History Will Curse Anyone Who Works For Trump-- Just The Way History Curses Hitler's Enablers

Generals Kelly and Mattis have left the room

Happy New Year! No one wants to work for Señor Trumpanzee-- and certainly not running the Defense Department. No one in that world respects Trump in the slightest or even considers him remotely human. On the other hand, they respect Jim Mattis a lot. Yesterday, writing for Politico, Blake Hounshell and Daniel Lippman reported on Trump's desperate search for a new Secretary of Defense by noting that "The chatter among people familiar with the selection… is that few outside the administration want the job of replacing Jim Mattis as defense secretary, given the president’s decision to yank American troops out of Syria and other recent moves." The other day retired 4-star General Stanley McChristal explained why he wouldn't work for Trump. It just took Cadet Bonespurs a matter of hours-- and a few snorts of chopped-up Adderall-- to lash back like a rabid dog:

We may be stuck with another actor playing the part for a while, crooked Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan. Far right Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Generals David Petraeus and Jack Keane turned down the job. Petraeus told the BBC that his views don’t align with President Trump’s on foreign affairs. "I think there does have to be policy alignment and I’m not sure that exists, I’m afraid." I'm sure this tweet from the asshole-in-chief went over especially well with the generals yesterday:

So if Trump can't get Shanahan confirmed, he could turn to Dan Coats or... does Jared have time in his busy schedule? You know what would be hilarious? If Trump winds up appointing the first closet case to run the Pentagon, Lindsey Graham-- even though the two of them don't see eye to eye on much to do with defense or foreign policy. Señor T spent New Year's Eve day bathing in self-pity and tweeting his unhinged and bathetic bullshit. He's got to be removed and any member of Congress who doesn't help needs to be defeated ASAP.

In the firing of SecDef Chuck Hagel, the person who comes out looking best (or least worse) is Chuck Hagel

In announcing Secretary Hagel's departure Monday, President Obama said only good things about him, but people who work for the president had already made sure that the secretary looks like a bumbling, stumbling fool.

by Ken

Somebody, or I guess I should say somebodies, in the White House, the Pentagon, and the media went to a lot of trouble to portray now-lame-duck Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel as a bumbling nitwit, so out of his depth, if not stumblingly incompetent, that even President Obama, who doesn't hardly fire anybody, had to give him the ax.

I got to watch a little of the president's formal announcement of Secretary Hagel's departure, and while the president said nothing but nice and appreciative things about the secretary's service, the message was already out. And the poor guy was forced to stand there at his executioner's side in front of the cameras for what felt like hours -- and if it felt like that to me, merely watching, I can only imagine how it felt to him.

That somebody, or somebodies, should be ashamed. It's only now, after the public humiliation, that we're getting actual reportage, which tells us that in fact Secretary Hagel did the job he was hired to do, in spite of considerable and relentless interference from persons-still-unknown in or connected to the White House, but that the nature of the job changed dramatically even as the already-impossible complexity of the problems grew even more complex and more impossible.


HAGEL HAD TO GO BECAUSE, IN SHORT --

(a) He did and was doing the job he was hired to do, and the some in terms of protecting the people in his charge from attacks from without (from Congress and elsewhere), but that that job is now obsolete, and --

(b) Nobody has a clue what the new job is, and this is being fought pretty aggressively by those unseen forces who have been making the secretary's job (and life) impossible these last two years. The best guess is that some of the new marching orders are the direct opposite of what he has always been told. Really what the administration seems to be looking for is a wizard with a magic wand. (One who can win confirmation from a Republican-controlled Senate, of course.)

(c) A guy who came into the job convinced, in apparent agreement with the man who hired him, that what the DoD needed was a guy in charge who does not have a personal vision and agenda he's determined to ram down everybody's throat -- that guy is now being berated and ridiculed for not being, say, Donald Rumsfeld.

(d) Throughout his brief tenure at DoD the secretary has been under siege from (unnamed) administration micromanagers who have been making it anywhere from difficult to impossible for him to do his job, whatever the hell that job is. This is, interestingly, interference that enraged his predecessor, Robert Gates, as we'll see in a moment. I wonder whether his administration critics who are deriding him for his weakness mean that he should have screaming bloody murder at them?

At this point, let's look at just a few excerpts from a report yesterday by the Washington Post's Gref Jaffe and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "White House seeks a stronger hand at Pentagon to manage crises."

On Hagel's job description:

President Obama tapped Chuck Hagel as defense secretary because he wanted someone who would quietly implement the administration’s policy, avoid controversy and promote no big, sweeping ideas.

Hagel was forced to resign Monday for being exactly that defense secretary.

Hagel didn’t make big mistakes. Nor had he lost the confidence of the uniformed military. But he often seemed lost or overly deferential to his generals in top-level White House strategy meetings, especially those focused on the battle against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, senior administration officials said.

“I could never tell what his opinion was on anything,” said a senior administration official involved in national security policy. “He’d never speak. . . . The key comment, the insightful approach — that never came out of him.”

Instead, Hagel worked behind the scenes to lessen the impact of budget cuts on the military’s ability to fight future wars and on the families of those in uniform. . . .

"He didn't want to be a larger-than-life secretary"

In recent months, though, as the White House groped toward a policy to confront the Islamic State, Obama decided that he needed a defense secretary who was more at ease in the White House Situation Room than with grunts in the field.

“Hagel tried to play a behind-the-scenes role on tough issues — the [budget cuts], sexual assault, ending two wars,” said Vikram Singh, a former top Pentagon official and a vice president at the Center for American Progress. “He didn’t want to be a larger-than-life secretary.”

His departure isn’t likely to lead to big changes in Iraq and Syria, where the president recently doubled the number of U.S. military advisers, or in Afghanistan, where Obama seems committed to ending the war. Nor is it likely to lead to warmer relations with Congress, as happened when Donald H. Rumsfeld was fired as defense secretary by President George W. Bush in 2006 and replaced by Robert M. Gates, who was widely hailed as his polar opposite.

“No one is going to be hailed to be the anti-Hagel,” said Douglas Ollivant, a retired Army officer and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “No one hates Hagel.”

On White House micromanagement:

“There is teeth-gnashing over micromanagement,” a senior defense official said. “Relations have not been great.”

Under Obama, the National Security Council has delved into the nitty-gritty of shaping war policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan, sometimes subjecting senior officials to hours of meetings to reach incremental decisions.

Earlier this year, the decision on how many U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan in 2015 was the subject of 14 meetings of NSC deputies, four gatherings involving Cabinet secretaries and other NSC “principals,” and two NSC sessions with the president, according to a former senior administration official.

The consequence of those meetings was to pare back the military’s request by just 700 troops — from 10,500 to 9,800. . . .

