In the collapse of Mosul, we lost a lot of weapons, we lost 2,300 Humvees in Mosul alone. Iraq’s Prime Minister, Haider al-Abbadi.
“Iraqi forces left hundreds of U.S.-supplied vehicles behind when they “drove” out of Ramadi, but were not “driven out,” in the words of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey. And now most of them are melted hunks of metal. On Friday, U.S. Central Command announced that airstrikes near Ramadi destroyed “five ISIL armored vehicles, two ISIL tanks, two ISIL vehicles, an ISIL armored personnel carrier…five abandoned tanks, two abandoned armored personnel carriers and two abandoned armored vehicles.” Quite a haul, and note the emphasis on the word “abandoned.” Juan Cole at Informed Comment.
I don’t want to sound too cynical about this, but I can’t remember when we have been on the winning side of a Civil War. I guess we can say that we fought North Korea/China to a draw, but we were the clear losers in Vietnam and Nicaragua. Yemen is turning into a clusterfuck and now the Iraqi army we have been training for ten years isn’t ready to go out and die.
Every time we lose, all the players talk about how this time it was a special case. If only we hadn’t backed that catholic, Ngô Đình Diệm, to be president, or Hasan al-Malikii for Prime Minister, if only we had done this or hadn’t done that. There is always a special reason and the pattern gets lost in the ground clutter.
The people fighting in a Civil War have their reasons too, they aren’t just running around at random. Yeh, sure, we usually like one side better than the other, maybe it is closer to our version of morality like the Northern Alliance educating girls in Afghanistan, maybe it is more stable – short-term, at least – like the generals in Egypt and we think that because we like it, it is better, and, if it is better, the side we like will win. We are blind going in, we only know what people with a vested interest tell us, thinking we know what is happening is delusional.
Put it like this: If you was in the first grade and you bit somebody every week, they’d start to think of you as a biter.Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Art Mullen
A little more than a week ago, during a news conference on Friday, August 1st, Obama said We tortured some folks, and went on to say It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. Either statement seems a little strange, together, they seem even more strange. Calling the US Army Military Police and CIA waterboarding, sodomizing, sleep depriving, freezing, and even beating, to the point of killing, various helpless people in their custody, tortured some folks, seems to be a bit aw shucksy.
When I first saw the pictures of our troops torturing terrorist at Abu Ghraib prison, I was shocked and embarrassed. To me, it never seemed likely that it was just a couple of stupid, low-level G.I.s. Still, I had no idea how high up the chain of command, the crime of torture would go. And murder, as far as that goes.
It wasn’t until a week later, and – I think partially in response to what Obama said – that Dean Baquet, The Executive Editor of The New York Times, wrote Over the past few months, reporters and editors of The Times have debated a subject that has come up regularly ever since the world learned of the C.I.A.’s brutal questioning of terrorism suspects: whether to call the practices torture….Given those changes, reporters urged that The Times recalibrate its language. I agreed. So from now on, The Times will use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information. The gist of the article – editorial? – between the opening quote and the ending quote, where the four dots are above, is that, heretofore there was not enough detail to know if it was torture. Of course there was enough detail, there just hadn’t been enough time after the torture.
Shortly after Mercedes’ 100th anniversary, Daimler-Benz opened its private records that showed they were a major player in the Nazi regime. It started in 1931 when Mercedes advertised in Volkischer Beobachter, the Nazi newspaper known for its anti-Semitic tirades and culminated – I guess you could say – with Mercedes using slave labor during World War II. BMW has now admitted that they used about 20,000 slaves during the war. Just recently, Audi has gone publicwith its culpability during the nazi era. In Audi’s – then called Auto Union but with the same four ring logo – case, Dr. Richard Bruhn, ran the company before, during, and after the war. Under his tenure Audi used about 20,000 slaves and about 4,500 disabled workers were sent to the Flossenbürg concentration camp where they were killed. There is talk that his picture may come off the wall.
I don’t know anybody who thinks what Mercedes, BMW, and Audi did was acceptable human behavior and it took them a long time to face that. Obama doesn’t want us to be too sanctimonious in the period of our national panic after 911. Organizations, like people, don’t like to admit to being criminals. Everybody wants there to be a justifying reason that makes it OK to torture, kill, or roundup and put people in Concentration Camps, this one Special Time. I think it is still too soon for us to admit that just because we were panicking, it isn’t OK to torture. Or kill people with drones.
This is a very much modified copy of a post I made in 2009. I am reposting it now because, 150 years ago, the Army of The Potomac was in the middle of what is now known as The Overland Campaign. Grant and Lee had battled to a draw in The Wilderness on May 5th through the 7th, 1864. This is where the Army of The Potomac learned that Grant was a different kind of general and they were going to become a different kind of Army.
Up until now, the Army of The Potomac would move south, fight the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, and win lose or draw – sadly, it was often lose – retreat to rebuild and re-provision for the next battle. This time, when Grant pulled his troops out of the battle-line, it was not to retreat, but to move further south to attack again at Spotsylvania Court House (May 8–21), then again and again. This was total war. Grant had said I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer, and he meant it.
Grant had come to do a job and he did it. The picture below shows just that.
This is a new kind of portrait and Grant was a new kind of general. The picture was probably taken during the Overland Campaign just after the battle of Cold Harbor. Grant is not the patrician hero, Grant, like Lincoln, was a mid-westerner. A common man. In this picture, he is tired, his eyes are sad, his boots are muddy. This is probably Matthew Bradley’s most famous photo. Not only because of it’s informality, but because it is so penetrating. I have read that a good portrait is an artifact of a relationship. This is a portrait of a real man, the dynamic new kind of American from the West.
