the Middle East.

If we have to defend the Saudi oil fields—which we may have to do—the Saudis can afford to pick up the bill and had better be handed one. Meanwhile, their military are busy helping put down protests in nearby Bahrain. The prospect that there will be all manner of protests throughout the Arab region of the world is now guaranteed.

The one in Egypt ended remarkably well with a bare minimum of dead Egyptians. The Tunisian overthrow of its dictator went swiftly and smoothly. Dare I remind the reader that both nations were led by men who were U.S. allies? Things are a tad shaky for another longtime ally, King Abdullah of Jordan, who has the evil Syrians as neighbors and a huge Palestinian population.

Flying well under the radar of U.S. media, on March 15, Israeli commandos intercepted a ship from the Turkish port of Mercin that was headed to Egypt’s Alexandria, loaded with weapons for Hamas in the Gaza. The ship had initially departed from Syria en route to a stop at a Turkish port. Turkey used to be an ally of Israel. (See YouTube IDF video) Formerly Egypt would never have allowed Hamas to get weapons. Also under-reported were the estimated fifty rockets fired into Israel from Gaza on March 19. The Israelis responded with a quick, lethal air strike.

You don’t have to be a CIA analyst to conclude the weapons were all made in Iran or at least transferred from there initially. Or that Israel will face another war at some point. If they nuke targets in Iran, it should be over fairly quickly, but they will still be facing Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south.

Like the Romans, the U.S. needs to extricate itself as much as possible from the Middle East unless its vital interests are threatened there. By which I mean, unless we have to defend Iraq’s, Saudi Arabia’s, Bahrain’s, Kuwait’s, and the United Arab Emirates’ oil fields. Defending the region’s only Western democracy, Israel, is also a good idea.

For the same reason that President Obama elected to let the British and French take the lead in Libya, we have ample firepower from the skies and from offshore naval forces to do much of the damage that may be required in what is likely to be a jolly good, but limited military operation in Libya and likely future conflicts.

There isn’t a single military figure among any of the potential candidates in the next election. What we need in the years immediately ahead may well be a President Petraeus.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Exiting Afghanistan

By Alan Caruba

Like others of my generation who lived through the Vietnam War, it was at the time the longest war that America ever fought. Now the longest war is the one in Afghanistan that began on October 7, 2001.

The Vietnam War began for the U.S. in 1963 when 2,000 military “advisors” were sent to aid the South Vietnamese government that had been established when the North and South was divided. In 1956, with U.S. support the South refused to hold reunification elections and a civil war ensued with the Communist North, beginning in 1958.

Suffice to say the South Vietnamese government was corrupt. It was a civil war and Lyndon B. Johnson’s intervention vastly expanded it in 1965. Along with the war, he launched his “War on Poverty” that would cost billions and achieve little except to expand the welfare state..

The public outcry against the war increased along with the casualties. It forced LBJ to forego running for a second term. From 1968 to 1973, efforts were made to end the war through diplomacy until in January 1973, during the Nixon administration, an agreement was reached. In April 1975, South Vietnam surrendered, thus uniting the North and South.

For ten years it seemed as if the war would never end. It tore the nation apart. Along with a lot of Americans I opposed the war. From the standpoint of the White House the war was seen as part of the larger Cold War but internally they were loath to admit that the U.S. military was not winning the war. These days the U.S. enjoys a robust diplomatic and economic relationship with Vietnam.

Following 9/11, the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. We are still there and the war, as noted, has become the longest in our nation’s history. After driving out the Taliban, we should have left, but we stayed on, supporting a corrupt government that Afghans do not trust. Presently, there are about 100,000 U.S. troops there, a significant military commitment.

The war in Afghanistan, according to Richard N. Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Affairs, is costing U.S. taxpayers between $100 billion and $125 billion a year. In 2010, the New York Times reports that U.S. troops experienced the highest combat casualties yet in the war; more than 430 service members died. Nearly 5,500 were wounded in action, more than double the total of 2,415 in 2009.

It is long past due for the U.S. to leave. It is a lesson the Russians learned after they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. It took ten years before they withdrew in defeat. The Afghans didn’t want them there and they do not want the U.S. there. We will leave and the only question is when.

