Today's Beau

This seems vaguely important.

Ukraine

Retired 3-star Ben Hodges seems like such a straight-shooter.

"It (defending Ukraine) matters, not because we love the people, but because of where it sits on the map. If we think strategically about the Black Sea Region, we'll be a lot more clever with our interactions with our Turkish ally..." and we can better understand the importance of other countries like Georgia and Romania, etc.

For myself, I do have an emotional connection with Ukraine because I have a familial connection there. And while I don't know any indigenous Ukrainians, I definitely feel a pretty strong bond, which goes along with, and strengthens my support for the strategic aspects of this big fuckin' mess that Putin's ego has blundered us all into.

Слава Україні

🌎🌏🌍 ❤️ 🇺🇦

Ukraine, Russia, China

Putin fucked up in various ways, aside from some pretty dumbass assumptions that the Ukrainians would just roll over and play dead.

• He didn't bring enough guys

You need a 3:1 advantage in numbers of invaders-to-invadees

You need 1 Russian occupier for every 50 Ukrainian occupy-ees

• He didn't think his own brand of corruption had taken hold in the Russian military almost top to bottom, side to side, and front to back
• He didn't figure on his little excursion becoming a unifying force for NATO
• As rich as he is, he hadn't stolen enough to survive what looks like it could be years of crippling economic sanctions

China is watching this clusterfuck closely, knowing it's practically a lead pipe cinch that Vlad will not survive it.

Xi would need at least 500,000 guys to invade (probably more because it's an amphibious landing), and he'd have to leave all of them on Taiwan for years as an occupying force.

Mike's Guess:

The need to reduce the number of occupation troops is what drives the inevitable slaughter of the occupied country's population, as well as the push to keep throwing more of your own people into the meat grinder. For the guy calling the shots, it becomes a fairly simple matter of "better them than me".

War has always been the stupidest fuckin' thing humans do. And it's even stupider now.

Grey Zone Tactics - Mar 2022

Question 1. How Does China View Competition in the Gray Zone?

Chinese analysts view gray zone actions as measures that powerful countries have employed both historically and in recent decades that are beyond normal diplomacy and other traditional approaches to statecraft but short of direct use of military force for escalation or a conflict. While Chinese scholars do not typically use the term gray zone to describe Chinese gray zone activities, the Chinese conceptualization of military operations other than war (MOOTW) is helpful for understanding how China may use its military for such activities. Chinese analysts characterize coercive or confrontational external-facing MOOTW as stability maintenance, rights protection, or security and guarding operations. China believes that MOOTW should also leverage nonmilitary actors and means.

Question 2. What Drives and Enables Chinese Use of Gray Zone Tactics?

Chinese activities in the gray zone support PRC leadership's overarching domestic, economic, foreign policy, and security objectives in the Indo-Pacific, which Beijing views as China's priority region. Gray zone activities balance China's pursuit of a more favorable external environment by altering the regional status quo in its favor with a desire to act below the threshold of a militarized response from the United States or China's neighbors. Recent developments have provided an increasingly varied toolkit for pressuring other countries across four key domains: geopolitical, economic, military, and cyber/IO. These developments are laws and regulations enabling Beijing to harness nongovernmental personnel and assets growing Chinese geopolitical, economic, and military power and influence vis-à-vis other countries increasing linkages between China's military development and economic growth the integration of military and paramilitary forces.

Question 3. How Does China Employ Gray Zone Tactics?

Overall, China tailors its gray zone activities to the target and has an increasing variety and number of more-coercive tools. Beijing layers the use of multiple gray zone tactics to pressure allies and partners, particularly on issues related to China's core interests. Combining multiple geopolitical, economic, military, and cyber/IO activities means that China no longer has to rely on significant escalation in any single domain and, if needed, can sequence actions to apply pressure in nonmilitary domains before resorting to use of military activity. China also appears to be more cautious and selective in using high-profile gray zone tactics against more-capable countries—for instance, employing a smaller variety of tactics against Japan and India than against Vietnam and the Philippines.

China has increasingly leveraged military tactics, and there is no evidence to suggest that China will use fewer military tactics as its overall military capabilities grow or that improved bilateral relations will discourage China from pressing its territorial claims. Likewise, there is little reason to believe that China will use fewer military gray zone tactics as its geopolitical or economic power increases. China has recently relied heavily on air- and maritime-domain tactics, for example.

China exercises caution in its use of high-profile, bilateral geopolitical and economic tactics and has become more active in wielding its influence in international institutions or via third-party actors. Since at least 2013, China has expanded its involvement on the ground in select regions, recruiting local proxies and engaging in various information efforts. In terms of nonmilitary tactics, China uses geopolitical and bilateral tactics most often.

Question 4. Which PRC Tactics Could the United States Prioritize Countering?

Given the wide range of PRC gray zone tactics and the diverse collection of allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region, the United States faces the difficult task of determining how to prioritize which PRC activities to counter. The U.S. government, experts, and academics do not currently agree on how to assess which PRC gray zone tactics are most problematic. Policymakers could consider aggregating across three different criteria: (1) the extent to which PRC tactics undermine U.S. objectives and interests in the Indo-Pacific region, (2) how difficult it is for allies and partners to respond to and counter tactics, and (3) how widely China uses specific tactics (against one or multiple allies and partners).