Grant was the new American hero. The quiet man just doing his job. John Wayne. Gary Cooper in High Noon. No braggadocio flourishes, just quietly getting the job done.
I had lunch with my daughter a couple of days ago and, concerned about traffic crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, I left for home early. There wasn’t any traffic, so I took a detour up to an old Nike Hercules battery overlooking San Francisco. Standing there, looking at the view, I remembered one warm summer morning in 1965, when I drove a general up to this battery.
I was a Sergeant – a buck sergeant, E5 – teaching Germans at Orogrande, New Mexico, when I met General Lolli. He had recently taken over the 28th NORAD Region – I thought it was the Eighth Region, but Google tells me, No, it was the Twenty Eight NORAD/Western NORAD Region – and Lolli was on a tour of various training facilities. Since I was from the Bay Area, he asked me if I wanted to be stationed in Sausalito and be his driver. I said something like Yes! Sir! and told my fellow teachers and my commander that I would soon be transferred to San Francisco. Then…nothing happened; for just long enough for everybody to think I had become slightly delusional. It wasn’t until about two weeks later, on a Thursday afternoon, that I was called into my Battery Commander’s office and told to report to Major General Andrew Lolli at Hamilton Air Force Base by 8 AM the following Monday.
While we were stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base, Lolli was an Army general – the only Army commander of a NORAD region – and I was his Army driver so I had to live at an Army facility. Fort Baker was the closest Army barracks and I had a private room near the entry (General Lolli lived at the Fontana West in San Francisco). Almost every morning, he would drive across the Golden Gate bridge and pick me up at Fort Baker, I would salute him and then drive him to Hamilton. On this particular morning, Lolli told me to drive him up the hill to the Nike Hercules Missile Site overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
As an aside, this was the height of the Cold War and the country was in full, paranoic, war hysteria. Schoolkids would practice hiding under our desks when the air raid sirens went off outside; F 101 Voodoo fighters, would take off out of Hamilton Air Base, looking for nuclear armed Russian TU-16 Badger heavy bombers; and our final defence was a series of twenty four Nike Hercules Surface to Air Missile – SAMs to the cognoscenti – sites around the Bay Area. I am not sure if this battery had missiles armed with nuclear weapons but the system was designed for nukes. End aside.
As we drove up to the site, Lolli called in a mock attack and, when we got there, the klaxon was going off and everybody was running to their battle stations. The missile site had probably been at DEFCON 5, but Lolli had now called it up to DEFCON 1, Air Defense Warning – RED. I don’t know if targets had been assigned, but the blast doors were opened and the missiles were brought up on their elevators, ready to launch.
I was standing way out of the way – way out of the way, not being nuclear cleared – next to a guard, and, to make conversation, I asked him how he liked being stationed in Sausalito. I was shocked when he said, It is terrible duty, nobody likes military people in the Bay Area, San Francisco is too expensive, and the weather sucks. It was hard to not agree about the weather. It was a warm summer morning almost everyplace but here; here we stood in a cold wind that was pushing the wet fog past us and then through the Golden Gate. The pavement was wet and slick and, in the distance, we could hear, but not see, lonely fog horns. Waiting for the All Clear, I thought, The weather may be crummy but this is San Francisco and my dating prospects are much better here than Orogrande or Korea.
When the All Clear finally did come and General Lolli got back in the car, he was furious. It had taken about fifteen minutes too long to come up to DEFCON 1 and Lolli has just relieved a full-bird-Colonel of his command. As we drove down the hill, the General said, If this had been real, I would have lost San Francisco.
Now, almost 49 years later, we are in a warm spell, the only fog is across The Bridge, the Nike Hercules Missile Site is no longer operational, and San Francisco is still there, sparkling in the sun. I watch a freighter go under The Bridge and a Raven joins me. Maybe she wants me to give her – and I am saying her with no idea if it is a him or a her – some food, maybe he is just enjoying the view like me, maybe she wants to chastise me for all the harm my race has done to the planet. I tell her, Hey, it could be worse, we could have fired off those missiles, we could have destroyed everything in a flash, more than 10,000 flashes, actually. But since you are here, just stay still and look over here, let me get your picture.
I read a couple of days ago that only about nine percent of the American public wants us to get into a war over Syria. Count me in the other 93% on this one. It is easy to say that Americans are tired of war, and we are, but there also seems to be a no plan problem here. How does a Syrian intervention fit into our overall Middle Eastern Strategy? Oh, and by the way, what is out overall Middle Eastern Strategy?
According to Reuters, The United States made clear on Friday that it would punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for the “brutal and flagrant” chemical weapons attack that it says killed more than 1,400 people in Damascus last week. What wasn’t made clear is that any punishing of Bashar al-Assad is really punishing someone else. By killing them, or trying to kill them.
If revenge is a dish best served cold, punishment is a dish best served hot. The longer we wait, the less it seems like there is a connection between what we are doing and what Syria did.
Obama said yesterday that we have to attack Assad, because our credibility is on the line. In other words, he is saying we are going to to destroy stuff in Syria and kill people in Syria for reasons that have nothing to do with Syria. It is now because our credibility is on the line. If our reason becomes about us, it really is not legitimate. The only legitimate reason for bombing Syria is to save Syrian lives and suffering. Bombing to save face isn’t bombing Syria to help its people.
It also seems to me that if we threaten to bomb somebody next time it, it would still be a threat even if we didn’t bomb this time. It still would depend on the circumstances.
