Armchair Generalist

America's Un-War

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Obama's Escalations in Libya

Word from Reuters is that President Obama has authorized covert support to the rebel forces in Libya, even as they retreat from Qaddafi's government forces. But the White House isn't commenting as to whether this includes arming and training the rebels.

Obama said the U.S. had not ruled out providing military hardware to rebels. "It's fair to say that if we wanted to get weapons into Libya, we probably could. We're looking at all our options at this point," he told ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer.

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted to reporters that no decision had yet been taken.

Can I just say what a stupid, bad idea this would be?

“We have seen flickers in the intelligence of potential al-Qaeda” and Hezbollah fighters among opposition forces, U.S. Adm. James Stavridis, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, said in congressional testimony.

Well, as long as it's just flickers. I mean, what could go wrong in giving unstable, young and violent men anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and heavy machine guns? So let's send in CIA teams to liaison with these guys and feel them out? As long as we're not talking about combat operations with US troops - yet. Is it true that no administration has ever figured out how badly our involvement in Vietnam went? Didn't that start off with CIA advisors and special ops teams, too?

Military bases in AFRICOM

Okay, I thought the whole thing about US Africa Command was that US military didn't have bases in Africa. So what's in Djibouti?

Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti (CLDJ) is located in the Horn of Africa and is the only U.S. military infrastructure located in Africa providing a base of operations geared toward building security, sovereignty, and stability in the region. When you arrive, you will see and hear the vibrant operational tempo that exists here day and night.
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The Camp supports approximately 2,500 U.S., joint and allied forces military and civilian personnel and U.S. Department of Defense contractors. Additionally, the base provides employment for approximately 1,200 local and third country nation workers. The Camp is the primary base of operations for U.S. Africa Command in the Horn of Africa and is home to Commander, Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa.

Learn something new every day. And I guess the moratorium against contractor services doesn't apply. Some real money being pumped into that forward operating base.

Cult of Crazy - Anthrax Edition (cont)

Okay, when I mocked a crazy lady's view of the 2001 anthrax attacks and manufacture of anthrax vaccine yesterday, I really didn't expect that anyone else - let alone a U.S. congressional representative - would share the view that the anthrax attacks were the reason that the US government went into Iraq. But then again, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) has not been very rational about this particular issue.

The anthrax attacks “made it possible to manufacture the argument that there was WMD in Iraq and links to Al-Qaeda,” Rep. Rush Holt, a leading Congressional critic on the anthrax investigation, tells Danger Room.
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“It was the second and confirming incident that a worldwide network had penetrated the United States, that the country was under widespread attack — and that anything was possible,” Holt says. “The enemy could be anywhere and everywhere and use any means to attack.”

I don't know why Holt thinks this is relevant to the FBI's investigation of Ivins, other than there is this crackpot theory by some who are convinced the anthrax came from Iraq - despite the overwhelming lack of evidence to support that statement - and therefore, the Bush administration must have had a relevant reason to think the anthrax came from overseas, thus supporting the need to invade Iraq. 

It may be that Holt got this brilliant idea based on a Newsweek article by Jacob Weisberg who suggests that the anthrax attack had a bigger effect on the Bush administration than previously appreciated, to the point that he believes the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq had the 2001 anthrax attacks not occurred. I find his theory much less than convincing. Weisberg writes:

In a November 2001 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cheney offered this definition: "We will hold those who harbor terrorists, those who provide sanctuary to terrorists, responsible for their acts."

But by the time Cheney spoke those words, a second wave of terrorism had already exposed the inadequacy of Doctrine 2.0. The anthrax attacks in New York and Washington created a sense of vulnerability that was in many respects greater than the mass murder at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Inside the administration, the October bioterror attacks had a larger impact than is generally appreciated—one in many ways bigger than 9/11. Without the anthrax attacks, Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq.

At that point, nearly everyone involved in national security assumed there would be another wave of terrorist attacks. The daily intelligence summary substantiated this panic; "chatter" was at record levels. In an effort to understand the potential threat, Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby ordered up a briefing on a war game, known as "Dark Winter," which modeled a smallpox outbreak in an American city in much the way "continuity of government" exercises Cheney had participated in during the 1980s simulated nuclear catastrophe.

According to a source close to Bush, Cheney swiftly reported back to the Oval Office with a sobering message: the United States was essentially defenseless against the most likely form of assault, a biological attack. "I sat through the most gruesome briefing in the Oval Office about anthrax, how it could spread, and how we had no defenses," Bush's first press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told me in the summer of 2007. "Dick Cheney was the strongest advocate of the possibility of attack and need to prepare for it."