While there are many ways to combine the three indicators, the most balanced approach might be to weight U.S. objectives and interests equally with allied and partner concerns (40 percent each) and the prevalence of PRC tactics less (20 percent). Based on this aggregate method, ten of the 20 most-problematic PRC tactics are military activities that the People's Liberation Army or Chinese paramilitary actors engage in, with many of the tactics involving operations near or in disputed territories. Other military tactics include China engaging in highly publicized and large-scale, cross-service military exercises; establishing military bases or potential dual-use facilities in neighboring countries to threaten a target; and building up or acquiring PRC military capabilities against targets.

Geopolitical, economic, and cyber/IO tactics also ranked among the top 20. While the most-problematic PRC activities were international geopolitical and grassroots economic tactics, other PRC economic activities and grassroots cyber/IO activities in the targeted region were also problematic. Relative to the other tactics, grassroots geopolitical activities and bilateral cyber/IO activities have been less challenging. These findings suggest that the United States should devote significant effort to helping U.S. allies and partners counter PRC international geopolitical and economic tactics (particularly PRC economic activity in the target region or in disputed regions) and address grassroots cyber/IO activities.

Recommendations

• The U.S. government should hold gray zone scenario discussions with key allies and partners to better understand their concerns, responses, and needs.
• The National Security Council or the U.S. Department of State should identify a set of criteria to determine the most-problematic PRC gray zone tactics to counter via whole-of-government efforts.
• The United States could prioritize countering Chinese activities in disputed territories and responding to PRC geopolitical international and economic tactics.
• The U.S. Department of Defense should develop gray zone plans similar to existing operational plans but focused on responding to a range of more-escalatory PRC gray zone scenarios.
• The U.S. Air Force should continue to build out intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific and improve regional cyberdefense capabilities to increase domain awareness, identify and attribute PRC activities, and counter PRC cyber/IO tactics.

BETTER MEN THAN THESE

HAVE BEEN TRYING

TO CONQUER THE WORLD

FOR 2,000 GENERATIONS.

AND THE WORLD REMAINS UNDEFEATED

A Message

My dear friend, President Xi -

Don't fuck with me.

Best Regards,

Joe

Today's Daddy State Bozo

"We are going to start killing people in Mexico who are killing Americans, because they are terrorists. We do it all over the world every night. We have all of the legal authority we need to go after these drug cartels if we change our laws.” --US Sen Lindsey Graham

A sitting US Senator is suggesting we make deadly incursions inside another country's sovereign borders, issuing death threats against the citizens of a foreign nation - a nation which is an important ally and trading partner.

Note: he makes a very Daddy State move, ie: "Let's change US law in order to make the crime of murdering Mexican citizens acceptable". And he does it after the operative phrase, "... start killing people in Mexico ..." which serves two purposes.

1. It gives him cover - he can rant and rave for the benefit of the MAGA gang, and still be relatively assured that nothing he tells them he wants to do will ever be done
2. It plants the seed - if the rabble raise a big enough stink, he can claim leadership on the issue.

Will there be consequences?

Hint: he has the magic (R) next to his name.

Geopolitics is a worldwide poker game

with more than 200 players.

They're all cheating,

and they all know they're all cheating.

The calculus is never simple.

The Big Stick

Janet Yellen speaks to the issue plainly and clearly.

Yellen Calls for More Ukraine Support and Warns China Against Helping Russia

Ahead of a meeting of G20 finance ministers, the Treasury secretary offered a dark assessment of Russia’s economy and warned China of the consequences of helping Moscow skirt U.S. sanctions.

BENGALURU, India — Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Thursday that the United States would redouble its efforts to marshal global support to help Ukraine and warned that China would face repercussions if it helped Russia evade American sanctions.

She spoke as top policymakers from around the world gathered in southern India for a meeting that is expected to focus largely on accelerating a global economic recovery after three years of international crises. The warning to China underscores how the impact of the war continues to reverberate, straining ties between the world’s two largest economies as they were attempting to stabilize their relationship.

“We have made clear that providing material support to Russia or assistance with any kind of systemic sanctions evasion would be a very serious concern for us,” Ms. Yellen said. “We will certainly continue to make clear to the Chinese government and the companies and banks in their jurisdiction about what the rules are regarding our sanctions and the serious consequences they would face for violating them.”

Ms. Yellen declined to describe specific U.S. intelligence about Russian attempts to avoid sanctions but the Treasury Department has pointed to attempts by Russia to seek assistance from China to supply it with items such as semiconductors which face trade restrictions.

Trade data shows that China, along with countries including Turkey and some former Soviet republics, has stepped in to provide Russia with products that civilians or armed forces could use, including raw materials, smartphones, vehicles and computer chips. Biden administration officials have expressed concern that China could provide Russia with lethal weapons, however China does not appear to have done so yet.

