When the USS New York sailed into New York City last week, containing in its hull a few tons of steel recycled from the World Trade Center debris, I read a very striking and pithy comment.

Beating ploughshares into swords

To me, this is a profound indictment of the jingoistist, somebody's-eye-and-I-don't-care-too-much-whose-for-an-eye mentality that has caused the US reaction to the 9/11 attacks to trigger far more damage worldwide than the original attacks. But a few days later when I googled to find where I'd actually read that comment, I found that others saw the same words in a different light:

When others beat our ploughshares into swords, no one should be surprised that Americans will find a use for them, least of all Americans. —Huffington Post commenter Noble

... I do not consider it a killing machine. IMHO, peace through strength is more than a slogan, it’s a reality we sorely need in this hostile world. The USS New York may very well be a 21st century example of turning ploughshares into swords. I’m proud of it and the country it serves in protecting us.—WORLDmag commenter Nana

Plowshares beaten into swords? ***** YEAH!
—Digg commenter fragMasterFlash

Isaiah 2: "......they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks;....", but, in the meantime since there are nations who wish to make war against us and kill our people, we're going to have to take some of those plows and hooks and turn them into the USS New York. —Free Republic commenter muawiyah

>Wouldn't it be..like bad luck to have it built of the steel from the
> towers considering..you know what happened?
> I mean like...if your last house crumbled in an earthquake...would you
> reuse the steel or concrete in your new house?
>
> I'm just thinking...

It wasn't unlucky, it was an attack. Taking the steel from a (peacfully, civilian) building that was brought down in an attack, and turning it not only into a military ship, but an _offensive_ attack ship, sends a very specific message. Kind of turning plowshares into swords. And if there is any reality to ghosts (other than in our hearts and minds), the fact that the front of that ship (the bow) is "guarded" by those ghosts is powerful juju.

—House of Fusion

Much like the World Trade Center, the steel once again endured tremendous tragedy in Louisiana. In August 2005, the ship was slammed by Hurricane Katrina. The steel and the ship survived, a glowing tribute in itself to keep persevering for the American people.

"It’s already got two battle stars now, the first being 9/11," said Koen. "It’s like the phrase on the monument outside the United Nations. We will beat this sword into a ploughshare and the ploughshare into a sword. We did just that with this."

—USS New York

The Gamble

By Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks. Ricks' reporting posits that, first, US military activity in Iraq in 2003-2006 was so utterly counterproductive to US aims that Bin Laden couldn't have asked for anything more. He covered that in his previous book, so this book is about "the surge". The surge is several things first, sending all available US troops to Iraq (amount to roughly 35,000, but the surge architects would have takes double that if the troops had been available). Second, a major change in US tactics, directed by General Petreus and amounting to using counter-insurgency methods , as opposed to ... not using counter-insurgency methods. The key elements of the new tactics are bribing Sunni insurgents to change sides, and changing priorities from trying to kill "bad guys" to trying to protect the Iraqi civilian population. The surge also benefited from Moqtada al-Sadr's decision to reduce his militia's level of attacks, and from the simple fact that most ethnic cleansing was already finished. The effect of the surge was to drastically reduce daily violence, but it leaves all of the major factions in Iraq completely unreconciled and fully armed, and may have simply postponed an inevitable civil war.

The book is extremely readable and I highly recommend it. It contains many details worth knowing, such as a thorough indictment of essentially every major military decision-maker from the Secretary of Defense to the Chiefs of Staff to the generals, from 2003 to 2006. Its main flaw is that it's simply the story of the second batch of generals, as told to this reporter. While those generals certainly seem to bring enough realism and pessimism to the story to make it plausible, Ricks is working through a very narrow perspective. He does mention negatives about the heroes of his story (Petreus and Odierno, primarily), and he is clear that he believes that while surge succeeded in buying time, that time won't be used for anything positive.

But the problem is not one of having enough bad things to "balance" the good things. As readers we depend on Ricks' judgment of what to mention in 300 pages to give an accurate impression of his years of research, both factually and emotionally. But the vast majority of his sources were either second-wave military leaders in Iraq and pro-war think-tanks, so he simply couldn't have enough information to make those judgments, no matter how plausibly realistic and self-critical the current military leaders seem to be, and we in turn must read between the lines for clues on how to weight Ricks' opinions. Ricks is as generous to his sources as he is harsh toward their predecessors, and his sources include some neo-cons, such as Fred Kagan, who clearly merit a far more critical approach.

