Accepting the Republican nomination for president, George Bush famously declared:
“Our military is low on parts, pay and morale.
If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report: Not ready for duty, sir.”
It was a lie of course. He told worse.
But, BUT!, Bush fans will argue, the president doesn’t lie, and if he does Michael Moore is fat. Fair enough. If we can’t call it a lie then the next best description would have to be self-fulfilling prophesy. Thanks to the surge plan the military doesn’t have any flexibility left in case things get worse, say, in Afghanistan. But no worries, I heard that things were going swimmingly over there.
Via Cernig, a few reports suggest that might not entirely be the case. From the Atlantic Council, where James Joyner spends his daylight hours:
The US Atlantic Council began its report with the words: “Nato is not winning in Afghanistan” and talks of a stalemate.
“Without urgent changes Afghanistan could become a failed or failing state,” it said.
“If Afghanistan fails, the possible strategic consequences will worsen regional instability, do great harm to the fight against Jihadist and religious extremism, and put in grave jeopardy Nato’s future as a credible, cohesive and relevant military alliance.”
The American Afghanistan Study Group [sponsored by the Atlantic Council and headed by Gen. Jones – C] reached a similarly grim conclusion in a report released on Wednesday.
It said that “resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, too few military forces and insufficient economic aid” were all contributing to the country’s woes.
Unless Joyner hangs out with defeatocrats all day, I take this to mean that we might yet lose Afghanistan.
On Diane Rehm’s show this monday Gen. John Craddock, NATO’s supreme commander for Europe, argued that we didn’t literally pull any troops out of Afghanistan to send to Iraq. Setting aside cases where he is flat wrong, Craddock would still be right only in the most superficial and meaningless sense. You don’t have to pull troops straight out of Afghanistan to shortchange the conflict. One can also drain the available pool of replacement troops and let commanders know – as we have done – that asking for more would be an unwise career move. It just isn’t debatable that divisions upon divisions could be repairing Afghanistan right now if they weren’t occupied babysitting Iraq’s civil war. The Afghanis even want more or less what we want, unlike the Sunni-Shia-Kurd hate triangle that Iraqis left in Iraq can’t or won’t let go. For the most part ordinary Afghans would gladly help us fix their country if we could keep them safe from revanchist Talibs.
Now, thanks to the Kagan clan’s genius surge plan, it doesn’t really matter how loud Afghanistan’s commanders call out for more troops. There’s no reinforcements left. If, god forbid, we have to make an opposed pullout from either country the massive short-term troop increase that would be needed to cover such a dangerous maneuver (as the Iraq Study Group correctly pointed out) just won’t be there.
Commanders in Afghanistan will have to make do with what they’ve got, but what they’ve got isn’t preventing the Taliban from taking back territory. As “surge” troops rotate back from ludicrously extended tours Petraeus will have to work with less. It isn’t with much joy that I look forward to the next Democratic president picking up two miserable wars, a broken army and no economy worth mentioning with which to fix it. Tell me about hope, I see simple math. The troops to salvage either war aren’t there. We won’t even have the spare force to pull out safely.
Then again, maybe al Qaeda will field a navy.
Andrew
It’s okay, Tim. When the Army collapses completely, it will be in the first few months of a Democratic presidency, so the Republicans will be just fine.
myiq2xu
Jet-Ski Jihadis?
It appears in retrospect that electing Commander
CodpieceChickenhawk as President wasn’t the best way to support the troops.Steve
In discussing Afghanistan, it is important to explicitly point to the elephant — hell, it’s a brontosaurus — in the middle of the room: Drug prohibition. The Afghan government and the NATO/US military cannot even hope to compete against the economic power which prohibition gives to the Taliban. Only prohibition can first make a weed more costly than gold, hence insanely profitable, and then give organized crime and terrorism a total monopoly over those profits.
As long as opiates remain illegal, the Taliban remain rich and Afghanistan remains doomed.
myiq2xu
Funny how our non-partisan military didn’t scream bloody murder when Chimpy lied.
They let him get away with it, and see what they got?
Ninerdave
Of course since we have all our troops in Iraq, reserves and the National Guard are “Not Ready for Duty, sir” at home too.
Incompetent assholes, the lot of them.