The United States has cracked down on some of the companies and organizations supplying goods and services to Russia. In January, it imposed sanctions on a Chinese company that had provided satellite imagery to the Wagner mercenary group, which has played a large role in the battle for eastern Ukraine. In December, it added two Chinese research institutes to a list of entities that supply the Russian military, which will restrict their access to U.S. technology.

On Thursday, Ms. Yellen made clear that the United States would crack down on sanctions evasion. “We are seeking to strengthen sanctions and to make sure we address violations of sanctions,” she said.

The effectiveness of sanctions on Russia continues to be a subject of intense debate, as recent forecasts from the International Monetary Fund suggested that its economy is performing better than expected.

But Ms. Yellen offered a dark assessment of Russia’s economy, arguing that sanctions imposed by the United States and other Western nations were working to isolate the Kremlin, drain the country of talent and sap its productive capacity. Still, the United States continues to view the conflict as the biggest threat to the global economy, and Ms. Yellen made clear that the Biden administration is prepared to continue punishing Russia for its incursion.

Ms. Yellen said that the United States plans to unveil additional sanctions on Russia and that it is working with its allies to devise ways to tighten restrictions already in place.

“We will stand with Ukraine in its fight — for as long as it takes,” Ms. Yellen said at a news conference as finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations, which include Russia and China, convened for two days of meetings.

The Treasury secretary said that the United States had already provided more than $46 billion in security, economic and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and that another $10 billion in economic support would be delivered in the coming months. Ms. Yellen also called on the I.M.F. to “move swiftly” with a fully financed loan package for Ukraine. The I.M.F. last year approved more than $1 billion in emergency financing to Ukraine to mitigate the economic impact of the war.

“Continued, robust support for Ukraine will be a major topic of discussion during my time here in India,” Ms. Yellen said.

The United States hopes to include a condemnation of Russia’s actions in Ukraine in the joint statement, or communiqué, that the finance ministers are set to release later this week. However, it is not clear if a decisive statement will be possible because Russia is a member of the G20 and India, which is hosting the event, continues to buy large quantities of Russian oil.

Despite the urgency to address the crisis in Ukraine, Ms. Yellen offered an upbeat assessment of the global economy, which has begun to recover. While she acknowledged that headwinds remained, she said the world was on more stable footing than last fall, when many were forecasting a global recession.

“It’s fair to say that the global economy is in a better place today than many predicted just a few months ago,” Ms. Yellen said, pointing to a recent global growth upgrade from the I.M.F.

She added that the United States economy was proving to be resilient, with inflation moderating while the labor market remains strong.

During their meetings on Friday and Saturday, finance ministers are also expected to discuss ways to alleviate the debt crises facing many developing countries. Officials are also expected to put pressure on China, which has become one of the world’s largest creditors, to demonstrate more willingness to let more countries restructure their debt.

“I will continue to push for all bilateral official creditors, including China, to participate in meaningful debt treatments for developing countries and emerging markets in distress,” Ms. Yellen said.

It was unclear if Ms. Yellen would have any meetings with Chinese officials this week. She said that keeping lines of communication open about macroeconomic issues remained important.

“I certainly expect that we will resume discussions,” Ms. Yellen said, adding, “I don’t have a specific time frame in mind but I think it’s important to do so.”

Today's Reddit

Here at USAmerica, we're never short on ideas - especially when it comes to fucking things up.

Sometimes we fuck something up because we need to unfuck it in order for somebody's brother-in-law to get out from under a debt that he couldn't fucking handle in the first fucking place and everybody fucking knew it, but it didn't fucking matter because he was married to the sister of some random Defense Department Undersecretary, so he was always going to land on his feet, and he always fucking knew that.

Sometimes we fuck something up because "Gee, it seemed like a good idea a the time ..."

Anyway. Poppy Bush and His Merry Adventures in Panama because Monroe Doctrine, bitch.

A Minor Win

A quiet little thing that makes peace in the Middle East a tiny bit more probable.

(pay wall)

Opinion
Biden just pulled off a big diplomatic victory — and almost no one noticed

International diplomacy is inherently difficult, usually unglamorous and often unsuccessful — but nevertheless essential. The Biden administration has seen for itself how hard it can be to achieve results: It has failed to entice Iran back into the nuclear deal or to convince Saudi Arabia to increase oil production. But last week the administration’s diplomacy hit pay dirt — and almost no one noticed.

On Oct. 11, Israel and Lebanon announced an agreement that would demarcate their maritime boundary. This sounds narrow and technical but is a major achievement given that the two countries have been formally at war since 1948. (And that has sometimes led to actual military conflict — most recently in 2006.) The two countries don’t have an internationally recognized land border, and they have not had a maritime border, either. That has been an invitation to conflict and an impediment to the exploitation of the large natural gas fields off their coasts.

Israel has been producing offshore natural gas for years, but its latest field — known as Karish — lies perilously close to the disputed maritime boundary with Lebanon. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to attack Israel’s oil rig in the area. Lebanon, for its part, has not been able to extract any natural gas at all because oil companies don’t want to drill in disputed areas. That natural gas is desperately needed by a country in economic meltdown whose citizens receive only an hour or two of power every day from the electrical grid.