I don't question that Cheney was really freaked out by the anthrax attack, and in response, he was a strong advocate for Projects BioShield and BioWatch under the proposed "Biodefense for the 21st Century" strategy. He pushed the "one percent doctrine" in that he decided that if there was a one percent chance that a terrorist could get a nuclear bomb into the United States, it was worth taking extraordinary steps to prevent that from occurring. This mentality has not, to date, resulted in any capability within the government to prevent or adequately respond to either bioterrorism or nuclear terrorism in any comprehensive form, but that's beside the point.

The idea that the CheneyBush administration either seriously thought Saddam was the source (or potential source) of anthrax for terrorists or just used the 2001 anthrax attacks as pretext for the invasion has already been debated to death (I thought). IT ISN'T THE CASE. IT WAS NEVER THE CASE. I don't know how many memoirs and analyses of the Iraq invasion we need to understand this simple point. The purpose of the Iraq invasion was to remind the Middle East that they weren't to frak with the United States unless they wanted to be seriously spanked. Oh, and if military power resulted in the export of democracy to an Arab nation, that would be a good thing, too.

The issue of WMDs in Iraq was a fraud. No one with any legitimate background in military analysis believed that Saddam's' chem-bio weapons were a serious enough threat to justify a preventive invasion. If Saddam was building a nuke, that might be different, but we knew he wasn't. The issue of the United States being vulnerable to biological weapons delivered by a terrorist group was a completely different issue that also had the CheneyBush administration's attention at the same time. But anyone who was active during that time could say, again with any degree of seriousness, that the two issues were either linked or of the same importance. They just weren't. And pointing to $50+ billion over a ten year period as "proof" that the US biodefense program is important is laughable - it's peanuts in the big picture and we really don't have much to show for it today. But that's a story for another day.  

The Limits of Air Power

I had meant to highlight this recent op-ed by Stephen Biddle in the Washington Post where the military analyst points out a few things about relying on air power to achieve humanitarian interests in areas of conflict. I haven't always agreed with Biddle over the last few years (in particular his defense of our involvement in Iraq) but this article makes sense.

The problem remains that warfare rarely allows big payoffs from small investments. As citizens of a superpower with an array of high-tech, standoff weaponry, Americans often assume they can impose their will on aggressors from a safe distance with limited sacrifice. As leaders of the free world, Americans often assume they can lead others who share their ideals to share the load, too, containing the cost of action. But this unwillingness to commit undermines real leverage. Locals with existential stakes often prove more stubborn than distant Americans expect, and even high-tech firepower has serious limitations against low-tech but determined enemies who control the people on the ground through close-up violence.

This script is playing out again in Libya. Western air power can easily annihilate Moammar Gaddafi’s modest air force and prevent him from using massed armor and artillery in the open. But once the dictator’s forces move into populated areas and resort to fighting among the civilian population, the utility of air power diminishes rapidly. Especially when the multilateral action is based on protecting civilians, rather than defeating one side, a dictator willing to mix ruthless fighters with innocent noncombatants poses serious challenges to limited applications of precision air power.

The result could easily be a drawn-out, grinding stalemate. Libyan geography makes this more likely than usual: Vast expanses of open desert separate its urban centers, making it difficult for either side to move force over a distance and use it to take and hold enemy territory far from one’s base. Gaddafi has the transport but cannot safely move logistical convoys over miles of exposed roadways with coalition aircraft overhead. The rebels are safe from air attack but lack the organization, equipment or logistical capacity to project such power themselves over such distances. This could produce a deadlock in which neither side can prevail — but where the West is committed to flying apparently endless, apparently fruitless sorties while Gaddafi crushes any remaining opposition in the cities he controls and the rebels cry out for assistance from their sanctuaries.

The sad thing is that many of us military analysts instantly recognized the perils of returning to a strategy that failed to achieve U.S. national interests in the 1990s. We all saw that, if the U.S. government (and its European allies) was serious about getting rid of Qaddafi, it would require more than what the air power demonstration would deliver. So we're all asking, what's next? Stalemate or deeper into the quagmire? Obama's tortured logic in his speech on Monday really didn't clear things up for me at all.

How District 9 Should Have Ended

Run Away, Run Away!

"White powder" intrudes in the office of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, WA.

Workers in the Gates Foundation's air-pressure sealed mail room opened a package that had a book in it, and they felt a powdery substance on the pages, the fire department said.

The fire department showed up, but found no hazmat materials in the building.

Two people were exposed to the powder, but they weren't treated for anything since nothing was detected, the fire department said.

Hmmmm, white powder in a book. Couldn't just be tiny scraps of paper from the binding? No, better call the fire department and hazmat team... And so the panics continue.

