Reverse English

There isn't a more profitable undertaking for any country
than to declare war on the United States and to be defeated 
--The Mouse that Roared (1959)

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist
--Indira Gandhi
__________________

President Obama recently traveled to Israel and met with President, Benjamin Netanyahu (after rebuffing him on his two previous trips to the United States.)  The visit was a set piece allowing Mr. Obama to co-opt some of his erstwhile mentor Wright's hortatory when he bade Israelis to reach out in peace to their mortal nemesis, Hamas (Obama will not meet with Hamas himself.)

Americans enjoy the feeling of newness and the appeal to youth-as-salvation, but Obama in Israel is not President Kennedy forming the Peace Corps. We err in many ways when we envision the Arab-Israeli peace process (NOT) as one of overcoming terrorism via application of our own template. 

Of course, that is not exactly what Obama did when he exhorted the young Israelis reach out with the olive branch to sworn enemy Hamas. The U.S. template of elective warfare is anything but nurturing and peace-loving. (One of the best political cartoon takes on the meeting was a two-panel, showing Obama in his pulpit apparently excoriating Netanyahu and government for being aggressive and building fences as no way to surmount problems and achieve peace, while the next panel has the president saying, "But enough about Washington ...")

The Israelis face an existential threat from terrorists who are chartered to destroy their nation. In fact, Hamas has organized beyond garden variety terrorism into low-intensity conflict, military in nature.  Israel is not the United States -- their Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is largely that, a defense force incapable of long-term, mass-casualty theatre operations. However, they maintain their military aura as they are a key ally of the U.S. in the area and we like to envision them as a maneuver force of the U.S. military machine.

While exhorting the Israelis to embrace peace, love and beauty with their avowed enemies, Obama failed to mention that he had just befriended the new Egyptian government with 200 new battle tanks. Did Obama feel this gift would increase or decrease the chance of peace in the region?  We peddle the fiction that whoever leads Egypt will protect the peace with Israel, but Anwar al-Sadat was a one-off in the Arab world, and his assassination was a shot across the bow from any of his fellows: do not deal with Israel unless you, too, want to be dead.

Did Obama gift the Israelis with 200 tanks? Did he de-fang the Egyptian support of Hamas? A country may not arm everyone and expect peace to flow from that; that is how the World Wars started.  Yet the U.S. president has the chutzpah to exhort Israeli leaders and public to subscribe to Flower Power, a posture that will get Israeli knocked down quicker than Robert Blake off of his Electra Glide in Blue.

Our president had no qualms about spreading his fairy dust within Israel, but he did not repeat his performance to Hamas or in any of the States supporting the elements that are hostile towards Israel. He did not address Egypt's anti-Semetic President Morsi or that nation's Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological father of al-Qaeda elements which are the U.S. enemy of choice in its Phony War on Terror (PWOT © ).

And at the same time Obama was calling for peace with the Palestinians and gifting the Eyptians with war tanks, he was discussing the possibility of Israeli, or U.S., or U.S. - Israeli military action against Iran. The Iranians are always a convenient whipping boy and distraction. So why must Israel strike a peaceful posture versus Hamas, but a military one versus Iran?

After two disastrous long-term wars, the U.S. has left the region anything but peaceful. We disingenuously tell the Israelis to be peaceful while remaining militarily engaged in Yemen, Somalia and the Horn of Africa -- while Africom uses the African continent as their playground.  We call it "defense" when we employ our forces worldwide, while telling Israel to bite the bullet in their own terrain.

The U.S. left Iraq behind with no insured peace and it will be the same in Afghanistan.  We have forgotten the principles of war and cannot remember the foundations of peace and prosperity. While we hunt and kill terrorists worldwide, President Obama has the Chutzpah to tell Israeli youth to embrace Hamas in a warm, fuzzy bear hug.  It is the scorpion and the frog, and Obama is either a callow 2nd term president or his fiendish machinations know no shame.

Speeches are not reality and effective policy must be based in fact, not feel-good tripe. Ranger's view is that of a detached observer.

If Obama were an honest broker, he would tell the Palestinian's Hamas that they will never have a place at the table of civilized nations until they accept the right of their neighbors to exist -- not until they demonstrate they can build in addition to destroying. That is a position from which the Palestinians could operate with credibility.

Anything short of that is nihilism, and that is not the posture of an advancing Western civilization.  Nihilists welcome death, hardly a dealer's card.

Amps in Their Panties

A lady removing her scanties,
Heard them crackle electrical chanties.
Said her beau, "Have no fear,
For the reason is clear:
You simply have amps in your panties
--Limerick

There's the way things ought to be,

and the way things are

--Platoon (1986)

Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock,

we blended with the crowd

We got computer, we're tapping phone lines,

I know that ain't allowed

--Life During Wartime,

Talking Heads

__________________

This is about the new-and-improved underwear bomb (not) and a brief analysis thereof. Intelligence is the focus, but first, some history.

