Tag: War

Well, It’s a Start

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The Biden administration has announced that it is reducing support for military operations by the House of Saud in Yemen.

The details are not in yet, but it appears that the scope of this reduction in support is limited.

It would be nice if US administrations didn’t spend their time coddling the incompetent boy prince of the the Riyadh regime:

Joe Biden has announced an end to US support for Saudi-led offensive operations in Yemen, as part of a broad reshaping of American foreign policy.

In his first foreign policy speech as president, Biden signaled that the US would no longer be an unquestioning ally to the Gulf monarchies, announced a more than eightfold increase in the number of refugees the country would accept, and declared that the days of a US president “rolling over” for Vladimir Putin were over.

“America is back,” Biden declared in remarks delivered at the state department, capping a whiplash fortnight of dramatic foreign policy changes since his 20 January inauguration. “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”

Biden said the conflict in Yemen, which has killed more than 100,000 Yemenis and displaced 8 million, had “created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe”.

“This war has to end,” Biden. “And to underscore our commitment, we’re ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arm sales.”

However, he said the US would continue to provide defensive support to Saudi Arabia against missile and drone attacks from Iranian-backed forces. US forces will also continue operations against al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula.

There is a whole lot of wiggle room for a whole lot of mischief by the petty Persian Gulf potentiates to continuing to prosecute their war against the people of Yemen.

The distancing of Washington from Riyadh is one of the most conspicuous reversals of Donald Trump’s agenda, but it also marks a break with the policies pursued by Barack Obama, who had backed the Saudi offensive in Yemen, although he later sought to impose constraints on its air war.

A bipartisan majority in Congress had previously voted to cut off support to the Saudi campaign, citing the civilian death toll and the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. But Trump used his veto to block the move.

The US will also freeze arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and name a special envoy to Yemen, to put more pressure on the Saudis and Emiratis and the Houthi forces they are fighting, to make a lasting peace agreement.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

With Saudi money flooding the lobbying channels inside the Beltway, I expect pushback from the very serious people, and a walk-back from the White House.

Giants Used to Walk Among Us

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Neil Sheehan, who covered the Vietnam war almost from the beginning, got Daniel Ellsberg to leak him the Pentagon Papers, and then wrote a searing book on the Vietnam war, A Bright and Shining Lie, has died at age 84:

Neil Sheehan, the Vietnam War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who obtained the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times, leading the government for the first time in American history to get a judge to block publication of an article on grounds of national security, died on Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 84.

………

Mr. Sheehan, who covered the war from 1962 to 1966 for United Press International and The Times, was also the author of “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam,” which won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer in 1989. Reviewing it in the Times, Ronald Steel wrote, “If there is one book that captures the Vietnam War in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it.”

Intense and driven, Mr. Sheehan arrived in Vietnam at age 25, a believer in the American mission. He left, four years later, disillusioned and anguished. He later spent what he described as a grim and monastic 16 years on “A Bright Shining Lie,” in the hope that the book would move Americans finally to come to grips with the war.

“I simply cannot help worrying that, in the process of waging this war, we are corrupting ourselves,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1966. “I wonder, when I look at the bombed-out peasant hamlets, the orphans begging and stealing on the streets of Saigon and the women and children with napalm burns lying on the hospital cots, whether the United States or any nation has the right to inflict this suffering and degradation on another people for its own ends.”

Mr. Sheehan’s readiness to entertain the notion that Americans might have committed war crimes prompted Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had turned against the war, to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of American decision-making on Vietnam, to him in 1971. The papers revealed that successive administrations had expanded U.S. involvement in the war and intensified attacks on North Vietnam while obscuring their doubts about the likelihood of success.

You don’t find reporters like this at the Times any more, or at the mainstream media.

It’s all stenography now.

Another Stopped Clock Moment

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It appears that Trump is cutting off military support to CIA death squads: (Details on the whole child murdering death squads are here)

Years from now, we will forgive historians who, when documenting the Donald Trump presidency — its cold indifference to hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths, its pandemic denialism, its migrant family separations, its use of the Justice Department as a political cudgel and the attorney general as a Mafia lawyer, the president’s genuine attempt to subvert the 2020 election results, and his impeachment — fail to note a bureaucratic dust-up between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon in the waning days of the administration.

