Expect to hear a lot more of this:
DAVID BROOKS: […] I thought nominating or appointing Petraeus was like an apology to George Bush and Dick Cheney, because it’s an acknowledgement finally that Petraeus’ strategy with the surge actually worked, which the administration is slow to acknowledge.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Which was something that Barack Obama had said — had been critical of.
DAVID BROOKS: Right. And, in private, I think they knew it worked. In public, they can’t say it. But it clearly worked.
It’s not just the zombie lies that kill us, it’s zombie quarter- and half-truths like “the surge worked”.
beltane
I briefly saw that yesterday. It was a painful few seconds until I got my hands on the remote.
I’d love to get David Brooks really drunk and then have this conversation with him.
blackwaterdog
They just have no shame. 5000 dead soldiers in the most criminal unjustified war you can imagine – and this is “an apology to Bush”?????
I despise these people.
aimai
If the surge worked, publicly or privately, what are we still doing in Iraq? Fuck david brooks with anything but another human.
aimai
uloborus
The tightrope they have to walk here is fascinating. The conservative right and anyone who still takes them seriously are desperate to vindicate George Bush as anything but a serial pooch-screwer, but George Bush is political poison. Publicly standing up for him not only pisses off all the moderates, but a lot of the fringe Right who believe Bush must have been a liberal because his policies failed. The contortions they have to go through to accommodate these two needs deserve their own field of science.
EDIT – @aimai: A goat? A pooch? A scrofulous donkey that leaks bot flies and rabies? What would you recommend?
tomvox1
Wow. I mean, I know Brooks lives in a reality of his own construction but this is really pathological. He should go back to rhapsodizing about the place of the Applebee’s salad bar in American life and leave the military commentary to someone far less beholden to ersatz manly-man mythologizing. To make this statement in public and then have it taken seriously by anyone is just absurd.
dmsilev
Can we set up a fund to buy David Brooks a rifle and a one-way plane ticket to Baghdad? Heck, make it a round-trip ticket with a return date a couple of months later.
dms
Redshirt
That’s literally disgusting.
It’s like nothing means anything, other than what these nutjobs want to say it means.
mr. whipple
Good, because that means the golden general can do his thing and we can get the fuck out of Afghanistan next summer.
Kryptik
When you can not only make a living, but inordinately and overproportionally influence politics and policy by lying out of your ass, or even half-lying out of your ass, and suffer no consequences, what incentive is there to tell the truth or fight for it?
God, fucking media.
Frank Chow
I would like to ask either one of these wankers, what are we winning? Do we get some patriot prize? If we “win” the war in Afghanistan and pull out as we should, no doubt these two will be asking for an invasion of Yemen in three months.
War hawks can only survive off the teet of war.
El Cid
The SURGE didn’t work. It was a propaganda show for domestic political consumption. The myth of this whole “new” ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy is a bunch of horse-shit.
I guess Obama retaining both Gates and Petraeus is a huge apology to G. W. Bush Jr. and Dick Cheney for changing their idiot Iraq war strategy in the last year and a half of dumbass’ Residency.
jon
By each and every favorable measure, The Surge worked.
Linda Featheringill
I think that Afghanistan is more complex than those guys realize. I honestly think that they don’t understand.
I suppose that using Iraq techniques in Afghanistan might have the same success as using WWI techniques. Hell, it might work.
But if Petreus can get us out of there, more power to him. I will stand up and publicly praise him.
I just think that the whole thing is too, too complex for words.
aimai
I love the idea, embedded in the original quote, that perhaps all of Obama’s presidency–even two terms–will be seen by Brooks as some kind of “apology” for running against Bush. What temerity Obama showed by even running as a Democrat in the first place. What arrogance. He should spend the next term and a half apologizing and implementing the same policies that George Bush apparently needed sixteen years to implement before they could come to fruition.
aimai
Earl
Yes, the surge worked so well…
Kryptik
@aimai:
I’m half expecting Brooks (or another bobblehead’s) next Op-Ed to solely consist of a picture of those infuriating “MISS ME YET?” billboards.
c u n d gulag
It’s not that Obama is politically/militarily savvy.
