-2 Friedman Units

This didn’t get much attention yesterday, but it seems important:

The US plans to wind down its war in Afghanistan a year or more earlier than scheduled by ending its combat role in the second half of 2013.
[...]
“Hopefully by mid to the latter part of 2013 we’ll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role,” Panetta said on his way to Brussels for a Nato meeting about Afghanistan. “It’s still a pretty robust role that we’ll be engaged in. It’s not going to be a kind of formal combat role that we are [in] now.”

Here’s some more Afghanistan news:

A secret US military report says the Taliban, heavily backed by Pakistan, are confident they can win the Afghanistan conflict, and that they are gaining popular support at the expense of the Kabul government.
[...]
Its conclusions, that the Taliban’s strength and morale are largely intact despite the Nato military surge, and that significant numbers of Afghan government soldiers are defecting to them, are in stark contrast to Nato’s far more bullish official line, that the insurgent movement has been severely damaged and demoralised.

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Over There

While I have so recently been reminded by our friends in the 101st Chairborne that I’m some arugula-chomping, word-chopping, bubble-bound faux-American, it happens that even folks from my particular corner of Alinskystan talk to people whose daily life is as real as it gets.

Which is to say that one of my friends most often in my thoughts is an infantryman to the bone, decades in uniform, absolutely dedicated to the idea of service and his men.  He’s an enlisted man, on his third tour in the Iraq/Afghanistan long war—and you can take this to the bank:  if you or your child had to hump up some hill where folks sought to do you or yours ill, you’d want my friend there too.  He’s one of nature’s sergeants, I’m trying to say, the kind of guy who knows what he’s doing to some very deep level, and takes the use of that knowledge as an obligation he owes anyone under gaze.

In December, I wrote him a quick note—just a “happy holidays – hope you’re OK” kind of thing.  When I got his reply, I asked for permission to post it here—which I’ve just received.

My friend speaks for himself. I’m not going to gloss it further except to say this:  I’m past tolerating being told by comfortable American Exceptionalists about the necessity of the next war, or the war after that.  My friend and his friends carry the load for all such  Dulce et Decorum posturing.

So.  Notes from Over There:

I am still in Afghanistan in [Deleted] province at an altitude of [Deleted] feet. We have no heat in our bee huts (plywood shacks that sleep six), the temperature at night is in the low teens. They tell us they are working on getting a heater.

It is a tough tour.  We lost six men to an IED three days before Christmas, [not his unit] we worked closely together and I knew them well. We have lost twenty Americans since I arrived. Today I was on an air mission we flew high into the mountains in a heavily Taliban controlled area, luckily we had no trouble. War is a strange thing, going out on missions almost everyday and not knowing if it will be your last day on earth.

We work with the provincial governors and sub governors to build roads, bridges, schools, and give out humanitarian aid, but the leaders steal most of the money and little gets down to the people. I am out in the boonies, we fire artillery all day and night and they rocket us. Soldiers...are killed and wounded almost weekly, the call goes out over the loud speaker all this type or that type of blood report to the aid station. I have carried wounded on to helicopters in the field and carried others off the helicopters back at base. It always makes my eyes water and heart hurt to see their broken bodies. It is surreal. I will finish my tour in [Deleted], I had a short leave home in [Deleted]. It is interesting; we raid villages at night and capture terrorist responsible for the bombings, we caught the ones who killed the [men lost before Christmas] the night before last.

I am fine. I am an old soldier, and still tough, I plan missions and lead them and so far, thank God, I have not lost one of my men. The fighting in Ramadi Iraq was more bloody, but this place is no joke either. I will never understand why nations go to war, I know the politics, countries do bad things, but it is so ugly. I now have a collection of faces of men that I knew who have been killed in action that live in my head. I am sorry to write like this but I guess I was feeling philosophical.

I hope you join me in sending every good wish and hope to my friend and those with whom he serves.  That is all.

Image:  Rembrandt van Rijn, Old Soldier, undated—first half of the seventeenth century.

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Remember, They Hate us for Our Freedom

A little more than three days time served for each victim:

A Marine sergeant who told his troops to “shoot first, ask questions later” in a raid that killed unarmed Iraqi women, children and elderly pleaded guilty Monday in a deal that will carry no more than three months confinement and end the largest and longest-running criminal case against U.S. troops from the Iraq War.

The agreement marked a stunning and muted end to the case once described as the Iraq War’s version of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The government failed to get one manslaughter conviction in the case that implicated eight Marines in the deaths of 24 Iraqis in the town of Haditha in 2005.

Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, 31, of Meriden, Conn., who was originally accused of unpremeditated murder, pleaded guilty to negligent dereliction of duty for leading his troops to disregard rules of combat when they raided homes after a roadside bomb exploded near their convoy, killing one Marine and wounding two others.

Amazing.

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A Little Sunday History

Nobody’s posted about the video of Marines pissing on dead Taliban soldiers, so even though it’s somewhat old news, I just want to disagree with the idea that the ubiquity of cameras adds a new transparency to war:

First, there’s the new transparency of war. Infinitely more battlefield details get recorded, and everyone has the tools to broadcast these details. So it’s just a matter of time before some outrageous image goes viral—pictures from Abu Ghraib, video from Afghanistan, whatever. These images will make you and your soldiers more hated by the enemy than ever—and hated by civilians who may identify with the enemy, whether because of national, ethnic, or religious kinship.

That’s Robert Wright at the Atlantic, but you hear that kind of thing all the time. I’ll grant that the Internet is faster, and that more cameras exist, but there were plenty enough cameras even in World War II to capture the dehumanization and mutilation of that enemy. The photo at top is of Bull Halsey’s famous exhortation to the troops after Pearl Harbor, and here’s a shot from Life Magazine, May 22, 1944, captioned “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you-note for the Jap skull he sent her”:

There’s an excellent and well-illustrated Wikipedia article on mutilation of Japanese war dead. It went far beyond pissing on corpses.

My point is that this is what happens in war, our society has been exposed to it in the past even without YouTube, and the reason that it’s not commonplace knowledge is that most of the recent chroniclers of WW II chose to ignore it when they created their Greatest Generation hagiographies. If you’re interested in a real accounting of the attitudes surrounding World War II, I’d recommend Paul Fussell’s book Wartime.

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Signing Statement

By request, here’s President Obama’s signing statement for the defense authorization bill he signed yesterday.

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There’s a rose in a fisted glove

Bear in mind that this is from a Politico article, and they offer nothing to quantify their assertion, but I found this idea interesting:

The anti-war stance, the sharp criticism of the war on terrorism, the calls to rein in military spending — all of it is fueling Paul’s support among the young voters who throng his events, and among independents and Democrats.

In a historically dovish state, with a crowded contest uniquely suited to a candidate with a fervent base of support, it’s a model that can work. But beyond Iowa’s borders, in a hawkish party that has traditionally embraced a muscular military role and recently criticized President Barack Obama for his alleged timidity, it’s a different story.

The area I live in (western New York) is on the border between the midwest and the northeast.

My own local teahadists like Lee Greenwood as much as the next group of wingers, but my local Republican Congressmen weren’t that pro-Iraq War as a group. Amo Houghton voted against the war resolution, Jim Walsh joined Democrats in voting for troop draw-downs after the 2006 election, Randy Kuhl (who came into office after the Iraq War started) claimed he doesn’t know how he would have voted on the Iraq War resolution.

I suspect that Iowa Republicans are far to the right of western New York Republicans on pretty much everything, but I’d be curious to know how much of war-mongerism is regional.

Also too, I don’t find it that surprising that Paul gets so much support from people in the military. I suspect a lot of them don’t like getting sent off to fight in boondoggle wars.

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We’ll Regret This One Day

I know this will mainly fall on deaf ears, but this is not a good development and not something we should be proud of:

The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.

Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.

The rapid expansion of the drone program has blurred long-standing boundaries between the CIA and the military. Lethal operations are increasingly assembled a la carte, piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that allow the White House to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern the use of lethal force.

Killing people in defense of this nation should be open and in full view of the public, not something decided in a CIA star chamber. And I just can’t wait until other nations get this technology and start to use it as casually as we have been.

At any rate, it would be nice if you all read the piece, which is actually pretty solid, before this thread devolves into the typical “WHY DO YOU HATE OBAMA” and “YOU OBOTS WILL DEFEND ANYTHING” shitshow that we all know will happen.

