{"id":185543,"date":"2014-10-15T21:29:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-16T02:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/10\/15\/the-banality-of-evil-at-1600-pennsylvania-avenue\/"},"modified":"2014-10-15T21:29:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-16T02:29:00","slug":"the-banality-of-evil-at-1600-pennsylvania-avenue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/10\/15\/the-banality-of-evil-at-1600-pennsylvania-avenue\/","title":{"rendered":"The Banality of Evil at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times is reporting that Obama asked for a report from the CIA on the effectiveness of covert to rebels, and it revealed that it was an almost unbroken string of failure<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Central Intelligence Agency<\/a> has run guns to insurgencies across the world during its 67-year history \u2014 from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba. The continuing C.I.A. effort to train Syrian rebels is just the latest example of an American president becoming enticed by the prospect of using the spy agency to covertly arm and train rebel groups.<\/span>

<\/span> An internal C.I.A. study has found that it rarely works.<\/span>

<\/span> The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration\u2019s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.<\/span>

<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> But in April 2013, President Obama<\/a> authorized the C.I.A. to begin a program to arm the rebels at a base in Jordan, and more recently the administration decided to expand the training mission with a larger parallel Pentagon program in Saudi Arabia to train \u201cvetted\u201d rebels to battle fighters of the Islamic State, with the aim of training approximately 5,000 rebel troops per year.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

George W. Bush was drooling idiot, and Richard Bruce Cheney is, well, Dick Cheney.  They don’t know<\/b> any any better.<\/p>\n

Barack Obama had doubts, and got research done, found out that it was a fool’s errand, and then he went ahead and did it anyway<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Barack Obama is in a very much a hostage of the inside the Beltway\/Council on Foreign Relations bellicose consensus, which has led us to nothing but ruin since at least our little adventure in Indochina.<\/p>\n

What’s more he is an enthusiastically<\/b> willing<\/b> hostage of this whole bomb\/drone\/invade everything and let God sort them out consensus, but he knows better<\/b>.<\/p>\n

If he didn’t he would not have called for the CIA study on backing insurgents.<\/p>\n

But he let loose the dogs of war, even though he knew better:<\/p>\n

What\u2019s worse: Launching a disastrous military campaign under false pretenses to achieve goals you wrongly believe are attainable? Or launching a disastrous military campaign you know is doomed in order to help your party win an election? <\/span>

<\/span>I ask in light of today\u2019s New York Times story about how President Obama asked the CIA<\/a> a while back whether arming rebel forces \u2013 pretty much the agency\u2019s signature strategy \u2014 had ever worked in the past. <\/span>

<\/span>He was told that it almost never has. <\/span>

<\/span>But then in June, once the political pressure<\/a> for intervention in Syria got too great, he did just that \u2014 sending weapons to rebels fighting the Syrian military. <\/span>

<\/span>Yes: He knew better, but he did it anyway<\/i>.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>As it happens, Syria is hardly the first or most significant place Obama has used his power as Commander-in-Chief in ways that get people slaughtered, even though he knew better, <\/i>primarily for political purposes.<\/span>

<\/span>Obama\u2019s biggest such decision killed a lot of American servicemembers who he sent to fight and die in Afghanistan.<\/span>
 During his 2008 presidential campaign, which was marked by his opposition to the war in Iraq, then-Senator Obama\u2019s vow to re-engage<\/a> in Afghanistan was seen by many as a ploy to avoid being cast as a dove, first by Hillary Clinton and then by John McCain. <\/span>

<\/span>What\u2019s not clear to this day is precisely when<\/i> Obama knew better; when he realized that the war in Afghanistan was hopeless.<\/span>

<\/span>By inauguration time, that conclusion seemed fairly obvious<\/a> to many foreign-policy watchers. So why not him?<\/span>

<\/span>But one month into his presidency, Obama announced<\/a> he was sending more troops there \u2013 30,000, as it would turn out. Despite the obvious lack of what he himself had frequently described as a must \u2014 an exit strategy<\/a> \u2013 he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by 50 percent. And the monthly death tolls<\/a> shot up.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over 1,600 American servicemembers  have died in Afghanistan since the summer of 2009 \u2014 well over half of all the dead during the entire war \u2013 along with countless Afghans<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

There were public signs<\/a> in November 2009 that Obama was \u201crethinking\u201d his plan. David Sanger, in his book Confront and Conceal<\/em><\/a>, wrote that Obama actually began a \u201creassessment of whether the war was as necessary as he first believed\u201d even earlier, in the summer of 2009. (At an off-the-record June 2009 dinner with historians the \u201cmain point<\/a>\u201d his guests tried to make was \u201cthat pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson,\u201d Garry Wills wrote  later.)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unlike Dan Froomkin’s analysis above, I am slightly more charitable.  I do not think that politics was the primary motivation.<\/p>\n

This is cowardice and hypocrisy, not the stupidity of Bush, or the violent delusions of Cheney.<\/p>\n

On a moral level, this is worse than Bush, because he has the tools to do the right thing, and he chooses not to use them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times is reporting that Obama asked for a report from the CIA on the effectiveness of covert to rebels, and it revealed that it was an almost unbroken string of failure: The Central Intelligence Agency has run guns to insurgencies across the world during its 67-year history \u2014 from Angola to Nicaragua …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153,1142,981,969,1051,1063,986,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-barack-obama","category-civil-war","category-evil","category-hypocrisy","category-iraq","category-middle-east","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185543"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}