Foreign Quagmires – Page 22

Iran: WMD 2.0?

The Republicans job of whipping up support to override an Obama veto of the bill to kill the Iran deal got tougher since Kerry just secured limited support for the deal from the Gulf States. The NYT reports that Khalid al-Attiyah, the foreign minister of Qatar, who hosted the meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council, said:

This was the best option among other options…We are confident that what they undertook makes this region safer and more stable.

With that, most Democrats who are on the fence will likely be convinced to support the deal.

Republicans should be convinced as well, but most won’t be. However, one Republican, Pat Buchanan, thinks they are wrong:

It appears that Hill Republicans will be near unanimous in voting a resolution of rejection of the Iran nuclear deal. They will then vote to override President Obama’s veto of their resolution…

Buchanan goes on to say that, if Republicans override the veto, the US will vote in the UN Security Council to lift sanctions, along with the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China, and:

A…vote to kill the Iran deal would thus leave the US isolated, its government humiliated, unable to comply with the pledges its own secretary of state negotiated. Would Americans cheer the GOP for leaving the United States with egg all over its face?

And if Congress refuses to honor the agreement, but Iran complies with all its terms, who among our friends and allies would stand with an obdurate America then? Israel would applaud, the Saudis perhaps, but who else?

Now, it seems that applause will not include the Gulf States. Here’s Buchanan’s money quote:

And how is Israel, with hundreds of atom bombs, mortally imperiled by a deal that leaves Iran with not a single ounce of bomb-grade uranium?

Word. Another Republican, David Stockman, (former OMB Director for Reagan) had this to say about the deal and its Republican support: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

Indeed, it was the same crowd of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Feith et.al. [who]…falsified the WMD claims against Saddam Hussein, [and] have been beating the war drums so loudly about the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Stockman concludes: (emphasis by Stockman)

So it needs to be shouted from the rafters at the outset that all the arm-waving and screeching against this deal by the GOP war-mongers and the Israeli lobby is grounded in a Big Lie. The whole Iran-is-after-the-bomb narrative is just WMD 2.0.

Finally, some clear thinking by a few Republicans on Iran.

The Iraq War was one of the most important and damaging episodes in the history of US foreign policy. And everyone remembers that the war was based on a lie, and that the lie was brought to you by Republicans.

Can Republicans explain why their demand for total capitulation by Iran is so well-suited to creating a winning position for the West? How can these Republicans pretend that nothing has happened over the last 15 years that throws their neo-con, chicken-hawk worldview into question?

It’s fair to ask Republicans who championed the Iraq War to explain the differences between the Iraq WMD debacle and the current situation in Iran. If they are compelled to debate why we should bomb or invade, and how that outcome would be any better than it was in Iraq, the debate over the Iran nuclear deal might turn out not to be much of a debate at all.

Sadly, most Republicans are not thinking clearly regarding Israel vs. Iran. In April, the Wrongologist reported on a Bloomberg poll showing that Republicans think that “patriotism” doesn’t mean they must support America’s interests first when it comes to Israel. From Bloomberg:

Republicans by a ratio of more than 2-to-1 say the US should support Israel even when its stance diverges with American interests…Democrats, by roughly the same ratio, say the opposite is true and that the US must pursue its own interests over Israel’s.

American Republicans said that Israel comes first by a 67/30 margin.

Learn from that, and don’t vote for ANY candidate who says that Israel’s needs come first in the debate about the Iran deal.

Israel Pays to Play

The Hill reports that on Monday, almost every freshman member of the US Congress jetted off on an all-expense paid trip to Israel for a week of briefings and lobbying. This year, the trip is intended to ensure they vote against the Iran nuclear deal.

The junket is an annual affair organized by AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, and just 3 freshman are not going. 67 of the total of 70 are expected to go this year, flying business class and staying at five star hotels. AIPAC’s stated goal is that 80% of any Congress has been on one of its trips to Israel at least once. Among the world’s democracies, it is an unparalleled example of one country’s attempted influence on the political system of another.

