Robert Gates Is Not A Gangster

Somehow, the Defense Secretary got the Air Force to acquiesce to his demands to ramp down production of the F-22.

Top Air Force officials said Monday that they supported the Obama administration’s decision to buy only four more of the advanced F-22 fighter jets, making it less likely that Congress will insist on extending its production.

The Air Force had previously said it needed 60 more of the planes, a position that had built expectations for a fierce battle in Congress over the program’s future.

Legislators from Georgia, Connecticut and other states with major suppliers are still likely to push for more planes. But it will be much harder for them to succeed if the Air Force is not quietly supporting their efforts, military analysts said.

Several industry officials and former Air Force officers said they would not be surprised to see Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor on the plane, pull back from a lobbying campaign emphasizing how many jobs would be lost if production was halted.

Michael Donley and Norton Schwartz, the secretary and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, even penned an op-ed in the WaPo arguing to move forward from the F-22.

I confess that I assumed this fight would be much more protracted. And it may still be - I wouldn't put it past defense-state lawmakers to insist on building what even the Air Force doesn't want. But let's again read between the lines here. The next paragraph after the ones I cited in the Times article are:

Under the administration’s plan, the Pentagon would speed up the testing of another Lockheed Martin fighter, the F-35, which it plans to buy in much greater quantities. Industry officials said the company might not want to risk angering the new administration as it already had many other lucrative defense contracts.

In other words, we're talking about moving from one Lockheed assembly line to another. Don't take my word for it, look at Donley and Schwartz' op-ed:

Much rides on the F-35's success, and it is critical to keep the Joint Strike Fighter on schedule and on cost. This is the time to make the transition from F-22 to F-35 production. Within the next few years, we will begin work on the sixth-generation capabilities necessary for future air dominance.

In other words, let's just switch assembly lines and keep the contractor money flowing.

Gates' budget isn't necessarily bad, and I was heartened by President Obama's statement in his economic speech today that it was a good start but "we can do more." But the outpourings of praise just seem to me misplaced. Ultimately, Gates is protecting the bloated military budget.

When Government Breaks Down

Here are just a few stories I've collected over merely the past week, the little outrages that aren't as substantial as, say, killing over a million Iraqis in an unnecessary war or leaving 47 million without health insurance or torturing prisoners at Guantanamo. But they provide shocks to the conscience nonetheless.

• The Department of Labor is rushing to make rules that would make it tougher for the government agency to regulate the amount of chemicals and toxins in the workplace.

• The Wage And Hour division of the Labor Department has been charged by the GAO with delaying and misplacing hundreds of overtime and minimum-wage complaints from individuals being shortchanged.

• Fifteen percent of all women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who have visited a VA facility have tested positive for sexual trauma through rape, assault or harrassment.

• An immigrant was handcuffed while giving birth in jail and separated from her infant within two days and she continued her imprisonment.

• In Louisiana, Baron Pikes was tasered nine times and killed after failing to comply swiftly enough with police demands. He wasn't resisting arrest, he just didn't comply fast enough.

• Supplies designed to go to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were massively undercounted due to a math error, resulting in a reduction of $70 million worth of aid.

• Pentagon auditors, whose role is to conduct oversight over government military contracts, were pressured by superiors to produce reports favorable to the contractors and shielding them from wrongdoing and overbilling, according to a GAO report. And at that time, the Air Force was spending counterterrorism funds on comfort capsules that can spirit them around the world in the height of luxury.

Now mind you, this is simply a partial list of the last week or so. This kind of venality, callousness and contempt for anyone but the rich and connected has characterized the last eight years. Corporations are to be protected instead of the poor. Authority is to be demanded but assaults on the downtrodden tolerated. Regulations are eliminated and help for the needy denied. This has become America in the first decade of the 21st century - an authoritarian kleptocracy. The level of rot is so great that the next President won't be able to get at all of it. Remember that these are just some of the LESSER stories.