NO! That can’t be it. It’s an open acknowledgement to the genious that was Bush!
What I love is, when you watch people like Brooks and Woodruff, you have to really, really look to see the strings they’re attached to on your TV.
But then, I don’t have HDTV, so maybe they’re clearer to everyone else.
MikeBoyScout
Bobo’s performance on the Snooze Hour last night was a real Bobo masterpiece of obfuscation and neo-con balderdash.
I’d up my PBS subscription very substantially if just once Mark Shields or one of his periodic stand ins would reach over and slam Bobo’s face in to the table when he propogandizes like he did Friday.
Judy, I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t bare to listen or allow our viewers to hear one more word of that nonsense.
El Cid
The SURGE never worked, except for, if you want to be charitable, a few areas within Baghdad.
The turn of local militias against the ‘Al Qa’ida’ idiots happened without U.S. influence.
The U.S. SURGE in no way prevented ‘ethnic cleansing’ which was fiercely warned as a consequence of withdrawal. Rather, the SURGE took advantage of the successful conclusion of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad by Sunni and Shi’a militias, beginning at the tail end of each set of forces driving rival civilians out of their preferred areas.
The U.S. then helped cement this successful Iraqi ethnic cleansing in its concrete wall building campaign.
The U.S. SURGE also depended heavily on buying off Sunni and Sunni-linked militias to end their attacks on U.S. troops to the tune of at least $30 million per month.
The SURGE in no way created what it was supposed to, the political space for a stable Iraqi government to assume enough control to allow for a U.S. transition.
It was a political propaganda campaign aimed at the U.S. public, who are the typical enemies in the eyes of the U.S. foreign policy establishment and thus the continual rubes to be fooled by massive propaganda campaigns.
There’s no group the U.S. foreign policy establishment hates more systematically and extendedly than the domestic U.S. population, because it often misunderstands its role in following whatever that hawk / liberal hawk establishment wants.
kay
I hate to beat a dead horse, but conservatives get away with this because of poor reporting.
The oil spill response is another example, and David Brooks is in that misinformation chain too.
There’s a plan for an oil spill response, and you cannot judge the response without knowing what it was supposed to look like.
No reporter in the first months bothered to read that plan. Jindal’s outrageous charges went unrebutted, because no reporter bothered to find out how the response was supposed to work.
Had any one of them sat down and read the unified response plan, they would have asked Governor Jindal why his state didn’t submit one, and why they had to hurry-up and draft one over a weekend.
Jindal did his anti-government rant, David Brooks joined in, and we are just now finding out how the plan was supposed to work.
People commenting here were aware that there was a state-federal plan. People here were questioning some of Jindal’s claims.
National media accepted every charge Jindal made without question. This information isn’t hard to find. It was up on the EPA’s website, for God’s sake.
People like Bobby Jindal and David Brooks were allowed to spew misinformation for two months, and we are just now getting around to reading the plan.
Amazing.
WereBear
I do not think foreign policy has learned a thing since WWII.
Even as a child, I was a reader of history, and noticed that the Communist boogyman they seemed to so fear only took hold in countries that basically still had serfs.
As a lever to catapult a medieval country into the 20th Century, it worked a treat. (Just add dictators and stir.) As something that would take over an existing first world country… not.
Kryptik
@kay:
But that’s just good reporting, Kay. If you’re a republican, then you’re telling the truth until proven without a doubt to have lied. If you’re a democrat, you’re lying out of your ass even if you’re proven to have been telling the truth without a reasonable doubt.
That’s just good journalisms, you know.
Linda Featheringill
@WereBear:
Very perceptive. I am impressed. [stands with hat off]
uloborus
@WereBear:
Let’s be fair. Large portions of the Stalin/post-Stalin Soviet leadership honestly really wanted to conquer the United States and impose Communism. Stalin was a monster whose nightmare rule created a fantastically dysfunctional and dogma-obsessed government. I mean, they probably wanted to build a colony on Mars and were about as close to that goal, but it really was an enemy power for a long period of time.
