OBOF & TYMHM PART 11

 

 

 

WELCOME TO OPINIONS  BASED  ON FACTS (OBOF)

&

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)

 

Name	Published
OVERVIEW	Dec. 28, 2010
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 1	Dec. 30, 2010
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 2	Jan. 10, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 3	Jan. 17, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 4	Jan. 24, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 5	Jan. 31, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 6	Feb. 07, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 7	Feb. 14, 2011
SPECIAL ISSUE	Feb. 18, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 8	Feb. 21, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 9	Mar. 01, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 10	Mar. 07, 2011
SS & MORE PART 1	Mar. 14, 2011
SS & MORE PART 1A	Mar. 21, 2011
SS & MORE PART 2	Mar. 25, 2011
SS & MORE PART 3	Mar. 29, 2011
SS & MORE PART 4	Apr. 04, 2011
SS & MORE PART 5	Apr. 11, 2011
SS & MORE PART 6	Apr. 18, 2011
SS & MORE PART 7	Apr. 25, 2011
SS & MORE PART 7A	Apr. 29, 2011
SS & MORE PART 8	May 02, 2011
SS & MORE PART 9	May 09, 2011
SS & MORE PART 10	May 16, 2011
SS & MORE PART 11	May 24, 2011
SS & MORE PART 12	Jun. 06, 2011
SS & MORE PART 13	Jun. 20, 2011
SS & MORE PART 14	July  05, 2011
SS & MORE PART 14A	July  18, 2011
SS & MORE PART 15	July  19, 2011
SS & MORE PART 16	Aug. 03, 2011
SS & MORE PART 17	Aug. 15, 2011
SS & MORE PART 18	Aug. 29, 2011
SS & MORE PART 19	Sept. 12, 2011
SS & MORE PART 20	Sept. 26, 2011
SS & MORE PART 21	Oct.   10, 2011
SS & MORE PART 22	Oct.   24, 2011
SS & MORE PART 22 EXTRA	Nov.  04, 2011
SS & MORE PART 23	Nov.  07, 2011
SS & MORE PART 24	Nov.  21, 2011
SS & MORE PART 25	Dec.  05, 2011
SS & MORE PART 26	Dec.  19, 2011
SS & MORE PART 27	JAN.  03, 2012
SS & MORE PART 27A	JAN.  05, 2012
SS & MORE PART 28	JAN.  17, 2012
SS & MORE PART 29	JAN.  31, 2012
SS & MORE PART 30	Feb.  14, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL1	Feb.  21, 2012
SS & MORE PART 30 EXTRA	Feb.  23, 2012
SS & MORE PART 31	Feb.  28, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL2 - 59	Mar.  06, 2012
SS & MORE PART 31 EXTRA	Mar.  07, 2012
SS & MORE PART 32	Mar.  13, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL3 - 1	Mar.  20, 2012
SS & MORE PART 32 EXTRA	Mar.  24, 2012
SS & MORE PART 33	Apr.  10, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL 4 - 2	Apr.  17, 2012
SS & MORE PART 34	Apr.  24, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL5 - 49	May  01, 2012
SS & MORE PART 35	May  09, 2012
SS & MORE PART CL6 - 19	May  15, 2012
SS & MORE PART 35 EXTRA	May  18, 2012
..   SS & MORE PART 36	May  22, 2012
SS & MORE PART 36 EXTRA	May  25, 2012
SS & MORE PART 36
EXTRA II	June 01, 2012
SS & MORE PART 37	June 05. 2012
SS & MORE PART 37 EXTRA	June 07, 2012
SS & MORE PART 38	June 12, 2012
SS & MORE PART 39	June 19, 2012
SS & MORE PART 40	June 26, 2012
SS & MORE PART 41	July  03, 2012
SS & MORE PART 42	July  10, 2012
SS & MORE PART 43	July  17, 2012
SS & MORE PART 44	July  24,2012
SS & MORE PART 45	July  31, 2012
SS & MORE PART 46	Aug. 07, 2012
SS & MORE PART 46 EXTRA	Aug. 09, 2012
SS & MORE PART 47	Aug. 14, 2012
SS & MORE PART 48	Aug. 21, 2012
SS & MORE PART 49	Aug. 28, 2012
SS & MORE PART 50	Sept. 04. 2012
SS & MORE PART 51	Sept. 11. 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 1	Sept. 20, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 2	Sept. 24,2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 3	Oct.  02, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 4	Oct.  04, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 5	Oct.  09, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 6	Oct.  18, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 7	Oct.  24, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 8	Oct.  31, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 8 EXTRA	Nov. 04, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 9	Nov. 13, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 10	Nov. 20, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 11	Nov. 27, 2012