The trip is paid for by The American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), the educational wing of AIPAC. According to the National Journal, over the past 14 years, the foundation has spent more than $9.4 million on Congressional travel. There are two separate trips organized along party lines, one for Democrats, and another for Republicans. The Democrats’ trip begins on August 3, and will be led by House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland). The Republican trip begins on August 8, and will be led by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California).

Wouldn’t it be nice if Congress had as much interest in the concerns of America as they apparently have for the concerns of Netanyahu? The ~~bribe~~ visit comes during the 60-day period in which Congress is reviewing the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program. President Obama has threatened a veto if the GOP-led Congress votes to reject the agreement. That would place the onus on lawmakers to muster enough votes to override the president, and the trip gives Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a fierce critic of the Iran deal, another chance to make his case directly to lawmakers.

This despite polls showing that 84% of US Jews favor Iran nuclear deal. The trip draws new attention to the fact that just about the ONLY opposition to this deal (discounting oil sheikhdoms) comes from the Republicans and Bibi. It will make it even more obvious that those Congress people who oppose the agreement do so not out of loyalty to their own country, but to Israel. But, a look at 2014 pro-Israel donations to Congress critters shows that Republicans have no monopoly on Israeli money. The data below are from OpenSecrets.org:

This is just what they gave in 2014. When will we demand that our Congress act to benefit Americans before seeking to benefit another country?

Think of the hypocrisy. We send $3.1 billion each year to Israel. Since 1948, we have sent $121 billion in total to them, all paid by taxpayers, most in the form of military assistance. And some of that money comes back in the form of donations to our Congress.

Israel is not our 51st state, yet we’ve sent them our dough rather than using it to repair our roads or to build new bridges at home. We’ve allowed them to meddle in our internal politics, we’ve invited them to disrupt our presidential elections.

Now, we will release Jonathan Pollard on parole after 30 years in prison. Pollard is a spy who stole US defense secrets and gave them to Israel. Pollard will be greeted as a hero in Israel, should he get to leave the US as a condition of his parole. Pollard’s release is dubious because he provided Israel with information during the Cold War that allegedly was then traded to the Soviet Union (reportedly in exchange for allowing Jews to emigrate). Think about it: Our #1 ally sent our secrets to the Soviets?

How long before Americans see the Israeli effort to buy Congress for what it is?

Monday Wake Up Call – August 3, 2015

Today’s wake up is for the US neo-con policy makers who made so many mistakes in the 1960’s and 1970’s that some are still being uncovered. Last week, NHK Tokyo had a report about the US’ operation of a secret experimental nuclear reactor in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

We put a nuclear reactor in Vietnam? When there was a war underway?

The site was in the city of Da Lat, 120 miles northeast of Saigon, where Americans had installed a research reactor. It was a General Atomics TRIGA Mark II model. We began building the TRIGA in the 1960s as another example of President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” campaign at the end of the 1950s, just like the reactor we sent to Iran in 1967.

So many neutrons, so little peace.

According to NHK, as the North Vietnamese Army was approaching, Henry Kissinger ordered the site dismantled to keep the technology out of communist hands. The big news: In the event of an inability to dismantle the reactor, the NHK reports that, as a last-ditch measure, Kissinger ordered that the radioactive core be blown up rather than fall to the North Vietnamese.

NHK interviewed Wally Hendrikson, now elderly, who in 1975 was a nuclear fuel specialist at the Idaho National Laboratory. He was on the small team sent to recover the reactor’s fuel. When Hendrikson arrived at the US Embassy in Saigon:

We were told distinctly that if we could not remove the fuel and get it out of the country, we were to make it inaccessible and to pour concrete…to cover the core.

