Political Smoke and Mirrors.

“All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.”  MT

The drums of war are beating. The ISIS threat is whipping public support into a frenzy. With short memories we tend to forget (1) that we created the mess in the first place (See: my six part series that ran from Sept. 27 thru October 7) and (2) waging war is THE most expensive matter in which any nation can get engaged. The glaring hypocrisy here is that the same people who have clamored for reducing the deficit are the very same people who now ignore the costs of waging war (to attempt to undo the mess they created) and want us (other people of course) to put “boots on the ground.”

A most enlightening web site is The National Priorities. The site shows, in real-time, what we are spending to fight wars and what we’re giving up. The Federal Debt is concerning and presently stands at $17.877 trillion, and rising. For that reason both political parties have established a priority of reducing the debt, but in very different ways. For the most part the Republican approach is to slash social programs, give greater tax breaks to the wealthy and increase discretionary defense funding.

Most recently House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has released his Pathway to Prosperity budget proposal which is filled with assumptions that will undoubtedly never materialize. Nevertheless his estimate of reducing the deficit and reaching a balanced budget in 10 years is most appealing to Republican voters, during an election year. A couple of seeming pros to his plan include eliminating the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) and increasing discretionary defense spending by $483 billon over the next tens years. We must bear in mind that Mr. Ryan’s proposal was built before the ISIS threat became front and center. So let’s take a close look at just these two proposals without considering the devastating impact on citizens resulting from his plan to slash social programs.

According to the CBO (Congressional Budget Office), at this stage, contrary to the gloom and doom projections of the Republicans, Obama Care is resulting in a net savings to the government of about $8 billion per year. To eliminate this program (as Mr. Ryan proposes) would not save money, but would instead end up adding to the federal debt by that $8 billion per year ($80 billion over the ten years). Nevertheless it’s human nature that once someone takes a stand they will continue to demand that reality conform to their views.

The other proposal (increase discretionary defense spending by $483 billon) may be woefully inadequate if we persist in waging another war. In his just released book—Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace—Leon Panetta says,“Americans should be braced for a long battle against the brutal terrorist group Islamic State that will test U.S. resolve—and the leadership of the commander in chief.” And what does Panetta mean by a “long battle?” His best guess is 30 years. Given that extraordinary period of time, it would be worth our while to count the cost. 

In most everyone’s considered opinion our current campaign of bombing only is costing U.S. taxpayers $3.12 billion/year. Add ten years of that cost ($31.2 billion) to Mr. Ryan’s $483 billon and we’re looking at some serious pocket change ($514.2 billion—over ½ trillion dollars). This, of course, assumes current bombing levels which nobody expects to continue. The costs and sacrifices will just increase, as they did in Vietnam. “Mission Creep” is always a reality to which no politician will ever admit . 

THE key fiscal issue here is, “where will this extra money come from if Mr. Ryan’s Pathway to Prosperity is adopted?” If it is, the middle class will be obliterated, everyone except the super wealthy will join the bottom financial tier (with no benefits) and the wealthy elite will continue (as they do currently) avoiding taxes altogether. 

Typical of political projections, it’s all smoke and mirrors. “Figures can’t lie, but liars will figure.” MT

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy.

The proverb most people are familiar with is, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” However, the proverb needs a time stamped expiration date, meaning that nearly always taking sides against one side, results in the other side turning against you. Witness the true story of U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson who partnered with the CIA to launch Operation Cyclone, a program to organize and support the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Bottom line: It worked, for a time, but eventually the mujahideen metastasized into numerous versions of what we know today as radical Islamists (one of which is the Taliban and another ISIS) using the military hardware we supplied turned against us: expiration date. 

According to globalresearch.org, “Washington supported the Free Syria rebels who aligned themselves with the terrorist group called Al-Nusra to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. Then the Syrian rebels, and other groups in Iraq, form another terrorist organization who call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The consequences of Washington’s policies of aiding the Syrian rebels, including ISIS, have served a purpose.” The question is, whose purpose? 