Last week, news broke that Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, sent a letter to the CIA notifying the agency that the Pentagon would review the terms of its military support to CIA operations. News reports suggested that the Pentagon was planning to strip the CIA of its support for counterterrorism missions around the world almost immediately. Drones, elite soldiers, fuel, and medical evacuation of casualties, for example, would disappear almost overnight. CNN reported that the Pentagon was “planning to withdraw most support for CIA counter-terror missions by the beginning of next year.” The New York Times suggested that the purpose was to “make it difficult” for the CIA to conduct its covert war in Afghanistan as Trump reduces the number of U.S. troops there. ABC News described the decision as “unprecedented.” The cuts would leave CIA paramilitary officers to die should they suffer casualties, former officers told the press.

But interviews with six current and former national security officials, including some directly involved in the Pentagon’s review, suggest it is neither immediate nor controversial. Instead, the review serves as a coda for the Trump administration’s chaos — and as an unintentional gift to the incoming Biden administration.

Miller’s letter to CIA Director Gina Haspel informed her that the Pentagon would update a classified 2005 memorandum of understanding outlining the terms of Defense Department support to CIA missions. The Donald Rumsfeld-led Pentagon wrote the memo in the early years of what the George W. Bush administration called the global war on terror. In the immediate weeks and months after the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon discovered that it had neither the intelligence capability nor the nimbleness that the CIA showed in their quick deployment to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda conceived of and trained for the attacks; the CIA needed special operations forces to buttress their tiny paramilitary division.

As an aside, United States Special Operations Command (USSICOM) was established in 1987, so it appears that the need to use CIA paramilitaries, particularly given its extensive expansion over the intervening 33 years, is to ensure that those operations are not subject to the purview of any potential war crimes investigations.

………

Fast forward to Donald Trump. He campaigned in 2016 on pulling out U.S. troops from the wars which began after 9/11 and later, as president, declared victory over the Islamic State. In 2018, the Pentagon, led by Defense Secretary James Mattis, published a new national defense strategy as a blueprint for a new era. Counterterrorism was no longer the country’s “primary concern.” The new strategy called long-term strategic competition with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran the top priorities.

………

Trump reportedly tried several times to pull troops out of Afghanistan but was said to have been blocked or slow-rolled by the national security establishment. After he lost the November election, Trump fired Esper because he was said to have resisted the move. As a result, Miller replaced Esper and quickly went about announcing that troops were indeed coming home. As almost an afterthought, Miller and the acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, also pushed to update the 2005 sharing agreement to fall in line with the change in national security policy, several defense officials told The Intercept. They said that fears of resource cuts to the CIA are unfounded overall.

………

A secondary justification for rewriting the agreement is to allow the Pentagon to answer a simple question that has plagued military officials for years: How much support do we provide to the CIA, and how is it used?

………

For military officials, the support to the CIA has become just like any other part of the Pentagon’s self-licking ice cream cone: one with no end. The agreement has persisted for 15 years, even as national security priorities have changed. Two military officials who spoke with The Intercept said the Pentagon couldn’t answer congressional committees’ questions about how the CIA used the Pentagon’s resources. As a result, the new memo will insist that the CIA provide more information to the Pentagon on where and how their support, including forces, is used.

………

According to the senior Pentagon official involved in the review, the Pentagon is asking the CIA to use military support in the so-called great nation competition and use fewer resources in their counterterrorism efforts. It is all part of a more considerable effort to move the military’s resources away from hunting suspected Islamic militants worldwide and toward the now two-year-old focus on other global powers. The military is letting the CIA know that they are ending its forever wars in a strategic sense.

“[Director Haspel] wants out of the war on terror,” the senior Pentagon official continued. “She thinks that takes the CIA away from its core mission of going after Russia and China. And it’s 20 years later, and we had to do [that] at the time, it’s 20 years now, and a shift has to be made.”

So Haspel is a moron who has never left the Cold War.

And people wonder why the Russians think that the war against them by the US never ended.

………

CIA counterterrorism veterans believe the review stems from Trump making a last-minute effort to punish the CIA for various offenses, but mostly because the agency concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him become president. A retired senior intelligence official told The Intercept that a senior congressional aide on an intelligence committee asked the White House last week to explain Miller’s letter to the CIA. The retired official said the aide was told, “It’s because the president’s followers believe the agency played a role” in Trump’s election loss last month. The retired official said the White House acknowledged that the claim of CIA involvement in Trump’s election loss was unfounded, but the facts didn’t matter. The message from the White House, according to the retired official, was that “it matters what Trump’s supporters think, and they think that’s the case.”