If all else failed, Hendrikson says,

We were to dynamite the core

Luckily, the team got the fuel out of Vietnam without needing to create a nuclear disaster. Vietnam later rebuilt the reactor, using technology and nuclear fuel from the Soviet Union. Today, the facility remains the only functioning research reactor in Vietnam.

How many times will we have to dodge bullets that the neo-cons and cold war warriors keep loading in guns that keep getting get pointed at America’s head? Wake up, neo-cons! To help you with your wake-up, here is #5 in our songs of summer series, Katrina and the Waves with “Walking on Sunshine”:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

A map of American swearing usage, produced by a lecturer in forensic linguistics at Aston University in Birmingham, UK. Hell, damn and bitch are especially popular in the south and southeast. Douche is relatively common in northern states. Bastard is beloved in Maine and New Hampshire, and those states – together with a band across southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas – like using motherfucker. Crap is more popular inland, fuck along the coasts.

Earlier this year, Trump for President, LLC trademarked “Trumpocrat” and “Trumpublican.” Who knew that Trump wanted you to have a ball cap with “Trumpocrat” emblazoned on the front? Doesn’t Trumpocrat sound more like a plutocrat than Democrat? “Trumpocalypse” sounds correct, and has a nice ring to it, but it apparently isn’t one that they trademarked.

Exxon’s lobbying firm donated to Chris Christie’s Super PAC while Christie pushed for favorable 9to Exxon) NJ environmental settlement. Public Strategies Impact, the firm that represents Exxon’s interests in New Jersey, has donated $50,000 to “America Leads,” a super PAC supporting Christie’s presidential campaign. Christie’s proposed settlement, aims to reduce levies against ExxonMobil from $8.9 billion to just $225 million. Christie has defended the agreement as a good one for the state. NJ Democrats legislators have been seeking to block the settlement. Nothing to see here.

Ebola vaccine trial in Guinea proves 100% successful. The trials involved 4,000 people. Unlike using the randomized approach, taking a population at risk of Ebola and vaccinating half of them while giving the other half a placebo, this study used a “ring” design. When Ebola flared up in a village, researchers vaccinated all the contacts of the sick person who were willing to take the vaccine, family, friends and neighbors, and their immediate contacts. Children, adolescents and pregnant women were excluded because of an absence of safety data for them. In practice about 50% of people in these clusters were vaccinated.

To test how well the vaccine protected people, outbreaks were randomly assigned either to receive the vaccine immediately, or three weeks after an Ebola infection was confirmed. Among the 2,014 people vaccinated immediately, there were no cases of Ebola from 10 days after vaccination. In the clusters with delayed vaccination, there were 16 cases out of 2,380. Scientists, doctors, donors and drug companies collaborated to push the vaccine through a process that usually takes more than a decade in just 12 months. Merck owns the rights to the drug. Invest at your own risk.

Monday Wake-Up Call – July 20, 2015

The Wrongologist is like many who tried to read “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon back in the day, and could not finish it. However, there is a wonderful thought in the book: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”

That thought describes the campaign by those who are against the Iran deal. Get people thinking about anything but the deal, and there is a good chance it will not be approved in Congress.

But this isn’t only a US-Iran deal. Our Congress can’t derail the deal, it can only nullify US participation in it. If that happens, we will be the ones left out. For more than a decade, Iran has been near the top of our Middle East agenda. Along the way, the risks inherent in Iran’s nuclear program have been inflated, in part because it helps drive the prevailing Western view of Iran as a rogue state; in part, because it was crucial to the sanctions regime that the Western countries constructed, and ideally, it might have helped to topple the regime.

This view prevails today in Israel and Saudi Arabia as well as among Washington’s neo-cons, all of whom see Iran as the major source of disorder in the region.

Before getting bogged down in the debate about the deal, stop and appreciate the single most important accomplishment here. We live in a world where nuclear weapons are easy to develop or to purchase, which is a huge potential problem. We must have a non-proliferation program that the international community agrees on and will make every effort to enforce.

