Sycophant Savior

General Petraeus wins a battle in Washington—if not in Baghdad.

by Andrew J. Bacevich

In common parlance, the phrase “political general” is an epithet, the inverse of the warrior or frontline soldier. In any serious war, with big issues at stake, to assign command to a political general is to court disaster—so at least most Americans believe. But in fact, at the highest levels, successful command requires a sophisticated grasp of politics. At the summit, war and politics merge and become inextricably intertwined. A general in chief not fully attuned to the latter will not master the former.

George Washington, U.S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were all “political generals” in the very best sense of the term. Their claims to immortality rest not on their battlefield exploits—Washington actually won few battles, and Grant achieved his victories through brute force rather than finesse, while Ike hardly qualifies as a field commander at all—but on the skill they demonstrated in translating military power into political advantage. Each of these three genuinely great soldiers possessed a sophisticated appreciation for war’s political dimension.

David Petraeus is a political general. Yet in presenting his recent assessment of the Iraq War and in describing the “way forward,” Petraeus demonstrated that he is a political general of the worst kind—one who indulges in the politics of accommodation that is Washington’s bread and butter but has thereby deferred a far more urgent political imperative, namely, bringing our military policies into harmony with our political purposes.

Putin wants US date to quit Iraq

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the US should set a date for a withdrawal from Iraq.

He was speaking during a live televised question-and-answer session with Russians covering both domestic and foreign policy issues.

Mr Putin said that while the US avoided setting a pull-out date "the Iraqi leadership... won't rush to build up its own security forces".

Mr Putin also said Russia would greatly strengthen its armed forces.

Russians submitted more than one million questions by telephone, text messages or via the internet, the Kremlin said.

The phone-in comes as speculation grows about Mr Putin's plans after his second presidential term ends in March.

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Gus: of course the answer from the White House for this is "when the job is done.." It may seem reasonable but, as we know the aggression/invasion was about oil, this answer in fact means: "never... and bugger off our turf!"... The US has no intention of leaving Iraq alone... The US had never any intention of going-in quick then getting out smart... I don't remember the exact figure but if my memory is correct I did calculate the value of the heist in petrol: about 1000 trillion dollars over 25 years. No small potato.... And if you're a pseudo-military napoleon, enough buckaroos to blame every death of innocent men and women on your enemy's shoulder — whomever you chose it to be.

CamerynLee was only 3 years old when her father, Lance Cpl. Eric J. Orlowski, a Marine Corps reservist, was killed in an accidental shooting during the first days of the Iraq war. Now 8, she is suddenly hungry for information about the man she remembers only in sketchy vignettes: Did he like chicken wings as much as she does? How about hockey? Was he funny?

Old Enough Now to Ask How Dad Died at War

 

US raid kills 10, including children, Iraqi medics say

Fierce fighting between the US military and militants in Baghdad's Shiite bastion of Sadr City has killed at least 10 people and wounded more than 40, medics and security officials say.

The clashes broke out as US forces carried out a raid in the impoverished neighbourhood, which is loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Medics at Sadr City's Imam Ali Hospital and Sadr Hospital confirmed the casualties and said the dead included a child and a girl.

US military also confirmed the operation.

"Coalition forces did conduct early morning operations in the Sadr City area, targeting criminals believed to be responsible for the kidnapping of Coalition soldiers in November 2006 and May 2007," the military said in an email.

The military did not offer any casualty figures.

Watch out for the US crowing cautiously about the Bushit surge working... So far this month barely more than 30 US troops have been killed by the insurgents. That's a drop of 50 per cent on last month's figure which itself was a drop of 10 percent approx. on the month before that. Thus things are looking good.

Unfortunately Bin Laden is asking the "freedom" fighters in Iraq to unite and fight the US troops... This can have a marked counter-effect on the Iraqi populace that'd be saying bugger off to Bin laden, and doing the exact opposite — fight more between themselves... Thus, is Bin Laden working for the Yanks? A scarecrow in the nebulous fields of whatever to be wheeled out in full light when needed, before secretly spraying the fields with birdicide. Who knows, his presence on the world stage has been like a carte blanche for the US to do anything they want... Like a passport to world domination.

One Nobel Prize Winner, Doris Lessing, has been saying that the US has overstated the importance of 9/11 and she likens 9/11 to no more than the IRA bombings in the 1980s...

But to my simple mind, the whole lot is like a pack of cards. Remove some troops and the whole lot might collapse again. leave the troops and the mighty will fall from greater heights.

