Remembering The Vietnam War

I graduated from high school in June of 1964.  The US had placed military advisors in Vietnam since the French left in 1954.  In August of 1964, a few weeks after my high school graduation, the North Vietnamese  allegedly fired on 2 US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin and congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving President Johnson unprecedented power to wage war.  The first action was the aerial bombing of military and industrial targets in North Vietnam.  It was anticipated that this action would bring the North to it's knees within 8 weeks.  That should remind you of "shock and awe" in Iraq.  Well it didn't work out that way.  The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong started attacking the US air bases in Vietnam.  In my freshman year in college the first US ground troops were sent to Vietnam to protect the air bases in March of 1965.

During my college career the war continued to escalate and a few months before my graduation in January of 1968 there was a coordinated attack by the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong - the Tet offensive.  As a result even more troops were sent and the draft boards were very busy.  Unlike the recent operations in the Middle East most Americans knew someone who served in Vietnam and many knew someone who died there.  When the war ended in 1973 over two and a half million had served there and 58,272 had died there.

The Vietnam war shaped my political thinking.  While over 58,000 of America's finest died for nothing I had hoped that we had learned a lesson.  But that was not to be the case.  The Bush/Cheney cabal and the military industrial complex made all the same wrong assumptions and there are still some who want to involve us in unwinnable military adventures.

I fear for the future.  The Middle East is a powder keg about to explode.  There are those who insist the US needs to show "leadership."  Leadership equals more of America's finest dying for nothing and resources needed to fix the homeland will be squandered elsewhere.  

This is what I'm thinking on this Memorial Day.  

The Price We Will Pay For Bush's Folly

On the same day that the totally bonkers Liz Cheney pens an op-ed in the WSJ where she says this:

The president has so effectively diminished American strength abroad that there is no longer a question of whether this was his intent. He is working to pre-emptively disarm the United States. He advocates slashing our nuclear arsenal even as the North Koreans threaten us and the Iranians close in on their own nuclear weapon. He has turned his back on America's allies around the world and ignored growing threats.

we find out that we will all be paying for Bush and Cheney's folly in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades to come. 

Abstract: The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history – totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs. The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid. Since 2001, the US has expanded the quality, quantity, availability and eligibility of benefits for military personnel and veterans. This has led to unprecedented growth in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense budgets. These benefits will increase further over the next 40 years. Additional funds are committed to replacing large quantities of basic equipment used in the wars and to support ongoing diplomatic presence and military assistance in the Iraq and Afghanistan region. The large sums borrowed to finance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will also impose substantial long-term debt servicing costs. As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives. The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.

Remember what we were told 10 years ago?  James Fallows does:

A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisors as Paul Wolfowitz, who said that the invasion would be largely "self-financing" via Iraq's oil, and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war's total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.

So what does the Harvard Kennedy School of Government report see as the greatest security threat?

One of the most significant challenges to future US national security policy will not originate from any external threat. Rather it is simply coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Get that Liz?  Our biggest security threat are the actions of your father and George W. Bush.
Go read the entire report (pdf) for a breakdown of the costs.

Bomb kills two Iraq politicians in disputed town

Bomb kills two Iraq politicians in disputed town (via AFP)

A bomb tore through an armour-plated car near a disputed town north of Baghdad on Tuesday, killing two election candidates and badly hurting a town mayor, weeks before Iraq's first vote since 2010. The blast in the town of Tuz Khurmatu, which also killed a bodyguard and wounded another, brings to 11…

Is It Really The Iraq War?

With the 10 year anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq there have been a number of conservatives and Republicans who think the war has tarnished the GOP brand.  I referenced Daniel McCarthy's piece in The American Conservative yesterday and Doug Mataconis has some thoughts on a few more today starting off with Ross Douthat's opinion piece today.   The Republican's predicament is being compared to the Democrat's problems post Vietnam War.  I am old enough to have been an adult in both situations.  While I can see parallels I'm not convinced it's entirely the parallels they are seeing.
First let's take a look at the Democrats post Vietnam.  I think there are 2 factors that led to the Democrat's woes after the war, one related to the war, one not so much and both were somewhat related to each other.

• The first was the emergence of the radical left - the hippies if you will.  The radical left movement was certainly a result of the war but it scared the hell out of people and their association with the Democratic Party hurt the Democrats.  The voters simply did not trust them to govern.
• The second was the Civil Rights Act.  Do you really think the South went from blue to red because of the Vietnam war.