The Al-Nusra Front is otherwise known as, “The Support Front for the People of Al-Sham,”: al-Qaeda in Syria—a branch of al-Qaeda operating in Syria and Lebanon. Get it? Bashar al-Assad (General Secretary of Syria and Regional Secretary of the Ba’ath Party in Syria), an acknowledged enemy of the U.S. and ally of Shiite dominated Iran (an acknowledged U.S. enemy), is opposed by the Free Syria rebels. They align themselves with al-Qaeda in Syria (also our enemy), we support both and one part is spun off to become ISIS. In the meantime we arm and equip the “New Iraqi Army” (mostly Shiites) at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of some $25 billion. Then the Iraqi Army quickly cut and ran against the well equipped ISIS forces, who then acquired all of the costly military hardware we supplied to the Iraqi Army and used it against us. The question is thus, whose the enemy? Better yet, whose the ally? 

Mr Twain never spoke truer words than these: “There has never been a just war, never an honorable one—on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful—as usual—will shout for the war. The pulpit will—warily and cautiously object—at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, ‘It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.’ Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers—as earlier—but do not dare say so. And now the whole nation—pulpit and all—will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”

There are many twists and turns that happened after the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bremer fiascos but history will show that none of them mattered. All that matters is ISIS is here, and now and we can take credit for that. The question now becomes, are there any allies, or is everyone an enemy who we didn’t create?

Sun Tzu’s prophesy—Not knowing ourselves.

Discord in the ranks.

The other half of Sun Tzu’s prophesy—not knowing ourselves, concerned Bremer and the distorted views of Rumsfeld—his immediate boss. Bremer held an exalted view of himself. His distorted view of the Iraqi people extended to him as well. He took pride in equating himself as another Douglas MacArthur, or General Lucius Clay, who’s roles seemed to him to parallel his own in occupying and rebuilding Japan and Germany following the Allies destruction of both. At the same time, Rumsfeld repeatedly underestimated force levels necessary to suppress the burgeoning, tumultuous insurgency that Bremer had stirred up. Bremer, and the rest of the world, soon discovered the significant differences between his job and that of his role models. 

While similarities existed between the Iraqi and Japanese occupations and reconstruction, the differences proved to be more critical. Bremer didn’t “let the sleeping dog of dormant, yet buried religious animosities lie.” What had been suppressed was fanned into a roaring inferno due his miscalculations concerning Sunnis and Shiites. 

He failed to heed Twain’s admonition concerning religion and politics: “I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.” In the case of the U.S., dividing church and state is foundational to running a democratic government. It didn’t work in Iraq, and may never, due to deeply imbedded religious roots. Given the declared goal of ISIS (to create a caliphate) it seems improbable that separating church and state is in the cards.

Bremer’s first order of business was to establish the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and under the direction of the Bush administration, he proceeded to carry the initial destruction onward to political/religious structure of the people. And this in turn eventually entailed banning all intellectual contributions stemming from the Ba’ath party (an arm of Sunnis in Bremer’s view) and dismantling the Iraqi Army, a force of roughly 400,000 soldiers, all of whom then had no means of earning a living. 

Three years later in 2007, there was a huge debate occurring in Washington concerning troop levels. At the time General Eric K. Shinseki concurred with General John Abizaid. Both believed more were needed. “First vilified, then marginalized by the Bush administration after those comments, General Shinseki retired and faded away, even as lawmakers, pundits and politicians increasingly cited his prescience.” The criticism was particularly vociferous coming from Rumsfeld, his deputy—Paul Wolfowitz, as well as politically inclined Pentagon leadership. The hard line resistance by Rumsfeld that more troops were needed proved both wrong yet accepted by the political administration.

In September of that year, a press release was submitted by Bremer as a New York Times op-ed. titled How I Didn’t Dismantle Iraq’s Army. Bremer said he didn’t make the decision on his own, and that the decision was reviewed by “top civilian and military members of the American government,” including Abizaid, who briefed officials in Washington, saying there were no more “organized Iraqi military units.” Bremer’s article went further into how the Coalition Provisional Authority considered two alternatives: 

(1) To recall the old army, or 
(2) Build a new army, 
“both to be vetted members of the old army—code for no Sunnis—and new recruits.”