 

 

IN THIS ISSUE

 

1.  Honey, I Shrunk the Pentagon.

2.  Senator Bernie Sanders news update.

3.  The fall of the American Empire.

 

 

 

 

Honey, I Shrunk the Pentagon

 

 

By BILL KELLER Op-Ed Columnist

Published: November 18, 2012

 

LET’S imagine you are the new secretary of defense, and, wow, has Secretary Panetta left you a full docket.  You have to extract more than 60,000 troops from Afghanistan without leaving behind a Mad Max dystopia.  You have to carry on shadow wars against homicidal extremists, refine contingency plans for Syria and Iran, keep an eye on China’s pushiness and Pakistan’s fragility, all without being too distracted by the frat-house antics of hormonal generals.

 

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

 

It’s easy to overlook in all that excitement, but your best opportunity to make a major contribution to the security of your country is none of the above. It is the unglamorous, unpopular, unfinished business of right-sizing our defense budget, without putting us at grave risk. What’s that you say? You’d rather go back to reading General Petraeus’s flirty e-mails? I sympathize. Imagine trying to get people to read a column about the budget.

Yet here you are with a historic opportunity to push the “Refresh” button on our national security. One long ground war is over, another is ending, and there is no prospect of (or stomach for) new wars of occupation. No new cosmic threat has arisen, much as hawks have tried to promote China, our biggest lender and one of our biggest trading partners, into that role.

 And, to cap it all, your budget is headed for that dread fiscal cliff. In the absence of a budget bargain between Congress and the president, half of the automatic spending cuts that take effect in January will come from your domain — almost 10 percent applied evenly across all accounts. This is widely viewed with alarm by military experts in both parties who see it, rightly, as budgeting by meat ax. So, then, what’s the alternative?

This country accounts for more than 40 percent of the money spent on defense worldwide. We spend as much as the next 14 countries on the top-spender list, combined, and most of them are American allies. And that’s just the Defense Department. It doesn’t include the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons program, the C.I.A.’s drone franchise, the NASA satellites, the benefits provided by Veterans Affairs, and so on.

For defense conservatives, reinforced by members of Congress whose constituents build ships and aircraft, there is no such thing as enough. The determination to maintain our commanding position in a dangerous world is inflated by the clout of arms makers and sanctified by our civilian reflex to call everyone in uniform “hero.” (No one who actually wears a uniform does that.)

For liberals, the defense budget is invariably too much, a deep aquifer of wealth that should be tapped to quench our domestic thirsts. When liberals are in power, though, they tend to recoil from serious cost-cutting, partly for fear of seeming weak, partly because no one wants to be picketed by the shipbuilders’ union, but largely because, from where a commander in chief sits, the world is a genuinely scary place. In his re-election campaign, President Obama was largely silent on military spending, except for his sarcastic retort about bayonets and horses when Mitt Romney complained that we have fewer battleships than we used to.

But the economic crisis has chipped away at Defense’s defenses. Early this year, in conformity with a budget directive from Congress, Panetta proposed a budget that would cut $487 billion — about 8 percent — from planned defense spending over 10 years. The fiscal cliff, known to defense wonks as “sequestration,” would cut an additional $492 billion.

