Author: Jeff Huber

So North Korea appears to be getting ready to test fire a missile that might eventually be able to strike the United States.  

That’s small potatoes compared to the rest of our foreign policy problems.  

Under the fold: the consequences of sleeping around with the enemies of your enemies…
There’s not enough good news from Iraq to mask the fact that it is an unmitigated disaster.  The Taliban are back in Afghanistan, and warlords there have made the country the world’s largest exporter of narcotics.  Terrorist groups have become legitimate political parties in Lebanon and Palestine.  Something’s going on with Iran’s nuclear program, we really don’t know what, but it’s a good bet that whatever is going on there isn’t what Condi Rice is telling us.  

China is positioning itself to surpass the U.S. economically, and is back in the sack with Russia. Saudi Arabia, our biggest buddy in the Middle East, is also one of the biggest sponsors of international terrorism.  

Thanks to the Bush administration’s ham fisted use of armed force, America’s military has become all but impotent in its ability to achieve our political objectives overseas–which is the primary reason it exists.  The U.S. has no peer competitor in the arms arena, yet we continue to throw astronomic amounts of money into fantastical weapons like the F-22 Raptor fighter jet that bring nothing of value to our so-called war on terror.  

The Department of Homeland Security, perhaps the single greatest failure in the history of the federal government, tells us that most American cities and states are still unprepared for terrorist attacks.

And the Bush administration still claims “national security” as its strong point.  

Irony: Dead and Loving It

PNAC–the Project for the New American Century–appears to be rolling up its carpet.  While I’m glad to see that happening, I wish it had happened a long time ago.

The PNAC was the neoconservative “think tank,” founded by William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others in 1997, formulated the “Reaganite” policy by which the Bush administration attempted to dominate the globe through armed force.  

The problem with pursuing Reagan-like policies was that the world was no longer Reagan-like.  

As America grew from its infant stage, it gradually adopted the European balance-of-power political model, sleeping with the enemies of its enemies until, by the time of the Cold War, it had pretty much slept around with everybody.  

Once the last great opponent was vanquished, America had the opportunity to stop the vicious cycle of changing allies every generation or so and practice genuine world leadership.  Some argue that we were headed in that direction during the Clinton era.  That may be true.  But if so, the neoconservative Bush administration reversed course, setting out deliberately to once again polarize the world, inflaming animosities with “axis of evil” and “with us or against us” rhetoric.  Rather than capitalize on the opportunity 9/11 presented to unite the world in a common cause of eradicating terrorism, the neocons chose instead to tell the UN and most of the rest of the world to take a hike.  

In just over 6 years, we’ve gone from having no real enemies to having no real friends.  

Reversing course again will not be an easy undertaking.  Decisive, favorable solutions to Iraq and Afghanistan do not exist.  We cannot regain credibility overnight.  And while we don’t want to maintain a preemptive military excursion policy, we obviously don’t want to completely disarm.  Determining proper types and levels of armed force needed to maintain a peaceful world will take some serious soul searching.  

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I’m watching the debate on the Senate floor on Iraq and Afghanistan.  It’s already sounding like a replay of last week’s pie fight in the House of Representatives.  Jon Kyl (R Arizona) is on the floor now, reiterating virtually every Simple Simon talking point the Rove machine has manufactured in the last five years.  

America will not become the leader the world needs as long as it continues to cling to failed policies and support them with Polly Cracker rhetoric.    

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

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The Next World Order Series

An AP report tells us how well the “security crackdown” in Baghdad is going.

A series of explosions struck commercial areas in Baghdad within hours Saturday, killing at least 17 people and dealing a blow to a huge government operation to secure the capital.

The blasts — seven within five hours — brought the death toll around Iraq to at least 23 people. The bombings also wounded at least 72. A day earlier, a suspected shoe bomber blew himself up inside one of Baghdad’s most prominent Shiite mosques, killing 13 people.