U.S. administrations have been trying for a decade to broker an agreement — with no luck. It was hard to make progress, given that officials of these warring states refuse to be in the same room with each other. Lebanon does not even recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Enter Amos J. Hochstein, a former Senate staffer, energy industry executive and veteran of the Obama State Department who is the presidential coordinator for energy security. He launched a fresh round of shuttle diplomacy at the beginning of the year, commuting from Tel Aviv to Beirut — a trip that usually required stopovers in a third country because there are no direct air or road links between Israel and Lebanon. “I’ve worked a lot of hard problems,” he told me. “This is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

He noted that “suspicion is really extreme on both sides” and the timing hardly appeared propitious: Israel is led by a weak caretaker government as one election after another fails to produce a durable majority. Lebanon is perpetually divided among different religious groups and in recent years has been on the brink of economic and political collapse.

Hochstein told me, in a telephone interview, that he changed the dynamics by going from asking who would win and who would lose under any agreement to asking how both countries could safeguard their vital interests. Israel’s government, led by centrist Prime Minister Yair Lapid, made concessions on the boundary line. Lebanon’s government, led by President Michel Aoun, recognized Israel’s control of a three-mile stretch of water close to shore and agreed to pay Israel its share of the proceeds from gas taken from the Israeli side the Qana Field, which lies in both countries’ exclusive economic zones. (The payments will go through an intermediary, the French energy company Total.)

The resulting deal was hailed as “historic” by both sides. Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is trying to return to power in the Nov. 1 election, predictably denounced it as a “disgraceful surrender.” It was also attacked by the former U.S. negotiator who tried and failed to get a deal in the Trump administration.

But this looks very much like a case of “sour grapes,” as my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Martin Indyk noted. Trump and Netanyahu couldn’t get a deal done; Biden and Lapid did. Israel’s security establishment is firmly in favor of the deal not only because it will help safeguard Israel’s natural gas fields but also because it will help bolster the Lebanese government and economy. Israel does not want a failed state next door.

This agreement is not as dramatic as the Abraham Accords struck under the Trump administration in which three Arab states (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco) recognized Israel. But it is, in some ways, even more surprising.

The UAE, Morocco and Bahrain weren’t at war with Israel. Hezbollah, the Iran-allied Lebanese militant group, by contrast, has long been, and remains, one of Israel’s main security threats. It is also the most powerful political entity in Lebanon with a de facto veto over government decisions. So, it’s pretty extraordinary that Hezbollah is allowing the Lebanese government to sign a deal that could turn Israel and Lebanon into business partners. “Lebanon has, for the first time, entered a kind of de facto recognition of Israel and its borders,” writes Daniel B. Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel.

That’s something for which the Biden administration deserves a lot of credit — just as the Trump administration deserved credit for the Abraham Accords. It just goes to show that diplomacy does pay off sometimes — even if we don’t always give it the attention it deserves.

Classic America

Showing what has to be in the top 5 examples of Americans' strangle-hold on the overly obvious is this headline at Brookings:

The American people’s message to President Biden about Ukraine—get tougher but don’t risk war with Russia

The latest survey of public opinion about the conflict in Ukraine presents a paradox. On the one hand, Americans say that they want President Biden to get tougher with Russia. On the other hand, their views about specific policies precisely track with the administration’s stance. Americans want the administration to do what the administration is already doing, and they do not want the administration to take the additional steps that it has already rejected.

For example, more than six in ten Americans favor imposing sanctions on Russia, providing financial aid to Ukraine, and sending weapons to Ukrainian forces. And by 52 to 19%, they support sending more American troops to bolster the defense of our NATO allies.

But Americans draw a bright line between these measures and policies that risk a direct confrontation between the United States and Russia. Just 33% support sending American troops to “help” the Ukrainians, and only 16% want our troops to be fighting by their side. By a margin of 21 to 52%, they reject shooting down Russia planes, and consistent with this stance, they oppose enforcing a no-fly zone in Ukrainian airspace.

Americans are also leery of non-military measures such as launching cyber attacks against Russia, presumably because they fear Russian retaliation against our information infrastructure, and flatly reject efforts to foment a coup against Vladimir Putin.

Americans are willing to confront the Russians diplomatically, however, and they reject the steps some have urged as ways of mollifying the Russians and ending their invasion of Ukraine. Only one in five Americans think that the US should promise Russia that Ukraine will never join NATO; just 14% say that we should roll back our troop deployments in Eastern Europe. And in a near-unanimous rejection of a Russian “sphere of influence,” only 8% think that Russia should be allowed to exert more power over the now-independent states of the former Soviet Union.

So, yeah Joe - keep doing everything you're doing, and keep on not doing everything you're not doing - and we'll keep believing we know everything there is to know, and that you're not doing what you should be doing, and that you are doing what you shouldn't be doing, because we watch the Press Poodles shit all over you for an hour or so every night.

With A Nod To Jimmy Carter

Carter took all kinds of heat for telling us he was going to line up his foreign policy with the basic tenets of human rights.

I'll admit that it sounded kinda limp at the time.

But the weirdness of "soft" power is that it ends up being the hardest thing - to do, certainly, but also the hardest thing to resist once it's put forward. How do you argue against doing what's right, when you know it's the right thing to do?