According to Bremer, Abizaid preferred the second alternative, thus escaping personal condemnation by passing the buck to Abizaid. What Bremer excluded from his op-ed was what Abizaid also said: “I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I’ve seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war.” History has proven both Abizaid and Shinseki right and the Bush political forces wrong. The intense wangling between the politicians and the generals typified Sun Tzu’s prophesy of not knowing ourselves.

Some have crucified Bremer for his individual errors, such as disbanding the army, refusing to employ skilled, mostly apolitical Iraqis (who were banned from holding positions in the newly formed government), and for alienating the Iraqi people into opposing religious factions. But these blunders, while significant, are not the reasons why most Iraqis hated the American occupation and supported violent resistance to it. The main grievance most Iraqis had with America was, and is, simply the occupation itself—an occupation that lingered on years after Bremer waved goodbye. To watch a Frontline video covering this debacle click here.

In the next and final post in this series, we’ll look at how we iced the cake of ISIS emergence and pounded the final nail into the casket of moderation by implicitly aligning ourselves with another Sunni enemy—the Shiites in Iran and those of the Syrian butcher Bashar Hafez al-Assad, President and General Secretary of Syria, and Regional Secretary of the Ba’ath Party in Syria—Saddam’s party, the very one we fought to destroy. MT was right about “...in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.” 

Other wrong ingredients in baking the cake.

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it. Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.” MT

Mr. Twain’s unabashed bitter pill of honesty distinguishes between what comes naturally, and what can only be earned. To examine this distinction takes us to another perspective regarding ourselves and our enemies.

According to Sun Tzu (The Art of War),“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Concerning the war in Iraq, as it eventually turned out, the U.S. fell prey to knowing neither the enemy nor themselves. Following the “Mission Accomplished” speech by President George W. Bush in May 2003, it became increasingly clear that the only thing of significance that had been accomplished was defeating the Iraqi army and the destruction of their infrastructure. And then came the oops: “Oh,you mean we now need to deal with the population of Iraq?” This small matter seemed to be a surprise and it suddenly dawned on those asleep at the switch that we were experts at waging war and miserable at managing the ensuing chaos of the people we had defeated. The U.S. appeared to never consider the “what comes next.” 

Then “Along Came a Spider” to weave the web of reconstruction—or more aptly Bush’s man: Presidential Envoy to Iraq—Mr. Paul Bremer. From May 2003 until June 2004, Mr. Bremer served as head of state of the internationally recognized government of Iraq and by nearly all counts was the tip of the spear, launched by the Bush bunch that led increasingly to civil war in Iraq. Bremer’s preconceived biases concerning the Iraqi people vastly distorted knowledge of the enemy.

Despite these biases, prior to the invasion, the Iraqi population was more unified than Bremer and the Bush people imagined them to be. Time and again, Bremer revealed his bias, referring to “the formerly ruling Sunnis,” “rank-and-file Sunnis,” “the old Sunni regime,”and “responsible Sunnis.” This obsession with sects informed the U.S. approach to Iraq from day one of the occupation, but it was not how Iraqis saw themselves—at least not until Bremer stuck his finger in the hornet’s nest and created chaos to match his wrong headed perspectives. 

Iraqis were not primarily Sunnis or Shiites; they were Iraqis first, and their sectarian identities did not become polarized until Americans occupied their country, treating Sunnis as the bad guys and Shiites as the good guys. There were no blocs of Sunni Iraqis or Shiite Iraqis before the war, just like there was no Sunni Triangle or Shiite South until American politicians imposed (reflected by Bremer) ethnic and sectarian identities onto Iraq’s regions. Bremer was not alone in his blindness. John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, displayed the same dismal approach to Iraq as Bremer. Bolton claimed that most of the refugees were Sunnis, fleeing because “they feared that Shiites were going to exact retribution for the four or five decades of Ba’ath rule.”

In spite of how Iraqis saw themselves, Bremer pitted the Sunnis and Shiites against one another, and fueled the fires of the ISIS emergence. This should come as no surprise since Bremer knew nothing about Iraq and its culture, spoke no Arabic, had no prior experience in the Middle East, and took no action to educate himself on the critical matters that could have led the Iraqi people toward unification, away from civil war, and the rising tide of ISIS.