The major deficiency of U.S. policy and operations since World War II has been intelligence; WWII could be viewed as a failure of strategic intelligence. The intel breakdown in pre-World War II scenarios was not in the collection cycle but in the policy application phase.

It is safe to say that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his Secretary of State Cordell Hull interpreted intelligence to reflect outcomes that were aligned with their goals. In short, the intel was a tool to be bent to their will, much the same as we saw with President G. W. Bush's actions in 2002.

WWII intelligence was largely a U.S. product with input from the British, Dutch and other major players. Historically, however, we realize that the input from other nations was often self-serving, designed to play U.S. policy-makers.

Korean War intel was largely a military product that was sufficient at the Division and Corps Level but broke down at Theatre. This was because the command structure (=MacArthur) totally misread the battlefield reports as they did not fit into his conception of the field forces reality. The problem was not external. The military collected, interpreted and disseminated the product in a correct manner, however, it was largely ignored.

This shows failure may happen at many points along the intel cycle, from gathering through application, and the failure may be one of incorrect input (intentional or not), or one of human bias. [Ranger has discussed Human Intelligence (HUMINT) versus Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) in the past, and one is not preferable to the other, nor may one exist successfully independent of the other. However, bias is always problematic.]

In Vietnam, the U.S. in country depended largely upon reports that were generated by the South Vietnamese government, data that was often faulty and self-serving. Unfortunately, this fact was largely ignored since an ally is always believed to be honest and trustworthy. As a result, projects like Phoenix were based upon faulty and misleading intel provided by a foreign power.

In the 1980's, when U.S. doctrine attempted to assimilate the experience of Vietnam, it failed to recognize this key deficiency in the Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) and Counterterrorism (CT) arenas since the only intel available was often foreign-based and produced.

Which brings us to 2012, and questionable intel is still chewing on our shorts. I will use the case of the second underwear bomber as a template for the problem, beginning with the facts, ending with an analysis. Put on your thinking caps.

Tomorrow: Amps in Their Panties II

Facebook the Nation

--Camel Jockeys, Petar Pismestrovic

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule,
where fifty-one percent of the people
may take away the rights of the other forty-nine
--Thomas Jefferson
___________________

Watching U.S. policy floundering in the Middle East is like watching the obsessive-compulsive t.v. character Monk walking a sidewalk.

He knows there are cracks, but he assiduously avoids stepping on them, his arduous crack-avoiding walk allowing him to maintain a measure of equanimity. He would deny that he's making any accommodation for something that is driving him mad -- he would deny even seeing the cracks -- and so it is with U.S. foreign policy. The fictional Monk is OCD, but how do we diagnose U.S. policy, one as bizarre as Mr. Monk's strange denial and sidesteps?

Our leaders have been all atwitter about the upswell of mob action in Egypt, elevating mobocracy to democracy. This ignores the reality that mob rule should not / cannot be tolerated by any government, democratic, autocratic or otherwise. The U.S. has never tolerated mob rule, nor should we.

The streets of Washington were planned with crowd control in mind. The School of the Americas at Ft. Benning taught crowd control as a basic element of foreign Army training. U.S. mobile training teams worldwide taught the host nation forces how to control crowds. Here in the States, elite Airborne Infantry units have performed domestic crowd control, and the National Guard is well-versed in the topic.

So . . . why is the U.S. so optimistic about riots and mobs in the streets of Cairo? Further, was Obama's 2009 Hope - Change Cairo speech the match to this tinderbox (Dictators and Hedgehogs)? We are inconsistent: The U.S. heralds mobs in one place yet quashes them in another, forcing the residents to accept rulers they do not want.

How can the U.S. disingenuously press on with its counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan in the face of such hypocrisy? It spends trillions of dollars forcing people not to be insurgent, while sitting back on its haunches calling mobs elsewhere constellations of freedom fighting? Furthermore, isn't a mob a form of Low-Intensity Conflict (LIC)?

Will we allow Sadrist mobs to control Baghdad? No, so why can mobs overthrow a regime in Cairo but not in Baghdad? If U.S. policy is to empower mobs, then COIN should be abandoned as dead-in-the-water.

We need to think versus reacting in a Pollyannaish, vacuous Katie Couric moment. We do not know where Egypt will end up, nor do we know if the results will be constructive or democratic. Additionally, we do not know if democracy in Egypt will benefit the U.S. On the pragmatic side: What leader will cast his lot in with us when he knows he will be tossed to the wolves after he has done our bidding for 30 years?

One thing is certain: Democracy does not prosper in mobs.