White House officials regularly call commanders in Afghanistan to gauge their thinking on the progress of the war and their future troop needs. Those calls were a particular source of irritation to Gates, who said he tried to squelch them during the first two years of Obama’s presidency. In a speech this month at the Ronald Reagan presidential library, he recalled being shocked to discover that a direct telephone line to the White House had been installed in the Afghanistan headquarters of the elite Joint Special Operations Command.

“I had them tear it out while I was standing there,” Gates said. “And I told the commanders, ‘You get a call from the White House, you tell them to go to hell and call me.’ ”

NOW, OF COURSE, WE'RE MUCH BETTER OFF, RIGHT?

Yeah, right. The headline on that Post piece, "White House seeks a stronger hand at Pentagon to manage crises," seems pretty ironic, since it seems pretty clear that to at least certain influential people in the administration, the last thing that's wanted is "a stronger hand at the Pentagon," except perhaps "a stronger hand" that will do exactly what they want exactly the way they want it. (As for handling uppity generals, the Obama White House sure has a great track record here, doesn't it?)

Any potential SecDef nominee is going to know a whole lot more than you and I do about the recent history of the job, not to mention the ordeal to be faced in getting confirmation from a Senate controlled by crackpot Republicans, who know and understand less about our foreign-policy challenges than practically anybody on the planet.

The grim reality, at least as far as I can tell from people who really do seem to know something about the history and present of such intractable problem spots as Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan is that there are no good answers for the messes that have developed, and the answers we've tried so far have mostly made things worse, as people who know about those areas could have predicted, and often did.

And the White House is under siege from a horde of self-styled national-security experts whose answers are even worse than the Obama team's.

To all the savagely cretinous Village National Insecurity "experts" perpetually lambasting the president for his incompetence and unconscionable failures, what he should really say is: "You fuckheads don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. The one service you might possibly be able to render to your country, if in fact you give a damn about anything except your self-importance and your scummy careers, is to blow your diseased brains out."

Then again, it isn't at all clear that the president has anybody working for him who's any better clued in. And the cackling chorus of National Insecurity "experts," so distressingly inexpert in all matters save bullying and careerist self-aggrandizement, having tasted blood, and despite having only worse ideas than the administration's, must feel themselves still further empowered. Great. Just great.


"THIS WON'T HELP THEM FIX THEIR TERRIBLE PROBLEMS"

I haven't even mentioned Elizabeth Drew's take as of noon yesterday in a new post on the New York Review of Books blog, "The Firing of Chuck Hagel," which takes an extremely interesting look at Chuck Hagel, his past and present relationship with President Obama, the difficult leap from Congress to any cabinet job (and especially the humongous managerial responsibilities of the DoD), and especially the politics of the present administration mess. It's an invaluable read for anyone who's been wondering what the hell lay behind Hagel's firing. I'm going to quote just the final paragraph.

We’ve seen past administrations in big trouble throw overboard an inconvenient major figure. Whether it was the right one has always been a question. So was the matter of how much difference the move actually made in improving the fortunes of the said administration. Most of the time a White House staff hasn’t been as eager as this one to make it clear, right away, that the officer didn’t resign but was pushed out. This is not a good sign. All the talk coming out of the White House that Hagel’s confirmation performance is still a problem and other complaints are mainly padding on a ruthless if necessary decision—necessary in the eyes of the president and his very closest aides. But this won’t help them fix their terrible problems in Iraq and Syria and—as is increasingly clear—Afghanistan. The senior adviser said to me Monday evening: “If Hagel had agreed with the White House he wouldn’t have been fired.”

Here's how it looks to me. God, do all of these people suck. And out of the whole bunch, in and out of government, the one who sucks least is probably Chuck Hagel.

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Awww! An ex-CIA director is captured for history in the company of his faithful companion

Leon Panetta (CIA director, 2009-11) and Bravo in their official CIA portrait, by Steven Polson, unveiled last week in the agency’s Directors’ Gallery.

"I brought him to work with me in the director's office, and he sat in on a lot of the briefings on the bin Laden raid and never leaked a word about what was going on."

-- Leon Panetta, to the Washington Post's "In the Loop"
team (which adds, "Well, that's what Panetta thinks")

by Ken

What's more, "In the Loop" reports, "Folks at the agency, probably thinking Bravo had clearance, would pet him as he wandered about during meetings in the office." The former CIA director told "In the Loop" that Bravo was with him during "a lot of crises," and "he kept me grounded." He added, "One of the greatest dangers of jobs in Washington is you lose your humanity, and people need to remember that."

So it was only natural, when it came time to commission an official portrait for the CIA's Directors' Gallery, ex-Director Panetta wanted to have Bravo the golden retriever included. He got his unconventional wish, and the result was unveiled last week.

The portrait was done by Steven Polson, who the "Loop"-ers note "has done a couple dozen or more of Cabinet-level folks -- including three former secretaries of state." Our relentless investigators did worm out of him, however, that "this is the first one with a dog." You have to figure that going forth, once word spread has spread, a groundswell of public officials entitled to having an official portrait done will clamor to have a treasured pets included.

It's certainly not the first time that the ex-CIA director and ex-defense secretary has been picture in the company of Bravo, as witness the photo below from his Pentagon days, when he thanked the Maine Golden Retriever Club for making him its first honorary member.

Then-Defense Sec'y Panetta and Bravo at their desk in 2012, when the secretary was made the first honorary member of the Maine Golden Retriever Club.

SPEAKING OF THE EX-DIRECTOR AND EX-DEFENSE SEC'Y --

"In the Loop" goes on to report:

Meanwhile, Panetta’s got a memoir coming out next month. Worthy Fights covers his whole D.C. career, from Richard Nixon’s administration (Nixon fired him) to the Obama White House.

Will it be a tell-all? Panetta demurred: “Hopefully people will learn some lessons about how to run the government. I’ve seen Washington at its best and at its worst, and there are some lessons to be learned. First and foremost, we have to elect leaders who want to govern.”

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Why on earth would anyone pay any attention to Village hack Bob Gates? (Just 'cause he wrote some crummy book?)

UPDATE: Who knew what about the
fall of the "Evil Empire"? (See below)


The thing to remember, looking at this portion of Wikipedia's table of U.S. SecDefs (click on it to enlarge), is whom Bob Gates replaced -- as if anyone could replace Donald Rumsfeld.

by Ken

Like most of our readers, we spend a lot of time here at DWT criticizing President Obama. Goodness knows, there's plenty to criticize. What's so frustrating, though, is that nearly all the time the criticism that gains media traction comes from the ranks of professional liars and crackpots -- though a hat tip is certainly in order for the amateurs in both fields, who have worked tirelessly at twisting actual stories beyond recogniton or just making stories up.

Why would you buy this book?

