Swedish Meatballs Confidential

Beautiful Blowback and Bumbling Benghazi

2012-10-20T20:24:00.001-04:00

Notice how the Malala Yousafzai narrative just keeps giving and giving. Splendid blowback.

And on Benghazi, funny the news this morning that COS Tripoli sent cable saying attack was terrorism. Funny because his outfit wrote the script for the officials who went on Sunday talk shows saying the consulate attack arose from a demonstration over the anti-Islam video.

Folks saying that OGA deception was - not to protect Obama anti-terror record - but to cover their own asses over the fuckup.

Whispers that Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi trying to round up help for Syrian rebels, that he met with Turkish intelligence official, and that OGA was responsible for his safety.

The controversy about all the "misstatements" about the 9/11 Benghazi begins to make sense.

Greasing Our Troops From Within - Not A Matter of Broken Etiquette

2012-10-02T16:20:00.000-04:00

Just saw that NightWatch is making same point we made a while ago.

That the "just disaffected recruits" tweak of the "black market uniform" IO theme is patently bogus.

The Afghan government has issued a new pamphlet, written by Afghan and American officers, that says Afghans should not take offense at cultural insults by Westerners because there are the result of ignorance… after more than a decade of interaction and cultural sensitivity training. Hmmmm.

This pamphlet implies that the spate of murders is the result of trivial cultural miscues. Even the Afghan general involved in the effort thinks it is feckless, too little too late. The implication is that the US and NATO command believe American and NATO soldiers are to blame for their own murders because they were insensitive to Afghan behavioral norms.

This thesis insults the Americans, NATO soldiers and the Afghans after a decade of interaction. It is preposterous and trivializing to ascribe murder to minor cultural gaffes.

The Afghans are more sophisticated and moral than that.The killings are a manifestation of a long term Taliban strategy, not a reaction to cultural misunderstandings.

PS: Clearly the "Afghan gov pamphlet" is a US PSYOP product.

Deconflicting the Afgh IO Matrix - Finally

2012-09-06T20:45:00.000-04:00

Noticed something the other morning.

Yes, they definitely deconflicted the IO matrix. Nice. No more mention of "uniforms" or "disaffected recruits."

And then no sooner than I had finished answering a call and moved on to indulging in more news did I see this:

Training suspended for new Afghan recruits

More vetting for ties to insurgency. Doesn't sound like disaffected recruits. Messaging #fail.

Looks like they've finally decided to deconflict the "Black Market Uniform"/"Green on Blue"/"Insider Attacks" IO matrix.

It's been interesting to note how the "Afghan Uniform"/"Insider Attacks" narrative has swallowed up much of the oxygen in the discussions of the war recently. Gen. Allen being forced to admit that instead of around 10%, that a quarter of the insider attacks are by infiltrators. The real number is doubtlessly 75-80% or even higher.

New messaging still deflecting from ultimate failure of Afgh mission if we can't leave honorably with trusted security forces in place.

IO Sophistry -- 'Infiltrator' Redefined

2012-08-22T15:25:00.000-04:00

Another volley in the BS IO.

A NATO study has found that nearly 90 percent of such killings stem from personal disputes or outrage rather than insurgent plots to infiltrate the security forces or use them as cover for attacks.

NFW.

John M. agrees that it is infiltrators.

It is clear that USG + MIL - in order to make their ridiculous IO narrative fly - have redefined "infiltrator" to mean someone who simply puts on a black market uniform and slips behind enemy lines to grease Coalition forces. I'm sure CI folks would object to such a limited definition. Even with such sophistry, the narrative proves false.

As we have argued for years (since the mess hall in Mosul, Iraq was blown up by someone mil announced was wearing a "black market uniform" - and investigation revealed to have been a infiltrated employee of the base), there is a determined information campaign to downplay the infiltrator problem in particular and the seriousness of insurgent challenges to post 9/11 US-led war efforts in general.

Domestic-facing Morale Operations do pay dividends. Ask many Americans who was the winner of the Iraq War and you will discover - to the surprise of everyone in the region - that it was the USA.

Indisputable that something like this is planned for our eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan.

AnglaVakt In Afghanistan

2012-08-22T13:45:00.000-04:00

Another initiative, now a priority, is a program named “Guardian Angel.”

Also, notice that they have cleverly modified the "black market uniform" IO narrative. For the last month or so they have claimed that investigations determined that these are mostly not infiltrators (ridiculous on the face of it), but "disaffected" members of Afgh mil and police. They don't bother with the obvious implication if this was true - that treatment from US trainers or the shitty operational atmosphere or something equally bad was causing basically decent recruits to decide to turn on their Western allies.