Under the fold: more good news…

Two of our soldiers are missing from a checkpoint south of Baghdad.

Car bomb and mortar attacks occurred in the Sunni city of Mahmoudiya.  

Other violence.  

Here’s the item that really caught my eye:

Gunmen attacked the house of Iraqi army Col. Makki Mindil, killing him after engaging his guards in a gunfight.

If that’s “standing up,” coffee is a cure for insomnia.  

Ah, but there is good news.  

There has been a slight decrease in the number of Iraqis reported killed since al-Zarqawi died June 7. In the nine days before the airstrike, 307 Iraqis were killed, compared with 262 in the nine subsequent days, according to an Associated Press tally.

So we’ve got that going for us.  But we have to temper our enthusiasm with the fact that on the same day al-Zarqawi was killed, Iraq’s director general of the State Company for Oil Projects was kidnapped.

Another Mission Accomplished, Another Corner Turned.  

In his weekly radio speech today, young Mister Bush announced his new plan to succeed in Iraq, which consists of “continued sacrifice” and “more patience.”  

I wonder how much better that will work than the “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” he announced in November 2005 at the U.S. Naval Academy.  

Or from the plan he announced in May of 2004 in a speech he gave at the Army War College.

Or the plan he announced in February 2003.

Or the plan he made with help of the Project for the New American Century prior to even taking office in January 2001.  

And then we have the magnificent, non-binding, stay-the-course GOP “legislation” just passed in the House of Representatives which was nothing more than a piece of pro-Bush cheerleading.

Criticize the left.  Pander to the right.  Stand up.  Stand down.  Fight!  Fight!  Fight!  

Yeah.  That will do the trick.

One of my hardcore conservative acquaintances who is a Vietnam veteran insists to this day that “We only needed eighteen more months, and we could have won.”

“Could have won what?” I ask him

“Victory,” he says.  

“And how would you have defined victory in Vietnam?” I say.

“Winning,” he says.

“So you can’t define ‘winning’ or ‘victory,'” I say, “but we’ll let that pass for now.  Let me ask you this.  After ten years, you only needed eighteen more months to defeat a third world country?”

“Hell, we could have done it in six months, if they’d let us.”

“If you could have done it in six months, how come you couldn’t do it in ten years?” I say.  “You know, that whole line of reasoning sounds like a little kid at bedtime, wanting to watch the end of a baseball game on television, saying, ‘five more minutes, mom.  The game’s almost over.'”

The game’s already over in Iraq, but if we’re not careful, we’ll be giving the war hawks another five minutes until another ten or twenty years have gone by.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

I spent the morning watching the House debate on Resolution 861, introduced by Henry Hyde (R Illinois).  You may remember Hyde as the guy who led the charge to impeach President Clinton for lying about not keeping his pants on.  Now, he says we all owe young Mister Bush our thanks for acting in Iraq.  

HR 861 is a sham.  The Republicans put up a bill full of platitudes, allowing no proposed amendments.  It’s all about writing Bush another blank check.  

Below the fold: forever war…  

And hidden in the middle of the platitudes is this tidbit:

…it is not in the national security interest of the United States to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq…

In other words, this bill is a yes/no vote on whether to allow Mister Bush–and his succesor–to keep our troops in Iraq forever.  

The whole morning, watching on C-SPAN, I kept wondering how to describe what I was feeling.  It came to me.  It was like watching my country being assimilated by the Borg.

This isn’t a debate on Iraq.  It’s an orchestrated GOP election campaign circus.

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Back from the grocery store just in time to see Murtha speak.  

At last.  Somebody actually using hard data to measure the ineffectiveness of the effort in Iraq.  Hopefully, his speech will be up on his web site.  “Rhetoric does not answer the problem,” he says.  Amen Brother Murtha.  

Henry Hyde (R Illinois) follows Murtha.  It takes him less than 30 seconds to conjure visions of mushroom clouds, and drones on for roughly ten minutes in praise of Mister Bush.    

