To understand how perverse the perennial debate, which in itself is a weak word for what passes as supposed scrutiny and argumentation over U.S. military spending, always deliberately and euphemistically called defense spending, one has only to read the “Statement on Department Efficiencies Initiative”  delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on August 9 when he proposed some modest changes in military command structures, such as the proposed closing of the Joint Forces Command,  l along with other organization adjustments which theoretically, in aggregate, could save billions of dollars over five years.

To read the subsequent whining and rhetorical rending of government by corporate CEOs and their Congressional allies one might think Mahatma Gandhi had been brought back from the dead and been made Secretary of Defense.

The fact that the prospect of “Thousands Of Defense Jobs To Be Eliminated,” as the Washington Post headlined it the following day, in a military-industrial corporate sector which employs hundreds of thousands in the most limited definition of the phrase, excited so much whining is the very epitome of farce.

First, considering Gates called for finding more than $100 billion in overhead savings over the next five years, when combined direct military spending is likely to total over $3.5 trillion dollars is what you call having very low expectations. Note this does not include other military related spending which would jack the total even higher. For detail see the newly released Report of the Task Force on A Unified Security Budget for the United States.

Second, in no way whatsoever can what Gates proposed be considered a cut, as happened in most press accounts. As Gates took pains to note, “Let me be clear, the task before us is not to reduce the department’s top line budget.  Rather, it is to significantly reduce its excess overhead costs and apply the savings to force structure and modernization.”

Third, it is a sign of how utterly dependent government is on private military contractors that Gates’ call for a 10 percent annual reduction in spending on contractors who provide support services to the military, including money for intelligence-related contracts, and he placed a freeze on the number of workers in the office of the secretary of defense, other Pentagon supervisory agencies and the headquarters of the military’s combat commands brought about cries of anguish. Why, anyone should possibly think this is a significant impediment to ongoing military outsourcing is beyond understanding. As Winslow Wheeler, Director, Straus Military Reform Project, Center for Defense Information, noted:

(The total number of these contractors appears to be unknown. One estimate is that the DOD contractors number 790,000; other numbers are higher. In any case, the denominator for this 10% reduction appears to be unknown. Also, it is unclear if this 10% reduction pertains to all contractors or a subset. If the correct number is 790,000, will there actually be three years of reductions of 79,000 of these people?)

Note what this recent Congressional Research Service report said:

The largest savings appear likely to come from a 30% reduction over three years in funding for ‘service support contractors.’… [but] There appears to be some significant overlap in the proposals, so their impact may not be cumulative….. Aside from the overlaps, several of the initiatives involve only relatively small amounts…. Many of the potentially larger savings appear to involve scrubbing the recent very large increases in intelligence spending.”

None of Gates initiatives has anything to do with a rational military budgeting process; something which has been AWOL for decades. What it means, as all people conversant with military spending issues understand, is that by trimming the Defense Department’s  civilian and military bureaucracies, Gates is hoping to persuade Congress and outside critics that the department is eliminating waste on its own to head off future reductions in overall military spending. Gates still sees military spending increasing in real terms; only by a somewhat lesser amount due to projected cuts.

Yet paltry as they are, even these very limited initiatives have the regular military ritualistically outraged. Perhaps it is because they see it as an affront to the magical illusion that military spending is the most efficient and least corrupt of all government spending. Note to readers; that particular illusion would not be possible without massive, witting assistance from a largely compliant, and usually clueless, mainstream media establishment.

As Michael Brenner, Professor of International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, recently wrote on the National Journal Security Expert Blog:

For the past decade they have a deep sense of entitlement.  Their presumed entitlement has no basis in law as do the much maligned Social Security programs funded through dedicated withholdings entirely separate from the tax revenues that keep the Pentagon machine well lubricated.  There indeed does exist a defense establishment whose self-interested thinking pervades what passes for strategic planning in Washington these days.  That was demonstrated when the Congress called upon the United States Institute of Peace to conduct an ‘independent’ review of needs and programs juxtaposed to the Quadrennial Defense Review made public this spring.  The USIP project had as co-chairs Bush administration National Security Advisor Steven Hadley and Clinton administration Secretary of Defense William Perry.  They led a twenty member panel chosen by DoD and Congress whose distinctive trait was that all but one had some financial stake in the Pentagon’s activities.

So it came as little surprise that the panel’s advisory report solemnly pronounced that the QDR understated America’s defense requirements and that spending substantially above that requested by DoD was imperative.

For those wanting to see a useful critique of the utter vapidity of the panel see this column by Winslow Wheeler, one of the relatively few analysts who actually understands its utter dysfunctional nature.

All in all, Gates pronouncement is just another reminder of the prescience of President Eisenhower’s farewell address:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Too bad we didn’t take it to heart when we still had the chance.

Related posts:

1. Gates Confronts Ike’s Wisdom About the Clearly Necessary and the Comfortably Desirable
2. 30 Top National Security Leaders Come Out in Support of New START Treaty
3. Contractors and Government: Till Death Do Them Part

If nothing else, the Wikileaks release of the Afghanistan War Diaries has had the positive effect of focusing public attention back of Afghanistan. Of course, there has increasing coverage this year, as the surge of troops ordered by President Obama last fall has been implemented. But the war there has not received nearly the coverage it deserves, given the intensified fighting and increased brittleness of American strategy and goals.

Let there be no mistake, the costs are high. The United States, as this Congressional Research Service report details will, most likely, suffer more killed and wounded this year, than in any year since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. As of July 12 that was 218 killed and 2000 wounded. In 2009, by comparison the numbers were 311 killed and 2,131 wounded. Total U.S. military deaths thus far from Oct. 11, 2001 are 1,154 and wounded is 6,773.

We should note that the deaths of at least 66 soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen have made July the deadliest-ever month for American troops in the nine-year war in Afghanistan. The tally includes six American service members who died in four separate attacks in southern Afghanistan last Thursday and Friday.

One of the salutary effects of the Wikileaks documents is to illustrate the incoherent response of the federal government when it comes to dealing with the reality of its policies. As the Project On Government Oversight noted:

There is no doubt this episode also exposes the ridiculous problems created by the overclassification of government information. The Administration cannot have it both ways—they claimed that there was nothing important in the 92,000 documents, then also claimed that this was a terrible breach of national security. There is no doubt that the release produced a better-informed populace about one of our most important public policy issues, the ongoing war in Afghanistan. But at what cost?

This, by the way, is a realistic appraisal of Wikileaks, as opposed to the predictable hysteria from such rightwingers as Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute.

Maybe people think that much of this is moot; that come next year the U.S. will redeploy its troops back home from Afghanistan. If so, they should ponder this exchange from the interview that ABC’s This Week with Christine Amanpour did with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates on August 1:

Let me put something up that David Kilcullen, the counter-insurgency expert, a former adviser to General Petraeus, said about the timetable.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID KILCULLEN:  They believe that we had stated a date certain, that we were going to leave in the summer of 2011.  And they immediately went out and spoke to the population and said, the Americans are leaving in 18 months, as it was then.  What are you doing on the 19th month?  Who are you backing?  Because we’ll still be there and they won’t be.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR:  So that question is out there.  So many people are arranging their schedules for 2011 — the summer of 2011.

But my question to you is this, what can General Petraeus do to defeat the Taliban at their own game?

What can he do now in Afghanistan to avoid this deadline that they’re setting for themselves?

GATES:  Well, first of all, I think we need to re-emphasize the message that we are not leaving Afghanistan in July of 2011.  We are beginning a transition process and a thinning of our ranks that will — and the pace will depend on the conditions on the ground.  The president has been very clear about that.  And if the Taliban are waiting for the nineteenth month, I welcome that, because we will be there in the nineteenth month and we will be there with a lot of troops.