They still do the "afghan uniform" misdirect in every case. Even when - as WaPo reported - the attacker wasn't even wearing a uniform. (The tea boy mentioned in NYT piece served the Afghan commander more than tea.)

US command has officially changed the designation from "green on blue attacks" to "insider attacks." And now we have this manpower-intensive "Guardian Angel" approach ...

The dire implications for the mission remain the same as when we first discussed the problem a couple of years ago. If our only hope for a decent exit from AF is to stand up a sizable security apparatus, and we have this disastrous "insider attacks" issue, we are fucked.

Hence, the only approach is to have a bullshit information operation to downplay the problem.

Rolling Thunder

2012-05-28T19:23:00.001-04:00

Prez went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial this AM to make a speech. Third CINC (after Reagan and Clinton) to do so.

I almost decided to forgo my annual reading of Fuck The Troops in favor of today's Memorial Day piece from ZH. (No endorsements necessarily implied.)

On a lighter note, another mil-oriented piece. Back to heavier, a letter to his parents from Vonnegut upon liberation from his POW camp.

And from the same fine site, a good mental hospital piece.

You needn't strain your eyes reading the original typewritten xeroxes, transcripts follow the originals.

Inside UBL Raid - A Trifecta w/ Peter Bergen Played for Laughs?

2012-04-28T17:20:00.000-04:00

Just saw this, Pakistan's spy agency seeks some credit for bin Laden's death.

Also this, ‘Manhunt’ details U.S. mission to find Osama bin Laden

In 2005, Bergen reports, a paper written by a CIA analyst became the guide for the ultimately successful hunt. With the absence of any plausible leads after nearly four years, the analyst proposed building the search on four “pillars” — bin Laden’s family, his communications with top al-Qaeda leaders, his occasional outreach to the media and his use of a courier network.

2005? Really? A rookie narcotics unit member on a half-assed police department could have come up with those ideas.

And then this:

As they debated how to find out whether bin Laden was inside, the CIA discussed numerous proposals.“One idea was to throw in foul-smelling stink bombs to flush out the occupants,” Bergen says. Another was to use loudspeakers outside to broadcast from a purported “voice of Allah” commanding them to come into the street.

Methinks Bergen was getting played for laughs by his sources.

And to complete today's trifecta, Raid to Kill Bin Laden Helped United States, Panetta Says.

Some of his details seem fanciful at best.

Post-Traumatic Growth - The Postwar Attitude Adjustment

2012-03-22T23:32:00.003-04:00

A long PTSD piece for Sunday's NYT Magazine.

Post-Traumatic Stress’s Surprisingly Positive Flip Side

Deconstructing & Construing/Rambling -- Inside the Works

2012-03-22T23:10:00.002-04:00

Dog and pony show time.

Also, this. Nice. Castro knew of JFK assassination plan, book says

Since Oswald was known to the Cuban exile community as a pro-Castro agitator (a suspected anti-Castro plant at that), he was already on Cuban intel scope by Summer '63. I doubt Castro would have wanted to get blamed for the assassination.

O's Mexico City visits to Cuban and Sov embassies can be nicely explained away by Latell's version.

One problem. Kennedy was starting to thaw the US/Cuban and US/USSR relationships at the time of his murder.

Best theory identifies extremist right-wing US elements. Would have required participation of some USG assets to have orchestrated the cover-up (Warren Commission irregularities, autopsy skullduggery, media campaign, etc.)

De-construction: Rumblings from Meatball Works

-"Perhaps I shouldn't have dismissed the kinetic IO angle.
That would mean not "retaliation", but a loud and clear warning to villagers over there against cooperating with enemy in the future

Maybe not."

-"Col. Kurtz. XXXXXXXXX who discussed the kinetic IO/PSYOP angle mentioned the little arms in a pile incident from Apocalypse Now when making his case to me.
No kidding.

COIN maybe, PSYOP definitely. (If indeed that's what happened.)"

Rwedux Rwednesday -- Losing Rwafghanistan

2012-03-13T23:33:00.004-04:00

Posted by SMC 5yrs ago:

Being Modest, Being Newsweek Sep,2006

The United States edition of the October 2, 2006 issue of Newsweek features a rather different cover story from its International counterparts.

The cover of International editions, aimed at Europe, Asia, and Latin America, displays in large letters the title "LOSING AFGHANISTAN," along with an arresting photograph of an armed jihadi.

