Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

Word salad with all caps

Too inconsequential to be sued

The Math Demands It!

Wetsuit optional.

Han shot first.

Mission Accomplished!

The house always wins.

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

A snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals

This is a big f—–g deal.

How has Obama failed you today?

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Reality always wins in the end.

Verified, but limited!

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

The revolution will be supervised.

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

We have all the best words.

Lighten up, Francis.

Also, too.

I personally stopped the public option…

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War

National Women’s Month: Let Me Introduce You To Jennifer Beck Bos

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National Women's Month: Let Me Introduce You To Jennifer Beck Bos

She saved my brother’s life.

Bos was a Nebraska Army National Guard specialist and a truck driver with the 1075th Transportation Company when she was awarded the Bronze Star with Valor device for exceptional heroism and gallantry during an insurgent enemy ambush that occurred near Salmon Pak, Iraq, on March 20, 2005.

While under attack she extracted a wounded Soldier trapped inside a damaged vehicle, moved the Soldier to safety and returned to her vehicle while under direct and indirect enemy fire and led the convoy out of the kill zone.

Bos was the first female in the Nebraska Army National Guard to be awarded the Bronze Star.

On March 20th, 2005 I received a phone call no sister ever wants to receive. It was my brother, shaken, tired and worried about his injured friend, telling me about what he’d just experienced.

National Women's Month: Let Me Introduce You To Jennifer Beck Bos 1

You can listen to his unit tell their story here (warning, it is intense):

“It Got Scary:” Nebraska National Guard Soldiers Reflect On Ambush In Iraq, 10 Years Later

“One of the most beautiful days I can remember weather wise, the entire deployment I was over there,” is how Jay Schrad remembered the morning of March 20, 2005.

Schrad and 13 other soldiers from the Nebraska Army National Guard’s 1075th Transportation Company were rolling out of a base in Kuwait, taking a 33-vehicle supply convoy into Iraq. They were young, most in their early 20s. Most were from the Columbus area. They’d been doing this for several months at this point, halfway through the deployment. This convoy included pairs of Nebraska soldiers in green semi-trucks, civilians driving white semis and three Humvee gun trucks providing security.

They had been attacked on previous missions with roadside bombs and small arms fire, which was no surprise, because regardless of tactics, mile long convoys attract attention in a war zone. “We made our presence known,” A.J. Bloebaum said. “They knew when we were coming.”

But they’d always sped away from the trouble.   read more

Heroes every damn one of them.

It’s been fifteen years this month and I still cannot type this without my pulse racing and my eyes tearing. My brother had already survived an IED that took his door off the truck. I am forever grateful for everyone in this unit. I’ve had dinner with many of them. I’ve heard about their struggles getting VA help. I know you still cannot startle my brother when he’s asleep (poor Bixby).

Those were long, sleepless months when he was deployed, I’d leave my computer on so I could see when he checked back in after every trip. Forever grateful for Yahoo’s messenger system that let us video chat almost daily. Forever grateful he came home.

I still ache that we will not have a woman president, feeling as if my gender has once again been sidelined. So I wanted to share about this amazing soldier and remind us all to keep fighting for our place at the table. And thank you, Jen, for making sure my brother and his unit made it out alive.

 

 

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Lest We Forget: The Liberation of Auschwitz

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As world leaders gather in Poland Monday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi-run Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland, Edith Friedman Grosman will be far away in Toronto. On Monday, the energetic 95-year-old, who was on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz, plans to live-stream the ceremony from home, but only if she feels up to it.

She’s already returned to Auschwitz four times, and that’s enough.

“I’m glad they’re doing something for Auschwitz 75,” she told The Washington Post. “But they have to do something in 100 years and 125 years, too.”…

They were told they would be registering for three months of work in a shoe factory, and that it was their patriotic duty to help in the war effort. But when they showed up to “register,” they were strip-searched, loaded into trucks and taken away. Most were teenagers, some were in their twenties, and a handful of mothers in their forties boarded in place of their daughters. None of those mothers would survive.

