Tell me that this doesn't sound like something out of a history of Nazi tactics in World War II:
The rules [of engagement]t explicitly allowed the killing of unarmed Iraqis under certain circumstances...Specifically, the snipers were allowed to shoot unarmed people running away from explosions or firefights....Of course, it's not unusual for innocent people to run from explosions.
Didier, who has since been promoted to captain, said that "if that individual makes contact with you and then breaks contact of their own accord and disarms themselves while they are breaking contact, they are still an engageable target because they are not wounded, nor did they surrender." He explained, "They are only breaking contact so that they can engage coalition forces at a later time." In court, Sgt. Anthony Murphy, one of the snipers who was responsible for a questionable kill, testified that he interpreted this order about breaking contact so they can engage at a later time as: "Engage fleeing local nationals without weapons."
In other words, if an innocent, unarmed Iraqi runs away to seek safety from a suicide bombing, a missile attack or a gunfight -- which any human being would instinctively do -- then he is fair game to be killed by an American sniper.
The excerpt above comes from a story in Salon.com, "Killing by the Numbers," about an "elite" U.S. sniper squad that murdered a captured, unarmed civilian in cold blood. A more detailed excerpt follows below, but I'd like to deal briefly with one ancillary aspect first.
The story expands to talk more generally about the sniper program in Iraq, and is careful -- overly careful -- to emphasize that the snipers responsible for so many "questionable kills" are operating in very stressful conditions: sleep-deprived, sweltering in deadly heat, surrounded by potential "hostiles," at constant risk of attack. All true, of course, but it prompts this simple question: What the hell are they doing there in the first place? Why are they squatting and sweltering in "hides" in a foreign land, looking to kill people who never attacked the United States?
Yes, it is entirely understandable that a soldier subjected to nerve-wracking, physically tormenting conditions might fail to act with reason, patience, judgment and prudence. But is this supposed to be some kind of excuse for crimes committed within the context of a larger crime: a war of aggression, the military invasion and occupation of a foreign country without any provocation? Surely many of the Nazi atrocities were committed by men under unbearable mental and physical strain as well. So what? Were they absolved of their crimes? And more importantly -- were their leaders absolved for instigating the larger crime that engendered these atrocities?
For as the story also shows, the "questionable kills" by American snipers derive largely from the murderous "rules of engagement" they are given by their superiors -- and by the anxiety of their officers to produce big "kill numbers" to appease the bloodlust -- and PR needs -- of the thugs in the White House and their "counterinsurgency genius," David Petraeus.
But let's return to the story of how a sniper squad murdered Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi, an Iraqi vegetable farmer, almost one year ago, after he stumbled upon their "hide" on the banks of the Euphrates.
I. George W. Bush and David Petraeus are preparing to make a new Fallujah in Sadr City, home to two million Shiites in Baghdad. Thousands of people are already fleeing the area before the full-scale slaughter and destruction begin. As in Fallujah, the multitudes who cannot escape will be trapped in a "free fire zone", subjected to ruthless bombardment and ground assault. Thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of innocent civilians stand in the shadow of imminent death.
The assault is part of the run-up to the coming attack on Iran -- an attempt to secure the rear of that new front by destroying Iraq's Shiite nationalist forces. It is also part of an on-going effort to eliminate the strongest rival to the Shiite extremists that Bush has installed in office in Iraq, before the conquered land's fall elections.
The preliminary assault on Sadr City has already begun, of course. As the BBC notes, in the last seven weeks around 1,000 people -- most of them civilians -- have already been killed by the Bush-Petraeus "surge" into the area. Petraeus is frantically building high-walled ghettos in Sadr City, slicing neighborhoods in half, sundering families, destroying communities and livelihoods. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is circulating leaflets in Sadr City districts, warning the people to leave -- or else.
This, you understand, is liberation. This is freedom. This is the glorious "surge" to victory. As Tacitus noted:
A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them.... To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace.
That translation of the quote was taken from a remarkable article by David Bromwich in the New York Review of Books, a shattering analysis of the nation's hideous and horrifying moral decay in the Terror War. The title says it all: Euphemism and American Violence. You should read the whole thing, but the conclusion is most apt to our immediate subject here:
"History begins today" was a saying in the Bush White House on September 12, 2001—repeated with menace by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to the director of Pakistani intelligence Mahmoud Ahmad—a statement that on its face exhibits a totalitarian presumption. Yet nothing so much as language supplies our memory of things that came before today; and, to an astounding degree, the Bush and Cheney administration has succeeded in persuading the most powerful and (at one time) the best-informed country in the world that history began on September 12, 2001. The effect has been to tranquilize our self-doubts and externalize all the evils we dare to think of. In this sense, the changes of usage and the corruptions of sense that have followed the global war on terrorism are inseparable from the destructive acts of that war.
In the name of tranquilized American people, a new evil is about to externalized upon the bodies of the women and children, the old and sick, the innocent and vulnerable in Sadr City. As the BBC reports:
The authorities in Baghdad say they are preparing for an exodus of thousands of people from eastern parts of the city. Fighting between government and US troops on one side, and Shia militia on the other, has intensified recently. Two football stadiums are on stand-by to receive residents from two neighbourhoods in the Sadr City area...
In the last seven weeks around 1,000 people have died, and more than 2,500 others have been injured, most of them civilians. The fighting so far in Sadr City has been fierce - street to street, and house to house.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is showing a determination to disarm the country's Shia militia groups - particularly the Mehdi Army - that he has never displayed before. However, Iraqi army operations, backed by US ground and air support, have so far failed to overwhelm the Shia militiamen, who are still responding with roadside bombs, sniper fire, mortars and rockets.
The government has distributed leaflets in two key districts of Sadr City, warning people to leave.The speculation is that government forces are preparing for a big push into eastern Baghdad to end the current fighting once and for all. Shortages of water and medical supplies have already made life inside Sadr City extremely difficult.
And this is just the beginning.