So now the president is under attack from Bob Gates, and it's all in the headlines. Even though, by my guess, probably at least 90 percent of Americans -- no, let's say 95 percent -- couldn't pick the guy out of a lineup, and probably at least 70 percent couldn't tell you who the hell he is, or was, or will be.

What whoever-the-hell-he-is did was write a book that says bad things about President Obama. Okay, there's one other detail that's relevant, or maybe two. First, he served as secretary of defense for the first two and a half years of the Obama Administration, as a holdover from the previous administration; and second, he has a Village-certified résumé. (I throw this last point in to distinguish him from the cadre of out-and-out loonies who churn out Obama-hating books under the imprints of the publishing arm of the Right-Wing Noise Machine.)

But why on earth would anyone pay any attention to anything this dope has to say? His charge against the president, as I understand it, is that while Gates was secdef, the president didn't support his own Afghanistan policy enthusiastically enough -- that the president in fact "had doubts" about that policy. Gasp!

By which I think we may infer that Secretary Gates didn't have doubts about the policy, in which case what he's really telling us is that he himself is a halfwit. Isn't he? Is there anyone with a working brain who didn't have doubts about our Afghanistan policy? I mean, what the hell was our Afghanistan policy? Really, what did we think we were going to accomplish, and exactly how did we think we were going to accomplish it?

It doesn't take a genius on Life in the Village to get a glimmering of what's going on here. Gates, having for some reason gotten a contract to write such a book, had to deal with Afghanistan, to explain how it was that on his watch as secdef so much money and manpower was poured into Afghanistan to no earthly effect, unless you count further corrupting the country, which was in no way short on corruption of its own. So obviously the explanation has to be, uh, um, er . . . it was somebody else's fault. And why not the president himself, for having failed to don a cheerleader's suit and go out and persuade both the American people and our fighters in Afghanistan that, you know, victory is just around the corner, high five!

Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn here was stated explicitly last week by our pal Washington Post "Loop"-master Al Kamen, in a piece called "Gates of Wrath":

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates's controversial  new memoir, "Duty," contains an explicit and useful warning to future presidents:

In your first term, never, ever appoint someone to a senior post that will be his or her last job in government. You will likely come to regret it -- a sentiment President Obama, Vice President Biden and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton may be feeling quite keenly these days. (The advice is especially important when that appointee is not a member of your political party or has no personal relationship with you.)

Second term? No problem. Secretary of State John Kerry, for example, can say whatever he wants in his memoir, and who cares? Obama will be out of office. And Obama's book could well come out before Kerry's.

Al also raises a rather important point that had been made by Post foreign affairs blogger Max Fisher:

[O]ur colleague Max Fisher notes that Gates, as the CIA's top Kremlinologist back in the Reagan administration, was wrong about the most "important issue he ever faced": whether Gorbachev might be a different kind of Soviet leader and worth dealing with to try to end the Cold War.

Gates strongly, and wrongly, insisted that Gorbachev was cut from the same cloth as his Soviet predecessors.  (This might explain why, if memory serves, Gorbachev appeared to refuse to shake hands with him at the Kremlin when Gates traveled there with Secretary of State James Baker  back in 1990. When Baker introduced Gates, Gorbachev said something like: "I know who you are.")

The Fisher piece seems to me worth a closer look. Here he is taking off from the now-much-circulated Gates claim in the book that Vice President Joe Biden was "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."

I am not appropriately positioned to evaluate Gates's positions on "every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." But I can tell you how he performed on the single most important one he ever confronted: ending the Cold War. He was, quite simply, dead wrong.

Could you pick him out of a lineup?

Back in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took over as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the United States faced a really big dilemma. Gorbachev professed to be a reformer. Should the United States work with him to reduce nuclear weapons, ease the U.S.-Soviet proxy battles that were at that point directly responsible for a number of deadly conflicts around the world and, just maybe, try to end the Cold War? This wasn't just a major, difficult question: It would turn out to be one of the most important U.S. foreign policy decisions in decades.

President Ronald Reagan eventually came around to the idea that, yes, he could and should work with Gorbachev. He was persuaded by, among others, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously said that Gorbachev was a man the West could do business with.

But Reagan had to overcome the fierce opposition of a top CIA Kremlinologist and eventual CIA director named Robert M. Gates, who maintained for years that Gorbachev was no reformer, that he was not to be trusted and that Reagan would be walking into a Soviet ploy.

Quite simply, Gates was wrong, overruled by Reagan, and the world was better off for it. Here is the beginning of Gates's campaign against Gorbachev, as chronicled in David Hoffman's Pulitzer Prize-winning history, "The Dead Hand," which shows that Gates actually tried to steer CIA analysis of Gorbachev in such a way as to create congressional pressure against working with the new Soviet leader:

Among the hardliners, Robert Gates, then the deputy CIA director for intelligence, felt that Gorbachev was a tough guy wearing a well-tailored suit. Underneath, he saw trouble, and did not want to be fooled. In the weeks before Gorbachev took power, in February 1985, Gates wrote a memo to one of the CIA's leading Soviet experts. "I don't much care for the way we are writing about Gorbachev," Gates said. "We are losing the thread of what toughness and skill brought him to where he is. This is not some Gary Hart or Lee Iacocca. We have to give the policy-makers a clearer view of the kind of person they may be facing." Gates said he felt that Gorbachev was the heir to Andropov, the former KGB chief, and to Suslov, the onetime orthodox ideology chief. Thus, Gates said, Gorbachev "could not be all sweetness and light. These had been two of the hardest cases in recent Soviet history. They would not a wimp under their wing."

The book recounts one episode after another of Gates arguing internally that Gorbachev was not a real reformer, that he was "cut from the old Soviet mold" and acting differently only to fool the U.S. From a series of 1986 CIA briefings that insisted Gorbachev would never challenge the Soviet system and was not entering arms negotiations with the intent of actually giving anything up:

Gates, a longtime Soviet specialist, who also briefed the president, predicted that Gorbachev wasn't going to be pushed around. "Gorbachev simply intended to outwit Reagan."

Even when Gorbachev proposed eliminating all nuclear weapons (something he and Reagan later came painfully close to achieving), Gates argued, wrongly, that it was a publicity stunt and "did not change any basic Soviet position." And on and on.

With commendable charity Fisher says, "The point here is not to beat up on Gates."

The point is that foreign policy is very, very difficult. Senior policymakers such as Biden and Gates are forced to make enormously tough choices based on data and precedent and rigorous analysis, yes, but also on gut and instinct, because outcomes are often impossible to predict. If Gates wants to filet Biden for being wrong, then that's his prerogative. But it's worth remembering that, when it comes to a standard as challenging as "every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades," everybody gets some big stuff wrong.