Given Trump’s pettiness and thin-skinned demeanor, it may very well be that Trump ordered the Pentagon to take its toys away from the CIA, but it also doesn’t matter.

………

But it does provide Biden with an unintentional gift. By forcing the incoming administration to respond to the review shortly after taking power, Trump’s team provides Biden with an opportunity to quickly take stock of 20 years of lethal operations, both in direct view and secret — and make a decision to end an unwinnable war.

………

A lame-duck president agitating for a useful bureaucratic change as a parting shot at the deep state is the same delusional logic that came with much of Trump’s four years: occasionally doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons.

Given the nature of CIA paramilitaries, their primary benefits appear to be evading the laws of war, and to maintain a military presence in an area in defiance of civilian leadership (Syria most recently), reducing this capability is an unalloyed good, regardless of the motivations.

Sock and Awe

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 12 years ago today:

12 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/g2W14AywFm

— Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) December 14, 2020

A tip of the hat to Muntadhar al-Zaidi, a journalist’s journalist. 

Unfortunately, I could not find any games that came from this meme that still worked.  They were all done in Flash, which uninstalled itself from my computer a few months ago.

And yes, the “Sock and Awe” title is my own joke.

True

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Glenn Greenwald makes a very good point, that by any impartial measure George W. Bush was a more damaging to the US and the world:

That the liberal belief in and fear of a Trump-led fascist dictatorship and violent coup is actually a fantasy — a longing, a desire, a craving — has long been obvious.

The Democrats’ own actions proved that they never believed their own melodramatic and self-glorifying rhetoric about Trump as The New Hitler — from their leaders joining with the GOP to increase The Fascist Dictator’s domestic spying powers and military spending to their (correct) belief that the way to oust The Neo-Nazi Tyrant was through a peaceful and lawfully conducted democratic election in which vote totals and, if necessary, duly constituted courts would determine the next president.

………

I began writing about politics in 2005 as a reaction to the lawlessness, executive power transgressions and authoritarian Article II theories imposed by Bush/Cheney officials in the name of fighting terror. They claimed the right to violate Congressional statutes restricting how they could spy, detain, or even kill anyone, including American citizens, as long they justified it as helpful in the fight again terrorism.

They invented new theories of secrecy to hide virtually everything they did and, worse, to bar courts from subjecting their actions to legal or constitutional scrutiny. Josh Marshall’s entire career is based on a well-documented claim that the Bush White House and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired U.S. Attorneys who were investigating their own associates, including those of Karl Rove. The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers and sources under the 1917 Espionage Act — enacted by Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent from U.S. involvement in World War I — than all prior presidents combined.

………

That the War on Terror itself was racist and Islamophobic — how else to explain year after year of predominantly Muslim countries being bombed by the Bush and Obama administrations? — was barely disputed in liberal discourse. Karl Rove’s core campaign strategy in 2002 and 2004 was to place anti-gay referenda on as many state ballots as possible, and disseminate slanderous propaganda about same-sex couples, all to incentivize evangelicals to vote. And now we’re subjected to the revolting sanctimony of the very same same operatives and supporters who did that, trying to prove the unprecedented evil of Trump by insisting that at least prior administrations did not rely on bigoted tropes or racist rhetoric.

………

And even if Trump has lied more frequently and more blatantly than prior presidents — a conclusion I would probably accept — how do those lies compare to the one sustained over many years, from liberals’ most currently beloved neocon pundits and journalists, that convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda and thus likely responsible for the 9/11 attack, leading to the invasion and destruction of a country of 26 million people and, ultimately, the rise of ISIS?

………

And even if Trump has lied more frequently and more blatantly than prior presidents — a conclusion I would probably accept — how do those lies compare to the one sustained over many years, from liberals’ most currently beloved neocon pundits and journalists, that convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda and thus likely responsible for the 9/11 attack, leading to the invasion and destruction of a country of 26 million people and, ultimately, the rise of ISIS?

It is not an exaggeration to say that much of the division on the center-left over the past four years has been shaped by whether one sees Trump as a symptom of American pathologies or as its primary cause, of whether one views the return of pre-Trump “normalcy” as something to loathe or something to crave, of whether one views the Bush/Cheney years and War on Terror abuses (to say nothing of the horrors of the Cold War) as at least as bad as anything Trump has ushered in or whether one sees those pre-Trump evils as somehow more benign and less ignoble. 