There’s something about Murtha being followed by Hyde that pretty much says for me what America’s upcoming election is about–the bluff and honest versus the serpentine.  

Hyde finishes his spiel and Murtha comes back to the floor.  Iraq has gone on longer than World War I, longer than the Korean Conflict, he says, and reiterates that the metrics belie administration claims of “progress” in Iraq.  

Ike Skelton (D Missouri) makes a great point about eating our “military seed corn” in Iraq.  I haven’t heard it put that way before, but I’ve long said that one of the greatest tragedies regarding Iraq is that we’re grinding our force into hourglass fill in a contest that has little if anything to do with our national security.  What happens in two or three years if we really need the military power that we squandered in Iraq?

As Jack Murtha says, China, Russia, Iran, and most of the rest of the world are perfectly happy to see us stay in Iraq until we’re powerless to meaningfully engage militarily anywhere else in the world.  

Duncan Hunter’s at the plate, giving a lecture on how it was okay to have disbanded the Iraqi Army, and lending his expertise on military command, control and discipline.  He’s also giving a “support the troops” pitch, comparing Iraq to World War II.  

Murtha gets up, God bless him, and slaps Hunter down for confusing the difference between supporting the troops and supporting the policy.  

Henry Waxman (D California) give a good account of contractor fraud in Iraq.  Bravo, he brought up David Brooks, the contractor who sold faulty body armor to the Army and Marines.  “We’re squandering money on Halliburton at the same time we don’t have enough money to protect our troop.”

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Ah, me.  

Peter Hoekstra (R Michigan) makes flatulent noise about “the first war of the information age.”  Yeah.  Like information didn’t exist, or wasn’t an essential part of war, before the World Wide Web existed.

These rubber stamp Republicans are blithering idiots.  

How much longer are we going to let them lead us over the cliff?  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

You’re a superpower that’s already beaten up the rest of the world.  What do you do, go to Disney Land or continue to beat up on the rest of the world?

Rome and Napoleonic France are but two historic examples of empires that failed to realize the military power that created them was insufficient, in itself, to sustain them.

If there’s something good to come from the Iraq war, it’s that perhaps the United States will have learned a lesson about wielding great power in time to avoid becoming a footnote in some other culture’s history book.  

Under the fold: carrying the biggest stick can wear you out…

With an arms budget equal to the military expenditures of the rest of the world combined, the United States represents the most lopsided balance of military might seen in the industrial age.  The problem with that kind of dominance is that there are very few instances where armed conflict is altogether necessary, and even fewer where an armed conflict will turn out well.

The Clausewitzean theory of absolute war became all but obsolete with the advent of a bipolar world in which the two superpowers possessed arsenals that could have ended human life on the planet.  The Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) theory rested on another of Clausewitz’s dictums, that war is political in nature, and that no desired political aim of either side could be achieved through global thermo-nuclear war.  

With the fall of the Soviet Union, absolute war became even more moot.  The United States could, if it wished, quite literally blow every other nation off the map.  But what would be the political purpose in that?  (And as songwriter Randy Newman might ask, where would we go on vacation?)

Barring truly extraordinary provocation, America is limited to use of its conventional forces in armed conflict, but even in conventional wars, the power ratio between the U.S. and any opponent is ridiculous.  There is no conventional military force in existence that we can’t make fairly quick work of (which is one reason no one is seriously trying to build a conventional force that could take ours on).  Hence the kind of asymmetric, insurgent style conflict we currently witness in Iraq.  

Let’s set one thing straight about counterinsurgency operations.  There are better and worse ways to conduct them, but there is no good way to conduct them.  And you can’t design a military that specializes in counterinsurgency because then it wouldn’t be good at doing what it’s supposed to do, which is fight and defeat other military forces.  

Counterinsurgencies get out of hand when the occupying force, frustrated at being unable quell the revolt, starts lining large sections of the population up in front of firing squads.  Once you start doing that kind of thing, you wind up killing a whole lot of people–enough that it might have been better to just drop a bunch of nukes on them.  