Most of the experts I follow think defense can be safely cut below Panetta’s level. How much? David Barno, a retired Army lieutenant general, and his colleagues at the Center for a New American Security last year laid out four increasingly severe budget-cutting scenarios in a very readable and, to my mind, credible report called “Hard Choices: Responsible Defense in an Age of Austerity.”

 Barno told me he could live with the second option (“Constrained Global Presence”), which cuts between $150 billion and $200 billion deeper than Panetta over 10 years. Barno estimates that additional “tens of billions, conservatively” could be saved by tightening the generous health and retirement benefits for military personnel and reforming the way we acquire new weapons.

 The bipartisan Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission recommended cuts in the same range. A new report from a defense panel assembled by the Stimson Center says that if the military is given flexibility to apportion the cuts where they will do the least harm, we can cut $550 billion — about the same amount as sequestration — “with acceptable levels of risk.” The centrist think tank Third Way recommends the same. These people are not reckless anti-military types or Ron Paul isolationists.

None of these cuts would absolve us of the need to grapple with the unsustainable growth of entitlements and to raise tax revenues. But making defense pay its share would make those other economies less painful. And after all, as Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was fond of saying, “The single biggest threat to our national security is our debt.”

Almost everyone starts with a significant cut in active-duty ground forces and the heavy vehicles and artillery that go with them. Keeping America and its allies safe these days depends more on our formidable array of ships, aircraft and precision-guided munitions, plus small units of highly trained special ops and drones to combat terrorist cells. With the cold war over, we can afford to slash nuclear arsenals without diminishing our deterrent.

On a tighter allowance, the services might learn to behave as if they were playing for the same side. “All four services currently operate their own air forces, with limited sharing of aircraft,” the Barno report reminds us. The smallest service, the Marine Corps, has more tanks, artillery and fixed-wing aircraft than the entire British military. The services have a multiplicity of headquarters, on the principle that generals have to command something.

Our military should invest heavily in research and development of breakthrough technologies, like unmanned aircraft, but resist the lure of gold-plated, highly specialized weapons that often overpromise and don’t deliver. The Pentagon should curtail the practice of no-compete contracts. Frank Hoffman a senior research fellow at the National Defense University, recalled that he recently replaced a stolen Sony computer with the same model for half the price and got double the battery life. “That does not happen in the defense business,” he wrote. “We replace airplanes, helicopters and trucks at five times the cost, and buy far fewer because of it.”

None of this is new thinking. The last secretary of defense who called for a postwar transformation of the military was Donald Rumsfeld. He arrived at the Pentagon in 2001 for his second tour with an insider’s understanding of the system, a C.E.O.’s impatience with inefficiency, and an awareness that the end of the cold war presented a different world of threats.

He was not a budget-cutter, but he wanted the money spent well. Before his good intentions got lost in the slogs of Afghanistan and Iraq, he railed at the interservice rivalries, the waste, the reluctance to give up anything or think afresh.

About four months into the job he dashed off one of his famous notes: “It is hard to imagine how a collection of such talented, intelligent, honorable, dedicated, patriotic people, who care about the security of the U.S. and the men and women of the armed forces, could have combined to produce such a mess. And yet, they conclude that nothing should be done to clean up the mess.”