As the New York Times reported on Sunday when President Obama announced his new war plan for Afghanistan last year, the centerpiece of the strategy was to safeguard the Afghan people, provide them with a competent government and win their allegiance. But the counterinsurgency strategy has shown little success; that counterinsurgency strategy has shown little success, as demonstrated by the flagging military and civilian operations in Marja and Kandahar and the spread of Taliban influence in other areas of the country.

The alternative approach is targeted killings of insurgents from Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It is not clear that killing enemy fighters is sufficient by itself to cripple an insurgency.

But even if it works well the best that can be hoped for is a political settlement with the Taliban. That is pretty thin beer, considering the past, present, and future American sacrifices in Afghanistan.

One sign of rationality, despite all the conservative grumbling and spinning, is that the American public is leading, not following the politicians and pundits. As Frank Rich pointed out in the New York Times:

the logs won’t change the course of our very long war in Afghanistan, but neither did the Pentagon Papers alter the course of Vietnam.

What Ellsberg’s leak did do was ratify the downward trend-line of the war’s narrative. The WikiLeaks legacy may echo that. We may look back at the war logs as a herald of the end of America’s engagement in Afghanistan just as the Pentagon Papers are now a milestone in our slo-mo exit from Vietnam.

…

Yet the national yawn that largely greeted the war logs is most of all an indicator of the country’s verdict on the Afghan war itself, now that it’s nine years on and has reached its highest monthly casualty rate for American troops. Many Americans at home have lost faith and checked out. The war places way down the list of pressing issues in every poll.

Nearly two-thirds of those asked recently by CBS News think it’s going badly; the latest Post-ABC News survey finds support of Obama’s handling of Afghanistan at a low (45 percent), with only 43 percent deeming the war worth fighting.

The bottom line of Afghanistan is that the U.S. not fighting to win. Instead it is fighting not to lose. What is the difference? Here is how Leslie Gelb, former president of the establishment Council on Foreign Relations explains it. He starts with the situation President Lydon Johnson found himself in with respect to Vietnam:

“I can’t win, and I can’t get out.” He was trapped between his awareness that victory was impossible at any reasonable price, and his fear that losing would be catastrophic for the United States, and himself. LBJ was stuck, and so was the United States.

…

Though President Obama himself and General Petraeus, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, still call for victory there, it is probably true that Obama and maybe even the general have come to LBJ’s conclusion: “I can’t win, and I can’t get out.”

Like Voltaire’s Candide, Gelb tries to see the best of all possible worlds:

Like President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Obama and his team can drown the aftereffects of Afghanistan in powerful diplomacy and continued, focused commitment to Afghans. In these ways, he can both continue to protect against terrorism in Afghanistan and start strengthening efforts against the new homes for terrorists-in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and in American cities.

This approach is not a cop out. It is a way to redefine victory. It was done in Vietnam. And people forget that the president of Vietnam visited George W. Bush in the White House during his last year in office. People hardly noticed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just visited there. People hardly noticed that Vietnam now looks to the United States as a protector against China.

If President Obama is also creative in the use of America’s power, we can mostly withdraw from Afghanistan-and not lose.

So when all is said and done and the last U.S. troops leave Kabul the American public can rejoice for not having lost.  Good luck in selling that to the American Gold Star Mothers.

Related posts:

1. Gen. McChrystal is no Gen. MacArthur
2. Now is the time for a national debate
3. Afghanistan: I don’t believe in miracles

First, let’s look at the past. Today the Los Angeles times reports that researchers have found that soldiers who suffered brain injuries can develop seizures decades — as long as 35 years — after the initial injury. A study published in the journal Neurology found that among a group of 199 Vietnam veterans, about 13% developed post-traumatic epilepsy more than 14 years after they had suffered a penetrating head wound, such as a gunshot injury or shrapnel that entered brain tissue. Penetrating head injuries are generally linked with a higher risk for epilepsy than other types of head injuries, such as concussions.

It is unclear how the study relates to combatants returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today, the authors said. The Vietnam veterans in the study suffered from penetrating brain injuries, which are rarer in soldiers fighting in the current conflicts because helmets have improved. Today, closed-head injuries (where the brain is not penetrated) are more common, in part because of the helmet improvements and partly because of a change in the weaponry used in modern warfare.

Nonetheless, Grafman said, the study underscores the importance of long-term follow-up for military civilians who have suffered traumatic brain injuries.

“It’s clear that this is life-long,” he said.

Now, let’s look at the present. Suicides among military personnel are up. Salon reported last week on the suicide of Marine Sgt. Tom Bagosy at Camp Lejune, North Carolina. The article noted that last year, 52 Marines committed suicide. The suicide rate among Marines has doubled since 2005, and the Corps has the highest suicide rate in the military.

That was tragic. Even worse is that Bagosy died a year after a former Camp Lejeune psychiatrist risked his reputation and career to warn Navy officials that unless Camp Lejeune dramatically improved mental health services — and in particular, develop precise, rigorous protocols for handling Marines who might kill themselves or others — there would be deadly consequences.

That psychiatrist, Dr. Kernan Manion, repeatedly warned Camp Lejeune and Navy officials in writing starting in the spring of 2009 about the risk of more Marine suicides, murder and “immediate concerns of physical safety” if Camp Lejeune did not improve. Frustrated by what he saw as a lack of action by officials at Camp Lejeune, Manion took his concerns to a series of military inspectors general in late August. He was fired four days later.

The lessons from Bagosy’s suicide are especially provocative because minutes before his death, Bagosy was inside the Camp Lejeune Deployment Health Center, the place where doctors are supposed to help Marines like Bagosy. Healthcare workers there knew he had problems. They knew he had already been diagnosed with both a brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, the signature injuries of the current wars. He’d been seeing a doctor there and a therapist. He’d talked with his therapist about thoughts of suicide. Officials at the clinic the day he died also knew Bagosy was acutely suicidal that very morning and that he was armed, because his wife, Katie, had called.

In June USA Today reported that Marines are trying to kill themselves at a record pace this year despite a 2009 program aimed at stemming the problem, according to Marine Corps data.

Eighty-nine Marines tried to commit suicide through May, most commonly by overdose or lacerations. At that rate, there could be more than 210 attempted suicides this year. There were a record 164 attempted suicides in 2009.

With 21 confirmed or suspected suicides by Marines this year, the Corps is on track to near last year’s record number of 52. The Marine Corps suicide rate in 2009 was 24-per-100,000, the highest in the military. The latest demographically adjusted suicide rate among civilians in 2006 was 20 per 100,000, federal records show.

The suicide rate among American soldiers hit an all-time high last week. The Army reported 32 confirmed or suspected suicides, both active and reservists) in June – the highest number on record for a single month, soldiers killing themselves at the rate of one per day. So far this year, 145 soldiers have committed suicide, compared with 130 during the first six months of last year, which at the time was the worst on record.

Two days ago, the Washington Post reported that senior commanders have reached a turning point. After nine years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are beginning to recognize age-old legacies of the battlefield – once known as shellshock or battle fatigue – as combat wounds, not signs of weakness.

In spring 2009, the top brass in the Marine Corps and the Army were seeing troubling signs that the force was starting to fray. The suicide rate in the two services was on pace to set a record. The percentage of the Army’s most severely wounded troops who were suffering from PTSD or traumatic brain injury had climbed to about 50 percent, from 38 percent a year earlier.