Me, I'm not at all above beating up on Gates. "CIA director" looks good on a résumé, just as it did on the résumé of another Résumé Guy, George Bush the Elder. It's always hard to know what a CIA director does, and my suspicion is that in the case of Chimpy Sr. it was "not much," or maybe "nothing that underlings in the Company couldn't clean up." I haven't read Gates's book, and don't intend to, but somehow I have a feeling I don't know any less about what he did in the job than people who have read the book (poor devils!).

Why hasn't he been in a lineup?

Left unspoken in all this is the one positive attribute that Gates brought to at least the early part of his tenure as secdef: He wasn't Donald Rumsfeld. Unfortunately, we know quite a lot about what Rummy did in the job, and it's horrifying. There are people who become legends such that it's said of their successors that there's no way they could succeed in the legend's shadow. In Rummy's case, it's the opposite: Only a drooling psychopath wouldn't have looked good after the whackjob he replaced. Gates had the incalculable advantage PR-wise of being the Unrummy.

Gates's foreign policy seems to be pretty much your standard tough-guy right-winger's view from inside a blindfold. I wouldn't be surprised, if some historian of foreign policy were to study his career, if a case couldn't be made that he was "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."


UPDATE: More on who knew what
about the fall of the "Evil Empire"

Reader Stentor added a comment that seems to me important enough to the story to append here. I couldn't get S's links to work, but I did find the one for the WaPo obit of Donald Graves and inserted it. Graves was famously profiled pseudonymously in July 1982 by the Washington Post's Charles Fenyvesi as "Mr. X" in "The Secret Files of Mr. X":

The State Department's man is a cartoonist's image of a federal bureaucrat: frail, bespectacled, with a preference for dark suits, white shirts and inconspicuous ties that never change width. He chooses his words with excruciating prudence, and the minute details of his speciality absorb him totally. He is horrified by the idea that he will be mentioned in the press, and he insists on anonymity. So we'll call him Mr. X.

Here's Stentor's comment:

Robert Gates wasn't the CIA's top Kremlinologist, he learned all he knew from this guy Donald E. Graves AKA "Mr. X" a State Department Analyst who edited the CIA's Survey of the Soviet Press for a decade before being transferred to State.

If Gates clashed with anyone back then besides Reagan, it was Graves, because he predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse that same year (1986) that Gates was waging his one-man campaign against Gorbachev. I quote a juicy fact from his Washington Post obituary that is quite damning to the legacy of Ronald Reagan's Evil-Empire-Ending Bona Fides.

"In 1986, his [Graves'] insights led him to predict that the Soviet Union would collapse internally in the near future. This analysis, which contradicted the Reagan administration's foreign policy positions, was not welcomed. Mr. Graves was removed as head of Soviet internal affairs, although he continued to work in the intelligence field. He later returned to the bureau under the first Bush administration.

But it sounds as if poor Mr. X, the bespectacled intellectual who was correct, got steamrolled by those in the Administration who disagreed with him. So if, in fact, Gates was dead-wrong back then, so was Reagan. That fact, printed right there in the WaPo, contradicts every rightwing Reagan-Lover's fantasy about the Gipper being responsible for toppling the Evil Empire, something I always knew was patently false, but never had any proof of until I read Graves' obituary shortly after he died. So you can bet I rub that in their faces as much as possible, like Cagney with a grapefruit.

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The R's make history by filibustering the Hagel nomination

"This isn’t high school, getting ready for a football game or some play that's being produced at high school. This is -- we're trying to confirm somebody to run the defense of our country, the military of our country." (Watch video of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today on the Senate floor here.)

by Ken

So they've gone and done it, the Senate R's have: This afternoon, for the first time in history, though they don't like using the word (see below), they filibustered the nomination of a "national security" cabinet position. And they couldn't be prouder. Because these diseased jungle animals were able to prevent the Senate leadership from getting the crucial 60th vote it needed to end debate ("Senate Republicans block vote on Hagel nomination").

Maybe Harry Reid wishes now that he had pushed for a rules change that would have at least required filibusterers to actually, you know, filibuster -- so that the country could at least see them doing their dirtywork. Do you suppose it's just a coincidence that the totally off-off-the-rails Senate R's decided just now that it was safe to proceed with their precedent-shattering shenanigan?

Even now these demented revolutionaries lie their stinking carcasses out. As Rachel Weiner pointed out this evening on WaPo's "The Fix" blo, "They still don't want to call it a filibuster."

"This is not a filibuster," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) announced on the floor immediately after the vote. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) concurred, saying Republicans weren't trying to block the vote, just asking for more time. "If this is not a filibuster, I'd like to see what a filibuster is," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) retorted. On Wednesday, we explained why Republicans don't consider their block of Hagel's nomination a filibuster.

Republicans don't want to filibuster Chuck Hagel's nomination to be the next Secretary of Defense. They just want to require a 60-vote threshold to end debate on his confirmation on the floor of the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has filed for cloture, saying it's a "shame" that he had to do so.

"We're going to require a 60-vote threshold," Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) told Foreign Policy. But, he added, "It's not a filibuster. I don't want to use that word." Likewise, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) says he now might vote against cloture, which cuts off debate. But he still thinks "a filibuster is a bad precedent" to set for a Cabinet nominee. No Cabinet nominee has been defeated by filibuster; the vast majority receive only an up-or-down vote.

No, that sack of filth Jim Inhofe, a man without a sane cell in his brain, doesn't want to use that word. Why should anyone give a damn what words Crazy Jim does or doesn't want to use? Well, you can read for yourself the tortured word play by which these lying scumbags try to pretend they aren't doing what they've so gleefully done. As I keep pointing out, when you're dealing with right-wingers, it's insane to make any assumption except that every word out of their mouths is a lie.

SO WHAT'S IN IT FOR THE R'S?

This morning WaPo "Fix"-master Chris Cillizza was exploring the question "Why Republicans are filibustering Chuck Hagel," and allowing for the shilly-shallying you know is going to creep in a Village stooge talks to self-important pols, the answer turns tout to be what one might have expected: because it makes them feel like big shots, and because they can. Here's the fancier version:

1. There's no downside. While the fight over Hagel is consuming official Washington -- and enraging the Democratic base -- Republican strategists believe that not only are few regular people following all of this, but the former Nebraska senator isn't someone with all that many allies outside of Washington. "He's about as unsympathetic a character as you're ever going to see so the political danger is virtually non-existent," said one senior Senate Republican aide. Added another GOP Senate strategist: "Hagel doesn't have a natural base of grassroots support outside the president and Democratic leaders so it's difficult to see any real backlash developing." Worth noting: A Quinnipiac University poll conducted earlier this month showed that two-thirds of people didn't know enough about Hagel to offer an opinion either favorable or unfavorable.

