http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

Bush Sets Defense As Space Priority
U.S. Says Shift Is Not A Step Toward Arms; Experts Say It Could Be

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 18, 2006; Page A01

President Bush has signed a new National Space Policy that rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone "hostile to U.S. interests."

The document, the first full revision of overall space policy in 10 years, emphasizes security issues, encourages private enterprise in space, and characterizes the role of U.S. space diplomacy largely in terms of persuading other nations to support U.S. policy.

"Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power," the policy asserts in its introduction.

National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said in written comments that an update was needed to "reflect the fact that space has become an even more important component of U.S. economic, national and homeland security." The military has become increasingly dependent on satellite communication and navigation, as have providers of cellphones, personal navigation devices and even ATMs.

The administration said the policy revisions are not a prelude to introducing weapons systems into Earth orbit. "This policy is not about developing or deploying weapons in space. Period," said a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Nevertheless, Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank that follows the space-weaponry issue, said the policy changes will reinforce international suspicions that the United States may seek to develop, test and deploy space weapons. The concerns are amplified, he said, by the administration's refusal to enter negotiations or even less formal discussions on the subject.

"The Clinton policy opened the door to developing space weapons, but that administration never did anything about it," Krepon said. "The Bush policy now goes further."

Theresa Hitchens, director of the nonpartisan Center for Defense Information in Washington, said that the new policy "kicks the door a little more open to a space-war fighting strategy" and has a "very unilateral tone to it."

The administration official strongly disagreed with that characterization, saying the policy encourages international diplomacy and cooperation. But he said the document also makes clear the U.S. position: that no new arms-control agreements are needed because there is no space arms race.

The official also said the administration has briefed members of Congress as well as a number of governments, including Russia, on the new policy. The public, however, has not learned much about it: The policy was released at 5 p.m. on the Friday before Columbus Day, with no public announcement.

The National Space Policy follows other administration statements that appeared to advocate greater military use of space.

In 2004, the Air Force published a Counterspace Operations Doctrine that called for a more active military posture in space and said that protecting U.S. satellites and spacecraft may require "deception, disruption, denial, degradation and destruction." Four years earlier, a congressionally chartered panel led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld recommended developing space weapons to protect military and civilian satellites.

Because of the political sensitivities, several analysts said, the Pentagon probably will not move forward quickly with space weapons but rather will work on dual-use technology that can serve military and civilian interests. But because many space initiatives are classified, Krepon and others said, it is difficult to know what is being developed and deployed.

Some of the potential space weapons most frequently discussed are lasers that can "blind" or shut down adversary satellites and small, maneuverable satellites that could ram another satellite.

The new Bush policy calls on the defense secretary to provide "space capabilities" to support missile-warning systems as well as "multi-layered and integrated missile defenses," an apparent nod toward placing some components of the system in space.

The new document grew out of Bush's 2002 order to the National Security Council, with support from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to assess the nation's military and civilian space policies. The review has already led to a major shift in emphasis at NASA, away from research and unmanned exploration to returning Americans to the moon and then sending them on to Mars.

Some sections of the 1996 Clinton policy and the Bush revision are classified. There are many similarities in the unclassified portions, and the NSC and the Defense Department emphasized that continuity. But there is a significant divergence apparent in the first two goals of each document.

Bush's top goals are to "strengthen the nation's space leadership and ensure that space capabilities are available in time to further U.S. national security, homeland security, and foreign policy objectives" and to "enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interests there."

Clinton's top goals were to "enhance knowledge of the Earth, the solar system and the universe through human and robotic exploration" and to "strengthen and maintain the national security of the United States."

The Clinton policy also said that the United States would develop and operate "space control capabilities to ensure freedom of action in space" only when such steps would be "consistent with treaty obligations." The Bush policy accepts current international agreements but states: "The United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space."

A number of nations have pushed for talks to ban space weapons, and the United States has long been one of a handful of nations opposed to the idea. Although it had abstained in the past when proposals to ban space weapons came up in the United Nations, last October the United States voted for the first time against a call for negotiations -- the only "no" against 160 "yes" votes.

The U.S. position flows in part from the fact that so many key weapons systems are now dependent on information and communications from orbiting satellites, analysts said. The U.S. military has developed and deployed far more space-based technology than any other nation, giving it great strategic advantages. But with the superior technology has come a perceived vulnerability to attacks on essential satellites.

The new policy was applauded by defense analyst Baker Spring of the conservative Heritage Foundation. He said that he supported the policy's rejection of international agreements or treaties, as well as its emphasis on protecting military assets and placing missile defense components in space. He also said that he liked the policy's promotion of commercial enterprises in space and its apparent recognition that private satellites will need military protection as well.

The issue of possible hostilities in space became more real last month when National Reconnaissance Office Director Donald M. Kerr told reporters that a U.S. satellite had recently been "painted," or illuminated, by a laser in China. Gen. James E. Cartwright, the top U.S. military officer in charge of operations in space, told the newsletter Inside the Pentagon last week that it remained unclear whether China had tried to disrupt the satellite.

US Says North Korean Test Was Nuclear

In an extraordinarily brief statement, the Director of the National Intelligence Office announced that the United States has confirmed that North Korea’s large explosion last week was nuclear. How do they know and why did it take them so long to confirm?

Apparently, the North Koreans had announced the test ahead of time to the Chinese and the Russians but the first physical evidence that something had happened in North Korea was seismic signals indicating a large explosion. (Some of the seismic recording stations are operated by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Office and are designed to verify compliance with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which has not been ratified by the United States.) The seismic data indicated a fairly small test (by nuclear standards), less than a kiloton, probably only a half kiloton. Some reports cite as low as 200 tons.

When we get down to half a kiloton, 500 tons, of high explosive (specifically TNT) equivalent, then it is technically conceivable that the explosion could have actually been conventional, not nuclear. Given the North Korean penchant for bluff, could they have actually set off half a kiloton of conventional explosives? The United States is planning a conventional test, Divine Strake, that will simulate nuclear effects and it will be over 700 tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil explosive, equivalent to almost 600 tons of TNT. A semi-trailer truck can carry 25 tons of cargo, so the 700 tons for Devine Strake, more than enough to simulate the North Korean test, would be 35 truckloads. That is a lot of ammonium nitrate, but not the sort of activity that would necessarily jump out at intelligence analysts monitoring North Korea. Seismic signals can distinguish explosions from small earthquakes but cannot tell the difference between conventional and nuclear explosions. So North Korea could have been faking it.

This explanation seems increasingly unlikely in light of recent reports that radioactivity consistent with a nuclear weapon has been detected downwind of the North Korean test site. This could nail the test as nuclear. It is not easy to seal up a nuclear explosion and we don’t even know how hard the North Koreans tried. If they wanted to minimize radioactive venting, they would have plugged the tunnel with a backfill of soil or clay and might have included concrete barriers. These might have ruptured or leaked during the test. If this happened, then quite an array of radioactive materials might have made it out and could have been detected. In addition to leakage, there is seepage. Even with a successful immediate seal of the test, gases might seep out through porous rock or cracks in the rock. According to my geological map of North Korea, the reported test site is in granite. Granite is not permeable but gases might leak out through difficult-to-detect cracks.

After the test, air samples taken down wind could be collected, returned to a laboratory and tested for even tiny traces of radioactivity. A leak would result in many telltale radioactive particles that would even give us some information about the design of the bomb. A seep most likely would give much less information, since the sample might be largely limited to gases, like xenon-133 with a five day half life. Xenon-133 might come from a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility. If that possibility could be eliminated, then a nuclear test is the most plausible remaining explanation. The DNI statement gave no details, referring simply to radioactive debris.

Anonymous sources in the government apparently have reported that the bomb was plutonium. I have no special inside information so I can only speculate, but this probably implies that there was a leak, not a seep, and we got a good radioactive sample. (Another point in the cited New York Times article, that use of plutonium indicates that the North Korean uranium enrichment program is not developed, is difficult to understand. When the United States tested a plutonium bomb in 1945, the test indicated nothing at all about the highly advanced state of its uranium enrichment program.)

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October 23, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

On the Offense

No matter what the facts say, President Bush insists
that we stay the course.


by Andrew J. Bacevich

Step by bloody step the Iraq War moves toward its denouement. Having set this tragedy in motion, the United States today finds itself consigned to the role of bystander, the world's only superpower having long since lost control of events. As things unravel, the president—the most powerful man in the world—is demonstrably powerless to affect the outcome. Meanwhile, American soldiers fight on, even as it becomes increasingly apparent that the Army only recently thought all but invincible will not win this war.

For the Bush White House, September 2006 will be remembered as the month when the roof caved in. Bad news came in successive waves: the Marine intelligence report declaring Iraq's critical Anbar Province all but lost; the failure of an all-out effort to win "the Battle of Baghdad"; the warnings from senior military officers that the Army, its readiness in free-fall, is nearing the end of its rope; opinion polls showing that a large majority of Iraqis simply want the Americans out of their country; above all, the leak of the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) declaring, "the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terror leaders and operatives." In response to all of this, the administration has had little to offer other than to repeat President Bush's conviction that "the only way to protect this country is to stay on the offense."

Although not especially adept at using the English language, the president manages in this short sentence to capture the fundamental error of judgment that has mired his administration in a crisis from which it cannot extricate itself.

To go on the offensive and to stay there: ever since the end of the Cold War, this vision has animated advocates of U.S. global hegemony. The collapse of communism, they believed, had left the United States in a uniquely advantageous position. The imperative of the moment was to press that advantage, to exploit America's unquestioned military superiority, creating a new world order that would perpetuate American global supremacy and ensure the universal embrace of American values.

To proponents of this view—whether those inside government like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz or well-connected outsiders like Richard Perle or William Kristol—9/11 came as a godsend of sorts. With shock, fear, and anger came breathtaking new possibilities. Old constraints fell away. All that was needed was a suitable launching pad.

This is where Iraq came in. Pathetically weak, vulnerable, and suffering under the boot of a sclerotic dictatorship, Iraq seemingly offered the ideal point of departure for inaugurating this new strategic offensive.

No one seriously expected Iraq to become the central front in the so-called global war on terror. The incursion was supposed to be quick and decisive. No one at senior levels of the Bush administration imagined that it might prove to be protracted and debilitating—nor did any of the neoconservatives or neoliberals who proclaimed the wisdom of President Bush's new doctrine of preventive war and were eager to have a go at Saddam Hussein.