Recognition is spreading, albeit far too slowly, that PTSD is a serious illness, not a sign of weakness. Earlier this month the government issued new rules that will make it substantially easier for veterans who have been found to have post-traumatic stress disorder to receive disability benefits, a change that could affect hundreds of thousands of veterans from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

The regulations from the Department of Veterans Affairs will essentially eliminate a requirement that veterans document specific events like bomb blasts, firefights or mortar attacks that might have caused P.T.S.D., an illness characterized by emotional numbness, irritability and flashbacks.

Finally, thanks to the superb series done by ProPublica and NPR in June we know that the military medical system is failing to diagnose brain injuries in troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom receive little or no treatment for lingering health problems.

Officially, military figures say about 115,000 troops have suffered mild traumatic brain injuries since the wars began. But top Army officials acknowledged in interviews that those statistics likely understate the true toll. Tens of thousands of troops with such wounds have gone uncounted, according to unpublished military research.

Among their findings:

From the battlefield to the home front, the military’s doctors and screening systems routinely miss brain trauma in soldiers. One of its tests fails to catch as many as 40 percent of concussions, a recent unpublished study concluded. A second exam, on which the Pentagon has spent millions, yields results that top medical officials call about as reliable as a coin flip.

Even when military doctors diagnose head injuries, that information often doesn’t make it into soldiers’ permanent medical files. Handheld medical devices designed to transmit data have failed in the austere terrain of the war zones. Paper records from Iraq and Afghanistan have been lost, burned or abandoned in warehouses, officials say, when no one knew where to ship them.

Without diagnosis and official documentation, soldiers with head wounds have had to battle for appropriate treatment. Some received psychotropic drugs instead of  rehabilitative therapy that could help retrain their brains. Others say they have received no treatment at all, or have been branded as malingerers.

Related posts:

1. Put Up or Shut Up
2. Nothing is Too Good for Our Boys, Redux
3. Obama and Karzai: The Odd Couple

I was out of town when the kerfuffle about the article about Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone magazine became public.

Now that I am back and have read the article I am amazed at how little it takes to get a general fired. I mean, for pity’s sake, this was not something on the order of Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur. It was not as if McChrystal was seriously criticizing Obama’s war strategy, like MacArthur did about Truman. How could he? This was the strategy, after all, that McChrystal had successfully persuaded Obama to sign off on and one that McChrystal’s successor, Gen. David Petraeus has pledged to continue.  I venture to say one hears more venomous remarks around the average office water cooler than what I read in the article.

Contrary to what some in the media write this was not a sign of a “dysfunctional civilian-military relationship.” To me it is a sign of posturing on the part of President Obama and, perhaps, an attempt to burnish his hawk credibility, and to sweep under the rug, at least for a little bit longer that his Afghanistan strategy is not working.

Let’s cut to the chase. As I see it successful counterinsurgency doctrine comes with a price; the commitment to stay for years and years, if necessary. When President Obama announced his latest surge last fall it came with an exit time, next year. Although one hears the usual rightwing objections, setting an exit date will only encourage the Taliban it is unlikely the American public will stand for keeping the current number of forces beyond next summer, when troops are scheduled to start exiting. And clearly that is far too soon to win at counterinsurgency. So, in that sense the war was already lost.

And that assumes the counterinsurgency strategy is workable. And there is reason to be doubtful about that, as this recent article in Tom Dispatch details.

What will most likely happen is that both sides, the U.S. and the afghan government, such as it is, will make polite noises and the U.S. will say to President Karzai, see you, wouldn’t want to be you

This future seems even more likely given recent news. Let me cite just a few examples.

A recent report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that the system the United States used for the past five years to rate the readiness of Afghanistan’s Army and police force was seriously flawed and there was no reliable way to measure any progress.

Despite spending by the United States of $27 billion on the training of Afghan security forces since 2002, the report found that even top-rated Afghan units could not operate independently and that the ratings of many security forces overstated their actual capabilities. In addition, the report said some parts of the country were so dangerous that assessment teams could not rate the security forces in those areas at all.

Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, said that she would strip $3.9 billion in aid for Afghanistan from next year’s spending bill over concerns about rampant graft in the country and alleged efforts by President Hamid Karzai’s government to derail corruption probes.

According to a National Journal article last month U.S. forces are encountering record numbers of improvised explosive devices. Every measure of the danger has neared or exceeded the records set last August, according to the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization,

From the last (relatively) quiet month, February, through the end of May, the number of U.S. and allied troops killed by IEDs per month rose 13 percent; the number wounded was up 34 percent. Explosions that succeeded in inflicting casualties jumped by 40 percent; and the total number of IEDs encountered, including those that detonated harmlessly or were found and neutralized, increased by 43 percent to an unprecedented 1,128 in May — that’s more than 36 a day.

Related posts:

1. Rules of Engagement
2. Speaking Honestly to the American People about Afghanistan
3. Afghanistan Debate Tonight

As a sign of how bad a mistake Israel made when its commandos boarded the Gaza bound ship Mavi Marmara on May 31 consider what Slate columnist Christopher Hitchens, a former liberal who moved rightward after 9/11 wrote yesterday:

The near-incredible stupidity of the Israeli airborne descent on the good ship Mavi Marmara, by troops well-enough equipped to shoot when panicked but not well-enough prepared to contain or subdue a preplanned riot, has now generated much more coverage and comment than Erdogan’s cynical recent decision to become a partner in the nuclear maneuvers of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

…

Israeli self-pity over Gaza—”You fire rockets at us! And after all we’ve done for you!”—may be incredibly unappetizing. An occupation that should never have been allowed in the first place was protracted until it became obviously unbearable for all concerned and then turned into a scuttle. The misery and shame of that history cannot be effaced by mere withdrawal or healed by the delivery of aid. It can only really be canceled by a good-faith agreement to create a Palestinian state.

Sad to say we have been down this road before with Israel. It does something wrong, countries and people object, and the pro-Israel crowd opens up the spin spigots, i.e., people who criticize Israel don’t understand that it is at war, that people who criticize are naïve leftists and terrorist travelers, or just plain old anti-Jewish bigots. 

For an example of the last see what Rabbi Marvin Hier , dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in California, wrote in regard to White House correspondent Helen Thomas. Hier who frequently acts as a rabbinical equivalent of Jesse Jackson wrote, “Even the White House Correspondent, Helen Thomas thought it’s an opportune time to show off her bigotry telling the Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go back to Poland and Germany.” Helen, I got two things to say to you – first, the Jews are not in Palestine, they’re in the state of Israel where they belong and where their ancestors lived for two thousand years before Mohammed. Second, you’re the one who should go home – there should be no place for bigots in the White House press room.”

I find these arguments astonishingly unconvincing.  Being Jewish myself let me first answer the age old question that arises among Jews when something notable happens involving us, namely is it good for Jews or bad for Jews. No question about it; this is bad for Jews.

Consider just a few points. A dual Turkish American citizen Furkan Dogan, 19 years old, was one of those killed aboard the Marmara. Early news reports said he had had one bullet in the chest and four bullets fired into his head from close range. That doesn’t sound like the sort of shots fired by soldiers being attacked. It sounds like the standard practice of commandos and covert ops personnel worldwide. In snap shooting, the target is the centre of the body mass – i.e., the abdomen. Being hit by a large caliber, subsonic round is normally adequate to stop the perpetrator. The main reason for shots to the head is to kill instantaneously, rather than immobilize, such as in the event of a suicide bomber. What it does not sound like is the shooting that is used as a last resort self defense measure.

More importantly, an American citizen has been killed. Does Israel and its supporters really believe that the United States should just stand aside and say nothing and let Dogan be branded as an activist, as if that is sufficient reason for killing him?