Over the next few days, Jewish girls were swept up from all the surrounding villages. By the end of the week, Friedman Grosman, then 17, and her sister Lea, 19, were on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz, arriving by train on March 27, 1942…

These young women arrived at a pivotal moment in the concentration camp’s history. At first, it had been a Nazi prison for Poles of every ethnicity, then for Soviet POWs. By 1942, the Nazis were focusing on gathering up Jews, though they had not yet started their “Final Solution” — mass extermination.

In fact, the girls’ real job wasn’t to make shoes, but to build the very infrastructure that would convert the camp into a death machine. Over the next year, they were brutally forced to demolish old buildings with their bare hands, empty trash out of frozen lakes and build dozens of new barracks. For clothing, they were given the bloody uniforms of dead Soviet soldiers and a few striped dresses with no undergarments. Their entire bodies were shaved, and their shoes were flat pieces of wood with flimsy cloth ties.

Most of them died that first year — of starvation, disease, beatings, medical experiments and suicide. Friedman Grosman’s sister was sent to a gas chamber after she caught typhus. More than 77 years later, her grief is still deep…

At her apartment in Toronto on Saturday, friends brought by so many dishes for Friedman Grosman that she worried she would have to throw food away. In between visits, she told The Post she had one message for the world: “Don’t hate. Because hate brings criminality and hate brings death. I saw it, I was there.”

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The Black PSYOP Part VI: The President’s Defense in the Senate

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The ongoing Black PSYOP by the President, his Congressional defenders, his surrogates, and his supporters is set to enter its next phase: using the defense of the President in the Senate trial of his impeachment to launder the Russian misinformation and agitprop about Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden, and the conspiracy theory that the Clinton 2016 campaign and Ukraine to interfere in the 2016 presidential election not the Russians through the Senate into mainstream reporting and to the American people.

From The Washington Post:

White House lawyers are gearing up for a scorched-earth defense of President Trump in the impeachment trial, mounting a politically charged case aimed more at swaying American voters than GOP senators — and damaging Trump’s possible 2020 opponent, Joe Biden.

Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal attorney, plan to use their time in the trial to target the former vice president and his son, Hunter, according to multiple GOP officials familiar with the strategy. Trump’s allies believe that if they can argue that the president had a plausible reason for requesting the Biden investigation in Ukraine, they can both defend him against the impeachment charges and gain the bonus of undercutting a political adversary.

This is why Senator Cruz floated his one for one deal on witnesses. Specifically that if the House Democratic impeachment managers are allowed to call John Bolton, then the President’s defense team gets to call Hunter Biden. It is why Senator Graham has been suggesting a special counsel be appointed to investigate the Bidens and if one isn’t appointed he’s going to do it himself through the Senate Judiciary Committee.

We know the President’s and his surrogates allegations about Vice President Biden and Hunter Biden are Russian agitprop. As Paula Chertok has reported and I’ve repeatedly referenced here in the previous Black PSYOP posts, it was created in the spring of 2014 in order to begin to dirty up Vice President Biden ahead of a potential 2016 presidential run.

The repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory the Clinton campaign conspired with Ukraine to steal the 2016 presidential election and frame the Russia and the President now appears to have been established by Russia as early as 2015.

Three weeks after Election Day 2016, the Kremlin officially floated a theory that would ultimately lead to only the third presidential impeachment in U.S. history.

“Ukraine seriously complicated the work of Trump’s election by planting information” aimed at damaging his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry told reporters on Nov. 30, 2016, accusing the Ukrainian government of scheming to help elect Hillary Clinton.

Russian officials offered no evidence—on that day or on any other day—that it was really Kyiv and not Moscow that meddled in the 2016 election. Nor have U.S. intelligence agencies backed off on their collective finding that the Kremlin orchestrated a major effort to help Trump win office.

Zakharova’s claims seemed easy enough to shrug off at the time. It was not surprising that the Kremlin, highly skilled in the dark arts of dezinformatsiya, would try to shift blame to its adversaries in Kyiv.