The cover of the United States edition, in contrast, is dedicated to celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz and is demurely captioned "My Life in Pictures."

Clarity At Last - Mil Option On Iran a Bluff

2012-03-02T12:17:00.001-05:00

Peres Says U.S. Must Put All Iran Options on Table

Ask and ye shall receive

Obama Says Military Option on Iran Not a ‘Bluff’

(Means that it is definitely a bluff. Had been unsure until now.)

Infiltration in Afghanistan Issue (Early Birds Get To Be Depressed First)

2012-02-27T07:48:00.001-05:00

It is said that there is no security on the net - even among "security" firms (not that Stratfor was ever worth sierra - or was a security co.).

On another topic, glad that we got out there early on the infiltration in AF issue. Has become quite the natsec crisis recently. Although some narratives are still hanging on tenuously:

“If the trust, ability and willingness to partner falls apart, you are looking at the endgame here,” said Mark Jacobson, who served until last summer as the NATO deputy senior civilian representative in Kabul.

The killing of the U.S. officers on Saturday occurred two days after a man wearing an Afghan army uniform fatally shot two American troops in eastern Afghanistan, the latest in a string of incidents in recent months in which local security forces have turned against NATO personnel.

And another piece in NYT today. “Afghan good enough” - slogan of the day.

(Although gov/media axis generally is trying to position the story as a "stay the course" and "we can't be pushed out of AF" theme - what can we expect in an election year - doubts as to the viability of the mission are becoming clear even to some of the normally oblivious.)

LTC. Davis' (U) Report Published in RS

2012-02-14T13:05:00.002-05:00

While we were otherwise distracted during our annual SMC-Con at Trump's swanky SoHo tower, the entire unclassified version of LTC Davis' Afghanistan report (84 page PDF) was published in Rolling Stone along with an accompanying piece by Michael Hastings (the correspondent that broke the Bud Light Lime story).

Lots of IO stuff in LTC Davis's report.

As COL Leap never even considered the American public’s support of the war might have been waning as a direct result of what was physically happening on the battlefield, General Baker likewise fails even to address in his article that the information operations – conceptually a perfectly legitimate and useful tool – must be tied strictly to effective actions on the ground. It is noteworthy that nowhere in the multi-page essay did the General address, even in passing, that the IO plan is worthless if it does not accurately support the actions and conditions on the ground. Instead, he emphasizes this to Army troops:

For years, commercial advertisers have based their advertisement strategies on the premise that there is a positive correlation between the number of times a consumer is exposed to product advertisement and that consumer’s inclination to sample the new product. The very same principle applies to how we influence our target audiences when we conduct COIN.

It is remarkable to consider that a senior ranking officer in the United States Army emphatically suggests that standard marketing strategies are the “very same” for combat operations, and yet it is also very telling. In explaining why a certain operation run by the 1st Armored Division was successful, he cited exclusively the actions the IO staff undertook, implying the actions of the combat troops had either little or no real impact on their success.

In Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower

2012-02-06T13:30:00.000-05:00

In Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower

“No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan,” he says in the article. “But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.”

(Check out his piece in Armed Forces Journal):

Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.

PS: Exum, et al. are gonna be pissed. ;)

High-stakes Hilarity (the ongoing progression of)

2011-12-11T11:06:00.004-05:00

NYT says PAK Taliban in talks with gov.

WaPo says PAK Taliban not in talks with gov.

While we are dealing with the region, Crocker articulates the tailored narrative regarding last week's attack against Shiites in Kabul. Says we have no idea who did it. But it wasn't the group claiming responsibility. And that the attack won't spawn sectarian violence. Ambassador psychic? Wishful thinking? Something else?

PS Scuttlebutt months ago was that a RQ-170 (equipped with science modules) was flown over Fukushima from a base in S. Korea.

Loved the ZH quip re the Iran flap: "The good news is we will all be able to buy a personal drone at Wal Mart in 6-9 months."

#Dude -- Amusing US Policy T'wards PAK et al

2011-12-08T21:16:00.005-05:00

Needless to say, dude's regurgitating conventional wisdom. To dude's credit, dude does touch on the intel cooperation angle. Barely.

Amusing that US policy towards PAK has gotten so entangled in a wilderness of lies.

Just like US Iran policy. And US Iraq policy. And US policy toward all the others.

Sometimes being sneaky just doesn't pay.

PS: What could be more retarded than the public explanations of the recent PAK ambassador secret message controversy?

We are supposed to think that there are no channels more secure than a dodgy hedge fund type for the PAK ambassador to convey a very pro-American scheme to US officials.