Zifnab
For better or for worse, I’m glad our military is breaking. When was the last time we used troops when we had the option of diplomacy? When was the last time we passed on the opportunity to invade an enemy nation? I’m sick of the US using big guns to answer every foreign policy problem. I’m also sick of watching half the US discretionary budget get tossed into the money pit of military contractors. Perhaps once our military is well and truly broken, we will feel inclined to actually try and fix it, rather than just throw more money at it.
myiq2xu
The military used to be reliably GOP but that’s another thing Chimpy fixed.
electroglodyte
I can’t find the link, and correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Bush try to reduce the size of the military in 2001, before 9/11? Peace dividend and all that.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
You want hope?
They’re brown and we’ve got nukes.
That doing it for you? No?
Yeah, me neither.
DougJ
We don’t want the smoking gun to be a nuclear submarine Imagine if Al Qaeda had one of those, parked in New York harbor. They could literally hold the entire nation hostage. And with the flip of a switch could make their Caliphate fantasies a reality.
Just think about that.
Phoenix Woman
Has unit cohesion (or lack thereof) approached 1970-in-Vietnam levels yet? I think that’s what Bush is aiming for, assuming he’s thinking at all.
God, it sucks having Ahmad Chalabi and Doug Feith directing one’s foreign policy.
The Grand Panjandrum
But, but, but we just killed the #3 AQ guy … again. At the rate we’re killing the #3 guys we should only be in that neck of the woods until the human race goes extinct.
Neal
This is fun.
At least things are going swell sort of near Afghanistan.
gypsy howell
As Dr Phil would say, How’s that workin out for ya?
I’d agree with you completely, but you’re overlooking the fact that breaking our army could be a feature, not a bug, for our republican corporatist overlords. Can you say “private mercenary armies draining the treasury and operating completely outside the law with no congressional oversight”? Yeah, I knew you could.
carol h
My son is in the army and returned from a 15 month deployment to Iraq next fall. The unit he deployed with returns to Iraq this fall but he transferred units. His new unit is scheduled to depoly to Iraq in Jan. of 2009 but the rumor is that they will go to Afghanistan instead. I have no idea if that is true but that’s what he hears. For those who say they are glad if the army breaks remember that the army is made up of real men and women, if it breaks it is because they break.
gypsy howell
I’m so fucking sick of all of them.
Jen
That was good. I like how we are always killing someone “high ranking” who turns out to be a driver or a travel agent for the terr’ists.
Philip the Equal Opportunity Cynic
When the Army collapses completely, it will be in the first few months of a Democratic presidency, so the Republicans will be just fine.
Yes. Funny thing — those same voices that reminded us that everything negative has been Clinton’s fault, right up to the last year of the Idiot Dauphin’s reign, will be the first to deflect blame when the next president’s apologists rightly lay his or her failures at the doorstep of this one.
canuckistani
It’s my fault, guys, cause I hate the troops, being a liberal and all. Booo, troops!
Dennis - SGMM
Odd, innit, that the administration which has been at pains to spy on everything and that has endlessly assured us that they have better information than any of their critics has missed the fact that we’re running out of troops? How else to explain the fact that they have taken no action over the past five years to increase the numbers of our ground forces?
Bubblegum Tate
Islamocommienazis have hijacked the Red October! This is all your fault, Beauchamp!
Philip the Equal Opportunity Cynic
@Dennis:
I think they’re well aware of the situation — just in a mix of denial and apathy as they run out the clock.
Jake
I’ll tell you one group of people who get a laugh out of this news: Veterans of Russia’s military.
myiq2xu
Imagine if they had a Death Star orbiting Earth!
myiq2xu
Whatever happened to Scott anyway? Is he at Gitmo or what?
myiq2xu
There’s a simple answer:
DRAFT COLLEGE REPUBLICANS!
Go Chickenhawks!
The Grand Panjandrum
Well said! I have five family members currently in the military and four of them have served multiple tours in this war. (the 5th one is a REMF in the AF, but they are putting him through grad school at MIT) But, yes, I do wish words were better chosen than they sometime are. I generally chalk it up to people’s frustrations with the leadership and not our kids.
Tsulagi
Yeah, the economy has long been booming too!
Rumsfeld wanted to eliminate two Army divisions and use the savings to buy toys. Smart, strong.
Old news. At least a dozen
torturedalternatively interrogated detainees have already given us those plans. That’s how you get the truth. Smart, strong.Agree, carol h. That would be a good thing to keep in mind. Glad your son returned safe.