It was a case of a majority of the population seeing the image of America changing.  The old morality and social order was dissolving before their eyes and they were afraid.
Now let's fast forward to the post Iraq war world.  Lee Atwater and Richard Nixon's "silent majority" has become the very loud minority. The country has moved on when it comes to civil rights, women's rights, gay rights etc.  So like the Democrats in the early 70s the Republicans no longer represent the majority of the American citizens.  While the Vietnam war was responsible for the emergence of the radical left it was the election of a black Democratic president that was responsible for the emergence of the radical right - the Tea Party.  Both were out of touch with the times.
Sorry Republicans, while the Iraq war was a mistake and mismanaged that's not your problem anymore than the Vietnam War was the Democrats real problem in the 70s.

Iraq War 10 Years Latter - Saturday Reads

As we all know it was 10 years ago that the Iraq war began.  I did a post last week but I wanted to see what others were saying.

John B. Judis recalls what it was like to oppose the Iraq war. He makes this observation at the end:

My own experience after Powell’s speech bears out the tremendous power that an administration, bent on deception, can have over public opinion, especially when it comes to foreign policy. And when the dissenters in the CIA, military, and State Department are silenced, the public—not to mention, journalists—has little recourse in deciding whether to support what the administration wants to do. Those months before the Iraq war testify to the importance of letting the public have full access to information before making decisions about war and peace. And that lesson should be heeded before we rush into still another war in the Middle East.

Noah Millman agrees with Judis for the most part but thinks he underestimates the dissenting voices.

But the dissenters weren’t “silenced” so much as ignored – and not only by the Administration. They were ignored when they testified before Congress. They were ignored by the press. They were ignored by ordinary people – like myself – in personal conversation. I remember vividly having an argument with an intelligent, non-ideological friend who opposed the war simply because he saw that the case for it was absurdly threadbare. When I couldn’t actually refute his arguments, I changed them in my own mind to easier-to-defeat straw men, the better to preserve my already-settled opinion. Yes, we were deceived about any number of matters – but we, official Washingtonians and ignorant college students, wanted to be deceived. Because we wanted to go to war.

Daniel Larison writes about the Unlearned Lessons of the Iraq War.  One of the lessons that hasn't been learned is that those who want war will engage in fear mongering and threat inflation.

Following the end of the Cold War, American hawks have felt compelled to build up every minor threat as a new global menace to replace the vanished Soviet Union. That has inevitably required grossly exaggerating the danger to the U.S. and the rest of the world from third- or fourth-tier states. The fear-mongering about Hussein’s Iraq in 2002-03 was one of the more extreme and absurd examples of this since there were few states in the world that posed less of a threat to America than a broken-down, disarmed, impoverished, and internationally isolated dictatorship. The idea that the U.S. was being “forced” to go to war was preposterous at the time, and in hindsight it appears even more so. 

We are seeing something similar now from those who want to attack Iran and get us involved in Syria.
Over at The Moderate Voice Dorian De Wind discusses the numbers of the Iraq war.

Daniel McCarthy thinks that Iraq will become The GOP's Vietnam:

The Republican Party may not be able to escape its McGovern phase, even if Democrats screw up (as they will) and we briefly get a Republican Carter. The party and the ideology soaked into it have lost their reputation for competence, and they’ve lost the emotional resonances that come with being the party of America: victory, prosperity, normality. Instead the resonances that come from the War on Terror are of a party and an era marked by resentment, recession, and insecurity. Although the party still sees Ronald Reagan when it looks in the mirror, what the rest of the country sees is George W. Bush—much as post-Vietnam Democrats continued to think of themselves as the party of Franklin Roosevelt when in the minds of most Americans they had become the party of Johnson and McGovern.
Until the Republican Party can come to grips with its failure, the Democrats will be the party Americans trust to govern.

10 Years Later

I wasn't blogging yet 10 years ago, I started this blog in May of 2004.  But I was reading blogs.  I remember that many pointed out that the ultimate winner of the war would be Iran.  I spent some time today going over some of my early posts.  One of the sources of intelligence used by the Bush/Cheney cabal was one Ahmed Chalabi.  In May of 2004 we found out that Chalabi was working for the Iranians.  Here is my post from May, 21, 2004:
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Talk about being had, it appears that Cheney and the Defense Department were being taken in and paying Iranian spies as in Chalabi and his slimy group.
Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran

WASHINGTON -- The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.

"Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.

In other words we attacked one country part of the Axis of Evil, Iraq, for another, Iran.
Will the incompetence ever end.
Josh Marshall also has some thoughts on this
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Indeed, we fought a war against Iran's arch enemy - we lost and Iran won.

Cheney promised us that the US would be seen as liberators.  It took a little over a year to see proof that this was just another lie.  This post from June 19, 2004:
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In a recent poll conducted by the US CPA in Iraq 55 percent of the Iraqi's polled said they would feel safer when the Americans left. With headlines like this you can see why:
US Strikes 'Al Qaeda Safe House' in Iraq, 22 Dead

FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. forces launched an air strike on Saturday on what they said was a safe house linked to elusive al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the Iraqi city of Falluja, killing 22 people in a "precision strike."

"An American plane hit this house and three others were damaged. Only body parts are left," a witness said, as rescuers dug through the rubble of the shattered house for survivors.

"They brought us 22 corpses, children, women and youth," Ahmed Hassan, a cemetery worker, said after the blast.

I'm sorry, but even if it was an al Quida safe house this is no way to make the Iraqi citizens feel more secure or feel good about the American presence. No matter how you felt about the war it can't be hard to concede that the effort has been thourghly botched.

Update

Juan Cole has some thoughts on this. He thinks it might be considered a war crime since many of the dead were women and children.
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Iraq was a colossal mistake.  Even those who think it might have been a good idea admit that there was gross incompetence on the part of the Bush administration.

Iraq - What Were We Fighting For Again?

Iraqi Forces At Syrian Border (AFP)

As the United States tries to decide how to support the rebel army in Syria the country that we spent a trillion dollars and lost 4,000+ Americans is fighting that same rebel army.

For the first time, Iraqi forces opened fire on Syria shelling the positions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) days after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki warned that a victory of the Syrian opposition would spread chaos in the region.
Al Arabiya correspondent near the Syrian-Iraqi border reported that Iraqi snipers took up positions on buildings near the Rebiya crossing while others forces shelled the positions of the Free Syrian Army.

The correspondent said that large reinforcements were being deployed by the Maliki government in Baghdad near the Syrian borders.

On Wednesday, Maliki warned if victory by Syrian rebels will spark sectarian wars in his own country and in Lebanon and will create a new haven for al-Qaeda that would destabilize the region.
“Neither the opposition nor the regime can finish each other off,” he said. “If the opposition is victorious, there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan and a sectarian war in Iraq,” Maliki said in an interview with the Associated Press.

So we overthrew an arch enemy of Iran and replaced it with an Iranian client state.  Of course this is no real surprise as it was predicted by many before the war started.
via James Joyner. 

The Footprint We Can't Afford

"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."
~ William Kristol, April 4th, 2003

William Kristol  takes to the pages of The Weekly Standard to bemoan the fact that the Conservative movement is in deep disarray.

And the conservative movement​—​a bulwark of American strength for the last several decades​—​is in deep disarray. Reading about some conservative organizations and Republican campaigns these days, one is reminded of Eric Hoffer’s remark, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” It may be that major parts of American conservatism have become such a racket that a kind of refounding of the movement as a cause is necessary. A reinvigoration of the Republican party also seems desirable, based on a new generation of leaders, perhaps coming​—​as did Ike and Reagan​—​from outside the normal channels.

Of course he's upset for all the wrong reasons.  What he is really upset about is the Neocons are no longer in power and the US is no longer the world's bully.  He want's the US to have a big footprint that it can no longer afford.

As the world unravels on Barack Obama’s watch, conservatives might want to take some solace in saying​—​We told you so! But they shouldn't  First of all, it’s not as if the Romney campaign or the GOP congressional leadership or most conservative organizations really spent much time bothering to warn of the consequences of Obama’s foreign policy. And in any case, there’s not much solace to be had, as the world coming apart threatens the well-being of America, not just the success of Barack Obama’s second term.

So what can conservatives do? They can explain that decline has been a choice, and that weakness has consequences. They can explain that Obama’s inaction in Syria now is of a piece with his inaction in Iran in 2009, that the abandonment of Iraq in 2011 prefigured the prospective abandonment of Afghanistan over the next couple of years, and that defense cuts at home go hand in hand with an oh-so-light footprint abroad. The Obama administration has chosen a course of American retrenchment and retreat. Conservatives can urge the president to reverse course. They can try to minimize the damage he can cause over the next four years. And, as important, they can prepare to be ready to repair the damage from the Obama years.

