[THS] John Grant: Truth Through a Soda Straw

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25760.htm

Truth Through a Soda Straw

By John Grant

    The truth about American politics is this: disguised by the theatrics of squabbling
Democrats and Republicans, Washington governs according to limits prescribed by a
fixed and narrow consensus. The two main parties collaborate in preserving that
consensus. Doing so requires declaring out-of-bounds anything even remotely
resembling a fundamental critique of how power gets exercised or wealth distributed.

    -Andrew Bacevich

June 18, 2010 "This Can't Be Happening. " -- Barack Obama has two serious leak
problems.

One is a real leak -- of oil from the bowels of the Earth into the Gulf of Mexico and
onto the shores of the Gulf States. The other is a metaphoric leak -- of information
from the vast reservoir of secrecy our military and its wars have become.

Dishonesty, the notion of “too big to fail” and Bacevich’s consensus are at the core of
both leak problems.

In the case of British Petroleum and the Deepwater Horizon explosion, we know how
a back-slapping, good ol’ boy network has led to a lack of oversight and regulation.
As we learned from the financial disaster, the arrogant single-focus drive for profit
leads to corners being cut and, in the case of BP, the absence of any kind of Plan B
to deal with great gobs of uncontrollable orange goo gushing from a hole over a mile
beneath the sea’s surface.

The secrecy leak is different. In this case, President Obama is trying to stop leaks that
tap into the too-big-to-fail corruption and dishonesty within a huge enterprise directly
under his control: The Pentagon.

The United States Military is the largest self-contained, self-aggrandizing enterprise in
the world. As militaries everywhere tend to do, it protects itself as an institution and
uses its power to co-opt whatever elements of the culture it feels it needs or can
benefit from.

Central America is the perfect small-scale model. In Guatemala, the military is an
institution that always trumps elected civilian leadership. In El Salvador, military
officers are deeply involved in banks and business ventures. In Honduras, the
general who mounted the 2009 coup has been appointed to run the lucrative
Hondutel phone system. In fact, the much-ballyhooed one-term limit for presidents in
Honduras exists precisely to limit a civilian politician’s power vis-à-vis the more stable
military institution.

Only naiveté or delusional patriotism explains why Americans do not realize this
dynamic also exists here in the US.

Since the Iraq debacle circa 2007, General David Petraeus has taken over the US
military by storm. He is clearly a very brilliant man. His highly-touted
counterinsurgency doctrine saved the war in Iraq from disaster and, then, made
continuing the war politically possible.

Disciples of the COIN Doctrine assure readers of Newsweek, in one preposterous
example, that, had it been employed in Vietnam, we could have won that war. It is a
doctrine based on seeing the military, not as Karl von Clausewitz saw it – “a
continuation of political activity by other means" – but rather as politics itself, with a
special focus on humanitarian outreach and “nation-building.”

In Clausewitz’s day, there was politics and there was war. War was a decisive step
beyond politics. In Petraeus’ Pentagon, the distinctions between politics and war are
diminished or lost completely.

Thus, our military, which does not operate on a two, four or six-year political cycle,
has incrementally moved deeper and deeper into the US policy decision-making
realm. The 9/11 attacks and the feelings of fear and revenge that followed have
accelerated this dynamic. Politicians from both parties now defer to Pentagon leaders
for decisions on war and peace -- something the founding fathers precisely tried to
avoid.

A man like Barack Obama with no military experience is forced to dance to their tune
or be seen as taking them on. So he dances.

In this sense, the true brilliance of General Petraeus and his COIN Doctrine is less
evident on the ground in Afghanistan – where the situation is a disaster – than it is in
the halls of power in Washington DC. Petraeus is the prime reason our two disastrous
wars are so invulnerable to criticism.

Sustaining this Olympian image as the man on whose shoulders our war policies rest
must be incredibly stressful for General Petraeus, who, after all, is just a human
being. When he passed out in a Senate hearing on Tuesday, it may have been
dehydration, as Petraeus said, but it also may have been due to the stress.

He had just been grilled by Senator Levin on sticking to the July 2011 withdrawal
date publicly declared by President Obama and, then, was being asked by Senator
McCain for assurances he would not hesitate, if necessary, to keep our soldiers in
Afghanistan beyond the July 2011 date. At that point, kerplunk!, his head hit the
table.

Clausewitz wrote a lot about confidence and doubt – or as Senator McCain put it in
the hearings, sounding “an uncertain trumpet.” Here’s a good example:

    After we have thought out everything carefully in advance and have sought and
found without prejudice the most plausible plan, we must not be ready to abandon it
at the slightest provocation. Should this certainty be lacking, we must tell ourselves
that nothing is accomplished in warfare without daring; that the nature of war
certainly does not let us see at all times where we are going; that what is probable
will always be probable though at the moment it may not seem so; and finally, that
we cannot be readily ruined by a single error, if we have made reasonable
preparations.