Would only make sense if the ambassador wanted to avoid the institutional partiality of the most likely channel. Meaning that he knows about some special reason to avoid using said channel.

If so, he picked the wrong dude to deal with.

Also, the way this played out would indicate that existing political arrangements with PAK are adequate.

Where's the River of Snot?

2011-11-27T19:40:00.004-05:00

A senior US law enforcement official asked me if I noticed anything strange about the video footage of the UC Davis incident.

I told him that I had only seen the famous still photo in the press. I hadn't seen any video.

"You've been exposed to pepper spray before haven't you?", he asked. I recounted for him the time that I was responsible for a minimal AD from a large canister of the stuff inside a moving vehicle.

He reached for his IPad and clicked on the first YouTube video he could find. "What isn't right about this scene?", he asked. I answered, "the protesters aren't hauling ass out of there. They aren't acting like they have been pepper sprayed."

"Where is the River of Snot?" He continued, "Before riot cops use pepper spray they mask-up. Do you see any of the cops standing there wearing gas masks? The stuff that they are spraying is marker. They are identifying the protesters that they are intending to arrest. Look right there, that other cop is standing in the mist with no effect."

He got no argument from me there. That wasn't pepper spray.

"Then why aren't the cops coming to their own defense?," I asked.

Timing is everything.

Blast From the Past

2011-11-15T11:15:00.001-05:00

Remember the mention of Cicely Angleton's passing? Now we have the obit of another member of the same exclusive circle. (The deceased was the sister of Mary Pinchot Meyer.)

While Mrs. Bradlee’s life with her husband Ben was in many ways charmed — private dinners at the White House and weekend getaways at Hyannis Port, Mass., with the Kennedys — it also had enduring sorrows. Their circle included Mrs. Bradlee’s older sister, Mary Meyer, a painter whose murder in 1964 on the C&O Canal towpath remains unsolved.

The case took an eerie twist, Ben Bradlee later wrote in his memoir, “A Good Life.” The Bradlees saw CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton picking the padlock on Meyer’s Georgetown art studio in an attempt to retrieve her diary. (Meyer and Angleton’s wife were friends.)

Mrs. Bradlee subsequently found the diary, which appeared to disclose her sister’s affair with late President John F. Kennedy. Mrs. Bradlee and her husband, who was serving as head of Newsweek’s Washington bureau, turned the diary over to Angleton with the promise that the CIA would destroy it.

More than a decade later, Mrs. Bradlee was upset when she heard Angleton had not kept his word. Through an intermediary, she got the diary back and set it on fire.

The real story is more spooky than here portrayed. Does anyone believe that Angleton would have conducted a black bag job himself over trifling gossip?

Mr. X By HENRY A. KISSINGER

2011-11-11T06:46:00.001-05:00

The NYT gets Henry Kissinger to review John Lewis Gaddis's book about George Kennan for the Sunday Book Review. Kissinger delivers a compliment or three about Gaddis, and then reviews Kennan's career, not the book.

And as you might imagine, the Kissinger imperative works its way into the story:

Kennan often shrank from the application of his own theories. In 1948, with an allied government in China crumbling, Kennan — at some risk to his career — advanced the minority view that a Communist victory would not necessarily be catastrophic. In a National War College lecture, he argued that “our safety depends on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world.” A wise policy would induce these forces to “spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us,” so “that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out and exhaust themselves in internecine conflict in order that the constructive forces, working for world stability, may continue to have the possibility of life.” But when, in 1969, the Nixon administration began to implement almost exactly that policy, Kennan called on me at the White House, in the company of a distinguished group of former ambassadors to the Soviet Union, to warn against proceeding with overtures to China lest the Soviet Union respond by war.

Kissinger refers to Dean Acheson as "the greatest secretary of state of the postwar period." False modesty or a ghostwriter? Gotta be one or the other, but we are leaning towards the former because no Kissinger Associates staffer would risk the repercussions from making a call like that.

Kissinger - the great Balance of Power practitioner - admired that Kennan (at least at times) shared his Metternich-influenced approach:

Stable orders require elements of both power and morality. In a world without equilibrium, the stronger will encounter no restraint, and the weak will find no means of vindication.

(...)

It requires constant recalibration; it is as much an artistic and philosophical as a political enterprise. It implies a willingness to manage nuance and to live with ambiguity. The practitioners of the art must learn to put the attainable in the service of the ultimate and accept the element of compromise inherent in the endeavor. Bismarck defined statesmanship as the art of the possible. Kennan, as a public servant, was exalted above most others for a penetrating analysis that treated each element of international order separately, yet his career was stymied by his periodic rebellion against the need for a reconciliation that could incorporate each element only imperfectly.