2. The beefs with Hagel are legit. Several operatives rejected the notion that the Hagel blockade is largely about politics. (Worth noting: ALL fights in Congress are at least 50 percent about politics and often far more than that.) "A number of senators have serious concerns with his lack of experience leading such a massive bureaucracy, in addition to his position on Iran and Israel," said one GOP strategist. "And in some ways, this is part of a broader debate and effort to draw attention to the administration's policies in the Middle East.  The longer this nomination is drawn out, the more attention is given to those issues."

3. It's a Republican rallying cry. Republicans thought they would be in the Senate majority right now. And they thought they might also have Mitt Romney in the White House. Neither of those things happened. Instead, Senate Republicans watched their House colleagues ensure they got a worse deal on the fiscal cliff and kick the can down the road on the debt ceiling.  In short: The Senate GOP conference needs something to rally around and Hagel's nomination serves as a useful exercise to do just that. (Also, never forget that Hagel is widely viewed as a wolf in sheep's clothing -- a Republican turned kind-of Democrat -- by most of his former colleagues.) "It's always good to have a ‘support your colleagues' exercise when a Senator in your conference is looking for information from the Administration early in a new Congress," explained one aide. "It ensures you're playing as a team going forward.  It sets a precedent that the conference will not be rolled."

There's no price to pay. Those, it seems to me, are the crucial words.

If I were advising the president, I would be flooding every media outlet in the country with angry denunciations of the treacherous Republicans who hate America so much that to promote their demented ideology and unchecked egos they prefer to have the Pentagon removed from effective control. I would be crusading to make sure that any American who contemplates voting for a Republican knows he/she would be voting for a traitor who wants to see the country destroyed.

Which of course puts the lie to point (2), about Hagel's administrative inexperience -- even though there is a point to be made here. The Post's Walter Pincus made the case the other day ("An image issue for Chuck Hagel"), arguing that his testimony January 31 before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he "appeared to be unprepared and open to bullying," may have fatally weakened him in the eyes of the people he would have to lead as defense secretary. Among senators, Pincus said, "Enough of his former colleagues will accept the idea that he didn't want to be confrontational or that he was having a bad day."

The people Hagel must worry about are the men and women of the Defense Department for whom the hearing was a first look at their next boss in action. It wasn't a promising start.

If there is one characteristic that marks the military it is preparation -- careful planning, covering all contingencies, firmness, clear questions and answers, personal discipline.

Being prepared is a military habit practiced for that moment when lives may depend on it. It's a quality expected in its leaders.

He cited the case of his friend Les Aspin, who was chair of the House Armed Services Committee when Bill Clinton tapped him to be defense secretary.

Aspin was extremely bright and a good politician. But he was casual, if not sloppy, not just in dress but in his habits. He lacked discipline. Meetings with him could start late and go on forever. He loved to explore every relevant aspect of an issue, and even those that weren't relevant.

As one of Aspin's long-term friends, I was among those who warned him that he had to shape up if he took the Pentagon job. His every step would be weighed by the military, from the Joint Chiefs on down the chain of command.

I was sitting in the stands at Fort Myer during Aspin's welcoming ceremony in 1993. I will never forget the murmurs among the officers and enlisted men around me when Aspin, slouching and out of step, reviewed the troops.

Almost immediately he faced complicated issues, but Aspin's easy-going style never gained much respect within "the building" -- the Pentagon. Criticized for Somalia decisions and troubled by a heart problem, he resigned in early 1994.

But I don't think the R's who complained to Chris Cillizza about Hagel's "lack of experience leading such a massive bureaucracy" had in mind the ease with which they had bullied and beaten him at his committee hearing. Here's Walter Pincus again:

The irony about Hagel's hearing performance is that it hid his feisty personality and left the impression he could be pushed around. More than a half-dozen times he apologized for making perfectly acceptable statements, sometimes not bothering to correct senators who took those statements out of context.

Pincus compared Hagel's performance with John Brennan's subsequent appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

The nominee to head the CIA clearly had that agency's staff in mind Thursday as he sat before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Several times he corrected or challenged senators. He told Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) he disagreed "vehemently" with the conclusion that Brennan had leaked classified information in 2012. With Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), Brennan questioned the accuracy of a news story that was the basis for Coats's questions.

In the end, the administration and the Senate majority leadership will probably do what they have to do to get the Hagel nomination to an up-or-down vote and he'll be confirmed -- as an even weaker defense secretary than Walter Pincus was fearing. And the mad-dog Senate R's will have shown once again that the Just Say No-niks are even more firmly in charge than they were in the president's first term.


UPDATE: YOUNG JOHNNY McCRANKY'S AGAINST
HAGEL 'CAUSE HE WAS MEAN TO CHIMPY THE PREZ

I was so wrapped up with trying to get this post done amidst a welter of other obligations that I didn't notice Howie's pass-along of a delicious ThinkProgress Security post by Hayes Brown in which Hayes quotes that crack security expert and man of principle Young Johnny McCranky on the tube this afternoon with another intellectual giant, Fox Noisemaker Neil Cavuto:

To be honest with you, Neil, it goes back to there's a lot of ill will towards Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly and say he was the worst President since Herbert Hoover and said the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War, which was nonsense. He was anti-his own party and people -- people don't forget that. You can disagree but if you're disagreeable, then people don't forget that.

That's right, you heard it from the dripping maw of the Crankyman himself: "If you're disagreeable, then people don't forget that." Honestly, folks, you can't make this stuff up.

If these people were Gong Show contestants, we'd be well rid of them all by now.

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AIPAC Agent Eliot Engel Goes After Obama Cabinet Pick As Being Too Anti-Israel

Engel's the Israeli agent in the middle

Before the House Democrats elected their ranking members, we started warning about the potential disaster of putting Zionist extremist Eliot Engel, whose loyalties are demonstrably more to the Likud Party in Israel than to the U.S.A., in as ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Engel, a New Dem and "Free" Trade cypher, was up against another Zionist, Brad Sherman, who isn't as extreme as Engel. House Democratic leadership, though, was intent on filling every position they could with New Dems-- while the Progressive Caucus dozed-- and Sherman was persuaded to withdraw from the race. The Democrats are now stuck with, for all intents and purposes, an Israeli spy as their spokesperson on the committee. And his first goal is to do AIPAC's dirty work against Obama's first choice for Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel. Like Susan Rice, Hagel is a flawed character, another figure DWT has been warning against-- not because he doesn't kiss AIPAC ass but because he was the originator of the computerized stealing of elections.

Obama is Obama and he isn't going to pick and good cabinet members, short of, perhaps keeping Hilda Solis on as Labor Secretary. So it's pointless in getting too emotionally invested in these fights between the insiders. Susan Rice and John Kerry are both equally what you might call useless tools of the Establishment conservative consensus. Hagel and Flournoy are equally useless... although... despite his flaws-- documented in that last link above-- Hagel does supposedly want to cut back on the power of the Military Industrial Complex. Supposedly.

