P Squared, Pt. II

Fine sounding phrases,
hiding hollow arguments
--Hendrick Van Loon

The president does not have power
under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize
a military attack in a situation that does not
involve stopping an actual or imminent threat
to the nation
--Barack Obama, 2007
__________________

[Oh, the difference a few years makes . . .]

Understanding the Petraeus - Panetta shuffle is a lot like understanding a terrorist incident: The meaning goes beyond the immediate target and has more significance than the action alone.

The key player in this mise en scène is Robert Gates, and not P². The timing is auspicious, and Gates' exit eerily coincides with his negative input on the Libyan air piracy campaign being run by the Obomba wunderkind. Gates has been more statesmanlike and restrained in the Libyan scenario than our erstwhile C in C, qualities which = presidential material.

It is Gates -- not Petraeus -- who is the threat to Obama's 2012 reelection bid. In a sane world, he would be a strong Republican contender. Unlike the rest of the wannabes Gates has a depth of government service extending back to the Reagan administration. He understands budgets, government policy and precedents, strategic planning, intelligence and statecraft. He is bipartisan and could attract the cross-over Democratic vote, unlike the other opposition candidates.

Gates is similar to Bush 41 in his knowledge of Washington's back streets. He is untainted and respected by the Legislative Branch and held in esteem by the citizenry. The personnel shuffle is a shell game. The reality is that Gates is the most respectable and electable potential candidate for the Republicans -- and the irony is, he is more restrained than either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

In short, Gates is more democratic than the Democrats. Obama couldn't put a glove on him.

Hope Springs Eternal

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates offered a not-too-robust summation of the situation in Iraq, this after a whirlwind tour earlier in the month of several (safe) countries in the Middle East, excluding Iraq (Gates Offers a Blunt Assessment on Iraq.)

Gates "acknowledged that the Bush administration may have misjudged the difficulty of achieving reconciliation among sectarian factions." But, "My hope is that it can all be patched back together."

Feeling like the late comic Sam Kinison here -- people, they never did have it together. You can't have reconciliation if you never had conciliation. You can only patch a bicycle tire so many times before it loses its integrity.

He said "the administration would have to balance the relative lack of progress on the political front with the somewhat encouraging trends in the security realm when it prepared its review in September. . ."

However, those "somewhat encouraging security trends" come at a cost. Tens -- perhaps hundreds -- of thousands of security contractors paid for by Uncle Sam. In a recent expose of cost overruns for two British subcontracting firms, the WaPo reported:

"The size of this force and its cost have never been documented. The Pentagon has said that about 20,000 security contractors operate in Iraq, although some estimates are considerably higher. . .Several lawmakers have recently sought to regulate the private security industry and account for billions of dollars spent on outsourcing military and intelligence tasks that once were handled exclusively by the government.

"The payments 'are immense and probably shocking to a lot of people, but they represent just two companies within one sector,' said Peter W. Singer, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who wrote a book on private security and has advocated greater oversight of the industry. "We're talking tip-of-the-iceberg stuff here. That's pretty disturbing when you begin to extrapolate it out" (U.S. Pays Millions in Cost Overruns for Iraq Security.)

The truth is, there is no effective Iraqi government, nor is there security, except when delivered by U.S. force of arms.