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Iraq: An Ending, of Sorts

(Jeff Danziger’s website)

“We” should never have gone there in the first place, “we” had no business doing what we did or hanging around as long as we did, but President Obama deserves credit for checking off another item on his campaign-promises list. From Andre Tartar at NYMag’s Daily Intel:

The last U.S. military convoy of about 25 military trucks and 100 armored vehicles, carrying the remaining 500 active duty troops (most based in Fort Hood, Texas), crossed out of Iraq at daybreak Sunday. The final pullout was even kept secret from the soldiers’ Iraqi counterparts to avoid any final attacks, says the AP. But at the Kuwait border, it turned into a jubilant scene as the column of horn-honking and whooping soldiers were greeted by their fellow servicemembers. Although a final contingent of 150 or so will stay behind for training purposes, this effectively closes out one of the longest wars in U.S. history, having cost nearly 4,500 American lives and $1 trillion, with more than 20 times more Iraqi lives lost.

I personally agree with Doghouse Riley:

Point Of Order: If We’re Going To Declare The War In Iraq Over, Shouldn’t We Declare War On Iraq First?

Or, If We Were Going To Have The Last Person To Leave Iraq Turn Out The Lights, Shouldn’t We Have Turned On The Electricity At Some Point?

My favorite bit, so far: WaPo entitling a slide show “From swaggering hope to quiet departure”. Which is like seeing a review entitled “Dance incompetently staged” and discovering it was written by the choreographer.

Herewith, a thread for everyone to reminesce about your favorite Ten Years of FUBAR, Mesopotamia Model memories/grievances.

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Oh, BTW- Mission Accomplished

An e-mailer ripped into me for not highlighting this:

President Obama observed the end of the war in Iraq on Wednesday before an audience of those who fought in it, telling a crowd of returning war veterans that the nearly nine years of conflict in Iraq, a war now indelibly imprinted on the national psyche, had come to a close.

“As your commander in chief, and on behalf of a grateful nation, I’m proud to finally say these two words,” Mr. Obama told a crowded hangar at this famed North Carolina army base that is home to the 82nd Airborne Division: “Welcome home.”

Calling it a “historic moment,” Mr. Obama, who has over the years of his presidency had his ups and down with his own military leaders, if not the enlisted men and women, infused his remarks with far more accolades for the military than the usual few that he dispenses to local politicians at the beginning of most of his standard speeches.

This time, he thanked the “legendary” 82nd Airborne Division. He thanked senior enlisted leaders. And the Sky Dragons of the 18th Airborne Corps. And the Special Operations Forces. And military families. In fact, the president wrapped himself in all of the storied patriotism and history of the country’s armed forces, congratulating the assembled troops for the job they did in Iraq — a war which he himself never approved.

It was a tough balance to strike. Mr. Obama had to speak of legendary battles in places like Falluja without referencing the weapons of mass destruction that were never found; he noted the sectarian violence without bringing up the years of fear that gripped the United States and the rest of the world back in 2004, 2005 and 2006, when it looked as if the American invasion of Iraq would engulf an already volatile region.

“We remember the early days — the American units that streaked across the sands and skies of Iraq,” Mr. Obama said. “In battles from Nasiriya to Karbala to Baghdad, American troops broke the back of a brutal dictator in less than a month.”

And yet, Mr. Obama said, “we know too well the heavy costs” of the Iraq War: “Nearly 4,500 Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice, including 202 fallen heroes from here at Fort Bragg. 202.”

The speech was the latest in a series of public appearances orchestrated by the White House to signal the end of the conflict and to drive home the point that Mr. Obama fulfilled one of his 2008 presidential campaign promises. At times somber, at times ebullient — there were plenty of “Hooahs” during his speech — the president tried to project an understanding of what the people, who have seen their family members go off to fight a war that most Americans came to oppose, have been through.

I hesitate to say this is the end, but it sure looks like we are close to it, with very few troops left in theatre.

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Dead Civilians are the Cost of Doing Business

Sadly, the only people who will be punished for this are the ones who forgot to destroy the documents:

One by one, the Marines sat down, swore to tell the truth and began to give secret interviews discussing one of the most horrific episodes of America’s time in Iraq: the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.

“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, said to investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq. At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”

The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.

The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s own internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.

Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not a single Marine was ever prosecuted. That is one of the main reasons that all American combat troops are leaving by the weekend.

But the accounts are just as striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently painful encounters with a population they did not understand. In their own words, the report documents the dehumanizing nature of this war, where Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not “remarkable,” but as routine.

Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.”

The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

Shit happens.

This is why, no matter how “right” some of you think US military action or involvement might be (Libya, for example), my default position is to simply oppose any use of force. No matter what the intentions or training, things break down and the innocent die. Bombs will go astray, intel will be bad, discipline will break down. It is inevitable.

Read the whole piece, and how many civilians were killed for getting too close to checkpoints because they were either illiterate and didn’t know to stop or because they didn’t have glasses and couldn’t even see they were near a checkpoint. The price for that was to be gunned down.