The problem for America and the rest of the world is a Middle East in the grip of Islam, a religion that opposes Western values and modernization. It will remain in turmoil for the foreseeable future and it will have to be resolved by the people of its nations.

Isolating Islam from the governance of those nations and the maintenance of democratically elected governments must ultimately be secured by those in Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and the most tribal of these nations, Afghanistan.

In Pakistan today there is a significant debate over whether a Western-style government can prevail in the face of the barbarism of the Taliban and the threat of al Qaeda whose way of governance is through murder and terror. The Pakistani middle class knows what is at stake.

The presence of American and allied troops in Afghanistan and Iraq only exacerbates the prospect of progress toward a stable Middle East, a process that may well take decades or longer. Meanwhile, we are draining the treasury of the United States and spilling the blood of our troops.

Leaving Afghanistan will change little in a nation that has successfully resisted invaders for centuries. Meanwhile, the U.S. is in the process of drawing down troops in Iraq where we have set in motion the first steps toward a modern nation freed of its demonic dictator, Saddam Hussein.

There is much to be done to save America from its present financial crisis. Not spending billions in far-off lands is a good step toward achieving that.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Iranian Hegemony, American Timidity

By Alan Caruba

Remember George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”? Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Bush identified these three during a January 29, 2002 State of the Union speech. On March 20, 2003, the U.S. and coalition forces invaded Iraq in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” We were assured that weapons of mass destruction would be found and, for the most part, few were.

The U.S. had been in Afghanistan since shortly after 9/11 in 2001, but Iraq became the focus and Afghanistan a backwater combat area where, as best as one can determine, nothing much has changed except that, reportedly, the U.S. is providing cover for meetings between the Taliban and President Karzai. The levels of corruption between these two are impossible to parse and, as usual, the only topic on the agenda is who gets to control the heroin industry that passes for Afghanistan’s Gross Domestic Product. Also reported is that Iran has been bribing top Afghan officials.

When I served in the U.S. Army, it was in a minor intelligence function as part of the Second Infantry Division. Its primary duty for a very long time has been the defense of South Korea where approximately 30,000 troops are stationed. They have been there since a truce was signed in 1953! The U.S. tends to stay on forever once we’ve invaded a country with the exception, of course, of Vietnam.

I mentioned my Army service only because the most recent intelligence “dump” by WikiLeaks evokes a visceral response to ever letting our enemies know anything about our conduct of the Iraq war and, in this case, the enemy is still Iran. It has been Iran since they took our diplomats hostage in 1979.

To my mind, WikiLeaks is engaged in an act of war against the United States, but I am sure that a legion of international lawyers would say they are not.

The worst part of all this is an analysis reported by an Israeli news agency, Debka File, over the past weekend. As often as not, one will find reports there that never seem to make it into the mainstream media here in the U.S.A.

For example, I suspect most Americans have no idea that we again have a second carrier group in the area of the Persian Gulf. That’s a lot of fire power and one or two such groups have been parked there for a very long time for a very good reason. Meanwhile, Egypt and Saudi Arabia just conducted “secret” war maneuvers together and it isn’t because either expects to be invaded by Bahrain.

The initial Debka File analysis of the U.S. classified documents “bared a catalogue of extreme abuse by Iraqi forces against fellow Iraqis and Iran’s deep involvement in terrorist operations against Americans and Iraqis alike—to both of which the U.S. turned a blind eye.”

Several very troubling facts emerge from the documents. U.S. troops “were instructed not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as abuses of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition.” That kind of directive comes down the chain of command from the very top.

Iraq became a sovereign nation on June 30, 2004 and the fighting among its elected leaders has not ceased for a day as to how the oil riches will be divvied up between Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites.

The last elections were held on March 9, 2010 and Iraq still does not have a functioning government. In the days when Saddam Hussein ran everything, elections involved a 99% vote for the psychopath, but this year’s election involved 325 seats in the parliament and a coalition government has not been decided upon for the last eight months.

Granting that Saddam was evil incarnate, he was nonetheless a bulwark against Iranian ambitions. He had invaded Iran in the 1980s and spent eight years trying to win a war against it. Failing that, he turned around and invaded Kuwait, drawing the U.S. into the first invasion, but one in which he was allowed to remain in power after Iraqi troops were pushed out of Kuwait.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has had the backing of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In the past he has had ties to Iran because both are Shiites and, according to Debka File he “headed Iran-backed Shiite terror networks responsible for political assassinations on his orders.”