Even with those caveats, the perspective he does provide is certainly a valuable one and one that belongs in any evaluation of the war, and the book is excellently done.

I'm aware of three candidates for most righteous, furious, funny political cartoonist. David Rees, Ted Rall, and Dwayne Booth.

Interlude. Realizing that list is exclusively male, I spent a few minutes googling for female political cartoonist. I found Signe Wilkinson, who wrote:

Editors also seem touchingly comforted by a breadth of humor that ranges from Jay Leno all the way to David Letterman monologue material. It’s humor that whacks Newt today, then Bill tomorrow, with just a touch of naughtiness. For example, if the news is filled with wild leaks about White House interns, a cartoon showing the first dog Buddy next to the first shrubbery and a lot of excited reporters racing over yelling “Another White House leak!” would be appropriate.

But I just went through about ten of her recent cartoons and they were all terrible, so I'll have to dig a bit deeper than the top google hit. End Interlude.

Anyway, two Mr Fish cartoons have really stood out this year since I started reading him daily. They aren't especially funny. The first one is apropos these very moving times of "Si se puede", and the second one I repost for Veterans Day.

A federal appeals court temporarily blocked the release of 17 Chinese-born Muslims detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba , a day after a landmark decision required them to be freed to the U.S.

[...] In court papers, Justice Department lawyers attacked Urbina's ruling ... The lawyers said that Urbina's decision "directly conflicts with the basic principle" that the executive branch, specifically the Department of Homeland Security, has sole discretion as to whether to admit foreigners into the U.S. —Marisa Taylor, McClatchy Newspapers

Excuse me while I go digging in the constitution for that basic principle.

Scott McClellan becomes the latest in a long, long sequence of former Bush officials to publish a book about it. He appears to take more responsibility than Feith. And this quote takes him a lot further than many others in and outside of the administration have been willing to go:

In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

As with virtually all such attacks of honesty and conscience, it's much too little, far too late.

Jon Stewart interviewed Doug Feith, one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, and the Daily Show website has the full ~17 minute interview online. It almost goes without saying that Feith lies more or less continuously throughout the interview, and I won't attempt to catalog that. Instead I want to point out something damning that Jon Stewart says:

Feith (at about 3:40 in Part 1): "there was a serious consideration of the very great risks of war and I think that many of them were actually discussed with the public, but to tell you the truth one thing is absolutely clear: this administration made gross errors in the way it talked about the war, some of the them are very obvious, like the WMD—"

Stewart: "—That was all we had to go on."

Which citizen in their right mind would rely solely on their own government to inform their decision about whether or not to support war? And I don't mean that in a post-Watergate, cynical Generation X or Y kind of a way, or even in a democratic way. Governments start wars. There is, in the lingo I learned last semester, a principle-agent problem, in that we the people delegate the power of war-making on our behalf to a government, but the decision-makers in that government have incentives that do not reflect the desires and needs of the people. If I could make one structural reform to the United States, it would be to require a three-quarter majority of the Senate and House to declare war. Of course, as a necessary corollary we would also have to restore the norm that the president and the military don't actually wage war without a declaration from Congress, a norm which disintegrated during the Cold War.

Anyway, on occasion of Feith's book promotion appearance on the Daily Show, a book which he claims that "if the public doesn't have accurate information, it's impossible in a democracy like ours to have a serious proper discussion of these enormously important issues. My purpose in writing the book was to provide accurate information ...." Here are a few of what I take to be well-established historical facts about the Iraq War:

• Key decision-makers in the administration, most notably Cheney and Rumsfeld, wanted from before the election to wage war with Iraq.
  • The reasons varied with each person
  • Chief among the reasons was oil, directly and indirectly
  • Another key reason for many decision-makers was to benefit Israel
• Hussein and Iraq were not an imminent threat to the United States
  • Al-Queda was not working with or operating in Iraq
  • Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction
• The administration deliberately lied to and misled the US Congress, the people of the United States, American allies, and the United Nations in order to create support for an invasion.
• Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2001 or early 2002.