It’s the Chinese who don’t and never did care about America as long as we stay out of Asia.
kay
@Kryptik:
It’s scary to watch. I didn’t read the whole Oil Pollution Law. I read a bullet-pointed synopsis. I think it took twenty minutes.
Ever since, I have read and listened with something like horror at realizing no news agency had read it.
Beginning yesterday, with CBS, they have been correcting the record, pushing back against some of Jindal’s claims on the deployment of the National Guard. First, Jindal denied it, then made an admission that CBS was correct. He hasn’t deployed the Guard members that he was given. Now the New York Times has a long sort of expose! on how the plan was supposed to work, and Jindal’s lies.
65 days later.
All of the misinformation and confusion could have been avoided. All they had to do was read the law. I submit you cannot report on this without some understanding of how it was supposed to work. Media all jumped in there, with no information, led by the New York Times, who are just now reading the plan.
The New York Times really set the stage for the Jindal’s misinformation campaign, and then David Brooks wrote an uninformed anti-federal government screed on disaster response, and the whole thing is bullshit, and the circle of conservative nonsense was complete.
Media would have known that if they had spent twenty minutes researching before breathlessly transcribing Jindal’s made-up reality. The New York Times led the way in creating this reality. That they are now printing the truth 65 days later doesn’t matter. The fantasy will stick.
WereBear
@uloborus: Well, I am being fair; it was perhaps not so obvious in the fifties, before I was born.
But by the time this crap was going on, it could be considered a scam for nefarious purposes.
kay
I await Bobby Jindal’s apology to the Coast Guard. He’s spent two months trashing them, unfairly, and for purely political purposes. While they bust ass down there scrambling to make up for his incompetence, and the fact that he didn’t submit or HAVE the plan he was supposed to have, and he gives cable channel interviews on how stupid they are, and how brilliant he is.
David Brooks can apologize to them too, for submitting a stupid misinformed screed on the inability of the federal government to respond, based on not one fact, and carefully crafted to push conservative dogma.
This was a coordinated campaign to discredit the federal government, and glorify a GOP governor, and every single reporter went along with it, because they didn’t know what questions to ask.
Because they didn’t bother to read the plan for the response.
WereBear
@Linda Featheringill: Thanks. She said humbly.
Kered (formerly Derek)
@MikeBoyScout:
I would pay for that.
uloborus
@WereBear:
Ah! Forgive me. It was ABSOLUTELY a scam for nefarious purposes, encouraged by warmongering xenophobic simpletons. Even though the Soviets actually honestly wanted to conquer us, they were A) incompetent, B) economically crippled by the same dogma that made them want to conquer us, and C) *nobody in the US knew any of this anyway*. It was purely the ‘stopped clock’ phenomenon that the Soviet government honestly had it in for us. We didn’t find out until the Iron Curtain fell. I just reflexively fill in the other side of any issue, even if it doesn’t even remotely outweigh your argument.
uloborus
@kay:
I listened to Obama’s team explain the law at length to the press. They utterly ignored it in favor of asking more questions to try and get a quote that suggested the White House really should have removed BP from the process already.
I mean, the whole point of the press conference was to explain the law and how everything was working.
WereBear
I agree that the Soviet Union claimed they wanted to take over, did in fact make a lot of moves about taking over, and that there was a lot of brinkmanship going on.
There were nuclear weapons involved, and that always gets my attention.
I’m just saying it was overblown, and yes, in a lot of quarters that should have known better, friggin’ insincere because it was the shortest distance between two points that had nothing to do with a “Communist takeover.”
Should we fear them militarily? Sure! Should we have feared them infiltrating our society and polluting our precious bodily fluids? Hell no.
kay
It’s going to happen again, a needless and really tragic invasion based on a carefully crafted web of leaked propaganda and factless screeds. It’s just a matter of time.
Every single time one of their lies takes off and becomes reality, whether it’s on health care, Iran or the oil spill, I think of Iraq.