The new intelligence data reveals even more about the extensive involvement of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Al Qods Brigades in attacks on American forces in Iraq. Over the course of the conflict there since 2003, American troops suffered 4,287 dead and 30,000 wounded in combat.

Out of all this expenditure of American treasure and lives, Iran has emerged with a strong network of puppet militias in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. It has forged strong ties with Syria. It has a network of allies inside Iraq. And it has pursued its quest for nuclear weapons and the development of the missiles to deliver them as far away as parts of Europe.

All of this suggests that America’s expressed policy of establishing a democratic Iraq and the total lack of confrontation with Iran adds up to failure at this point. The problem with that assertion, however, is that Saddam was an unpredictable, disruptive figure who had to be neutralized.

It looks like George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil is still very much intact and an understandably war-weary United States is leaving a battlefield whose nations were created in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles way back when Woodrow Wilson was the president.

As the French say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Follow the Money

hat tip to TYSKnews.com.

All Wars Must End Sometime

By Alan Caruba

As the Vietnam War began to lose momentum for American troops, Sen. George Aiken suggested, “Let’s just declare victory and get out.” This is the way modern wars end.

President Obama noted the 4,400 troops that died in combat over seven and a half years in Iraq. He also made mention of American valor on Iwo Jima during World War Two. What he did not mention were the 26,000 troops that died taking Iwo Jima. Later, it was even worse during the invasion of Okinawa.

Historians noted that “Okinawa was the largest amphibious invasion of the Pacific campaign and the last major campaign of the Pacific War. More ships were used, more troops put ashore, more supplies transported, more bombs dropped, more naval guns fired against shore targets than any other operation in the Pacific.

More people died during the Battle of Okinawa than all those killed during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Casualties totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle.”

That should put our mission in Iraq in some wider perspective as the Commander-in-Chief assured Americans on the evening of August 31, 2010 that “All U.S. troops will leave by next year.”

This is in stark contrast to the fact that U.S. combat troops remain in Europe since 1945, in South Korea since 1953, and on land, sea and in the air, can be found representing U.S. interests on bases throughout the world. We shall be in Iraq when our grandchildren and great grandchildren are born.

In 2008, a majority of Americans seeking “hope and change” elected the most reluctant Commander-in-Chief in modern history and, as he changed the focus of his speech from our military missions to the nation’s economic crisis, the most incompetent Economist-in-Chief.

The speech was intended to clear Iraq and Afghanistan off the President’s very clean desktop in the Oval Office so his campaign for reelection can focus on the economy. Obama knows he can no longer blame it on George W. Bush.

Indeed, at one point he tried to tie the costs of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the reason for the economic crisis, but they are not. The crisis was based entirely in the collapse of the U.S. housing market, preceded by a curious electronic “run on the banks” during the 2008 election campaign that led to Obama’s election.

At one point he made brief mention of “A new push for peace in the Middle East” referring obliquely to the forthcoming Israeli-Palestinian talks. They will fail. The Palestinian Authority has already offered so many unrealistic demands that these talks like all that preceded them are pure theatre.

Unknown to Americans was another White House event earlier on Tuesday, August 31st. The Islamic Society of North America had announced it in its August 27 newsletter. Long associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the ISNA was an un-indicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial.

The Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations organized leaders of twenty national Muslim groups to attend “a special workshop” presented by the White House and U.S. government agencies (Agriculture, Education, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, etc) in order to provide these groups “special access” that would “cut through red tape” to facilitate federal funding.

Founded in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood is a global Islamist political movement dedicated to imposing Sharia law on all nations and institutions. Their credo is “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leaders. Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

So, while the President marked the end of the combat mission in Iraq, it is folly to think that the Islamists have anything else in mind than total victory over the West.

After 9/11 George W. Bush did not send troops to Afghanistan and later to Iraq in order to ensure that Muslim groups in America could receive special attention to secure federal funds, but the White House of Barack Obama was tending to this while the President was putting the finishing touches on his speech announcing the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq that evening.

