Category: Iraq

Call Me a Cynic………

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So Barack Obama has repeated his promise to be out of Iraq by August 31.

Note that this involves a lot of weasel words, the core phrase being, “America’s combat mission in Iraq would end.”

That doesn’t mean that there won’t be soldiers there, and that they won’t be shot at, but rather that they are providing “Training and Logistical Support.”

Shades of American advisers in Vietnam.

I don’t think that Obama wants to stay, but he does not have the strength to tell the Pentagon to get the F%$# out and shut the F%$# up, and because the generals still want a little war, because it’s good for careers, and because a real peace dividend would interfere with their consulting gigs in retirement.

I am not suggesting that the Pentagon is unpatriotic, any more than I would suggest that the telemarketing industry is, but they view their benefit to be an independent good for the nation, which does not serve the nation.

This is why robust civilian control of the military is essential for a civil society.

I may be wrong in my prediction, I am wrong more often than not, but I fear that I am right.

Gunmen Wearing Military Uniforms, My Ass

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When gunmen in military uniforms stormed the the Sunni village of Albusaifi, and shot 24 people, you can be pretty sure that they were, in fact, soldiers.

One of the recurring themes during the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from many parts of Baghdad was that the attackers were, “Dressed as security forces.”

This was not because these uniforms are floating around the street for anyone to pick up. It was because they were soldiers and police, and they were acting with the tacit approval of the Iraqi government.

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, knew what was going on, and approved of what was going on, which is why the ethnic cleansing went into high gear in 2006, following his ascension to the PM’s office.

Maliki has been implacably hostile to incorporating the Sunni “Sons of Iraq,” Sunni militiaman recruited to fight against Al Qaeda, into the state security apparatus, as promised, and has directed a program of harassment and arrest against them.

This is just the next step in this process.

I’m quoting American Conservative Magazine?

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Why yes, I am quoting American Conservative Magazine.

You see, Daniel Larison, reads Ross Douthat’s most recent New York Times screed (no link to the Times, I don’t want to encourage them, but his wankitude is here on my blog).

Ross, it seems, felt offended because people were using insufficient nuance when describing Bush and His Evil Minions™, particularly with regard to the architects of the invasion of Iraq, and Mr. Larison responds:

Yes, the problem might be that we do not have artists capable of rendering contemporary architects of a war of aggression that was based on shoddy intelligence, ideological fervor and deceit in a sufficiently subtle, even-handed manner. If only Hollywood were better at portraying the depth and complexity of people who unleashed hell on a nation of 24 million people out of an absurd fear of a non-existent threat! Life is so unfair to warmongers, is it not? Then again, the reason our debates are so poisonous and our nation so divided might have something to do with the existence of utterly unaccountable members of the political class that can launch such a war, suffer no real consequences, and then reliably expect to be defended as “decent” and “well-intentioned” people who made understandable mistakes. The unfortunate truth of our existence is that villains do not have to come out of central casting for comic book movies. They are ordinary, “decent” people who commit grave errors and terrible crimes for any number of reasons. Many great evils have found their origins in a group’s belief that they were doing the right thing and were therefore entitled and permitted to use extraordinary means.

………

(emphasis mine)

That is a righteous rant.

Why Would the USAF Buy French Mirages?

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Because they don’t want the planes sold to the Iraqi Air Force, and this would take them off the market, so the Iraqis could buy F-16s:

This is an interesting rumor. While the Mirage F-1 has almost reached the end of the line as an operational asset with the AdA, it remains a capable fighter and should stay in service for about another decade with a few other air forces (Ecuador, Morocco, and Iran). The Iraqis have recently requested that France delivers the 24 pre-embargo F-1s ordered at the time by the regime of Saddam Hussein in 1985. The Iraqi air force has a long, and relatively successful, history with the F-1 and is particularly looking forward to rebuilding its air defense capability with an aircraft it knows well. However, things are somewhat more complicated; there has been a long standing rumor of F-16s going to the Iraqi Air Force instead and lately, it would also appear that the UAE Mirage 2000-9s have entered the fray.

Sorry, but if this is true, and note that it only a rumor, some heads should roll.

While I understand how US Air Force officers might favor the F-16, it is something that they are familiar with, the idea that they would purchase the aircraft in order to clear the way for a defense contractor is over the top.

This appears to be a decision driven by a desire by some Air Force officers to secure a cushy gig at Lockheed-Martin in retirement, not a decision driven by the real needs and capabilities of the Iraqi military.