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When They Do It, It is Called Warmongering

When we do it, we call it national security:

The recent crash of a U.S. spy drone inside Iran offers a glimpse at the growing secret effort by Washington to curb the nuclear program of its longtime foe, the Associated Press reports.

Iran last week released video footage of what it says is an intact unmanned aerial vehicle shot down within its territory. U.S. officials have said equipment failure was more likely to have caused the crash. Observers have expressed little surprise that the drone would be part of U.S. covert activities against the Middle Eastern state.

Tehran has previously claimed that Washington was behind computer-based strikes against Iran, along with bomb attacks that killed two nuclear scientists and injured another. Washington has countered that Iran has played a hand in the death of U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan and tried to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

“It’s beginning to look like there’s a thinly veiled, increasingly violent, global cloak-and-dagger game afoot,” American Enterprise Institute military specialist Thomas Donnelly said at a recent event in Washington.

Clandestine activities in the nuclear impasse are “much bigger than people appreciate,” said former national security adviser Stephen Hadley. “But the U.S. needs to be using everything it can.”

Ahh, American exceptionalism.

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Kubrick Was There First

Regarding DougJ’s amazing (and horrifying AEI quote), I’d just like to point out that Kubrick got there first.

AEI:

The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.” … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem.

Kubrick:

Anyone won runs is a VC. Anyone who stands still is a well disciplined VC. HAHAA. You guys ought to do a story about me some time.

Politicians hide themselves away, they only started the war. Why should they go out to fight? They leave that role to the poor.

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Over

Twitter informs me that Obama is scheduled to announce a complete withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. What did we accomplish? What did we gain? Other than the removal of Saddam, nothing that I can tell, and I don’t understand how we are better off with Iraq in chaos and more closely aligned with Iran. Anyone who supported this debacle, as I did, should forever have their judgment questioned on everything. Even if you think they are right, remain suspect of their opinions. It’s just that simple. When I look at it now, it was such an easy call, such an easy test of critical thinking skills, and I and others failed it. It’s just that simple.

Which leads me to the most nauseating aspect of this announcement- all the people who were wrong will now be given airtime to do “victory laps” on national tv, complete with Liz Cheney and other dead-enders going on tv claiming this vindicates the previous administration. If I weren’t already bedridden with the flu, it would be enough to make me sick.

Trillions of dollars, untold tens of thousands dead, god knows how many wounded, millions scarred, and for what?

Now let’s GTFO of Afghanistan.

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With a Thompson Gun for Hire, Fighting to be Done

The Obama Administration is sending 100 armed troops to central Africa, starting in Uganda, to serve as advisors to help hunt down the Lord’s Resistance Army. This isn’t our first effort to stop the LRA:

American efforts to combat the group also took place during the administration of President George W. Bush, which authorized the Pentagon to send a team of 17 counterterrorism advisers to train Ugandan troops and provided millions of dollars worth of aid, including fuel trucks, satellite phones and night-vision goggles, to the Ugandan Army. Those efforts scattered segments of the Lord’s Resistance Army in recent years; its remnants dispersed and regrouped in Uganda’s neighbors. In spring 2010, apparently desperate for new conscripts, Mr. Kony’s forces killed hundreds of villagers in the Congolese jungle and kidnapped hundreds more, according to witnesses interviewed at the time. Unlike the earlier effort, the 100 military advisers sent by Mr. Obama will be armed. They will be providing assistance and advice to their African hosts, Mr. Obama said, and “will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense.”

Stephen L Taylor has more on the LRA and its ugly practices.

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Iran so far away

I’m not quite as perturbed by news of the Iranian terror plot as Tim is. After the way the librul media undermined Dear Leader’s efforts in Iraq, the American public probably lacks the Churchillian resolve to bring freedom to the Iranian people. Don’t get me wrong, I dislike the Iranian mullahs, I’m convinced that they are even worse than our own mullahs, if only because they seem to have more influence over there.

But I’m curious. One of you reported, with journalism:

As I saw posted in TPM comments, Bolton’s boner can be seen from space. Should it last more than four hours, head for the shelters.

How are the other war bloggers faring? Does Hitch have one more war in him? What’s going on at Kaplan? How about Jeffblog or whatever Jeffrey Goldberg calls himself now?

I don’t have the stomach to check this out myself and I fear a lot of the action is on Twitter or Facebook or other places beyond my ken.

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