Wikileaks.org is once again directly accessible. I checked it out and noticed that in late 2007 someone leaked "the names, group structure and equipment registers of all units in Iraq with US army equipment". Various grains of salt to be taken with this information, not least of which the suspect quality of the material even if it is all completely authentic.

My highlights of the highlights include:

• At least 2,386 backpack tear gas sprayers. "The use of chemical weapons such as CS gas for military operations is illegal," so these are either being used for war crimes or domestic policing by US troops.
• 39 automatic cash counting machines
• 5 "portable mobile chemical and biological stations". This brings to mind the old joke, how do we know Hussein has weapons of mass destruction? We have the receipts from when we sold them to him.
• Almost half of the 950,000 individual items in the spreadsheets are pieces of body armor.
• The most common items after body armor are radios and electronic counter-measures (presumably radio-bomb jammers)

Justice Scalia filed a dissenting opinion which, to the extent that I understand it, I agree with. It's kind of confusing since you have to know exactly what Hamdi was asking, and I think the plurality opinion is right, as far as it goes—I think they are saying that the decision to make someone an enemy combatant must be subject to review—so I would have thought Scalia could concur with that while dissenting on the bigger point that THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES CAN'T DETAIN PEOPLE INDEFINITELY WITHOUT A CRIMINAL SENTENCE OR CONGRESSIONAL SUSPENSION OF THE WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS. But I guess Scalia has to dissent with the one step in the right direction that could be part of many more steps back.

... It follows from what I have said that Hamdi is entitled to a habeas decree requiring his release unless (1) criminal proceedings are promptly brought, or (2) Congress has suspended the writ of habeas corpus.

...

Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis—that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it. Because the Court has proceeded to meet the current emergency in a manner the Constitution does not envision, I respectfully dissent.

—Justice Scalia

An unclassified Air Force report issued in April 2003 categorized 50 attacks from March 19 to April 18 as having been time-sensitive strikes on Iraqi leaders. An up-to-date accounting posted on the Web site of the United States Central Command shows that 43 of the top 55 Iraqi leaders on the most-wanted list have now been taken into custody or killed, but that none were taken into custody until April 13, 2003, and that none were killed by airstrikes.

Yes, but "Senior military officials said ... intelligence agencies were engaged in a hard task." So I guess 0 for 50 is understandable, because in order to actually drop precision bombs on military officers, instead of just random buildings that very probably have innocent civilians, you would have to, you know, have an idea where those evildoers were, and in order to do that you'd have to have, like, spies and stuff. In Baghdad.

... commanders were required to obtain advance approval from Mr. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was likely to result in the deaths of 30 more civilians. More than 50 such raids were proposed, and all were approved ...

The trend over the last decade or so has been that the US military is so intensively technologized that our military allies can't really cooperate closely because they just don't have the toys. But since it's turning out that we simply don't have a significant spying capability, maybe they have something to offer after all. Anyway, it's been years since 9/11 - how many Arabic speakers are the CIA, DIA, NSA, ETC, employing? If the number's not in the thousands, can we ask some more officials to resign for personal reasons?

"When you take a large country the size of Iraq, with all those sensors and communications, how do you get the right information to the right person who needs it in a timely manner?" General Cone said.

I guess my hope would have been that the US military would have had the answer to that question before dropping all those bombs. My taxes are paying for this. Your taxes, American readers, are paying for this.

``Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the United States. We will not forget that treachery and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy...'' President George W. Bush, Wednesday June 2 2004.

Where to begin...

I have two comments.

1) I hope I'm not the only person who did a double-take upon hearing this. A good many countries were heavily embroiled in World War II long before Pearl Harbor was attacked. The United States entered World War II when it declared war on Japan December 8 1941--the day after the tragedy in Hawaii. I hope Bush meant to say, "like our involvement in the Second World War..." but somehow I doubt it.

2) On tonight's "The National" (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's evening television news program), anchor Peter Mansbridge referred to the "so-called war on terrorism." The mention occurs about 21 minutes into the broadcast (air date June 2 2004) in a piece reporting on the aforementioned speech given by Bush in Colorado Springs. (Streaming video is available at http://www.cbc.ca/national ) Historical revisionism begets skeptical and dare-I-say hardball news terminology...

Rush Limbaugh asserts that the reported torture Iraqi captives by US soldiers and mercenaries is "is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?"