A Piece Of Ordnance In Every Pot

We in the blogosphere have been so worked up about the FISA bill that we virtually ignored the fact that the Senate confirmed what the House began, passing an enormous spending bill to fund the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan well into the next Administration. There are also provisions for a new GI Bill, unemployment benefit extension for an additional 13 weeks, and a number of domestic spending initiatives (including midwest flooding relief).

Considering that the 110th Congress was elected with a mandate to end the war, it's a little surprising that practically nobody raised their voice in so much as anger to this continued funding. It could be learned helplessness, a resigned view that Congress wasn't going to use their procedural abilities to make any effort to stop the occupation of Iraq. Or it could be that the nation has been bullied into believing that "we're winning" and "the surge is working" while the media has simultaneously taken the details about Iraq off the TV screens and front pages, which makes it that much easier for the bullies.

It's not like people aren't still dying - they are, including 13 Americans this week and scores of Iraqis, at least 70 just yesterday. They're dying at a somewhat reduced rate, but political progress is not existent and the core factors causing the violence remain unchanged. Ethnic cleansing and paying off enemies to create heavily armed militias are the main contributing factors, and those aren't recipes for stability. Yet this is considered to be success. But let me give you an example of what that success looks like, what our tax dollars have bought, and keep in mind the Heller v. DC ruling when you read about it:

Meanwhile, Iraqi officials said a U.S. airstrike killed four members of a family north of Baghdad early Wednesday. Iraqi and U.S. officials provided conflicting accounts of the incident.

Capt. Ahmed al-Azwawi, a police official in Samra, a village about seven miles south of Tikrit, said U.S. troops were conducting an operation in the area when a man fired shots in the air with an AK-47.

Azwawi said the man, who sold propane gas for a living, was afraid thieves were in the vicinity.

U.S. soldiers then retreated and called in an airstrike, Azwawi said, killing the man, his wife, and two of their children.

The kids were 6 and 8, and a separate report claims that two other kids were killed.

There's no secret, other than in the US media, that American forces are trying to secure Iraq through massive airstrikes, many of which result in trigger-happy responses anytime anyone fires a gun (and practically every adult male in Iraq owns an AK-47). The murdered families have relatives, and every incident like this engenders anger and distrust. The status of forces agreement sought by Bush calls explicitly for continued air superiority for the US military.

As usual, when America sees a war slipping away, they bomb the fuck out of the ground. And the bipartisan coalition of the United States government enthusiastically endorses and funds the slaughter. Let's be very clear - your representatives bought another year's worth of stories like the one above, with no gain in national security, a stretching of the US military to the very breaking point should anything else crop up, and no effort to manage or deal with the underlying root causes in the country we unnecessarily invaded.

McCain Outsources His Brain

The New York Times did a study of John McCain's closeness to President Bush, and tried super-hard to exonerate him, but couldn't. They had to admit that his stances on the biggest issues facing the country are identical to Bush, and sometimes even at odds with his prior positions. It's pretty easy to figure out why this is. The campaign is run by practically every Republican lobbyist on K Street, and sometime after the primary they sat him down and told him exactly what he would believe and espouse and enact if installed in the White House. And McCain nodded his head and cooed "Anything else, guys?" That's how you have to judge everything out of this guy's mouth. The response to McCain calling for 45 new nuclear reactors has to be "How many lobbyists from the nuclear industry on his staff," as an example.

Problem is, they were sloppy. In addition to wanting their agenda passed starting January 2009, they wanted it immediately. And so he intervened on behalf of Airbus in awarding a lucrative Air Force contract, selling out American workers at Boeing and being so cavalier about it that the GAO ruled the deal was in fact illegal. (McCain lost any hope of winning the state of Washington with this blunder, and there's also a big Boeing facility in Wichita, Kansas, which might get competitive by the time we're done).

And despite the lobbyists swimming around the campaign, McCain found himself last year short on cash. So he flew around on his sugar momma's jet without reimbursing her, and he sold out the campaign finance process and tried to opt out of the public financing system while benefiting from it in collateral loans and ballot access. This isn't a result of financial influence from lobbyists, but it does reflect the ETHOS of a lobbyist.