They all look the same, and they all follow a familiar trajectory.
This happens at least once every six months. Again and again and again, and every single time they’re treated as credible, good-faith actors, and given the benefit of the doubt. Conservatives seemingly cannot be discredited. It’s impossible, for some reason.
It’s just really disheartening.
Jager
@mr. whipple:
as Micheal Hastings said yesterday in an interview;
“I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising”
“There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues,that was hard earned through experience, not something I heard at a cocktail party on fucking K street!” “Thats what reporters do, report the story!”
Let’s through some money together and send Brooks to Afganistan for 6 months, he can use my old jungle boots if he needs footwear!
Honus
@aimai: Because we we never intended to leave Iraq. That’s what those five or ten “Megabases” were about. We are to dominate the middle east oil fields from Iraq, through Syria and Iran. And that plan is only temporarily on hold, until the next neocon administration.
Davis X. Machina
The surge did work. A time-limited increase in the deployment of US forces in Iraq stabilized a increasingly contentious country, split on religious and ethnic lines, that was threatening to spin out of control just long enough for actors in the civil sphere to get their acts together and pull off an election. The coalition with the most covert and overt official US support, however, didn’t do as well as expected.
Instead Obama won.
Iraq — it was never anything but the world’s most expensive campaign commercial.
uloborus
@WereBear:
No, I agree! I completely agree. I wasn’t being snarky. My point was ironic as much as anything. It’s funny that the Soviets really wanted to do everything (except large scale nuclear war – they were probably LESS crazy than us on that issue) that they were accused of, but the infiltration and military assault fantasies were ludicrously impractical and based on xenophobia (or corruption) rather than knowing anything about the Soviets.
kay
@uloborus:
The Coast Guard commander gave what I thought was a good rundown, but he speaks in that quasi-military code language, and it’s hard to decipher.
“It’s too HARD” , right?
I’m not particularly on the ball, and when I (belatedly) realized this was a huge disaster, the first place I went was The Plan, because it stands to reason you can’t really evaluate actions if you don’t know what’s supposed to happen, and who does what, and why.
The New York Times were too busy writing vitriolic editorials to read the plan.
Jindal requested 3X the available boom in the United States, vastly more than he had requested in his incomplete submitted plan, and then blamed the Coast Guard for not having it at the ready. They didn’t have it at the ready because Jindal didn’t know he’d need it. The whole point of having states submit plans was they’re supposed to know their state’s coastline.
What an asshole he is. Really. I mean, that’s a flat-out lie on his part, blaming them for his fuck-up, and a complete lack of accountability.
me
Brooks has a surge in his pants every time he thinks about Dave Petraeus,
Kryptik
@kay:
This is the most depressing thing about everything. Even if the media clues up and realizes ‘hey, maybe this isn’t true, we should look into that’, it’s done so late and limply enough that it’s too late to push back against the narrative they themselves created, the fantasy they not only enabled, but endorsed.
kay
@Kryptik:
It’s painful to watch it happen. I have to say, though, CBS did follow up with Jindal and essentially force him to admit he hadn’t deployed the Guard he was given, but it took two tries.
First, he trashed the Coast Guard (again) and blamed them, but then CBS went back and asked him again.
A little perseverance does wonders.
Scamp Dog
@El Cid:
From the Villager perspective, the Surge worked. It got the bad news out of the media discussion for long enough that we didn’t have to pull the troops out. That protects their Republican pals from embarrassment, lets them mock DFHs, and (best of all!) maintains the status of Very Serious People. Besides, the continuing war keeps deficits high, so we have the excuse of not having any money to spend on the lower orders. What’s not to like?
Kryptik
@kay:
Oh god, two tries, how horrible.
….then again, two tries is infinitely more effort than not trying at all, and just letting the Republicans hand you their talking points.
uloborus
@kay:
Yes. I didn’t even know the law existed or that there was a plan until I saw the press conference. I will concede that I may be better able to parse technical language than the White House Press Corps, but they weren’t even *trying*. It could not have been more obvious that they didn’t give a fuck about the realities of the situation, only their narrative. I mean, they weren’t terribly subtle, and the only questions that weren’t obvious digs in that direction were unrelated to the spill at all.