The hawks did not view Baghdad as a destination. They saw it as a way station. U.S. forces would arrive, depose the dictator, and then quickly move on to tasks of even greater urgency: bringing Iran and Syria to heel, engineering the transformation of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, then turning perhaps to the Horn of Africa, to Pakistan, and to Central Asia. Ultimately the United States would pacify the entire Islamic world, while not so incidentally putting other would-be adversaries like China on notice. Along the way, it would establish important new precedents and carve out for the United States prerogatives permitted no other nation. This project would also educate the American people as to the nation's proper responsibilities and cement the authority of those who directed national-security policy.

The members of this national-security elite fancied themselves architects of history. Just as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the creation of NATO in the late 1940s had set an azimuth that the United States followed for decades thereafter, so too regime change in Baghdad promised in a single stroke to reorient—even revolutionize—U.S. policy.

But there was more. Unlike Truman's strategy of containment, which in effect had entailed an amoral accommodation with communist tyranny, the offensive orientation of this new strategy held out the prospect of eliminating evil from the face of the earth. This time there would be no "long twilight struggle"; instead, righteousness was certain to prevail.

A perverse sort of genius informed this vision. Bristling with megalomania, it also reflected a profoundly American sensibility: an insistence that it was incumbent upon the United States to set things right and that the world would surely accept and even embrace the American dominion that resulted. Have we not, after all, always stood for freedom?

Alas, the doctrine of taking the offensive ran aground almost immediately, lost its momentum, and has never recovered. The Bush administration and its supporters have spent the past three and half years trying to deny this fact or searching for ways to work around it.

During the transition from summer to fall, further denial became impossible. Even the generals now know that victory is not the cards—they have quietly redefined "winning" as holding out long enough for the Iraqis to take over the fight.

How long U.S. forces can sustain their current holding action is now emerging as a pressing question. As if to emphasize the growing scarcity of troops, the Pentagon in recent weeks has both extended the tours of units already in Iraq and moved up the deployment dates of units back home that are headed for the war zone.

Meanwhile, the once crack Third Infantry Division, preparing for its third Iraq tour, has two of its four brigades without tanks or other heavy equipment. The Army's chief of staff complains that army depots are clogged with 600 battle-damaged and worn-out Abrams tanks and 1,000 Bradley Fighting Vehicles awaiting repair. The Army lacks the money to fix them—this despite the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have now cost an estimated $500 billion.

Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. Central Command, recently let the cat out of the bag. Asked to assess the progress in Iraq, the general replied: "Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we're winning the war." Abizaid is no fool: he knows that the time allotted for this war is running out and that his available resources are permanently constrained.

The distressed condition of the U.S. military only makes the findings of the NIE on "Trends in Global Terrorism" the more devastating. All of the sacrifices of American soldiers in Iraq have served only to exacerbate the problem of Islamic radicalism. The U.S. presence in Iraq, the NIE reports, is "breeding deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Islamic world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement." We're in a deep hole, and "staying on the offense" has only made it deeper still.

Those on the outside who once clamored the most insistently for war have by now largely turned on President Bush, accusing his administration (not without justice) of mind-boggling incompetence.

Among the insiders who sold Mr. Bush on his offensive strategy, those who remain in office—like Rumsfeld or Vice President Cheney—have been largely discredited. A handful of other survivors, pre-eminently Condoleezza Rice, have distanced themselves from their prior ideological enthusiasms. Chameleons do well in politics.

Among the many who have moved on, few rise to the president's defense. Some foolishly pen self-exculpatory memoirs that no one takes seriously. Others keep their silence, whether out of prudence or as penance we cannot say.

As the evening of his presidency approaches, George W. Bush alone persists, armored in ignorance and resolve but adamant that from perseverance will come victory. Were it not for the wreckage that he has strewn in his wake, one might almost feel a twinge of sympathy for the man.
_______________________________________

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

October 23, 2006 Issue

http://www.ostp.gov/html/US%20National%20Space%20Policy.pdf

Unclassified
US National Space Policy

Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America

By Stan Goff

Author Stan Goff, a retired 26-year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces, sounds a warning call that many of the historical precursors of fascism—white supremacy, militarization of culture, vigilantism, masculine fear of female power, xenophobia and economic destabilization—are ascendant in America today.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15340.htm

http://www.alternet.org/rights/43085/

Pentagon Monitoring Peace Activists' E-Mails

By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive. Posted October 19, 2006.


"This information is being provided only to alert commanders and staff to potential terrorist activity or apprise them of other force protection issues."
More information keeps coming out, thanks to the ACLU, about the Bush Administration's equation of protest with terrorism -- and the snooping it then engages in.

Homeland Security is monitoring peace groups and even peering at their e-mails. "This information is being provided only to alert commanders and staff to potential terrorist activity or apprise them of other force protection issues."

It then shares that information with Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which include the FBI and state and local law enforcement, as well as with the Pentagon's notorious Talon (Threat and Local Observation Notice) program.

For instance, an April 12, 2005, Talon document, just released by the ACLU, shows that the Pentagon was concerned about "suspicious activity" at an upcoming event sponsored by the Broward Anti-War Coalition in Florida.

This peace group, according to the document, was planning -- hold your breath here -- "guerrilla theater and other forms of subversive propaganda" at the Fort Lauderdale Air and Sea Show.

The source of the information was the Miami-Dade Police Department, and members of Army Recruiting and the Miami Joint Terrorism Task Force were briefed on it, the document states.

Another Talon document, dated March 1, 2005, released by the ACLU, reveals that Homeland Security agents are monitoring e-mails of such scary groups as the Quakers.

"The source received an e-mail on 25 Feb 05, subject: upcoming peace/anti-war events. The e-mail was from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Northeast Ohio," the document states. And that source is identified as "a special agent of the Federal Protective Service, US Department of Homeland Security." The document adds, "Source is reliable."

The Joint Terrorism Task Force of Dayton, Ohio, was briefed on this one.

The planned activity of the Quakers that so concerned the Pentagon, Homeland Security, and the Joint Terrorism Task Force was this: "On 19 Mar 05, there will be a 'Stop the War NOW!' rally in commemoration of the second anniversary of the U.S. Invasion/Occupation of Iraq. The Akron rally will have a march and reading of names of war dead. ... The Akron march begins at noon and goes past a local military recruiting station and the FBI office. The march will end at the Federal Building in Akron, for a rally, followed by reading of names of U.S. and Iraqi war dead."

A third Talon document, dated March 7, 2005, also relies on an e-mail from the Quakers. "Source received an e-mail from the American Friends Service Committee" about "actions at military recruitment offices with the goals to include: raising awareness, education, visibility." The source is again identified as "a special agent of the Federal Protective Service, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Source is reliable."

All three Talon documents state at the top: "This information is being provided only to alert commanders and staff to potential terrorist activity or apprise them of other force protection issues."

"Potential terrorist activity." Isn't that delightful?

Word to the wise: If you're a peace activist, the government may be watching you and reading your e-mails.

Something just to keep in mind.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/#43218
Military families go hungry at Camp Pendleton
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein on October 19, 2006 at 6:43 AM.

Support our troops, feed their kids:

As the Iraq war marches toward its fourth anniversary, food lines operated by churches and other nonprofit groups are an increasingly valuable presence on military bases countywide. Leaders of the charitable groups say they're scrambling to fill a need not seen since World War II.

Too often, the supplies run out before the lines do, said Regina Hunter, who coordinates food distribution at one Camp Pendleton site.

“Here they are defending the country. . . . It is heartbreaking to see,” said Hunter, manager of the on-base Abby Reinke Community Center. “If we could find more sources of food, we would open the program up to more people. We believe anyone who stands in a line for food needs it and deserves it.”

The base's list of recipients swells by 100 to 150 people a month as the food programs streamline their eligibility process, word spreads among residents and ever-proud Marines adjust to the idea of accepting donated goods.


Ways to help
People interested in donating food, furniture or money to help military families in San Diego County can call:

Military Outreach Ministry at Camp Pendleton: (760) 908-7043
Military Outreach Ministries at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station: (619) 843-8964

[San Diego Union Tribune, tipster Flint.]

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20061018/D8KR9IJO0.html

8 Soldiers to Be Court-Martialed

Oct 18, 5:14 PM (ET)

By RYAN LENZ
Google sponsored links

EVANSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - Eight soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were ordered Wednesday to be court-martialed on murder charges stemming from their service in Iraq, and two could get the death penalty for allegedly raping a 14-year-old and killing her and her family.

The Fort Campbell soldiers facing the death penalty are Sgt. Paul E. Cortez and Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman. Both are accused of raping Abeer Qassim al-Janabi in her family's home in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, then killing the girl, her parents and younger sister.

Spc. James P. Barker and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard are also accused in the rape and murders but will not face the death penalty, the military said in a statement.

Former Pvt. Steven Green, who was discharged for a personality disorder and arrested in North Carolina, will be tried in federal court in Kentucky. Green has pleaded not guilty to one count of rape and four counts of murder.

Military prosecutors have said the five - all from the division's 502nd Infantry Regiment - planned the attack from a checkpoint near the family's home, changed their clothing to hide their identities and set the girl's body on fire to destroy evidence.

Their unit suffered months of bombings and shootings that felled dozens of comrades. Defense attorneys have argued that soldiers of every rank were emotionally ragged and strained.

In statements given to military investigators, Spielman was described as a "look-out" while the others entered the home. His attorneys said they were shocked that he faces a death penalty.

"Even according to the government's evidence that they're putting forth, Jesse isn't even a principal in murder and rape," said Craig Carlson, Spielman's attorney.

Several of the soldiers have military defense attorneys, who are prohibited from discussing their cases outside of a courtroom. Messages seeking comment were left with Barker's attorney, David Sheldon in Washington, D.C.

Four soldiers from the division's 3rd Brigade also will be tried in a separate court-martial on charges of murdering Iraqi detainees in northern Iraq's Salahuddin province during a raid on a village.

Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard and Spc. Juston R. Graber are accused of murdering three Iraqi men taken from a house May 9 on a marshy island outside Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

Maj. Gen. Thomas R. Turner has not yet ruled on whether to order a court-martial for Sgt. Anthony W. Yribe, who is accused of failing to report the attack on the girl but is not alleged to have been a direct participant. Yribe has requested a discharge from the Army in lieu of a court-martial.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has just released the newest in a long series of studies by itself, and others, about how poorly the Department of Defense projects the resources needed to support its own defense plan. The study explains the counterintuitive statement we have heard from one analyst for years about the “rising cost of lower readiness.” Sadly, that only begins to describe the problems. We provide some comments, and a link to the CBO study.

Comments regarding CBO’s study, “Long-Term Implications of Current defense Plans: Summary Update for Fiscal year 2007.”