McCain is now 100% pure lobbyist, without convictions or honor of his own. He's outsourced his own brain.

Remember, We Have 8 More Months Of This Guy

You're barely going to even see George Bush's face on the national media between now and his inevitable exit, but it's worth reminding ourselves that 8 months is ample time to do even more damage to America and the world. And the signs are there that he's willing to do it:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hinted after his meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush Wednesday that U.S. action against Iran is imminent. While he avoided saying anything clear and specific on the matter, Olmert did mention a “timetable” and said action would take place before Bush leaves the White House.

“We reached agreement on the need to take care of the Iranian threat,” Olmert said after the meeting. “I left with a lot less question marks [than I had entered with] regarding the means, the timetable restrictions and America’s resoluteness to deal with the problem.”

“George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on the matter before the end of his term in the White House,” Olmert reportedly said after his 90 minute long one-on-one meeting with the American Commander in Chief.

As far as I can tell, the Bush-Cheney agenda for the rest of his term is a short list. 1) Get full immunity for his lawbreaking, whether it be illegal spying or torture or rendition or outing Valerie Plame or whatever else, 2) sign a long-term agreement that will keep American troops in Iraq long into the future, and 3) attack Iran. Every action by the Administration from here on out has these goals in mind. I was puzzled by the firings of top leadership at the Air Force until I came to this conclusion, and now, given this additional information, the pieces are starting to fit:

The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons . . .

Titled "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" and written under the direction of Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the draft document [PDF file] is unclassified and available on a Pentagon Web site. It is expected to be signed within a few weeks by Air Force Lt. Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, director of the Joint Staff, according to Navy Cmdr. Dawn Cutler, a public affairs officer in Myers's office. Meanwhile, the draft is going through final coordination with the military services, the combatant commanders, Pentagon legal authorities and Rumsfeld's office, Cutler said in a written statement . . .

The draft document also envisions the use of atomic weapons for "attacks on adversary installations including WMD, deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons."

This guy can be trusted to carry out the Iranian mission. There's no other rationale necessary.

When you have a President so messianic that he believes he will be ultimately vindicated by history no matter what he unleashes, then nothing is beyond the realm of possibility. This attack is going to happen. It may not be staged in Iraq, but the US has plenty of other bases or aircraft carriers from which to launch a first strike.

Immunity, long-term bases in Iraq, bombs in Iran. If you want the last eight months to conclude without total chaos, you'll do what you can to pay attention to these three developments.

And The War Machine Rolls On

Wow, he admitted it. Bush basically agreed that his war is a Works Progress Administration laundered through the defense industry.

CURRY: You don’t agree with that? It has nothing do with the economy, the war — spending on the war?

BUSH: I don’t think so. I think actually the spending in the war might help with jobs…because we’re buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses and the economy’s adjusting.

This isn't untrue at all. The bloated, outsized defense budget is being propped up by wars and threats of wars. It's how the Air Force can claim that $144 billion is not enough of a budget and that they need more for things like "dorm furnishings". If members of Congress object they want us to lose the war on terror. The Air Force can ask for more F-22 fighter jets because they can fearmonger about the threat of "emerging powers" like China, which is simply nuts, and simply a way to justify a weapons system that is absolutely unnecessary.

There is virtually no check on the war machine. The perfect example is the Bush Administration announcing a crackdown on contractor abuse with a loophole so big you can drive a Naval carrier group through it.

A Bush administration plan to crack down on contract fraud has a multibillion-dollar loophole: The proposal to force companies to report abuse of taxpayer money will not apply to work overseas, including projects to secure and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan.

For decades, contractors have been asked to report internal fraud or overpayment on government-funded projects. Compliance has been voluntary, and over the past 15 years the number of company-reported fraud cases has declined steadily.

Now, the Justice Department wants to force companies to notify the government if they find evidence of contract abuse of more than $5 million. Failure to comply could make a company ineligible for future government work.

The proposed rules, which are in the final approval stages, specifically exempt "contracts to be performed outside the United States," according to a notice published last month in the Federal Register.

