Bush's Final Year Off To A Hell Of A Start

The Bush Administration kicked off their final year by acknowledging that there wouldn't be any progress on the international front.

Only a few months ago, senior officials predicted that before their exit, they could deliver the Middle East peace deal that had eluded so many predecessors. But this month, as President Bush toured Israel and the West Bank, officials made it clear that the deal he's now talking about is not a long-awaited final agreement, but a preliminary pact to set the terms for talks.

In addition, the administration's efforts to get North Korea and Iran to end their nuclear programs have suffered deflating setbacks in recent weeks. And although the administration's greatest foreign policy undertaking, Iraq, has seen encouraging security improvements, the goal of Iraqi political reconciliation remains distant.

The upshot is that the Bush administration is going to be spending the next year managing crises and tidying up messes until the next president takes over, rather than reaching legacy milestones, as officials recently had hoped.

Amazing, so you apparently can't spend seven years neglecting global problems and then expect to solve them all in the way that a college student crams for a test.

The foreign policy landscape, from the perspective of the Bushies, isn't actually so bad. No, they're not likely to get their glorious war in Iran, no matter how much the President disavows the assessments of the intelligence community. This clumsy Gulf of Tonkin facsimile, forever to be known as the Filipino Monkey incident, will make any other effort to propagandize for war fall on deaf ears.

So no, they didn't get their war. But they're hoping to escape Iraq by the skin of their teeth, creating a situation that is untenable but that they won't be blamed for. And that was the entire point.

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstanding, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that "Iraq is sovereign," that sovereignty remains a fiction [...]

In short, the surge has done nothing to overturn former secretary of state Colin Powell's now-famous "Pottery Barn" rule: Iraq is irretrievably broken, and we own it. To say that any amount of "kicking ass" will make Iraq whole once again is pure fantasy. The U.S. dilemma remains unchanged: continue to pour lives and money into Iraq with no end in sight, or cut our losses and deal with the consequences of failure.

In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has ensured that U.S. troops won't be coming home anytime soon. This was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, "part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative," thereby deflecting calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war -- and leaving it to the next president -- was to get Iraq off the front pages and out of the nightly news. At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a masterstroke. From his new perch as a New York Times columnist, William Kristol has worried that feckless politicians just might "snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory." Not to worry: The "victory" gained in recent months all but guarantees that the United States will remain caught in the jaws of Iraq for the foreseeable future.

There's enough going on for the fabulists to continue the lie about success, and the military can bomb the place into submission so that they can create a narrative that things are stable. But really, the Bushies are invested in forcing the successor to keep the war going, mainly by ensuring that the Iraqis are so dependent on us that leaving would unleash short-term chaos.

We're now seeing a lame duck just trying to get out of Washington before everything caves in.

The Not-So-Innocent Abroad

With the "Filipino Monkey" story starting to hit the major press, the Administration's credibility on this Straits of Hormuz incident is lessening even further. It's very clear that the audio threats, which set this apart from more routine incidents in the Straits, bore little relation to the incident itself and was likely to be essentially a crank call. And Cernig notes that the other threatening aspect of the early reports, those mysterious white boxes that the Iranians tossed in the water, were pretty much... white boxes.

The small, boxlike objects dropped in the water by Iranian boats as they approached U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday posed no threat to the American vessels, U.S. officials said yesterday, even as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff charged that the incident reflects Iran's new tactics of asymmetric warfare.

After passing the white objects, commanders on the USS Port Royal and its accompanying destroyer and frigate decided there was so little danger from the objects that they did not bother to radio other ships to warn them, the officials said.

"The concern was that there was a boat in front of them putting these objects in the path of our ships. When they passed, the ships saw that they were floating and light, that they were not heavy or something that would have caused damage," such as a mine, said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, a spokeswoman for the Navy's Fifth Fleet in the Gulf.