Maybe now they’ll have no choice.

~~~

SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS

NEWS UP-DATE.

 

 

 

NOTE  FROM  FLOYD:

 

I recently wrote about two Senators that I have great respect for and for whom I contributed to their re-election campaign.  One was Bernie Sanders (I) Vermont, but strongly backs Democrat progressive thinking.  The other was Sherrod Brown (D) Ohio. 

 

Bernie is going to provide his followers with news updates from time to time and I am going to pass them on to you.  They are important and he writes in a very clear and understandable way.

 

I think you will find his reports well worth your time.  

 

Dear Floyd,

Crunch time is coming in terms of the fiscal cliff and deficit reduction.  At a time when the wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well, while the middle class is disappearing, we must not balance the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable people in this country.  Elections have consequences.  The American people have spoken.

Please ask your friends, family and co-workers to contact the White House and their members of Congress:  No cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs important to working families.  It is time for some austerity for the wealthy and large corporations.

Below, I have included an op-ed I recently wrote for Politico which deals with this issue.  Thanks for your efforts in fighting to protect the middle class.

Sincerely,


Senator Bernie Sanders

We must not balance the budget on poor, elderly
By Senator Bernie Sanders
November 18, 2012

The Democrats won a major victory on Election Day.

Despite dozens of billionaires spending huge amounts of money to defeat President Barack Obama, he won a crushing victory in the Electoral College and received 3 million more votes than former Gov. Mitt Romney did nationally. Democrats won 25 of 33 seats contested in the Senate and, to everyone’s surprise, expanded their majority there by two. They also gained seats in the House.

Now, with this victory behind them, the president and congressional Democrats must make it very clear that they will stand with the middle class and working families of our country. These are the people who, because of the Wall Street-caused recession, have seen a significant decline in their family income. These are the people who worry about whether they can afford health care and whether their kids will be able to attend college. The Democrats in the House and Senate must stand with these people -- not the millionaires and billionaires who are doing just fine.

Most important, in the coming weeks and months, the Democrats must demand that deficit reduction is done in a way that is fair -- and not on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor. At a time when real unemployment remains close to 15 percent, we must also focus on creating the millions of jobs that our people need.

In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth. Incredibly, the top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent. In the last study done on income distribution, we learned that 93 percent of all new income generated between 2009 and 2010 went to the top 1 percent while the bottom 99 percent split the remaining 7 percent. This extraordinary unfairness is not only morally reprehensible, it is bad economics. It will be very difficult to create the jobs that our people need when so many Americans have little or no money to spend.

Congress must pass legislation to create a major jobs program to put millions of people back to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. Throughout our country, we need a massive effort to improve our roads, bridges, water and wastewater systems, airports, rail, broadband and cellphone service. Rebuilding our infrastructure makes us more productive and internationally competitive -- and creates millions of new jobs.

In terms of deficit reduction, let us not forget that in 2001, when Bill Clinton left office, this country had a $236 billion surplus. As a result of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were unpaid for, huge tax breaks for the rich, a Medicare prescription drug program put on the credit card and a significant decline in federal revenues because of the recession, we now have a $1 trillion deficit and a $16 trillion national debt.

Congress must address the deficit situation and the fiscal cliff, but we must do it in a way that is fair. At a time when the wealthiest people in this country are doing extremely well and their effective tax rates are low (think Romney), the people on top must pay their fair share of taxes to help us deal with the deficit. We must also end the outrageous loopholes that allow one out of four large profitable corporations to pay nothing in federal corporate income taxes. Further, it is absurd that current tax policy allows the wealthy and large corporations to avoid paying over $100 billion a year in federal taxes because they stash their money in tax havens in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere.

We must also take a hard look at wasteful spending in the Defense Department, where we now spend almost as much money as the rest of the world combined. Significant savings can be found at other federal agencies, too.

What we must not do, however, is move toward a balanced budget on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor. Sadly, that is the approach that virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are advocating. As the founder of the Defending Social Security Caucus, I look forward to working with other members of Congress, the AFL-CIO, senior and disability groups and the vast majority of people in our country who want to prevent cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education and other programs vitally important to the working families of America.

In my view, if the Republicans continue to play an obstructionist role, the president should get out of the Oval Office and travel the country. If he does that, I believe that he will find that there is no state in the country, including those that are very red, where people believe that it makes sense to continue giving huge tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires while cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. I have a strong feeling that when large numbers of constituents all across this country start calling and emailing their senators and members of Congress about this issue, the American people will win this fight.

The good news is that we are already beginning to see some Republicans make thoughtful comments showing they understand that elections have consequences. Bill Kristol, the conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor, said Sunday that the Republican Party should accept new ideas, including the much criticized suggestion by Democrats that taxes be allowed to go up on the wealthy. “It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It really won’t, I don’t think. I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer.”

Kristol is right. At a time when the gap between the very rich and everybody else is growing wider, common sense and justice require the people who are doing extremely well financially to help us in a significant way to reduce deficits. 