And what’s that going to get you politically if you’re a sole superpower that insists other nations respect human rights?

(Sidebar: an AP report from late Tuesday says:

Iraq’s new prime minister promised “no mercy” for terrorists Tuesday as President Bush paid a surprise visit to Baghdad on the eve of a security crackdown involving 75,000 troops, road closures and a curfew.

Stand by for this to turn uglier than Frankenstein’s baby.)  

Being Careful How You Use It

One of the dangers of a sole super power maintaining a standing, all-volunteer military of overwhelming combat force is that it’s tempting to overuse, especially when you have an administration in power–like the one we have now–that’s predisposed to overuse it.

Back in my active duty days, I wrote to a friend, “Every time our political leaders commit us to major armed conflict, they expose our failure to achieve our main purpose in the post-modern, post-Soviet world, which is to deter armed conflicts.”  

Under the neoconservative regime, we not only gave up on the idea of deterring armed conflicts, we purposely set out to create them.  And, lamentably, we shined our heinies in Iraq by showing the entire world that we’re very good at starting “preemptive” wars that by their very natures are not “winnable.”

In the Next World Order, America needs to come up with a new calculus of power.  The old equations simply don’t work any more.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

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Jeff’s Next World Order Series

Regarding the recent suicides at Guantanamo, camp commander Rear Admiral Harry Harris said, “I believe this was not an act of desperation, rather an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us.”

Hey, maybe Admiral Harris has hit on the ultimate strategy to win the war on terror: convince them all that the best way to defeat America is to commit suicide.  It’s brilliant!  Sun Tzu would approve wholeheartedly.

Under the fold: die hard or die harder…

And what the heck, the suicide strategy makes a whole lot more sense than this “stand up, stand down” drivel we’ve been fed lately.  

The suicide strategy would give the administration and Pentagon spin doctors something they could really sink their teeth into.  Forget trying to sell the war to Americans, or blaming every failure in the war on Democrats and the media.  Launch a massive, multi-pronged psychological operations campaign aimed at convincing the bad guys to do themselves in.  

Such a campaign should follow, at the very least, three distinct lines of operation:

Incentive: “Double Virgin Days” would offer twice the virgins in afterlife to young Jihadists for reporting to U.S. controlled “martyrdom centers.”  At the centers, prospective martyrs would be offered a wide variety of suicide options, everything from self-immolation to “Allah’s little helper” pills.

“Don’t delay!  This is a limited time offer.”

Shame: “Suicide now and avoid the draft.”  

Don’t embarrass your family and friends by being one of those losers who had to be ordered to take your own life.  Do the manly thing and volunteer.  

Radio Free Islam would run constant spots of Ann Coulter saying “There are two kinds of radical Islamists: suicides and cowards.”  

Depression: “You’re a rag head, your life sucks anyway.”  

Run spots on Arab television of Rush Limbaugh playing golf, lighting $50 cigars with $100 bills and saying, “The only way you’ll ever live like me is by being dead.”  

If this suicide strategy sounds ludicrous to you, you haven’t been paying attention to everything else that’s been going on since we launched our woebegone war on terror.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Like it or not, our present Iraq War is representative of what American armed conflicts will be like in the Next World Order: costly, indecisive, difficult to terminate, and politically counterproductive.  

We will never get a straight answer from the Bush administration regarding what the real political objectives of the Iraq invasion were, but they certainly weren’t situation we have now.  The best-trained, best-equipped, best-financed military in the history of mankind is stuck in a quagmire for which an increasing number of experts agree there is no military solution.

Under the fold: global competition in the Next World Order

Our military’s difficulty in achieving our political objectives is not for lack of investment in them.  The U.S. now spends as much money on the Department of Defense as the military budgets of the rest of the world combined.  In 2005, according to the CIA World Factbook, U.S. military expenditures exceeded $518 billion.  By contrast, the emerging “peer competitor” China spent a paltry $81.5 billion.  America’s arms expenditures represented 4.19 percent of its purchasing power parity gross domestic product ($12.36 trillion).  By comparison, China’s military budget accounted for less than one percent of its GDP ($8.859 trillion).  