II. The story of Fallujah's destruction at Bush's order in mid-November 2004 -- a burnt offering to celebrate his renewal of power -- gives us an intimation of what is about to happen in Sadr City. This is what I wrote, in the Moscow Times, about that assault while it was still going on:
Ring of Fire: The Fallujah Inferno "The inferno…is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." -- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
There is of course no space, nowhere to move or breathe in the sealed chamber of the American Infoglomerate – the vast entanglement of corporate media and government propaganda that smothers the body politic with hysterical outpourings of diversion, drivel and deadening white noise. Here, events occur in a total vacuum: they have no history, no context, no consequences. Stripped of the heft and scope of reality, they can easily be molded and distorted to fit the prevailing political and business agendas. Amnesia, ignorance, confusion and fear are left to rule the day: excellent fuel for the stokers of the inferno, who use the heat to work their alchemical magic – transforming human blood into gold.
"There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens."
This was a voice from the depths of the inferno: Fadhil Badrani, reporter for the BBC and Reuters, trapped in the iron encirclement along with tens of thousands of civilians. It was a rare breath of truth. The reality of a major city being ground into rubble was meant to be obscured by the Infoglomerate's wall of noise: murder trials, state visits, Cabinet shuffles, celebrity weddings – and, above all, the reports of "embedded" journalists shaping the "narrative" into its proper form: a magnificent feat of arms carried out with surgical precision against an enemy openly identified by American commanders as "Satan," the Associated Press reports.
One of the first moves in this magnificent feat was the destruction and capture of medical centers. Twenty doctors – and their patients, including women and children – were killed in an airstrike on one major clinic, the UN Information Service reports, while the city's main hospital was seized in the early hours of the ground assault. Why? Because these places of healing could be used as "propaganda centers," the Pentagon's "information warfare" specialists told the NY Times. Unlike the first attack on Fallujah last spring, there was to be no unseemly footage of gutted children bleeding to death on hospital beds. This time – except for NBC's brief, heavily-edited, quickly-buried clip of the usual lone "bad apple" shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner – the visuals were rigorously scrubbed.
So while Americans saw stories of rugged "Marlboro Men" winning the day against Satan, they were spared shots of engineers cutting off water and electricity to the city – a flagrant war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as CounterPunch notes, but standard practice throughout the occupation. Nor did pictures of attack helicopters gunning down civilians trying to escape across the Euphrates River – including a family of five – make the TV news, despite the eyewitness account of an AP journalist. Nor were tender American sensibilities subjected to the sight of phosphorous shells bathing enemy fighters – and nearby civilians – with unquenchable chemical fire, literally melting their skin, as the Washington Post reports. Nor did they see the fetus being blown out of the body of Artica Salim when her home was bombed during the "softening-up attacks" that raged relentlessly – and unnoticed – in the closing days of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the Scotland Sunday Herald reports.
What they saw instead were two loudly devout Christians, Bush and Tony Blair, clasping hands and proclaiming that Artica Salim had been torn to shreds in order to fight terrorism – specifically, the terrorism of Jordanian thug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The city's alleged refusal to turn over Zarqawi was the ostensible reason for the attack; yet halfway through the assault, with dead civilian bodies already stinking in the streets, Coalition commanders finally admitted the truth: Zarqawi wasn't in Fallujah – and hadn't been there for weeks, perhaps months.
But then, Zarqawi leads a peculiarly charmed life. Three times before the war, U.S. forces were set to kill him and destroy his organization. It wasn't that difficult; after all, he was operating in Kurdish-held Iraqi territory, where the U.S. military had free rein. Yet each time, Bush called off the strike, the Wall Street Journal reports. He needed Zarqawi for his pre-war propaganda, so he could point to an "al Qaeda ally in Iraq" – even though Zarqawi was on Bush's Iraqi turf, not Saddam's. And Bush still needs Zarqawi, or someone like him – a killer whose lurid malefactions obscure the even larger crime that set all these atrocities in motion: an unprovoked aggressive war based on lies, whose only goal is the imposition of a regime that will enrich Bush's cronies while advancing American dominance of the world's resources.
Bush and Zarqawi are mirror-image enemies: foreign terrorists breaking into Iraq to spread indiscriminate death and ruin in pursuit of their brutal visions. Everywhere they go, everything they touch, everyone they draw to their cause becomes inferno.
Arthur Silber has the second part of his powerful "Choosing Sides" series up now: Killing Truth and Hope -- The Fatal Illusion of Opposition. There is little I can add to the insight and eloquence of the piece -- just go read the whole thing, and follow up on the links provided there as well.
But I would like to highlight two particular aspects of the post. First is Silber's succinct description of the "corporate-authoritarian political system" that confronts us at every turn with its soul-crushing, death-dealing power:
This system encompasses every area of our national life....The military-industrial complex -- or what is now often more accurately described as the military-industrial-congressional complex -- is the most significant component of these interrelationships, but there are many other parts. They encompass all major industries, and almost every minor one, as well as many of our educational and cultural institutions....
This system as it exists today consists of innumerable interrelated, constantly moving parts. Countless agencies, commissions and bureaucrats act in concert and on their own to expand their power, and that of government generally. The system has a life of its own; it is its own reason for being. It sustains itself, and it seeks more and more territory for its dominance. The exercise of power and the acquisition of still more power are not directed at the improvement of the lives of "ordinary" Americans, whoever they may be; ordinary Americans are of no interest or concern to the ruling elites, except insofar as their labor and often their lives are necessary for the maintenance of the lives of immense comfort and privilege enjoyed by the powerful. Power is not the means to some other end, although that claim is a crucial element of the extraordinarily successful propaganda so willingly swallowed by the public. Power -- its exercise and maintenance, and the acquisition of still more power -- is the end.
Again, see the original for the several illuminating links provided.
Silber also deals extensively with two important articles by Pam Martens recently published at Counterpunch. (Here and here.) As Silber notes, Martens is a personal admirer of Barack Obama, and believes him to be a more or less sincere tool of forces beyond his control. Yet this does not prevent her from doing what legions of "progressives" -- especially in the blogosphere -- seem congenitally unable to do: look at the reality of the Obama campaign in the face. And Marten's reality-based analysis of the campaign's real nature is absolutely devastating. She shows the true backers of Obama's candidacy:
A Wall Street cartel of financial firms, their registered lobbyists, and go-to law firms that have a death grip on our federal government....Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.