 ~~~

NOTE  FROM  FLOYD:

The following article is the most revealing of developments leading up to the present downfall of the former General Petraeus, that I have  seen.  It dates back to the Bush/Chaney era and how it all intertwined in an unreal manner.  It is long, but, in my opinion, is well worth your time.  

 

The Fall of the American Empire

By Tom Engelhardt

TOM DISPATCH / OP-ED

Published Friday November 23, 2012

 

“Until recently, here was the open secret of Petraeus’s life: he may not have understood Iraqis or Afghans, but no military man in generations more intuitively grasped how to flatter and charm American reporters, pundits, and politicians into praising him.

 

History, it is said, arrives first as tragedy, then as farce.  First as Karl Marx, then as the Marx Brothers. In the case of twenty-first century America, history arrived first as George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and the Project for a New America -- a shadow government masquerading as a think tank -- and an assorted crew of ambitious neocons and neo-pundits); only later did David Petraeus make it onto the scene.

 

It couldn’t be clearer now that, from the shirtless FBI agent to the “embedded” biographer and the “other woman,” the “fall” of David Petraeus is playing out as farce of the first order.  What’s less obvious is that Petraeus, America’s military golden boy and Caesar of celebrity, was always smoke and mirrors, always the farce, even if the denizens of Washington didn’t know it.

 

Until recently, here was the open secret of Petraeus’s life: he may not have understood Iraqis or Afghans, but no military man in generations more intuitively grasped how to flatter and charm American reporters, pundits, and politicians into praising him.

 

This was, after all, the general who got his first Newsweek cover (“Can This Man Save Iraq?”) in 2004 while he was making a mess of a training program for Iraqi security forces, and two more before that magazine, too, took the fall.  In 2007, he was a runner-up to Vladimir Putin for TIME’s “Person of the Year.”  And long before Paula Broadwell’s aptly named biography, All In, was published to hosannas from the usual elite crew, that was par for the course.

You didn’t need special insider’s access to know that Broadwell wasn’t the only one with whom the general did calisthenics.  The FBI didn’t need to investigate.  Even before she came on the scene, scads of columnists, pundits, reporters, and politicians were in bed with him.  And weirdly enough, many of them still are.  (Typical was NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams mournfully discussing the “painful” resignation of “Dave” -- “the most prominent and best known general of the modern era.”) Adoring media people treated him like the next military Messiah, a combination of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Ulysses S. Grant rolled into one fabulous piñata.  It’s a safe bet that no general of our era, perhaps of any American era, has had so many glowing adjectives attached to his name.

Perhaps Petraeus’s single most insightful moment, capturing both the tragedy and the farce to come, occurred during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  He was commanding the 101st Airborne on its drive to Baghdad, and even then was inviting reporters to spend time with him.  At some point, he said to journalist Rick Atkinson, “Tell me how this ends.”  Now, of course, we know: in farce and not well.

 

For weeks, the news has been filled with his ever-expanding story, including private rivalries, pirate-themed parties, conspiracy theories run wild, and investigations inside investigations inside investigations.  It’s lacked nothing an all-American twenty-first-century media needs to glue eyeballs.  Jill Kelley, the Tampa socialite whose online life started the ball rolling and ended up embroiling two American four-star generals in Internet hell, evidently wrote enough emails a day to stagger the imagination.

 

But she was a piker compared to the millions of words that followed from reporters, pundits, observers, retired military figures, everyone and anyone who had ever had an encounter with or a thought about Petraeus, his biographer-cum-lover Paula Broadwell, Afghan War Commander General John Allen, and the rest of an ever-expanding cast of characters.  Think of it as the Fall of the House of Gusher.