Keep that in mind the next time you hear Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld making scare noise, as he has recently, about China’s “increased military spending.”  Also keep in mind that unlike the U.S., China is making its first real effort to modernize its conventional arsenal since the Korean War.  

The Decline of Military Power

As instruments of power go, economy has trumped military might among the states in the upper world order tier nations.  And economically, America has embarked on a headlong downward slide.

As of 2005, we were still first among the major political entities in GDP, but not by much.  The European Union, at $ 12.18 trillion, trailed us by a mere 1.46 percent.  China was behind by 28.33 percent.  But those numbers only tell part of the economic competition trend.

The Bush administration has made much of America’s economic growth rate, pegged at 3.5 percent for 2005.  Wow.  That’s on par with the growth rates of Arubia, Nambia, Benin, and the Bahamas.  The good news is that we’re ahead of Denmark, which only posted a growth rate of 3.4 percent.  And we’re comfortably outpacing losers like Antigua, Mexico, Tuvalu, Mauritius, Guernsey, and Cosmoros, whose economies only grew at a measly 3.0 percent.

Granted, those economies are pretty small, and not all that influential on the overall global order.  

But what about China, the number three economy in the world?  (And the number two economy among single nations.)  Their 2005 growth rate was 9.9 per cent.  

Does that get your attention?  

Then get a load of this.  America’s national debt is 64.7 percent of its GDP.  China’s is 28.8.  

And China isn’t pouring a half trillion plus dollars a year into the fan on its military like the United States is.

Who is America’s number two creditor?  China ($ 129 billion).  Number one is Japan ($158 billion).  We owe our number three creditor, Germany, $120 billion, and $89.3 billion to our number four creditor, Russia.  

All of these nations have much to gain by siding with Iran on its nuclear energy position and blowing off Condi Rice and John Bolton.    

Are you starting to get the picture?  China, Russia, and the European Union sure are.  Iran’s political leaders sure are.

America’s political leaders sure aren’t.  

Or at least, they’re pretending not to.

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Jeff Huber’s Next Word Order Series

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Talk about convenient timing for the Bush administration.

Jammed off the radarscope this week by Ann Coulter’s mouth and the demise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the squaring off between Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) and Dick Cheney (unofficial master of the universe) over the NSA domestic spying investigation.  

Under the fold: Springtime for Dubya

CNN and other news outlets reported Thursday that Specter “sent a stinging letter to Vice President Dick Cheney after learning Cheney had lobbied other Republicans on his committee without his knowledge.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Specter is galled that Cheney’s been breaking the legs of other Republican Judiciary Committee members to block subpoenas of phone company executives regarding the NSA domestic surveillance program.  

It’s difficult to determine whether Specter is actually upset that Cheney has been kneecapping fellow Republicans on Specter’s committee, or if he’s just upset that Cheney did the kneecapping without telling Specter about it.  

Specter’s three page letter said, “This was especially perplexing since we both attended the Republican senators caucus lunch yesterday, and I walked directly in front of you on at least two occasions en route from the buffet to my table.”

Is Specter more concerned about buffet table protocol or about whether the Bush Administration is tossing Americans’ constitutional rights in the trashcan in the name of “plenary” executive powers?

Whatever the case, the result is the same.  The White House’s claims to “unreviewable,” absolute powers will go unchecked as long as the GOP owns the Senate and the House.  

Springtime for Dubya

As I discussed last December in Smoke, Mirrors, and War Powers, the administration has consistently based its claims of supreme executive authority on the Constitution and the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in September 2001 days after the 9/11 attacks.

But the Constitution grants no such wartime authorities to any President. Article II makes him commander in chief–of the military, not the country.  And that’s it.  The Constitution makes no mention of special powers in times of war, declared or undeclared.