Sorry Billie, we simply can't afford that big footprint anymore.  We should have never gone into Iraq - a war based on lies and paid for on a credit card.  Afghanistan now also appears to have been a mistake.  And you want to get us involved in wars in Syria and advocate an attack on Iran.
 
And speaking of Iran - have you forgotten that Khomeini gained power in Iran because the democratically elected Prime Minster was overthrown by the CIA and universally hated Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was placed in power as a puppet of the US and Britain.  Our interventions have not really worked out too well.

No we can't afford that big footprint or the blow back that usually results when we insert ourselves.

The Year Was 1972

George McGovern / Wikimedia Commons

The Year was 1972.  I had just become a civilian after three years in the military.  While I was never in Vietnam I knew many who were and the impact it had on their lives.  Friends and relatives had been killed in SE Asia and nearly everyone had known for some time that the war could not be won but thousands had died anyway.  I voted for George McGovern that year.  My second presidential election and the second time I had voted for the loser.  Well George McGovern has died at 90.  

If you are looking for an eulogy for the "liberal stalwart" you probably can't do any better than the 2006 article by Bill Kauffman  in of all places The American Conservative, Come Home, America.  You really should go read the entire thing but I will give you a few snips.

But perhaps, as George McGovern ages gracefully while his country does not, it is time to stop looking at McGovern through the lenses of Scoop Jackson and those neoconservative publicists who so often trace their disenchantment with the Democratic Party to the 1972 campaign. What if we refocus the image and see the George McGovern who doesn’t fit the cartoon? Son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister who had played second base in the St. Louis Cardinals farm system, this other George McGovern revered Charles Lindbergh as “our greatest American” and counted among his happiest memories those “joyous experiences with my dad” hunting pheasants. He was voted “The Most Representative Senior Boy” in his high school and went to the college down the street, walking a mile each morning to Dakota Wesleyan and then coming home for lunch.
This other George McGovern was a bomber pilot who flew 35 B-24 missions in the Dakota Queen, named after his wife, Eleanor Stegeberg of Woonsocket, South Dakota, whom he had courted at the Mitchell Roller Rink. He grew up in and remains a congregant of the First United Methodist Church of Mitchell; he knows by heart the “old hymns” and sings them aloud “with the gusto of those devout congregations that shaped my life so many years ago.” This other George McGovern is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan and member in good standing of the Stan Musial Society. He lives most of the year in Mitchell, his hometown, and says, “There is a wholesomeness about life in a rural state that is a meaningful factor. It doesn’t guarantee you are going to be a good guy simply because you grow up in an agricultural area, but I think the chances of it are better, because of the sense of well-being, the confidence in the decency of life that comes with working not only with the land but also with the kinds of people who live on the land. Life tends to be more authentic and less artificial than in urban areas. You have a sense of belonging to a community. You’re closer to nature and you see the changing seasons.”

And yes that B-24 pilot was no 'chicken hawk' but a decorated peace hawk.

McGovern is, as you might guess, an opponent of the Iraq War and the Bush administration, which he finds appallingly un-conservative.
.........
I ask if Iraq is yet in Vietnam’s class as a foreign-policy disaster. “The casualty rate isn’t nearly as high,” he responds, “but the assumptions are just as misguided. Vietnam was a logical expression of the Cold War ideology that we operated under for half a century. If you accepted the view that we had to confront communism wherever it raised its head, Vietnam became perfectly logical.

Caution to the wind:

With the Oregon Republican and neo-Taftie Mark Hatfield, McGovern sponsored the 1970 McGovern-Hatfield “Amendment to End the War,” which called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam and “an end to all U.S. military operations in or over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos no later than December 31, 1971.”
Impatient with the chronically cautious, with the kind of eunuchs who tell you behind closed doors that they’re against a war but don’t want to risk their position by taking a public stand, McGovern told his colleagues, “Every Senator in this Chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This Chamber reeks of blood.”

Kauffman concludes with this:

Oh, how the Democrats could use a bracing shot of McGovernism.

I couldn't agree more.  Rest in Peace George McGovern.

9/11 - Fear and Incompetence

Thomas Ricks reviews 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by Kurt Eichenwald.  While it has some weaknesses it does a good job of pointing out what happens when fear was driving the incompetent Bush administration following 9/11 leading to a lot of really bad decisions.