But that effort to shift blame may have started months earlier. A review of Russian state media reports from the time and interviews with a dozen current and former officials and experts in Kyiv and Washington paint a more sinister picture: that Zakharova’s seemingly throwaway accusation was actually the culmination of a year-long effort to frame Ukraine for a Russian attack, ultimately leading to parallel efforts by Moscow and President Donald Trump to try to game the 2020 election by seeking dirt on former vice president Joe Biden.

Cindy Otis, a former political and military analyst at the CIA who now leads the disinformation analysis program at Nisos, a cyber security firm, says that Moscow may even have planted the seeds even earlier than Zakharova’s news conference.

“There’s been an evolution of the main narrative” tying Ukraine to the 2016 election, Otis said. She pointed to a March 2015 article in the Kremlin-funded outlet Russia Today that tried to connect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the future Democratic presidential nominee, to the popular uprising against the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013.

“The Russian narrative in 2015-2016 was that Clinton interfered in Ukraine, and that her campaign was being directed or driven by Ukrainian oligarchs,” Otis said.

As is typical of Russia’s disinformation operations, it hinged on a kernel of truth—the reports cited donations her charity had received from Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk beginning in 2008, which were initially reported by the Wall Street Journal.

“They really seized on that Wall Street Journal article,” Otis said, pointing to a chart included in the article listing “Ukraine” as the Clinton Foundation’s top donor that was widely shared by suspected Russian trolls and the far-right on social media.

But it wasn’t just isolated accounts accusing Ukraine of manipulating the 2016 election; lawmakers say they’ve seen signs of an organized, top-down effort directed by the Kremlin to create a false narrative and exonerate Russia.

Russia’s disinformation and agitprop campaign was laundered through the usual sources starting with Russia’s state backed news media platforms designed to propagandize Americans, such as RT, and from their through a variety of far right and alt-right sources until it hit places like Brietbart, The Gateway Pundit, and then, ultimately, John Solomon at The Hill.

This phase of the Black PSYOP will be wrapped within faux righteous indignation that the Democrats are simply continuing the conspiracy against the President, by using the impeachment to finish the job delineated in Russia’s conspiracy theory about the election, to remove him from office, overturn the 2016 presidential election results, and fix the 2020 election by doing so, as well as a lack of burden sharing by the EU in support of Ukraine. None of this is true! Approximately 2/3rds of the aid that Ukraine receives is from European Union member states. The Ukrainians are forbidden from using the Javelin missiles we’ve sold them, and which his defenders constantly reference as something the President did for Ukraine when no one else – not Obama, nor the EU leaders – would, because the President doesn’t want to upset the Russians, so they’re stored across the country from where the Ukrainians are actually fighting a Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russians are the ones who actually conspired with and interfered in the 2016 elections on behalf of the President, not the Ukrainians conspiring with the Clinton campaign. If the Senate were to vote to convict the President during the trial phase of his impeachment it does not overturn the 2016 election, it simply removes him from office and bars him from running again at the Federal level. VP Pence would become president if this were to happen, which is not overturning the 2016 election. Overturning the 2016 elections would make Secretary Clinton president, which isn’t even in the realm of the possible. Finally, the President has repeatedly indicated that he would welcome foreign assistance in his reelection campaign or solicited it – on camera, to reporters!

The Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative country club, is just another front in the Black PSYOP campaign to fix the 2020 presidential election and absolve Russia of responsibility for the unconventional war it has been waging on the US so that sanctions against Russia can be lifted.

We are off the looking glass and through the map!

Open thread.

 

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Creating Their Own Reality

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The Bushies claimed they could “create their own reality” through their actions. That was arrogant. Their political heirs are creating their own reality by believing Commander Bananapants’ off-the-cuff lies. That’s delusional:

I’m no national security expert, but wouldn’t the Secretary of Defense be the person who’d present the evidence to Trump if it exists? Or at least be privy to that classified information, particularly if, as Esper claims, he’s the one who’s deploying troops to counter the alleged threats?