Invading a country, without real provocation - no matter how much you hate their government or the way they conduct themselves - is just wrong and unjustifiable. We didn't stick to that one in 2003. We failed miserably, went into Iraq for all the wrong reasons, and we're still paying a steep cost for it.

The same point could be made about Afghanistan in 2001. That one's a little harder, but the principles are the same. The asshole Taliban in charge of that government gave the bad guys a place to hang out, and so they shared in the guilt for 9/11. But a full-on invasion was a bad idea because first, it was disproportional, and second, because of that disproportional response, we stuck ourselves with a busted joint (just like Iraq) that we had to rebuild afterwards while ducking the blowback from people who were thoroughly ungrateful for our noble efforts to liberate them by fucking everything up for them, and now - after 20 years - we're pretty much right back where we started. 20 fucking years.

And we've heard all the same shit coming from Putin that we heard from Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Bush - what a horrible threat "those people" are, and we have to get them before they get us.

It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a war of conquest and nothing more.

So Biden is doing it about right, I think. He's trying to keep the world community focused on a very strong response, but doing it in a more balanced way that puts hard-power war-fighting resources in the hands of the Ukrainians while using the soft-power tools of sanctions and political pressure to degrade Putin's capacity to sustain his armed aggression.

The problem - as usual - is trying to get people to think in wider terms, and to start moving away from the old Henry Kissinger Real Politick I'm-Only-Out-For-Myself crap, which is very much what got us into this fuckin' mess to begin with.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Too many nations still waffle on Ukraine. The U.S. cannot ignore them.

Russian aggression against Ukraine violated both morality and a principle of international law — the sanctity of sovereign borders. So stark was the transgression that neutral or nonaligned nations such as Switzerland and Sweden have strongly condemned President Vladimir Putin’s war and joined international sanctions against his regime. However, many large and influential nations, including some democracies with which the United States has strong relationships, have equivocated. It’s a troubling aspect of the crisis and calls for a deliberate but differentiated U.S. response.

The fence-sitters take a range of positions. In a category by itself is China, which has pursued neutrality while refusing to modify its prewar declaration of friendship with Moscow. Slightly less indefensibly, South Africa and India abstained from a United Nations resolution deploring Russia’s aggression and refused to levy any sanctions. Then come countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Israel and the United Arab Emirates (not a democracy, to be sure), which did vote for the U.N. resolution but still balk at sanctions.

Each country has its rationalization, often related to an entanglement with Russia, either current or — in the case of South Africa, where some still feel a misplaced sense of gratitude for the Soviet Union’s support against apartheid — historical. India still buys most of its weaponry from Russia, despite its recent alignment with the United States, Australia and Japan against China. Brazilian agriculture depends on Russian fertilizer. Israel has a deal with Mr. Putin, whose air force in Syria allows Israeli airstrikes on Iranian convoys that supply Hezbollah guerrillas.

Only for Mexico is the problem pure, misguided ideology rather than conflict of interest. It has only $2.3 billion in two-way trade with Russia, but the United States’ southern neighbor and largest merchandise trading partner — $614.5 billion in 2019 — nevertheless sticks to non-interventionist dogma under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Some members of his left-wing political party — unconscionably — chose this moment to inaugurate a “friendship committee” with Russia.

The lesson, unfortunately, is that much of the world does not share the combination of moral outrage and geopolitical self-interest that has forged democracies in Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim into a solid coalition arrayed against Moscow’s war. Mr. Putin has spent years trying to co-opt countries around the world, no doubt in anticipation of a long-planned move against Ukraine. Undeniably, he is reaping some benefits from that now.

Countries supporting sanctions against Russia account for the vast majority of world economic activity, so the refusal of others to cooperate is not decisive. Still, the United States should not underestimate either the need to counter Russian influence among nations that are equivocating or the opportunities to do so.

The Biden administration’s approach should vary, depending on its leverage in each country. There’s not much point using moral suasion on China, for example, though hints to Beijing of the price it would pay for re-arming Mr. Putin appear to be having some impact. For the rest, Washington should aggressively deploy moral suasion, trade and aid — economic as well as military. That’s what Russia has been doing; this country must respond in kind.

On Leaving Afghanistan

Generally, as kind of a default, I'm in favor of going out of our way to help when a fledgling new government is trying to stand up a working democracy.

But no matter who you are, there's always a couple of problems with that, and especially so when you're the dominant power on the planet:

1) We can't be everybody's guardian - everybody's mentoring uncle. We have to choose our projects a lot more wisely, and then do it a lot better.

2) Our good intentions are usually worth exactly diddly-shit when there are assholes like Dick Cheney and Tom Cotton in on the deal - guys who wear The Helper mask so it's hard to recognize them as The Conquerors they truly want to be - so we'll always draw some harsh criticism for throwing our shit around.

 

Anyway, here's a piece from Slate lining it out pretty well.

We Now Know Why Biden Was in a Hurry to Exit Afghanistan

He made several missteps, but on the big picture, he was right.

There was a moment in Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the withdrawal from Afghanistan when it became clear why President Joe Biden decided to get the troops out of there as quickly as possible.