 

Here was the odd thing: none of David Petraeus’s “achievements” outlasted his presence on the scene.  Still, give him credit.  He was a prodigious campaigner and a thoroughly modern general.  From Baghdad to Kabul, no one was better at rolling out a media blitzkrieg back in the U.S. in which he himself would guide Americans through the fine points of his own war-making.

 

Where, once upon a time, victorious commanders had to take an enemy capital or accept the surrender of an opposing army, David Petraeus conquered Washington, something even Robert E. Lee couldn’t do.  Until he made the mistake of recruiting his own “biographer” (and lover), he proved a PR prodigy.  He was, in a sense, the real life military version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay (“the Great”) Gatsby, a man who made himself into the image of what he wanted to be and then convinced others that it was so.

 

In the field, his successes were transitory, his failures all too real, and because he proved infinitely adaptable, none of it really mattered or stanched the flood of adjectives from admirers of every political stripe.  In Washington, at least, he seemed invincible, even immortal, until it all ended in a military version of Dallas or perhaps previews for Revenge, season three.

His “fall from grace,” as ABC's nightly news labeled it, was a fall from Washington’s grace, and his tale, like that of the president who first fell in love with him, might be summarized as all-American to fall-American.

Turning the Lone Superpower Into the Lonely Superpower

David Petraeus was a Johnny-come-lately in respect to Petraeus-ism.  He would pick up the basics of the imperial style of that moment from his models in and around the Bush administration and apply them to his own world.  It was George W. and his guys (and gal) who first dreamed the dreams, spent a remarkable amount of time “conquering Washington,” and sold their particular set of fantasies to themselves and then to the American people.

 

They were the original smoke-and-mirrors crew.  From the moment, just five hours after the 9/11 attacks, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- in the presence of a note-taking aide -- urged planning to begin against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq ("Go massive.  Sweep it all up.  Things related and not..."), the selling of an invasion and various other over-the-top fantasies was underway.

 

First, in the heat of 9/12, the president and top administration officials sold their “war” on terror.  Then, after “liberating” Afghanistan and deciding to stay for the long run, they launched a massive publicity campaign to flog the idea that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to al-Qaeda.  In doing so, they would push the image of mushroom clouds rising over American cities from the Iraqi dictator’s nonexistent nuclear program, and chemical or biological weapons being sprayed over the U.S. East Coast by phantasmal Iraqi drones.

 

Cheney and Rice, among others, would make the rounds of the talk shows, putting the heat on Congress.  Administration figures leaked useful (mis)information, pressed the CIA to cherry-pick the intelligence they wanted, and even formed their own secret intel outfit to give them what they needed.  They considered just when they should roll out their plans for their much-desired invasion and decided on September 2002.  As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

 

They were, by then, at war -- in Washington.  Initially, they hardly worried about the actual war to come.  They were so confident of what the U.S. military could do that, like the premature Petraeuses they were, they concentrated their efforts on the homeland.  Romantics about U.S. military power, convinced that it would trump any other kind of power on the planet, they assumed that Iraq would be, in the words of one of their supporters, a “cakewalk.”  They convinced themselves and then others that the Iraqis would greet the advancing invaders as liberators, that the cost of the war (especially given Iraq’s oil wealth) would be next to nothing, and that there was no need to create a serious plan for a post-invasion occupation.

 

In all of this, they proved both masters of public relations and staggeringly wrong.  As such, they would be the progenitors of an imperial tragedy -- a deflating set of disasters that would take the pop out of American power and turn the planet’s “lone superpower” into a lonely superpower presiding over an unraveling global system, especially in the Greater Middle East. Blinded by their fantasies, they would ensure a more precipitous than necessary American decline in the first decade of the new century.