The Navy ships in the water appeared to take this incident in stride. Somebody in the upper echelons saw an opening and leaked this to the press, and blew it up out of proportion. When you have people like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen saying he's never seen such a provocative incident but then admitting he never saw the video, the suspicions grow. And the fact that it occurred at precisely the time when Bush was headed to the region with the intent of threatening Iran is no accident. If the dynamic between the US and Iraq was changed by the release of last year's NIE, Bush hasn't gotten the memo.

President Bush on Sunday called Iran "the world's leading state sponsor of terror" and sought to shore up opposition to the government in Tehran throughout the Middle East.

But even as he criticized Iranian leaders, saying they were seeking to repress their citizens and cow neighboring countries, Bush appealed to U.S. allies in the region to open up their own political and economic systems to greater democracy.

Spotlighting a swath of the globe where U.S. diplomacy is built around seeking help for the administration's anti-terrorism effort, the president criticized only Iran by name. He avoided mentioning Egypt, his final stop on a six-nation Middle East trip, despite its long record of human rights abuses, limited political rights and economic disparity. Nor did he cite other nations across the region with similarly troubled histories.

Kind of a delicate subject in the Middle East, and the emirs didn't take kindly to it.

Even political analysts here who share Bush's democratic vision said that his speech painted over the daily reality for most inhabitants of the Middle East, an oil-rich region where power is largely inherited and human rights violations abound.

Whether chastising Iran or praising Palestinian elections, analysts said, Bush left out key facts that would have offered a messier — and more true-to-life — portrait of the modern Middle East.

"Iran is a neighbor, we have to deal with that," said Ambassador Ibrahim Mohieldin, director of the Arab League's Americas department. "The U.S. is thousands of miles away from Iran - it's OUR national security that will be affected" if leaders agree to keep Tehran isolated at Washington's request.

This is the result of an incurious man who is given a script without checking the facts. Bush can talk about democracy promotion, but when it comes down to it a substantial portion of US aid goes to undemocratic regimes, and little goes to actually strengthening the building blocks of democracy. Bush can praise the United Arab Emirates (!) as a model society because to him, it is; an obscenely wealthy oligarchy that practically enslaves immigrant labor to construct their opulent palaces. Bush can caution for stability in the region while selling $20 billion in arms to the Saudis, clearly as a counter-balance to Iran, which may increase tensions rather than diffuse them (Congress, by the way, has the ability to, and should, outright reject these sales). Bush can call for an end to the occupation of Palestine while failing to understand or even engage with the dynamics of the debate, seven years after ignoring the peace process and making the problem significantly more protracted. This is the "Innocent Abroad," only he's not so innocent.

In private meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week, Newsweek reports that President Bush disowned the U.S. intelligence community’s judgments:

"But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. “He told the Israelis that he can’t control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE’s] conclusions don’t reflect his own views” about Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity."

This incident in the Straits was very orchestrated and very timed. Career staffers in the intelligence apparatus won the first round in the effort to halt a march to war with Iran, but that was only a round (that WSJ piece is really interesting, by the way, have a read). We have a President that is visiting the Middle East at the same time he is ignoring their wishes and making their region significantly less livable through saber-rattling and falsification.

The Filipino Monkey

Banging head against desk...

The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”...
In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets....

Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.

“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

There have been naval incidents in the past, there will be more again. If the hype that this particular one got can cool down the tendencies in the Gulf, great. But the goal here was to create something that wingnut zombies can discuss over and over again in an effort to promote future war with Iran.

UPDATE: There were two other incidents between Iranian crafts and US warships in December. They were previously unreported. Hm, I wonder why? Maybe because they were routine and unremarkable and shouldn't have been released to be used as wingnut war fodder? But now that the Pentgon and the Administration is feeling heat about the Filipino Monkey incident, they have to release these other two. Good to know.

Serious Seriousness Watch

(BUMPED)

Did John McCain, running to be leader of the free world, really say that the Straits of Hormuz "incident" was a serious situation of the utmost seriousness? Really?