Bush killed more people, Obama deported and assassinated more people, and both of them normalized the excesses of the US state security apparatus.

Trump is a lesson that can be learned from, because the evil that put him in power did not come from him, though he certainly has no lack of personal evil, it came from a broken and corrupt society.

No fundamental change means that in 4 or 8 years something worse, if just because it is more subtle and more competent, will be knocking at the orifices of the American body politic.

This is Not the Mark of a Winning Foreign Policy

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That the US is supporting the Taliban in its fight against Isis in Afghanistan indicates that it’s not a particularly coherent foreign policy either. 

This is a direct consequence of our regime change Mousketeers misguided attempt at the overthrow of the Assads in Syria.

The Council on Foreign Relations crowd have absolutely no concept of blowback, despite our being the recipient of this phenomenon over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again:

Army Sgt. 1st Class Steve Frye was stuck on base last summer in Afghanistan, bored and fiddling around on a military network, when he came across live video footage of a battle in the Korengal Valley, where he had first seen combat 13 years earlier. It was infamous terrain, where at least 40 U.S. troops had died over the years, including some of Frye’s friends. Watching the Reaper drone footage closely, he saw that no American forces were involved in the fighting, and none from the Afghan government. Instead, the Taliban and the Islamic State were duking it out. Frye looked for confirmation online. Sure enough, America’s old enemy and its newer one were posting photos and video to propaganda channels as they tussled for control of the Korengal and its lucrative timber business.

What Frye didn’t know was that U.S. Special Operations forces were preparing to intervene in the fighting in Konar province in eastern Afghanistan — not by attacking both sides, but by using strikes from drones and other aircraft to help the Taliban. “What we’re doing with the strikes against ISIS is helping the Taliban move,” a member of the elite Joint Special Operations Command counterterrorism task force based at Bagram air base explained to me earlier this year, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the assistance was secret. The air power would give them an advantage by keeping the enemy pinned down.

Last fall and winter, as the JSOC task force was conducting the strikes, the Trump administration’s public line was that it was hammering the Taliban “harder than they have ever been hit before,” as the president put it — trying to force the group back to the negotiating table in Doha, Qatar, after President Trump put peace talks there on hold and canceled a secretly planned summit with Taliban leaders at Camp David. Administration officials signaled that they didn’t like or trust the Taliban and that, until it made more concessions, it could expect only blistering bombardment.

In reality, even as its warplanes have struck the Taliban in other parts of Afghanistan, the U.S. military has been quietly helping the Taliban to weaken the Islamic State in its Konar stronghold and keep more of the country from falling into the hands of the group, which — unlike the Taliban — the United States views as an international terrorist organization with aspirations to strike America and Europe. Remarkably, it can do so without needing to communicate with the Taliban, by observing battle conditions and listening in on the group. Two members of the JSOC task force and another defense official described the assistance to me this year in interviews for a book about the war in Konar, all of them speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about it. (The U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan declined to comment for this story.)

As Rita May Brown (not Albert Einstein) said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Osama bin Laden Won

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QED

It’s September 11, and it’s been 19 years since the attacks, and I thought that this would be a good time look back and try to figure out what it all means.

I keep going back to Eric Frank Russell’s science fiction classic book Wasp, in which the protagonist is sent behind enemy lines to provoke reaction, and it is that reaction which harms the enemy.

Bin Laden knew that he could never defeat the United States, but that he could provoke a response that would cripple the country.

Think of the statecraft equivalent of anaphylactic shock or a Cytokine storm.

Al Qaeda won in the years following 9/11.

You could argue that he won when Bush invaded Iraq, trapping the US military in a quagmire, but I think that it happened when Barack Obama, who ironically enough presided over bin Laden’s killing, normalized the excesses of the Bush administration’s policies of drone terror against brown people and the pervasive surveillance state.

In either case, what has followed in our society has flowed from that day, and out society is by far the worse for this.

We were on an unsustainable path before the attacks, and the descent has only accelerated since then.

Tweet of the Day

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"I joined a gang of bank robbers. These incompetents, tripped on their shoelaces, got lost, ran out of gas, forgot the masks and passed a note to a teller that read 'I have a gub.' Worst part? They wouldn't let me blow things up! I quit. Here's a book about my moral superiority." https://t.co/tzYQUyqmbQ

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) June 25, 2020

John Bolton is not your friend, and he has been a consistent force for evil his entire life.