She also exposes the rank hypocrisy of Obama's claim to be free from the influence of the Big Money lobbyists who wield such overwhelming, sinister sway in Washington. This claim is, to put it bluntly, an egregious lie. As Martens demonstrates, Obama's Wall Street backers are also some of the worst, most corrupt lobbyists -- such as Greenberg Traurig, former home of that master criminal of the Bush Regime, Jack Abramoff.
Senator Obama's premise and credibility of not taking money from federal lobbyists hangs on a carefully crafted distinction: he is taking money, lots of it, from owners and employees of firms registered as federal lobbyists but not the actual individual lobbyists. But is that dealing honestly with the American people?
The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated marketing machine in memory. That's not a good thing. Marketing is not even distantly related to democracy or civic empowerment. Marketing is about creating emotional, even irrational bonds between your product and your target audience.
Martens goes on to report that "the Obama campaign has spent over $52 million on media, strategy consultants, image building, marketing research and telemarketing." As Silber says, you should read Martens' articles in their entirety to get the full impact of her facts and analysis.
In his piece, Silber kindly quotes from a post I wrote, in which I noted that the very small differences between the two major parties could have significant effects, because "even minute mitigations in the operation of vast power structures can translate into real benefits for many ordinary people, simply due to the scale on which such structures operate." But Silber goes on to note, quite rightly:
If you choose to support one party over the other because of those "minute mitigations" that "can translate into real benefits for many ordinary people," that's fine -- but intellectual honesty ought to compel you to recognize the great danger you're courting.
He has much more to say on this theme -- again, go read the whole thing -- but it is a point worth stressing again. As I noted in this earlier post ("Disabuse Your Illusion"):
Whether these mitigations of injustice and suffering in certain instances outweigh the cost of participating in – and thereby to some extent legitimizing and perpetuating – a system that inevitably produces injustice and suffering on a massive scale is a question that each person must decide for themselves, in their own individual conscience.
And this question is certainly pertinent in the case of Barack Obama. For by the choices he has made in picking advisers to help him shape his policies, he has given every indication that while his presidency might represent a better management and presentation of the current system, it will in no way overturn or even seriously challenge it on any essential point. In other words – and bearing in mind the type of not-insubstantial mitigations noted above – he will keep doing what Bush has been doing, only more competently, less radically, with a greater care for the long-term viability of the power structure. And what is that structure that Obama seeks to refine and extend? It is an imperial system based on militarism and the exaltation of elitist profit and privilege above all other concerns.
It's your choice. But as Silber says -- "at least be honest about the nature of your choice." Have the courage to do what Martens and Silber are doing, and look reality in the face.
Do you want to know what the entire American political establishment -- Democrat and Republican, conservative and "progressive" -- really stands for? Do you want to know what they all support, whole-heartedly, without the slightest objection or demur? Do you want to see their true vision for the world, behind all the pious rhetoric and poisonous lies? Then look no further; here it is, in the raw:
A leading human rights group on Tuesday accused Ethiopian troops in Somalia of killing civilians and committing atrocities, including slitting people's throats, gouging out eyes and gang-raping women. (AP)
"The people of Somalia are being killed, raped, tortured; looting is widespread and entire neighbourhoods are being destroyed," said Michelle Kagari, Africa Programme Deputy Director at Amnesty International, speaking from Nairobi.
Witnesses described to Amnesty International an increasing incidence of Ethiopian troops killing by what is locally termed "slaughtering" or "killing like goats" -- referring to killing by slitting the throat. The victims of these killings are often left lying in pools of blood in the streets until armed fighters, including snipers, move out of the area and relatives can collect their bodies.
In one case, a 15-year-old girl found her father with his throat cut upon returning home from school, after Ethiopian security forces swept through her neighbourhood.
Other cases in the report include:
Haboon, a 56-year-old woman from Mogadishu, who said her neighbour's 17-year-old daughter was raped by Ethiopian troops. When her 13 and 14-year-old sons tried to defend their sister, the soldiers beat them and took their eyes out with a bayonet. The mother fled. It is not known what happened to the boys. This girl is in a coma as a result of the injuries she sustained during the attack.
Guled, aged 32, who said that he saw his neighbours "slaughtered". He said he saw many men whose throats were slit and whose bodies were left in the street. Some had their testicles cut off. He also saw women being raped. In one incident, his newly-wed neighbour whose husband was not home was raped by over twenty Ethiopian soldiers. (Garowe Online)
Ceebla'a, aged 63, from Wardhiigley, said she fled Mogadishu on 15 November 2007 with her young children after some shooting in the area. One day she saw three men leaving their shops being picked up by Ethiopian soldiers for investigation. The next morning she saw the bodies of the three men on the street. One was strangled with electrical wire. The second had his throat cut. The third had been chained ankle to wrist, and his testicles had been smashed. (Amnesty report)
These Ethiopian troops were armed, trained and funded by the Bush Administration, then sent into Somalia as a proxy army for yet another Terror War "regime change" operation in late 2006. American military forces have been directly involved in the operation, on the side of the invaders, throughout the conflict, from the very beginning to this day -- as evidenced by the U.S. missile attack last week that killed at least two dozen civilians in the course of an "extrajudicial" assassination of a Somali insurgent leader.
There has been no objection to any of this from any major figure in American politics. Barack Obama doesn't object to it. Hillary Clinton doesn't object to it. Nancy Pelosi doesn't object to it. It goes without saying that John McCain and the Republicans don't object to these latest war crimes by their blood-drenched leader. The entire Washington power structure has lined up to support this hideous project: military aggression, murder, destruction and rampant atrocity. Somalia -- already one of the world's most fragile and ravaged nations -- is being battered into utter destruction before our eyes....and in our names.
"The human rights and humanitarian situation in Somalia is growing worse by the day. This report represents the voices of ordinary Somalis, and their plea to the international community to take action to end the attacks against them, including those committed by internationally-supported [Transitional Federal Government] and Ethiopian forces."
Security in many parts of Mogadishu is non-existent, and the entire population of Mogadishu bears the scars of having witnessed or experienced egregious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.
"There is no safety for civilians, wherever they run. Those fleeing violence in Mogadishu are attacked on the road and those lucky enough to reach a camp or settlement face further violence and dire conditions."