Kennan's dissenting view on Vietnam is portrayed as follows:

In a turbulent era, Kennan’s consistent themes were balance and restraint. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he applied these convictions to his side of the debate as well. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against the Vietnam War but on the limited ground that there was no strategic need for it. He emphasized that the threat posed by Hanoi was exaggerated and that the alleged unity of the Communist world was a myth. But he also warned elsewhere against “violent objection to what exists, unaccompanied by any constructive concept of what, ideally ought to exist in its place.” He questioned the policy makers’ judgment but not their intent; he understood their dilemmas even as he both criticized and sought to join them.

Kissinger's final judgement:

So emphatically did Kennan sometimes reject the immediately feasible that he destroyed his usefulness in the conduct of day-to-day diplomacy. This turned his life into a special kind of tragedy. Until his old age, he yearned for the role in public service to which his brilliance and vision should have propelled him, but that was always denied him by his refusal to modify his perfectionism.

(...)

Policy makers, even when respectful, shied away from employing him because the sweep of his vision was both uncomfortable (even when right) and beyond the outer limit of their immediate concerns on the tactical level.

Well. Not exactly accurate. After he left the State Dept., Kennan was a consultant to the Cold War arm of the U.S. Government from the 1950's until at least the 1990's.

NYT Mag - Gettin' Lulzy with Herman Cain

2011-11-10T07:58:00.003-05:00

From this Sunday's NYT Mag - On the Ropes with Herman Cain

In October, Cain had to undo damage from the following: a suggestion to put up an electrified fence on the Mexican border, statements endorsing a woman’s right to choose, an apparent unfamiliarity with the terms “right of return” and “neoconservative,” a tentative thumbs-up to negotiating with Al Qaeda for prisoners and news stories of a completely mismanaged campaign.

That was before things got tough. Now allegations of sexual harassment have drowned out pretty much anything else related to Herman Cain. And if that’s in any way a blessing, it’s only because it diverted attention from what may have been some serious violations of campaign-finance laws.

(...)

The Web site of J. D. Gordon Communications, the firm founded by Cain’s campaign spokesman, J. D. Gordon, offers, among its services, “crisis communications.” It notes that “timely and accurate responses to a crisis have never been more important to success.” Given the way Gordon has handled Cain’s latest crisis communications, perhaps Guantánamo Bay, where Gordon was the Navy spokesman, should be seen in a new light. [FTW]

(...)

Let us pause here to make a necessarily severe assessment: to say that Herman Cain has an imperfect grasp of policy would be unfair not only to George W. Bush in 1999 but also to Britney Spears in 1999. Herman Cain seems like someone who, quite frankly, has never opened a newspaper.

But I suspect Cain’s flubs are unrelated to intelligence. In 2010, Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute set off a lively debate by suggesting conservatives had fallen prey to “epistemic closure,” a fancy way of saying that they were getting all their information and opinions exclusively from one another. This may or may not be true of the conservative movement. But it is certainly true of Herman Cain.

“I can honestly say that if I hadn’t been on the radio, I wouldn’t have been as familiar with the issues as I am now,” Cain has written. “I believe that having that program was God’s way of forcing me to understand the critical issues confronting our nation.”

In short, Cain’s briefings on politics came from heated right-wing callers on talk radio. “Epistemic closure” is probably too mild a term for such conditions.

(...)

Cain likes to tell his audience that “the voice of the people is more powerful than the voice of the media.” In fact, he likes to tell them this right after dropping everything for a television interview ...

Cain also likes to tell his audience that callers to his show went from “concerned” to “frightened” for the nation’s future. This, too, is true. More than any other candidate, Cain has managed to connect to those Americans — yet, unlike Sarah Palin, he has done it by unleashing optimism rather than bitterness. He can articulate a crowd’s worst fears — America is falling apart, weakening in the world, suffering economic carnage — and then reassure everyone that, no worries, we can fix it. If any candidate were able to relate to voters in this way and have a clue what he or she was talking about (there, in Cain’s case, is the rub), that person would be unstoppable.

A review about a new book on George Kennan in The New Yorker

2011-11-07T17:18:00.004-05:00

A long review of John Lewis Gaddis's new book on George Kennan is in the Nov 14 issue of The New Yorker.