He, or more than likely his Washington handlers, held hardened perspectives that drove U.S. policies. In Bremer’s mind, the way to occupy Iraq was not to view it as a nation but as a group of minorities. So he pitted the minority that wasn’t benefiting from the system against the minority that was, and then expected them both to be grateful. Bremer ruled Iraq as if it were already undergoing a civil war, helping the Shiites by punishing the Sunnis. He didn’t see his job as managing the country; he saw it as managing a civil war. Due to his impacted resolve, Bremer, more than anyone, ending up causing one.

Many Iraqis saw the Americans as new colonists, intent on dividing and conquering Iraq. That was precisely Bremer’s approach. When he succumbed slightly to Iraqi demands for democracy and created the Interim Governing Council, its members were selected by sectarian and ethnic quotas. Even the Communist Party member of the council was chosen not because he was secular but because he was a Shiite.

However, according to Bremer, Iraqis hated their army at the time of the U.S. invasion. In fact, the army was the most nationalist institution in the country, one that predated the Ba’ath Party. In electing not to fight U.S. forces, the army was expecting to be recognized by the occupation—and indeed, until Bremer was installed, it appeared that many soldiers and officers were hoping to cooperate with the Americans.

His miscalculations of the enemy accounted for one half of Sun Tzu’s prophesy. In the following post, we’ll explore how the U.S. came to fulfill the second half of Sun Tzu’s prophesy—not knowing ourselves.

How to bake an ISIS cake: recipe for success.

Bakin success.

Bakin a cake ain’t much different from roasting your enemy. Assemble the right ingredients, throw them all together, toss em in the oven for a time and wallah (والله), out comes the perfect finished product, except for one thing: the wrong ingredients.

Mr. Twain didn’t say that, but he did say this:  “Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to the Christian school—not to acquire his religion, but his guns.” Oh, and for the readers edification, “wallah/والله ” is an Arabic expression meaning I promise by Allah, and is used to express great credibility. It’s considered a sin among Muslims to use this phrase and follow it up with a lie. And we told a heap of em. In the words of our satirist: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And as far traveling was concerned, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime,” and we seem a bit short on those attributes as well.

It’s doubtful that before 9/11 many modern Americans knew anything about Sunnis or Shiites, and even less about the importance of the Muslim religion in the Middle East. But what we did, and do, know about are guns and allegedly being Christian. We’ve become a nation of the combination of both. We wear the badge but fall short of the brotherhood part. “If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.” Gandhi had a similar take. He said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

But back to the “small steps” and ingredients for the cake. After 9/11 we had the wind of the civilized world in our sails. The destruction of the Twin Towers was the Pearl Harbor of our time and al-Qaeda was the “evil axis,”—the term George W. Bush used extensively throughout his term to describe governments that he accused of helping terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. That was the first lie: the pretext that justified our invasion and the destruction of the infrastructure of Iraq and every reasonable means for the population for surviving. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq nor were there many members of al-Qaeda (at least at first), but going after the “evil axis” became the battle cry that justified the destruction. So if there were no weapons of mass destruction or al-Qaeda, what was our motive? Certainly getting Saddam and his cronies, but was it reasonable to destroy the entire nation toward that end? Perhaps there was another reason (beyond Oil), and to explore that mystery we’ll follow the money. 

Our war machine is awesome. There is some disagreement concerning the magnitude of our destructive power but best guess says, just counting bombs dropped alone, more tonnage was dropped on Iraq than in WWII altogether. From a distance this is a meaningless statistic but I assure you, having fought two years in Vietnam, it’s not meaningless to people where a war destroys your culture and means of existence. 

But our practice, as discussed in the post The mouse that was forbidden from roaring, has been to rebuild what we destroy and that costs a lot of cash. Last estimate for that rebuilding project: $138 billion. That sounds like a bunch, but is chump change compared to what we tax payers spent to rebuild Western Europe and Japan following WWII. That figure amounted to 11% of our GDP in 1945—$1.652 trillion in today’s money. Eleven percent of our GDP today, to rebuild Iraq, would be $15.92 trillion! Nevertheless the $138 billion that was spent, was spent poorly and Iraq today remains a rubble, unable to provide for even basic necessities. The big issue—follow the money—who got the contracts to rebuild? The answer: Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, #1 with $39.5 billion. Might that be sufficient motivation, beyond oil? Oh, let’s not forget the oil.