 

Not that they cared, but they would also generate a set of wrenching human tragedies, first for the Iraqis, hundreds of thousands of whom became casualties of war, insurgency, and sectarian strife, while millions more fled into exile.  Then there were the Afghans, who died attending weddings, funerals, even baby-naming ceremonies.  Also, of course, there were tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and contractors, who died or were injured, often grievously, in those dismal wars.  Don’t forget the inhabitants of post-Katrina New Orleans left to rot in their flooded city; or the millions of Americans who lost jobs, houses, even lives in the economic meltdown of 2008, a disaster that emerged from a set of globe-spanning financial fantasies and snow jobs that Bush and his crew encouraged and facilitated.

They were the ones, in other words, who took a mighty imperial power already in slow decline, grabbed the wheel of the car of state, put the pedal to the metal, and like a group of drunken revelers promptly headed for the nearest cliff.  In the process -- they were nothing if not great salesmen -- they sold Americans a bill of goods, even as they fostered their own dreams of establishing a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and a Pax Republicana at home.    All now, of course, down in flames.

In his 1987 Princeton dissertation, David Petraeus wrote this on perception: "What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters -- more than what actually occurred."  On this and other subjects, he was certainly no dope, but he was a huckster -- for himself (given his particular version of self-love), and for a dream already going down in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And he was just one of many promoters out there in those years pushing product (including himself): the top officials of the Bush administration, gaggles of neocons, gangs of military intellectuals, hordes of think tanks linked to serried ranks of pundits.  All of them imagining Washington as a battlefield for the ages, all assuming that the struggle for “perception” was on the home front alone.

Producing a Bedside Manual

You could say that Petraeus fully arrived on the scene, in Washington at least, in that classic rollout month of September (2004).  It was then that the three-star general, in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, gave a president in a tight race for reelection, a little extra firepower in the domestic perception wars.  Stepping blithely across a classic no-no line for the military, he wrote a well-placed op-ed in the Washington Post as General Johnnie-on-the-spot, plugging “tangible progress” in Iraq and touting “reasons for optimism.”

 

Given George W. Bush’s increasingly dismal and unpopular mission-unaccomplished war and occupation, it was like the cavalry riding to the rescue.  It shouldn’t have been surprising, then, that the general, backed and promoted in the years to come by various neocon warriors, would be the military man the president would fall for.  Over the first half of the “surge” year of 2007, Bush would publicly cite the general more than 150 times, 53 in May alone.  (And Petraeus, a man particularly prone toward those who idolized him -- see: Broadwell, Paula -- returned the favor.)

But there was another step up the ladder of perception that would make him the perfect neocon warrior.  While commanding general at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 2005-2006, he also became the “face” of a new doctrine.  Well, actually, a very old and particularly dead doctrine that went by the name of counterinsurgency or, acronymically, COIN.  It had been part and parcel of the world of colonial and neocolonial wars and, in the 1960s, became the basis for the U.S. ground war and “pacification” program in South Vietnam -- and we all know how that turned out.

Amid the greatest defeat the U.S. had suffered since the burning of Washington in 1814, counterinsurgency as a doctrine was left for dead in the rubble of Vietnam.  With a sigh of relief, the military high command turned back to the task of stopping Soviet armies-that-never-would from pouring through Germany’s Fulda Gap.  Even in the military academies they ceased to teach counterinsurgency -- until Petraeus and his team disinterred it, dusted it off, polished it up, and turned it into the military’s latest war-fighting bible.  Via a new Army and Marine field manual Petraeus helped to oversee, it would be presented as the missing formula for success in the Bush administration’s two flailing, failing invasions-cum-occupations on the Eurasian mainland.

It would gain such acclaim, in fact, that the University of Chicago Press would publish it as a trade paperback on July 4, 2007.  Already back in Baghdad, filling the role of Washington’s savior, the general, who had already written a foreword for that “paradigm shattering” manual, would flog it with this classic blurb: “Surely a manual that’s on the bedside table of the president, vice president, secretary of defense, 21 of 25 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and many others deserves a place at your bedside too.”