There are some hardcore regulations!

It's not that the military doesn't require funding and equipment, especially after years of war. It's that the expenditures are completely misplaced, going to contractors who police themselves and outdated weapons systems instead of what the troops need to save their lives.

Hundreds of U.S. Marines have been killed or injured by roadside bombs in Iraq because Marine Corps bureaucrats refused an urgent request in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles, an internal military study concludes.

The study, written by a civilian Marine Corps official and obtained by The Associated Press, accuses the service of "gross mismanagement" that delayed deliveries of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks for more than two years.

We've known that MRAP vehicles are a priority for quite a while now. I don't know if it's not cost-effective or what. The point is that the war machine is self-sustaining. And as you can see from the Speaker of the House's criticisms of the Bush budget, this is a bipartisan problem. There are enough defense contractors spread around virtually every district in the country to give members of Congress a self-interest in keeping the status quo. The Republicans go on and on about government waste and earmarks (not the President's own earmarks, mind you), the Democrats talk about misplaced priorities, but that defense budget is sacrosanct. And until we change that dynamic, the bill we give to our children and grandchildren will not be substantially smaller.

Hearts And Minds At 30,000 Feet

If it feels like I've done this story before, it's because I have. We continue to try and wage a counterinsurgency campaign with massive bombing that defeats the entire purpose of counterinsurgency, which is to get the population on your side. The reason for the bombing is that it requires less personnel, and also airpower is the only thing keeping the country from a full-on sectarian civil war. You have this lie of "precision bombing" being perpetuated:

In Iraq, the temporary increase of 30,000 U.S. troops ordered by President Bush in January has led to the increase in bombing missions. The U.S. command has moved forces off large bases and into neighborhoods and has launched several large offensives aimed at al-Qaeda.

"You end up having that many more opportunities for close air support," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Mueller, director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Doha, Qatar.

More precise targeting and smaller bombs have made it easier for the Air Force to support ground troops in counterinsurgencies, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We're hitting within 15 feet of where we're aiming," Mueller said. A typical 500-pound bomb is 50% explosives, but newer versions carry about 100 pounds of explosives.

Some bombs are "designed to take one building and not the whole block," Mueller said.

Which I guess means that the Air Force was targeting the children:

Bombs struck Shiite targets in Baghdad on Monday, killing at least seven people and wounding two dozen, and an adviser to a prominent Sunni politician was gunned down in a western section of the capital, police said.

The blasts occurred a day after the U.S. military said its forces killed an estimated 49 militants during a dawn raid to capture an Iranian-linked militia chief in Baghdad's Sadr City Shiite enclave, one of the highest tolls for a single operation since President Bush declared an end to active combat in 2003. The U.S. military said the militia chief was not captured or killed.

Iraqi police and hospital officials, who often overstate casualties, reported only 15 deaths including three children. Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said all the dead were civilians.

The U.S. military said it was not aware of any civilian casualties, and the discrepancy in the death tolls and accounts of what happened could not be reconciled. American commanders reported no U.S. casualties.

Bombs are never going to be as precision-targeted as the US military claims. That's just ludicrous. And so expanding the air war five-fold increases by five-fold the chances of civilian casualties, which turns the population against the occupation, and sends them scurrying for anywhere the US isn't bombing. Some of them have made their way to Kurdistan where they may face another fresh hell. The Iraqi government has joined the Afghan government before them and strongly condemned these continued air attacks and begged for them to stop. We are literally bombing Iraq back into the Stone Age. It's the most underreported facet of the occupation.

There's a strain of thought that casualties are actually going up in Baghdad and down in the parts of the country we're US forces have left. I don't think it's that cut and dried, but clearly American airpower is really the only big stick we can wield to stop more civilian strife. Yet that will backfire as well.

Iran Post

So White House automated robot Dana Perino was asked about the Sy Hersh article today, and she predictably refused to address the substance, simply going on about his "anonymous sources" (which are apparently terrible, unless the source is Scooter Libby). But this was the telling part to me:

PERINO: Look, the president has said that he believes there is a diplomatic solution that we can use to solve the Iranian problem. And that’s why we’re working with our allies to get there.