The review starts off by establishing that Kennan did not much care for Americans (America yes, Americans no). A number of examples illustrating how Kennan was a dick are included (this is not even the worst):

In January, 1944, when the end of the war was in sight, Kennan served in the American delegation to the European Advisory Commission, in London. Bohlen (who had been in Tokyo when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and was interned for six months) remembered Kennan returning to Washington “appalled by the behavior of American soldiers—their reading of comic books, their foul language, and their obsession with sex, among other things. He wondered whether the United States was capable of being a world power.”

Once we stipulate that Kennan had his flaws as a human being, we are able to get down to business. A very good discussion of The Long Telegram and "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" by "X" begins thusly:

In all his reports, Kennan’s repeated message to Washington was “Get real.” He didn’t just disapprove of idealistic policy talk. He deeply loathed it. Declarations about the self-determination of peoples or international economic coöperation—the kind of thing that Roosevelt and Churchill announced as Allied war aims in the Atlantic Charter—seemed to him not only utopian and unenforceable but dangerously restrictive on a government’s scope of action. If you tell the world that you are fighting to preserve the right of self-determination, then any outcome short of that makes you look hypocritical or weak. Concessions to Soviet national-security interests were going to be necessary in Eastern Europe; it was better to be frank about this, and to stop pretending that Moscow and Washington had the same goals and values. But for domestic political reasons the American government always wants to appear virtuous, Kennan thought; so it continued to call the Soviets comrades and allies even as they were clearly preparing to walk all over the Atlantic Charter.

(...)

Kennan was appalled when he read the draft of Truman’s speech [announcing the Truman Doctrine], and for the rest of his life he protested that he had meant containment to be a policy of selective confrontation, and its means to be diplomatic and economic, not military. But he was construed otherwise. Lippmann wrote a book, called “The Cold War,” in 1947, attacking Kennan and containment, on the assumption that the X article, which appeared four months after Truman’s speech, was meant as a justification of the Truman Doctrine. Lippmann had got Kennan completely wrong. Kennan was so upset that he wrote Lippmann a long letter explaining his mistake, but could never bring himself to send it.

Reviewer kinda goes off the rails when he suggests that Kennan's requirement to have suicide pills on hand when stationed in Moscow was so that he could make an honorable exit if his compulsive womanizing were to be discovered. (The real reason is doubtlessly more prosaic.) And Gaddis, the author of the book, does not endorse the reviewer's theory on this.

As the exemplification of a realist in international relations, Kennan drew criticism easily:

[I]n 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn attacked Kennan, by name, for refusing to apply moral values to politics. “Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong, and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world,” he said.

Solzhenitsyn was right that Kennan was allergic to concepts that were important to Soviet dissidents, concepts like “human rights.” The reason Kennan considered the United Nations a bad idea was that it is an organization based on the pretense that every nation can subscribe disinterestedly to international legal principles—when nations are always, and rightly, interested primarily in preserving or extending their own power. He was horrified by the Nuremberg Trials. “Crimes against humanity” was just the sort of exalted legalism that he thought led to foreign-policy disaster. In any case, he believed that, once the United States accepted Stalin as an ally, it lost the moral authority to condemn Nazism. Kennan spent a good deal of his early life in Germany; in the two volumes of his memoirs, there is not a single mention of the Holocaust.

The review wraps up on a high note:

Still, buried within Kennan’s realism there is a moral view: that in relations of power, which is what he thought international relations ultimately are, people can’t be trusted to do the right thing. They will do what the scorpion does to the frog—not because they choose to but because it’s their nature. They can’t help it. This is an easy doctrine to apply to other nations, as it is to apply to other people, since we can always see how professions of benevolence might be masks for self-interest. It’s a harder doctrine to apply to ourselves. And that was, all his life, Kennan’s great, overriding point. We need to be realists because we cannot trust ourselves to be moralists.

Sometimes I Feel Like 'A Last Standing Hetero-Hero'

2011-11-05T23:16:00.001-04:00

A really shitty piece from David Sanger (NYT). Quds force plots "from Yemen to Latin America." And this:

“The Saudi plot was clumsy, and we got lucky,” another American official who has reviewed the intelligence carefully said recently. “But we are seeing increasingly sophisticated Iranian activity like it, all around the world.” Much of this resembles the worst days of the cold war, when Americans and Soviets were plotting against each other — and killing each other — in a now hazy attempt to preserve an upper hand.

Unless he is talking about the proxy wars like Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, he is way off base. Killing each other's intelligence officers was off the table to avoid snowballing reciprocation. That's why the lobby at CIA had relatively few stars on the wall until quite recently.

