May 6, 2008
Ilan Goldenberg catches the Bush Administration admitting something that all us lefties have been saying for years: Iraq is preventing us from achieving success in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has concluded it can't send additional troops to Afghanistan until sizable numbers of forces withdraw from Iraq, a senior military official said Monday.
U.S. commanders in Afghanistan believe they need an additional three brigades of American forces, between 10,000 and 12,000 troops, to combat the Taliban and to speed the training of Afghanistan's security forces.
The requests will go unmet until U.S. troop levels in Iraq start coming down. The military "can't move a substantial amount of additional forces into Afghanistan unless there are additional forces which come out of Iraq," the official said. "We might be able to generate a little bit more, but not 10,000 to 12,000 more troops."
The comments were an acknowledgment of the challenges facing the Pentagon as it scrambles to find enough troops for counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
U.S. troop levels in both Iraq and Afghanistan are already at or near their highest levels since the start of the two wars. The administration's decision to freeze troop levels in Iraq after the last of the 30,000 "surge" troops depart this summer has left Pentagon officials with few options for finding more forces for Afghanistan.
To put this another way, our use of military force in Iraq directly undermined our mission in Afghanistan.
On the one hand, the fact that the Iraq War will produce more suicides than combat deaths could be seen as a triumph of modern battlefield medicine.
On the other hand, given that mental health is more of a long-term problem than a short-term one, mental health problems should be mostly treatable. So it is an absolute disgrace that we are not providing adequate mental health care to our returning soldiers:
Soldiers who'd been exposed to combat trauma were the most likely to suffer from depression or PTSD, the Rand report said. About 53 percent of soldiers with those conditions sought treatment during the past year. Half of those who got care were judged by Rand researchers to have received inadequate treatment.
Failure to adequately treat the mental and neurological problems of returning soldiers can cause a chain of negative events in the lives of affected veterans, the researchers said. About 300,000 soldiers suffer from depression or PTSD, the report said.
This is why the "I put a yellow magnet on my car" version of "supporting the troops" infuriates me. That's politics as personal symbolic expression and noting more. Returning soldiers don't need magnets. They need medical care. And we aren't giving it to them.
May 3, 2008
I was planning on taking the day off today, but you really do need to read this.
April 30, 2008
My money in this battle is on Webb, hands down.
New rule: If you are a senior public official in the United States government and you are forced to admit that "no one could have foreseen or anticipated" things that it was your job to foresee, you are a moron.
Today's exhibit: Paul Wolfowitz.
"I think I said in my comments quoting Doug's book, no one anticipated this insurgency, a lot of people were slow to recognize it once it started," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "And I do think a real failure -- I assign responsibility all over the place -- was not having enough reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough, because I think a sensible counterinsurgency strategy would not be to flood the country with 300,000 Americans, but rather to build up Iraqi forces among the population."
This is Abu Muqawama's area of expertise, so I'm going to outsource my response to him:
There's just so much in that paragraph alone into which Abu Muqawama could sink his teeth. Let's start with that bit about not anticipating an insurgency. It dawns on this blogger that contingency-planning would have been something in which both Doug and Paul (the Pentagon's #3 and #2, respectively) might have taken some interest.
Second, about those Iraqi forces... Well that's a good plan, Paul. Building up security forces is certainly a big part of any sensible counter-insurgency campaign. And since you are talking about building up those security forces, we take it to mean that you were cool with the part where we disbanded the Iraqi Army in 2003. That's fine. But one question: while we're building up the Iraqi Army, who provides security to a nation the size of California in the meantime? Is this Iraqi Army just going to miracle itself into existence?
... Abu Muqawama sits, stares at the computer for a second, and then yells, to the alarm of everyone in a 50-meter radius:
%$#@!!! %$$$$$$$$#@! I can't believe they allowed you to be in charge of %$#@ing anything, much less be the number %$#@ing two -- TWO! -- man in the %$#@ing Pentagon! What! The! %$$$$$#@!
(Abu Muqawama takes a deep breath, holds it, exhales, regains his composure. Onlookers remain horrified.)
...
Sorry about that. This post was just humming along, and Abu Muqawama was trying to make reasonable criticisms in his usual snarky tone and then. he. just. lost it. Because he remembered Paul "The Absent-Minded Professor" Wolfowitz, a man who couldn't plan a two-car funeral, was once in a position of great power in the Department of Defense at the most crucial time in the world's history since the end of the Cold War. Abu Muqawama needs to take some time off here because there is no way he can offer you dispassionate analysis for the rest of the day. This is like that time that he lost it and (unfairly) called Fred Kagan a chickenhawk. Anything he has left will be similarly based on 100% raw emotion.
But let him leave you all with this question: has America ever been as poorly served by its leaders as it was between 2001 and 2005?
No one could have predicted that the invasion and occupation of an oil rich Arab nation by the United States would lead to an insurgency? I mean... wow.