It’s Like They are Trying to Demoralize the Democratic Base

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Because it looks like they are going to delay the Iraq withdrawal:

The U.S. military has prepared contingency plans to delay the planned withdrawal of all combat forces in Iraq, citing the prospects for political instability and increased violence as Iraqis hold national elections next month.

Under a deadline set by President Obama, all combat forces are slated to withdraw from Iraq by the end of August, and there remains heavy political pressure in Washington and Baghdad to stick to that schedule. But Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Monday that he had briefed officials in Washington in the past week about possible contingency plans.

I understand that there need to be contingency plans, but the fact that this gets leaked to the Washington Posts means that they are looking to see if a delay is politically feasible for them to further extend Operation Useless Dirt 1.*

So in August, 3 months before the election, they are going to push back the withdrawal, and they expect the base to be enthused about working for the Democratic party.

The Obama administration is beginning to make the Carter administration look like Niccolò Machiavelli.

A few more months of this, and I might be ready to vote green.†

The equation here is very clear: Military operations are very good for careerist military officers, so you will always have a significant portion of the military arguing for these operations, since it benefits them personally.

You need to ignore them.

*H/t Eric Palmer for this bon mot describing Operation (insert name here).
†Not really, pulling the lever for the Greens would have vomiting in the voting booth.‡
‡But yes, actually vomiting in the voting booth might be a real possibility.

Because It’s Not a War on Islam

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Well, they have just discovered that sniper scopes purchased for the Marine Corps contain verses from the Christian bible:

Following an ABC News report that thousands of gun sights used by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan are inscribed with secret Bible references, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps said the Corps is ‘concerned’ and will discuss the matter with the weapons manufacturer.

“We are aware of the issue and are concerned with how this may be perceived,” Capt. Geraldine Carey, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps, said in a statement to ABC News. “We will meet with the vendor to discuss future sight procurements.” Carey said that when the initial deal was made in 2005 it was the only product that met the Corps needs.

However, a spokesperson for CentCom, the U.S. military’s overall command in Iraq and Aghanistan, said he did not understand why the issue was any different from U.S. money with religious inscriptions on it.

(emphasis mine)

Ummm………Because inscribing Christian verses on weapons that you kill Muslims with will make it that much more difficult for US troops to train with Muslim troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because it’s likely to inspire more violence against American troops, because it is another piece of evidence that Islamic radicals will use to show that this is a war against Islam?

That kind of fits the definition of, “Contrary to good order and discipline,” doesn’t it.

The Marines get it, the US Army doesn’t.

Interestingly enough, it’s the the Army, along with the US Air Force in which the bulk of complaints about discrimination by aggressive Evangelicals have been reported.

It appears that this has been common knowledge among gun enthusiasts for about 4 years, but the military never noticed what the Trijicon corporation was doing.

The State Department Cover-Up of Blackwater Succeeds

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Basically, the State Department used the Oliver North option, so by immunizing and debriefing them, they made a trial almost impossible, and the judge, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina, was forced to dismiss the case.

Obviously, part of the problem is that the prosecution screwed up, though they can refile, but the real crux of the matter here is that the Bushies in the State Department intended this result. They wanted to protect Bush supporter Eric Prince and his company, now called Xe.

Republican Congressmen did this at the Iran-Contra hearings, because they feared that North would rat out Reagan if he actually ended up in prison.

Fighting Terrorism With Lesbian Pr0n

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The Wall Street Journal has a bomb shell of s story.

It appears that insurgents in Afghanistan have hacked into the video feeds of US drones:

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

(link to SkyGrapper software mine)

I am surprised by this. Not so much by the idea that anyone in a situation to be surveilled and attacked by the US might attempt to use SIGINT to defend themselves, that it just basic common sense, but by the fact that the US military has been using an unencrypted feed to transmit data.

And, of course, we have the accusation that it was Iran who actually hacked the feeds, or developed the method to hack the feeds, because, much like in the case of the the Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP) used by insurgents in Iraq, it is claimed that only the Iranians have the technical know-how to use such a system.

Of course, in the case of the EFPs, this accusation relied on a number of lies, in particular the idea that EFP construction was so technically challenging that only the Iranians could do it, despite the fact that the IRA was using EFPs in Ireland over 30 years ago, and that they actually discovered workshops where IEDs were manufactured…………It turns out all you need to make an EFP is a simple lathe and some copper.

The idea that once someone discovered the video feeds were unencrypted, and my guess would be that this has been known since the Kosovo campaign, because the Serbs were typically all over this kind of stuff.