What’s key in the Iran deal is that the world united to say that it’s very important that we don’t sit back and do nothing while new countries get nuclear weapons. In this sense, the accomplishment isn’t really specific to Iran. The most significant thing is that we can agree that non-proliferation is the goal, and come together to prevent the spread of nuclear weaponry. If Turkey or Saudi Arabia decide tomorrow that they want a nuclear weapons program, there will be a credible system in place to deter them.

And if blocking Iran from making a nuclear bomb was the real goal, this deal offered the best choice. Despite what Netanyahu and American chicken hawks believe, we cannot eliminate their nuclear program by bombing Iran. The West cannot invade Iran and succeed with that goal. either. If you take Netanyahu and the neo-cons at their word, sanctions won’t work.

So, it is not surprising that the deal’s opponents offer NOTHING as an alternative.

Time will tell if the deal delivers on what it’s supposed to do. Iran has been an implacable foe of the US (and vice-versa) for 36 years, and that isn’t going to change overnight. But there is the real potential for a thaw in the hostile relations between our two countries, and this makes Israel and our (Sunni) Arab friends and enemies very uncomfortable. This deal also gives us a chance to take a look at the mess in the ME within a new paradigm. The old paradigm has not worked. It created a hole so deep that the region is at risk of never being able to crawl out of it.

While our traditional allies are understandably anxious, they’ve come by their anxiety honestly. And, if we take Einstein’s definition of insanity being the belief that doing the same thing over and over again will give you a different result, then our allies and their friends in Congress are insane.

The most prominent arguments against the deal aren’t really arguments at all. The people making them don’t like the deal because they don’t like Iran, and because the deal has some upside for Iran. That is, of course, the nature of deal-making. The chicken hawks don’t want to come out and say they oppose diplomacy in all forms and simply want a war with Iran, so we get their reframing and bluster instead.

Peacemaking has risks. War also brings risk.

The one lesson Americans never ever seem to learn is probability assessment. Our politicians always lock into one factor they are sure will predict the future with certainty.

Well, it’s time for them to grow up. If the Iran deal is a curtain, it is a deal that allows us a good amount of time to figure out what’s behind the curtain.

Behind every curtain is another curtain, the future, and nobody knows what’s back there. So, wake up Congress, debate the deal, but approve it.

Here to help wake them up is #3 in our songs of summer series, here is “Summertime” by Janis Joplin from 1969:

If your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good lookin’, you better not cry.

If you read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 19, 2015

We live in an amazing time. Donald Trump is again running for President, and the Huffington Post has decided it will not cover his run, because they consider him to be a joke.

Yet, the Republican base is happy with Mr. Trump. WaPo reports that 57% of Republicans now have a favorable view of Trump, compared to 40% who have an unfavorable view. That is a complete reversal from a late-May Post-ABC poll, in which 65% of Republicans saw Trump unfavorably. The Donald has pushed some candidates polling numbers down to the point where it could affect their ability to raise money.

Since Trump is currently polling at the top of the big group of Republican presidential candidates, the media shouldn’t assume his candidacy is a joke. They should be taking him seriously. Trump’s approval numbers with Republicans is currently the biggest story in the political campaign, and the reasons why he’s so popular deserves to be front and center.

He is the Cliff’s Notes version of today’s Republican Party.

What he is saying resonates with many in their base, which has been diligently cultivated and grown for the last 40 years. Now, their crop is coming in. Consider that Sen. Ted Cruz is only in his third year of his first term in office and Sen. Rand Paul is only in his fifth year. Except for Scott Walker, not one of them has a political record they can run on. The rest are bottom of the barrel careerist pols.

Once, we thought that no one could be lower in that barrel than Nixon. Then we had Reagan. And then, GWB. Hard to believe that the next Republican presidential candidate could be lower in the barrel than GWB, but if there is someone, the GOP will find him/her, and about 45% of the electorate will vote for him/her.

So, don’t focus simply on the media’s carping about Trump’s comments on Mexicans, because 55+% of American Republicans agree with him.