It’s all bullshit. President Brainworms made this shit up on the fly during a Fox News appearance to justify his irresponsible decision to escalate the confrontation with Iran.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that when Trump, Esper and sundry Trump apologists talk about Iranian attacks on U.S. troops, they’re mostly talking about Iranian actions early in the Iraq War. The Obama administration had that threat contained with the JCPOA.

Trump tore up that agreement because he claimed he could get a “better deal.” Looks like that’s working out about as well as Trump’s other negotiations.

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Innocent, Helpless Victims

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Apparently this is the line we’re going to hear about Biden’s vote for Iraq:

Former Secretary of State John Kerry defended former Vice President Biden over the Iraq War, saying that the George W. Bush administration “broke their word with respect to how they would proceed” in Iraq.

“The fact is that we were promised by a president, by an administration, that they were going to do it as a last resort after exhausting diplomacy, that if they have to go to war it would be with a coalition that they built broadly, and that they would do it only in conjunction with our allies,” Kerry said Friday. “It didn’t have to happen; it was a war of choice.”

“It was a mistake to have trusted them, I guess, and we paid a high price for it,” Kerry added. “But that was not voting for the war.”

This is such a projection of weakness and, frankly, political cowardice – we trusted Bush and he let us down. A mistake “I guess”. Is that really where Biden wants to go with this? To say he’s a victim of Bush? Two thoughts:

First, if we’re supposed to trust your judgment as the biggest, baddest, smartest foreign policy guy, isn’t trusting Cheney/Bush on foreign policy a refutation of learning from your experience? We all know people who have worked in a job for a long time (“experienced”) and absolutely suck at it. It’s not the experiences you have, but how you’ve grown and learned from them. If you hadn’t learned that you can’t trust someone like Cheney/Bush not to go to war, and you haven’t learned that Iraq was the biggest foreign policy fuckup in the last two decades of this country’s existence–and that any role you played in it deserves apology rather than weak excuses like this– you’ve learned nothing.

Second, Iraq is such heavy baggage. If I had to point to one factor that sunk Clinton’s ’08 campaign, other than her advisors’ inability to count delegates, it was her Iraq vote in contrast to Obama’s position on the war. I also think it was a factor in Kerry’s ’04 loss, since he had to dance around his vote rather than have a simple, forthright position opposing the war. Instead of trotting out excuse makers, the Biden campaign needs to be working to dump that baggage with a short, sweet acknowledgement of error and failure.

All that said, there are some things about Iraq I don’t understand at a very fundamental level. I was never, ever for a war in Iraq after 9/11. I certainly supported the Afghanistan war, but Iraq was clearly an war of choice. It had nothing to do with the perpetrators of 9/11. It seemed just like the kind of overreaction that they were trying to bait us into, we fell for it, and any honest history will show that it was a waste of some of our best people and immense amounts of money.

So when the excuse making begins, I have no interest in or patience for it, because I thought it was an obvious mistake from the start. The fact that it was a popular mistake at the time, and that Cheney/Bush lied about it, holds absolutely no water. I don’t think I’m alone in that view, but I guess Biden wants to go to Kerrytown in a bucket. I’m afraid I’m not enjoying the ride.

(via LGM, worth a read)

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Bloomberg Reports That the “US Probes If Russia Targeting Biden in 2020 Election Meddling”: YA THINK?!?!?!!?!?!

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Today in water is wet reporting:

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are assessing whether Russia is trying to undermine Joe Biden in its ongoing disinformation efforts with the former vice president still the front-runner in the race to challenge President Donald Trump, according to two officials familiar with the matter.

The probe comes as senior U.S. officials are warning that Russia’s election interference in 2020 could be more brazen than in the 2016 presidential race or the 2018 midterm election.

Part of the inquiry is to determine whether Russia is trying to weaken Biden by promoting controversy over his past involvement in U.S. policy toward Ukraine while his son worked for an energy company there.

YA THINK?!?!?!?!

As I delineated way back in September when The New York Time‘s Ken Vogel was peddling his agitprop about Hunter Biden and Vice President Biden with a “I’m just asking questions here…” smirk, the Russians started this disinformation and agitprop based influence campaign against Vice President Biden in 2014. Because they thought that he was likely to run for president in 2016 and they were starting their campaign to dirty up every potential candidate tied to President Obama’s administration and that administration’s actions regarding Russia.