With each piece of evidence, it becomes clearer that in late 2001 and in 2002, President Bush and Vice President Cheney had begun panicking. Mistaking rumors and lies fabricated by victims of torture as actionable information and elbowing aside skeptics, they gave rein to their fears that the worst was yet to come — and their hysteria spread to and infected parts of the national security ­establishment.
......
The administration’s lack of self-­control led the president to repeatedly make baseless assertions to the American people. Bush said in his first State of the Union address that American soldiers had apprehended people in Bosnia who were plotting to bomb the American Embassy there. As Eichenwald shows, this was untrue. No evidence supporting that charge was ever found, and five of the six men were set free after being held for seven years, their detention ruled illegal by a federal judge. (The sixth remained in detention on the basis of secret intelligence.)

And this is one of the scariest things - Iraq and the Bible:

A more deadly consequence of this heedlessness was the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the false belief that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. An exchange from that time conveys the mind-set of the Bush administration. When Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, told Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy defense secretary, that there was no intelligence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, “Wolfowitz tightened his lips,” Eichenwald writes. “ ‘We’ll find it,’ he said with certainty in his voice. ‘It’s got to be there.’ ” The run-up to the Iraq war also elicits one of the most pungent lines in the book. After Bush told Jacques Chirac that biblical prophecies were being fulfilled and specifically that “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” the French president decided, in Eichenwald’s words, that “France was not going to fight a war based on an American president’s interpretation of the Bible.”

So here we have an ignorant President and a bunch of ideological incompetents in charge at a very dangerous time in out history.  Many of these same ideological incompetents are the same ones advising Mitt Romney.  That should give everyone pause since everything indicates that Romney is just as ignorant as Bush.

Netanyahu Scaremongering in 2002

Bibi Netanyahu visited the United Nations this week to talk about Iran's nuclear program.  He came complete with visual aids.  Juan Cole points out this is not the first time that Netanyahu has practiced scaremongering involving a nuclear program.  He did it in 2002 and he was talking about Iraq not Iran and he was dead wrong.

Israeli PM Binyamin “Chicken Little” Netanyahu tried to scaremonger about Iraq in 2002, as his contribution to the Anglo-American war of aggression on that country. “there is no question whatsoever,” Netanyahu said, “that Saddam” was seeking nuclear weapons. He said that Israeli intelligence reported to him that Russian scientists and North Korea were on site and actively aiding this phantom nuclear weapons program.
There was no Iraqi nuclear weapons program in 2002; it was dismantled in the early 1990s by United Nations inspectors. There were none of the chemical or biological weapons Netanyahu spoke of. No Russians. No North Koreans. Bupkes.

Remembering The Largest Intelligence Failure

It was 11 years ago today that 19 psychopaths took the lives of over 3,000 people.  What few people still can't let themselves admit is it also represents a massive failure of intelligence and leadership.  The intelligence failure could have been mitigated if the Bush administration had shown more leadership but the administration was busy planning an invasion and occupation of Iraq which in the end would benefit Iran.

Kurt Eichenwald:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that "a group presently in the United States" was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be "imminent," although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.
But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives' suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.
In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.[bold mine]

 It's those same neoconservatives the Romney has turned to for his foreign policy advise.  If you thought Iraq was a mistake what do you think an attack on Iran would be.
Yes it's important to remember those who died on that day but it's also important what contributed to it and the horrible and costly mistakes that followed.

Weekend Book Review - Kaboom: Embracing The Suck In A Savage Little War

I graduated from college in June, 1968. This was a few months after the Tet Offensive. The United States still had a draft and I was caught in it. I received my draft notice in September and I was ordered to report in November. If I went the draft - two year route it was almost guaranteed that I would end up as a grunt in Vietnam so I went down to the local recruiting office and enlisted for Army Intelligence. I gave up another year of my life to possibly save it. I never saw Vietnam or combat. I served with other college graduates on the frontiers of freedom in downtown Munich, Germany. Most of us opposed the war and opposed being in the Army. We might not have been in or near combat but we had a relationship I had not experienced before and have not experienced since.



Fast forward forty years and some things have changed but others are the same. There is no draft but there is a futile war managed by men who don't know what they are doing. The situation on the ground in Iraq is the subject of Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War by Matt Gallagher. Kathrine Tomlinson of California Literary Review tries to compare Gallagher's book to other war literature - she misses the point. Ms Tomlinson has never been in the military or close to war and doesn't understand that this is not a book about war but a book about soldier's relationships in war. It's about what they refer to in the military as esprit de corps. It's about those personal relationships - looking out for others in your unit regardless of politics because of the shared "suck".