It makes you wonder what Obama’s priorities really are. It makes you wonder if you can trust anything he says.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Muddle East

By Alan Caruba

For a long time the world’s attention to an increasing degree was on Vietnam. A war was fought there from 1954 until 1975, but the U.S. didn’t get seriously involved until August 7, 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the arrival of the first combat troops in March 1965. It would take ten years to extricate ourselves from that mess.

The U.S. would remain shy of such conflicts until the 1990s.

In the August 23 Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens provided a short history of the U.S. involvement in Iraq in an article titled “The Twenty Year’s War.” He traced Saddam Hussein’s malevolent trail of death inflicted on Iraqis, Kurds, and, in 1990, the Kuwaitis when he invaded.

Stephens believes Bush41 could have avoided the necessity of Bush43 having to invade a second time to find Saddam and let his people hang him.

I agree with Stephens’ view and recall how appalled Bush41 and Colin Powell were at the efficient and brutal destruction of the Iraqi army in 1990. At the time Powell was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The result was a hasty Iraqi surrender agreement that nullified what had been a victory for U.S. forces.

Later, as Secretary of State to Bush43, Powell tried to talk him out of the second invasion. War is hell, but history teaches that it is frequently necessary. Powell was a very reluctant warrior. The result, said Stephens, was a war that lasted nineteen years longer than it should have.

That got me thinking about the way Israel, from the day it was founded in May 1948 to the present, has never ceased to be in a state of war with its “neighbors” although both Jordan and Egypt concluded peace, the absence of active war, was a good idea. Both got severely mauled in earlier attempts to destroy Israel and peace had included the return of the Sinai to Egypt.

So, here we are, over sixty years later, still concerned for Israel’s fate and especially so now that Iran will have the nuclear plant to which the U.S. and Europe objected and Russia built. At a billion bucks each, Russia understandably thinks this is a good idea.

Back in the 1930s when it was the Soviet Union, Stalin thought it was a good idea to sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in order to divide Poland between them. Twenty million dead Russians later, Stalin no doubt regretted dealing with Hitler. I’m guessing that Putin will have cause to regret the deal with Iran.

Iran’s Brushehr nuclear plant is built on a fault line, one of several that cover some ninety percent of the nation’s land mass. Moreover, it has a long history of earthquakes that since 1900 have killed an estimated 126,000 Iranians. The most recent was on September 10, 2008 and prior to that there were earthquakes every year from 2003 to 2006.

There’s another kind of earthquake that is also developing in Iran and it is a human one because the vast bulk of the population, born since the 1979 revolution, really hates the Supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. They shout “Death to the dictator” at public gatherings. Mamoud Ahmadinejad is just as unpopular. Events, both natural and social, are likely to overtake the current regime.

The Iranians are Persians. They have funded Hezbollah and Hamas, two Arab groups bent on Israel’s annihilation. The threat to Israel is very real, but it is a diversion, a way to keep Iranian and Arab masses focused on that little nation instead of their own oppressive regimes.

The nations and groups currently trying to spread terror worldwide are Arab. Nobody likes or trusts the Arabs and that includes the Arabs. Thanks to its nuclear capabilities, the Arabs distrust Iran’s Persians, too.

The seemingly endless suicide bombings, usually of mosques, are beginning to make Arab Muslims as well as Muslims in non-Arab nations regard this expression of fanaticism as counter-productive.

In Europe where large Arab Muslim populations exist, there are signs that the Europeans have grown tired of their demands and wary of their ghettos, tiny nations within nations, where they live and threaten the social fabric of France, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere on the continent.

It’s not that the Middle East won’t remain a tinderbox of conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. It will, but even in Muslim nations there are forces at work to strike back against al Qaeda and the Taliban as was the case when Pakistan sent troops to the Swat Valley before the recent floods inflicted an even greater threat to its population.

Decades of Islamic oppression within Arab nations is slowly creating a blowback.

If Allah is so great, the world is demonstrating time and again that jihad usually means getting attacked at great cost whether it is Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Somalia. Even Turkey, the one nation that had thrived by imposing a secular government after World War One, is feeling the heat for having drifted into the Arab orbit.

In America, where freedom of religion is part of our DNA, the threat of an Arab-inspired Islamic jihad has worn thin our traditional tolerance. The current debate over the audacity of building a mosque within sight of Ground Zero is evidence that enough is enough.