In 1983, Pentagon “maverick analyst” Franklin (“Chuck”) Spinney testified to a joint session of the Senate Armed Services and Budget Committees about what he called “The Plans/Reality Mismatch.” The term referred to the failure of the Pentagon to accurately project the real cost of the defense program it sought in its multiyear plans. The Pentagon underestimated the actual costs of its own program each year by an order of magnitude of billions of dollars. The behavior became known as “underfunding.”

That was almost 25 years ago. Spinney’s ground breaking study started a cottage industry in Washington. Since then, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and several Washington think tanks have duplicated Spinney’s research, but with one change: each year, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, in war and in peace, the “underfunding” problem gets worse. At the turn of the millennium CBO measured the gap between projected and likely actual funding needs in the Pentagon’s multiyear plan to be $50 billion – per year. The only element Donald Rumsfeld has added to the problem as the longest serving secretary of defense in recent memory is to accelerate the problem. In its new study, (“Long term Implications of Current Defense Plans: Summary Update for Fiscal year 2007”), just released on the internet on Oct. 18, CBO finds the problem to have grown to over $100 billion – per year. Up to 27 percent more money than the Pentagon has been requesting may be needed to actually implement its plans.

There are many causes and elements to the problems that the Pentagon and Congress jointly refuse to address. In one of its more interesting passages on page eight, CBO identifies three critical elements:

1) the per capita costs to operate and maintain our ground forces – even without the expenses of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – have been rising;

2) as our weapons inventory continues to age, it also is more expensive to operate, and

3) new weapons, being more complex, are habitually more expensive to operate than the systems they replace.

In each case, despite increases for these issues, their budgets turn out to be inadequate. As Spinney warned us for years, as the costs go up, the readiness goes down.

The same thing is happening in the Pentagon’s hardware budget. As the costs to buy new systems skyrockets (as it has for the Air Force’s F-22 and F-35 fighters, the Army’s Future Combat System, and the Navy’s new overweight destroyer), we tend to buy fewer items than planned and the programs are delivered late (as for example by several years for the F-22). Thus, as Spinney also told us, the larger, older existing inventory is not replaced, either in total or on time. Given the added expense of the new systems, they literally translate to an inventory that is simultaneously shrinking and aging – at increased cost.

Some argue that the solution can only be more spending, such as that advocated by the chief of staff of the Army, General Schoomaker. While past increases have not been as dramatic as those he seeks for the Army, Congress and the Pentagon have indeed been increasing peacetime spending for years. The result? The problem gets worse.

Others argue that more realistic cost estimates and less unrealistic program ambitions are the only way out. The problem is not “underfunding,” it is “overprogramming.” That route to a solution has never been attempted, certainly not seriously, clearly not recently. Is it time?

Is the study really a yawner? Of course not, but that would seem to be all it is likely to provoke in Washington.

The way CBO describes these issues, its study (“Long-Term Implications of Current Defense Plans: Summary Update for Fiscal year 2007”) is available by clicking here.


Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information @ www.cdi.org/smrp
202 797-5271 in DC
301 840-8992 in MD
301 221-3897 cell
winslowwheeler@comcast.net

Stephen Day has kindly provided his analysis of the Administration's newly announced space policy. This draws on his 25+ years in the commercial space business.


U.S. National Space Policy

On October 6, 2006, the Office of Science and Technology issued an updated National Space Policy, which supersedes the previous Presidential Decision Directive (Space Policy) of September 1994.
The policy document lays out a complex set of interrelated objectives and constraints regarding national policy - which the typical layman will find hard to decipher. The tone of the Space Policy is heavily oriented to national security and defense, in their many guises. There is a telling preamble of “Principles” that states “The United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space by all nations for peaceful purposes, and for the benefit of all humanity. Consistent with this principle, ‘peaceful purposes’ allow U.S. defense and intelligence related activities in pursuit of national interests.” An intelligent reader will smile at the juxtaposition of the two sentences, and ponder the unlikely coexistence of matter and antimatter!
Specific reactions to the new Space policy will depend on who is directly affected. For example, for the U.S. defense industrial complex the news is good – more business and more lucrative Government contracts. For the Defense Department and most national security agencies the new policy is also good – bigger budgets, more surveillance, more clandestine operations. For NASA and its ~$17 Billion budget the new policy is also generally good, though it continues to struggle explaining to the U.S. public the benefits of returning to the Moon and Mars with human missions (e.g., what will we do when we get there?).
For our international partners and competitors (there are no less than six nations currently planning independent human missions to the Moon) the news is mixed. The U. S., under the current administration, will cooperate, as long as our national (defense) interests are not perceived to be in any way compromised. This raises vexing problems as to how long the Moon can realistically remain a military-free zone - and could make the U.S. an unreliable partner for cooperative commercial ventures. The overall tenor of the policy statement is that “we’ll cooperate as long as it’s in our interest - and we reserve the right to do anything we damn well please!”
For industries outside the military industrial complex, the news is likewise mixed. Few in the general public have ever heard of the esoteric State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations, affectionately known as “ITAR” to those in the business, but it remains a major impediment to international cooperation on space missions involving the sharing of certain IT technologies even with close allies. At the absurd level, it has blocked student projects involving building experimental joint mini satellites and control mechanisms between U. S. and Japanese students in a forum known as JUSTSAP. In the case of GPS, the commercial business has blossomed and is well on its way to becoming a $200+ billion business by 2020 in the U.S. However, all U.S.GPS satellites are owned and controlled by the Defense Department and are unlikely to be turned over to the commercial market place any time soon - in contrast to the European system Galileo, that is expected to be commercial circa 2010. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since the US tax payer and businesses are getting a return from their taxes. The potential problem is the degree of uncertainty caused by some rather bellicose statements in the new Space Policy that could cause some to doubt the availability of GPS signals in times of international stress.
Some statements such as reducing orbital debris, coordinating on radio frequencies (ITU), and nuclear power in space are eminently sensible, but these are vestiges of the previous space policies.
In summary, what come across from the new Space Policy is not dissimilar to many of the Executive Branch’s recent other pronouncements affecting international business, law, codes of conduct and rules of engagement, etc. Watch out world, we’re the dominant military and space faring nation, and we intend to stay so with or without you! Perhaps with a more internationally sensitive administration this too shall pass.

Stephen Day
Washington, DC
ssday@aol.com

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/5240e35e-5f99-11db...00779e2340.html

US army concedes failure in Baghdad
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Steve Negus, Iraq Correspondent

Published: October 19 2006 19:00 | Last updated: October 19 2006 19:00

American and Iraqi efforts to improve security in Baghdad have failed to reduce bloodshed in the increasingly violent Iraqi capital, the senior US military spokesman in Iraq acknowledged on Thursday.

In an uncharacteristically gloomy admission, Major General William Caldwell said the recent surge in violence was “disheartening”. He said US and Iraqi forces would have to “refocus” security measures. The review was demanded by General George Casey, who commands the 140,000 US troops in Iraq.

Gen Caldwell did not specify how security methods might be refocused, but the unusually grim assessment seems in part intended to put pressure on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take political steps that US officers have long said need to accompany military operations.

“In Baghdad, Operation Together Forward [launched in August to curb violence in the capital] has made a difference in the focus areas but has not met our overall expectations in sustaining a reduction in the level of violence,” Gen Caldwell told reporters.

At its launch, Operation Together Forward was to deploy more than 20,000 Iraqi security forces – including army and police – plus more than 7,000 coalition forces to tighten security in the capital. In July, General John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, told US senators that reducing violence in Baghdad was the key to avoiding a full-scale civil war. Since those comments, the level of violence in Iraq, and Baghdad in particular, has continued to rise.

So far in October, 72 US troops – including a soldier killed in fighting near Balad on Thursday – and hundreds of Iraqis have been killed. Gen Caldwell said attacks on US and Iraqi forces in Baghdad shot up 22 per cent in the first three weeks of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.

The increasingly pessimistic assessments from Iraq come as Republicans in Congress grow anxious that the Iraq war is going to cost them control of one, or both, houses of Congress in next month’s elections.

While the Bush administration insists that progress is being made in Iraq, privately they are frustrated with the apparent inability of the government of Mr Maliki to help clamp down on some of the sectarian killing perpetrated by death squads and Shia militias associated with members of the governing coalition.

Mr Bush on Wednesday made a comparison between Iraq and the Vietnam War when he said Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, “could be right” in writing that the violent situation in Iraq was the “jihadist equivalent” of the Tet offensive, which helped increase public opposition to that war. But a White House spokeswoman said Mr Bush was only trying to make the point that “the enemy is trying to affect the psyche of Americans”.

The US military wants Mr Maliki to stop protecting radical Shia groups such as the Mahdi Army militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. In a virtually unprecedented criticism of the Iraqi leadership, Gen Caldwell said US forces had been forced to release Sadrist organiser Mazin al-Sa’edi on Wednesday, one day after his arrest on suspicion of involvement in violence, at the prime minister’s request.

Mr Maliki told USA Today that he had blocked a US proposal to conduct a large-scale operation against the Mahdi Army, saying the government did not intend to disarm militias until the end of this year.


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

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General Says Mission In Baghdad Falls Short

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 20, 2006; A01



BAGHDAD, Oct. 19 -- A two-month U.S.-Iraqi military operation to stem sectarian bloodshed and insurgent attacks in Baghdad has failed to reduce the violence, which has surged 22 percent in the capital in the last three weeks, much of it in areas where the military has focused its efforts, a senior U.S. military spokesman said Thursday.

The assessment by Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV followed a 43 percent spike in attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces in the capital since midsummer that has pushed U.S. military fatalities to their highest rates in more than a year. The military reported that three soldiers were killed in Anbar province west of Baghdad on Wednesday, bringing the number of U.S troops killed so far this month to 74.

Caldwell's appraisal of the Baghdad campaign known as Operation Together Forward was in stark contrast to reviews during the opening weeks. At that time, U.S. military leaders said the deployment of 12,000 additional U.S. troops in Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods was significantly improving security for residents.

The operation "has not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence," Caldwell said Thursday at a weekly news briefing. Violence has risen in the areas where the U.S.-Iraqi operation has focused, because of counterattacks, he said.

"We're finding insurgent elements, the extremists, are pushing back hard. They're trying to get back into those areas" where Iraqi and U.S. forces have targeted them, he said. "We're constantly going back in and doing clearing operations."

Under the program, joint U.S.-Iraqi teams of soldiers and police entered dangerous Baghdad neighborhoods and used aggressive tactics to try to secure them, engaging with fighters, searching door-to-door and patrolling the streets. Teams then moved on to the next sector, leaving behind a fixed force that attempted to ensure gunmen would not return. The goal of the program was also to restore basic services such as trash collection.