So who is Matt Gallagher?

I was born into a class, in a time, to a people, in a place where someone else's sons and daughters served in the armed forces. While I wasn't a politician's boy or a spurner of old money like in the fables, a child of two lawyers still qualified as a Fortunate Son in most parts of the world. I was raised in that curious subculture of Americana enslaved to emo music, new friend requests on Facebook, and lots and lots of Internet porn-part of the generation that the "An Army of One" slogan supposedly appealed to, due to our obsession with all things self. I didn't come from the breadbasket of rural America or the urban ghettos like most of my men, and I didn't seek out the military for glory or for country. I came from the West Coast suburbs, modern white collar contentment at its most gnarled and escapist, and happened to read too many damn books about soldiers.

While Gallagher was from a different world he easily became one with his men - that is esprit de corps or shared "suck" at work. One of the things they shared was a disdain for incompetent field officers and civilians. You can appreciate that if you have been in the military but even if you haven't you have probably had experience with incompetent middle mangers in the civilian world.


In December, 2007 Gallagher and his platoon, The Gravediggers, found themselves NE of Baghdad in Saba al-Bor doing counterinsurgency as part of "the surge".

Just another day in the Suck. Just another day of counterinsurgency tedium, solving a nonconventional, nation-building, political problem with a conventional military used to nation destroying that sometimes forgot it was trying to be nonconventional. Just another day of our dismount teams walking with me between creeping Strykers, winding through the back alleys and alley backs of Saba al-Bor. Just another day of talking to the locals and listening to their multitude of gripes, bitches, and complaints. Just another day of "mistah, mistah, gimme-"
"Please, sir, I want some more."

Gallagher gives is a first hand account of the nuts and bolts of the counterinsurgency effort during the "surge". He does very little editorializing and I will leave it up to you to decide the wisdom and effectiveness of the policy.


More important for me was not the war itself but the relationship of men thrown together 24 hours a day, seven days a week in an alien and hostile place far from home.


The majority of Americans have no idea what war is all about. I recommend Kaboom because it may well help in a small way facilitate that understanding.  It's also a good read as Matt Gallagher also has a pretty good way with words and adds some humor to what should be a humorless situation.
Cross posted at The Moderate Voice





Note:

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for this review.

Finally they notice

Via upyernoz at Rubber Hose the New York Times has finally figured out what many of us have been saying for months - the US and the Iranians are on the same side in Iraq.
U.S. and Iran Find Common Ground in Iraq’s Shiite Conflict

BAGHDAD — In the Iraqi government’s fight to subdue the Shiite militia of Moktada al-Sadr in the southern city of Basra, perhaps nothing reveals the complexities of the Iraq conflict more starkly than this: Iran and the United States find themselves on the same side.

The causes of this convergence boil down to the logic of self-interest, although it is logic in a place where even the most basic reasoning refuses to go in a straight line. In essence, though, the calculation by the United States is that it must back the government it helped to create and take the steps needed to protect American troops and civilian officials.

Iranian motivations appear to hinge on the possibility that Mr. Sadr’s political and military followers could gain power in provincial elections this fall, and disrupt the creation of a semiautonomous region in the south that the Iranians see as beneficial.

The American-Iranian convergence is all the more remarkable because of mutual animosity. The United States says that Iran has backed thousands of attacks on American troops in Iraq, bitterly opposes its nuclear program and has not ruled out bombing Iran if Iranian policies do not change. Meanwhile, at the level of senior officials at least, Iran takes quite seriously its depiction of the United States as the planet’s Great Satan.

I made this observation below:

They are constantly ranting about Iran but they have and continue to do all of Iran's dirty work in Iraq. They toppled Iran's arch enemy, Saddam, they put the most pro-Iranian elements in Iraq in power and they continue to defend those elements with US blood and treasure.

and upyernoz explains:

for years the iranian government has backed the same iraqi government as the u.s. over a year ago, bush met with the leader of what was then called the SCIRI (now called the ISCI) to pressure them to join the maliki government. the SCIRI/ISCI is one of the most overtly pro-iranian group in iraq. the members of the ISCI's militia, the badr organization, actually draw their pensions from the iranian revolutionary guard. bush was, quite literally, pushing iranian agents to become part of the u.s. supported iraqi government.