I didn’t know that Jindal had requested three times the available boom in the US. That’s cute. Or that he hadn’t even made up a plan. The administration team was actually trying hard not to be rude about him. But it became abundantly clear that Jindal’s request was placed because it was impossible to fill and wasn’t remotely rooted in the actual recovery plan, just an arbitrary and childish demand.
EDIT – I knew there had to *be* a plan, just not that it had been prepared long ahead of time and was based on laws drafted after the Exxon Valdez disaster.
WereBear
I predict at some point a short burst of actual journalism because it will sell on the novelty value.
The instant the public starts actually relying upon it… bait ‘n’ switch.
Kryptik
@WereBear:
You think we’ll even get to that point? If we got actual journalism, we’d have the tea partiers beating down doors demanding heads and every news outlet bought out by Fox.
Sure, it’d be a small contingent, but you can be assured the media would treat them like they were 10 million strong and shut everything down.
uloborus
@WereBear:
I do not predict actual journalism any time soon, because I don’t think they’re aware that what they’re doing isn’t journalism already. It’s tremendously ironic that the *news organizations* are experiencing epistemic closure. They talk to themselves, judge each other’s performance, are buddies outside of work and are jealous of who’s got the best scoop only if it’s juicy gossip.
sukabi
Obama’s larger strategy in appointing Petrayus is 2-fold… Petrayus is taking a demotion (this frees up a more important position so the overall strategy / policies of the region can be changed) and it takes Petrayus out of contention for the 2012 election cycle… he’s either going to have to retire in the next year and abandon his mission in Afghanistan in order to launch a presidential run (not good… a cut and runner) or suck it up and kiss his higher office aspirations good bye for 6 years or so…
plus it has the added benefit of shutting down any carping about what a horrible decision shit-canning McChrystal was…. ( I don’t think it was bad, but you know if he hadn’t come up with Petrayus as his replacement the next 6 months would have been one huge hissy fit from the GOP and all their stenographers)
Brooks and his ilk will always come off as assholes of the first order, precisely because they can’t do anything else.
uloborus
@sukabi:
Dunno. Patriarchus has been pretty damn emphatic about his lack of interest in running for office.
sukabi
@uloborus: he’s still in uniform, he’s not supposed to voice his political views / plans… it’s directly against the military rules for proper protocol.
dj spellchecka
way late to the thread [and el cid hit all the points as to why the surge wasn’t the major factor in “calming” baghdad] but i’d like to offer brooks a flight to the city and a visit to the american embassy as long as he has to get from the airport to the green zone on foot….
El Cid
@Davis X. Machina: No, it didn’t. The stability came with the end of ethnic cleansing, the paying off of the militias, and the turn against the ‘Al Qa’ida’ nitwits which weren’t the US’ doing.
uloborus
@sukabi:
Very true. He’s been more than just ‘no comment’ about it, he’s been exasperatedly emphatic, but the military is damn all serious about that protocol – which is why Micky Mouse is being relieved. I’m going to hope that, like Colin Powell, he actually wants nothing to do with politics, but you’re right that we can’t take denials seriously because of that rule. Of course, by the same token the media are being asshats by asking the question a hundred times.
Davis X. Machina
@El Cid: You’re assuming Iraq was about Iraq. It was always about the US, often about Israel, occasionally about Europe, sometimes about Saudi, except when it was about Vietnam.
It was the ultimate proxy war — it wasn’t even fought over what it was being fought over, and it was being fought on a different continent from where the war was.
sukabi
@uloborus: the thing about Colin Powell… if he hadn’t been involved with the Bush / Cheney cabal he would have definitely made a run at President… he was busy doing the speaking tour / book writing prep work prior to that. Now he’s damaged goods.