Another dismaying aspect is the fact that the Israeli assault confirms a transformation in Israel’s relationship to such individuals and the organizations they belong to.  By attacking a humanitarian mission, even if it was consciously used by its organizers as much for public relations as humanitarian efforts, Israel has put itself squarely on the side of repressive regimes or violent militias, who often interpret the provision of relief and assistance to civilians as intervention on behalf of the enemy. It is a continuation of the trend that smeared Richard Goldstone, who authored the Goldstone report that criticized Israeli conduct in its was a three-week armed invasion, codenamed Operation Cast Lead,  of the Gaza Strip during the winter of 2008–2009. With its naval assault Israel put itself on the same level as those who attack Red Cross or human-rights workers. No matter how you try to spin it this is wrong.

Insofar as the rationale that the blockade of Gaza is necessary and that ships cargo must be searched to prevent weapons reaching Hamas it has long been known that far more weapons are smuggled into Gaza via the tunnels under the Gaza-Egyptian border than are brought in by ship.  And, more to the point, there were no weapons on the ship. The Israelis are no slouch in public relations. If there had been so much as a single AK-47 aboard we would be seeing it in endless video loops across the world.

And, the simple fact of the matter is that Israel had no right to attempt to board the ship in international waters. The humanitarian flotilla was in international waters, on the high seas. The principle of freedom of navigation is enshrined in international law, including in the Convention on the High Seas, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and has attained the status of customary international law by which all states are bound. Under this principle, all states have the freedom to sail ships flying their flags on the high seas. Sovereignty over a ship is exclusive to the state whose flag the ship is flying. Any attempt to board the ship of another flag-state is therefore considered a breach of that state’s sovereignty.

Maritime blockades can not be imposed in international waters. Contrary to Israel’s assertions, maritime blockades must be restricted to ports or coastal areas under the enemy’s control, and may not be imposed in international waters. Israel’s attempt to impose and enforce its blockade in international waters was therefore illegal. Israel’s claim that it has a right to pursue a ship intending to breach its blockade from the time it begins its voyage, based on the so-called doctrine of continuous voyage, is a minority position in international law. Israel’s reliance on this questionable doctrine does not justify its attack on the humanitarian flotilla and its infliction of many casualties.

Given that Israel’s attack against the humanitarian flotilla was itself illegal, Israel’s claim that its commandos were acting in self-defense is unfounded. The principle of self-defense applies only when a state is repelling an attack against it. Certainly, the flotilla ships were not attacking the Israeli naval forces. Moreover, even if Israel did have a right to board the ships, its use of force in doing so was unnecessary and disproportionate to any threat the unarmed civilians aboard the ships may have posed. Given the belligerent nature of the attack against them, the civilians aboard the ship had every right to defend themselves against the overwhelming force of the Israeli commandos.

Fare more important, however, is that the strategic reason for the blockade, i.e., to weaken and ultimately make the Gaza Palestinians reject Hamas is a failure. Ever since Hamas was elected into power in a fair election Israel has been furious and sought to pressure the Palestinians to overthrow Hamas. As Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, told the Israeli media in early 2006, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” But Hamas is not weakened; quite the contrary. In fact it has been strengthened. This was entirely predictable. Generally, when a population is under attack it clings to the government in power, no matter what its faults.

And the coverage of the assault by most major media lends credence to Sarah Pailin’s description of it as the “lamestream media.” It says something disturbing about the American media when there is more critical – and by that I mean skeptical, as in good journalism – coverage of the assault in the Israeli media than there is in the American.

For those who don’t remember history what Israel did is uncomfortably similar to the case of the Exodus. As Israeli columnist Uri Avnery wrote on Sunday, that ship left France in 1947 with the hope of breaking the British blockade, which was imposed to prevent ships loaded with Holocaust survivors from reaching the shores of Palestine.

If it had been allowed to reach the country, the illegal immigrants would have come ashore and the British would have sent them to detention camps in Cyprus, as they had done before. Nobody would have taken any notice of the episode for more than two days.

But the person in charge was Ernest Bevin, a Labour Party leader, an arrogant, rude and power-loving British minister. He was not about to let a bunch of Jews dictate to him. He decided to teach them a lesson the entire world would witness. “This is a provocation!” he exclaimed, and of course he was right. The main aim was indeed to create a provocation, in order to draw the eyes of the world to the British blockade.

What followed is well known: the episode dragged on and on, one stupidity led to another, the whole world sympathized with the passengers. But the British did not give in and paid the price. A heavy price.

Many believe that the “Exodus” incident was the turning point in the struggle for the creation of the State of Israel. Britain collapsed under the weight of international condemnation and decided to give up its mandate over Palestine. There were, of course, many more weighty reasons for this decision, but the “Exodus” proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I AM not the only one who was reminded of this episode this week. Actually, it was almost impossible not to be reminded of it, especially for those of us who lived in Palestine at the time and witnessed it.

There are, of course, important differences. Then the passengers were Holocaust survivors, this time they were peace activists from all over the world. But then and now the world saw heavily armed soldiers brutally attack unarmed passengers, who resist with everything that comes to hand, sticks and bare hands. Then and now it happened on the high seas – 40 km from the shore then, 65 km now.

In retrospect, the British behavior throughout the affair seems incredibly stupid. But Bevin was no fool, and the British officers who commanded the action were not nincompoops. After all, they had just finished a World War on the winning side.

If they behaved with complete folly from beginning to end, it was the result of arrogance, insensitivity and boundless contempt for world public opinion.

Ehud Barak is the Israeli Bevin. He is not a fool, either, nor are our top brass. But they are responsible for a chain of acts of folly, the disastrous implications of which are hard to assess. Former minister and present commentator Yossi Sarid called the ministerial “committee of seven”, which decides on security matters, “seven idiots” – and I must protest. It is an insult to idiots.

Israel would do well to recognize that its increasing myopic approach to geopolitics, as in treating ever problem as if it were a nail that needs to be beaten down is self-defeating.

Related posts:

1. Goodbye to 2009: The year in review
2. The U.S. Really Is Doing a Heck of a Job, Thus Far
3. Obama Reiterates Commitment to Middle East Peace

I am reminded of the old saying, “Be careful what you ask for as you might just get it” regarding the recent news about the breakthrough in the long running deadlock over Iran’s nuclear program, Thanks to an agreement brokered by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan Iran has agreed to send the bulk of its nuclear material to Turkey as part of an exchange meant to ease international concerns about Iran’s aims and provide fuel for an ailing medical reactor.

The essential details are that after a final agreement is signed between Iran and the Vienna group, Iran’s nuclear fuel will be shipped to Turkey under the supervision of Iran and the IAEA. Iran we will send 1,200 kilograms [2,640 pounds] of 3.5% enriched uranium to Turkey to be exchanged for 120 kilograms [264 pounds] of 20% enriched uranium from the Vienna group to replace the nearly exhausted fuel of the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) that makes medical isotopes. This represents more than half of the 2065 kg of LEU that Iran had produced as of February according to the IAEA, and it greatly reduces Iran’s capability to produce enough fissile material for a bomb. The Vienna group refers to Russia, France, the U.S. and the IAEA.

But Iran would not suspend sensitive atomic activities which the West suspects are aimed at making bombs, including work to enrich uranium to a level of 20 percent it launched in February.

“Iran expressed its readiness to deposit its LEU within one month. On the basis of the same agreement the Vienna Group should deliver 120 kg fuel required for Tehran research reactor in no later than one year,” a joint declaration said.

Turkey does not enrich uranium itself although it has agreed to serve as the venue for the fuel exchange. It remains unclear whether it would serve as a guarantor for the low-enriched uranium or whether the material would be shipped to a nation with refinement capacity such as Russia, Brazil or France.