The RIA-Novosti, a Russian state backed news outlet, excerpt that Paula Chertok reported on back in May 2019 and posted above is from May 2014. It also includes allegations against Hunter Biden, Vice President Biden, and then Secretary of State Kerry’s step-son. There was informed speculation in 2014 that both Vice President Biden and Secretary Kerry were considering presidential runs in 2016. This initial piece of agitprop and disinformation, casually placed in a Russian state backed news media article, forms the basis for the Black PSYOP that I’ve delineated and written about here over the past several months. A disinformation and agitprop laundry that includes the Republican members of Congress, especially those involved in the impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, members of the US Senate, and Rudy Giuliani’s OANN documentary.

There can be no doubt that Russia is not just continuing its political warfare campaign, as part of Putin’s undeclared war against the US, leveraging information warfare, cyber operations, and other active measures in 2020 to effect the 2020 campaign, but that the bullshit story about the Bidens and Ukraine is central to it. It is nice to see that both the news media and the US Intelligence Community are now focused on this reality, but it is unfortunate that they are late to the game.

Open thread!

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Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Democrats Refuse to Roll Over for MOAR WAR!!!

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Per the Washington Post:

… U.S. officials said Wednesday they knew Iranian missiles were coming hours in advance of the attack after warnings from intelligence sources and communications from Iraq. Iraq’s acting prime minister has said he was informed of the attack ahead of time.

“We knew, and the Iraqis told us, that this was coming many hours in advance,” said a senior U.S. administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the communications.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced that the House will vote Thursday on a measure to limit Trump’s military actions regarding Iran. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said the classified briefing by Trump administration officials Wednesday was “probably the worst briefing I’ve seen at least on a military issue in the nine years I’ve served in the United States Senate.”…

Even the GOP’s dynamic duo was unpleased with Pompeo…

ETA:

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The Orange Oaf Speaks…

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The orange oaf is scheduled to waddle forth to address the nation at 11 AM ET. Post reporter Josh Dawsey says on Twitter: “Several aides say Trump is not looking to escalate further with Iran with this morning’s speech.” Well, that’s good?

I predict Trump will be extra snorty and insufferably braggy — really going out on a limb here!

Anyhoo, open  thread.

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Iran Fires On US Airbase

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Things are still happening. Here’s a selection of tweets.

I’ll add more in the comments as they show up.

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The Levantine Problem Set: Some Light(ish) Reading

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Bill Arnold in the comments to BettyC’s earlier post asked for some short reading about Iran. While they’re no longer posted on an outward facing website at USAWC, I’m attaching the three cultural assessments I did on 1) the Syrian Civil War, 2) Iran and Hezbullah, and 3) Iraqi sectarian violence. These were all done between spring 2013 and spring 2014. They are unclassified open source cultural assessments prepared by my office, when I had an office, at USAWC in support of various US Army and DOD elements that were dealing with these issues. They’re a bit dated now, for instance, Ahmedinijad is no longer Iran’s president, but they should provide what Bill is looking for.

USAWC_Culture_Ops_Syria_Brief_Final

USAWC_Culture_Report_Iran_Hezbullah_Shia_Near_Abroad_Final

USAWC_Cultural_Operations_Report_Politicization_of_Iraqi_Identity_Final

You can also find my article about the strategic complications of Iran’s human geography at this link. This was published by The Modern War Institute at West Point in August 2018 and is rooted in earlier work I had done for US Army and DOD elements.

Update at 9:05 PM EST

Figured I’d add one more. This is the preliminary write up – just the facts ma’am style – of the tribal history and social study I designed, directed, oversaw, and conducted in central Iraq in 2008. This initial write up was produced at the request of the senior State Department official who ran our brigade combat team’s embedded provincial reconstruction team. I gave him a courtesy briefing of what we’d been finding and he asked if I could write it up ASAP as he wanted to send it back to the Secretary of State as soon as possible. I have no idea if it ever got to Secretary Rice. Regardless, here you go.