The Bush administration is supporting a group that is literally on the payroll of the Iranian government - the Badr Organization.

I have to wonder if al-Sadr remains in Iran because the Iranians won't let him return. The last thing the Iranians what is as al-Sadr in power.

Quote of the day

I discussed Condi Rice's playground bully moment below and Jazz did it over at The Moderate Voice. Juan Cole's reaction is the quote of the day:

Has Rice ever said anything about Iraq that was true or useful? Even as she was talking up 'improved security' in Baghdad, mortar shells were falling about her in the Green Zone.

Bring em on!

I have spent the last several years trying figure out if the Bush/Cheney administration and the neocons are stupid and delusional, just plain crazy or if there is some bizarre method to their madness. I'm beginning to think it must be all of the above. They are constantly ranting about Iran but they have and continue to do all of Iran's dirty work in Iraq. They toppled Iran's arch enemy, Saddam, they put the most pro-Iranian elements in Iraq in power and they continue to defend those elements with US blood and treasure. The latest example is this:
Iraqi Army Takes Last Basra Areas From Sadr Force
But of course they didn't do it alone.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

While the administration talks about about Iran's support for al-Sadr the Iranians are laughing. They like al-Maliki's government just fine since it is supported and controlled by the pro-Iranian ISCI and Da'wa party. The Iraqi security forces are primarily members of the Badr Brigade - a creation of the Iranians.

While that is stupid it is not nearly as stupid as this:
Secretary of State Rice Mocks Muslim Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a Coward

BAGHDAD — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers.

Now the American and British air strikes may have driven the Mehdi army underground but only to fight another day. The always stupid and incompetent Rice has just poured gasoline on embers which will flare up even sooner resulting in the deaths of both Iraqis and Americans. This administration is criminally stupid and incompetent.

Great momments in wingnuttery

As if one failing occupation wasn't enough we have the wingnut post of the day from Dr. Rusty Shackleford:
The Two Wars in Iraq & Mistaken Republican Support for Obama
First we have this:

Bush screwed the pooch in Iraq. There is a good argument to be made that we should not have invaded in the first place.* There is no good argument that we should leave.

Well he's half right and that's an improvement but it goes downhill from there.

This conclusion is inevitable when one comes to the same realization as me. There was a war in Iraq and there is a war in Iraq. In fact, we've had two wars in Iraq: Iraq War I & Iraq War II.

The war now is not the same as that war. The first war in Iraq was against Saddam Hussein, the second war is against Islamists of various stripes, but mainly al Qaeda.

Give me a break, "the second war is against Islamists of various stripes, but mainly al Qaeda". Not even the Pentagon or the Bush administration make such claims anymore. You're not paying attention to the latest talking points Rusty, it's all about Iran now - you know, the country who's President is greeted with flowers by "our" puppet government.

And poor Rusty's rantings become even more demented and delusional. In fact his conclusion reads like something from Fafblog:

We must begin to speak of two Iraq wars. The two wars conception is more precise. It describes what has happened and what is happening in Iraq more fully than speaking of the war. It clarifies many of the debates surrounding the present war as well as allows us to conceptually think more clearly.

Further, the only way to convince war skeptics that winning the present war in Iraq is in our national interests is to give them the linguistic tools for being able to conceive of it as separate from the first war, even if it flows from it.

The First Iraq War may have been "optional", as many of the critics say; but the Second Iraq war is not. We must win it. The price of victory may be high, but the price of defeat is higher.

*There are also good arguments, in my estimation, that the decision to invade Iraq was correct.

**There may be an argument that Iraq I was an extension of the Gulf War in the same way that some view WWII was an extension of WWI.

Of course the Fafblog crew isn't serious - Rusty is! Straight jacket please.

Clueless, Dangerous Idiots-Hot Air Edition

The other day I discussed how clueless the neocons and the Bush administration is when it comes to the realities of Iraq. Not to be outdone our friend Ed Morrissey writing at Hot Air proves he is either in denial or just as clueless.
Iraqis aren’t stupid — and they’re watching us

As Michael reminds us, we can argue over 2002-3 all we want, but it doesn’t have anything to do with 2008. We are in Iraq, and al-Qaeda is arrayed against our troops. In fact, this is the best possible situation if we want to fight terrorists — to have them on a battlefield in straight-up fights against our military. It’s exactly what terrorists don’t want. If they wanted to fight our military, they wouldn’t use bomb commuter trains and fly civilian airplanes into their targets.