And really, you know the rest.  He would be sold (and, from Baghdad, sell himself) to the public the same way Saddam’s al-Qaeda links and weapons of mass destruction had been.  He, too, would be rolled out as a product -- our “surge commander” -- and soon enough become the general of the hour, and Iraq a success story for the ages.  Then, appointed CENTCOM commander, the military man in charge of Washington’s two wars, by Bush, he made it out of town before it became fully apparent that his successes in Iraq would leave the U.S. out on its ear a few years down the line.

The Fall of the American Empire (Writ Small)

Afghanistan followed, as he maneuvered to box a new president, Barack Obama, into a new “surge” in another country.  Then, his handpicked war commander General Stanley McChrystal, newly minted COIN believer, “ascetic,” and “rising superstar” (who would undergo his own Petraeus-like media build-up), went down in shame over nasty comments made by associates about the Obama White House. In mid-2010, Petraeus would take McChrystal’s place to save another president by bringing COIN to bear in just the right way. The usual set of hosannas -- and even less success than in Iraq -- followed.

But as with Saddam Hussein's mythical WMDs, it seemed scarcely to matter when there was none there.  Even though Afghanistan’s two COIN commanders had visibly failed in a war against an under-armed, undermanned, none-too-popular minority insurgency, and even though the doctrine of counterinsurgency would soon be tossed off a moving drone and left to die in the Afghan rubble, Petraeus once again made it out in one piece.  In Washington, he was still hailed as the soldier of his generation and President Obama, undoubtedly fearing him in 2012, either as a candidate or a supporter of another Republican candidate, promptly stashed him away at the CIA, sending him safely into the political shadows.

With that, Petraeus left his four stars behind, shed COIN-mode just as his doctrine was collapsing completely, and slipped into the directorship of a militarizing CIA and its drone wars.  He remained widely known, in the words of Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution (praising Broadwell’s biography), as “the finest general of this era and one of the greatest in modern American history.”  Unlike George W. Bush and crew who, despite pulling in staggering speaker's fees and writing memoirs for millions, now found themselves in a far different set of shadows, he looked like the ultimate survivor -- until, of course, books and “bedsides” resurfaced in unexpected ways.

 

In the Iraq surge moment, the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org unsuccessfully tried to label him “General Betray Us.”  Now, as his affair with Broadwell unraveled into the reality TV show of our moment, he became General Betray Himself, a figure of derision, an old man with a young babe, the “cloak-and-shag-her” guy (as one New York Post screaming headline put it).

So here you have it, the two paradigmatic figures of the closing of the “American Century”: the president’s son whose l wilderness and the man who married the superintendent’s ambitions were stoked by Texas politics after years in the person a daughter and rose like a meteor in a military that could never win a war.  In the end, as the faces of American-disaster-masquerading-as-success, neither made it out of town before shame caught up with them.  It’s a measure of their importance, however, that Bush was finally put to flight by a global economic meltdown, Petraeus by the local sexual version of the same. Again, it’s history vs. farce.

 

Or think of the Petraeus version of collapse as a tryout for the fall of the American empire, writ very small, with Jill Kelley and Paula Broadwell as our Gibbons and the volume of email, including military sexting, taking the place of his six volumes.  A poster general for American decline, David Petraeus will be a footnote to history, a man out for himself who simply went a bridge or a book too far.  George W. and crew were the real thing: genuine mad visionaries who simply mistook their dreams and fantasies for reality.

 

But wasn’t it fun while it lasted? Wasn’t it a blast to occupy Washington, be treated as a demi-god, go to Pirate-themed parties in Tampa with a 28-motorcycle police escort, and direct your own biography... even if it did end as Fifty Shades of Khaki?

 

ABOUT Tom Engelhardt, author

 

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. He is the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, as well as a collection of his Tomdispatch interviews, Mission Unaccomplished. Each spring he is a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

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If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll talk with you again on Tuesday December 4, 2012.

 

God Bless You All

&

God Bless the United States of America.

Floyd