Mere civilians can only imagine the vast, hidden reservoir of secrets a man like David
Petraeus carries within him: All manner of black budget research projects and
operations, a host of global special operations missions, surveillance into everyday
lives, hidden detention centers and probably the largest element in that vast
reservoir, the record of screw-ups, the evidence of bad decisions and embarrassing
outcomes and, finally, the hypocrisies and outright lies. And, of course, there’s the
fact many of these matters are illegal or unconstitutional and that the visual ugliness
of war makes it hard to sell.

His job, despite the setbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq, is to put a good face on it and
sell it to Congress, which still holds the purse strings on our wars.

The New York Times reported that Petraeus’ goal before the Senate hearing was to
show that the military now has “the inputs right” in the war in Afghanistan and that
these promising inputs will lead to positive “outputs” down the road. This as the war
in Afghanistan becomes the longest war in US history.

The seductive logic of the Petraeus COIN Doctrine is, while we may be having a
rough time now, if we only adhere to Clausewitz and persist with the plan to keep
sending young soldiers and our money into the maw, we will someday come out
smelling like a rose.

Forty years ago, it was called “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Tapping into the reservoir of US secrecy

Julian Assange is the Australian who founded WikiLeaks, the web-based entity
created to leak military secrets. Assange may be about to release critically
embarrassing Pentagon video of a May 2009 US air strike on the Afghan village of
Garani that killed over 100 civilians with a one-ton airburst bomb. At the time,
General Petraeus said the video would show the attack was justified. It was never
released.

The US military is now reportedly hunting for Assange, who spends a lot of time in
Iceland, a nation very friendly to journalists and leakers.

For interesting video comments on Assange by Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel
Ellsberg, go to: Michael Moore.com.

In May the military arrested SP4 Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst
in Iraq, for allegedly releasing to WikiLeaks video from the nose of an Apache
gunship as its pilots gleefully gun down two Reuters cameramen and a number of
Iraqis. In the incident, the aerial gunmen seriously wound two children in a van.

As the two kids are removed from the van by US soldiers, the pilots are heard
commenting that they shouldn’t have brought kids to a firefight. The fact the gunship
is far enough away that the people on the ground seem not to be aware of it and
that the van seems to have stopped to give assistance to the wounded from the first
volley, makes the pilots’ remarks seem sadistic and delusional.

Beyond the issue of “war crimes,” the Apache video is devastating as a window into
how US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are fought, how one-sided they are
technologically and how hi-tech war tends to debase soldiers to the point of
expressing glee at killing people – in this case, people defending their own
neighborhood.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates was quick to condemn the video leak. He said it was
like looking at war “through a soda straw.”

It’s hard to disagree with Gates’ soda straw metaphor. (I’ll leave for another day the
question why the Bush appointee Gates is still running the Defense Department.)

Gene Roberts, the famous editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer during the 1980s when
the paper was a crusading magnet for Pulitzer Prizes, liked to describe his business
this way: A city newspaper was a lighthouse in the center of a darkened city, sending
out a pencil-thin line of light to illuminate tiny pockets in the life of the city.

Soda straw. Searchlight. It’s all the same. The only way to bring the light of truth to a
vast area of darkness is to illuminate small pieces of that darkness. This is exactly
what WikiLeaks is attempting to do using the internet -- and it seems to scare the Hell
out of the US military and the Obama administration.

They are so scared, the man who campaigned for transparent government is more
dogged than George Bush in stanching journalistic leaks and shutting down court
hearings that might tap into the military’s reservoir of secrecy.

Currently, the Obama administration is seeking to send whistleblower Thomas Drake
to jail under The Espionage Act for leaking material on a National Security Agency
program to a Baltimore Sun reporter. His purpose was efficiency and the
discouragement of waste. The intention is clearly to make an example and intimidate
future leakers.

Then, there’s the courts. All now agree Canadian Maher Arar was 100% innocent
when the US rendered him to Syria for a full year of detention and torture. Still, the
Obama administration argued the Supreme Court should not hear his case.

Why? According to Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, it might raise questions about
“the motives and sincerity of the United States officials who concluded that petitioner
could be removed to Syria.”

Leaking is an honorable enterprise

In order to prevent the release of material damning or embarrassing to them, the
Pentagon and the Obama administration are criminalizing good, honorable people
whose instincts are to be open and fair.

There is no reason why Americans should not see what US soldiers in Iraq and
Afghanistan are doing in their name and with their tax resources. In a free society,
the fact something may discredit the military is the military’s problem. Using the
power of courts, prisons or worse to quash the truth is, as a Times editorial put it,
disgraceful.

In a Department of Defense Anti-Terrorism Awareness Training course, the following
question is asked:

    Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?

    A. Attacking the Pentagon.

    B. IEDs.

    C. Hate crimes against racial groups.

    D. Protests.

    The correct answer is D. Protests.

If at the center of your government you have a huge, closed, untouchable military
institution that trains its personnel to see legitimate civilian opposition as the enemy,
you are in trouble. The arbitrary rule of secret government becomes inevitable.

Decent, red-blooded Americans need to support courageous entities like WikiLeaks
and prevent the US government from making truth-seeking a criminal act.