The American-backed invasion, and the depradations of the American-backed TFG, which was helped into power by Somali warlords in the pay of the CIA, have, inevitably, radicalized opposition forces, some of whom respond with similar brutality. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, violent "regime change" aggression only exacerbates the extremism it purports to combat. And, as in the other Terror War operations, the chaos wrought by the war in Somalia breaks down all vestiges of society and human communion, leaving people prey to freebooting criminal gangs and the ravages of desperation.
In the face of all this deliberately fomented horror -- and its embrace by the entire American political establishment -- it is difficult to regard the U.S. presidential race as anything other than a sickening obscenity, played out on a stage drenched in viscera. "Oh my god, did you hear what Harold Ickes said about Barack?!" "Mercy me, did you hear what those latte-swilling Obamaniks said about Hillary's gas tax plan?!" This is juvenile navel-gazing taken to sinister extremes. I honestly cannot fathom such people, who pretend to care about politics and policy -- yet ignore the unspeakable ruin and suffering that are the reality of our politics, the accepted, bipartisan results of our policies.
Until we have a politics that considers the fate of Haboon and her children to be just as important, just as meaningful, just as real as our own, there will be no end to this cycle of atrocity and terror, no end to ruin and revenge, no real change, no matter who is elected.
(More details from the Amnesty report can be found after the jump.)
Judith Miller might have been the poster child for the corporate media's collaboration with the Bush Administration's war of aggression against Iraq -- but her New York Times colleague and co-writer, Michael Gordon, was every bit as culpable and complicit, happily playing stovepipe to the bloodthirsty bullshit gurgling up from the White House and Pentagon cesspits.
Miller is gone from the mainstream heights, but Gordon soldiers on at the Times -- literally. Although he is probably not paid directly by the Bush Regime to peddle their propaganda, he serves precisely the same function as the military brass that the Administration embedded as "independent analysts" on the network news shows -- a nefarious practice most recently exposed in great detail by...the New York Times.
But the Times, like most of our great institutions, piously follows the scriptural injunction, and lets not the right hand know what its left hand is doing. And so while it exposes television's willing collusion with White House warmongering, the paper continues its own collaboration with fomenting aggression -- this time, the conflict with Iran.
Gordon's latest is a classic of this sinister genre. He dutifully stovepipes claims by the usual unnamed "American officials" who tell him that Iranian agents have revealed that Hezbollah is training anti-American Iraqi Shiites inside Iran. This information, we are told, comes from "interrogations" of four Shiite militia members who were captured by American forces last year.
In other words, four Shiites who have been subjected to George W. Bush's beloved (and personally approved) "harsh interrogation techniques" for an entire year have -- surprise, surprise! -- told American officials exactly what they want to hear: that Iran is training Iraqi insurgents to kill Americans. Or to speak plainly and with no addition: four men have been tortured into confessions that serve the Bush Faction's militarist agenda.
But let us be absurd, and entertain for a moment the notion that Gordon's story is true; or rather, that the information tortured out of Iraqis held in indefinite detention and subjected to "strenuous interrogation" for a year is actually true, that Iran is actually using Hezbollah as a proxy to train Iraqi Shiites. The only sensible reply to such an assertion is: So what?
Why shouldn't Iran do exactly what the United States is doing in Iraq: training friendly militias to advance its own "national interests"? (Albeit in a far less extensive, less lethal way -- and in a troubled nation that sits on its border, and which recently invaded Iran?) In the perverted moral universe of the nation-state, Iran would only be following the lead of world's most exemplary nation. What's more, consider the wider, truer context of the story: it takes place at a time when Bush has ordered the escalation of the ongoing U.S. covert campaign inside Iran itself, in which Washington is paying and arming terrorist groups to murder Iranians and wreak violent destruction -- while also authorizing U.S. covert agents to assassinate Iranian officials. Given this reality, why shouldn't Tehran -- or any nation thus targeted for terrorism and assassinations -- take measures to respond?
But of course, Gordon's story is almost certainly false -- especially in its raw, context-less, unnuanced and uncritical regurgitation of Pentagon spin. And in any case, as actual experts such as Juan Cole and Nir Rosen have noted over and over, Iran's closest allies in Iraq are the same extremist factions that Bush himself now maintains in power in Baghdad, at an immense cost of American blood and treasure (not to mention the cost of a million Iraqi lives). Here's Rosen:
The truth is, most allegations about Iran's role in Iraq and the region are unfounded or dishonest. Iran was responsible for ending the recent fighting in Basra and calming the situation after Iraqi parliamentarians who backed Prime Minister Maliki approached it. The Iranians, never close to Muqtada or his family, were so annoyed with Muqtada and his presence that they reportedly ordered him out of Iran where he had been living in virtual house arrest anyway since arriving six months earlier. Iranian officials and the state media clearly supported Prime Minister Maliki and the Iraqi government against what they described as "illegal armed groups" in the recent conflict in Basra, which is not surprising given that their main proxy in Iraq, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council dominates the Iraqi state and is Maliki's main backer.
The Supreme Council is of course also the main proxy for the US in Iraq and somehow in the Senate testimony it was forgotten that its large Badr militia was established in Iran and is actually the only Iraqi opposition group to have fought on the Iranian side against Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. Moreover, the Badr militia was a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that is so demonized today, and Badr dominates the ministry of interior, if not most of Iraq at the higher echelons. But none of this openly available information made its way to the Post's editorial writers or the dominant discourse in the US.
As long as Bush's favored Shiite factions remain in office in Baghdad, Iran will have close and willing allies in charge of Iraq. In fact, the worst possible result for Iran at this juncture would be the collapse of the present Baghdad government and its replacement by a faction or coalition actually devoted to the interests of an independent, sovereign Iraq. In this, Tehran and Washington have the same goal: the continuation of a weak, vulnerable and easily cowed and manipulated government nominally in charge of the broken, ruined nation once known as Iraq. If Hezbollah is actually training any Iraqis in Iran, it is the militias of the parties now in charge of the Bush-backed government.