Breaking News from the Gulf of Tonkin

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My bad, it’s not the Gulf of Tonkin, it’s the Persian Gulf, but given that it looks like we are dealing with yet another false report that could lead to war, the similarities are uncanny.
The rocket attack on the military base that eventually led to the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was probably executed by Daesh, not an Iranian backed militia:

The white Kia pickup turned off the desert road and rumbled onto a dirt track, stopping near a marsh. Soon there was a flash and a ripping sound as the first of the rockets fired from the truck soared toward Iraq’s K-1 military base.

The rockets wounded six people and killed an American contractor, setting off a chain of events that brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war.

The United States blamed an Iraqi militia with close ties to Iran and bombed five of the group’s bases. Angry Iraqis then stormed the American Embassy. The United States then killed Iran’s top general. Iran then fired missiles at American forces and mistakenly shot down a passenger jet, killing 176 people.

But Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started the spiral of events, saying they believe it is unlikely that the militia the United States blamed for the attack, Khataib Hezbollah, carried it out.

………

American officials insist that they have solid evidence that Khataib Hezbollah carried out the attack, though they have not made it public.

Bullsh%$.

If they had evidence, we would have heard it.

They wanted to get their war on, facts be damned.

………

The rockets were launched from a Sunni Muslim part of Kirkuk Province notorious for attacks by the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, which would have made the area hostile territory for a Shiite militia like Khataib Hezbollah.

Khataib Hezbollah has not had a presence in Kirkuk Province since 2014.

The Islamic State, however, had carried out three attacks relatively close to the base in the 10 days before the attack on K-1. Iraqi intelligence officials sent reports to the Americans in November and December warning that ISIS intended to target K-1, an Iraqi air base in Kirkuk Province that is also used by American forces.

And the abandoned Kia pickup was found was less than 1,000 feet from the site of an ISIS execution in September of five Shiite buffalo herders.

These facts all point to the Islamic State, Iraqi officials say.

The repercussions for this bit of insanity will be playing out for decades, and they will not be good for us.

Tweet of the Day

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Hate to say it but reports claiming US military leaders were “stunned” when our totally normal president took their most extreme suggestion is military PR. Of course they knew it was a possibility, and they were ok with it; otherwise they wouldn’t suggest it to a lunatic.

— Alex Kotch (@alexkotch) January 5, 2020

This take is not completely accurate.

It increasingly seems that there are elements within the Trump administration, the foreign policy establishment, and the state security apparatus who have been doggedly trying to go to war with Iran for decades.

Still, whoever was involved in this decision needs to be named and shamed.

#AdderallTRump

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The hashtag is trending on Twitter following Donald Trump’s speech on Iran.

Following reports by an ex-staffer on The Apprentice that routinely Trump snorted the stimulant Adderall and abused Sudafed.

Trump’s speech is reported (not gonna watch it, he makes my flesh crawl) to have slurred words, mispronounced words, and sniffed constantly, (58 times) and people noticed:

Why all the sniffing? Why the slurring?

I wonder why President Donald Trump sniffs so much when he’s giving super important public addresses.

What’s up with that snort?

I wonder why he appeared to be slurring his words today.

Anxiety? Dementia, or some other health disorder? Drugs? Lack of drugs?

There are rumors, but nothing confirmed.

Whatever it is?

It ain’t good.

This is guy has the authority to start World War III.

Pleasant dreams.

Your End of the World Update

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1200 km from Mar a Lago

I’ve generally thought that the War Powers Act was largely a dead letter, with Presidents ignoring the requirements of the law, and Congress lacking the cojones to devend the law in court.

That being said, Trump claiming that a tweet is sufficient notice to Congress takes the cake:

President Trump claimed Sunday that his tweets are sufficient notice to Congress of any possible U.S. military strike on Iran, in an apparent dismissal of his obligations under the War Powers Act of 1973.

 Trump’s declaration, which comes two days after his administration launched a drone strike that killed top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani, was met with disbelief and ridicule from congressional Democrats, who called on the president to respect the role of the legislative branch in authorizing new military action abroad.

Meanwhile, Trump is claiming that he will target Iranian cultural sites, a war crime, and an Iranian official has tweeted a link to a Forbes article that listed Trump properties around the world in response.