Chem Demil Update

The US Army Chemical Materials Agency hit the 85% mark for destroyed chemical agents and munitions last week. There are three sites still operating disposal facilities - they're all incineration sites.

CMA is left with only 5 percent of its stockpile remaining before completing its mission of destroying 90 percent of the entire U.S. chemical agent stockpile since EIF. The final 10 percent will be disposed of by the U.S. Army Element Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives (ACWA) program. CMA is moving forward at a pace that should have mission completion by April 2012.

“Reaching 85 percent demonstrates how dedicated CMA’s work force is to the safety of the community, the workers and the environment,” said Conrad Whyne, CMA director. “It shows dedication to their country and the safe disposal of the stockpile. I am looking forward to celebrating the end of the mission and a safer tomorrow when we reach 90 percent.”

With this achievement, CMA has destroyed 26,019 tons of agent and more than 2.3 million munitions.

No accidents, nobody exposed outside of the depots, a very successful record. You know, except for the point that the US government was supposed to be finished with this disposal program by 2012. We actually got pretty close, if it weren't for that damn senator in Kentucky...

Cult of Crazy - Anthrax Version

Yes, it all becomes clear now. The reason why the anthrax letters were sent out against American media centers and Democratic senators was to manufacture a "Tonkin Gulf" excuse to invade Iraq and push the USA PATRIOT act through. Oh, and the single US pharmaceutical firm that makes anthrax vaccine is led by a bunch of shady crooks who have exploited the situation. Why didn't I see that before?

Oh, yeah. I'm sane. 

Libya Lesson: Don't Give Up Your WMDs

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis points out that the lesson for North Korea and Iran (and any other "rogue nation" that is developing a nuclear weapons capability) is that playing ball with the United States and abandoning your WMD program doesn't mean you get to stay in power. So what's the point of negotiating?

Mark Sheetz from Boston College notes:

In accepting the Nobel prize, President Obama declared that military force was justified on humanitarian grounds and that the defense of human rights was in the national interest.  Now he has set the precedent of waging war for third tier interests beyond the narrow scope of national security. In so doing, he has compromised the nation's security interest in non-proliferation. The key lesson that states like Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia will draw from the military intervention in Libya is to keep a nuclear development program if you have one and go get one if you do not. One has to believe that Qaddafi is now tormenting himself at night with the question: "Why did I ever agree to give up my WMD programs? 

Great discussion in the comments under Dr. Lewis's post. Someone noticed for instance this statement from SecState Clinton:

"We deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya," Clinton told reporters as she received Mutassim Kadhafi, who serves as his father's national security adviser.

"We have many opportunities to deepen and broaden our cooperation and I am very much looking forward to building on this relationship," the chief US diplomat said before shaking the young man's hand.

Oh wait, that was SecState Clinton 2009. SecState Clinton 2011 needs to sternly rebuke her former self. Prof Walt explains why SecState Clinton 2009 is so similar to SecState Rice 2008 - it's all about the neocon-liberal alliance.

The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance. Both groups extol the virtues of democracy, both groups believe that U.S. power -- and especially its military power -- can be a highly effective tool of statecraft. Both groups are deeply alarmed at the prospect that WMD might be in the hands of anybody but the United States and its closest allies, and both groups think it is America's right and responsibility to fix lots of problems all over the world. Both groups consistently over-estimate how easy it will be to do this, however, which is why each has a propensity to get us involved in conflicts where our vital interests are not engaged and that end up costing a lot more than they initially expect.

Or there's the shorter form of this paragraph that I truly enjoy: "liberal inteventionists are just ‘kinder, gentler' neocons, and neocons are just liberal interventionsts on steroids."

Typical Republican Hawk

Yes, the Obama administration's rationale for retaining 50,000 troops in Iraq, continuing the war in Afghanistan with no clear end-state, and starting a war with Libya with no clear end-state is abysmal. But it's not any different than what a Republican politician would do. That makes this kind of hypocrisy even more despicable.

If Obama takes our troops out of Iraq, starts significant reductions in troops in Afghanistan, and avoids a ground war in Libya while pulling back the air power show, he stands a good chance of being seen as a credible national leader, in which he can keep his Nobel Peace Prize. If he doesn't, he's lost my support for 2012, and I suspect, many others. No sense voting a Dem into office if he acts like a Repub. Of course, if a Tea Party candidate is the GOP presidential nomination, that statement doesn't hold.