Now, Caldwell said, "we are working very closely with the government of Iraq to determine how best to refocus our efforts. . . . It's clear that the conditions under which we started are probably not the same today. And so it does require some modifications of the plan."

Attacks on police and military units continued in many parts of Iraq on Thursday. Coordinated suicide car and truck bombings and mortar attacks on several police facilities and two U.S. patrols in the northern city of Mosul killed at least 12 Iraqis and wounded 30, local police and hospital officials said. There were no reports of U.S. casualties.

Later in Kirkuk, about 150 miles north of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber targeted a group of soldiers and civilians lined up outside a bank to cash their paychecks before the start of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr this week. The explosion killed 12 people and injured about 70. Three people were killed in a suicide car blast at a checkpoint west of Kirkuk early Thursday night.

In Baghdad, at least 19 people were killed and 31 injured in mortar attacks, suicide bombings and roadside bombings. News services reported at least 23 other killings Thursday in violence scattered around the country.

There are about 68,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops in Baghdad, and about 15,400 troops are taking part in Operation Together Forward. The campaign was launched in early August in response to attacks that were claiming as many as 100 lives a day in the capital. In September, 2,667 Iraqis were killed in Baghdad, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry.

Without providing exact statistics, Caldwell said attacks had surged during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The four weeks of fasting ends in a few days with the beginning of the three-day festival of Eid al-Fitr. But Caldwell said the increase in attacks on U.S. forces also reflected the fact that more forces are patrolling Baghdad because of Operation Together Forward. The timing of the violence was also linked to the upcoming midterm elections in the United States, he said.

"The enemy knows that killing innocent people and Americans will garner headlines and create a sense of frustration," he said.

Caldwell said Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has adopted Operation Together Forward as "the model which he is trying to take to clear the city of the violence and extremism." But the campaign is under intense counterattack, he said, because "if you want to in fact discredit the government and show they have an inability to bring security and safety to the city, you would in fact target the focus areas. We think that's exactly why it's occurring."

Maliki, who heads a government led by Shiite Muslim religious parties, has come under criticism recently for not doing enough to curb sectarian violence, particularly reining in the Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by popular Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The force has been accused of slaughtering Sunni Arabs and forcing tens of thousand of them to flee their homes.

Caldwell also said that on Wednesday, at Maliki's behest, the U.S. military freed a Sadr official, Mazin al-Saidy, who had been detained the day before by U.S. forces in Baghdad on suspicion of being a member of the Mahdi Army and involvement in the killings of numerous Sunnis.

Caldwell said he did not know why Maliki had intervened to have al-Saidy released, but said it was not for the United States to "second-guess him."

"He is the prime minister of this nation, and . . . if he makes that decision, he has a lot of other information which we probably are not privy to," Caldwell said.

He said that as a condition of his release, Saidy signed a statement "promising to support the government of Iraq and disavow future acts of violence."

Washington Post correspondents in Mosul, Kirkuk and Baqubah contributed to this report.



© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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Major Change Expected In Strategy for Iraq War

By Michael Abramowitz and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 20, 2006; A01



The growing doubts among GOP lawmakers about the administration's Iraq strategy, coupled with the prospect of Democratic wins in next month's midterm elections, will soon force the Bush administration to abandon its open-ended commitment to the war, according to lawmakers in both parties, foreign policy experts and others involved in policymaking.

Senior figures in both parties are coming to the conclusion that the Bush administration will be unable to achieve its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq within a politically feasible time frame. Agitation is growing in Congress for alternatives to the administration's strategy of keeping Iraq in one piece and getting its security forces up and running while 140,000 U.S. troops try to keep a lid on rapidly spreading sectarian violence.

On the campaign trail, Democratic candidates are hammering Republican candidates for backing a failed Iraq policy, and GOP defense of the war is growing muted. A new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released this week showed that voters are more confident in Democrats' ability to handle the Iraq war than the Republicans' -- a reversal from the last election.

Few officials in either party are talking about an immediate pullout of U.S. combat troops. But interest appears to be growing in several broad ideas. One would be some kind of effort to divide the country along regional lines. Another, favored by many Democrats, is a gradual withdrawal of troops over a set period of time. A third would be a dramatic scaling-back of U.S. ambitions in Iraq, giving up on democracy and focusing only on stability.

Many senior Republicans with close ties to the administration also believe that essential to a successful strategy in Iraq are an aggressive new diplomatic initiative to secure a Middle East peace settlement and a new effort to engage Iraq's neighbors, such as Syria and Iran, in helping stabilize the country -- perhaps through an international conference.

One point on which adherents of these sharply different approaches appear to agree is that "staying the course" is fast becoming a dead letter. "I don't believe that we can continue based on an open-ended, unconditional presence," said Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, a centrist Maine Republican. "I don't think there's any question about that, that there will be a change" in the U.S. strategy in Iraq after next month's elections.

Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration foreign policy official, told reporters yesterday that the situation is reaching a "tipping point" both in Iraq and in U.S. politics. "More of essentially the same is going to be a policy that very few people are going to be able to support," said Haass, now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He added that the administration's current Iraq strategy "has virtually no chance of succeeding" and predicted that "change will come."

Many Senate Republicans are waiting for the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel co-chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III, a Republican, and former Indiana representative Lee H. Hamilton, a Democrat. Both Baker and Hamilton have made it clear that they do not see the current administration Iraq policy as working -- though they don't plan to issue recommendations until well after the midterm elections, probably in early January.

Many foreign policy experts believe that the commission could sway President Bush more than most such study groups because of Baker's close ties to the Bush family.

In an interview this week, Hamilton said there is no "silver bullet" to turning the situation around in Iraq but said frustration is clearly rising over the current course. "I can't walk out the door without someone handing me a recommendation," he said.

Sen. John E. Sununu (R-N.H.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said he is open to "significant changes" in the U.S. approach and is hoping the Iraq Study Group can supply them. "I don't think anyone in the administration is pleased about the current state of affairs," he said. "I would hope that members of the administration are willing to learn from past mistakes . . . and choose a different path that would allow us to meet our objectives."

How open Bush will be to a change in course is unclear, even as the violence escalates -- this week has been one of the bloodiest for the Americans in Baghdad in months. In recent remarks about Iraq, Bush has sounded a more flexible tone, saying he is open to suggestions for changes and emphasizing that his commanders adjust tactics constantly. He has repeatedly made it clear that U.S. patience with the new Iraqi government is not open-ended.

White House officials describe the current turmoil over Iraq policy in Washington as an expected byproduct of the upsurge in violence. Press secretary Tony Snow yesterday dismissed a dramatic about-face in policy -- such as a division of the country or phased withdrawal -- as a "non-starter" and called the idea that the White House will seek a course correction in Iraq "a bunch of hooey."

Bush has been adamant that the United States will not withdraw its troops until the Iraqi government can defend itself.

Like many who have met with the president in recent months to discuss Iraq policy, author and military expert Robert Kaplan said he detected clear limits to Bush's flexibility. "He seemed genuinely to enjoy the challenges to his policy that we threw at him," Kaplan said, describing a session Bush held with several outside strategists at Camp David in June. "He wasn't at all defensive. He appeared open to any new direction or tactic, except withdrawal, and yet that is what he might be faced with after November."

Along with the political debate, there also is growing frustration inside the U.S. military over Iraq, with some officers debating privately whether the situation there is salvageable. In recent weeks, senior military officers have offered a torrent of negative comments, a sharp contrast to the official optimism of the past three years.

"We're obviously very concerned about what we're seeing" in Baghdad, Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said yesterday. He indicated that changes to a plan to restore security to the capital are being considered. "We find the insurgent elements, the extremists, are in fact punching back hard," Caldwell said.

In recent days, the demand for change on Iraq has been especially notable from inside the president's party: Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, returned from a trip to Iraq saying that country was adrift and all options should be considered. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a conservative Republican from Texas, said this week that she is willing to consider the wisdom of somehow breaking up Iraq.

Until now, Democrats' calls for withdrawing troops have been largely irrelevant, but if Democrats take one or both houses of Congress next month, their views could become significant in shaping strategy.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who would take over the chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee, said he favors beginning a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops that "gives the Iraqis notice that they're going to be looking into the abyss" unless they make necessary changes.

One version of this option was presented to House Democrats last month by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who outlined a four-step plan that would include a joint declaration by the U.S. and Iraqi governments on a timeline for the departure of U.S. troops, a follow-up international conference on stabilizing Iraq and a greater focus on economic reconstruction.

Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who is campaigning to become the new majority leader should Democrats take power, said many in his caucus like the idea behind the Brzezinski plan, though perhaps not all the specifics. "The Iraqis have to understand that there is a time frame," he said. "Our commitment is substantial, but it is not unending."

People familiar with the work of the Iraq Study Group say it is also mulling a variant of the gradual withdrawal idea that would move U.S. troops out of Iraq but leave a residual force in the region to keep the violence from spreading and Iraq's neighbors from meddling.

Another idea getting a closer look is a new power-sharing agreement that would give more power to autonomous regions -- Kurdish in the north, Sunni in the middle and Shiite in the south -- while weakening the central government. This idea is most closely identified with Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and Les Gelb, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Because there is no oil in what would be the Sunni-controlled area, Biden and Gelb envision some sort of scheme to share oil revenue with the Sunnis to get them to agree to such a plan.

Biden said yesterday that if the Democrats win big in next month's elections, "You have a lot of Republicans who are going to openly join Democrats and will push back hard against the president."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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Echoes of the Tet offensive, when US became 'mired in a stalemate'
By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 20 October 2006
The Tet offensive marked the moment when what had been seen as a relatively manageable overseas conflict involving the United States turned into something much more messy.

The assaults launched by the Viet Cong against the South Vietnamese and their US military allies in early 1968 - coinciding with the Tet festival, or lunar new year -- were a military fiasco. But the size of the offensive, the dramatic increase in US troop numbers it triggered, and the consequent loss of life on all sides, weighed heavily on US public opinion and led to Lyndon Johnson's refusal to seek re-election in that year's presidential race.

The Viet Cong attacked on six specific targets in Saigon, including the American embassy, the National Broadcasting Station and the office of President Nguyen Van Thieu. None was successful, but television images of US General William Westmoreland in front of a devastated embassy strewn with bodies had a jolting effect on public perceptions at home.

The offensive also involved a long, draining battle for the Khe Sanh airstrip, used as a US Marine base south of the demilitarised zone separating North and South Vietnam. Khe Sanh became a symbol of the war's futility, abandoned as it was in June 1968, deemed to be of no strategic worth.