And this is just really special:

To many members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — and, by the accounts of his former colleagues, to the Israeli leader himself — the Iran problem is 1939 all over again, an “existential threat.”

“WHEN Bibi talks about an existential threat,” one senior Israeli official said of Mr. Netanyahu recently, “he means the kind of threat the United States believed it faced when you believed the Nazis could get the bomb.”

On another subject, was funny seeing coverage of the "Vengeful Librarians." (If they were really vengeful, we would have been toast for exposing way back when that bit about how they deal with bloggers - sending requests for info to embassies, etc.)

Finally, this smells a lot like one of those cases of emailed disinfo that spreads urban legends for metric marking. (Or aren't we supposed to mention these?)

PS: Now we know why Herman Cain instituted his policy of not allowing his campaign staffers to speak to him unless spoken to. ;-)

Tokenism Revisited.-- Rice, Powell, and Economic Warfare

2011-11-03T21:49:00.007-04:00

Fascinating all week long to witness the media framing the prospect of a Greek referendum as beyond the pale. Nobody even faking a preference for democracy. (of course Papandreou is playin' pussy's brinkmanship)

Also, international relations-wise , moments like this can be really instructive. A keen eye will often - by monitoring course changes by political actors - get a good idea of who is buttering who's bread.

Also, on another topic, funny this: intelligence officials underscored that the United States does not conduct economic espionage as a matter of national policy. Times have changed? (Methinks not.) They probably could have worded it better, i.e. to indicate that we don't spy to help our corporate interests. (But that would have been pushing it too.)

And from this weekend's NYT Book Review:

Brent Scowcroft, Gerald Ford’s and George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, said about the man he had worked with in two previous administrations: “Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.” What had turned this capable, pragmatic, respected figure into the harsh and belligerent man who seemed toward the end to believe that only he understood the world of his time? Part of it was that he had become “really conservative,” as he told President Bush when he was invited to join the ticket in 2000. Certainly, he was convinced that 9/11 had dramatically changed the world and had radically transformed America’s role in it. And he was disturbed that so many people did not share his views. He also had serious heart problems through much of his life, which intensified during his tenure as vice president, and though he courageously fought to keep going, his poor health may have contributed to what Scowcroft considered his change.

The angry responses to Cheney’s book are evidence of how embattled the Bush White House became in its last years, and how central Cheney’s role was. Colin Powell has accused Cheney of taking “cheap shots” in his book. He has challenged Cheney’s claim that he had forced Powell out of the State Department. Powell himself had long made clear that he would serve only four years, and he charged Cheney with lying. Powell also called Cheney’s statements in the book “the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist.” He added, “I think Dick overshot the runway.” Rice responded to Cheney by describing his book as “utterly misleading” and an “attack on my integrity.”

PS A best friend -- Kodiak -- remains adamant on insisting Dick's a real nice guy (neighbors or energy biz-buddies, or something along those lines). Such claim remains a gnawing notion -- not unlike gravity -- I can't quite shake despite ambitious velocity vectoring asymptotically (alas) towards terminal. Dissonance.

A Motocrossin' Karzai Under Moonlit Firmament

2011-10-26T21:49:00.000-04:00

Think my chronic (intermittently as such) dinner-date is vectoring POTUS'ward. We agree on nuthin' but manners and appreciation of certain harsh & easy geo-climes (Fla.& Baltics). Comity makes the world go 'round, an effwit was heard a mutterin'

Just saw that Karzai ("I will side with PAK in a conflict with US") will be receiving a visit from McChrystal. Which contractor McC will be representing is a mystery for now. But SMC 101 would argue to look skeptically at stuff like this:

“Karzai has always liked to feel he had a special relationship with the Americans beyond with the ambassador,” said Bruce Riedel, who conducted the first review of Pakistan and Afghanistan policy for President Obama in early 2009.

“This could be a way to develop a useful back channel for Karzai, as well as a back channel for the administration. It could let McChrystal say things that might not be all the politic for Ryan Crocker to say.”

Hilarious, considering that Karzai is an entirely created and owned product of the same folkz who used to sign Riedel's paycheck

The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also. --Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

Bioterrorism Preparedness - Shortcomings & Clusterfuckery

2011-10-26T14:55:00.003-04:00

Next Sunday's NYT Magazine will feature a piece on possible shortcomings (and actual clusterfuckery) in US preparedness against bioterrorism.