The Bushists know all this. They know that Iran is actually backing Bush's own allies in Iraq, and, if anything, have helped keep that collection of grifters, grafters and collaborators in office. But it doesn't matter to the Bushists that Iran is serving Washington's short-term interests in Iraq -- any more than it mattered that Saddam Hussein was performing an invaluable service for the West during his tenure in power -- including after the first Gulf War. As Michael Scheuer put it recently:
Saddam Hussein was the single most important ally of the United States against al-Qaeda and its allies, and he was the best kind of ally because he did what America needed done without our having to coax, pay, or coerce him to do so. As long as Saddam was in power, the jihadis were stuck in place in South Asia and they were not coming west to permanent bases because the Iraqi intelligence and military services lethally greeted them on arrival. Saddam surely supported Palestinian terrorists, but so what; they attacked Israel not the United States. For America, Saddam was the cork in the neck of the bottle that kept the Sunni Islamists penned-up. Feith and his neocon sidekicks pull the cork from the bottle and now the jihadis have moved 2,500km west to more seriously threaten the Arab Peninsula, the Levant, Europe and Israel.
I believe that the chieftains of the Terror War were well aware of all this, just as they are obviously aware that Tehran is backing America's own partner in Iraq. But just as this knowledge didn't stop them from removing Saddam -- to the obvious detriment of their professed aims -- neither will it stop them from trying to remove the Iranian regime, despite their mutual alliance with Tehran in backing the Green Zone government. That's because it is not and has never been their goal to see secular, democratic, independent governments in either Iraq or Iran. They do not and have never cared a single instant about the freedom and well-being of the Iraqi or the Iranian people. (Or the American people, for that matter.) They are engaged on a long-range project of perpetual war toward an eventual goal of iron-clad military domination of a strategic portion of the world's energy supplies and distribution, and the establishment of America's "unipolar domination" over geopolitical affairs.
The many wars that are being fought -- and will be fought -- toward that goal are regarded as highly profitable sidelines. Their details don't really matter -- which collaborators can be cobbled together, which temporary alliances can be formed, what kind of governments emerge in the shattered territories, what actually happens to the worthless rabble who happen to live in the targeted lands. As we have noted before, this is why the Bush Administration's Iraq war aims and strategies and tactics have appeared to be constantly changing and blatantly contradictory -- because these details do not matter. As long as the war grinds on -- in whatever form -- the militarists will reap gigantic war profits (with the concomitant skewing of the political playing field at home; that kind of swag buys a lot of politicians, a lot of think tanks, and a lot of corporate media), and will keep the ball rolling toward the ultimate goal.
Michael Gordon has long been one of the most useful non-entities pushing this wheel of fire and death down the road for the masters of the war machine. And with his latest piece of shameless, craven stenography, he has done them sterling service once again.
The Terror Master: Bush Orders Covert 'Surge' Against Iran, with Dem Support [quote]If the ruling elite were monolithic, banger would be correct.[/quote]
It would take more than that. On many subjects, the "ruling elite" are monolithic. Banger isn't here to divine truth. Banger is here to rend holes in fabric, to put loop...
Shoot, Kill, Lie, Repeat: America's New Moral Universe mjosef --
Great comment.
Sadly, most people spend their lives either running from or sublimating those innate human qualities like violence.
I've had conversations with women who tell me that they don't like how men are so competitive. Then those...
Serving the System: Disillusion, Deception and the Obama Campaign Good excerpt, Charles. I especially like this statement:
[quote]And frankly, I think it appeals—it’s an appeal that gets greatest traction among people who want to take politics out of politics, ultimately.[/quote]
That's exactly right. It's ...
Shoot, Kill, Lie, Repeat: America's New Moral Universe for putting the focus back where it belongs.
I wanted to mention another interesting essay. Titled [i]"Liberal" Israelis: Still Crying And Shooting After All These Years[/i], it touches on some of the same issues as your piece.
http://lawrenceofcy...
Fallujah Revisited: Bush, Petraeus Prepare 'Cleansing' of Sadr City Thank you for writing about the horror of Fallujah. On the the day that we stormed into this beautiful space in April of 2003 and occupied a school and then shot and killed residents of this town protesting our soldiers occupying their kids school I...
Serving the System: Disillusion, Deception and the Obama Campaign Amy Goodman had an interesting conversation on April 30 between 2 African-American professors (Melissa Harris Lacewell and Adolph Reed, Jr.) discussing the Obama candidacy that epitomizes the current choice before us. Here, a couple of excerpts
Lac...
Shoot, Kill, Lie, Repeat: America's New Moral Universe The greatness of Mr. Floyd's wartime reporting is that he is not on the frontlines like the star war reporters of old, like Ernie Pyle, Ernest Hemingway, Michael Herr. He is where hundreds of millions of us are - connected to the war by our economic ...
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Crushing the Ants: The Admiral and the Empire
Thursday, 06 March 2008
UPDATED*
There has been quite a buzzing in "progressive" circles over the new Esquire article about Admiral William Fallon, head of U.S. Central Command, the military satrapy that covers the entire "arc of crisis" at the heart of the "War on Terror," from east Africa, across the Middle East, and on to the borders of China. Much has been made of Fallon's alleged apostasy from the Bush Regime's bellicosity toward Tehran; indeed, the article paints Fallon as the sole bulwark against an American attack on Iran – and hints ominously that the good admiral may be forced out by George W. Bush this summer, clearing the way for one last murderous hurrah by the lame duck president. The general reaction to the article seems to be: God preserve this honorable man, and keep him as our shield and defender against the wicked tyrant.
But this is most curious. For behind the melodramatic framing and gushing hero-worship of the article – written by Thomas Barnett (of whom more later) – we find nothing but a few mild disagreements between Fallon and the White House over certain questions of tactics, timing and presentation in regard to American domination of a vast range of nations and peoples.
Fallon himself has long denied the story which had him declaring, upon taking over Central Command, that a war on Iran "isn't going to happen on my watch." And in fact, the article itself depicts Fallon's true attitude toward the idea of an attack on Iran right up front, in his own words. After noting Fallon's concerns about focusing too much on Iran to the exclusion of the other "pots boiling over" in the region, Barnett nevertheless keeps pressing the point and asks: "And if it comes to war?" Fallon replies with stark, brutal clarity:
"Get serious," the admiral says. "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them."