And by the way, if this doesn't prove the recklessness of the Administration or the Pentagon or whoever leaked this routine incident and scared it all up with voices that bore no relationship to the incident itself, I don't know what does. This will now be another zombie lie buried deep in the conservative brain, and anyone making the case for war with Iran will certainly add "and they attacked our ships in the Straits of Hormuz." It'll jump all the way to that conclusion.

This is how wars start. Years and years of little things in the background.

And it's sick that the racist homophobe is the voice of reason in the Republican Party.

Guess what, today the Navy commander of the fifth fleet was on ABC and announced that, “you know, that voice might not have come from those vessels.” So what does that mean? Was there a rush to judgment on this, ready to go to war? … And we don’t need another war, and this incident should not be thrown out of proportion to the point where we’re getting ready to attack Iran over this.

That will be buried under the weight of history.

UPDATE: Russell Walter Mead:

From the 18th century to the present day, threats to American ships and maritime commerce have been the way most U.S. wars start. The pattern began early. Attacks by the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean led President Thomas Jefferson to send the U.S. Navy thousands of miles on a risky expedition to suppress the threat to American merchant ships in 1801....The widespread (though probably erroneous) U.S. belief that the USS Maine had been destroyed by a Spanish mine in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, forced a reluctant President William McKinley to launch the Spanish-American War in 1898....The Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964 (alleged attacks on U.S. ships by North Vietnamese boats) led Congress to authorize President Lyndon Johnson's use of force in Indochina.

Exactly. Even in this age of technology we don't have a Chopper 6 out in the Persian Gulf. We have to rely on the Defense Department for this kind of information, and we have to rely on the President and his staff to put it in the proper context. This has been a familiar historical pattern.

Straits of Hormuz Audio/Video - Almost Certainly A Fake

After a few days of scrutiny, the Straits of Hormuz "incident" with Iranian gunships is completely falling apart. Not for the President - he's still using it as a scaremongering tool - but for anyone who's seriously looking at this thing.

It's important to note that non-events like this happen in the Gulf with regularity. In military parlance it's described as "free training. And certainly, from the video released by the Pentagon, it doesn't look like a whole lot more than that. I guess they felt like they had to spruce it up more. So they added this additional audio track that sounds like a random bad guy from Iron Eagle or something, threatening the American ships:



That audio really makes you laugh out loud. Apparently there are plenty of people at the Pentagon who feel the same way:

The list of those who are less than fully confident in the Pentagon’s video/audio mashup of aggressive maneuvers by Iranian boats near American warships in the Strait of Hormuz now includes the Pentagon itself.

Unnamed Pentagon officials said on Wednesday that the threatening voice heard in the audio clip, which was released on Monday night with a disclaimer that it was recorded separately from the video images and merged with them later, is not directly traceable to the Iranian military.

I think it's more directly traceable to a Hollywood soundstage. There's no background audio behind the "Iranian," yet he's supposed to be on a gunship with an outboard motor? This has to be the rationalization of the century from the spokesliars at the Pentagon:

Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.

As emptywheel said,

Oh yeah. Those fancy Iranian motorboats have such high-quality radio systems that they filter out the ambient noise of an outboard motor working at full speed while the tape taken from the US ship, taken at least partially inside the bridge, itself has the noise of a ship at sea.

That extra audio, which is the only thread between this and a perfunctory and meaningless incident, could easily have been chatter from the shoreline about the incident, kind of a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" version of what happened. It sure isn't credible that it came from the boat.

All ships at sea use a common UHF frequency, Channel 16, also known as “bridge-to bridge” radio. Over here, near the U.S., and throughout the Mediterranean, Ch. 16 is used pretty professionally, i.e., chatter is limited to shiphandling issues, identifying yourself, telling other ships what your intentions are to avoid mishaps, etc.