OK, Ed is even more delusional than the administration - not even they think al-Qaeda is a significant force is Iraq. He then goes on to say that al-Qaeda wants us to leave Iraq - nothing could be further from the truth. Both al-Qaeda and Iran love the fact that our military is tied down and rapidly being worn down in Bush's ill advised Mesopotamian quagmire. And speaking of Iran - they are all ready the winners in Iraq. Their longtime nemesis, Saddam, is gone and their very good friends of the ISCI and Da'wa party a firmly in control. If we really think the government of al-Maliki is "our" ally we are really fools.

Clueless, Dangerous Idiots

The Bush/Cheney administration and the neocons are truly clueless - dangerous - idiots.
Iran Top Threat To Iraq, U.S. Says

Last week's violence in Basra and Baghdad has convinced the Bush administration that actions by Iran, and not al-Qaeda, are the primary threat inside Iraq, and has sparked a broad reassessment of policy in the region, according to senior U.S. officials.

Evidence of an increase in Iranian weapons, training and direction for the Shiite militias that battled U.S. and Iraqi security forces in those two cities has fixed new U.S. attention on what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday called Tehran's "malign" influence, the officials said.

The intensified focus on Iran coincides with diminished emphasis on al-Qaeda in Iraq as the leading justification for an ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq.

Yes, they are still looking for an excuse to attack Iran. And if they do? It would appear they are oblivious to the fact that the ISCI and Da'wa party are even closer to Iran than al-Sadr. The ISCI's Badr brigade has infiltrated the Iraqi security forces and they will not stand by if the US should attack Iran. With the ISCI and the Da'wa party in charge of the government Iran is already calling most of the shots. Iran, unlike the US, realizes al-Sadr is popular and powerful so they give him token support. But they would much prefer to have the ISCI and the Da'wa party running the show in Iraq.

If the US thinks that al-Sadr is a problem just wait until the US bombs Iran. That's when all hell will break lose.

Losing In Iraq

Over at Chuck for... I spent some time on the issue of "Winning" as an unconvinced sort, this over here is the other side. What is it that constitutes losing in Iraq? The Republicans are pretty clear that if the Democrats prevail and we withdraw, we lose. Withdraw = defeat. I can get the metric of leaving when the Republicans don't want us to is a Republican defeat, but they evidently want us to take it as something more.



Sainted Gen Petraeus was willing to put Al Qaeda in Iraq numbers at something in excess of 1,000. That is quite a few trouble makers with access to military hardware and munitions. It is not a credible fighting force, it cannot take and hold ground. It is really no more than a police matter. Whatever else it is, Al Qaeda in Iraq cannot take over the government. Nobody paying any attention could manage to "lose" to that bunch.



There is talk of our exit leading to a failed state. This is actually said with a straight face - failed state - as though what is in existence now is somehow successful. The government in Iraq is rated one of the most corrupt in the world, Republicans can rightfully point to that success The government is representative of a fraction of the country, some self-excluded, some excluded but it is not a government of Iraq. We have now armed and trained Sunnis, those at most danger of genocide, so they will now be somewhat difficult to just eradicate.

An explosion of violence is possible. The question being whether such a spike of violence would be in fact worse than the steady drip, drip of violence today. It is an unfortunate sort of measure to take, but factually the difference between 5,000 victims over 5 years and 5,000 over a month is immaterial. The pile of bodies at one time certainly looks worse in a short period, it is still the same pile. I have a natural aversion to being heartless in expression, but dammit, dead is dead.

The very latest version of loss is Iran having great influence over Iraq. I have a news flash for those making that argument, they already have it. Our President sneaks in, the Iranian President roams the streets to cheers, flowers, and kisses. A failed Iraqi offensive against the Sadrists is saved by a ceasefire mediated by the Iranians - not us. The plain fact is that Iran has sheltered the Shia from Saddam and from us, now. We opened that door thrice, once by invading Iraq, once by failing to secure the country after Saddam's fall, and once again by poking the Iranians. There is finally the fact that Iranians are Persians and Iraqis are Arabs and despite some physical similarities they are not anything remotely the same nor particularly fond of each other. Iraq will not become an Iranian colony.

If the Republicans must declare leaving a loss, then I'll go along with it. I'm much more fond of reality than the words used to describe it.