Hopefully for the Iraqi, the US troops will leave sooner than ever and the Iraqi will find ways to live together. They owe this to themselves but the Yanks will make sure it does not work.

Because if the Iraqi get united, the Yanks might have to say good-bye to the oil. Thus, no way Jose... Troops for another 30 years or more... What's a better training ground for troopers than a small simmering war somewhere, while gently plundering?

From the American Conservative

...

Of course no one disputes the fact that America’s past record of inventiveness has been extraordinary. Probably close to one-third of all the major inventions of the last 100 years have been American.

The question is where this enormous burst of creativity came from. Most Americans assume it sprang from a supposedly uniquely creative American culture—a culture that is thus considered an inexhaustible source of economic out-performance going forward.

The truth is more prosaic and—for anyone concerned about the sustainability of American economic leadership— quite chastening. What really made the difference was that, thanks to factors that were to prove all too transitory, 20th-century Americans had greater opportunities for invention. Because they were richer, far more of them studied advanced engineering and science. Moreover, taking the century as a whole, America’s huge corporations greatly outspent foreign rivals in research and development.

The problem is that other nations are now not only catching up but in some cases drawing ahead. America’s vulnerability has been succinctly summed up in a study by the technology-policy analysts Pat Choate and Edward Miller. In a report to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in 2005, they commented, “The United States’ economy is so large and powerful, and its scientific and technological leadership has long been so overwhelming that the nation could ignore potential technology-based flaws, traps, and dangers. But that era is quickly ending.”

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Gus: after more than ten years asleep at the helm of Australia's wealth going down into the black hole of trade deficit and credit card munchers — this when not swashbuckling anything that could educate people or trying to bury the workforce into the dirt — the Australian government of John Howard has realised (with a bit of prompting mind you) that a country NEEDS engineers and qualified trades people, including MORE doctors...

But John Howard HATES things like TAFE, proper technical colleges that are PUBLICLY funded and owned... This is why in his bag of promises — non-core or fully cored, who cares — he is planning to create a parallel system of PRIVATE education technical colleges, funded by PUBLIC moneys... The rat! And his grand pie in the sky is a plan with a time lapse of lagging proportion that would make a non-goal reaching tortoise proud...

Throw John Howard out... OUT!

'Hidden costs raise' US war price

US Democrats say the wars are costing the US too much
The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing nearly double the amount previously thought, according to a report by Democrats in the US Congress.

They say "hidden costs" have pushed the total to about $1.5 trillion - nearly twice the requested $804bn (£402bn).

Higher oil prices, treating wounded veterans, and the cost to the economy of pulling reservists away from their jobs have been taken into account.

The White House has called the report politically motivated.

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Gus: as if going to war was not politically motivated...

Politics... including the lies and the ransacking of resources, etc... See toon at the top...

October 11, 2008

Finland’s Ahtisaari Wins Nobel Peace Prize

 By WALTER GIBBS and ALAN COWELL

OSLO — The Nobel Committee awarded its 2008 peace prize on Friday to Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president who has been associated over decades with peace efforts and quiet, cautious diplomacy from Asia to Africa and Europe.

Out of 197 people nominated for the annual prize, the committee said, Mr. Ahtisaari had been chosen “for his important efforts in several continents and over three decades to resolve international conflicts.”

Specifically, the committee mentioned his work in ending South African domination of Namibia, the former South-West Africa, in the late 1980s and peace efforts in the Indonesian province of Aceh, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Central Asia, the Horn of Africa and, most recently, in Iraq.

Mr. Ahtisaari has frequently been seen as a contender for the peace prize, whose recipients last year included former American Vice President Al Gore.

The committee’s citation said: “Throughout all his adult life, whether as a senior Finnish public servant and president or in an international capacity, often connected to the United Nations, Ahtisaari has worked for peace and reconciliation.”

See toon at top — a year hence...

 

By DANIEL LARISON

Steven Metz warns against America’s unsustainable pursuit of primacy in the world:

America’s fixation with primacy and military dominance, while now the orthodoxy, is a relatively recent thing. It was initially intended as a temporary expedient to help stave off the Soviet Union as Europe and other regions rebuilt after World War II and dozens of new nations emerged out of the former European colonial empires. But during the course of the Cold War, the United States somehow became addicted to primacy, no longer seeing it as a temporary expedient but as the new normal[bold mine-DL].