In any case, the military is now claiming that this breach has been fixed, implying that encryption has been added.

I’m wondering what took so long. The satellite TV providers have been encrypting their signals with minimal computational overhead for decades.

Of course, I have an improvement on this idea, and it involves lesbian pr0n. (You were wondering when we would be getting to the pr0n, weren’t you)

In addition to using encryption, the video feed should use steganography to embed the signal inside an unencrypted non-tactical video feed.

The unencrypted video should be lesbian pr0n,* because the then the insurgents would in order to extract the true signal, be forced to watch nekkid women (Oh my God, tits!) deriving sexual satisfaction (Oh my God, female orgasm!) without benefit of a penis (Oh my God…………You get the idea), and it just screws with their heads (both upper and lower).

One of the reasons for the pr0n,† is because any relatively competent state actor would be able to decrypt a video feed in a relatively short period of time by gang tackling the signal with a video game based massively parallel super-computer.

*It was actually Bill Volk who made the suggestion.
†Beside the fact that I am a smart ass.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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The New York Times is now reporting that mercenary corporation Blackwater (now Xe) approved over a million dollars in bribes to Iraqi officials in order to continue to operate in Iraq:

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

So they violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and, if you go down further, it looks like they were paying off victims and witnesses in order to secure their silence during the FBI investigation.

Srsly, prosecushuns, now!

Signs of the Apocalypse: George F. Will Calls Out Dick Cheney

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On ABC’s This Week (Stephanopoulos), they have a discussion of Dick Cheney’s speech, where he says that Obama is taking too long to make up his mind.

George F. Will, yes that George F. Will, takes takes Cheney to task:

“A bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction,” Will said on ABC’s “This Week. “For a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point. We have much more to fear in this town from hasty than from slow government action.”

When you have lost the guy who drilled Ronald Reagan for his debates with Jimmy Carter while using Carter’s stolen briefing books, you’ve lost everyone.

Start watching at about -11:10. (the timer on the clip counts down, not up)

Wanker of the Day

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T. Boone Pickens :

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are “entitled” to some of Iraq’s crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.

Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq’s vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

“They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it,” Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. “Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars.”

Because the Iraqis asked us to invade, create a civil war, and set off a chain of events that killed somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 of them, all while driving another million of so out of the country.

I’m not sure what it is about the oil bidness, but it does appear that they attract more than their share of sociopaths: T. Boone Pickens, Dick Cheney, John D. Rockefeller, the bin Laden clan, the royal families of the UAE and Kuwait, and (of course) the House of Saud, just to name a few.

Another Milestone In the Annals of Stupid and Corrupt

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Just when I think that Bush and His Evil Minions™ have left me so jaded that they can no longer shock me with their corruption and incompetence, I discover that not only did the CIA have assassination teams, but they outsourced these teams to Blackwater, USA (now Xe):

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

This is not surprising. Blackwater’s mercenary division, Blackwater Security Consulting (BSC), was founded in 2002 with the obvious goal of cashing in on the paranoia bonanza post 911, and used that, along with the reputation earned by Eric Prince’s father as a reliable supporter of extreme right wing causes, to generate revenues.

Notwithstanding the caveat in the article:

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

I think that it’s more likely than not that there was a real intent by the CIA to hire outside contractors as hit-men.

If CIA paramilitary forces needed training, they could get that from any number of military organizations.

After all, as has been discovered in Iraq, Mercenaries are:

  • Not subject to US law.
  • Indemnified from the local law.
  • Not required to use the same reporting standards as government agents on either finance or notification.

So, the most incompetent and brutal of the mercenaries were chosen, probably on the basis of political payback for contributions and a shared Christo-Fascist world view, and the intent was to just turn them loose to kill people without the slightest indication of meaningful supervision.

Great googly moogly.

We need a special prosecutor now.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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Richard Bruce Cheney has admitted that he was wrong:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney disavowed intelligence he once cited to suggest that then-Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to stage the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheney said today that information by the Central Intelligence Agency of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on Sept. 11 “turned out not to be true.” Still, Cheney said a longstanding relationship existed between Hussein and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Not only is he admitting error, he is doing so on a signature issue.

I have no clue as to what is going on. First, he embarks on his “human snarl tour,” in which he says that he is right about everything, and now he is backing off of his biggest lie.

Either there are wheels within wheels beyond my understanding, or he’s throwing small strokes, and I cannot figure out which.