The deal appears to build upon an IAEA proposal last year that was endorsed by the Obama administration and Western powers. Back then Iran was to send around 2,640 pounds of its low-enriched uranium to Russia to be further refined and afterward to France to be converted into 20%-enriched fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor. The compromise was to serve as a way of drawing Iran’s supply of nuclear material below the threshold for building a bomb and to create an atmosphere for a broader deal between the West and Iran.

That deal broke down when Iran appeared to back away, with political factions in Tehran accusing the West of trying to swindle Iran out of its stockpile. A few months ago, Iran began producing its own 20% enriched uranium, a move that nonproliferation experts worried could bring Iran closer to the highly enriched uranium needed to fuel an atom bomb.

One would think that the U.S. and Western allies would welcome this. At the very least it could ease the international standoff over Iran’s disputed nuclear program and deflate the U.S.-led push for tougher sanctions.

Of course, predictably and sadly, one would be wrong. On May 17 the White House Press Secretary issued a statement that said, “We acknowledge the efforts that have been made by Turkey and Brazil. The proposal announced in Tehran must now be conveyed clearly and authoritatively to the IAEA before it can be considered by the international community. Given Iran’s repeated failure to live up to its own commitments, and the need to address fundamental issues related to Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and international community continue to have serious concerns.”

It is true that the deal is hardly a resolution to all the issues regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The deal is not as good as it would have been last October (because Iran’s stockpile of LEU is much larger now, making 1200kg a less significant portion of the whole; and because Iran continues to enrich up to 20%). And, the deal is only a short-term measure which does not address long-lasting concerns regarding Iran’s history of secret nuclear activities and its lack of transparency with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Yet, at the end of the day, this deal moves Iran farther away from a nuclear weapon.

Still, it is significant. Gary Sick, a former member of the National Security Council staff and executive director of the Gulf/2000 Project at Columbia University wrote on his blog:

We should all be reminded of the original purpose of the agreement. It was intended as a confidence-building measure that would open the way to more substantive discussions of other issues. The original offer that Iran provisionally accepted in October tacitly accepted Iran’s right to enrich uranium; in return Iran would give up control over a significant portion of its existing stash of LEU. Even low enriched uranium can be further enriched to create bomb-grade (roughly 90+ percent) highly enriched uranium (HEU) that is required for a bomb. The October agreement would have created an environment conducive to at least minimal mutual trust and the beginning of serious negotiations.

Note to negotiators: In the past six months, Iran has not used its LEU to build a bomb, even without an agreement.

Iran has set up a special line of centrifuges to enrich uranium to the 20 percent required for the TRR. But that line is small, separated from its other enrichment facilities, and under inspection of the IAEA. The move to enrich some uranium to 20 percent was obviously intended as a pressure tactic to drive the West back into negotiations, since Iran does not have the capability to manufacture fuel cells for the TRR.

We should also be reminded that Iran did not reject the original deal: they proposed amending it. Basically, when the Iranian negotiators came home with the proposed deal, they were attacked from all sides – including members of the Green Movement – for being suckers. Their opponents pointed out that they were going to rely on the word and good will of Russia (where the LEU would be enriched to 20 percent) and France (where the fuel cells would be fabricated). Iranians from left to right argued that both of these countries had repeatedly cheated Iran on nuclear issues: Russia by delaying endlessly the completion of the nuclear power plant at Bushehr, and France by refusing to grant Iran rights to the Eurodif enrichment facility partially owned by Iran since the days of the shah. Why, they asked, should we believe that this agreement will be any different?

Instead, they proposed that the swap of LEU for the fuel cells should happen on Iranian soil, probably in stages and within a fixed period of time. That idea was rejected by the United States and its negotiating partners.

The new bargain appears to be a compromise in which the LEU would physically be removed from Iran and held in escrow in Turkey for up to a year, in which time the fuel cells would be manufactured and delivered to Iran. The new bargain also appears to go much further in formally recognizing the legitimacy of Iran’s independent enrichment program. That should not be a surprise given the fact that Brazil, one of the parties to the bargain, has its own enrichment facility similar to Iran’s and in fact concealed its details for some time.

So where does that leave us?

Essentially, it takes us back to last October. The one big difference is that Iran has more LEU now than it did then. But the reality is that Iran will keep producing LEU unless a new agreement is reached to persuade them to stop. If we had completed the agreement of a swap in October, Iran would have the same amount of LEU as it has now. If we wait another six months for negotiations, Iran will have still more LEU.

In short, this agreement is largely symbolic and limited in its practical effects. If the West accepts the deal as worked out by Brazil and Turkey, and if a new round of negotiations begins – on both the nuclear and other major issues – then this could be a breakthrough. If the West turns it down, or if the two sides do not use it to negotiate some of the major issues that separate them, then nothing much will have been accomplished.

The next step is up to the United States and its negotiating partners.

Although angst is high among the sanctions-at-all-costs crowd, this path to a nuclear swap deal was fully endorsed by the United States and was the centerpiece of the justification for sanctions. One way to respond at this point may just be to declare that our threat of sanctions worked: Iran has capitulated and we accept yes as an answer.

Hmmm…are we that smart?

So, the ball is in the U.S. and its allies court. But so far we seem determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The usual suspects, Washington talking heads, are falling all over themselves condemning Iran for actually taking up the American offer to move LEU to a third country. Let’s see: Iran actually accepted the American offer just as it was presented, and had the audacity to accept it while it was still on the table. And then Iran went ahead and kept on enriching uranium so the American offer looked a lot less attractive to the West then it did in October. This left the White House sputtering about how untrustworthy they were, and no one believed their intentions anyway. This begs the question, if the U.S. thinks that this is a bad bargain now, why did they offer it in the first place?

This New York Times headline “Uranium Offer by Iran May Hinder Efforts on Sanctions“ and the “teaser” for it on the NYT home page–”Monday’s agreement between Iran, Brazil and Turkey could undermine efforts in the U.N. to impose new sanctions on Iran”– speaks volumes. The sanctions cart is obviously being held firmly in place, in front of the non-proliferation horse, by those shaping the interests narrative and who are determined not to let the “horse” move forward.

In fact, if a fraction of the effort that the US has brought to bear, in drumming up support for sanctions for nearly three decades had gone into serious diplomacy directed toward Iran rather than against it, the current confrontational climate would not have been nurtured by either side.

People need to keep their eyes on the prize. The objective here is not to continue holding a grudge against Iran for the Iranian revolution or the hostage crisis. The point as Cliff Kupchan, research director of the Eurasia Group said on the May 17 PBS NewsHour said:

I think we, potentially, the United States, potentially, gets something out of this, too. Look, the prize here is not to sanction Iran. The prize here is to find a diplomatic solution to this very worrisome crisis. Now, it’s just possible that, through this swap, we could build more confidence than we have now, which is virtually none, and more…

Related posts:

1. Should We Engage Iran Out of the NPT?
2. Are We Ready: The Consequences of ‘Bomb Iran’
3. Nuclear Security Summit Offers Unprecedented Opportunity

As Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrived in Washington yesterday for a visit let’s look at Afghanistan. If Presidents Obama and Karzai were a couple they might well be seeing a marriage counselor. There has been much baggage between them in recent months. As diplomats might say, their relationship has been strained; what one might call tough love. Indeed, so much so that President Obama has instructed his national security team to treat Afghan President Hamid Karzai with more public respect. President Obama should remember the old military saying that respect can’t be ordered, only earned.

Just last month Karzai said in a meeting with Afghan lawmakers that he would consider joining the Taliban. Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said some of Karzai’s comments were “troubling” and the White House would re-evaluate whether his trip to Washington would be constructive. Subsequently Karzai denied that he ever made the comments.

Officially, of course, things are getting better. According to the latest Congressionally mandated Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,  released April 28, stability  in Afghanistan is no longer on the decline, and most Afghans believe that despite increased violence, security actually has improved since this time last year. 