It came when Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained why he and the other chiefs—the top officers of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines—all agreed that we needed to pull out by Aug. 31. The Doha agreement, which President Donald Trump had signed with the Taliban in early 2020 (with no participation by the Afghan government), required a total withdrawal of foreign forces. If U.S. troops had stayed beyond August, Milley said, the Taliban would have resumed the fighting, and, in order to stave off the attacks, “we would have needed 30,000 troops” and would have suffered “many casualties.”

And yet, as Milley also testified on Tuesday, he, the chiefs, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and other military officers advised Biden to keep 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the Aug. 31 deadline. The difference is that those troops wouldn’t be attached to any “military mission.” Instead, they would “transition” to a “diplomatic mission.”

However, it is extremely unlikely that the Taliban would have observed the semantic distinction. In their eyes, 2,500 U.S. troops would be seen as 2,500 U.S. troops, regardless of whether their mission was officially said to be “military” or “diplomatic.” Therefore, the Taliban would resume fighting, as Milley said they would, and Biden would then have been faced with a horrendous choice—to pull out while under attack or send in another 30,000 troops.

Some historical-psychological perspective is worth noting. In the first nine months of Barack Obama’s presidency, the generals were pushing for a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan—an increase of 40,000 troops—and a shift to a counterinsurgency (aka “nation-building”) strategy. Biden, who was then vice president, was alone in suggesting an increase of just 10,000 troops, to be used solely for training the Afghan army and for fighting terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistani border. As Obama recalls in his memoir, Biden urged the new and relatively inexperienced president not to be “boxed in” by the generals. Give them 40,000 troops now, and in 18 months, they’ll say they need another 40,000 to win the war. As Obama later acknowledged, Biden was right.

And so, as Milley was advising Biden to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, even while acknowledging that another 30,000 might be needed if the Taliban resumed fighting, it’s easy to imagine Biden thinking, “They’re trying to box me in, just like they did before, just like they’ve always done since the Vietnam War,” which was raging when Biden first entered the Senate in 1973 and has shaped his views on war and peace ever since.

Milley and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of Central Command, both acknowledged at the hearing that the U.S. military was flying blind through much of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. The officers of the day tried to mold the Afghan army in their own image, making them too dependent on U.S. technology and support, so that once we withdrew, collapse was inevitable. Milley also noted that he and the other officers paid too little attention to Afghan culture and to the corrosive effects of the Afghan government’s corruption and lack of popular legitimacy. So, Biden might well have been thinking, why should he pay attention to anything these guys had to say on the war in Afghanistan, which they’ve been wrong about from the very beginning?

Biden made several missteps, some of them disastrous, in the pace and sequence of the withdrawal. Most of all, he should have pulled out all the spies, contractors, U.S. citizens, and Afghan helpers before pulling out all the troops. But on the big picture, he was right, and the generals, as they now grudgingly admit, were wrong.

And that last bit is the operative principle - generals make the plans, but the civilian command authority makes the decisions.

"Conservative" "Thinking"

Hugh Hewitt never disappoints - we can always count on him to pimp some of our favorite "conservative" lies.

Like this:

For 20 years, the sacrifices made in Afghanistan were part of keeping the homeland safe.

Allow me to suggest an edit:

"For 20 years we've heard the lie that tries to link safety at home with funneling trillions of tax dollars to defense contractors for overseas military adventures - which fosters the various layers of corruption (foreign and domestic) wherever large piles of cash are made readily available, which in turn makes it nearly impossible to accomplish the stated objective."

Yes, we should stay appropriately engaged in the world, but engaging in "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan - "fighting them over there" - has led us to neglect the rising threat of terrorism posed by our very own brand of homegrown terrorism right here in USAmerica Inc.

The GOP has been in the process of attempting a coup not unlike what the Taliban has been attempting in Afghanistan. This little screed wouldn't have anything to do with stuffing Jan6 down the memory hole would it, Hugh?

That, and a little projection, intended to shift the criticism from Trump - who set all this shit in motion - to Biden, who's now trying to keep America's promises and make it work.

Hugh Hewitt, WaPo: (pay Wall)

America has lost a war, and the consequences will be terrible. Yes, this happened in 1975 with the fall of Saigon, but it is not easy to find a precedent in our history for a calamity such as that unfolding in Afghanistan, where thousands of Americans — the exact number is uncertain — are suddenly stranded far from home with no simple avenue for escape.

Events have left many Americans in a state of collective shock. The video of an infant being passed from family members over concertina wire to U.S. troops at Kabul’s airport illustrated the profound desperation that is sweeping Afghanistan, and elicited an awareness that we have betrayed much and many in the past week.

We can be proud of our warriors and still be deeply ashamed of our country.

The Pentagon suggested Thursday that if Americans in Afghanistan — mostly contractors and nongovernmental aid workers now — could get to the airport in Kabul, their safe passage home was likely. The Pentagon did not explain how Americans were to get safely to the airport. The president tried again Friday to give similar reassurance and guidance to the trapped — and failed again. He told the world they would get home. He gave no guidance on how they could get to the airport.