Trump’s bombast actually helps the others:

Pluto is clearer to us than the 2016 Super PACs:

Obama now has to deal with our domestic Ayatollahs about Iran:

Iran deal will never be good enough for some on the Right:

Harper Lee’s book has startling revelation:

The Greek deal is mythic:

A State for the Kurds?

The Kurds are on the verge of creating a homeland of their own, despite Iraq and US efforts to avoid it. If they do, the Middle East may never be the same. The Wall Street Journal had an interesting report about the possibility of an independent Kurdish state:

Amid an imploding Middle East ravaged by religious hatreds, the Kurds are providing a rare bright spot—and their success story is finding fresh support and sympathy in the West. By contrast with the rest of the region, all the main Kurdish movements today are broadly pro-Western and secular.

There are 30 million Kurds in the ME and only 4.5-6 million live in Iraq. Their language, Kurdish, is part of the Indo-European family of languages—close to Persian (Farsi) but unrelated to Arabic or Turkish.

Unlike Iranians, who are mostly Shiite Muslims, most Kurds are Sunnis. Despite that, they are confronting the Sunni ISIS, and the Shiite-supported Syrians.

Here is a map of the potential Kurdish state:

In Iraq, the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government, (KRG), was adopted by the new Iraqi constitution after the US invasion. Kurds control their own affairs. This has allowed the Kurds to achieve a boom in investment and construction that has produced new highways, hotels and shopping malls.

The Kurdistan government in northern Iraq maintains its own armed forces, known as the Peshmerga (literally, “those who confront death”), and no Iraqi troops are allowed in the region. The KRG controls its own borders, and Westerners can fly into the region’s capital, Erbil, without a visa. Kurdish is used everywhere as the official language, and few young Iraqi Kurds can speak fluent Arabic.

Yet, political divisions hamper the Kurds’ fight against ISIS, and their prospects for self-rule. Only a minority of Peshmerga brigades on the front lines are under KRG command, while the rest still report directly to one of the two rival political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

From a regional perspective, Iran has a significant Kurdish minority that it has suppressed in the past. Now, it is strengthening ties with the KRG, since Iran views the KRG as an ally in the fight against ISIS.

In Syria, the civil war has enabled Kurds to set up a wide area of self-administration in the northeast of the country, eliminating the border between Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, who now travel back and forth across it without visas.

And in Turkey, decades of outright denial of the existence of Kurds, (they called Kurds “Mountain Turks”) led to a bloody war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. The fighting ended only after a cease-fire was proclaimed in March 2013. The PKK was once an ally of the Assad regime, and is still classified as a terrorist group by the US and Turkey.

But, in the just-concluded Turkish elections, Kurds voted for the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, which won 13% of the national vote and gained 86 seats in the Turkish parliament. The Kurds demonstrated they can serve as check against the anti-democratic aspirations of Turkey’s President Erdogan.

But neither the Iraqis nor the US want an independent Kurdistan, despite the possibility that Kurdistan as an independent state would be a buffer against the expansion of ISIS. They act as a “Northern Front” in the war against ISIS, and ISIS will be forced to commit resources to the area, as demonstrated by the Kurds seizing the crucial border crossing, Tal Abyad, cutting ISIS supply lines and uniting Kurdish areas that now stretch from Iraq halfway to the Mediterranean Sea.

Yes, an independent Kurdistan would mean the “fragmenting” of Iraq, which Mr. Obama does not support. But Iraq was never a real country; it was cobbled together after WW1 by European bureaucrats drawing arbitrary lines on a map, with no thought to historical or cultural realities. Like Humpty Dumpty, no one knows how to put those historical anomalies “Syria” and “Iraq” back together again. They’re going to be a mess for a while.

The Kurds are different. They have the makings of a state − an area that enjoys the allegiance of its people, has civil order that allows it to raise taxes and create an effective army. It is doubtful that the US will formally recognize a Kurdish state anytime soon, but the ME is a place where that is irrelevant.