The Article explains why we have not yet developed a needed new Anthrax vaccine:

Five years later, the cancellation of that contract is still a matter of fierce debate in biodefense circles. Many experts say that the decision had less to do with science than politics. Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, recently studied the role that lobbying may have played in VaxGen’s demise. Between 2004 and 2006, Lilly writes in a new study, the company that produced the old anthrax vaccine, which is now called Emergent BioSolutions, employed an army of lobbyists to undermine the VaxGen contract. “Each time VaxGen’s test results were less than had been hoped for,” the report says, “Emergent pounded VaxGen with a highly orchestrated campaign to overstate the problems and discourage government support of the effort.”

[...]

General Russell, who led the early countermeasure program, told me: “It was Emergent lobbying that killed VaxGen. Period. Emergent bought the Congress. Congress killed VaxGen.” Several current officials share Russell’s view. When I asked one senior biodefense official about the lack of a new anthrax vaccine, the official nearly exploded: “Why don’t we have a second-generation anthrax vaccine? The reason is Emergent lobbying!” Even the director of Barda, Robin Robinson, acknowledged that politics played a role in the decision. “Should we have kept it? I think there’s a long debate,” he said. “They had brought in some really top-flight people in there, and Lance Gordon was really good at judging talent. Unfortunately, there was a lot of political pressure.”

Soon after the VaxGen contract failed, the company folded into another, and Emergent bought the rights to develop the new anthrax vaccine it had spent three years lobbying against. Abdun-Nabi told me his company was still trying to develop that vaccine, but critics question whether Emergent, which signed another contract this month to deliver $1.25 billion more of the old vaccine to the stockpile, is pursuing the replacement vaccine as enthusiastically as possible. “They bought the technology and buried it,” Russell says. “We are five or six years behind where we should be. We should be working on a third-generation vaccine.”

There are disagreements over how far afield we should be looking past the two main bioterror threats: smallpox and anthrax:

In fact, other than the vaccines for anthrax and smallpox, there are no vaccines in the stockpile for any other agents on the material-threat list, nor are any of those vaccines in the advanced development program, nor will any of them enter the program any time soon.

[...]

Many agents on the list, Fauci said, were a product of the cold war, when the U.S. military kept a list of “Category A” pathogens being developed by the Soviet bioweapons program. “So when the decision was made to make an investment into developing countermeasures,” he told me, “that was essentially their matrix from the beginning: these are what we know the Soviets had. We know they have stockpiles. This is what we’re going to protect against.” He mentioned the bacterium glanders, which was reportedly used by Germany in World War I and by Japan in World War II but seemed to Fauci a comparatively minor threat today. “I think the unknown threat of a mutant microbe is infinitely greater than someone coming and dropping a glanders on us!” he said. “I mean, seriously! Get real about that!”

When I mentioned Fauci’s comments to O’Toole, who oversees the biological-threat list at the Department of Homeland Security, she said he was “completely wrong” to suggest that the list is rooted in cold-war thinking. “We use current intelligence as an integral part of every material-threat determination,” O’Toole said. “I’m surprised anyone in N.I.H. would think otherwise, particularly since the details of the material-threat determination process are briefed at the White House. It does raise a troubling question about how seriously N.I.H. is engaged in the biodefense mission.”

Whether or not Fauci is right about the origins of the material-threat list, his observation that a natural outbreak is more likely than a biological attack is difficult to dispute. Each year, seasonal flu leads to about 200,000 hospitalizations and several thousand deaths in the United States. Although a biological attack could be much larger, there is no certainty that such an attack will ever happen. How to balance the unlikely but catastrophic potential of bioterror with the steady advance of natural disease is one of the most puzzling challenges for biodefense policy going forward.

To some extent, this is also a question of framework. Fundamentally, the countermeasure program is a public-health project, yet with its reliance on classified intelligence and secret-threat assessments, it is more closely aligned in many respects with the methodology of other national-security projects. Where biodefense fits into government bureaucracy will have a profound impact on its financing. In public health, the $12 billion necessary to develop new vaccines for a dozen material-threat agents can seem a towering, even absurd, figure. Within the realm of national security, the same amount represents less than a quarter of the cost of the military’s experiment with the V-22 Osprey heli-plane, or about what the U.S. will spend in Afghanistan between now and Christmas.

“We spent trillions of dollars in the cold war preparing for a potential nuclear exchange that never occurred,” says Kenneth Bernard, who was the senior biodefense official in the Clinton White House from 1998 to 2001 and then again in the Bush White House from 2002 to 2005. “We’re not spending that kind of money to prevent a bio attack because the people who work on biology are not trained to think like that. They are much more interested in dealing with the three particular strains of influenza that are in the dish this year than they are in thinking about a plague attack in 2018.”