Joseph Nobles
Didn’t we have a story recently about how well the Iraqi-style surge was working in Afghanistan? But in Iraq it was called the Sons of Iraq, and in Afghanistan it was called a protection racket.
uloborus
@Davis X. Machina:
Really? Because what I saw was that Iraq was about Bush’s wet dreams of being A Great President Who Toppled The Evil Dictator His Father Couldn’t And Brought Peace To The Middle East, and Cheney’s wet dreams of Global American Hegemony. Okay, lots of other people signed on for their own reasons, but all the leaks pointed to those two motivations.
Davis X. Machina
@Davis X. Machina: @sukabi: Powell’s wife always vetoed the idea — she was, maybe still is, who knows, convinced that no African-American President will leave office alive.
Davis X. Machina
@uloborus: All that pales in comparison with the prospect — and history will show we dodged this particular bullet, not because we were good, but because we were lucky — of reducing the Democratic Party to a Mulroney-ized rump, and the introduction of the One-Party State — or the Mother of all LBO’s.
Sure, lots of explosions stage left — but the world’s largest property crime stage right.
Think of it — the world’s largest economy — these people don’t believe in nations — and for a generation, or more, as far as the eye can see, you get to write the regulations, you get to name its judges, you get to dictate its tax policies, you get to direct its spending, you get to set its monetary policy……and you get to deploy the apparatus of state security if anyone gets obstreperous.
Petty criminals snatch purses. Organized crime suborns accountants, cooks books, launders money.
This was organized crime not just at the nation-state level — Russia already was doing that — this was organized crime at the superpower level. Why bother with bribing, or killing, the security guards when you can just have the legislature write the law against larceny out of the statute books, or have the judiciary strike it down? Who cares about ‘the watchman state’ when you can have the state provide your getaway car with a police escort? Why steal money when you own the presses?
Any money, or blood, poured into the sands of Mesopotamia, could be written off as start-up costs. The war makes everything else possible.
If it wasn’t Iraq it would have been elsewhere. If it wasn’t Bush, it would have been someone else.
uloborus
@Davis X. Machina:
Alright, but that’s the Neocon philosophy – Cheney’s driving motivation. And for Neocons it’s seamlessly integrated with the idea of World American Hegemony. It’s about their philosophy taking over the world, starting with the US because American Exceptionalism is integral to that philosophy. They published papers about this stuff. And you’re right, for Cheney it could have been any nation anywhere, and the more wars the better. But his Frat Boy Protege had it real bad to refight his old man’s war and Win – and Iraq really was a perfect target for the Neocon dream.
El Cid
@Davis X. Machina: I know what I believe both Iraq and the SUUUUURGE was about, having nothing to do with any of their publicly justified goals.
The reason I always keep outlining the myth of the SUUUUURGE is that it is now used as a justification to suggest we now have some ‘counter-insurgency’ model to use for the next wars, that we won’t have the Iraq problems all over again, we’ve really finally figgered it all out for the next war.
uloborus
@El Cid:
You do have a point there. I think the surge did what it was supposed to do, and largely did it by recognizing that brute force is a dumb way to do anything. But you’re right, the Chickenhawks represented it then and are representing it now as some strategy to defeat the insurgents and pacify the country, when it was really just a way to quiet down anti-American violence long enough for the US to ease out. If the Iraq government had time to become self-sustaining, great, but it’s pretty clear that in both Iraq and Afghanistan the Bush cavalier attitude towards cleaning up their own mess has created governments that… remind me of Bush’s!
Tecumseh
Judy Woodruff: I’m going to pull something completely out of my ass right now.
David Brooks: I agree with what you pulled out of your ass and second it with something I pull out of my ass
Judy Woodruff: Well I guess we discovered the true meaning of Obama promoting Petreus now thanks to all this ass pulling.
David Brooks: Agreed. I think I’ll write a column about what I pulled out of my ass, some more stuff I’ll pull out of my ass, and then everybody will add stuff out of their ass that agrees with it and we’ll have some conventional wisdom and talking points.