The Tet offensive gave so much life to the anti-war Democratic presidential candidate, Eugene McCarthy, that he came close to scoring an upset victory over the President in the New Hampshire primary. That inspired Bobby Kennedy to enter the race, and prompted Mr Johnson to withdraw.

Perhaps the iconic moment was in late February when Walter Cronkite, the revered CBS Evening News anchor, visited Vietnam and told his viewers the US was "mired in a stalemate" and needed to get out.

The Tet offensive marked the moment when what had been seen as a relatively manageable overseas conflict involving the United States turned into something much more messy.

The assaults launched by the Viet Cong against the South Vietnamese and their US military allies in early 1968 - coinciding with the Tet festival, or lunar new year -- were a military fiasco. But the size of the offensive, the dramatic increase in US troop numbers it triggered, and the consequent loss of life on all sides, weighed heavily on US public opinion and led to Lyndon Johnson's refusal to seek re-election in that year's presidential race.

The Viet Cong attacked on six specific targets in Saigon, including the American embassy, the National Broadcasting Station and the office of President Nguyen Van Thieu. None was successful, but television images of US General William Westmoreland in front of a devastated embassy strewn with bodies had a jolting effect on public perceptions at home.
The offensive also involved a long, draining battle for the Khe Sanh airstrip, used as a US Marine base south of the demilitarised zone separating North and South Vietnam. Khe Sanh became a symbol of the war's futility, abandoned as it was in June 1968, deemed to be of no strategic worth.

The Tet offensive gave so much life to the anti-war Democratic presidential candidate, Eugene McCarthy, that he came close to scoring an upset victory over the President in the New Hampshire primary. That inspired Bobby Kennedy to enter the race, and prompted Mr Johnson to withdraw.

Perhaps the iconic moment was in late February when Walter Cronkite, the revered CBS Evening News anchor, visited Vietnam and told his viewers the US was "mired in a stalemate" and needed to get out.

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Sydney Morning Herald

In the inferno, with no way out


October 20, 2006

Humiliation or getting dragged further in are the US choices now, writes Paul McGeough, chief Herald correspondent.

DEMOCRACY in Iraq is a meaningless term until after the civil war that is now tearing the country apart.

Only when Iraqis stop killing each other will they be able to decide the terms and conditions under which they are to live together - or not, as the case might be. It is an endgame that cannot be imposed by outsiders.

These days there is much squirming in Washington, London and Canberra as onion-like layers are peeled back to reveal the policy bankruptcy of the would-be king-makers who believed they could remake the world by invading Iraq.

Remember all the talk of Iraq as a democracy "beacon" or "beachhead" in the Middle East? Wasn't it supposed to be a bright, sunny day in the so-called Arab Spring?

Now we face the prospect of the US President, George Bush, getting serious advice that the best way out of the Iraq quagmire may have to include cutting in the dictators and theocrats of Damascus and Tehran on the Baghdad deal.

James Baker, a Bush family confidant and a former secretary of state who is heading a Congress-appointed search for a new strategy in Iraq, was deeply pessimistic in a speech in Houston on Tuesday: "There is no magic bullet … it's very, very difficult.

"Anybody who thinks that somehow we are going to come up with something that is going to totally solve the problem is engaging in wishful thinking."

But associates say Baker may recommend dialogue with Syria and Iran, sworn enemies of the President. It is a measure of the depth of the crisis that such a serving of crow pie would be even considered for the White House.

Sadly, the Americans are now having the debate that they should have had before they invaded Iraq. And the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Australia's John Howard are tap-dancing lest they be seen to have been duped when Bush - inevitably, some say - jumps the policy rails.

Under pressure to articulate the democratic prerequisites for a foreign withdrawal from Iraq, on ABC Radio's AM program yesterday, Howard set out a bald, minimalist position that seems to hinge on Iraq's democratic future - as opposed to its democratic present.

Interviewer Chris Uhlmann: "I thought at the outset of this war, one of the things being aimed for was a democratic Iraq?"

Howard: "Yes, it is; and that remains the objective. But before …"

Uhlmann: "But it is no longer necessary that Iraq be democratic before we withdraw?"

Howard: " … I think what we need is a situation where the Iraqis can provide security and that the democratic future of that country is reasonably secure."

THE DIFFICULTY with Iraq is that its system of government cannot be nursed along in isolation from the so-called war on terrorism.

That's where Bush, Blair and Howard botched it: by insisting that the invasion of Iraq was a necessary battle in the war on terrorism, they have made the outcome in Iraq an unavoidable measure of success or failure in the war on terrorism.

And for these three Western leaders, Iraq is a fiasco. The hopelessness of their case is this: they can withdraw any time they like, and leave the terrorists of the world to claim victory; or they can stay as mute, useless witnesses to the Iraqi bonfire which they ignited. There are a whole lot of halfway houses, but few if any in which they will find shelter from humiliation and embarrassment.

The civil war genie is out of the bottle in Iraq. Howard and others miss the point when they bang on about all being well once they have built the capacity of the new Iraqi security forces. It's not the ability of the raw forces to do the job that is in question, so much as the willingness of their political masters to issue orders that will be obeyed.

Let's be clear. The violence in Iraq is at such appalling levels because it is tolerated by Iraqi leaders. It's the same with the Iraqi elections. People come out to vote and the world obsesses about their courage and bravery. But little or no attention is paid to the strict ethnic and religious lines along which they voted and there is little questioning of what that means.

Their leaders get the red-carpet treatment when they turn up in Washington. "Ah," some commentators conclude, "all is well … they are democrats after all." But nothing is said when the Iraqis turn up more frequently to mesh with the nuclear maddies of the Axis of Evil in Tehran.

And despite each month's civilian body count proving the failure of the latest US-managed attempt to liberate Baghdad, there seems to be an inability in the corridors of power to grasp that we are observing the limits of American power. Democracy was to be the Western gift to the Iraqi people. So, have they been badly short-changed?

Spend enough time in Iraq and two truths emerge. Without for a minute arguing for a Saddam Hussein comeback, many Iraqis bitterly make the point that the ousted dictator could do what all the global forces mustered by Bush cannot do: impose law and order and deliver secure utility services.

As they ruminate over glasses of sweet black tea, they observe that in the absence of Saddam this was the war they had to have. But if Iraqis had been warned of this as an outcome of his demise, many would have settled for the devil they knew.

The politicians are loath to agree, but the scholar Anthony Cordesman, one of the most constant observers and analysts of the Iraq conflict, is satisfied that what is happening in Iraq constitutes civil war.

Iraqis knew that they had scores to settle. In the past year there has been more than a tenfold increase in sectarian violence. In the past three months alone, civilian casualties increased by 51 per cent. While a study by The Lancet which concludes that the Iraq death toll could be more than 600,000 sounds outlandish, other credible assessments put the toll anywhere between 44,000 and 128,000.

That's a lot of September 11 equivalents in a country where the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, thought the Americans would be welcomed as liberators and in which his former deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, predicted this war would not cost the US a nickel because of all that Iraqi oil.

In his latest Iraq bulletin, Cordesman warns that Washington's analysis of the violence is selective and misleading - ignoring population distributions that constitute a clear measure of civil war and "grossly" understating the level of the conflict in their counting and definitions.

He also notes that US polling of Iraqi public opinion is misleadingly selective. Quoting a State Department poll that found 50 per cent to 90 per cent of some communities were concerned that civil war might break out, Cordesman observes tartly: "No one asked Iraqis how many felt they were already in a civil war."

The US-led invasion of Iraq sparked an insurgency - domestic and foreign - that didn't need Einstein to work out that the best way to paralyse the new Iraq and Washington's grand design was to provoke a civil war. But Bush misleads Americans in his harping on about the insurgents as the cause of the violence. His implication is that a single, mean-spirited force is working against the US. That is not the case.

Shiites and Sunnis are killing each other. Christians are under increasing attack. The Kurds are armed to the teeth in defence. The hideous killings and tortures are by Iraqis on Iraqis. The most miserable ethnic and religious cleansing is again Iraqi on Iraqi and at last count more than 150,000 people had been displaced.

Who will be exhausted first? Will the Shiites tire before every Sunni in the country is dead? Will their Sunni neighbours tolerate that? Will Sunnis who feel deprived of the power and resources they enjoyed under Saddam finally surrender to the reality of their small numbers under a Shiite majority? And if they don't, will Shiite neighbours, like Iran, help beat them into submission? Iraq is out of control.

Bush now agrees that perhaps the current violence is the Iraqi equivalent of the Vietcong's Tet Offensive which turned US public opinion against the war in Vietnam. Blair smacked down his top brass last week for daring to suggest the British military presence provoked rather than quelled violence in Iraq, but suddenly he, too, is talking of withdrawing.

And on Wednesday, the democratic minimalist John Howard emerged. But all are hogtied. They talk about the risk of chaos and human catastrophe if they dare to pull out, seemingly oblivious to the chaos and human catastrophe that is today's Iraq.

The best they can do is to send more body bags. Cordesman concludes: "Iraq is already in a state of serious civil war, and current efforts at political compromise and improving security at best are [only] buying time. There is a critical risk that Iraq will drift into major civil conflict over the coming months, see its present government fail, and/or divide or separate in some form."

Fine democracy, that.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Vietnam comparisons underscore Iraq woes
President concedes spike in violence bears resemblance to Tet Offensive
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Given the U.S. military’s troubled history in Vietnam, generals and their foot soldiers in Iraq may have shuddered after they heard President Bush acknowledge a comparison with today’s Iraq and the Viet Cong’s 1968 Tet Offensive.

In an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, the president said a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman might be correct in drawing that analogy.

“He could be right,” the president said. “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”

Tet, which began in early 1968 and is seen by many as a turning point in the Vietnam war, did serious damage to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s public support. Two months after the offensive began, he announced he would not seek a full, second term in the White House.

Bush links violence to elections
The military and the Bush administration, even before the president’s comments Wednesday on ABC, had blamed the recent increase in attacks on U.S. soldiers in Baghdad and elsewhere on the insurgents’ savvy — a gamble that they could affect the vote in coming U.S. elections.

“In regards to this spike in violence ... it’s no coincidence that the surge in attacks against coalition forces and the subsequent increase in U.S. casualties coincides with our increased presence on the streets of Baghdad and the run-up to the American midterm elections,” military spokesman Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell said Thursday.

“The enemy knows that killing innocent people and Americans will garner headlines and create a sense of frustration,” he said.