HTT_Mada’in_Oral_History_Findings_BCT_Release

There will be a test later…

Open thread!

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Sunday, Nutty Sunday

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In the wee hours this morning, Trump tweeted more bellicose nonsense about Iran as a follow-up to the war crimes threats he made earlier yesterday:

Sunday Nutty Sunday

[Note: I assume the “Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment” thing is a lie.]

Today in Iraq, the parliament voted to boot the U.S. out. Also, CNN interviewed Iran’s top military adviser, and he sounds a whole lot more rational than Trump:

In an exclusive interview with CNN in Tehran, the adviser — Maj. Gen. Hossein Dehghan — made the most specific and direct threat yet by a senior Iranian official following the killing of Gen. Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Baghdad.

Dehghan said Iran would retaliate directly against US “military sites.”

Nice touch to specify that Iran would target “military sites” to create a contrast with Trump. Way to seize the moral high ground, general.

And moments ago, a cherry to top off the shit sundae: Iran announced it would suspend all commitments to the 2015 nuclear deal. Given that they’re dealing with an unhinged lunatic, can you blame them?

Will our allies stick with us? Pompeo unhelpfully crapped on them for not clapping hard enough about the Soleimani assassination, and Trump has been shitting on our friends for three years, so I’m skeptical.

Oh well. Open thread.

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Iran’s Response: Unconventional and Most Likely Embarrassing

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Cole muses:

Given the asymmetry in the types of military power between the US and Iran, as well as the ability to wield it, Iran’s response to yesterday’s strike that killed Suleimani and Muhandis, and tonight’s strike near Taiji (Taiji is where Abu Ghraib is for those wondering about where Taiji is – it is the northernmost of the agricultural districts, or qadas, that ring Baghdad and separate Baghdad Province from the surrounding provinces), will undoubtedly be unconventional. But it is important to keep in mind that an unconventional response doesn’t mean an unconventional use of military power. The Iranians, like all states, have other elements of national power that they can leverage and use to respond. We refer to these elements of national power as the DIME-FIL (Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, and Legal). The Iranians also have a well developed and effective cyber operations capacity. And the cyber domain, the tools used to operate effectively in it, and the cyber operations themselves are all very effective ways of utilizing the non-military forms of power.

As we consider what the Iranians might do, we need to move beyond the low hanging fruit of attacks by their proxies on US and our Coalition partners in the region. Or attacks on the petroleum sector in our regional partners that would spike oil and gas prices. I’m not suggesting these won’t happen, I’m sure there will be some of them, but these are obvious and we can plan for them, to manage them, and to mitigate them. There are also less obvious targets and less obvious weapons and tools that the Iranians can use to strike back.

This past fall DHS, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Arlington, VA Police Department participated in a table top simulation, dubbed Operation Blackout, focusing on the 2020 election. They were the Blue Team (the good guys). The opposing force, or Red Team (the bad guys), were a group of white hat hackers. The Red Team were not permitted to hack the actual election in the simulation, they couldn’t hack machines, voting systems, anything like that. So what did they do? They hacked everything else. And, as a result, within the simulated world of the exercise they created so much chaos that martial law was declared by the person on the Blue Team playing the president in the exercise and the 2020 election, within that notional world, was cancelled. You can read the Red Team’s write up of the exercise here.

In early 2018 I prepared a strategic analysis on Russia’s active measures campaign. I wrote:

Putin’s cyberwarfare has also targeted actual American infrastructure. Russian for cover officials have been tracked mapping US critical physical infrastructure, such as the communication and power transmission grid. This was in support of a cyberwarfare campaign to infiltrate and compromise another important American center of gravity: the US power generation and transmission grid. Putin’s ability to weaponize information and the platforms where American’s get their information combined with his ability to bring down all or portions of the US power grid should have every national security professional very, very, very worried. Putin’s cyberwarriors have already tried to create a response through planting false social media stories of actual fake news reports about a foreign terrorist attack on the US energy sector, an ebola outbreak, and a riot in response to a police shooting. All of which never happened. Imagine what happens when Putin starts turning parts of the US power grid off during extreme weather events while at the same time he’s spreading disinformation made to look like actual news reports or official municipal, state, and/or Federal responses to the disaster he’s created. This is the threat we face.

