MSNBC as State-Controlled Media: Maddow interviews Bacevich

If I were Obama I would take great comfort in having hope fiends like Rachel Maddow in the Liberal media. Never put it past an Obama supporter to give him credit for something he hasn't done yet (all the while overlooking what he is actually doing and has done...)

'The Rachel Maddow Show' for Monday, August 2nd, 2010

"MADDOW: Do you think there‘s really no difference between Democrats and Republicans on the biggest most important issues in national security?

BACEVICH: The differences are far smaller than one would conclude from all of the rhetoric and the hype. I‘ve long believed that if you‘re looking for the big truths about American politics, about the way Washington works, you don‘t look at the differences between the Republicans and the Democrats. You look for the continuities. ...

MADDOW: But the difference that I see between theoretical McCain presidency and the actual Obama presidency in Afghanistan is that withdrawal deadline. Now, the administration is taking great pains to make that withdrawal deadline next summer seem very squishy.

And if there is no withdrawal, then, I‘d say you‘re right. But if there is withdrawal, if they really do wind that war down and end it and don‘t let it go on permanently, isn‘t that a potential crack in the consensus? Is it a break in permanent war, sort of an opportunity to question that as a default path? "

Baseball and the Culture of Empire

The Liberal Press: Covering for Imperial Atrocities

Do Disclosures of Atrocities Change Anything?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

"The important constituency here is liberals, who duly rise to the challenge of unpleasant disclosures of imperial crimes. In the wake of scandals such as those revealed at Abu Ghraib, or in the Wikileaks files, they are particularly eager to proclaim that they “can take it” – i.e., endure convincing accounts of monstrous tortures, targeted assassinations by US forces, obliteration of wedding parties or entire villages, and emerge with ringing affirmations of the fundamental overall morality of the imperial enterprise. This was very common in the Vietnam war and repeated in subsequent imperial ventures such the sanctions and ensuing attack on Iraq, and now the war in Afghanistan. Of course in the case of Israel it’s an entire way of life for a handsome slice of America’s liberals.

What does end wars? One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls, or fears it will. With the U.S. war in Afghanistan none of these conditions has yet been met. The U.S. began the destruction of Afghanistan in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniev Brzezinksi started financing the mullahs and warlords in the largest and most expensive operation in the CIA’s history until that time. Here we are, more than three decades later, half buried under a mountain of horrifying news stories about a destroyed land of desolate savagery and what did one hear on many news commentaries earlier this week? Indignant bleats often by liberals, about Wikileaks’ “irresponsibility” in releasing the documents; twitchy questions such as that asked by The Nation’s Chris Hayes on the Rachel Maddow Show: “I wonder ultimately to whom WikiLeaks ends up being accountable.” "

Adm Mullen: Creating Jobs in Afghanistan

Adm. Mullen on Meet the Press

"Afghanistan has to be stable enough, has to have enough governance, have to--has to create enough jobs, have an economy that's good enough so that the Taliban cannot return to the brutality of the kind of regime that you just showed."

The Great Myth of Counter-Insurgency

"We're Losing This F--cking Thing!"

The Great Myth of Counter-Insurgency

By CONN HALLINAN

"The problem is not Afghanistan, but the entire concept of COIN, and the debate around it is hardly academic. Counterinsurgency has seized the high ground in the Pentagon and the halls of Washington, and there are other places in the world where it is being deployed, from the jungles of Columbia to the dry lands that border the Sahara. If the COIN doctrine is not challenged, Americans may well find themselves debating its merits in places like Somalia, Yemen, or Mauritania.

“Counterinsurgency aims at reshaping a nation and its society over the long haul,” says military historian Frank Chadwick, emphasizing “infrastructure improvements, ground-level security, and building a bond between the local population and the security forces.”

...

COIN is always presented as politically neutral, a series of tactics aimed at winning hearts and minds. But in fact, COIN has always been part of a strategy of domination by a nation(s) and/or socio/economic class.

The U.S. has strategic interests in Central Asia and the Middle East, and “terrorism” is a handy excuse to inject military power into these two energy-rich regions of the world. Whoever holds the energy high ground in the coming decades will exert enormous influence on world politics.

No, it is not all about oil and gas, but a lot of it is.

Winning “hearts and minds” is just a tactic aimed at insuring our paramount interests, and/or the interests of the “friendly” governments that we fight for. Be nice to the locals unless the locals decide that they don’t much like long-term occupation, don’t trust their government, and might have some ideas about how they should run their own affairs.