As Caldwell spoke, the White House sought to clarify Bush’s remarks, to put them back into the context of ties between increased American deaths and the coming U.S. vote.

“The president was making a point that he’s made before, which is that terrorists try to exploit pictures and try to use the media as conduits for influencing public opinion in the United States,” spokesman Tony Snow said.


Related story
White House rejects proposal to split up Iraq



Deadly month continues
Attacks in Baghdad rose 22 percent in the first three weeks of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, Caldwell said, when compared to the previous three weeks. The month of fasting and prayers began in late September and is in its final days.

So far this month 73 U.S. troops have been killed, putting October on course to be the deadliest for American forces in Iraq since November 2004, when U.S. was in the midst of a drive to oust insurgents from their stronghold of Fallujah in Anbar province.

Caldwell dodged when questioned about Bush’s comparison of Iraq with the Tet Offensive.

“I think we’re getting far beyond my realm to start making analogies back to Vietnam War, but I would tell you that we’re obviously very concerned about what we’re seeing in the city.”

Disagreement over war strategy
As happened in Vietnam, the United States and its host government are growing increasingly at odds over specifics in how the war is being conducted.

Among other things, Washington and Baghdad may differ over an amnesty plan for insurgents — a bid to draw fighters into the political process. There were reports the White House was pressuring Iraqi authorities to give amnesty to Sunni insurgents, although that would be a surprising change for the Bush administration, which has resisted amnesty because it could potentially include those who have killed American troops.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki took office under a 24-point national unity program, which included an amnesty, but the plan soon collapsed after disputes with the United States over which insurgents could be included.

Beyond that, the country’s Shiite-dominated parliament — with no objection from fellow Shiite al-Maliki — adopted a measure last week that would allow Iraq’s 18 provinces to band together according to religious or ethnic population into autonomous or federal regions. Some fear such a move would effectively lead to the dismemberment of Iraq, but not before far more bloodshed.

The White House on Thursday came out strongly against such a plan, which reportedly shared some elements with expected recommendations of a commission exploring U.S. options in Iraq.

Snow said a division of Iraq was a “nonstarter,” suggesting a yet a fresh point of friction in the growing list of issues over which the al-Maliki government and the Bush administration appear to be at odds.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

U.S. rethinks its strategy to cut Iraqi violence

The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq acknowledged Thursday that
a much-touted security crackdown by American and Iraqi forces has
failed to reduce violence in the capital and called the results
"disheartening." By Louise Roug.
http://latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/...y?track=tottext

GOP solidarity on the war is cracking

Public anxiety over the Iraq war, already reflected in polls and
demands from some Democrats to withdraw U.S. troops, is now
prompting calls for change from some unlikely quarters: Republican
congressional candidates. By Noam N. Levey, Janet Hook and Richard
Simon.
http://latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation...y?track=tottext

http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/troop...S00010000000001

Troops' Debt a Growing Security Concern
By THOMAS WATKINS, AP

SAN DIEGO (Oct. 20) - Thousands of U.S. troops are being barred from overseas duty because they are so deep in debt they are considered security risks, according to an Associated Press review of military records.

The number of clearances revoked for financial reasons rose every year between 2002 and 2005, climbing ninefold from 284 at the start of the period to 2,654 last year. Partial numbers from this year suggest the trend continues.

The number of troops held back has climbed dramatically in the past few years. And while they appear to represent a very small percentage of all U.S. military personnel, the increase is occurring at a time when the armed forces are stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We are seeing an alarming trend in degrading financial health," said Navy Capt. Mark D. Patton, commanding officer at San Diego's Naval Base Point Loma.

The Pentagon contends financial problems can distract personnel from their duties or make them vulnerable to bribery and treason. As a result, those who fall heavily into debt can be stripped of the security clearances they need to go overseas.

While the number of revoked clearances has surged since the beginning of the Iraq war, military officials say there is no evidence that service members are deliberately running up debts to stay out of harm's way.

Officials also say the increase has not undermined the military's fighting ability, though some say it has complicated the job of assembling some of the units needed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The problem is attributed to a lack of financial smarts among recruits; reckless spending among those exhilarated to make it home alive from a tour of duty; and the profusion of "payday lenders" - businesses that allow military personnel to borrow against their next paycheck at extremely high interest rates.

The debt problems persist despite crackdowns on payday lenders and the financial counseling the Pentagon routinely offers to the troops.

Data supplied to the AP by the Navy, Marines and Air Force show that the number of clearances revoked for financial reasons rose every year between 2002 and 2005, climbing ninefold from 284 at the start of the period to 2,654 last year. Partial numbers from this year suggest the trend continues.

More than 6,300 troops in the three branches lost their clearances during that four-year period. Roughly 900,000 people are serving in the three branches, though not all need clearances.

The figures gathered by the AP represent just a piece of problem, because the Army - which employs an additional 500,000 people and accounts for the vast majority of the 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan - rejected repeated requests over the past month to supply its data, saying such information is confidential.

At Point Loma, Patton said clearance revocations in key areas such as military police forces have gotten so common that he often looks for two sailors to fill a single posting.

Still, Patton said he had never heard of anyone racking up bills to get out of combat. "There are folks who find ways of avoiding being deployed, as there always will be, but I've never seen any do it through finances," he said.

Security clearances are revoked when service members' debt payments amount to 30 percent to 40 percent of their salary. The exact amount depends on the military branch.

There are three levels of clearance - confidential, secret and top secret. Not all troops need clearance. Marine infantrymen don't, but some Marine specialists, such as those in intelligence, do. So do many jobs in the Navy and Air Force.

Financial problems are the overwhelming reason security clearances are revoked. Other reasons include criminal activity, questionable allegiance and ill health.

A key reason the military revokes clearances on financial grounds is the fear that soldiers in debt might be tempted to sell secrets or equipment to the enemy.

Also, "when they are over there fighting, we like them to have their heads in the game," said Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert, commander of Marine Corps bases in the western United States. "We like to have them ... not worrying about whether or not they are going to be able to make the mortgage payment or car payment."

Members of the brass also blame runaway interest rates at payday lending businesses, many of which are clustered outside bases around the country. Several states have cracked down on payday lending practices, and on Tuesday, President Bush signed legislation limiting how much these businesses can charge military personnel.

Some personnel fall into debt upon returning from combat.

"It can be hard to cut that sense of elation and desire to live for the moment," Lehnert said. "Some tend to get themselves overextended financially."

Also, when they go to war, they get combat pay, and none of their income is taxed. That can lead them to overspend when they come home.

Patton said that like other services, the Navy offers zero-interest emergency loans. Also, military personnel commonly take money-management classes as part of basic training.

"Every time we go in and do an indoctrination brief, there is instruction or training in place to give them some of the pitfalls of debt," said Terry Harris, a personal finance educator at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida. "We do inform them about the pitfalls of security clearances being lost to that."

The increase in finance-related revocations could actually be a good sign - it could reflect greater awareness among the troops, according to Chief Master Sgt. Rodney J. McKinley, the Air Force's highest-ranking noncommissioned officer.

"We have a few more people coming forward and saying, `Hey, I'm having some financial difficulty and need help,' versus going down the other path where they keep so quiet," McKinley said.

Associated Press Writers Pauline Jelinek in Washington, Melissa Nelson in Pensacola, Fla., and Estes Thompson in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.


10-20-06 01:04 EDT

CULTIVATING MILITARY LEADERSHIP IN A DEMOCRACY

A new U.S. Army Field Manual presents a vision of excellence in
military leadership and articulates principles by which such
excellence may be achieved.

"It is critical that Army leaders be agile, multiskilled
pentathletes who have strong moral character, broad knowledge,
and keen intellect."

But in America, the "warrior ethos" is not an independent value,
the Army manual explains. Rather, the value of military
leadership derives from the constitutional order that it serves
and supports.

"The Army's military and civilian leaders are instruments of the
people of the United States."

Furthermore, the effectiveness of Army leadership is dependent on
the quality and wisdom of the elected leaders of the country.

"The elected government commits forces only after due
consideration and in compliance with our national laws and
values," the manual says. "Understanding this process gives our
Army moral strength and unwavering confidence when committed to
war."

The 200 page manual presents extensive theoretical as well as
inspirational material and a bibliography for further study.

See U.S. Army Field Manual FM 6-22, "Army Leadership: Competent,
Confident, and Agile," October 12, 2006 (4.4 MB PDF):

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm6-22.pdf

CRS ON ARMS SALES AND PROLIFERATION

Several recently updated reports from the Congressional Research
Service, not readily available to the public, provide an
introduction to the subject of conventional arms sales and the
proliferation of weapons technology.

"International Small Arms and Light Weapons Transfers: U.S.
Policy," updated October 2, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RS20958.pdf

"Military Technology and Conventional Weapons Export Controls: The
Wassenaar Arrangement," updated September 29, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RS20517.pdf

"Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan:
Effects and Countermeasures," updated September 25, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RS22330.pdf

"Arms Sales: Congressional Review Process," December 20, 2002:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL31675.pdf

"Globalizing Cooperative Threat Reduction: A Survey of Options,"
updated October 5, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL32359.pdf

"Iran's Influence in Iraq," updated September 29, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS22323.pdf

"Project BioShield," updated September 27, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RS21507.pdf

http://www.counterpunch.org/cloughly10202006.html

The White House and the Congress are Equally Guilty
What Are They Dying For?
By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

I was a soldier for 36 years. And when soldiers of NATO (including the US) and Commonwealth countries are killed, nowadays, I feel that "there but for the Grace of God go I" because during my military service I was preparing to fight (or was actually fighting) against people who were enemies of my country.

But when I examine the wars going on at the moment I wonder whether NATO and Commonwealth soldiers (and others, too) who are suffering so many casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan should feel morally comfortable with fighting against the people who are resisting their presence and attacking them. What are they fighting for?

In September, 74 US soldiers were killed in Iraq. In the first 19 days of October, 70 US troops died. Of the 370 US soldiers wounded in September, 295 are seriously incapacitated. In Afghanistan the picture is equally grim. Day by day the number of dead soldiers increases--British, American, Canadian and French, mainly. And of course there are hundreds of Afghan and Iraqi soldiers and police who have been killed, in addition to countless thousands of civilians in both countries whose deaths matter not one jot to the Washington warfighters.

Why have they died?

Why are so many people being killed? What vital Cause have these soldiers died for? What message do their gravestones have for us? And why have hundreds of thousands of civilians been killed in countries since they were invaded by foreigners in order, we are told by the Bush people, to "bring democracy" to them. What's going on in Washington?