QUESTION: That’s what he said before we went to Iraq, too.

QUESTION: But what’s the — can you answer as to the substance of whether or not the White House asked? I mean, if it’s not true, then you can say Sy Hersh is wrong and CNN was wrong to air it. You can say it.

PERINO: We don’t discuss such things.

"We won't discuss such things" because if we did, you'd understand that it's full steam ahead on Iran, and you might actually report the same things the British press is reporting.

The American air force is working with military leaders from the Gulf to train and prepare Arab air forces for a possible war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

An air warfare conference in Washington last week was told how American air chiefs have helped to co-ordinate intelligence-sharing with Gulf Arab nations and organise combined exercises designed to make it easier to fight together.

Gen Michael Mosley, the US Air Force chief of staff, used the conference to seek closer links with allies whose support America might need if President George W Bush chooses to bomb Iran.

This apparently means the Air Force would have Arabs help on bombing runs in Tehran, flying side by side with American forces. Does anyone believe the Jordanians or the UAE would actually do that? I think this is more about operations and basing, but still it represents a step forward. Which is obviously where this is headed, just take it from the guy who sat with Bush last week:

Podhoretz, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush in 2004, met privately with the President for 45 minutes recently. During the course of the meeting, Bush listened diligently as Podhoretz laid out the “the case for bombing Iran.” Podhoretz seems to have come away convinced that he made the case.

"I believe President Bush is going to order airstrikes [on Iran] before he leaves office. Because he has several times said — at least twice to my knowledge — that if we allow Iranians to acquire nuclear capabilities, 50 years from now, people will look back at us the way we look back at Munich and say ‘how could they have let this happen?’"

Of course, N-Pod, who prays nightly for an attack on Iran, may just be saying that to continue the drumbeat.

But regardless, there's definitely some movement here. The generals have at least been mollified that this would be targeted and specific enough that they can grudgingly give their nod. By the way, this is all happening in the context of Iran helping the Iraqis to prevent precisely the thing that the Administration claims the Iranians are doing.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has secured a pledge from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to help cut off weapons, funding and other support to militiamen in Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Saturday.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said there were signs of a slight drop in the types of attacks associated with Shiite militants since the deal was reached last month, and he dangled the possibility that U.S. and Iraqi officials might be able to do something in return. But he said it was too early to tell whether there has been a real reduction in Iranian support.

"Honestly, and I really mean this, all of us would really welcome the opportunity to see this, confirm it and even - in whatever way we could - to reciprocate," Petraeus told reporters on a visit to the Baghdad neighborhood of Karada. "But it really is wait and see time right now still."

Here's the deal. This may be more of Petraeus' the surge is working crap, even though it has nothing to do with establishing a political solution, the entire point of the surge (and 1,000 dead a month in a country of 30 million, the equivalent of 100,000 dead of political violence on our streets, is nothing to write home about). But as Juan Cole noted, there are Iranian equivalents to Blackwater, nasty mercenary elements that have nothing to do with the central government who may be bad actors within Iraq. And tentatively, at least, Iran is doing what it can to interdict their shipments of weapons. The notion that all EFPs in Iraq are coming from the Ayatollah's secret stash is ridiculous; in fact, I doubt they'd be that stupid. But the Cheney Administration is counting on American ignorance and our willingness to lump together all Muslims as one big bad guy.

As Digby notes:

So, there we have it. All the months of screaming into he void by many bloggers and others on this subject, culminating last week in the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment in which many Democrats, including our presidential frontrunner, signed on to the fundamental premise Cheney is using to justify the attack. (What an excellent move on their part.) [...]

Cheney isn't really a politician anymore and hasn't been one for a long time. He represents the people who really run things at times like this, the big money boyz, and their concerns are not so parochial as a Republican win. They run things no matter who's in office. (And anyway, they've set certain things in motion, pillaged the treasury so thoroughly and solidified their hold on the media and the Democrats sufficiently enough that they think a few years of GOP R&R is probably a good idea. They need to allow the Democrats just enough power to be blamed, in any case.)