Rehashing the Ivins Case - Again

My good friend Noah Schachtman must not be busy enough with all the defense issues out there - budget cycles, Libya, info-warfare, drones over Afghanistan - so he's decided to enroach on my area by rehashing the FBI's case on Bruce Ivins as the source of the October-November 2001 anthrax mailings.  He has an article in Wired magazine that is both sympathetic to Ivins and his colleagues and yet accounts for a good deal of the FBI's forensic investigations and detective work. It's strange, then, to end the article like this:

There’s an irony in the fact that the culprit was likely a top government anthrax expert: Since 2001, the US has built dozens of labs, spent just under $62 billion, and hired an army of researchers to prevent a second bioterror attack. In effect, Washington has devoted the past decade to training and equipping hundreds of people like Ivins.

It’s an unnerving scenario. But there’s something much scarier to contemplate. There’s still the possibility that the government was as wrong about Ivins as it was about Hatfill. If that’s the case, the anthrax mailer is still at large. And that means someone launched the deadliest biological attack in the history of the United States—and got away with it.

So after an insightful, balanced discussion on the ambiguous outcome of the anthrax investigation, an affair that both sides are not entirely comfortable with, Noah wants to end on the note of slamming the goverment - twice. First he suggests that the US government's huge, blundering biodefense efforts are creating terrorists, or at least putting dangerous organisms in the hands of potentially unstable individuals. Then he suggests that the FBI might not have gotten the right guy. And sure, the US biodefense program is open for criticism, but that certainly wasn't the point of this story. And while there are those who might not be happy with how the investigation was executed, certainly there has been no anthrax attack in nearly ten years. This suggests something to me.

Meanwhile, there are indications that Ivins really shouldn't have been allowed in a lab at all.

“Dr. Ivins had a significant and lengthy history of psychological disturbance and diagnosable mental illness at the time he began working for USAMRIID in 1980,” the report says. Those factors “would have disqualified him from a ‘secret’-level security clearance had they been known. Such disqualification would have prevented him from having access to anthrax.”

The committee recommended that the military require such waivers for those seeking initial and continuing security clearances. It also recommended that background investigators be trained to recognize and thoroughly investigate red flags for mental health issues.

Ironically, in Noah's article, a scientist leading the FBI's technical analysis appears to have some misgivings over the FBI's profiling of Ivins, specifically his strange habits.

The cross-dressing, the sorority obsession, the bondage—”it would be very easy to get sucked into all of this because, you know, it makes for a great tabloid-type story,” she says. “Ivins was a bit peculiar. But one of our civil liberties is to be peculiar.”

Yeah, well, when you're working in the nation's top biodefense lab with live anthrax spores, that's one "civil liberty" that really isn't to be admired or tolerated. The FBI got the right guy. The case is closed. Can we please move on without the unsubtle jabs at the government's investigation?

And BTW, to lead off a news article with the title "Army Could Have Prevented Anthrax Mailings" is so incredibly misleading and slanted that I can't think of the right adjectives to describe it.

Nuclear Mondays

LTG (ret) Robert Gard of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation wants to prove out Sigger's Law by accusing the House Republicans of wanting terrorists to get nuclear weapons. You see, the House recently voted to cut the National Nuclear Security Administration more than a half billion dollars in its FY11 budget. It shouldn't be a surprise that House Republicans don't care for arms control agreements or even paying for arms control inspections, but Gard wants to suggest - rather dramatically - that this is a deliberate act of ignoring the threat. So he's going to the radio:

"What I am about to tell you sounds crazy, but it's true," Gard says in the minute-long ads. "Your Congressman... is making it easier for terrorists to get nuclear weapons."

TPM asked Gard if that kind of rhetoric was more fearmongering than legitimate argument.

"This is real, declared threat," Gard said, referring to a 1998 promise by Osama Bin Laden that Al Qaeda would pursue WMDs. "This isn't something we're making up. We need to give it high priority to prevent a nuclear explosion in an American city with disastrous consequences."

No, it is pretty much straight fearmongering. Just as the Republican party's claim to be responsible on national security issues is largely rhetorical and absent of substance, so is this dramatic statement that Teh Terrorists are going to get the bomb any day now if we don't immediately fund the NNSA. You may want to fight fire with fire, Gen. Gard, but NNSA has survived on lower budgets before. The world isn't going to end. While securing radiological material is important, diplomatic efforts to reduce the growth of terrorist groups and more focused intelligence efforts will do just as much (if not more) to reduce the already low probability of nuclear terrorism.

The Center's position paper on this issue is here.

Casual Fridays

Three years ago, BSG was starting its fourth season... and they were desperate enough to have to do this lame act on Letterman.

UPDATE: Replaced the Star Wars video that was yanked off YouTube by the lame College Humor guys.

Captain America

My favorite superhero. I hope the movie lives up to the hype.

