dagblog - Comments for "Regime Change and Precedent"

Thanks for the further

Oxy Mora — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 17:55:11 +0000

Thanks for the further background, Moat.

What about the famed to-be

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 16:43:50 +0000

What about the famed to-be-militarized State Dept, with own helicopters etc. (as seemed to be what Hillary was referring to as we pulled troops out of Iraq)? Do you think this may have been part of what occurred in Benghazi when rumored to be gun running for Syria, or only a CIA gig, or something else?

It's interesting that 2 of our Axis of Evil antichrists have had to become partial allies to tamp down local unrest. If we didn't live in such jaded times, the irony would be priceless.

Joe Liberman & John McCain were still joshing about Iran attacks long after 9/11, but maybe no one in the Administration does anymore - haven't paid that much attention.

I am replying to the

moat — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 15:01:18 +0000

In reply to Regime Change and Precedent

I am replying to the invitation to say more as a new comment so that it looks better in a mirror.

Going back to the matter of States working with non-State actors; the reason I focused upon Lehman was because of how diffuse he was regarding which State to blame. In the transcript I linked to, Armitage and Lehman joke about wanting to bomb the Iranian embassy after the USS Cole attack. The nine-eleven attacks put an end to such wild swings at the piñata. The attacks were organized by Arabs and were directly connected to the politics within and between Arab nations. The operations to take down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan as an attempt to hunt down fugitives did not confront the source of the agenda; the Arabs in Afghanistan were foreigners who would never have been hanging out there if not for the war against Soviet occupation. So, there is an understandable desire to mess directly with the Arabian political miasma.

Running through the list of possible targets, the first one that comes to mind is Saudi Arabia. Many of the attackers came from there. A lot of the Al Qaeda fatwas name the place as one of the violated places. The Wahhabis are earnest Salafist. What's not to like?
Oh, wait, our country is deeply intertwined with Saudi Arabia in matters of energy production, banking, and weapons procurement. Forget about it.
How about Egypt? Scratch that, they have been carrying our water since the deal struck by Carter.
Syria? While they make a nice leg on the tripod of evil, they are too busy representing the role of Iran's harlot to change the narrative now.
The Emirates; need I say more? Yemen? Lebanon? Palestine? Jordan? That leaves Iraq.

Underneath all the disingenuous attempts to link Iraq to Al Qaeda was a deeply felt inadequacy to have any effect on the political environment in the Arab world at all. So the archives of AEI and PNAC started filling up with arguments for “breaking the rack” rather than discussing individual objectives. The utter lack of a strategy became a strategy in itself. Pentagon brass like Lehman and Rumsfeld started lining up their deployment lists and worker bees like Clarke and Tenet drew up lists of individual targets. The two sides of the instrument of war began to lose an important boundary between them. The military was carrying out an operation that would have been carried out by the CIA in the past. The CIA itself was busy fighting for position with the expansion of Military Intelligence on one side while being overwhelmed with tasks on the other. Clarke was right to say Iraq was a diversion but time has come to show that his project was one also. The absence of a coherent policy on the connection between state and non-state actors has us dissolving states on one end of the scale or chasing tribal members on the other end toward no strategic end than demonstrating our willingness to fight.

Actually our ability to blow

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 15:29:42 +0000

In reply to The timeline leading up to

Actually our ability to blow up SUVs is overrated, as judged from our limited ability to contain ISIS. But feel free to expand on the breaking of our institution-building capabilities. "Dynamic black hole" is apt - whatever shit flows out of it, WE WIN!!! SYKE!!!

As long as not succeeding is the goal and not a side-effect, it's rather hard to change the outcomes or better the techniques. Grover Norquist must be ecstatic that we're finding dozens of governments to drown in their own bathtubs, though the size of bathtubs have gotten recognizeably larger and surrealistic.

The timeline leading up to

moat — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 14:15:28 +0000

In reply to I like "Friday Casual" as the

The timeline leading up to the attack is one of those "important issues that do not convey the point I wish to make." It would be off topic to travel too far into that here but it would be interesting to have a discussion about it for its own sake.

I brought up the careless quality of the Bremer period because it is one of the contributing factors bringing about the degradation of international institutions that PP spoke of. The promises of easy success were mendacious. But the concealment of difficulty was not just about selling the project to the public and their representatives. The way the project was carried out broke important components of the instrument of war itself.

We have become very skillful at blowing up SUVs filled with people who are skillful at blowing up other people. But the ability to build political structures and alliances that would allow some populations to become powerful enough to move past continuous conflict is not something our polity is getting better at. The neoconservatives are okay with that. They traded in the "strongman" method of proxy war for the dynamic black hole approach.

It will require a very concerted effort on many levels to alter the methods being used. An Executive agenda would obviously be necessary but not sufficient for the purpose alone.

Lots of people were similarly

NCD — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 17:02:02 +0000

In reply to While we don't have the

Lots of people were similarly not flippant or overly-optimistic that leaving Qaddafi in power to 'get rid of'' the ongoing uprising against his 40 year despotic rule would mean 'all will be OK'.

Iraq was a peace, Libya was in civil war. There is a difference there.

I like "Friday Casual" as the

Oxy Mora — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 15:24:46 +0000

In reply to When I slip on the lightly

Moat, I like "Friday Casual" as the metaphor for Bremer's reconstruction of Iraq.

Thanks for the link to the transcript. A question came to mind about what is known of OBL's timing for the attack. Anything on that?

But Bush on the other hand...

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 12:00:57 +0000

In reply to Perhaps, perhaps similar

But Bush on the other hand....

Perhaps, perhaps similar

ocean-kat — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 06:32:58 +0000

In reply to While we don't have the

Perhaps, perhaps similar things were said in the run up to the bombing of Libya. That happened after I got a job as a caretaker of a ghost town with no electricity or internet and before I got solar panels and satellite internet. I couldn't really follow the story with much depth. But still, while both Obama and Clinton are too hawkish for my tastes it's hard for me to see either of them being that ignorant or flippant.

While we don't have the

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 06:02:02 +0000

In reply to Feb. 7, Defense Secretary

While we don't have the horrid soundbites on Libya, and I suspect these Iraq statements were deliberately mendacious, I'd guess a lot of people were similarly flippant and overly-optimistic with Libya. It's so close to Europe! Just get rid of Qaddafi and all will be okay!