The subtext of that, of course, is that they will browbeat the American people into either stifling their dissent against this action or risk being called traitors to the troops. Only treasonous betray-up bloggers would dare say a word.

World Report

Because why not?

• So Bin Laden's going to preview the new Al Qaeda fall season with a taped message. Judging from the photo, he dyes his beard; is that part of the mores of the traditional Wahhabist caliphate? Aside from wetting the pants of a few insaneosphere residents, I'm pretty sure nothing he has to say makes a lick of difference. I'm sure the media will somehow turn this into a "win for the GOP," that the most wanted man in the world who killed 3,000 Americans on a Republican Administration's watch is still alive 6 years later. Just remember: EVERYTHING is good for the GOP. That's why they're doing so well these days!

• I remember hearing at some point a few months back a bit of media chatter that "Israel and Syria are going to war this summer because... just because." Didn't think much about it until this story today that Syria claims to have repelled Israeli warplanes that actually dropped munitions. Israel won't comment. Did they violate Syrian airspace to get to Syria, or to get a couple countries over to Tehran?

• Three Marine officers were censured for their failure to investigate the massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha in 2005. Their military careers are effectively over. Murder charges in this case have been dropped against two of the men mainly because of the byzantine military justice system and code of conduct IMO.

• Here's a nice story: airstrikes in Baghdad killed 14 civilians while they were sleeping. Read to me in the counterinsurgency manual where a key component is a massive bombing campaign. This is the great untold story of this escalation; we're dropping a tremendous amount of ordnance over there. You cannot win hearts and minds by substituting bombs for boots on the ground. We don't have enough troops for the mission (not that the mission is winnable), so we're trying to compensate with airstrikes. It just stirs up more anger.

• German authorities are looking for a dozen more suspects in the foiled terror plot against various facilities. Good for diligent police work. Meanwhile the US Embassy in Nigeria is under alert of attack. The world is still dangerous, made more so by our debacle in Iraq and our inattention to extremism around the world.

• Fred Hiatt is a complete idiot, trying to save his own reputation by attacking the good name of Mohammed El Baradei, who happened to be right about Iraq and is right about Iran. It's those who have been completely wrong who are trying to deflect from their own mistakes by beating the drums for yet another war.

• We all hope for some better news from Iraq, we just don't see a lot to be that pleased about. But this is encouraging, and it's typical that it had nothing to do with the Americans. Top Parliament leaders met in Finland with representatives from South Africa and Northern Ireland, to discuss the best practices for real reconciliation. It suggests that this isn't about the Iraqis "getting their act together," it's about removing the crush of the American presence so that the Iraqis can figure this out for themselves. I'm mindful that this doesn't mean the Shiites and Sunnis will immediately become best of friends; the work done in Northern Ireland took decades. But they did take the steps toward a resolution here, even if they are baby steps. Note that South Africa and Northern Ireland are not occupied nations. And maybe we don't need to return power to CIA-and-lobbyist-backed thug who will destroy democracy in order to save it.

• 50 killed in campaigning for Guatemala's national election, and it's not until this weekend. Political rivals are shooting each other and a lot of candidates are backed by drug lords. This is pretty normal practice in a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world. As long as our goal is to spread freedom and democracy, could we be bothered to give a hand here?

• Riverbend has left Baghdad. She was an honest voice among the madness, and she will be missed, but she is certainly safer in Syria.

• And finally, a sketch comedy group in Australia managed to get through two security checkpoints and pretty darn close to George W. Bush with a guy dressed up as Osama bin Laden.

The group staged a faux motorcade, pretending to be the delegation of Canada with one of the comedians dressed as bin Laden, and made it past two police checkpoints before being stopped, reported The Hill.

Cast members hired two motorcycles and three large cars on which they put Canadian flags. Police waved the motorcade through two checkpoints before pulling it over near the Intercontinental Hotel where Mr. Bush is staying.