Article I gives most of the actual war making powers to Congress.  

The AUMF, often referred to as the “blank check,” and claimed by the administration to have given young Mister Bush unlimited authority to do darn near anything he wants to the Constitution in the conduct of his war on terror, states that ” Nothing in this resolution supercedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.”

The War Powers Resolution, passed in 1973, says “Nothing in this joint resolution…is intended to alter the constitutional authority of the Congress or of the President, or the provision of existing treaties…”

And there’s nothing in the Constitution that gives Congress the power to allow Presidents to exceed their constitutional authority.  

We know that we can’t trust the administration to check its own powers.  And since the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes the law of the land is now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the Supreme Court has become, for all practical purposes, irrelevant.  

And as long as Dick Cheney controls Congress, there’s really no discernable difference between the United States in 2006 and, well, name your favorite historical tyranny.  

Like Thomas Jefferson, I’d rather not get into heaven than have to go there as a member of a political party.  And as I recall, I’ve only voted for one Democrat–John Kerry–in my entire life.

But I’ve more than gotten over my aversion to “Hollywood Democrats.”  For the foreseeable future, any time I have a choice between voting for a Republican or Porky Pig, I’m taking the pig.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

In his speech last Sunday, Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said “That a country has no right to achieve proficiency in nuclear technology means it has to beg a few Western and European countries for energy in the next 20 years.  Which honest leader is ready to accept this?”

Easy answer.  No honest leader would accept it.  And no honest leader of any other nation would ask Iran to accept it.  

But then, few people these days will accuse George W. Bush of being honest, so he has an excuse, right?

Under the fold: expecting different results…

Clinging to Failure

Khamenei also said, “In Iraq, you [America] failed. You say you have spent $300bn to bring a government into office that obeys you. But it did not happen. In Palestine, you made every attempt to prevent Hamas from coming to power and again you failed.”

True statement, and a darn sight truer than anything young Mister Bush has ever said about U.S. adventures in Iraq and Palestine.

Khamenei on Europe: “Our government has healthy and good relations with European countries. These relations with Europe will be even better in the future, when gas plays a more important role as a source of energy. They need our gas.”

Nothing like being up front about things like, uh, realities.

Condi Rice has been telling us that the EU3 is all on board with backing the U.S. policy toward Iran.  She’s been saying that since early 2005.  

According to Khamenei, the “international community” cooperation with the U.S. isn’t all Condi cracks it up to be.

Some 116 non-aligned countries supported Iran in its bold move to acquire nuclear technology. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference has voiced support for Iran. Independent governments all support Iran. All those people who have acted as middlemen to repeat America’s words to us, under American pressure and out of courtesy, have told us in secret that they have been asked by the Americans to say so and that they do not think the same way.

What Khamenei had the good grace not to say is that one of the countries that support Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear technology is Iraq.

Condi and the rest of the Bush inner circle (and their media echo chamberlains) continue to insist that Iran seeks the ability to produce its own nuclear weapons.  

Khamenei denied this on Sunday, as he has consistently, that Iran has any such ambitions.

We have no problem with the world. We are no threat whatsoever to the world and the world knows it…
The other suggestion is that Iran is seeking a nuclear bomb. This is an irrelevant and wrong statement, it is a sheer lie. We do not need a nuclear bomb. We do not have any objectives or aspirations for which we will need to use a nuclear bomb. We consider using nuclear weapons against Islamic rules…
We think imposing the costs of building and maintaining nuclear weapons on our nation is unnecessary. Building and maintaining such weapons is costly. In no way do we deem it correct to impose these costs on the people.

I’m not entirely willing to take him at his word, but I know this: between him and Condi Rice, there’s no question as to which one has told the world the most lies.  

Big Bang Diplomacy

Over at firedoglake, Pachacutec has a superb analysis of the Iran situation as it stands right now.  (BTW, thanks for the plug, Pach.)  