Back to the hideous Engel. The House doesn't vote on the president's nominees but he's already sticking his nose into the process on behalf of Israel and AIPAC, claiming Hagel has an "endemic hostility towards Israel."

In an interview Friday taped for C-SPAN's Newsmakers, conducted jointly by The Cable and Politico, Engel said that Hagel's record on Israel and Iran make him a poor choice to lead the military. In particular, Engel said he was irked by Hagel's reference to the "Jewish lobby" in an interview with former official Aaron David Miller. (Miller supports Hagel's nomination.)

"I think that remark is troublesome, it's problematic. It shows at the very best a lack of sensitivity, at the very worst perhaps a prejudice. And I'm concerned about it, I'm concerned about the nomination," Engel said. "If I were doing the appointing, I would not appoint Chuck Hagel."

Engel, who represents the Bronx, Rockland, and Westchester, said he has been hearing a lot of opposition to the potential Hagel nomination from his constituents. He also said that Hagel's activities related to Israel, including his statements on Hamas and Israel's influence in Washington, show a pattern of "hostility."

"It seems there is some kind of an endemic hostility towards Israel and that's troublesome to me and troublesome to a lot of people," Engel said. "In the sensitive post of secretary of defense, those are warning bells. Those are red lights."

Obama should have the privilege of picking his own team, Engel said, but he predicted that Obama will pass over Hagel to avoid the controversy.

"I think [the president] knows that the Hagel nomination potentially is a problem," he said.

Engel said that former Pentagon official Michèle Flournoy would be a good potential secretary of defense. He also praised the president's Friday nomination of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) to be the next secretary of state.

And it isn't just the AIPAC-Jews in Congress like Engel, Lieberman and Chuck Schumer threatening to derail Hagel. The Republicans smell blood in the water and sense another opportunity to screw with Obama, who never seems to learn that when you give in to bullies-- the way he so shamelessly did by acceding to GOP demands that he name John Kerry Secretary of State, it never-- never-- mollifies them or makes them cooperative; it's only emboldens them. Like predators who have tasted warm blood, partisan obstructionists such as Lindsey Graham-- who have their own careerist agendas to worry about, most of which conflict with the well-being of the nation and are antithetical to American good governance and security-- are on the warpath over Hagel.

Yesterday, the sleazy little South Carolina closet queen was on his perch at Meet the Press hissing and warning menacingly that "a lot of Republicans are going to ask him hard questions. And I don't think he's going to get many Republicans votes... I like Chuck, but his positions I didn't really quite frankly know all of them, are really out of the mainstream and well to the left of the president. I think it would be a challenging nomination, but the hearings will matter, so Chuck will have a chance to defend himself.”

Obama's weak and naive leadership brings this on himself. He only feels getting tough when it comes to his own base. He's happy to use cutthroat tactics against progressives but he's the worst champion the left has ever had when it comes to standing up to the forces of plutocracy and the partisan, reactionary forces of the far right. And if you think he's ever going to change, you haven't been paying any attention.

Israel Is Right To Distrust Chuck Hagel-- But For Entirely Different Reasons

Unless AIPAC can force Obama to change his mind-- or talk enough of the senators they control into defeating the nomination-- it looks like Chuck Hagel will be the next Secretary of Defense. Let's leave his long record of ugly homophobia out of the discussion for now, although "he consistently voted against legislation that would have expanded hate-crime protections to LGBT Americans [and], according to the Human Rights Campaign Congressional Scorecard, he earned a 0 percent for the 107th, 108th and 109th sessions of Congress."

Many Democrats like him because he was the first Republican to oppose John Bolton’s nomination to be Bush's UN ambassador, because he voted with the Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to begin an investigation into the pre-Iraq war intelligence and because he came out against Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq when few other Republicans dared. In 2008, he opposed his old colleague, John McCain and endorsed Obama for president. Fine, fine... but there's something else to consider that has long been swept under the rug, especially Inside the Beltway-- how Hagel's electronic theft of his Senate election set the stage for Bush stealing the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Early in 2003, Thom Hartmann helped expose how Hagel cheated to win his reelection 2 months earlier.

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government-- answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders-- would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.

You'd be wrong.

The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.

Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."

What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.

"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka. "They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me."

Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft?

..."The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected," wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years ago. "To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."

That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at our doorstep.

"They can take over our country without firing a shot," Matulka said, "just by taking over our election systems."

Taking over our election systems? Is that really possible in the USA?

Bev Harris of www.talion.com and www.blackboxvoting.org has looked into the situation in depth and thinks Matulka may be on to something. The company tied to Hagel even threatened her with legal action when she went public about his company having built the machines that counted his landslide votes. (Her response was to put the law firm's threat letter on her website and send a press release to 4000 editors, inviting them to check it out.

"I suspect they're getting ready to do this all across all the states," Matulka said in a January 30, 2003 interview. "God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the country," he added, "because they leave no paper trail. These corporations are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting machines."

...Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and maintenance of voting over to private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their owners, officers, and stockholders, puts democracy itself at peril.

And, argues Charlie Matulka, for a former officer of one of those corporations to then place himself into an election without disclosing such an apparent conflict of interest is to create a parody of democracy.

Perhaps Matulka's been reading too many conspiracy theory tracts. Or maybe he's on to something. We won't know until a truly independent government agency looks into the matter.

When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, the man responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete, asking him why he'd not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job.

Meanwhile, back in Nebraska, Charlie Matulka had requested a hand count of the vote in the election he lost to Hagel. He just learned his request was denied because, he said, Nebraska has a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel.

Matulka shared his news with me, then sighed loud and long on the phone, as if he were watching his children's future evaporate.

"If you want to win the election," he finally said, "just control the machines."

Well, at least he didn't piss off the yentas on the ridiculous Sunday morning TV gab-fests. This is as good a time as any to bring up Barney Frank's new thought piece on the new mandate for the Defense Department, in which he points out that progressives need to stay strong on cutting back on military spending. Remember, Barney was one of the 22 in the group of bipartisan congressmembers who signed a letter this week demanding the military budget be "on the table" in the Grand Bargain deficit reduction negotiations.

There were so many encouraging signs for liberals in the election results this year that one of the most significant has been overlooked. For the first time in my memory, a Democratic candidate for President argued for less military spending against a Republican candidate who called for great increases-- and the Democrat won. George McGovern was the last Democratic candidate to talk about spending less on the military. Subsequently, every Democratic presidential candidate was told that he had better look sufficiently tough on national security because a perception that Democrats were too weak vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was a major point of vulnerability. That is why Michael Dukakis, a public official with an extremely distinguished record, and a man of great dignity and integrity, staged an ill-conceived photo-op of himself wearing a helmet and riding in a tank, which became a negative factor in his campaign.