Given that the Houthi drones that struck Saudi oil facilities have a range of (at least) 1200 km (750 miles), and are small enough to be carried on a boat not much larger than the one that carried Greta Thunberg across the Atlantic.

The boat, or for that matter a pickup truck, could be parked in Cuba, Nassau, or Cancun and hit Mar a Lago, which is, of course, what Hesameddin Ashena implied in his tweet.

If I were Trump, I would not be OCD about making his tee times.

Meanwhile, CBP is arbitrarily detaining US citizens of Iranian origin at the US border, which, notwithstanding denials, appears to be a part of a deliberate, and bigoted, policy.

This is seriously f%$#ed up.

Hearts and Minds

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The Washington Post has gotten its hands on internal documents that show that the US state security apparatus has been lying about progress in Afghanistan for most of the war.

Gee, that does not sound like the Vietnam war at all.

We are doing the same thing that we did in Vietnam because we learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam.

The lesson that was “learned” was that we “lost” because the American public stopped supporting the war, which makes counter-insurgency primarily an exercise in PR.

It’s a convenient explanation, because it means that there is no accountability for Pentagon officials or members of the military, the American public failed them.

It’s also complete bullsh%$.

The war was lost because the NLF (Viet Cong) and the the NVA beat the US military.

They defined the terms of engagement, and in so doing, they played to their strengths and our weaknesses, just like the Taliban is now.

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

To quote (not) Tallyrand, “They have forgotten nothing, and they have learned nothing.”

There needs to be a thorough and independent investigation of how we were defeated in Vietnam Afghanistan, and those who made a dogs breakfast of it need to be called out.

It’s called accountability, and it is all too rare for general officers in the US military.

Tweet of the Day

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A short little history of war propaganda:

Vietnam 1964 – Gulf of Tonkin incident

Gulf War 1990 – Incubator Babies

Iraq War 2003 – Imaginary WMDs

Libya 2011 – Nonexistent massacres in Benghazi#Syria 2019: Video from a Kentucky military show passed off as Syrian war footage https://t.co/AWS9QKBOMn

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) October 15, 2019

When issues of war and peace come up in America, the only way to get an accurate story is to find a foreign source.

I Can’t Even………

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Trump is defending his abandonment of our Kurdish allies in northern Syria because they did not hit the beaches with us at Normandy.

This is amazingly stupid and ahistorical. (Turkey was neutral in the war, and Syria, Iran, and Iraq were under the control of the UK by the time that America entered the war)

I’m not surprised about the betrayal of the Kurds, this has been a bipartisan standard operating procedure for the United States since (at least) the early 1970s, but this justification is mind-bogglingly stupid.

It Seems That the House of Saud Thinks That It Was the Houthis

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Seriously, the only reason for the House of Saud to agree to a cease fire in Yemen is that they are worried about further attacks on their critical infrastructure coming from the Houthis:

Saudi Arabia is moving to enact a partial cease-fire in Yemen, say people familiar with the plans, as Riyadh and the Houthi militants the kingdom is fighting try to end a four-year war that has become a front line in the regional clash with Iran.

Saudi Arabia’s decision follows the Houthis’ surprise declaration of a unilateral cease-fire in Yemen last week, just days after they claimed responsibility for the Sept. 14 drone and cruise-missile strike on Saudi Arabia’s oil industry.

If the mutual cease-fire in these areas takes hold, the Saudis would look to broaden the truce to other parts of Yemen, the people familiar with the plans said. Enforcing the cease-fire will require Saudi Arabia to reach out to its Yemeni allies on the ground to ensure that they adhere to Riyadh’s dictates.

The new cease-fire faces steep odds, as similar arrangements have crumbled before. But the Houthis’ unexpected unilateral move for a cease-fire last week raised hopes in Riyadh and Washington that the Yemeni fighters might be willing to distance themselves from Tehran.

After the Sept. 14 attack on the Saudi oil facilities, Houthi leaders initially said they were responsible. Saudi, U.S. and European officials dismissed the claims as an attempt to obscure Iran’s role in the strike. Yemeni fighters, these officials say, have neither the weapons nor the skills to carry out such a sophisticated strike.

Which is why the Saudis are folding lime overdone pasta to the Houthis, because they, “Have neither the weapons nor the skills to carry out such a sophisticated strike.”

Sounds convincing to me.