It didn’t have to be this way. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States might have considered its global mission complete, disengaged from all but the most vital parts of the world, and undertaken a major military demobilization. Instead, political leaders opted for a smaller but even more advanced and adept military, seeking to “overmatch” any potential adversary. Along the way, the use of armed force became the tool of first resort in American statecraft, supplanting the balanced mix of military, diplomatic and economic power that characterized America’s Cold War strategy.

Metz makes a strong case that continuing a strategy of primacy is both unsustainable and unnecessary. Like our sanctions and regime change addictions, our addiction to primacy is harmful to both the United States and the world. It causes us to assume more costs and burdens than our security requires, and it drives us toward reckless confrontations with other states that we don’t need to have. Our political leaders often use our preeminent position in the world as a license to take aggressive actions that end up needlessly costing lives and money in wars that devastate the affected countries and create more enemies than we had before. 

The pursuit of primacy has become such an ingrained habit that it never occurs to our policymakers that there could ever be any other way of doing things, and they are quick to denounce proposals that the U.S. settle for something less than predominance. Supporters of the current strategy lean heavily on exaggerating threats and stoking fears to make primacy seem like the only valid alternative. Metz notes that their claims don’t withstand scrutiny:

For instance, advocates assume that without U.S. military dominance, the global system—or at least some parts of it—will devolve into conflict or fall under the control of hostile nations that might keep the United States out of the regions they monopolize. That was a valid concern during the Cold War when America faced an expansionistic Soviet Union bent on world domination. But it no longer is.

The other thing that primacists miss or deliberately ignore is that those parts of the world where the U.S. has exercised “leadership” most forcefully and most often are the places that are wracked by conflict. Our role in these places is not a stabilizing one and hasn’t been for at least the last two decades. If the U.S. moved from a strategy of primacy to one of restraint, it would put an end to our repeated destabilizing forays.

Metz adds that there is virtually no debate about changing the strategy:

Yet the idea that America’s economic health depends on primacy and military dominance has been repeated so often that it is an article of faith among mainstream policy experts and political leaders.

If Metz is right that primacy is unsustainable, and I think he is, it is crucial that Americans begin thinking about how to replace a strategy of primacy while we can do so on our terms rather than waiting until the change is forced upon us. Put more bluntly, we need to get help for our primacy addiction before it kills us

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/our-addiction-to-global-...

 

Gus note: the huge US army and the cost associated with it also helps "solve" the huge unemployment problem the US would experience without it. The Pentagon and its sinkhole budget is like a "social" program providing jobs paid for by huge deficits. That this can be used as a "world bullying gendarme" is only a side issue — a non profitable issue that only survives on its glorious illusionary hubris. The carbon traders piggyback on this "world bullying" programme. The cannon makers also piggyback on this opportunity, employing a lot of people...

The fact that US army veterans suicide at a rate 3 times that of the "normal" population is a benefit to the Pentagon. Less people complaining about being "unemployed" and less money to be paid to Vets. Gus is cynical of course.

Same with the huge US prison population: should the petty criminals and small drug users be "on the streets", they would be unemployed — adding to the number. Without the army and the prisons, the unemployment in the US would be between that of France (9%) and Spain (18%).

 

Read from top.

On December 10, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony will be held in Oslo, the capital of Norway. This analysis will try to look at how the prize fits in the bigger picture, but first, some general background is appropriate:

Norway is a member of NATO and has close ties to the United States and Great Britain. The political, economic and bureaucratic elites are firmly integrated in transatlantic networks, a nexus of economic connections, think tanks, international institutions, media and a thousand other ties that bind. They tend to identify with the liberal wing of the empire, (i.e. the Democrats, not the Republicans), but will work with any US administration. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are selected by the Norwegian parliament, and the Committee is nominally independent.

Despite being considered – and where the population considers itself – a ‘peace nation’, there are few countries that have eagerly joined more wars than Norway, from the attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan 2001, the occupation of Iraq, Mali, Libya 2011 and the ongoing occupation of Syria. Norway spends large sums of money supporting the joint Western effort to control the rest of the world through comprador intermediaries in non-governmental organizations.