DougJ
It’s terrifying to contemplate Even if there’s only a one percent chance of that happening, we should act as though it will happen. The ramifications of an Islamofascist Death Star orbiting the earth would be immense.
It’s unlikely that we have a pilot with sufficient skill to fire a shot into the one penetrable part of the Death Star. Our best bet would be to have Randy Quaid fly into it.
The Grand Panjandrum
C’mon you know that when kids say they support the war, what they mean is that they support OTHER kids fighting the war while they finish their education then start a career.
You’ve seen this video by Max Blumenthal, no? Fucking priceless.
croatoan
Your mistake was in thinking that he was referring to how things were at the time. He wasn’t. He was making predicting the effects of his presidential term. “Our military [will be] low on parts, pay and morale.” “I will [make it necessary to] restore honor and integrity to the White House.” “I would [not] be very careful about using our troops as nation builders.” “And the president of the United States [after me] must jawbone OPEC members to lower the price.” “Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the [vice] president to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”
DougJ
In theory, they could build the Death Star out of aluminum tubes and power it with yellow cake. Scott Beauchamp wrote instructions for doing just that before the Weekly Standard caught him.
Zifnab
I’m not sure if that’s preferable to it limping along for another ten or twenty years until we begin losing wars we didn’t have the option of avoiding.
Since WW2, America has been under the impression that our military is some sort of magic bullet that solves all our problems. Despite generations of evidence to the contrary – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq – we continue to feed the military industry trillions of dollars to build unstoppable death machines that don’t win.
As Ron Paul pointed out, why do we have military bases in Japan and Germany? Do we plan on fighting China or Russia any time soon? If so, why?
We’ll never pull back from those giant sinkholes of taxpayer money and government effort just because. Let’s declare the military broken now, get over our hyper-inflated egos, and overhaul the military when it needs fixing. But throwing on another band-aid and telling ourselves “We’re the best in the world” again, strikes me as ludicrous.
Emma Anne
Is that really true? I used to argue with some ex military guys I knew about which party was really better for the troops, and they were not going to entertain the possibility it could be the Dems. Any evidence that the attitudes have really changed? Or are they just mad at Bush and planning to vote for McCain to fix it.
Phoenix Woman
O/T, but here’s a graphic showing Michelle Malkin’s head exploding: http://roxanne.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/malkinexplodes.jpg
By the way: Help me out here, John, if you could. Please to explain: Why, why, WHY do the wingnuts hate McCain so much? I really don’t get it.
Is it because of McCain-Feingold (which really hasn’t impacted the GOP’s cash flow as much as the breakup of the DeLay-Abramoff-Norquist “K Street Project” did)?
Is it because he occasionally makes mouth noises that aren’t supportive of Dear Leader — even though his mouth says one thing and his voting record (especially on the crunch votes) says something else (namely “I am George W. Bush’s cabana boy”)?
Is it because some merciful deity has installed a kill switch in their brains that is leading them to attack their best shot at retaining the White House, thus sparing us further pain?
Z
So this is one thing I don’t get about the Repubs.. I know Bush & Co are just trying to ride out the clock, keep things from completely falling apart, before they leave office.
If Romney got elected I would expect him to change his “Yay! Everything is great! Victory! Rah!’ story on a dime. We all know he is full of it, anyway.
What I don’t get is McCain. How can he say that crap and act like he actually believes it? Surely he knows what perilous shape we are in? What would he do if he actually got elected? There is no way we would have enough troops to do what he wants to do without a draft.
Jake
No. Now I can’t decide if I want to laugh or puke but thanks for passing that along.
Maybe it is for the best that they stay at home. I can’t imagine they’d be much use in any situation that involves physical or mental stress.
“OMG, they want 2 kill us!”
“Yep, that’s what the enemy does. Get out there.”
“Uh … uh … I can’t. I gotta check my stock quotes!”
The Grand Panjandrum
I never understood why we would keep bases in Europe after the USSR broke apart. The bases are still in Japan so troops have a place to be discriminated against. Most people don’t know this but they have “Japanese only” bars. Americans are not welcome.
myiq2xu
There’s a story that Napoleon was bragging about his army and they were marching past in a parade. He said something about how their bayonets shined, to which Tallyrand replied:
“You can do many things with a bayonet, except sit on it.”