Then “hearts and minds” turns nasty. U.S. Special Operations Forces carry out as many as five “kill and capture” raids a day in Afghanistan and have assassinated or jailed more than 500 Afghans in the past few months Thousands of others languish in prisons.

The core of COIN is coercion, whether it is carried out with a gun or truckloads of money. If the majority of people accept coercion—and the COIN supported government doesn’t highjack the trucks—then it may work.

And then maybe not. Tufts University recently researched the impact of COIN aid and found little evidence that such projects win locals over. According to Tufts professor, Andrew Wilder, “Many of the Afghans interviewed for our study identified their corrupt and predatory government as the most important cause of insecurity, and perceived international aid security contracts as enriching a kleptocratic elite.”

...

So COIN is back. And it is working no better than it did in the 1960s. Take the counterterrorism portion of the doctrine.

Over the past several years, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has been carrying out a sort of long-distance Phoenix program, using armed drones to assassinate insurgent leaders in Pakistan. The program has purportedly snuffed out about 150 such “leaders.” But it has also killed more than 1,000 civilians and inflamed not only the relatives of those killed or wounded in the attacks, but Pakistanis in general. According to an International Republican Institute poll, 80 percent of Pakistanis are now anti-American, and the killer drones are a major reason.

“Hearts and minds” soldiers like Petraeus don’t much like the drone attacks because they alienate Pakistan and dry up intelligence sources in that country.

But McChrystal’s Phoenix program of killing Taliban “leaders” in Afghanistan is no better. As author and reporter Anne Jones notes, “Assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers—those we call the ‘bad Taliban’—actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns who are more interested in living off the population we’re supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty.”

The “hearts and minds” crew have their own problems. McChrystal and Petraeus have long stressed the counterproductive effect of using airpower and artillery against insurgents, because it inevitably produces civilian casualties. But this means that the war is now between two groups of infantry, one of which knows the terrain, speaks the local language, and can turn from a fighter to a farmer in a few minutes."

The MIC has a new sales exec

Obama Seeks to Expand US Arms Exports | CommonDreams.org

"The United States is currently the world biggest weapons supplier - holding 30 per cent of the market - but the Obama administration has begun modifying export control regulations in hopes of enlarging the U.S. market share, according to U.S. officials."

Andrew Bacevich on Democracy Now!

Andrew Bacevich on Afghanistan War: "The President Lacks the Guts to Get Out"

"PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: More than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades, a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down and markets open and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress, and advancing frontiers of human liberty. For, unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for, what we continue to fight for, is a better future for our children and grandchildren. And we believe that their lives will be better if other people’s children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama justifying the escalation of war. Professor Bacevich, your response?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, it’s a very sanitized version of American history that I imagine many Americans find agreeable, but it does tremendous violence to the actual facts of our post-World War II history. I mean, we are not an imperial nation in the sense that Great Britain or France, nations like that, were once imperial nations, but we are imperial. We wish to dominate. We wish to ensure that norms that work to the advantage, or perceive to work to the advantage, of the United States prevail across the world. And we are, I think, uniquely, in this moment, determined to rely on military power to enforce those norms.

...

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today is Andrew Bacevich. This is his first interview on his book that’s coming out tomorrow, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. I wanted to read a quote from a piece you just recently wrote, where you’re saying, "The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?"

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I’m referring to President Obama here. I voted for President Obama. I admire President Obama. And I want to see him make good on his promise to us to change the way Washington works. In particular, I want to see him address the Washington rules, this pattern of behavior in the realm of national security policy that I think is so wrongheaded. And I’m deeply disappointed that he has chosen not to do that.

You showed the clip from the West Point speech in December 2009, when he made the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan and to make it Obama’s war. I think that was a tragic error. The Afghanistan decision was his opportunity to begin to chart a new course on national security policy, to begin to break away from this pattern of behavior that we’ve adhered to for the past sixty or so years. And he blew it. I can’t pretend to look into his heart and understand what factors caused him to make the decision he did. I suspect that a political calculation may have weighed more heavily than a strategic calculation or a moral calculation. And I find that deeply upsetting, because I, and I think many of us, felt that here, finally, was a public figure who—whose decisions would not be influenced primarily by political calculations.

...

When I was a serving officer for twenty-three years, I think trying to do my best as a serving officer, I was not particularly—I did not engage in serious critical thinking. To some degree, serious critical thinking is inconsistent, perhaps, with being a professional officer."