In 2005, George Bush received more PAC money from the oil and gas industry than any other politician. The result? GW signed an energy bill from the Republican-controlled Congress that gave $14.5 billion in tax breaks for oil, gas, nuclear power and coal companies. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was based on recommendations by Cheney’s energy task force, also rolled back regulations the oil industry considered burdensome, including exemptions from some clean water laws. All of this transpired only one year after Congress passed a bill that included a tax cut for domestic manufacturing that was expected to save energy companies at least $3.6 billion over a decade. It must not go unmentioned that both Bush and Cheney were former oil executives and during the Bush/Cheney administration the oil and gas industry spent $393.2 million on lobbying the federal government.

This was just the first, in the series of small steps ingredients that led to the inevitable ISIS cake. More will come in subsequent posts.

Standing between the Hatfields and McCoys.

“Man is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly, teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”—MT

The Bush administration’s claim of weapons of mass destruction, (that justified the invasion of Iraq) was correct. The problem was one of misidentification. We were led to imagine atomic and biological weapons at the ready. But what we were not told was of another weapon of mass destruction, also at the ready, that had been seething for centuries. To grasp the significance of the Middle Eastern tree of turmoil it’s necessary to first consider the roots. This was the Sunni mouse that had laid in waiting, divided around the world into somewhere between 1.2-1.5 billion individuals, without a roar waiting for release from Pandora’s Box. As George Eliot said, “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together,” and we provided those series of small steps necessary for the dormant ISIS mouse to roar with a ferocity never imagined.

One of the “true religions” spoken of by our satirical pundit is Islam, but in this case it isn’t a matter of conflict between one true religion and another. Instead it is a conflict within Islam that has been brewing for nearly 1,400 years, flaring from time to time with a violence capable only when motivated by religious fervor, thus proving MT’s point: “Man is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for the universal brotherhood of man with his mouth.”

To acquire an adequate portrait of this millennial old conflict would require volumes, but as the saying goes, A picture is worth a thousand words. By clicking here, you can witness that picture. It doesn’t require a genius to know that standing in the middle of a gun fight between the Hatfields and McCoys isn’t the best of ideas. To shoot at either side invites the fury of the other. In the posts to follow, I’ll walk you through the most important small steps we took to light the fuse that led to the current conflagration.

The suffering of silence.

Sufferers of silence

“There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”—MT

In a post from another blog I spoke about putting legs under our words and titled the post, Talk without action is cheap (and worthless). Our satirist MT apparently agreed, given his quote above. The essence of his words, and mine, concerns accomplishments, or worse; apathy and complacency—the death knells of accomplishment.

Far too often our tendency is based on the flawed notion of, “It an’t my problem,” with the corresponding notion of making nice and not rocking the boat. We maintain a conspiracy of silence, motivated by an unspoken consensus to not mention or discuss given subjects in order to maintain group solidarity, or fear of political repercussion and social ostracism. “Nice people” avoid controversy and ignore the plights of those, seemingly not like us. In so doing we exhibit the mantra of the assumed elite: A “CEO of Self.”

When you cut through the pomposity, a conspiracy of silence is cowardly dishonest and delusional to the point of refusing to acknowledge our connectivity with the interrelated fabric of life. The complexity of living in today’s world is straining this practice to the breaking point. When does ebola become our problem? When does injustice become our problem? When does poverty, or the growing economic polarization become our problem? Bigotry? Racism? Hatred? An environmental catastrophe?

In 1925, following World War I (the War to end all wars) T. S. Eliot wrote a poem called The Hollow Men. The poem of 98 lines ends with “probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English.” Eliot captured the spirit of apathy brilliantly and concluded that the silent conspirators rule the world, not by force, but rather by inaction. He said, 

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.”

“Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is…
Life is…
For Thine is the…

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Haunting words to contemplate.