Ed Drone
I don’t know, but I’ve been told,
The streets of Heaven are lined with gold.
I ask you how things could get much worse,
If the Muslims happened to get there first!
Wow-ee, pretty scary.
Ed
DougJ
Why do you hate heaven, Ed Drone?
Wilfred
That reminds me. What happens to Romney’s sons if he withdraws from the race? Do they march off to defend Homeland, or do they franchise Gitmo as Mittmo?
Digital Amish
Lets set aside idealogical and partisan differences for a minute*. Last I heard, we spend as much on our defense budget as the rest of the world combined. And we can’t sustain two piddle ass operations in two third world contries. What the fuck is going on. Seriously. This is what we get for outspending the rest of the world? Fuck!
*This Republican adminstration has fucked up everything it’s been allowed to touch. (That’s my meme from now until November… it’s not Bush, it’s Republicans.
myiq2xu
My favorite part is the guy who prayed teh gay away.
I don’t know about y’all, but I didn’t need to pray to God in order to figure out that I liked innies, not outies.
myiq2xu
That reminds me of the good news/bad news joke where they tell the Pope that Jesus has returned to Earth and He’s on the phone. The bad news is He’s calling from Salt Lake City.
Tim F.
I guess it’s better than Germany building a self-sufficient army. Without some yanks around Putin’s not-entirely-benign shadow would probably move them to bulk up quite a bit. That wouldn’t please me.
myiq2xu
They’ll probably keep touring America in their
RecreationalUrban Assault Vehicle looking for Islamofascists.myiq2xu
My old landlady used to say that the Germans are nice people except they have a tendency to line up and start goose-stepping every so often.
DougJ
I’ve been wondering that too. Especially Tagg, the one who’s a dead ringer for Tom Brady. What’s he going to do with himself?
DougJ
Sorry to get all stream-of-consciousness here, but this reminds me of the ending to one of my favorite book reviews of all time. It was a comparison of David Brooks’ book “The Company Kid” with a book of advice for kids who wanted to do the stuff kids are supposed to do in college — get drunk, skip class, not do laundry, and so on. It ended “the kids (from the second book) may stagger when they walk but at least they don’t goosestep.”
Chuck Butcher
The part of Max’s video that sinks a knife into these people is their confusion on being confronted with the idea of serving. I compare with my stance many years ago, “I am not going to kill people for one dictator over another just to make the military industrial complex wealthier…” Sounds a bit different than, “I gotta get my degree so my Republican cohorts can make me rich (not you dumbass – you aint’got a prayer) off the backs of the prols.”
Maybe I’m splitting hairs here…nah.
A broken military is a very bad thing when they are in the field, Zif, maybe I really don’t have a problem with your idea otherwise.
Funny how things turn out (not), Afghanistan was a real problem, Iraq turns out not to have been. We may lose Afghanistan and now Iraq is a huge problem. A lost Afghanistan could be a worse problem than Iraq was claimed to have been. We could easily “lose” both in actual results. Maye I don’t sound real pissed because I’ve been beating this particular drum since before Hillary voted “yea.” I guess I’m just tired…and sad to have been right.
You WANT to be the next President??? I’d rather beat my head with a framing hammer.
tBone
I don’t know anything about him, but with a name like Tagg, I think the only possible answer to your question is:
He’s going to go swimming in a vast sea of coke and trust fund nookie.
Dennis - SGMM
Belgium, Poland and France are all NATO members now. Wouldn’t any German bellicosity become a bit complex?
Zifnab
Tell it to Hitler. Frak’n liberal fascists.
null pointer exception
Okayyy. The debate is on.
incontrolados
Best trivial reason for not electing Mittens — do not want to hear any more about those boys. “Dad the dog’s going poopy off the roof of the car! No worries boys, he loves it! YaY! Dad!”
HyperIon
early dylan or is it arlo?
Bubblegum Tate
Damn, that’s funny. “Up yours, Islamonazis!”
HyperIon
“i’ll let you be in my dream if i can be in yours.”
dylan wrote that!
Z
TenguPhule
Why do you hate our navy?
Al Qaeda would field a fleet of wooden sailboats that will easily defeat the multitrillion dollar coffins designed to fight a force that nobody else can afford any more.
And if they ever get their hands on motor boats, we’re all doomed.