Forget the sexual peccadilloes of a hypocritical little Congressman and the lies of Republican leaders who protected him until the game was up and their contemptible conduct was exposed. These people are but tiny morsels of stinking dross in the stove of history. They are slimy maggots who are as worthless as they are self-important, and their posturing and pompousness deserve nothing but scorn. They have forgotten they have a higher duty to the American people than simply being re-elected, which, to the whole lot of them (and to all politicians, everywhere in the world) is the most important thing in their squalid little lives. There isn't a politician alive (or dead , or yet to come) who wouldn't sacrifice his or her dearest principle if they realized that by sticking to it they would fail to be elected.

Members of both Houses in Washington forget or ignore the fact that they are just as responsible as Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice for the deaths of American (and other) soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. These legislators are just as guilty as the White House barbarians, too, for the deaths of all the women and children who have been killed by berserk militias that didn't exist in Iraq until after the US invaded. And they are equally responsible for the deaths of all the ordinary citizens who have died in screaming agony after being subjected to "precision" bombing by US aircraft or the midnight guns, grenades and fists of door-smashing soldiery.


***

On October 17, Cheney, on a brief trip to Planet Earth, announced that "If you look at the general overall situation, they [the Iraqi government] are doing remarkably well", which is absolute nonsense, as over 100 people had been slaughtered in Baghdad the previous day.

And here's Bush on October 11 : "We're on the move. We're taking action. We're helping this young democracy succeed . . . Our troops have increased their presence on the streets of Baghdad. Together with Iraqi forces, they're working to ensure that terrorists and death squads cannot intimidate the local population and operate murder rings . . ." Is the man insane? Can this really be the President of the United States of America speaking? Bush must know that since the his forces' attempts to control Baghdad began in August there has been an amazing and terrible increase in deaths in the city, and that over 400 Iraqi civilians have died horribly since he made his absurd pronouncement.

Why did they die? And what are his soldiers are dying for?

Bush must know that in September there were at least (according to verifiable morgue figures) 2,660 civilians killed in Baghdad ; 400 more than in the previous month. They were killed by "death squads" and "murder rings", but the armed forces of the occupying power, the United States of America, were unable to do anything to bring to an end or even reduce the slaughter of thousands of Iraqis whose only crime was to belong to a different faction to the people who killed them.

In response to a question about a report that over 300,000 Iraqis had been killed since he went to war on Iraq Bush could only stumblebum that "I do -- I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me. And it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to -- you know, that there's a level of violence that they tolerate."

George W Bush has the temerity, the grotesque insolence, to state that Iraqis are actually willing to "tolerate" , to accept willingly, the hideous violence that has been caused by his invasion and occupation of a country that presented no threat whatever to the United States.

And after his disastrous war developed into the bloody quagmire that is killing scores of American soldiers every week, Bush had the impudence to declare that " . . . it's now time for the Iraqi government to work hard to bring security in neighborhoods so people can feel -- can feel, you know, at peace."

When did you last hear such rubbish from a president? Cheney and Bush have brought war, devastation and death to Iraq. It is entirely the fault of the Washington warfighters that hundreds of thousands of people have died since their invasion only a few years ago. The "Iraqi government" is a sham. It governs the green lawns outside its premises in the US-owned Green Area which is full of swimming pools, electricity generators and coffee bars. It is ridiculous for Bush to demand that the "Iraqi government" should "bring security" to anywhere in the country. 140,000 US troops can't do it. How can a raggle-taggle Iraqi army possibly do any better?

On October 17 McClatchy News reported that "U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad [. . .] also sounded that alarm, saying the government must tackle such broad issues as de-Baathification, needed changes to the constitution, distribution of oil and strengthening the security forces. But when pressed on how he expects the government to respond, he couldn't offer an answer."

Of course he couldn't offer an answer. The man is out of his depth and incompetent. And the day after he made his idiot pronouncement the bombs and bullets of the Iraqi resistance killed ten American soldiers. Why?

What did these soldiers die for?

Bush said on October 11 that "We can't tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East with large oil reserves that could be used to fund its radical ambitions or used to inflict economic damage on the West".

Have 2,800 American soldiers (and thousands of Iraqis) been killed for the sake of LARGE OIL RESERVES? How many more will have to die in the Cheney-Bush war for oil? When you look at the casualty lists on such sites as http://icasualties.org/oif/ you can't help being emotional after reading descriptions of how young soldiers met their unnecessary deaths. And we all know that these lists will become longer for so long as the War Party is supreme in Washington.

It is probable that American soldiers are dying at least in part for the sake of US oil companies, but the main reason for their slaughter is that Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld do not want to change course because that would entail admitting they are wrong. For so long as they wield power in Washington there will be chaos and death in Iraq. US soldiers, and others, are dying because of mighty egos in Washington.

It's as simple as that.

Brian Cloughley writes on military and political affairs. He can be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/wheeler10202006.html

As Cost Goes Up, Readiness Declines
The Mad Logic of Pentagon Spending
By WINSLOW WHEELER

In 1983, Pentagon "maverick analyst" Franklin ("Chuck") Spinney testified to a joint session of the Senate Armed Services and Budget Committees about what he called "The Plans/Reality Mismatch." The term referred to the failure of the Pentagon to accurately project the real cost of the defense program it sought in its multiyear plans. The Pentagon underestimated the actual costs of its own program each year by an order of magnitude of billions of dollars. The behavior became known as "underfunding."

That was almost 25 years ago. Spinney's ground breaking study started a cottage industry in Washington. Since then, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and several Washington think tanks have duplicated Spinney's research, but with one change: each year, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, in war and in peace, the "underfunding" problem gets worse.

At the turn of the millennium CBO measured the gap between projected and likely actual funding needs in the Pentagon's multiyear plan to be $50 billion--per year. The only element Donald Rumsfeld has added to the problem as the longest serving secretary of defense in recent memory is to accelerate the problem.

In its new study, ("Long term Implications of Current Defense Plans: Summary Update for Fiscal year 2007"), just released on the internet on Oct. 18, CBO finds the problem to have grown to over $100 billion--per year. Up to 27 percent more money than the Pentagon has been requesting may be needed to actually implement its plans.

There are many causes and elements to the problems that the Pentagon and Congress jointly refuse to address. In one of its more interesting passages on page eight, CBO identifies three critical elements:

1) the per capita costs to operate and maintain our ground forces--even without the expenses of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--have been rising;

2) as our weapons inventory continues to age, it also is more expensive to operate, and

3) new weapons, being more complex, are habitually more expensive to operate than the systems they replace.

In each case, despite increases for these issues, their budgets turn out to be inadequate. As Spinney warned us for years, as the costs go up, the readiness goes down.

The same thing is happening in the Pentagon's hardware budget. As the costs to buy new systems skyrockets (as it has for the Air Force's F-22 and F-35 fighters, the Army's Future Combat System, and the Navy's new overweight destroyer), we tend to buy fewer items than planned and the programs are delivered late (as for example by several years for the F-22). Thus, as Spinney also told us, the larger, older existing inventory is not replaced, either in total or on time. Given the added expense of the new systems, they literally translate to an inventory that is simultaneously shrinking and aging--at increased cost.

Some argue that the solution can only be more spending, such as that advocated by the chief of staff of the Army, General Schoomaker. While past increases have not been as dramatic as those he seeks for the Army, Congress and the Pentagon have indeed been increasing peacetime spending for years. The result? The problem gets worse.

Others argue that more realistic cost estimates and less unrealistic program ambitions are the only way out. The problem is not "underfunding," it is "overprogramming." That route to a solution has never been attempted, certainly not seriously, clearly not recently. Is it time?

Is the study really a yawner? Of course not, but that would seem to be all it is likely to provoke in Washington.

Winslow T. Wheeler is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information and author of The Wastrels of Defense. Over 31 years, he worked for US Senators from both political parties and the Government Accountability Office on national security issues. He can be contacted at: winslowwheeler@comcast.net.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/world/mi...age&oref=slogin

Military Analysis
To Stand or Fall in Baghdad: Capital Is Key to Mission

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: October 23, 2006
BAGHDAD, Oct. 22 — After three years of trying to thwart a potent insurgency and tamp down the deadly violence in Iraq, the American military is playing its last hand: the Baghdad security plan.

The plan will be tweaked, adjusted and modified in the weeks ahead, as American commanders try to reverse the dismaying increase in murders, drive-by shootings and bombings.

But military commanders here see no plausible alternative to their bedrock strategy to clear violence-ridden neighborhoods of militias, insurgents and arms caches, hold them with Iraqi and American security forces, and then try to win over the population with reconstruction projects, underwritten mainly by the Iraqi government. There is no fall-back plan that the generals are holding in their hip pocket. This is it.

The Iraqi capital, as the generals like to say, is the center of gravity for the larger American mission in Iraq. Their assessment is that if Baghdad is overwhelmed by sectarian strife, the cause of fostering a more stable Iraq will be lost. Conversely, if Baghdad can be improved, the effects will eventually be felt elsewhere in Iraq. In invading Iraq, American forces started from outside the country and fought their way in. The current strategy is essentially to work from the inside out.

“As Baghdad goes, so goes Iraq,” observed Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, who commands American forces throughout Iraq.

Many ideas — new and not so new — are being discussed in Washington, like a sectarian division of Iraq (which the current government and many Iraqis oppose); and starting talks with Iraq’s neighbor, Iran (which the Iraqi government is already doing, but the United States is not). Some of these ideas look appealing simply because they have not been put to the test.

However the broader strategy may be amended, nothing can work if Baghdad becomes a war-torn Beirut. Baghdad security may not be a sufficient condition for a more stable Iraq, but it is a necessary condition for any alternative plan that does not simply abandon the Iraqis to their fate.

It is hard to see how any Iraq plan can work if the capital’s citizens cannot be protected.

The current operation is called Together Forward II, the second phase of an effort begun in July to reduce violence in Baghdad. The name reflects the core assumption that the Iraqi government is to be an equal partner in regaining control of its capital. Necessarily, the security plan requires an integrated political and military approach, since its goal is not to vanquish an enemy on a foreign battlefield but to bring order to a militia-and-insurgent-plagued city.

But the early returns have raised searching questions as to whether the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is truly prepared to tackle the mission.

“It is a decisive period,” said Maj. Gen. J. D. Thurman, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division and the senior commander of the American forces in Baghdad.

“They either seize the opportunity or they don’t,” he said. “If they don’t, then our government is going to have to readjust what we are going to do, and that is not my call.”

Since it would take several months to secure and begin reconstruction in the dozen or so strife-ridden neighborhoods that are the focus of the plan, American commanders said the viability of the strategy could not be properly assessed before the year’s end. So far, however, the plan has been short on resources as well as results. The Iraqi Defense Ministry has supplied only two of the six Iraqi Army battalions that General Thurman has requested.