This is unacceptable. Is there really no alternative to simply hoping for the best? “Trust me and the Taliban?” Really?

Then there are sensitive questions about President Biden’s capacity to deal with fast-moving events. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) commented early in the week that the president appeared “shellshocked.” On Friday, Biden played his favorite loop in the East Room, promising to bring Americans and our loyal Afghan allies home — but not really explaining how. He is stubbornly attached to his inner narrative and won’t budge from it.

Questions about Donald Trump’s temperament and capacity dogged his entire presidency. To age, as candid older men and women will freely confess, is to slow down from previous capacity, to grow fixed in opinions and habits. Biden is our president, and we only get one at a time, but we can ask that everyone around him make doubly sure he is getting everything older Americans routinely need as they age — particularly unpleasant advice when they don’t want to hear it.

Maybe especially when they don’t want to hear it.

The broad unease about the president’s ability to adjust to quick changes in facts on the ground is genuine, and the fact that he finally allowed four reporters to ask questions on Friday about his decision-making did not allay that unease.

The families of every American abandoned to the tender mercies of the Taliban deserve a president who is accessible and commanding, not one who seems uncertain or half-withdrawn. CNN’s Clarissa Ward, reporting with incredible courage from Kabul, should not be Americans’ best source of information on conditions at the Kabul airport. It should be the president, but his answers on Friday did not help him much or set many minds at ease.

This is very much a disaster of choice, not inevitability. The questions are many: What did the president not know about the political landscape in Afghanistan — and for how long has he not known it? What options did he solicit? Which did he decline? What advice did he reject?

It is also necessary to ask: What signal does this send to an increasingly aggressive China and Russia, and will they act on that signal? What does this mean for the perilous situations in Taiwan and Ukraine? And how did the United States get blindsided again?

For 20 years, the sacrifices made in Afghanistan were part of keeping the homeland safe. That shield has dropped. The president again insisted on Friday that we have over-the-horizon abilities. But, as one reporter asked Biden, if we didn’t see the collapse coming, how can we be confident that we will see the next attack on the homeland coming?

Finally, given the president’s argumentative and defensive speech Monday, refusal to take questions after a threadbare deflection speech Wednesday, the confused and confusing sit down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and his halting do-over performance Friday, the Biden-friendly legacy media must press to learn what is happening behind the scenes. ABC News’s refusal to release the entire unedited tape of Stephanopoulos’s midweek interview with the president is unacceptable. The same degree of scrutiny that fell on every Trump move must follow this president.

At moments of national calamity, we all need to be respectful of our common citizenship, but difficult discussions must be had in public, and the president especially must be available and accountable to the people he has so long wanted to lead. This is not, as the president and his team may imagine, another sort of campaign crisis to be endured and overcome in a few news cycles. The oldest president ever must keep his circle expanding and information flowing in, with truth-speakers close at hand. And he must meet with the press again and again as the crisis unfolds.

BTW #1: The idea's been floated that Biden tried to convince Obama to get us out of Afghanistan pretty much the whole 8 years he spent as VP. That story will emerge at some point as people start to dig into the history of the first two decades of "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire".

BTW #2: In case you've missed it, "conservatives" have also been pimping the bullshit that Tom Cotton is their best bet for the 2024 GOP nomination. Look for more of this as we go, and especially be on the lookout for the Press Poodles to say things like "Well, that Tom Cotton guy has some common sense stuff goin' on yada yada yada".

Ya heard it here first, kids.

Watch This One Little Wrinkle

Afghan Veep Amrullah Saleh might be cooking up a few surprises for them Taliban fellers.

Reuters:

Afghan First Vice President Amrullah Saleh said on Tuesday he was in Afghanistan and the "legitimate caretaker president" after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country as Taliban insurgents took the capital Kabul.

Saleh told a security meeting chaired by Ghani last week that he was proud of the armed forces and the government would do all it could to strengthen resistance to the Taliban.

But the country fell to the Taliban in days, rather than the months foreseen by U.S. intelligence.

In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Saleh said that it was "futile" to argue with U.S. President Joe Biden, who has decided to pull out U.S. forces.

He called on Afghans to show that Afghanistan "isn't Vietnam & the Talibs aren't even remotely like Vietcong".

A video of desperate Afghans trying to clamber on to a U.S. military plane as it was about to take off evoked a photograph in 1975 of people trying to get on a helicopter on a roof in Saigon during the withdrawal from Vietnam.

Saleh said that unlike the United States and NATO "we haven't lost spirit & see enormous opportunities ahead. Useless caveats are finished JOIN THE RESISTANCE."

Saleh, whose whereabouts were unknown, said that he would never "under no circumstances bow" to "the Talib terrorists." He said he would "never betray" Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance who was assassinated by two al Qaeda operatives just before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Everything is up in the air and we won't know a lot more than we know now - which isn't much - until the airlift attempt has run its course and some of the dust settles.

So far, the Talibani have gone to great lengths trying to sound "reasonable", but just like every other bunch of theocratic assholes, they can be expected to revert to their usual asshole selves as soon as they consolidate their position.

Losing

The Guardian:

Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.