The report attributes the 87 percent increase in violence from February 2009 to March 2010 largely to increased U.S., coalition and Afghan national security force activity, particularly into areas where they previously had not operated.

In fact, as USA Today reported, violence is at an all-time high in the 9-year-old war. In the first three months of the year, the number of roadside bombs targeting U.S. service members increased by 16 percent.

The New York Times reports that shootings of Afghan civilians by American and NATO convoys and at military checkpoints have spiked sharply this year, becoming the leading cause of combined civilian deaths and injuries at the hands of Western forces, American officials say.

At least 28 Afghans have been killed and 43 wounded in convoy and checkpoint shootings this year — 42 percent of total civilian deaths and injuries and the largest overall source of casualties at the hands of American and NATO troops, according to statistics kept by the military. While this is not nearly as many as killed by the Taliban the U.S. and NATO forces are, unlike the Taliban, supposed to be protecting Afghan civilians, not killing them.

This is such a problem that a British general proposed granting medals for “courageous restraint” to troops in Afghanistan who avoid deadly force at a risk to themselves.

The future will likely be even more violent as U.S. and Afghan commanders prepare to launch a major offensive in the southern Kandahar province in an attempt to remove the Taliban from one of their strongholds. The U.S. military is also sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

The Pentagon report, which covered the situation on the ground from Oct. 1 to March 31, cites progress in President Barack Obama’s strategy aimed at disrupting, dismantling and defeating al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But it offered what a senior defense official speaking on background called a sobering assessment of the conditions on the ground, and a recognition of the importance of what happens within the next six months in determining the direction the operation ultimately will take.

The report cites requirements that international partners have not filled – primarily for trainers and mentors to support development of Afghan security forces, particularly the police force, which lags behind the Afghan army.

Just last Thursday David Sedney, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that not nearly enough trained Afghans are available to take control of key Taliban strongholds such as Marja after the military has pushed out the enemy.  “The number of those civilians . . . who are trained, capable, willing to go into [Taliban-controlled areas] does not match at all demand,” he said.

Despite increased violence, the Pentagon report notes that the downward trend in stability appears to have stemmed, along with Taliban momentum. But it’s far too soon to say the corner has been turned, the official told reporters.

The senior official said, “But the emphasis, I would say, would be very much that after a number of years of things moving in the wrong direction, that has changed.  We are no longer moving in the wrong direction, and there are signs that we’re moving in the right direction.” In other words, things are not as bad as they were. I think that is what they call damning with faint praise.

Indeed, the Pentagon report itself said the offensive waged earlier this year in the Marja region and elsewhere in Helmand achieved only “some success in clearing insurgents from their strongholds.”

As of March 31, about 87,000 U.S. forces were on the ground in Afghanistan, with additional forces to bring that number to 98,000 by August. In addition, 46,500 international forces are serving in Afghanistan, with 38 countries pledging about 9,000 more troops to support operations, tactics and training. As of March 31, 40 percent of those additional troops had arrived in the country.

The costs remain high for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Just yesterday the Pentagon announced the deaths of:

Spc. Jeremy L. Brown, 20, of McMinnville, Tenn., died May 9 at Contingency Outpost Zerok, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit using small arms fire.  He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.

Cpl. Kurt S. Shea, 21, of Frederick, Md., died May 10 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.  He was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Lance Cpl. Christopher Rangel, 22, of San Antonio, Texas, died May 6 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Capt. Kyle A. Comfort, 27, of Jacksonville, Ala., died May 8 in Helmand province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit using an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Fort Benning, Ga.

Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Davis, 19, of Perry, Iowa, died May 7 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Also yesterday IPS reported that although Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s plan for wresting the Afghan provinces of Helmand and Kandahar from the Taliban is still in its early stages of implementation, there are already signs that setbacks and obstacles it has encountered have raised serious doubts among top military officials in Washington about whether the plan is going to work.

The U.S. military still struggles to find ways to ease Afghan concerns about governmental corruption. Yesterday the Washington Post reported on how a plan to empower a large Pashtun tribe in eastern Afghanistan angered a local power broker, provoked a backlash from the Afghan government and was disavowed by the U.S. Embassy.

Yet, as the London Times reports, NATO has taken one of the biggest gambles of its mission in Afghanistan by reluctantly deciding to collaborate with Ahmad Wali Karzai, the notorious power-broker of Kandahar — despite allegations that the half-brother of the President is involved in the drugs trade.

Finally the Washington Post reported that clear tensions exist between McChrystal and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry.

At times their differences over strategy have been public, particularly after two of Eikenberry’s cables to Washington last year were leaked to the news media. The cables warned that McChrystal’s request for new troops might be counterproductive as Karzai was “not an adequate strategic partner.” McChrystal’s staff members were particularly upset that they weren’t made aware of Eikenberry’s position before he sent the cables to Washington, they said in interviews.

Given all this it is no surprise that nobody is expecting anything substantial to happen during President Karzai’s visit. As the Washington Post reports today:

“This is not a trip about deliverables,” such as economic or military agreements, a senior administration official said. Instead, U.S. officials said, they will push Karzai to make good on promises he has made to address government corruption and accountability, and work to influence his plans for a national peace conference late this month.

Related posts:

1. Be Careful for What You Ask For Because You Just Might Get It
2. Gen. McChrystal is no Gen. MacArthur
3. Afghanistan questions I hope will be answered tonight

Two years after my discharge from the Navy in 1977 I was doing undergraduate work at the University of Oregon. While there I was a member of a campus veterans group. We did a lot of advocacy on behalf of Vietnam and Vietnam era veterans, on issues that back then were still unknown, such as Agent Orange exposure and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

One thing I took away from that was that while most people were happy to talk about the sacrifices of veterans it was, in the end, mostly talk. When it came to actually doing something or putting their money where their mouth was, most people, rather like Dick Cheney’s famous excuse for avoiding the draft, had better things to do.  In short, as the classic mordant military humor puts it, nothing is too good for our boys in uniform so that’s what we’ll give them, nothing. 

Still, I had some minor hope that in the future, if only because the VA would never again want to be perceived as incompetent and ineffectual as it was back then that it and the regular military would do somewhat better in the future.

And, to be fair, some good things did happen in the intervening years. The VA set up its Vet Center program for Vietnam vets, slightly better educational benefits programs were instituted for active duty forces, and PTSD was recognized as a legitimate medical illness to name a few improvements.

Then the Walter Reed Army Medical Center neglect scandal happened, resulting from a series of allegations of unsatisfactory conditions and management at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) in Washington, D.C. culminating in two articles published by the Washington Post in February 2007. Cases of outpatient neglect, were reported as early as 2004, but generated substantial public and media attention only with release of the Post exposé.

It all seemed dreadfully familiar. There was the usual outrage, both genuine and feigned, on the part of the public and Congress and pundits; calls for action, investigations, establishments of commissions to study the problems, recommendations for improvement, et cetera, ad nauseum.

Indeed, less than a week after the article, new Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Walter Reed and said those responsible would be “held accountable.”

“I endorse the decision by Secretary of the Army Fran Harvey to relieve the Commander, Major General George W. Weightman of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The care and welfare of our wounded men and women in uniform demand the highest standard of excellence and commitment that we can muster as a government. When this standard is not met, I will insist on swift and direct corrective action and, where appropriate, accountability up the chain of command.

So, let’s fast forward to the present and see how we are doing three years later. Let’s just look at a few articles from this month.

USA Today reported April 1 that the Department of Veterans Affairs has no way of determining long-range health care costs for the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal study on the wars’ impact released Wednesday shows.