The article makes clear that Fallon's main concerns about a war with Iran are, as noted, about tactics and timing: Sure, when the time comes – no shuffling on that point – we'll crush these subhumans like the insects they are; but we've already got a lot on our plate at the moment, so why not hold off as long as we can? After all, Fallon is conducting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as overseeing an on-going "regime change" operation in Somalia, where the United States has been aiding Ethiopian invaders with bombing raids, death squads, renditions and missile strikes against Somali civilians – such as the one this week that killed three women and three children.
The most remarkable fact about the Esquire article is not its laughable portrayal of the man in charge of mass slaughter and military aggression across a broad swathe of the globe as a shining knight holding back the dogs of war. Nor is it the delusion on the part of Barnett --- and much of the commentariat as well – that Bush would ever appoint some kind of secret peacenik as the main commander of his Terror War. (Although it could well be that Fallon will be fired in the end for not groveling obsequiously enough to the Leader, in the required Petraeus-Franks manner. Or indeed, that he might even resign rather than commit what he sees as the tactical error of crushing the Iranian ants at this particular time. But so what? If he quits, someone else who would be happy to do the stomping will be appointed in his place. If Bush decides to attack Iran, then Iran will be attacked. There is no one standing in the way. It's as simple, and terrifying, as that.)
No, what is most noteworthy about the article is that Barnett has given us, unwittingly, one of the clearest pictures yet of the true nature of the American system today. And that system is openly, unequivocally and unapologetically imperial, in every sense of the word, and in every sinew of its structure. For what is Fallon's actual position? We see him commanding vast armies, both his own and those of local proxies, waging battles to bend nations, regions and peoples to the will of a superpower. We see him meeting with the heads of client kingdoms in his purview, in Cairo, Kabul, Baghdad, Dushanbe: advising, cajoling, demanding, threatening, wading deeply into the internal affairs of the dominated lands, seeking to determine their politics, their economic development, their military structure and foreign policies.
For example, Barnett tells us that Fallon was locked away with Pervez Musharaff for hours the day before the Pakistani dictator imposed emergency rule last year. Barnett, hilariously, swallows Fallon's line that Washington didn't greenlight Musharaff's crackdown: "Did I tell him this is not a recommended course of action? Of course." Yes, Admiral, whatever you say. But did you tell him there would be any adverse consequences whatsoever from Washington: any cut-off or even diminution of military and economic aid, for example? Of course not. (For a glimpse of hero-worship, here's how Barnett sets the scene: "As the admiral recounts the exchange, his voice is flat, his gaze steady. His calculus on this subject is far more complex than anyone else's." A calculus more complex than anyone else's in the whole wide world! And certainly more complex than any analysis those ants in Pakistan could come up with themselves.) To his credit, Fallon then goes on to give the true picture: Washington supported the crackdown because Pakistan is "an immature democracy" that needs a savvy strongman – and American loyalist – at the helm. As for the idea that Benazir Bhutto – then still alive – could play a role in stabilizing the country: "Fallon is pessimistic. He slowly shakes his head. 'Better forget that.'" A few weeks later, Bhutto was out of the picture.
What we are seeing, quite simply, is an imperial proconsul in action. There is no difference whatsoever between Fallon's role and that of the proconsuls sent out by the Roman emperors to deal with the wars and tribes and client kingdoms of the empire's far-flung provinces. There too, the Emperor could not simply snap his fingers and bend every event to his will; there had to be some cajoling, compromise, occasional setbacks. But behind everything lurked the threat of Roman military power and the promise of ruin and death if Rome's interests were not accommodated in the end. It is the same with America's proconsuls today. Nowhere in the article – nor anywhere else in the well-wadded bastions of the "bipartisan foreign policy community" (and amongst its fawning scribes) – will you find even the slightest inkling of a doubt that America should be comporting itself as an imperial power in this way. It is simply a given that an American military commander – with or without a calm, steely gaze and complex calculus – should be hashing out emergency decrees with Central Asian dictators, launching missile strikes on African villages, driving hell-for-leather in bristling convoys down the streets of occupied cities, stationing warships off the coast of Lebanon and Iran… and continually throwing massive amounts of American blood and treasure into a never-ending campaign to "crush the ants" that swarm so inconveniently around the imperial boot heels. For the elite – and, sadly, for the majority of other Americans as well – this is simply the natural order of the world. Not only are these imperial assumptions unquestioned; they are unconscious, as if it were literally inconceivable that the nation's affairs could be ordered in any other way. We should be grateful to Barnett. Not even the most scathing dissident could have produced a more damning indictment of America's imperial system than this fawning – indeed groveling – piece of hagiography.
Postscript: This is not the first time that Barnett's true-believer cluelessness has produced genuine revelations. Last year, in a similarly gung-ho, brass-awed piece on Washington's latest imperial satrapy, the Africa Command, Barnett revealed that the Bush Administration was using an American death squad in Somalia to "clean up" areas after a bombing or missile strike. As I wrote in June 2007 ("Kill Anyone Left Alive": American Special Ops in Somalia):
The Esquire piece, by Thomas Barnett, is a mostly glowing portrait of the Africa Command, which, we are told, is designed to wed military, diplomatic, and development prowess in a seamless package, a whole new way of projecting American power: "pre-emptive nation-building instead of pre-emptive regime change," or as Barnett describes it at another point, "Iraq done right." Although Barnett's glib, jargony, insider piece -- told entirely from the point of view of U.S. military officials -- does contain bits of critical analysis, it is in no way an expose. The new details he presents on the post-invasion slaughter are thus even more chilling, as they are offered simply as an acceptable, ordinary aspect of this laudable new enterprise.
Barnett reveals that the gunship attacks on refugees were just the first part of the secret U.S. mission that was "Africa Command's" debut on the imperial stage. Soon after the attacks, "Task Force 88, a very secret American special-operations unit," was helicoptered into the strike area. As Barnett puts it: "The 88's job was simple: Kill anyone still alive and leave no unidentified bodies behind."
Some 70,000 people fled their homes in the first wave of the Ethiopian invasion. (More than 400,000 fled the brutal consolidation of the invasion in Mogadishu last spring.) Tens of thousands of these initial refugees headed toward the Kenyan border, where the American gunships struck. When the secret operation was leaked, Bush Administration officials said that American planes were trying to hit three alleged al Qaeda operatives who had allegedly been given sanctuary by the Islamic Councils government decapitated by the Ethiopians. But Barnett's insiders told him that the actual plan was to wipe out thousands of "foreign fighters" whom Pentagon officials believed had joined the Islamic Courts forces. "Honestly, nobody had any idea just how many there really were," Barnett was told. "But we wanted to get them all."