This analysis will discuss some (overlapping) points about the Nobel Peace Prize:

1. The prize reinforces certain grand narratives, the most important one being We are the good, and thus have the right to decide the fate of the rest of the world.
2. It creates symbols for regime change operations. It beatifies modern day ‘good natives’ complaining about cruel treatment and pleading for the West to do something to liberate them (but are often remarkably unable to see Western abuses).
3. It reinforces general reasons to start wars, by making specific themes very important at the same time they are being used to justify military action.
4. It reinforces the narrative that enemy fights with illegal and cruel weapons. The focus on chemical weapons, as opposed to napalm or sanctions, is one example.
5. It sanctifies peace treaties that are more like unilateral surrenders, advantageous to Western imperialism and capitalist interests.
6. For a bunch of peaceful people, the prize winners are remarkably eager for war and bloody interventions.
7. Some other points + Conclusion.

1. WE ARE THE GOOD, AND THUS HAVE THE RIGHT TO DECIDE THE FATE OF THE REST OF THE WORLD

The Nobel Peace Prize gets its prestige and press coverage because it reinforces several big narratives. If it should deviate too much from what the powerful want, it would be ignored. Of prime importance is the notion that we are the good, and we have a monopoly on interpreting reality and to decide what is important. (‘We’ in this context being people in the West, and by extension their governments and leaders). During the Cold War, the prize had a similar function. It would be interesting to take a closer look at it, but for practical purposes this analysis will mostly be limited the last 30 years. Once you start to notice certain basic themes, they are rather obvious. To put it pointedly, the Nobel Peace Prize tries to aid regime changes to achieve the Empire’s aims where it is possible to avoid direct war, but it will aid in confirming the narrative that our troops are good guys.

This explains why Western leaders so often get the prize. The point is creating an impression that there exists a more humane possibility within our current unjust world system. When they receive it, what they have actually done is not an issue. Hence the award to people like Jimmy Carter (winner 2002); as president he instigated several bloody covert interventions in Central-America, Africa and of course the Islamist fighters in Afghanistan, but has since then opposed direct US wars; or Al Gore (winner 2007), who when he was vice president didn’t shy away from using the military as a foreign policy tool (see part 7). The prize to Barack Obama (winner 2009) can be placed here.

But the main use of the prize is to create support in Western liberal opinion for interventions that would otherwise be naked imperialistic aggressions.

2. A FOCUS FOR REGIME CHANGE OPERATIONS

Where a Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to a dissident of a non-western country, the CIA or the Pentagon (see point 3) often has a task force working on cracking the exact same country.

They winners have varying degrees of internal appeal in the targeted country, but the main purpose in choosing these people is not to boost their standing internally, but to justify attempts at regime change to Western liberal public opinion. Without the focus on these martyrs, these operations would look suspiciously like old style colonial domination.

Hence the beatification of Aung San Suu Kyi (winner 1991) coincided with a concerted campaign to get control over a recalcitrant, but very strategic country. Suu Kyi is in many ways typical of the people the Committee prefers. She is a known entity, having conspicuously strong personal connections to the former colonial power – Oxford educated, married to a British citizen, her children are British citizens, etc. Signaling in which direction her political compass was oriented, she asked the world to use the old colonial name Burma instead of Myanmar. She asked for harsh measures against her own country (for its own good) fitting hand in glove with the US strategy actually used. In fact, all means would be permissible to use against this regime imprisoning a modern day saint.

The Nobel Prize to Suu Kyi played an invaluable role in creating huge support, especially on the liberal left, for the draconian economic sanctions against an otherwise fairly obscure country. And maybe many of her Western supporters actually did believe that the US and UK could fund her with large sums of money and create entire NGO-networks for her with the expressed goal of subverting a sovereign nation’s government, and her intentions to still be pure and progressive.

Myanmar is immensely rich in natural resources and is positioned between China and the Indian Ocean, and China and India. Any significant land connection between these two 21st century great powers would have to go through Myanmar to avoid the Himalayas. It is also of great Chinese interest as a transit country to the Indian Ocean. Therefore, the country was targeted with a multi-approach regime change operation.

A massive press campaign was arranged over several decades, a plethora of NGO financed, whilst “former” CIA-agents now turned missionaries were working with the ethnic guerilla forces to create military pressure. In the usual attempt to concentrate all opposition into a joint force, extreme right wing religious fanatics became the spearhead in this campaign. The sanctions imposed on Myanmar, precluded any economic development and doomed the population to a life of crushing poverty.

One could interpret the recent calls to take the prize back from Suu Kuy as disappointed buyers not getting what they paid for.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/12/06/the-nobel-peace-prize-in-support-of-...

 

 

Read from top and read also:

I never planted them...
and:

peace prize