The next day USA Today reported that soldiers who say they killed enemy troops in combat, are at greater risk of suffering combat stress and having emotional problems, according to a new study.

Those soldiers often pay a profound psychological and emotional toll, according to Shira Maguen, a staff psychologist at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and lead author of the study on soldiers and post-traumatic stress disorder. Of nearly 2,800 soldiers surveyed, 40% reported killing or being responsible for somebody’s death in Iraq.

Also that day the San Antonio Express-News reported that Fort Hood has had at least nine questionable deaths among young soldiers in the first three months of 2010, more than half of them confirmed suicides, despite Army efforts to reverse a trend linked to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The deaths of five GIs assigned to the post this year have been confirmed as suicides, with another suspected of killing himself. That’s about half the number for all of 2009, when 11 GIs committed suicide. Fort Hood, the biggest post in the Army as the year began with 46,500 troops, had a suicide rate of 26 per 100,000 people from 2006 to 2008, far above the civilian rate of 14.06 per 100,000.

The New York Times reported April 25 that Fort Carson’s Warrior Transition Battalion, a special unit created to provide closely managed care for soldiers with physical wounds and severe psychological trauma, is far from being a restful sanctuary. “For many soldiers, they have become warehouses of despair, where damaged men and women are kept out of sight, fed a diet of powerful prescription pills and treated harshly by noncommissioned officers. Because of their wounds, soldiers in Warrior Transition Units are particularly vulnerable to depression and addiction, but many soldiers from Fort Carson’s unit say their treatment there has made their suffering worse.”

See the predictable Pentagon response taking exception to the NYT article here here.  Yet bear in mind that the Pentagon official in charge of the wounded warrior program said Sunday he has been forced to resign, as the military continues to struggle with how best to care for troops injured in combat.

Noel Koch said in an e-mail that he was asked to step down by Clifford Stanley, the undersecretary of defense for personnel. Koch had been serving as the deputy undersecretary of defense for wounded warrior care and transition policy.

The same day the Associated Press reported that Authorities believe that 21 soldiers from Fort Campbell, Kentucky killed themselves in 2009, the same year that the Army reported 160 potential suicides, the most since 1980, when it started recording those deaths. The number of patients being treated at the behavioral health clinic at the base hospital has increased by 60 percent, from 25,400 in 2008 to nearly 40,000 in 2009.

And finally, but surely not last, this morning USA Today reports that the Pentagon effort to consolidate two premier hospitals for treating wounded troops has more than doubled in price and is so rudderless that an independent review and a bipartisan group of legislators say the care could suffer.

The cost of closing Walter Reed Army Medical Center, replacing it with a larger complex at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and building a hospital at Fort Belvoir, Va., has risen from $1 billion to $2.6 billion, Pentagon records show.

Correcting the problems raised by Congress will cost another $781 million, according to a Pentagon report released Monday. And improvements must wait until after the new Bethesda facility — named the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center — is finished in September 2011, the report says.

The independent review last year found that, without improvements, the center would lack an adequate number of operating rooms and some would be too small to accommodate the latest surgical technology. There would not be enough single-patient rooms, critical for controlling infections.

The center will not be “world-class” as Congress envisioned, legislators say. “Wounded warrior care will suffer,” they wrote to the Pentagon in a January letter made public last week.

Related posts:

1. Nothing is Too Good For Our Boys So That’s What We’ll Give Them: Nothing: Part 3
2. Put Up or Shut Up
3. Afghanistan: I don’t believe in miracles

Increasingly one can’t go a day without reading more news about private military and security contractors. Actually, private military and security contractors (PMSC), a catch all phrase encompassing, broadly speaking, two categories – logistics workers and armed guards – is a bit of a misnomer, as in the United States context it generally refers to just those working under State or Defense Department contracts. But that excludes contractors working for the intelligence community, or Department of Homeland Security or numerous other departments and agencies. But for the sake of convenience, as it is such a widely sued and recognized phrase, I’ll continue to use it.

Whether one likes the idea of using PMSC or not the inescapable fact is that U.S. reliance on them has grown so much in the past few decades that trying to stop using them is literally impossible. They are now far too intertwined with the clients they work for to be removed. To attempt to do so would like the scene in the first Alien movie, where the crew of the Nostradamus attempt to remove the Alien creature from Executive Officer Kane after it attaches itself to its face.  And no, I’m not saying that PMCS are parasites.

But until that magical day comes when the country actually has a serious soul-searching discussion on whether it is in the U.S. interest to maintain a global military presence contractors are here to stay.  Put another way, to paraphrase the classic Spencer Tracy movie, it’s a mad, mad, contracting world now.

After years of experience in Iraq and Afghanistan it is clear that use of PMSC only works well when the client, i.e., the U.S. government for the most part, is clear about its goals, knowledgeable about its contractors capabilities, and has the both the staff and resources to provide proper oversight and accountability of the contract.

To their credit both the U.S. government and even PMSC have taken steps in recent years to improve the status quo of oversight, including new Congressional subcommittees focusing on the issues to Special Inspector Generals for Iraq and Afghanistan Reconstruction.  Of course, given the fairly abysmal state of affairs back in 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq almost anything would be an improvement.

As an Aviation Week blog post noted, “After eight years of war, the U.S. government is finally “starting to grapple with the issue of contractors in ways that they haven’t before. . . It’s a hell of a lot better than it was two years ago,” says Moshe Schwartz of the CRS [Congressional Research Service], who adds that the “Defense Dept. [is] improving, but they’ve still got issues.”

The question is whether it is enough. Progress is still spotty. Consider a the Commission on Wartime Contracting hearing held yesterday on rightsizing and managing contractors during the Iraq drawdown.

The government has requested the contracts withdraw at the same rate as troops pull out, but that has not been happening with contractors working for KBR, which has the largest contract with the Pentagon, including maintaining equipment and feeding troops, for $38 billion.

As Christopher Shays, Co-Chair of the Commission said in his opening statement, “The Department of Defense expects that contractor employees in Iraq will exceed 70,000 in August 2010. That would be about half the contractor count of January 2009 – but still nearly one and a half times the U.S. troop-strength target for August.” There are about 98,000 troops in Iraq, but that figure is expected to drop to 50,000 by August.

An audit found that most contractors working for Houston based KBR were sitting in Iraq with nothing to do and they were not coming home at the pace troops were.

“This DCAA audit stated that if this KBR contracting reduced their staffing levels to adequate that the government could save 193 million dollars,” said Commissioner Robert Henke, Wartime Contracting Commission.

The Army never formally responded to the audit. KBR responded that the government needs to speak with one voice and give them direction. It said it constantly warned the military about the lack of use of its services and has since come up with more cost saving methods.

Last Thursday a Mother Jones article noted:

It was just a single contract for a single job on a single base in Iraq. The Department of Defense agreed to pay the megacontractor KBR $5 million a year to repair tactical vehicles, from Humvees to big rigs, at Joint Base Balad, a large airfield and supply center north of Baghdad. Yet according to a new Pentagon report [PDF], what the military got was as many as 144 civilian mechanics, each doing as little as 43 minutes of work a month, with virtually no oversight. The report, issued March 3 by the DOD’s inspector general, found that between late 2008 and mid-2009, KBR performed less than 7 percent of the work it was expected to do, but still got paid in full.

This is not to pick on KBR because it could be right. Shays said:

KBR expects to have about 30,000 employees in Iraq by late summer of this year, compared to more than 60,000 in March 2009. But the planning to synchronize contractors’ drawdown with military needs does not appear to be as advanced as the military’s planning for removing its own personnel and property.

Part of the reason for that may be that the U.S. military has yet to make key decisions that will affect contractors’ drawdown plans. It appears the government is not giving contractors adequate guidance on events, dates, and requirements for them to trim or redeploy workforces appropriately.