There are a number of superbly executed fallacies here. The first is in the phrase "what happens at a Skull and Bones initiation;" eight words does all of this:

1. hide the reported rapes, sexual abuse, deaths in custody, and other crimes by focusing on a narrow set of reported crimes
2. gloss over the contextual difference: the difference between
   • physical and psychological abuse by cultural peers, with a known duration, within a known social order in which death is rare
   • physical and psychological abuse by foreign soldiers conducted in a prison on indefinitely jailed prisoners without due process or clear legal protections, in the context of an active war where death is frequent
3. link the Iraqi prisonors with Skull and Bones alumni, including George Bush and John Kerry, which:
   • diminishes the extremity of the victims' situation by associating them with free, safe people
   • hints at blaming the victims, because it's just an initiation, not prison torture

I won't go on. If you are still listening to and deriving enjoyment from this radio entertainer, I have to ask you: why? Do you like him because his smooth lies help you dissociate yourself from any lingering liberal/pinko/pc guilt? I can see how his version of the world is much more comfortable for Americans to live in, but it's not the real world. I don't claim a monopoly on truth, but surely this is beyond the pale.

The following is Marine Lieutenant Colonel Strobl's account of escorting the remains of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps.

Finally, a bit of justice is served in the Boeing 767 Air Force scandal. This history of this thing was so extreme, that it looks like not only is somebody going to jail, but the somebody is the Air Force official who signed the checks on the terrible deal in exchange for a cushy Boeing job after she retired. They had to put the squeeze on her also-guilty daughter to get a confession, but maybe they can get the Boeing guy who offered her the deal. Then they could get all the Boeing execs who must have known the illegal details but went along with it because it's how business is done, and then they could court-martial all the Pentagon folks that have been doing this for years, and the civilians (civilian = Pentagon official who has retired in order to cash out her connections in the defense sector) they could just kidnap to Guantanamo. And then maybe everybody in Washington who profits from selling machines for killing people to international murderers would be in prison, and the US would not be the world's biggest arms dealer any more.

Ah, I may have gotten carried away somewhere in that last paragraph. Anyway, to focus on the actual positive, one highly placed criminal has confessed. It's a start, I hope.

A couple of months after the war ended the US army started blowing up UXO’s (unexploded ordinance – it took me forever to figure out what those three letters meant). They issued a warning saying that explosions on the top or half hour were controlled explosions. Just so that we wouldn’t freak out. Almost half a year later I still look at my watch every time I hear an explosion. I noticed my cousin does the same thing.

David Brooks recently claimed in the New York Times that only "full-mooners" believe that neoconservative institutions like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) have any influence on Bush Administration policy because PNAC "has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy." But PNAC disseminates the views not of its paid staffers, receptionists and interns, but of powerful Administration insiders like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld,

...

Unfortunately for [neoconservatives], a political ideology can fail in the real world only so many times before being completely discredited. For at least two decades, in foreign policy the neocons have been wrong about everything. When the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the hawks of Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger declared that it was on the verge of world domination. In the 1990s they exaggerated the power and threat of China, once again putting ideology ahead of the sober analysis of career military and intelligence experts. The neocons were so obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat that they missed the growing threat of Al Qaeda. After 9/11 they pushed the irrelevant panaceas of preventive war and missile defense as solutions to the problems of hijackers and suicide bombers.

They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn't. They said he was in league with Osama bin Laden. He wasn't. They predicted that no major postwar insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.

During 1990 and 1991, some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian Gulf as elements of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Of these, 148 were killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action, and 145 were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite a low number given the scale of the operations. As of May 2002, however, the Veterans Administration reported that an additional 8,306 soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result of service-connected "exposures" suffered during the war. Even more alarmingly, the V.A. revealed that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of General Norman Schwarzkopf's entire army, had filed claims for medical care, compensation and pension benefits based on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991. After reviewing the cases, the agency has classified 168,011 applicants as "disabled veterans." In light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for the first Gulf War may actually be a staggering 29.3 percent.

[Kennedy's] larger goal after that was to settle the Cold War, without either victory or defeat—a strategic vision laid out in JFK’s commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963.