Bush and Cheney wanted their kangaroo courts, and it looks like they almost got them. Were it not for a few brave men and women in the Military's JAG Corps, who knows how far this would have all gone.
WaPo:
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, April 28 -- The Defense Department's former chief prosecutor for terrorism cases appeared Monday at the controversial U.S. detention facility here to argue on behalf of a terrorism suspect that the military justice system has been corrupted by politics and inappropriate influence from senior Pentagon officials.
Sitting just feet from the courtroom table where he had once planned to make cases against military detainees, Air Force Col. Morris Davis instead took the witness stand to declare under oath that he felt undue pressure to hurry cases along so that the Bush administration could claim before political elections that the system was working.
His testimony in a small, windowless room -- as a witness for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, an alleged driver for Osama bin Laden -- offered a harsh insider's critique of how senior political officials have allegedly influenced the system created to try suspected terrorists outside existing military and civilian courts.
Davis's claims, which the Pentagon has previously denied, were aired here as the Supreme Court nears a decision on whether the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that laid the legal foundation for these hearings violates the Constitution by barring any of the approximately 275 remaining Guantanamo Bay prisoners from forcing a civilian judicial review of their detention.
Davis told Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who presided over the hearing, that top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have "strategic political value."
Davis said he wants to wait until the cases -- and the military commissions system -- have a more solid legal footing. He also said that Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy.
"He said, 'We can't have acquittals,' " Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents Hamdan. " 'We've been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.' "
Davis also decried as unethical a decision by top military officials to allow the use of evidence obtained by coercive interrogation techniques. He said Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser to the top military official overseeing the commissions process, was improperly willing to use evidence derived from waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. "To allow or direct a prosecutor to come into the courtroom and offer evidence they felt was torture, it puts a prosecutor in an ethical bind," Davis testified. But he said Hartmann replied that "everything was fair game -- let the judge sort it out."
He also said Hartmann took "micromanagement" of the prosecution effort to a new level and treated prosecutors with "cruelty and maltreatment." Hartmann, he said, was trying to take over the prosecutor's role, compromising the independence of the Office of Military Commissions, which decides which cases to bring and what evidence to use.
Davis, who initially defended the commissions process, testified that he resigned his position as chief prosecutor late last year as senior officials increased pressure on him to make decisions he thought were inappropriate. He now heads the Air Force Judiciary and plans to retire. Hartmann declined to comment on the proceedings through a spokesman, Air Force Capt. Andre Kok.
Andrew Sullivan responds to the idea that "We can't have acquittals":
In a very simple phrase, you can see all the bad faith, stupidity and impeachable violations of core American values at the very top of this rotten administration. They have forfeited any trust in their handling of these matters; indeed have shown how vital it is that they are swept out of office and replaced with something utterly different. Something, you know, American.
April 25, 2008
It is moments like these that make me wonder why so many people blindly accept the notion that conservatives understand the culture of our military better than liberals. Eliminate porn from military bases? Even bases in the middle of a war zone? Who are these people kidding?
And this post from NRO's K-Lo is so absurd I have to quote it in full:
The last thing I'd ever want is a feminizing of our military. But military bases are family affairs and therefore this is worth a discussion.
I love men. I love men being men. I love military men. And I thank God they are military men. But I find it hard to believe that all military men are "drinking and whoring Saturday night," and if they are in any kind of majority, yeah, that bears scrutiny.
Like I said yesterday, I don't know that Broun's legislation is a good idea. But I know what he's thinking: Porn is bad. Why is the military peddling it? It's a good question. Not the biggest question of our day; it's not the hill to die on, as many readers have put it to me. But porn in our culture does need to be addressed and discussed. And if that indicates a feminization of anything, maybe that's what women are here for -- to, every once in awhile, stand athwart history and yell, "Stop. What are we doing to our men?
Look, on some level I understand her point about military bases being "family affairs," but first and foremost they are bases where we train men and women to prepare to kill other men and women in the name of national self-defense. And that must take precedence above all else, even families.
That aside, who is this "we" that are "doing" something to "our men?" Is anyone forcing active duty soldiers to buy porn, or are they doing it of their own free will? If regular citizens are allowed to buy porn, why should we single out soldiers for different treatment? Is this somehow supposed to make them better soldiers? Really?
As for what they do on a Saturday night, I can only say that KLo clearly has never been anywhere near a military base on the weekend. I mean... wow.
We are training our fellow citizens to prepare to kill other human beings. If the worst thing they want to do in their free time is get drunk and look at porn, well...
Want more? View Category Archives by month:
May 2008 (3)
April 2008 (19)
March 2008 (1)
February 2008 (5)
January 2008 (5)
December 2007 (2)
October 2007 (1)
September 2007 (10)
August 2007 (6)
July 2007 (2)
June 2007 (3)
May 2007 (6)
April 2007 (4)
March 2007 (7)
February 2007 (1)
December 2006 (1)
November 2006 (1)
|
Subscribe to this blog's feed