No need to recognize the Kurds as a state, just treat them like one. Buy their oil (as Israel does), and give them weapons and humanitarian aid.

They may richly repay the investment.

Monday Wake Up Call – June 22, 2015

Wrongologist reader Rene asks: “why doesn’t the Wrongologist say something about the Greek crisis”?

Most people believe that Greece needs debt relief. The creditors should discount some of the amount that Greece owes, since there’s no way they can pay it all back. But, that hasn’t happened and it’s unlikely that it will, since it’s politically impossible. Why? It is very hard to explain in a short post, but Forbes has a great summary of the facts:

The money is owed to the taxpayers of other European Union and Euro Zone countries. And what’s more, [their] taxpayers know this.

So, this is the issue: To solve the Greek debt problem, something like 50% of their debt has to be written off. That would equal 1.5% to 2% of GDP for each country in the Euro Zone. So it’s not happening.

Even though the money has already been lost by lending it to Greece in the first place, the response by the Euro Zone is troubling. From Ambrose Bierce in the Telegraph:

The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the IMF, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.

Worse, Europe is now provoking a Greek bank run in their effort to force Greece to its knees, issuing a report that warned of an “uncontrollable crisis” if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, “an exponential rise in unemployment”, and a “collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership”.

So Europe’s guardians of financial stability are deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state, saying they are out of the Euro Zone if they don’t comply.

The IMF is forcing a contradictory austerity policy in Greece – with no debt relief, exchange cushion, or offsetting investment. Moreover, they are applying a completely different standard in Ukraine, announcing on Friday, that it will: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Continue to support Ukraine through its Lending-into-Arrears Policy even in the event that a negotiated agreement with creditors in line with the program cannot be reached in a timely manner.

This despite the fact that the IMF, by its rules, does not lend to nations that are likely to default.

In the case of Greece, the creditors are acting in concert. They are doubling down, assuming (possibly rightly) that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the last hour.

The European governments must approve any bailout extension, but we are now so close to the expiration of the second bailout on June 30th that it is too late to get a deal approved by then. But IMF Chief Christine Lagarde has 30 days before she has to report a Greek non-payment of €1.5 billion on June 30th to her board, the real drop dead date appears to be July 20th, when a €3.5 billion payment is due to the ECB.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how the two sides will agree to anything other than a short-term deal before the July 20th date. Any “third bailout” of restructuring Greek debt as suggested in the Forbes article above, may be impossible.

In the words of Woody Allen:

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

So wake up Euro Zone! To help with a gentle wake-up, here as we start summer, is the last in our series of spring bird visits to the fields of Wrong. Here is the Song Sparrow:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

Dispatches from the Clown Car:

Rick Santorum says Iranians can’t be trusted because they are theocrats. Sure. We all know that Christian theocrats are trustworthy.

Jeb Bush says a tolerant country should allow religious discrimination. Day is night. Black is white. Discrimination is tolerance. Welcome to the fun house that is Conservative politics today.

Rick Santorum Argues Heterosexual Parents Are Every Child’s ‘Birthright. Really? Aren’t caring, loving parents a birthright? Why should we care about parents’ sexuality as long as they’re committed to loving and protecting their children?

Chinese physicists have developed a laser-based deep space propulsion system that harnesses more power than conventional solar sails. China is actually developing/investing in science, technology and innovation. Has anybody alerted our misleaders in Congress? Maybe we can find something else to develop besides military weapons.

Cambodia is training an elite squad of African rats to sniff out landmines. A team of 15 rats were imported from Tanzania with the help of a Belgian NGO, which trains rats to sniff out mines. The rats will try to locate the huge quantities of unexploded mines that have killed nearly 20,000 people since 1979.