Australia: better comedy than Yahoo Serious and Crocodile Dundee! Who knew?

Who's Killing Who?

Michael Gordon of the New York Times kind of embarrassed himself today by uncritically writing up a press release suggesting that Iranians, through a Hezbollah proxy, are responsible for various acts of violence in Iraq. There's a flip-side variant to this as well, where stateside journalists write up "Americans kill X insurgents" stories without wondering whether or not those dead insurgents are, you know, actually insurgents.

The U.S. military is investigating the killings of 17 people in a U.S. helicopter attack north of Baghdad a week ago, after residents of the area complained that the victims were not fighters from the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, as the military originally claimed, but members of a village guard force and ordinary citizens [...]

Garver said townspeople claim "the individuals were not al-Qaeda, but members of the community." He said additional details were not available, pending completion of the investigation.

In between those excerpts are a full account of the attack, directly from a military press release. Another more egregious example of this is in Afghanistan, where possibly 80 civilians died as a result of air strikes, which as we know are growing, in a clumsy and stupid effort to stop an insurgency from 30,000 feet.

Air strikes in the British-controlled Helmand province of Afghanistan may have killed civilians, coalition troops said yesterday as local people claimed that between 50 and 80 people, many of them women and children, had died. In the latest of a series of attacks causing significant civilian casualties in recent weeks, more than 200 were killed by coalition troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to have been killed by Taliban militants.

The bombardment, which witnesses said lasted up to three hours, in the Gereshk district late on Friday followed an attempted ambush by the Taliban on a joint US-Afghan military convoy. According to Mohammad Hussein, the provincial police chief, the militants fled into a nearby village for cover. Planes then targeted the village of Hyderabad. Mohammad Khan, a resident of the village, said seven members of his family, including his brother and five of his brother's children, were killed.

'I brought three of my wounded relatives to Gereshk hospital for treatment,' he told the Associated Press news agency by phone. The villagers were yesterday burying a 'lot of dead bodies', Khan said.

While the media spends a tremendous amount of time on incompetent would-be terrorists who didn't kill anybody, they don't initially question official figures from the front, even as the military has time and again throughout history proven a willingness to lie and cover-up reality in battle. The era of "embedded journalists" has brought reporters simultaneously closer to and further away from the front lines than ever before, giving them the adrenaline-fueled thrill of being in battle (and sometimes suffering the consequences) while being shielded from what is really happening (or being unable to express it because editors thousands of miles away aren't letting the stories pass). Covering a war has never been easy and is always filled with disinformation. This is especially true with an Administration so concerned with official secrecy.

Hearts and Minds at 20,000 Feet

This is a really great post for the Guardian's blog by Matthew Yglesias, about the fuility of carrying out massive airstrikes in a counterinsurgency campaign. We failed to learn this lesson in Vietnam, and we're continuing that failure to this day.

Of course, any military operation carries some risk of civilian casualties and other forms of collateral damage that can doom a counterinsurgency operation. Air strikes are, however, especially risky in this regard. That's why the US army's highly touted new field manual on counterinsurgency warns that the "employment of airpower in the strike role should be done with exceptional care":

Bombing, even air strikes, should be weighed against the risks, the primary danger being collateral damage that turns the population against the government and provides the insurgents with a major propaganda victory. Even when justified under the law of war, bombing a target that results in civilian casualties will bring media coverage that works to the benefit of the insurgents. A standard insurgent and terrorist tactic for decades against Israel has been to fire rockets or artillery from the vicinity of a school or village in the hope that the Israelis would carry out a retaliatory air strike that kills or wounds civilians - who are then displayed to the world media as victims of aggression. Insurgents and terrorists elsewhere have shown few qualms in provoking attacks that ensure civilian casualties if such attacks fuel anti-government and anti-US propaganda. Indeed, insurgents today can be expected to use the civilian population as a cover for their activities.