Thus the Kenyan border area -- where tens of thousands of civilians were fleeing -- was meant to be "a killing zone," Barnett writes:
America's first AC-130 gunship went wheels-up on January 7 from that secret Ethiopian airstrip. After each strike, anybody left alive was to be wiped out by successive waves of Ethiopian commandos and Task Force 88, operating out of Manda Bay. The plan was to rinse and repeat 'until no more bad guys, as one officer put it.
At this point, Barnett -- or his source -- turns coy. We know there were multiple gunship strikes; and from Barnett's account, we know that the "88s" did go in at least once after the initial gunship attack to "kill anyone still alive and leave no unidentified bodies behind." But Barnett's story seems to suggest that once active American participation in the war was leaked, the "killing zone" was abandoned at some point. So there is no way of knowing at this point how many survivors of the American attacks were then killed by the "very special secret special-operations unit," or how many "rinse-and-repeat" cycles the "88s" were able to carry out in what Barnett called "a good plan."
Nor do we know just who the "88s" killed. As noted, the vast majority of refugees were civilians, just as the majority of the victims killed by the American gunship raids were civilians. Did the "88s" move in on the nomadic tribesmen decimated by the air attack and "kill everyone still alive"? Or did they restrict themselves to killing any non-Somalis they found among the refugees?
* Update: The original version of the post misidentified Fallon in the first paragraph. Thanks to astute readers for pointing out this mistake.
I see no possibility of any change in the fundamental course of U.S. policy towards ever-increasing militarism/imperialism. I'm trying to visualize an alternative and I see none at all. Those who run the world want us to be Rome--in fact it has been the dream of the West to have a new Rome for the past millenium. And here we are, the new Rome. Does anybody see any possibility of a change? I see none. I see no substantial opposition and I see that the liberal intelligencia has bought into the phony "War on Terror" even though the fiction is as obvious as the Emperor's New Clothes. "We" want the Empire on some collective unconscious level. Everything is in place so that even if we collapse economically the imperial forces will seize what they have to.
Chris, I've never disagreed with you before, but now I do. Some points:
--It's not Fallon's fault that the unitary executive, commander in chief of us all, is allowed to operate unfettered and unconstitutionally by a compliant congress.
--You describe Fallon as omnipotent, then fault him for not having enough control over Musharaff.
--You characterize Barnett's "hero-worship" as Fallon's fault.
--Fallon acting as"proconsul" is necessary because of the vacuum left by a non-functioning State Department, and therefore serves a need, doesn't it?
--The fact that there is, as you concede, a "few mild disagreements" between the commander in chief and a uniformed officer several levels lower in the command chain is, believe it or not, remarkable, particularly under present conditions. That is Barnett's main point, and I agree.
other Fallon-facts: --One of Fallon's first moves on taking command of Centcom was to order his subordinates to avoid the term "long war" - a phrase Bush and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had used to describe the fight against terrorism. Military sources explained that Fallon was concerned that the concept of a long war would alienate Middle East publics by suggesting that US troops would remain in the region indefinitely.
--Fallon acquired a reputation for a willingness to stand up to powerful figures during his tenure as commander-in-chief of the Pacific Command from February 2005 to March 2007. He pushed hard for a conciliatory line toward China, which put him in conflict with senior military and civilian officials with a vested interest in pointing to China as a future rival and threat. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II14Ak02.html
Come on, you'll miss The Fox when they can him this summer for another Casey/Petraeus/Franks bootlicker-type.
PS -- You refer to Fallon as "Mullen" throughout the first paragraph. I tried to contact you but that feature is disabled.
I first ran into Barnett several years back as he gave a PowerPoint presentation (on CSPAN) called "The Pentagon's New Map". It was pretty much the best presentation on the how's of empire I had ever seen. Where others could only speak in generalities of empire as some sort of deserved manifest destiny, there was Barnett laying it all out in a way where it all actually might work. He was brilliant.
Still, I wished as I watched then that I could have been there in the audience to ask him a question during the concluding Q&A;. "OK," I would have said, "that is certainly the way to "do empire", but you didn't address WHY we are "doing empire" in the first place. With all the great work you've done here, you've not answered the most basic question, and that is IF we should be "doing empire" at all?"
But alas, Barnett, ever in his own mind the perfect soldier, cannot think like this. There is the mission, and that is sufficient. Why cloud things up with reasons? Or as you've said here, Chris, clueless. A brilliant mind, but clueless.
Don, thanks very much for catching the boneheaded mistake on Fallon's name; I really appreciate that.
As for the disagreements you mention, I'm not sure I agree with some of your characterizations of what I wrote. I don't think I implied that Barnett's hero-worship is Fallon's fault, for one thing. Nor did I describe Fallon as "omnipotent." In fact, I specifically made the point that neither he, nor the Roman proconsuls -- nor the Roman Emperors for that matter -- were omnipotent. I thought I was pretty clear on this point: "the Emperor could not simply snap his fingers and bend every event to his will; there had to be some cajoling, compromise, occasional setbacks." Perhaps I could have make this lack of omnipotence even clearer, but I don't really see how.
Also, I didn't fault Fallon for "not having enough control over Musharaff" (although even if I had done that, it would have fallen under the same lack of omnipotence described above). On the contrary; I though I stated pretty plainly my opinion that Fallon in fact greenlighted Musharaff's action, with Washington's blessing. I called Fallon's description of his session with Musharaff "hilarious," since it was obvious that neither he nor Bush ever threatened Musharaff with any adverse consequences for his action. Again, I thought I was pretty clear on this point, but maybe not.
And no, of course it's not Fallon's fault that Bush is allowed to be a tyrant by a corrupt and compliant congress. I don't think I blamed Fallon for the cancerous rot of our constitutional republic. As for his being forced to act as proconsul because of a non-functioning State Department, well, I guess that's right -- if you believe that it is the State Department's function to wade "deeply into the internal affairs of the dominated lands, seeking to determine their politics, their economic development, their military structure and foreign policies." This is what Fallon is doing. (It's also what the State Department is doing as well; the recent Vanity Fair story on Condi Rice's involvement in engineering a coup in Palestine and sowing the seeds of the present upsurge of horror in the Middle East is a good example.)