Heinz says they’re sorry for a code on a ketchup bottle that links to porn site. A Heinz Ketchup buyer was exposed to porn from a website similar to www.watchmygf.xxx after Heinz allows a domain to lapse, and an adult entertainment firm buys it.

More Iraq??

We have solved nothing in 12 years in Iraq. As Tony Wikrent says at Naked Capitalism,

The sheer imbecility of American leaders is brought into glaring light [by] Bush’s attempt at the transformation of Iraq from among the Middle East’s most repressive states to a multiparty democracy.

As Col Lang says, we own it [Iraq], but cannot fix it.

So naturally, we will send more troops there in the next month or so. And to a new location. This will bring American troop levels to 3,500 since we left Iraq in 2011. The air base where the additional US forces are to deploy is al-Taqqadum, which sits about halfway between ISIS positions in Ramadi, about 40 kilometers (24 miles) to the west, and Fallujah, to the east.

Pat Lang reminds us that al-Taqqadum was originally a British air force base called RAF Habbaniya, which later became an Iraqi air force base. It had been abandoned for a long time when US forces occupied it in March, 2003. We initially called it Forward Operating Base (FOB) Ridgway before settling on the more Iraqi-friendly Camp Taqqadum in 2004. Pat Lang on our plans:

Former RAF Habbaniya was the center of the…British presence in Iraq. Look at the pictures of chapels, cemeteries, and swimming pools for the British troops… Habbaniya is the place we will defend and try to make Sunni tribesmen and Shia cowards into fighters? The omens for this are not good.

Think about it: It is an airfield we know well and maintained for years, but it’s only 24 miles from the ISIS lines. We are by design putting our newest effort right where the enemy could take out our planes and our soldiers. Makes you think that it is a trip wire of sorts, leading to a large re-deployment to Iraq when ISIS crosses our wire. We will have to fortify and defend this place very heavily. Otherwise, ISIS will see it as a place to engage us directly in battle.

Da Nang anybody?

The idea behind the new site is to provide greater support for Sunni tribal fighters, who have yet to receive all of the backing and arms promised by the Shiite-led government. But there may be a glitch. The Guardian quotes Mr. Obama at the close of the G7 summit, saying that there were not enough recruits to train:

We’ve got more training capacity than we’ve got recruits…It’s not happening as fast as it needs to.

The Guardian also quoted Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar and expert on ISIS that:

Only 1,100 Sunnis had taken part in the US training program, and none of them have graduated from it. In total, about 9,500 fighters have completed the training.

Washington wants to revive the “Sunni Awakening” strategy that we used in 2007 when large numbers of Sunni tribal fighters joined with US troops to help defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki promised us that he would incorporate the Sunni fighters into Iraq’s standing security forces and pay them regular salaries, but failed to do so, sparking the sectarian anger across Anbar Province that left some Sunni tribal leaders amenable to working with ISIS.

Mr. Obama originally said that we did not have a strategy, now, a year later, he sends an additional 450 troops to train Iraqi recruits that he himself says don’t exist. The Wrongologist has supported President Obama, however, this has the makings of a fool’s errand.

Why do we keep talking about training Iraqis to fight? The evidence shows that lots of Iraqis already know how to fight, and many of them are fighting very effectively against the very government that America installed.

This is almost like early days in Vietnam. We dribbled in more and more advisers and support. But it’s not what’s in the hands of the soldiers, it’s what’s in their hearts, and we have no control over that.

The NYT says this will cost us $8 million per week, or $47,619.05 per hour, which is more than many people earn in one year. Do the American people want their tax dollars spent in this way? When our infrastructure is falling apart? When our kids have to take out onerous loans to go to college? When Social Security, which we paid for, is under threat from the right side of the aisle?

Thomas P. M. Barnett has advised US leaders on national security since the end of the Cold War, including the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Central Command and Special Operations Command. Barnett said in a TED talk:

We field a 1st half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game

Barnett is correct. We have not learned how to play the 2nd half in Iraq.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Foreign Quagmires