More Ruminations About Libya

Prof Juan Cole takes a surprising turn on events by outlining ten reasons why the intervention in Libya in 2011 is different than the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He seems to support a "humanitarian" intervention in Libya, saying it's more like Kosovo than Iraq. And that may be true, but it's also irrelevant. He still fails to note the absence of any semblance of US strategy other than to "protect civilians" through all means short of a ground invasion.

But maybe the United States could use the "Afghan model" of special ops and air power to turn the tide in Libya. Prof Rob Farley runs that issue down, noting that there still is no idea of what the US role is following a hypothetical regime change.

The first problem is that none of the partners in the current operation seem interested in undertaking even the relatively modest commitment of forces envisioned by the Afghan Model. Coalition aircraft have struck Gadhafi loyalist forces approaching Benghazi and Misurata, but supporting rebel attacks on strongholds like Ajdabiya would require a more substantial commitment of platforms and ordnance. More importantly, none of the coalition partners have given any indication that they are willing to deploy even the minimal level of special forces operators that would be required to carry out an operation along the lines of the Afghan Model. Such a commitment would probably require U.S. involvement, as U.S. SOF have the most experience coordinating this kind of campaign. Without significantly greater air support and the use of SOF, chances for rebel military victory are sketchy. More likely is a long civil war in which neither the Gadhafi loyalists nor the anti-Gadhafi rebels can win a clear victory.

The second problem is that military victory as envisioned in the Afghan Model only gets you so far. The larger question involves the political settlement in Libya after a U.S.-supported rebel victory. As we learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, the overthrow of even unpopular leaders and political movements can leave the nucleus of a national insurgency. Such an insurgency against a new Libyan government is no less likely than the development of the Iraqi insurgency. This is not to say that an insurgency in Libya is inevitable, simply that it can't be ruled out. The incoherence of the rebel leadership almost certainly increases the chances that an insurgency -- as well as more conventional struggles for power -- will arise as the various interest groups squabble over portions of the Libyan state.

But don't tell the American people that. Seems that blatant shows of air power against foreign nations that result in no American deaths are rather popular to the great unwashed. Republican pundits, however, will criticize whatever the White House decides to do.

Meanwhile, Dr. Charli Carpenter reminds us that there is actually a policy approach to determining which states are legitimate targets against which the international community could intervene. This isn't to say that this approach was used in Libya's case, just that pointing to the lack of US interventions in Bahrain, Yemen, Somalia, The Congo, Sudan, Gaza and the West Bank, and Cote d'Ivoire isn't an adequate justification for not intervening in Libya.

And over at Kings of War, the Faceless Bureaucrat talks about "humanitarian intervention."

Humanitarian intervention is an unavoidable contradiction.  Humanitarian activity is based on four principles, none of which apply in this case:

• •  Humanity: requires the protection of life as the objective.
  • Independence: complete autonomy from political as well as military actors.
  • Impartiality: requires response according to need without discrimination.
  • Neutrality: requires the avoidance of providing military or political advantage to any side over another.

I will state that again: none of these principles–the sine qua non of any humanitarian undertaking–apply to Operation Odyssey Dawn (just where do they come up with these names?).

Interesting stuff. I'm glad there's smarter people than me on the net so I can learn from their wisdom...

And of course, one cannot but be confused by the White House's insistence that regime change is absolutely not part of the military operations, but at the same time, "Qaddafi must go" and a democratic government must be placed in charge. It's almost as if the Obama administration does acknowledge other forms of government power, but won't quite outline those functions.

Lindsey Graham is an Asshat

SHORTER Lindsey Graham: "If we don't use American military power to overthrow Qaddafi, then the Iranians will never take us seriously about our threats to bomb their nuclear weapons infrastructure."

Unbelievable. And I'm not even going to get into John McCain's selective memory.  Republican politicians think there is only one source of government power - military - and that diplomatic, economic, and intelligence tools are just not options. That is, unless there's a Democrat in the White House. What maroons.

Hat tip to Justin Elliot.

RIP Elizabeth Taylor

There was this inane show last Tues night on ABC called "The Best in Films" that showed clips of the movies that people voted as "best action," "best scifi," "best kiss," etc etc. Unsurprisingly, the list had a good number of contemporary actors and films, with a few scattered shout-outs to the more well-known, older classics. It occurred to me, upon hearing of Ms. Taylor's passing, that far too many people are unaware of the true cinematic giants who once walked among us.

Like Rob Farley, I was too young to appreciate most of Ms. Taylor's acting performances, but it's easy to recognize world-class beauty, sophistication, and talent when it's in front of you.

US Military Assistance - It Depends

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