If you believe that the United States should be doing these things, well, then, you're right that Fallon is fulfilling a necessary function. But the entire point of my piece was to say that we should NOT be doing these things, we should NOT be an empire, and so we should NOT have government officials -- from the Pentagon, or Foggy Bottom, or anywhere else -- carrying out these imperial duties.
I'm sure Fallon is every bit the attractive character that Barnett paints in his article: tough, savvy, far-seeing, with a greater eye for the complexities of the region than his bosses back in Washington, etc., etc. But as I said in the article: so what? If he stands in the way of what Bush and Cheney want to do, they will move him aside. All of his "remarkable" disagreements will mean nothing.
And can we remember one central point, before we turn Fallon into some kind of hero? [I'm not say that you personally think he's a hero, I'm just talking about the general trend.] However attractive or savvy Fallon may be as a person, he is still the overall commander of an outrageous, blood-soaked, shameful, on-going war crime in Iraq. I don't "blame" Fallon for Bush's constitutional usurpation; I do blame him for serving this tyrant and prosecuting the tyrant's illegal, immoral and murderous war of aggression. No one forced Fallon to take this position and run this war, and all of the "Terror War" atrocities under his command. If he had resigned as a point of honor at the beginning of the war, declaring that no honorable soldier could take part in such a criminal action, then he would have been a hero. But now he is a willing, active, central accomplice to a massive war crime. For all of his savvy, he has no honor. For all of his toughness, he is a moral coward. He deserves our contempt.
pigs in a blanket, 69 cents, eggs roll 'em over and a package of Kents. Hash browns, Hash browns. Dreams of a waitress with Maxwell house eyes, marmalade thighs, and scrambled yellow hair-T. Waites. Gone. Wendy's hot'n'juicy in the green zone.Blood on the parapet, blood on the median strip.Blood running black and thick as #6 crude.....
Chris, I believe from all I've read that Admiral Fallon is pouring some oil on troubled waters within the Centcom countries and is the primary military restraint against war with Iran, an example being the dampening of the recent confrontation in the Gulf. That's his history and that's what he's doing. Mainly he's getting around and talking to people, which is not a common trait in this administration. Personally I feel safer with him at the helm of Centcom rather than as a resigned "honorable soldier," and I take the fact that he's hanging in there to moderate the effect of the current criminals in Washington as a more honorable option than quitting. He's doing this even as he suffers the indignity of the CinC bypassing him to highlight his subordinate, General Petraeus.
I am afraid, as you suggest, that Fallon will be gone by summer to be replaced by a mere functionary. The military doesn't brook non-compliancy for long, but isn't it more honorable to be fired than to quit? Until then Fox Fallon deserves our support.
Mr. Bacon, I believe you are on the wrong website somehow.
Anyone still in the U.S. military has hands soaked in innocent blood and does not deserve support. Besides, they HAVE support. That is what most people reading this website object to.
The demise of the State Department as America's primary official focus for contact with foreign governments and their people is a post-World War II development that began gradually, but has now run its course to tragic global end point, culminating in the dramatic escalation of overt militarism and covert paramilitarism of the Bush/Cheney regime.
The issue (as Dwight Eisenhower and historian Chalmers Johnson both might frame it) is whether the military/industrial/national security complex can be restrained by the American political system, or whether imperial needs will devour whatever fragile Constitutional constraints and domestic policy options that remain.
Guns or butter, empire abroad or democracy at home.
Take your pick, much like the people of Great Britain were forced by economic and political realities to make that painful choice regarding their former colonies in the late 1940's and early 50's.
As Chris's insightful review of Esquire's profile of Admiral Fallon illustrates, scarcely a soul holding public office today is even asking the right sorts of questions. If there's any light at the end of the tunnel, I think it will come from embracing the analysis of Joseph Stiglitz's latest book on the catastrophic economic impact of continuing the occupation of Iraq, or expanding things deeper into Iran and the rest of our self-created "arc of instability". Even the dimmest of American voters can grasp the notion that we can't keep running up the national credit card tab forever by borrowing from the Chinese indefinitely to fight wars of indefinite duration, and expect there will be any money left for either bread or for circuses.
Also, it's not just the Pentagon, and Pentagon spending, that has to be addressed. Sixty years worth of black ops by the Central Intelligence Agency overseas were part and parcel of creating the global imperial presence. The State Department slid down the policy making totem pole into relative insignificance during the last half century due to creeping paramilitarism right alongside militarism.
I agree that Fallon is a very slender reed upon which to lean when it comes to staving off an "October surprize" bombing incursion into Iran by the Bush administration while the war criminals pack their bags to leave the White House, laughing all the way to the bank. Furthermore, the reasonable, restrained neo-likberal Admiral is powerless to prevent escalation from bubbling up from the bottom, say, if there were a major SNAFU creating significant US casulties on one of the ships in the giant Persian Gulf flotilla, and a decision had to be made whether to attribute the tragic incident to hostile action or somebody's negligence within the chain of command.
I tend to view Admiral Fallon's status as a bellwether in two respects -
1) The Admiral resignation/removal will be viewed by me as an ominous sign with respect to the prospects for an attack on Iran; and
2) That a military General with sights firmly set on the strategic goal of long-term control and dominance represents a kind of, er, hope is an extremely troubling sign 'o' the times.
The times are such that the Admiral's views of, and role in, the American Empire nevertheless represent the best that can be hoped for in the circumstances. Put another way for clarity: When it comes to an attack on Iran, I'll gladly accept any delay, even if it is for tactical reasons, and be grateful for it.
Such objectives are - ahem - admirable when compared to, say, a military general whose goal is career-furtherance, and only to happy to be the power elite's political poster boy du jour.
So, if for the worst of reasons, Admiral Fallon buys some time for Iran, my view is that it's time well bought. The time so bought may allow for other events and factors to play some kind of role in preventing another calamitous and immoral attack on humanity.
George W. Bush and David Petraeus are preparing to make 
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