But over in the Gulf, Ch. 16 is like a bad CB radio. Everybody and their brother is on it; chattering away; hurling racial slurs, usually involving Filipinos (lots of Filipinos work in the area); curses involving your mother; 1970’s music broadcast in the wee hours (nothing odder than hearing The Carpenters 50 miles off the coast of Iran at 4 a.m.)

On Ch. 16, esp. in that section of the Gulf, slurs/threats/chatter/etc. is commonplace. So my first thought was that the “explode” comment might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft, but some loser monitoring the events at a shore facility.

The timing here is very ironic, and not because it matches up with the President's trip to the Middle East (hey guess what, he can snap his fingers and deliver a Palestinian state! Presidentin' is easy!). This comes in a week when newly released reports from the NSA reveal that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was definitively a hoax.

The author of the report "demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was 'unimpeachable,' but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that 'no attack happened that night,'" FAS said in a statement.

"What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence shows that there was no attack. It's a dramatic reversal of the historical record," Aftergood said.

"There were previous indications of this but this is the first time we have seen the complete study," he said.

I don't think this Straits of Hormuz incident is going to have the same impact as the Gulf of Tonkin, except in maybe making "I'm coming at you" the "Don't tase me bro" catchphrase of 2008. But it's clear that both incidents share the desire to generate propaganda for the purposes of serving foreign policy goals. In 1964 they pulled it off. In 2008, with little credibility for this government, they had to show their work. And it's about the level of a junior high school crank call.

Bush, Israel putting Iran options on the table

As if on cue after the suspicious incident with Iranian gunships, President Bush, on his first visit to Israel of his entire Presidency, will be briefed on attack options from Israeli security officials.

Israel security officials are set to brief President Bush on their "Iran file" regarding the country's alleged nuclear weapons program "and how it could be destroyed - when he begins a tour of the Middle East in Jerusalem this week," the UK Times Uzi Mahnaimi reported Sunday.

"Ehud Barak, the defence minister, is said to want to convince him that an Israeli military strike against uranium enrichment facilities in Iran would be feasible if diplomatic efforts failed to halt nuclear operations," the paper added. "A range of military options has been prepared."

Of course, the Israeli (as well as the American) military establishment has attack options for a range of nations. It is said that the Pentagon has plans for attacking Canada housed somewhere. But what's notable here is that Bush is getting a personal briefing on Israeli intelligence about Iran's nuclear ambitions, after his own country's NIE revealed that Iran abandoned their nuclear program in 2003. Since then, Israel has been denying the NIE vociferously, believing that Iran restarted the program.

Now, even this report admits that Israel "does not have any evidence which could turn the tables on a recent US intelligence report which concluded that Iran has stopped developing nuclear weapons." Which is why they're focusing on uranium enrichment, an element brought up by any number of neocons in the wake of the NIE.

"While security officials are reluctant to reveal all their intelligence, fearing that leaks could jeopardise [sic] the element of surprise in any future attack, they are expected to present the president with fresh details of Iran’s enrichment of uranium - which could be used for civil or military purposes - and the development of missiles that could carry nuclear warheads," Mahnaimi wrote.

There's no doubt that Bush still wants to label Iran as a threat that needs to be dealt with before the end of his term. He desperately wants to remain relevant as his agenda gets swamped by the Presidential race. He wants to update NCLB, he wants to make his tax cuts permanent and he wants to get amnesty for the phone companies for breaking the law and supporting his illegal spying program. The first two of these are going nowhere; the third, we're going to have to fight like hell. But legitimately, Bush only gets back to the front page in a foreign policy emergency. Whether or not he creates it is of no consequence.

See also this bizarre report which claims that Syria was actually building a plutonium processing plant to assemble the bomb when it was attacked by Israel. One wonders where the plutonium went after the attack, then.

The point is that this Administration is looking for any impetus for war with Iran. If they can't cook the intelligence over here, they can certainly try to do so over in Israel. The timing of this incident in the Straits of Hormuz, combined with Bush's visit, is all too obvious.