[Cross-posted @ milpub]

Rube Goldberg's COIN

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent
a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves
--Eric Hoffer

[Clear guidance] and unity
is not only logical but indeed indispensable
in a successful military organization,
but in a democracy debate is the breath of life
--President Eisenhower

"To the Taliban, winning is, in fact, not losing,"
he said.
"They feel that over time, they will ultimately outlast
the international community's attempt to
stabilize Afghanistan. It's really a game of will to them."
--Taliban Surprising U.S. Forces

__________________

The September/October Columbia Journalism Review's cover story -- "Too Close for Comfort?" -- questions the impartiality of reporter Tom Ricks' recent coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, suggesting Ricks has become a cheerleader for wars he once roundly criticized. And Ricks is not the only former critic-turned-supporter.

Ricks is the author of 2006's Fiasco, which savaged George Bush's war efforts as being ill-conceived and poorly executed with neither clearly stated plans nor goals. However, since 2007 Ricks has affiliated himself with the Washington D.C. think tank Center for a New American Security where he has an office, and he is now a champion of current U.S. counterinsurgency [COIN] efforts.

Ricks attributes what he is now lauding as the successes in Iraq and AFPAK to "dissidents" like General Petraeus, but a dissident never did wear 4 Stars on his uniform. A 4 Star is a playa.

Ranger wonders why he doesn't cash-in on COIN, cheerleading for phony wars and faulty COIN doctrine. The fetti must be good.

Tom Ricks is too good of a journalist not to know the basic flaws with COIN policy, some of which have been delineated by former COIN advocate Col. Gian P. Gentile, a man now on Rick's hit list. Some of the fallacies accepted as bedrock strengths are:

• ♥'s and Minds: It is erroneous to believe that either Afghan or Iraqi hearts and minds will be won by a foreign, Christian-based Western Army of Occupation. If any hearts and minds are won, they probably belong to the pimps and whores who are selling. What is the proof of hearts and minds won?

• Low Intensity Conflict [LIC] and Terrorism as existential threats to the welfare of the United States: While these are viewed as central to U.S. Defense Policy, there is no proof that we are, as the Review states, "[in] an age in which global terrorism and small-scale conflicts, rather than a cold-war enemy like the former Soviet Union, define the threats to the United States."
  

Defense policy should be based upon reality versus ambiguous, poorly understood and often overblown threats. Neither AFPAK nor Iraq will ever be key U.S. allies, nor do they contribute to the welfare of the U.S. -- they are money pits and albatrosses attached to our body politic. COIN sounds good, but how does the American taxpayer footing the bill benefit from LIC/CT in AFPAK and Iraq?

The security of the U.S. is a different creature than the security of these far-flung nations. Threats to Karzai and the Iraqi leaders are not threats to the U.S. These people are not allies -- they are U.S. inventions.

LIC and CT are not threats, though they are interpreted as such by a military and political class desperate to justify their existence and place at the public money trough. Terrorism is the threat.

• General Petraeus and followers emphasize "protecting the local population, rather than going after the insurgents," but what do you do when the insurgents are the population?

COIN has U.S. soldiers fighting and dying for foreign governments when there is no logical imperative for their sacrifice. COIN is an emotional construct, like "hope".

• In addition, no one explains how the insurgents in AFPAK and Iraq are a threat to the welfare of the U.S. An insurgent threat to these nations is not necessarily a threat to America. Insurgents are not always terrorists, and vice versa.

• Why does the U.S. have a right or obligation to impose its will upon failed or failing states.

U.S forces are placed in a position of fighting for foreign governments when there is no logical imperative for their sacrifice. We win neither hearts and minds nor allies, and only an idiot would believe these countries would come to the aid of the U.S. in a pinch. When our dollars die, so too will their love and devotion. Allies are not pimps, nor are pimps allies.

The weakness of COIN is that it is a top-down imposition, while the insurgents are building a bottom-up approach to opposing a foreign-controlled puppet regime. COIN cannot succeed in impoverished environments where concepts of democracy are not explainable to a tribal existence-level society.

Democracy demands an educated middle class, something which has fled Iraq and is in short supply in Afghanistan. Democracy cannot be intubated. Just because COIN makes for pretty words in a manual does not make it realistic or achievable.

Bottom line: It matters not who controls Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan -- the only thing that matters is that they not export terrorism, and COIN will not ensure that. The threat not CT, LIC or any other acronym -- the threat is terrorism.

The entire Phony War on Terror (PWOT©) is based upon a hyperbolic global threat. The real threat is failed nations and power vacuums thus created, and U.S. policy in isolation cannot solve the problem via fancy manuals and COIN policy.

The problem must be confronted via multi-national United Nations action. COIN is simply an extension of U.S. exceptionalism and unilateralism, and as such is DOA.