Perhaps his most salient point is the extent to which the Bush administration and its GOP yes men in Congress have weakened America.  

Aside from the thirty-something percent of the U.S. population that still supports Bush, the entire world sees that our stance on Iran looks and sounds almost identical to the run up to our invasion of Iraq.  The only real difference is that this time, we’re not even pretending to have any proof to support our allegations about the “bad guy’s” WMD program.  

Everybody knows the administration is off on another snipe hunt.  Everybody knows that when it comes to war and peace track records, the western world makes Iran look like a bunch of hippy dippy peaceniks.  (Iran has fought one war in the last 100 years, and that was initiated when Iraq invaded it.)

They know that Iran has every right in the world to develop its own nuclear energy program, a vital component of which must be the ability to refine its own uranium.  

They’ve watched us prove in Iraq that our “best trained, best equipped” military is incapable of creating the kind of world order that the neoconservatives envisioned.  

They know that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc. are a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks.  

And they’re perfectly willing to sit back and watch us pull the trigger again and shoot off the last of our toes.

Next World Order Foreign Policy

The neoconservative vision of creating a world order favorable to America at the point of a gun is a proven failure.  Never in the history of humanity has so much power been vested in people who were so incapable of exercising it wisely.  

In my Next World Order series, I’ve outlined a political model in which America, if it is to continue to thrive, must find a way to transition from a “failed hegemon” to a “first among nations.”  

We’re not going to be able to achieve the “first among nations” status if we continue to pursue the delusional policies and strategies of the Bush administration.  One of the best ways we can reverse course, right here, right now, is to drop our kindergarten position on Iran and encourage its efforts to develop a self-sustaining nuclear energy.  

The surest way to create a stable Middle East is for the region to wean itself into the 21st century, and if Iran can emerge as the nation that will lead the Muslim world to modernity, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

The Next World Order Series

Part I: America’s 21st Century Military

Part II: Network-centric Warfare

Part III: America’s Military Industrial Complex

Part IV: The Revolt of the Retired Generals

Part V: What Good is War?

Part VI: Body Count

Part VII: Order in the Next World Order

Part VIII: The Cost of War and Peace

Part IX: Balance of Power

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

I normally avoid any discussion of Ann Coulter for fear of inadvertently granting any legitimacy to her “contributions” to the national debate.  But her latest attack on the 9/11 widows defies ignoring.

I’ve said before that Ann Coulter is a perfect example of how far a gal can travel on an Ivy League education, a fourth grade sense of humor, and a broomstick.  This darling of the rabid right is so self-absorbed she could suck the sunlight out of summertime.  

For her to berate the widows of 9/11 victims of having a political agenda and calling attention to themselves is such a jaw stretching pot and kettle act its difficult to imagine how even she could have so little sense of shame.  But then again, she’s a hardcore supporter of the Bush administration, and makes a good buck being one.

So she probably figures being shameless is just the price of doing business.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

From Sunday’s New York Times (filed by AP):

Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned Sunday that oil shipments from the Gulf region would be disrupted if the United States attacked his nation, but his threat was dismissed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice…

…Rice told ‘Fox News Sunday that ”we shouldn’t place too much emphasis on a threat of this kind” because Iran also has an interest in protecting its major source of revenues.

”What we should place emphasis on is Iran’s opportunity to find a way out of this impasse,” Rice said.

Under the fold: dunce diplomacy…

If Condi Rice spent half the time and effort conducting honest to God diplomacy as she spends spinning Bush administration poppycock on Sunday talk shows, we might actually be seeing progress in the Iran negotiations.  As it is, she’s only creating impasses and making other countries responsible for finding their ways out of them.

Iran’s leaders have stated time and time and time again that they will not give up their “inalienable right” under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) to develop nuclear energy technologies.  So what does Condi offer Iran as the “carrot” for engaging in direct negotiations?  That they give up their inalienable right to develop nuclear energy technologies.  