And that was, partly, a question of atomic survival—a subject that can only be said to have obsessed America’s civilian leadership in those days, and for very good reason. The Soviet Union, which had at that time only four intercontinental rockets capable of hitting the U.S. mainland, was not the danger that rational men most feared. The United States held an overwhelming nuclear advantage in late 1963. Accordingly, our nuclear plans were not actually about deterrence. Rather, then as evidently again now, they envisioned preventive war fought over a pretext.

"In my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama bin Laden," Gore said.

Coalition / Iraq:
killed: 200 / 1,500
wounded: 300 / 3500
tanks: 32 / 87
other armored vehicles: 33 / 52
helicopters: 14 / 0
artillery pieces: 0 / 172

Translation by The Agonist.

This Russian analysis contains assorted bad news, which sounds like normal war problems. But I thought we had a Transformational Military that wouldn't suffer from normal war problems. If we don't, how are we going to defeat a numerically superior force unencumbered by rules of war and fighting to the death in its home territory, without causing so many civilian casualties as to fail the political mission that's the justification for the war?

The first part of the [coalition] plan - a march across the desert toward Karabela - was achieved, albeit with serious delays. The second part of the plan [to go around Basra through An-Nasiriya toward Al-Ammara ... splitting Iraq in half] in essence has failed.

Analysts point out that capture of Basra is viewed by the coalition command as being exceptionally important and as a model for the future "bloodless" takeover of Baghdad. So far, however, this approach does not work and the city's garrison is actively defending its territory.

Already, radio intercepts indicate, all available [coalition] repair units have been deployed to the front. Over 60% of all available spare parts have been already used and emergency additional supplies are being requested.

The sand is literally "eating up" the equipment. Sand has a particularly serious effect on electronics and transmissions of combat vehicles. Already more than 40 tanks and up to 69 armored personnel carriers have been disabled due to damaged engines; more than 150 armored vehicles have lost the use of their heat-seeking targeting sights and night vision equipment.

Currently, as intercepted radio communications show, the coalition command is trying to establish the whereabouts of more than 500 of its troops that fell behind their units, departed with resupply convoys or were carrying out individual assignments. So far it was not possible to establish how many of these troops are dead, captured or have successfully reached other units.

Between 10,000 and 100,000 American veterans of the first Gulf War have abnormal symptoms attributed to "Gulf War Syndrome." The graphic on the right side of this NY Times article outlines possible causes, such as:

• 69% took pyridostigmine bromide pills to protect vs nerve gas
• 53% had anthrax vaccination
• 30% bathed on water not provided by the military

What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops.

(And Tony Blair's speech, infinitely better than Bush's.)

I look at Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Pearle, I think of a guy who read that scene in Atlas Shrugged in which one of Ayn Rand's rich supermen confidently piloted a speed boat after fifteen minutes of watching someone else fiddle with it and thought, that's how I'm going to live my life.

The word is that Dick Cheney may be gravitating toward tactical alliance with Colin Powell over Korea. Cheney seems to be thinking that as fun as regime change in Pyongyang might be, the US is focused on Iraq and then later on Iran. And he doesn't want Korea blowing up while the US has important business to get done in the Persian Gulf. (Even global hegemons have to set priorities!)

In the course of her research Priest learned two things—that the CinCs are figures of extraordinary power throughout the territory they command, far more influential than American ambassadors; and that "the mission" of the US military has expanded enormously in the last decade or two. "The US government had grown increasingly dependent on its military to carry out its foreign affairs."

[General Zinni] concluded that "he had become a modern-day proconsul, descendant of the warrior-statesmen who ruled the Roman Empire's outlying territory, bringing order and ideals from a legalistic Rome. Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus—they would have understood. His compatriots, he knew, did not."

...

Zinni was often restive with Washington's half-measures, but in every other way he got what he wanted. He traveled in his own plane with an entourage of thirty or more, and he ran his mini-empire from Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida, where he was aided by a staff of more than a thousand backed by a special CinC budget of more than $50 million a year. One impression emerges clearly from Priest's account of the instrument under Zinni's control: the military is the only generously funded institution in American public life.

Six months after The Threatening Storm's publication, however, Pollack's book reads as much like an indictment of the Bush administration's overeagerness to go to war as it does an endorsement of it. A more appropriate subtitle for the book would have been The Case for Rebuilding Afghanistan, Destroying al-Qaida, Setting Israel and Palestine on the Road to Peace, and Then, a Year or Two Down the Road After Some Diplomacy, Invading Iraq.