That is not just a question of numbers. Some American military officers say they believe the Iraqi Army may be more effective than the Iraq police, and more trusted by local citizens. Yet several Iraqi battalions have deserted rather than follow orders to go to Baghdad, according to American military officials. In the case of these units, summoning them to the Iraqi capital was tantamount to demobilizing them.

Some of the Iraqi police forces the Americans must work with have been infiltrated by militias. One Iraqi National Police unit has already been withdrawn from the streets and a training program has been instituted to improve the others. The Americans are carefully monitoring a number of police stations that they say have made common cause with some of the militias and intend to report them to the Iraqi government

The original concept behind the plan was that American forces were to hold cleared areas for 60 to 90 days, during which the process of economic reconstruction would begin. Then American forces would turn the sectors over to Iraqi police and army units, freeing up American troops to tackle security challenges elsewhere in the city. Without sufficient Iraqi forces, however, this process has been hampered and it has been more difficult to prevent militias and insurgents from sneaking back into cleared areas.

Securing Baghdad “What takes the combat power is the holding piece,” said General Thurman. “We can do the clearing. But once you clear if you don’t leave somebody in there and build civil capacity in there then it is the old mud-hole approach. You know the water runs out of the mud hole when you drive through the mud hole and then it runs back in it.”

Delays in Iraqi government programs to improve electrical, sewage, water and health facilities have also hampered the effort. It had been expected that such Iraqi programs would begin before Ramadan, the monthlong holiday that is about to end. But the programs are now projected to start in November. In the absence of large-scale Iraqi programs, the Americans have sponsored some smaller efforts to improve sanitation and repair services, programs that have generated jobs and helped lower the unemployment rate in the city.

While the sectarian violence would be far worse if not for the American efforts, the number of murders in the Baghdad area has not decreased as hoped. Fifty-two bodies were found in General Thurman’s sector, which includes Baghdad and large swaths of territory north and south of the city, during the first week of August, when the security operations began. During the week that ended Oct. 14, the body count was 176. For the week that ended Oct. 21, the body count was 143, a noteworthy decline but still more than at the start of the operation.

There are a number of ideas being discussed in private to fix the plan. Americans still hope to receive additional Iraqi Army forces next month. They also hope to persuade the Iraqi government to purge police stations infiltrated by militias. Iraqi deployment areas may also be realigned.

American forces have already shifted some forces to new high-violence sectors and may make further adjustments. Shrinking the military zone controlled by the American Baghdad-based division, which now extends south to the cities of Najaf and Karbala, has also been discussed as a way to increase the density of American troops in the capital.

Erecting more barricades to section off parts of the city has been proposed by some officers. So has legitimizing some neighborhood watch organizations. That idea cuts against the policy to abolish militias but has been advocated by some military officials as a useful expedient.

Keeping the Army’s Fourth Division in place in Baghdad instead of rotating it home when it is to be replaced by the First Cavalry Division would substantially increase the number of American troops in the city. But there have been no indications that such an idea is under serious consideration.

In the final analysis, American officers say, much is in Iraqi hands. The American military is looking toward the Maliki government to finally disband the militias and reintegrate them into Iraqi society. It is not clear if the Iraqi government will follow through on such a step since some senior Iraqi officials have said the militias cannot be broken up until the Sunni-based insurgency is brought to heel.

American officials also say that the Iraqi government needs to more strictly enforce bans on the possession of illicit weapons and accelerate its reconstruction and job creation programs.

“Part of our problem is that we want this more than they do,” General Thurman said, alluding to the effort to get the Iraqis to put aside sectarian differences and build a unified Iraq. “We need to get people to stop worrying about self and start worrying about Iraq. And that is going to take national unity.”

“Until we get that settled I think we are going to struggle,” he added.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1022-26.htm

Is Iraq Another Vietnam? It is Already Lost
by Robert Freeman

Wars are lost before they are quit. The Germans lost World War II by the end of 1942 when their Sixth Army was destroyed at Stalingrad. Yet, they would “stay the course” for another two and a half years. The Japanese lost the Pacific war in June 1942 when their aircraft carriers were sunk at the Battle of Midway. They, too, would “stay the course” through two atom bombs before abandoning their aspirations for empire.

The Iraq War was lost even before it was begun. The reason is that it was founded on lies, it was begun in delusion, and it has been prosecuted with incompetence. As a result, it has metastasized vastly beyond the scope for which it was ever conceived, even as the means to fight it have shrunk dramatically. The result is a “perfect storm” that makes it impossible for the U.S. to win. The loss to U.S. power in the world will be incalculable, far greater than was the damage occasioned by the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.

As was Vietnam, the War in Iraq was founded on lies. It was conceived in the waning days of the first Bush administration when the “crazies” as they were called — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle — were talking about taking over the Middle East. By the time Bush II came to power in 2001, these crazies, rechristened as “neocons,” were ready with a game plan. All they needed, they said in the Project for a New American Century, was “another Pearl Harbor,” something to galvanize the nation into action. Amazingly, that catalytic event materialized on schedule as 9/11.

Within hours of the 9/11 attack in September 2001, Donald Rumsfeld was telling those around him to “roll it all up” into a plan for attacking Iraq. George W. Bush was telling National Security Council counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke to “find the connections to Iraq.” But Paul O’Neil, Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, has noted that the formal planning for an invasion of Iraq began at Bush’s first cabinet meeting, in January 2001.

That is why none of the putative rationales for War ever panned out. None of them were true. Iraq had had nothing to do with 9/11. It had no WMDs. It had no connections with Al Qaeda. None of that mattered. The American public was mercilessly flogged into a frothing frenzy to embrace a nakedly colonialist war to steal Iraq’s oil and put a stranglehold on China, India, and Europe, America’s new industrial competitors.

Remember mushroom clouds over New York City? Remember yellow cake uranium? Remember the aluminum tubes whose only possible use was for uranium enrichment centrifuges? Remember the tons of chemical and biological weapons that could be launched on 45 minutes’ notice? Lies, all.

The lies ensured that the U.S. would never occupy a moral high ground in the War. As each phony rationale was exposed for the lie it was, another excuse was offered up in its stead. No weapons of mass destruction? Saddam was a bad guy anyway. No Iraqi complicity in 9/11? We’re bringing freedom to the Iraqi people. No connection between Saddam and al Qaeda? We’re fighting a global Islamic jihad.

The lies of Iraq have left a growing, cancerous legacy of doubt, shame, and revulsion in the American psyche. The symptoms can only be suppressed through the contrivance of ever more desperate lies. Witness, for example, the current lie that Iraq is a battle “for the survival of Western Civilization,” juxtaposed with another current lie, that it is a “comma” in the unfolding of the modern Middle East. Which is it? Of course, it is neither but just as surely, it cannot possibly be both. But that is the problem that liars create for themselves when their lies begin to unravel.

The fragility of the Iraq War’s rationale — and its consequent collapse — is revealed in the fact that Bush could ask no sacrifice of the nation to fight it, for if there was any pain to be borne, people might look harder at the justification.

The neocons remembered all too well that it was the imposition of the draft in Vietnam and suburban middle class white boys coming home in body bags that had soured the nation on that War. So, there would be no draft for Iraq. The War would be fought by the downtrodden and destitute, the socially invisible, the economically unemployable, and the politically impotent.

Similarly, there would be no increase in taxes, in fact, just the opposite. Taxes would be cut every year, effectively a bribe to conscript the American public’s commitment to an indefensible and unwinnable war. But the tax cuts didn’t make the cost of the War disappear. They only postponed them. Eventually, they will precipitate a financial crisis that will bring the entire house of cards tumbling down and the nation’s economy with it.

A similarly vast edifice of official deceit formed the public discourse about Vietnam and doomed it just as surely as have Bush’s lies about Iraq.

In 1946, Truman rebuffed Ho Chi Mihn’s request for help in throwing out the French colonial occupiers. Ho turned to the Russians, in the process helping the Americans convert a legitimate war of national liberation in which the U.S. was on the wrong side, into a war against communist “aggression” in which the U.S. could lie to itself about being a fictive savior.

It was Eisenhower who backed out of the Geneva-sponsored elections of 1956 that were intended to unite Vietnam. He wrote privately that, “our guys would have lost.” It was Kennedy who retailed the “domino theory” even though it had been repudiated by the CIA in 1961, long before the 1965 escalation that would make the War irreversible.

It was Johnson who, in 1964, faked the Tonkin Gulf incident into an attack on the U.S. and the justification for full-scale war. And it was Nixon who lied about a “secret plan to end the War,” all the while planning to increase its intensity and expand it into Laos and Cambodia.

Gradually, however, the truth leaked out. At first it was a few courageous journalists who knew the truth first hand and dared tell it. The dikes burst when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, a meticulous chronology of official U.S. lying about the War.

It was the American people, tired of being lied to, who gave up on the War and the politicians who had sold it. Johnson convened his committee of “Wise Men” to craft a face-saving pull-out, just as Bush, for the same purpose, has convened his “Iraq Study Group” headed by Bush family consigliore and Republican fixer, James Baker.

In addition to the foundation of lies on which it was premised, the Iraq War was also lost because of the debilitating delusion of the war-mongers themselves, chickenhawks almost to a man.

Remember “a cakewalk” and our being “welcomed as liberators”? Remember “flowers being strewn in our path”? Remember “a self-funding war,” one that would be over “not in months, but in weeks”? Remember Paul Wolfowitz telling Congress there was “no reason to believe there should be a problem with sectarian violence”?

The delusion was inevitable, for once leaders begin to lie to their own people, they inevitably succumb to the seduction of the lies themselves.

It was just such delusion that enabled Donald Rumsfeld to persuade himself that the War could be fought and won with 160,000 troops. When the more sober voice of General Eric Shinseki, a man who had actually seen combat, cautioned that it would take 500,000 troops to secure Iraq, he was forced out of his job, replaced by a more politically ambitious yes-man who would traitorously anoint the administration’s politically-tainted Kool-Aid as militarily-sound wine.

It was the same delusional thinking that led Rumsfeld to threaten to fire anyone who asked about post-War planning. Why plan, when victory is assured? Similarly, Bush fantasized that victory could be secured with air power alone instead of by boots on the ground, that “hearts and minds” could be won by the issuance of heavy ordinance from the bomb bays of B-52’s. The result was Bush’s fantastically hubristic, “Bring ‘em on,” and the later, catastrophically misguided, “Mission Accomplished” stunt in May 2003.