...In the past few years, with President Obama having completed the withdrawal from Iraq, with the killing of Osama bin Laden, and with the announcement of a plan to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014 (too late, but an improvement over the open-ended commitment Obama inherited), it has become possible to get some political traction for our efforts to cut military spending. Because so much of that spending stems from overreach advocated by those who believe that America should be the enforcer of order everywhere in the world-- and because we subsidize our wealthy European and Asian allies by providing a defense for them so they need not spend much on their own-- there has been increasing conservative support for reining in the military budget. Ron Paul, who goes far beyond most liberals in his eagerness to impose severe military cuts, was a popular figure with a significant base of GOP support not despite taking this position but in part because of it.

Earlier this year, for the first time that I can recall, a majority of the House of Representatives voted to reduce the military appropriation recommended by the House Appropriations Committee. The cut was only $1.1 billion-- less than it should have been-- but it was a decision that froze spending at the previous year’s level, and it passed by a vote of 247-167, with the support of both an overwhelming majority of Democrats (158-21) and a significant minority of Republicans (89-146).

Deficit reduction over the long term must include significant reductions in military spending along with tax increases on the very wealthy if we are to avoid devastating virtually everything we do to promote the quality of life at home. A realistic reassessment of our true national security needs would mean a military budget significantly lower not only than the one President Obama inherited, but that which he now proposes. That is, by next year, we no longer should be forced to spend additional funds-- close to $200 billion a year at their peak-- in Afghanistan and Iraq. Additionally, we can reduce the base budget by approximately $1 trillion over a ten-year period (this includes the $487 billion reduction that President Obama proposed in early 2012) while maintaining more than enough military strength to fully protect our security and those of our allies that genuinely need help because they are too poor and weak in the face of powerful enemies. (Should the nation decide in a democratic way to go to war again, that would require an increase in the military budget, and I would hope, in taxation to pay for it.)

Getting the military budget down to that level-- which would mean a reduction of about $250 billion from what it was in the first year of the Obama Administration-- faced two obstacles at the beginning of this past year. First was the traditional political concern that the Republican presidential candidate would have an advantage over the Democrat on the question of who can better protect our national security. Fortunately, Obama understood that things have changed, and that the American people are ready for a reduction in military spending. Governor Romney, operating in the traditional conservative mode, missed it. One of the most important signs that the public was ready to support a rational-- i.e., significantly reduced-- military budget came during Clint Eastwood’s ramble at the Republican National Convention. One of the few coherent things he said in that memorable debate that he lost to a chair was that the President should have announced his willingness to pull out of Afghanistan altogether. This criticism of the President from an antiwar position elicited cheers from the Republican delegates.

...Given the numbers involved, the major trade-off in putting together a total deficit reduction package is between the military and health care, by far the biggest nondefense spending item in our budget. Reductions in Medicare, Medicaid, grants from the National Institutes of Health, aid to hospitals, etc., clearly will have far worse social consequences than equivalent cuts in the military and, I believe, more damaging economic effects, because there is more of an economic multiplier from the health expenditures than from military spending.

...[B]eing the strongest nation in the world can be achieved much less expensively than at current levels. Obama deserves a great deal of credit for ending the war in Iraq, for committing to ending the war in Afghanistan, and for successfully withstanding Republican pressure to spend more on the military. But I believe he underestimates the extent to which the public is willing to support even further reductions, and I believe that he may appear to be overly influenced by being told that as President, he has the duty to continue to lead the indispensable nation.

The United States was indispensable in 1945 and for many years thereafter, given the weakness of other nations, including our closest allies, and the strength of the Soviet Union. But things have changed. We can no longer afford to be the indispensable nation extending a military umbrella over many allies on whom it is not raining-- and who can well afford their own protective gear if it does. Fortunately, there is no longer any need for us to play that role, and that in turn is fortunate because, for a number of reasons, we cannot succeed at the job when we try.

This all means that a major political task going forward for liberals is pushing for further reductions in military spending, an objective that we now know is not only socially and economically necessary but also politically achievable.

Whoa! Some DoD downers are developing cold feet about letting Israel sock it to Iran?

"A classified war game held this month to assess the American military's capabilities to respond to an Israeli attack on Iran forecast that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials."

-- from "Pentagon Finds Perils for U.S. if Israel Were to Strike
Iran," by the NYT's Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker

by Ken

Sharp as tacks those boys -- and the odd girl, I guess -- in the Pentagon. You can't slip anything past them! Here they are charged with the awesome responsibility of gaming a "defense" strategy against Iran, which of course means deciding whether it would be better for us to attack the SOBs or leave it to the Israelis, and some of them are conscientious enough to call for a time out and express something less than unguarded enthusiasm for at least one of the two available options. (It is, of course, a foregone conclusion that somebody's got to attack Iran.)

And I do mean "gaming." That's how they do it, the generals and admirals and all their buddies in the defense-industrial complex. They do war games. It's probably a little more sophisticated than the average paintball game TV writers are all the time inserting into their plots, presumably on the theory that viewers aren't already bored enough.

Okay, I see we're not calling it a "game" so much as a "military simulation." I guess that's kind of like paintball played by think-tank geeks. Paintball with paintnukes.

Now, you remember those "officials," the ones who've been blabbing to the Timesguys about the "classified war simulation" (apparently not wildly concerned about its classifiedness)? And told them how the exercise "forecast that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials"? Those officials.

The officials said the so-called war game was not designed as a rehearsal for American military action -- and they emphasized that the exercise's results were not the only possible outcome of a real-world conflict. But the game has raised fears among top American planners that it may be impossible to preclude American involvement in any escalating confrontation with Iran, the officials said. In the debate among policymakers over the consequences of any possible Israeli attack, that reaction may give stronger voice to those within the White House, Pentagon and intelligence community who have warned that a strike could prove perilous for the United States.

Hey, this isn't just us left-wingers shooting the breeze, speculating about . . . well, these same exact eventualities. No, this is Pentagon generals and who-all, with supercomputers and God only knows what other kinds of super-cool game stuff. What did you think, they were just playing Risk?

The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results and spoke on condition of anonymity because of its classified nature. When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first-strike would likely have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there.

The two-week war game, called "Internal Look," played out a narrative in which the United States found it was pulled into the conflict after Iranian missiles struck a Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, killing about 200 Americans, according to officials with knowledge of the exercise. The United States then retaliated by launching its own strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

The initial Israeli attack was assessed to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by roughly a year, and the subsequent American strikes did not slow the Iranian nuclear program by more than an additional two years. However, other Pentagon planners have said that America's arsenal of long-range bombers, refueling aircraft and precision missiles could do far more damage to the Iranian nuclear program -- if President Obama were to decide on a full-scale retaliation.