Judy Woodruff: Tune in next week when we pull more stuff out of our ass on the economy, the elections, and the meaning of So You Think You Can Dance.
Corner Stone
@uloborus:
We have 90K troops in Iraq, and about 80K in Afghanistan. According to reports, we’re the only nation with troops still in Iraq. The NATO force in Afghanistan totals about 120K.
There has been no “ease out” of anything, nor will there be. That’s what COIN means, no matter what other name they want to give it at times.
Steeplejack
Here is what has been my beef all along: to the extent that the “surge” worked–and that is certainly a debatable point–it worked only because they finally brought the level of force that they should have brought in the first place.
It’s like plumber No. 1 shows up at your house with no tools to do any work, but then plumber No. 2 is a genius because he actually brings a wrench and some pipe cutters. WTF.
AxelFoley
@kay:
It is, ain’t it?
Elizabelle
@kay:
Kay: you are one of the main reasons Balloon Juice is my favorite blog. Very perceptive and information-based, as usual.
I don’t know why professional journalists don’t work as hard as you do. It’s their shame.
Liked werebear’s comment on serfs and dictators too. Clever and memorable.
Carry on.
Elizabelle
@Steeplejack:
And why can’t that be publicly acknowledged?
George Bush is not a genius. He did not do his job well. At all.
matoko_chan
The surge never worked. now the mini-surge has failed. the COIN doctrine and cnas have utterly failed.
When can we admit it?
Ask Bacevitch
matoko_chan
@aimai: the problem is not just the Surge. the whole COIN doctrine is FAIL.
That is what McC was saying with his media exposee and his resignation.
As long as the drone strikes continue, “winning” in Afghanistan is simply mathematically impossible– according to social network theory, one of the underlying principles of COIN doctrine.
Drones create exponentially more terrorist networks than they destroy by de-noding, because injustice propagates as influence along both social and blood kinship network connections.
It is going to be really hard for the milstrat guys to admit COIN is just useless.
They are invested.
LosGatosCA
El Cid has it right, the surge did work. It was one of the greatest political rear guard action of all time.
This is sneaky smart by Obama and maybe eleventy dimension chess by Petreaus. The military aspects of Iraq and Afghanistan are about 5% of the discussion – it’s 95% political.
Obama has to avoid the helicopters on the roof as we leave. Petreaus has to take personal charge of COIN to have a legacy to translate to the political arena. He may even relish being in direct control- like Pat Riley firing Stan van Gundy.
Corner Stone
Yep. Iraq was our “focus” and after 7 years we’re here:
…
And this was in a country that was more less functioning at a government ministry level before we blasted it to shit.
Seven mother fucking years later and we can’t get them back to the level of electricity and general services they had pre-2000.
And Afghanistan is solvable? There’s a point we can skulk off with “honor”?
Shit.
matoko_chan
@LosGatosCA: nope, the surge was nominally intended to pacify Iraq long enough for a standalone election.
that was the advertised purpose.
but it was really just cover to slink off out of the cities and pretend “we won”.
those retards….the more democracy there is MENA, the more Islam there will be. the citizens liek Islam…..they will vote for it everytime they get to vote.
the entire core premise of COIN, that trusted networks would lead to the elimination of al-Q in Iraq and a stable “democracy” was a total hoax.
the US PAID the Sons of Iraq. the anbar “awakening” was a total scam.
tensor
Seven mother fucking years later and we can’t get them back to the level of electricity and general services they had pre-2000.
And Afghanistan is solvable? There’s a point we can skulk off with “honor”?
Obviously, we need to bomb more civilization into them. It’s the American Way.
Even as a child, I was a reader of history, and noticed that the Communist boogyman they seemed to so fear only took hold in countries that basically still had serfs.
Which was a problem in 1950, as the decaying European empires had left scads of new countries, each run by a tiny, tottering, discredited elite, ruling over quasi-literate serfs. Communist take-overs in these places would have been a serious long-term problem. (Nothing in the above should be read to imply the U.S. responded in anything which could be interpreted as a sane and reasonable manner, of course.)