Yet also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.

Call it the Trump double-whammy. Diplomatically speaking, the US is on life support.

“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.

“But that’s not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from ‘making America great again’, this epic policy failure will further tarnish [its] reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”

This adverse shift could be permanent, Walt warned. Since taking office in 2017, Trump has insulted America’s friends, undermined multilateral alliances and chosen confrontation over cooperation. Sanctions, embargoes and boycotts aimed at China, Iran and Europe have been globally divisive.

For the most part, oft-maligned foreign leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel have listened politely, turning the other cheek in the interests of preserving the broader relationship.

But Trump’s ineptitude and dishonesty in handling the pandemic, which has left foreign observers as well as Americans gasping in disbelief, is proving a bridge too far.

Erratic behaviour, tolerated in the past, is now seen as downright dangerous. It’s long been plain, at least to many in Europe, that Trump could not be trusted. Now he is seen as a threat. It is not just about failed leadership. It’s about openly hostile, reckless actions.
- and -

Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, said he hoped the crisis would force a fundamental US rethink about “whether the ‘America first’ model really works”. The Trump administration’s response had been too slow, he said. “Hollowing out international connections comes at a high price,” Maas warned.

Lasting resentment over how the US went missing in action in the coronavirus wars of 2020 may change the way the world works.

And Another Thing

OK, the hair-on-fire brigade got all up in arms for good reason, but it turns out that 45* is just a fucking dolt and it seems the world understands this to the point that while they take this shit very seriously, they know now that they have to be the grownups and not go too nuts when he does something that's unbelievably stoopid - even for him.

I have to think there's a strong probability that Iran is just biding their time, and they'll kick us in the nuts when they're good-n-ready.

45* gave a brief statement this morning, and somehow, for now, things are relatively calm again.

WaPo, Paul Waldman:

Five Takeaways From Trump's Deranged Speech On Iran

Having prepared carefully to deliver inspiring words that would bring all Americans together as they worry about the possibility of another war in the Middle East, President Trump stepped to the podium Wednesday morning and instead gave a brief speech that was vintage Trump: lacking in even the barest eloquence, replete with lies, delivered with garbled pronunciation and weirdly somnolent affect, and unintentionally revealing.

• Trump’s Iran policy has been a catastrophic failure.
• Trump desperately wanted to find a way to declare victory and back off.
• Trump is still obsessed with Barack Obama.
• Trump is comically insecure about his manhood.
• Trump still has no idea what he wants to accomplish with regard to Iran or how to do it.

Some fallout - so, Cynical Mike says that maybe Iran isn't in a big hurry to retaliate in kind partly because 45*'s dumbfuck move serves the purpose of "unity" and "rally 'round the Ayatollah", which makes the social oppression a little easier because it pushes down on certain protests - most notably (as usual) the movement to free middle eastern women from the repressive bullshit imposed on them by religious control freaks.

I'm thinking we'll prob'ly see less of this in Iran - young women resisting the forced hijab.

Hear What They Say

...but be sure to watch what they do.

Business Insider:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Friday morning, just hours after the US military killed the top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, that "the world is a much safer place today." Some allies and partners suggested otherwise, however, and Pompeo's own government agency advised Americans to flee Iraq.

"The world is a much safer place today," he said. "And I can assure you that Americans in the region are much safer today after the demise of Qassem Soleimani."

His comments came as the State Department urged American citizens in Iraq to leave immediately.

"Due to heightened tensions in Iraq and the region," the US Embassy in Baghdad said in a security alert Friday, "the US Embassy urges American citizens to heed the January 2020 Travel Advisory and depart Iraq immediately."

"US citizens should depart via airline while possible, and failing that, to other countries via land," the embassy instructed.

About That Letter

Jeremy Bowen, BBC News:

In the letter dated 9 October, and sent after US troops were pulled out of Syria, Mr Trump told Mr Erdogan: "Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!"

President Trump was urging Turkey not to launch a military offensive against Kurdish-led forces in northern Syria, but Mr Erdogan ignored this request.

US Vice President Mike Pence is now in Ankara to push for a ceasefire.

The US has faced intense criticism for the withdrawal of troops, which critics say gave Turkey the green light to launch the military attack.

In response, Turkish presidential sources told BBC Turkish: "President Erdogan received the letter, thoroughly rejected it and put it in the bin."

It is hard to imagine language like it in many letters between presidents.

Donald Trump's mixture of threats and locker-room banter infuriated Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His staff told the BBC that he threw the letter into the bin and launched the Syrian operation the same day. That could be proof there was no Trumpian green light.

That letter is not what you need from a world leader - it's total shit. It's what you might expect to see from The Onion or in a sketch on late night TV.

I think it's reasonable to conclude that Erdogan saw that letter and knew he'd have no problem with 45*, which makes it a de facto green light.

And even though the timing might indicate there was no "green lighting" of the invasion from 45* (CYA is way more likely), there's a mountain of indication that he's impotent at best, and unfortunately, we can only sit and wait for him to dig down to some new low every fucking day so as to show us what he is "at worst".

BTW - take a good look at the map, and tell me this isn't about Putin making moves to secure a warm water port.