Our Timesguys explain that the game wasn't really mounted to formulate policy. It "was designed specifically to test internal military communications and coordination among battle staffs in the Pentagon, Tampa, where the headquarters of the Central Command is located, and in the Persian Gulf in the aftermath of an Israeli strike." However, "the exercise was written to assess a pressing, potential, real-world situation." And "in the end, the war game reinforced to military officials the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of a strike by Israel, and a counterstrike by Iran," according to, you know, the officials (wink, wink).

The Timesguys go on to talk about differences between American and Israeli intelligence services about the nature and imminence of the Iranian threat, and also the risks involved in making boom in Iran. (Favorite quote: Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak telling an Israeli audience that the consequences of such an undertaking wouldn't be all that big a deal, even while allowing that "a war is no picnic." Good one, Ehud!) They also note that the simulation generally assumed that as far as the Iranians are concerned, there isn't a whole lot of difference between devils -- America, Israel, all pretty much the same deal.

The Timesguys also give us some background to this Internal Look extravaganza, which "has long been one of Central Command's most significant planning exercises, and is carried out about twice a year to assess how the headquarters, its staff and command posts in the region would respond to various real-world situations." Oh, and by the way: "In December 2002, Gen. Tommy Franks, who was the top officer at Central Command, used Internal Look to test the readiness of his units for the coming invasion of Iraq." I'll let you insert your own joke about that one.


GEE, IF IT'S NOT SUCH A GOOD IDEA (FOR
US) IF ISRAEL ATTACKS IRAN, THEN WHAT?

This isn't all that difficult to work out, provided you've been paying attention. The good news, you'll recall, is that there's not one but two options for defending ourselves against the Iranian military menace. The bad news is that that leaves only one alternative if for some reason the Pentagon boys and girls turn thumbs down on having the Israelis attack Iran. Even here there's good news of a sort: Since there's only the one alternative, we don't have to waste time with, you know, whiny debates and naysaying.

It's just bombs away! Unless, perhaps, Willard Inc. becomes our commander in chief, in which case he might be persuaded to just set some sort of ambush when those treacherous Iranians make their move into Syria. This would probably disappoint the saber-rattlers of the great Right-Wing Noise Machine, who are just itching for another invasion, having apparently lost interest in the one we're still trying to disengage from, in Afghanistan.

The disengaging is rarely as entertaining as the engaging, and somehow rarely seems to work out the way game-playing military theorists theorize.

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We don't believe in economic stimulus at home, but apparently it's OK to do it for the Taliban

With all that taxpayer moolah we're shoving directly and indirectly into Taliban piggybanks, can't we at least try to persuade them to "Buy American"? Or is this what's meant by "globalism"?

by Ken

And the, uh, good news, is that we managed to transfer this particular $360 million to the Taliban without having to give more than a modest amount of it directly. Most of it just sort of wound up in their hands.

Maybe it's because I had just read a review by Charles Rosen in the New York Review of Books of a new translation by John Ashbery of the prose poems of Rimbaud (the review, which also covers a new translation by Karl Kirchwey of Verlaine's Poems Under Saturn; only a digest is available free online, but if you're interested let me know and I'll see that you're taken care of), but I can't help feeling that what the folks at The American Prospect have achieved in today's "Balance Sheet" report, "A Stimulus for the Taliban," qualifies as some sort of prose poem. After telling us about AP's report ("$360M lost to insurgents, criminals in Afghanistan") "that the U.S. military, after going through hundreds of combat support and reconstruction contracts, estimates that $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of the Taliban," The Balance Sheet, um, explains:

In a confusing process described as "reverse money laundering," money moves from the United States to companies hired for transportation, construction, power projects and similar jobs who turn out to have ties to criminal networks. Only a small chunk of that $360 million was directly given to the Taliban; the bulk of the money was lost to profiteering, bribery and extortion by criminals and power brokers.

Say what?

I don't know about you, but I'm sure breathing easier knowing that "only a small chunk of that $360 million was directly given to the Taliban." After all, aren't those "criminals and power brokers" who extracted "the bulk of the money" via "profiteering, bribery and extortion" merely enacting an Afghan version of the Republican plan for turning the U.S. economy around? Isn't this pretty much what cesspools of corruption like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have in mind when they talk about "job creation"? Of course the only decent-paying jobs are for the profiteers, bribers, and extorters, but it's often true that a certain number of grunt-level jobs trickle down to the yawping masses.

As we've pointed out frequently, at least the huge sums that vanish down DoD ratholes normally provide a certain amount of economic stimulus, one of the few kinds apparently still permissible in the Teabagging Era -- it's what we call "military Keynesianism," and the Fiscal Prudes of the Right don't at all like to talk about it. However, at least that money tends to be shoveled into our own economy, whereas this particular $360M seems to have vanished into assorted Afghan ratholes. Criminal Afghan ratholes. And of course the Taliban.

The DoD is on the case, however. The Balance Sheet further reports:

The Department of Defense announced Monday that they would reduce subcontracting, and thus the number of connections to the criminal network. Additionally, U.S. authorities in Afghanistan are screening contractors more carefully, and are more aggressively barring companies that violate contract terms or are involved in illicit behavior. They hope this kind of scrutiny will prevent more money from getting to the pockets of the very people the U.S. is supposed to be fighting.

The Balance Sheet also includes -- in its "The Experts" side panel -- a quote from a piece by Karen DeYoung in yesterday's Washington Post (this is the correct link: "U.S. military awards contracts in Afghanistan to get money away from insurgents"):

U.S. commanders have argued that outsourcing the transport and security frees up the U.S. warfighters to handle more important missions. The only alternative, said a senior congressional staff member speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss information not yet released, is "to reduce the [U.S.] footprint in Afghanistan."

Policymakers and the public need to understand, he said, that "the cost of doing business is that we have to pay, effectively, our enemy for the right to be there."

Since that's clearly crazytalk, the business about reducing the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan, I guess we just have to go on paying our enemy for the right to be there. Which segues right into the other "expert" quote offered by The Balance Sheet, from the AP report linked above (here's another correct link):

Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., former chairman of the House oversight panel that investigated the wayward payments, said that the U.S. must stop the diversion of taxpayer dollars to the enemy. "When war becomes good business for the insurgents, it is all the more difficult to convince them to lay down their arms," Tierney said.

One might add, though, that a good part of the problem from a budgetary standpoint -- meaning in particular from a debt and deficit standpoint -- is that war is such excellent business for our own domestic profiteers, bribers, and extorters. And it actually produces a decent number of decent-paying jobs. But like I said, our friends the Fiscal Prudes never like to talk about military Keynesianism. So just forget I said anything.

Say, how 'bout that weather?


Of course weather talk is apt to lead to climate-change talk, and we're not supposed to talk about that either. So just never mind.

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