But while military leaders clearly know this on some level - it's right there in the manual - they obviously aren't acting on their knowledge. Indeed, even in Iraq itself where David Petraeus, the author of the counterinsurgency manual quoted above, is in command, we're deploying more air strikes, not fewer. The first four and a half months of 2007 have already seen more air strikes than in all of 2006.

As William S. Lind observed on June 11, the rise in strikes is indicative of the ongoing failure of the "surge" on the ground. After all, "calling in air is the last, desperate and usually futile action of an army that is losing" its ground-based counterinsurgency efforts. "Worse," he writes, "the growing number of air strikes shows that, despite what the Marines have accomplished in Anbar province and General Petraeus's best efforts, our high command remains as incapable as ever of grasping 'fourth generation' war."

A military is a naturally conservative unit. In the business of saving their own soldiers' lives, they will provide whatever cover they can to help them carry out the mission. But airstrikes will simply enrage a population and, considering that they are by definition imprecise, they will fail to accomplish the kind of pinpointed goals you need to stop a counterinsurgency on the ground, and indeed may even work against the goal. (I'm also wondering if this also has to do with the lack of manpower. It's easier for one Air Force pilot to destroy a target than to send thousands of troops in there)

It hasn't been reported much, the increase in the level of airstrikes. But it's as sure a sign as any that we're losing wars on two fronts, and that our military is institutionally resistant to the kind of change needed to reverse course.

Plane Gate

I think the consensus coming out of this ridiculous Nancy Pelosi plane story is that she was unfairly smeared. What's troubling is how readily the media swallowed the hook, again, showing that the default position is still to buy the horseshit from the right.

I mean, Avedon Carol is absolutely right: Howard Kurtz writes a story about the controversy highlighting blogs that just started, perhaps specifically for the purpose of flogging the Pelosi story. How did he find them? Who brought them to his attention? He'll never say (and he's on Meet the Press this week, but don't expect to hear that discussion).

The rest of Kurtz' story is also a disaster:

Nancy Pelosi asked for a bigger (and far more expensive) plane because the one she was using couldn't make it to the West Coast without a refueling stop. Hastert didn't have that problem getting to Illinois.
Pelosi may be right on the substance, but the symbolism is awful. She insists she didn't ask for the plane, but if a military flight is needed, she wants a nonstop to San Francisco. The average voter will be left with an image of her flying around on a jumbo jet in the lap of luxury....

Pelosi has gone on the offensive, saying that Pentagon officials leaked the dispute for partisan reasons and that the negotiating was done not by her but by the House sergeant-at-arms. The flap made the network newscasts last night, although Tony Snow pointedly declined to pile on, calling the story "silly."

But...but...but...it wasn't just Pelosi who said that the "negotiating" was done by the House sergeant-at arms. The sergeant-at-arms himself attested to this! He did so in a statement yesterday -- and he did more than just say he was "negotiating"; he said he had requested the plane. I know Kurtz was in column mode here, but isn't this kind of critical information? Particularly in a column looking at media coverage of this tale? And if Kurtz is going to say that Pelosi "insists she didn't ask for a plane," how can he simultaneously state as fact that "Pelosi asked for a bigger (and far more expensive) plane"? Proof, please.

Here's the real question: Given the fact that Pelosi has been getting pummeled for days on this non-story, how could any self-respecting reporter or editor see the sergeant-at-arms' statement and not either make it the lede or feature it very prominently in his or her story? Wouldn't basic fairness dictate that?

Even Republicans acknowledge how stupid this story is. "“Next week, we are going to steal their mascot and short-sheet their beds,” said Jeff Flake (R-AZ). So some Republicans are AHEAD of the media on this one. But of course, the leadership of the GOP brought this one up. And Jack Murtha's going to let them have it:

Meanwhile, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said on Thursday that he's planning hearings this spring on executive and congressional travel on military aircraft.

Murtha said he's requested from the Defense Department records on travel and logistics from the past two years. He asked the Defense Department to hand those over within a month.

Somehow I think this might turn out embarrassing for the Republic Party (h/t Rep. Weiner).