Al Qaeda will worsen life for American Muslims as it continues to recruit them. As reported in Israpundit.com, “It’s under new American management. No fewer than four U.S. citizens and a permanent U.S. resident have risen to senior leadership posts”, warning that “By remaking itself into an American enterprise, al Qaeda is now more lethal than ever.”

How ironic is it that Americans, in a burst of enthusiasm for “cultural diversity”, elected a president who was raised in a Muslim nation, Indonesia, and returned to the U.S. to be raised by grandparents enthralled with communism.

The conflict that some in the Middle East want to export will take its toll on that region of the world until it is exorcised and it will threaten Americans until they root it out from within their society. Being politically correct only gets people killed.

A twenty year’s war? No, much longer than that.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Not Really Leaving. Not Really Non-Combat

In a commentary earlier this week I said Bush was right to invade Iraq. It has taken seven years to "stabilize" the nation, but it will likely take a generation to get it to function like a nation in which its various components work together. Failing that, it will break into separate entities of Kurds, Sunni and Shiites. No one knows. In the meantime, we still have 50,000 troops there and are likely to keep them there a very long time for the sake of the entire region.

Bush was Right about Iraq!

By Alan Caruba

As I watched the last of the U.S. active military force pull out of Iraq on August 19, I could not help but notice the famed “Indianhead” patch that unit was wearing on their uniforms because long, long ago, I wore that patch, the emblem of the Second Infantry Division.

Most people are likely unaware that 30,000 of the Division are in South Korea, some sixty years after the truce was declared, ready to repulse the first wave of attack if North Korea is crazy enough to try again.

Let’s just say it. George W. Bush was right!

He was right to invade Iraq and remove a psychopathic dictator from control of that nation, a man who had spent eight years at war with Iran, who had invaded Kuwait, and who, if the Israelis had not blown up a nuclear reactor being built there, would have had a nuclear weapon with which to threaten the entire region.

When Saddam Hussein wasn’t busy gassing hundreds of Kurds to death, his prisons were filled with hundreds of Iraqis and he happily filled mass graves during his thirty years of appalling tyranny. When they held “elections” there, he got 99.9% of the vote. Iraq was as good a definition of Hell as present day Iran.

It’s true that no weapons of mass destruction were found after the 2003 invasion, but even Saddam admitted that he purposely made sure that everyone thought he had them. The intelligence community believed he did and George W. Bush believed he did.

Bush could read a map. Smack dab in the middle of the Middle East is Iraq. It borders Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, and a small part of Turkey. You don’t have to be a general to know that, strategically, Iraq militarily holds the key to the Middle East.

An Iraq in the hands of Saddam Hussein, his two vile sons, and the rest of the criminals around him needed “regime change” and George W. Bush provided it. He held firm and he believed his “surge” would work. He was right.

As wars go, the casualties sustained were modest. You can do comparisons with other modern conflicts and history will bear out that our troops inflicted a lot more hurt on the enemy than they did on us. We lost troops to the lowest form of guerrilla warfare, roadside bombs.

We demonstrated that a robust democracy, set upon the goal of removing a cancerous, threatening regime in an unstable region, could make history the way it has always been made; by sending in the troops.

The troops that left Iraq did so because, during his final years in office, George W. Bush negotiated their withdrawal with the Iraq government, one that had been democratically elected by the people of Iraq. Well before Barack Hussein Obama arrived in the Oval Office, their departure had been put in motion.

All through the 2008 election campaign Obama could not bring himself to admit that George W. Bush was right about the decision to invade, to remain, and to surge troops in to quell the insurgency.

For eighteen months we have had to listen to Obama blame Bush for everything and the voters have concluded that George W. Bush was right.

The only thing Barack Hussein Obama wants to do is run away. He wanted to get out of Iraq. He wants to get out of Afghanistan.

The American military, though, will remain in Iraq for years to come. Some 50,000 troops are there to “train” the Iraqi army and police forces. The American military is still in Europe sixty-five years after the end of World War Two. The American military is still in South Korea. It has missions all over the world and the world is a safer place because of it.

George H.W. Bush who fought in World War II knows that. George W. Bush who served in the Texas National Guard knows that.

Barack Hussein Obama who was a Boy Scout in Indonesia does not.

© Alan Caruba