Now imagine what happens when the Iranians start doing the things that I described above or creating the type of chaos that the Red Team created in the 2020 election simulation. And not in or just in New York or DC or LA or Seattle or Miami or Atlanta or Chicago, but in more suburban and rural areas. In red states that have no where near the state and local capabilities to respond. Imagine what happens when they hack into banks and the financial service sector and start stealing financial information and manipulating the markest. Imagine what happens when they release the Signals Intercepts they have of US elected and appointed officials, as well as those of people running major corporations or the news networks and newspapers.

And this is where the embarrassment comes in. If you want to strike back at the President, you do so in a way that gets under his skin. Skin that he demonstrates daily on his Twitter feed is exceedingly thin. The President is noted for spending hours speaking to world leaders, his outside advisors and friends on an unsecured phone from the White House residence each night, or from one of his properties when he goes to Mar a Lago or plays golf at his clubs, presents a target rich environment all on his own. The Iranians have a target rich environment given the President’s well documented poor Op-Sec and Info-Sec practices. The Iranians have a target rich environment given Rudy Giuliani’s poor Op-Sec and Info-Sec practices. The Iranians have a target rich environment because Jared Kushner communicates with Muhammed bin Salman on WhatsApp, which is  not secure. The Iranians have a target rich environment in the largely wide open US information and cyber domains. And they have the ability to exploit weaknesses in those domains to leverage power, other than military power, across the DIME-FIL. And they will leverage those capabilities to wage an unconventional war against the US and one of the strategic objectives will be to embarrass the President. And that embarrassment will be both an end in itself and done to goad him into badly overreacting out of anger, which will then provide the Iranians with further opportunities to wage their unconventional campaign.

Open thread!

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How to Stop a War

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Our Commander-in-Chief:

President Trump told reporters Friday that the United States had killed Qasem Soleimani, one of Iran’s top military figures, in a bid to “stop a war.” The president, speaking at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, urged Iran not to retaliate.

“We did not take action to start a war,” he said.

So it goes something like this, see if I’m paying attention:

  1. Kill top general of the opposition forces.
  2. ?????
  3. War stopped. QED

Other thoughts in the same vein:

  • “I didn’t go running in traffic to get hit by a car, but to cross the street.”
  • “I didn’t have unprotected sex to get pregnant, but to have some fun.”

Open thread.

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Say Hello to the New Boss

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Apparently Qasem Soleimani was a key leader in the Iranian military:

As leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, the 62-year-old bore responsibility for Iran’s clandestine operations abroad, quietly extending the military reach of Iran deep into foreign conflicts such as those in Syria and Iraq.

In the process, he earned himself near-mythical status among his enemies and idolization by his Iranian hard-line supporters.

Analysts have complained that Soleimani had more diplomatic clout than Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and pondered whether he would eventually seek top political office. Some compared him to Karla, the fanatical, but fictional, Soviet spymaster in John le Carré’s Cold War novels.

Killing him was a major provocation, and certainly it will have some effect on the morale and capabilities of the Quds Force, but is it going to have any long-term effect? My guess is that it won’t, for two reasons. First, military and paramilitary organizations are designed to be resilient to loss of command since one of the major risks of war is, obviously, death. Second, the command structure of any quality military organization is going to be full of ambitious and talented officers who are capable of taking the place of the top leader.

In other words, there are half a dozen Karlas waiting in the wings to replace this guy. The history of this endless war is replete with the killing of some #1 or other that probably causes some short-term chaos, but changes very little in the long run. I think part of the reason that the US is constantly “decapitating” enemies is that we can do it with precision airstrikes rather than a commitment of ground troops, so it is a relatively easy gesture that shows we’re “doing something”.

Well, now we did something. As much as Trump, Pompeo and the rest want to do more, that next steps are a hell of a lot more militarily and politically risky than a targeted airstrike.

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