If there’s a surer way to guarantee that a diplomatic effort fails, I have yet to read or hear about it.  

It appears to me that Rice’s phony overture is a ruse to push the Iran issue to the UN Security Council, where the U.S. will insist on levying sanctions against Iran.  

And guess what’s going to happen there.  The EU3–England, Germany, and France–may go along with the proposal for the sake of appearances, but do you really think Russia and China will?  One might reasonably guess that those two countries are already hacked off at America enough to veto any U.S. sanction proposal, but just wait.  

As the issue moves to a Security Council vote, Dick Cheney will go on TV and insult the pants off of those two countries again.  And just in case that doesn’t do the trick, the Bush administration will insist on locking the Russian and Chinese ambassadors to the UN in a room with John Bolton for twelve hours.  

Then Condi will go back on TV to explain that diplomacy, once again, didn’t work, just like it didn’t with Iraq, and blame the failure on the UN, the media, the democrats, etc…  

Then we’ll go boom boom on Iran, Iran will try to go boom boom back, and however that turns out, Condi will tell Tim Russert that it was all Iran’s fault.  Tim, as he so often has, will smile, nod, and ask Condi if she’s going to run against Jeb Bush for Commissioner of the National Football League or President of the United States.    

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Condi’s old job as National Security Adviser wasn’t actually to advise young Mister Bush on foreign policy and security strategy.  Young Mister Bush already had Uncle Dick and Uncle Don and the rest of the neoconservative brain trust around to do that for him.  

Condi’s job was to tutor Dubya in basic geography.  Stand him in front of a map of the world and say things like “the blue parts are water, the green parts are land.”  Explain to him that no, Iceland isn’t really that big, it just looks that way because of how things work out when you draw a sphere on a flat picture, but yeah, Alaska really is bigger than Texas anyway.

Dubya saying, “shoot.”  

Imagine the scene, Dubya consulting with his new Secretary of State in front of the world map after the Katrina incident.

“No, Mister President, that’s Italy.”

“That’s right, I remember now.  Italy’s the boot that faces left.”

“And Louisiana’s the boot that faces right.  Clear over on the other side of the map.”

“Oh, yeah.  The green part up above that blue part that’s named after Mexico.”  

“That’s right, sir.  You’re so smart.  You’re my best student ever.”

Young Mister Bush furrows his brow.  

“You know, I just thought me of something.  How come that blue part is named after Mexico when so much of it is next to America?  Seems like we ought to pass a constitutional amendment to have that name changed on all the maps.”

“That’s a wonderful idea, Mister President.”

“Remind me to take that up with Karl and Uncle Dick next time I see them.”

Imagine also, Condi in the oval office, trying to help Bush distinguish between Iran and Iraq.  

“They’re on opposite sides of that little blue part in the center of the Middle East,” she says, “and their names end with a different letter.”

Young Mister Bush shrugs, and smirks.  “Sounds like nuance to me,” he says.  

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Condi Rice is rapidly consolidating America’s all time political trifecta of shame: Worst President Ever, Worst Secretary of Defense Ever, Worst Secretary of State Ever.

She’d be completing a “quadrifecta” except that the Worst Vice President Ever crown is still up for grabs between Dick Cheney, Spiro Agnew, and Aaron Burr.  

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While Condi was working the TV crowd Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld dropped by Hanoi and said that the U.S. wants to expand its military relationship with Vietnam.  

What a world.  We have Condi conducting diplomacy by making ominous war noises about Iran and Rummy conducting diplomacy by talking about selling arms to an old enemy.  

Maybe those two should switch jobs.  Anything would be an improvement, right?

Heck, Rummy could solve the impasse with Iran overnight by offering to sell them a handful of our nukes.  

That could blow up in his face, though.  I mean, if Iran said, “No, we’re serious, we don’t want any nuclear weapons,” what then?

Everybody would have to hunker down in Uncle Dick’s office and invent a new crisis.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.