Yesterday the Washington Post had an article on a Pentagon contract with Afghan contractors worth up to $360 million to transport U.S. military goods through some of the most insecure territory in Afghanistan. U.S. military officials say they are satisfied with the results, but they concede that they have little knowledge or control over where the money ends up.

According to senior Obama administration officials, some of it may be going to the Taliban, as part of a protection racket in which insurgents and local warlords are paid to allow the trucks unimpeded passage, often sending their own vehicles to accompany the convoys through their areas of control.

Last week it was reported that a DynCorp International executive says he was fired for complaining that the company charged the State Department millions of dollars for a database that did not exist. The 2004 contract awarded DynCorp $1 million to build a database of Americans trained in law enforcement who were willing to go to Afghanistan or Iraq at a moment’s notice, and $1 million a year to maintain it, Michael Riddle claims in Federal Court.

So,  like Felix and Oscar, the famed Odd Couple, government and contractors are stuck with each other for the foreseeable future but let’s hope that they can improve the quality of their relationship so they don’t have to start seeing a counselor; at least any more than they already are.

Related posts:

1. Repeal the ban. Our soldiers’ lives are depending on it
2. Up is Down, Night is Day, and Restructuring is “Cuts”
3. Nothing is Too Good for Our Boys, Redux

It is a good thing that that Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, never tried to enlist in the U.S. military. Judging by her recent actions it appears she would never be able to say the oath of enlistment with a straight face. I mean the part where one swears to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, which includes little things like subsequent amendments, such as those in the Bill of Rights.

What I refer to is when she and Bill Kristol, via their “Keep America Safe“ campaign, accused nine lawyers in the Justice Department, who had represented Guantanamo detainees of being the “al-Qaida Seven,” of working in the “Department of Jihad,” Perhaps Cheney and Kristol are simply exercising their First Amendment right to say anything that gets them on a talk show. After all, the right to cynically accuse someone of being a terrorist is protected under the Constitution. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, in so doing they trample underfoot other Constitutional rights that benefit all of us.

Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick details the problems with the Cheney approach.

Ten years ago, these were just words. Ten years ago, someone accused of being a terrorist had recourse to the same panoply of rights as everyone else. Ten years ago, an accused terrorist still had the right to a trial, for instance. But thanks to people like Liz Cheney and her dad, the Sixth Amendment right to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury” is gone, once you’ve been branded a terrorist. Just ask Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. After 9/11, once you’re branded an enemy combatant, you can be held for years without any of your constitutionally protected rights, including the right to be told of the charges against you or to confront the witnesses against you. Thanks to people like Cheney, those alleged to be members of al-Qaida are stripped of their Sixth Amendment right to prove they are not. But that’s not all.

Ten years ago, if you labeled someone a terrorist, he had an Eighth Amendment right to be free from torture, since the very idea of “cruel and unusual punishment” was anathema, even for our enemies. But thanks to people like Liz Cheney and the brave souls at the Bush Office of Legal Counsel, it’s OK to torture terrorists these days. As long as you’re pretty sure they’re terrorists. This is good news for the Cheney way of thinking, because it means that you can abuse a possible terrorist into admitting that he actually is a terrorist without all that fact-finding necessitated by a criminal trial. But there’s even more.

Ten years ago, if some paranoid hysteric accused you of being an al-Qaida sympathizer or a jihadist, you could find a lawyer to help you make the case that you were not. But in the ever-expanding war on the Bill of Rights being waged by Liz Cheney, once you’re designated a terrorist, you lose your Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Because just by representing you-even if you’re acquitted-your lawyers become terrorists, too!

Given that the Bill of Rights pretty much evaporates once you’ve been deemed a jihadi lover of Bin Laden, you might think Liz Cheney would be super-careful tossing around such words. They have very serious legal implications. Not to mention that some of her dad’s favorite people, from Alberto Gonzales to Ted Olson, scolded the then-top Pentagon official for detainees, Charles “Cully” Stimson, for suggesting on a talk radio show in 2007 that American corporations should boycott law firms that provided pro bono assistance to detainees. Stimson was forced to apologize and resign for his comments. Lucky for Cheney, she doesn’t work for the Pentagon, so she doesn’t have to resign. She merely has to be ridiculed by Bill O’Reilly.

Liz Cheney isn’t careful about the words she throws around. She uses terrorist and killer the way normal people use words like salt and pepper. To her, they are just words. That’s probably the scariest part of all.

When the “al-Qaida Seven” and their two DoJ colleagues fought to defend alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, they weren’t fighting to protect jihadist murderers. They were defending the U.S. Constitution-the great whomping chunks of the Bill of Rights that Cheney and her friends are so eager to write out of existence. They did it because that’s what lawyers are ethically obligated to do. They did it because-as Spencer Ackerman points out-the Military Commissions Act of 2006 expressly provided that detainees get defense lawyers. And they did it, as Jay Bookman notes, for the same reason John Adams agreed to represent British soldiers charged with killing civilians during the Boston Massacre in 1770. Because long before Liz Cheney was born and long after she’s gone, the Bill of Rights requires serious people to take it seriously.

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Liz Cheney will weasel her way out of this week’s hyperbole. She’s already trying to parse her way out of the embarrassing fact that the Bush Department of Justice and Rudy Giuliani’s law firm also housed traitorous Gitmo lawyers. Now, Keep America Safe says its problem is only with pro bono Gitmo lawyers. Yesterday, Cheney told Washington Times radio she “doesn’t question anybody’s loyalty.” She just objects to the criminal justice model of dealing with terror. Those words jihad and al- Qaida? Having helped make them the foulest words in America, she wants you to think they’re mere words.

We should note that give the torture tactics her father championed giving prisoners legal representation is not a liberal affectation but crucial to preserving the rule of law. Last week Salon reported that Dick Cheney called waterboarding a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding.

Just how out of touch with reality are Cheney and company? Salon founder Joan Walsh wrote:

Right now I’m watching Kenneth Starr denounce Liz Cheney on MSNBC’s “Countdown,” and it’s very disorienting. Starr was one of the villains of Clinton’s impeachment, dragging his investigation far beyond the Whitewater questions that triggered it, leading the nation through a tale of stained blue dresses, sad Oval Office trysts and more than we ever needed to know about cigars. But he’s delivering sense about our justice system tonight on MSNBC. Saying something nice about Ken Starr on Salon might cause our servers to meltdown – but I’m going to have to. Liz Cheney made it happen.

Even Starr is outraged by Cheney’s despicable attack on Justice Department lawyers who’ve defended terror suspects in their past. She’s labeled the group “the al Qaida seven,” and suggested they should be ineligible for Justice Department work.

By contrast Starr called such work “in the finest traditions of the country.” He noted that American founder and president John Adams “represented the British redcoats who were accused of the Boston Massacre – and he successfully defended seven of the British troops who were accused of these crimes.” Starr worked in Atticus Finch from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” remembering Finch told his kids “‘I’ve got to do this as a matter of conscience,’ and it was the conscience of a great profession… One needs to be courageous at times and stand up to power.”

Most recently New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote:

Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn. This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.

Truly, Ms. Cheney is a chip off the old blockhead. Apparently her understanding of constitutional rights and jurisprudence is about as accurate as her father’s aim with a shotgun. Actually, it is worse than that. She is at least reasonably intelligent so I’m sure that she and her cohorts do, in fact, know that their campaign of demonization runs counter to the facts and American legal tradition. They just don’t care. All’s fair when you are just another aspiring political hack positioning yourself to run for office.

Related posts:

1. The Ashcroft Dilemma
2. What Not to Do About Yemen
3. Introducing the “Torture Client Protection Act”