Newshoggers.com

Keep Pretending You're Canadian

By Steve Hynd

Keep pretending you are Canadian when you go abroad, folks - because Obama's own popularity overseas isn't translating into popularity for America and Americans overall.

According to a new poll, while Obama is viewed positively in most of the world, global attitudes toward America have barely improved at all.

Asked whether they have confidence in Barack Obama to "do the right thing regarding world affairs," for all nations (excluding the US) an average of 61 percent say they have some or a lot of confidence.

But asked how the US treats their government, few--on average just one in four--say it "treats us fairly," while two-thirds say that it "abuses its greater power to make us do what the US wants."

Overall, these views are no better than they were in 2008. Only three countries diverged from this view (Kenya, Nigeria, and Germany).

The poll, by WorldPublicOpinion.Org, found that most folk, even most Americans, thinks the U.S. is still a warmongering bully:

The US is criticized for coercing other nations with its superior power (15 of 19 nations), failing to abide by international law (17 of 19 nations), and for how it is dealing with climate change (11 of 18 nations).

...In all nations polled, majorities say that the US "use(s) the threat of military force to gain advantages." Majorities range from 61 percent in India and Poland to 92 percent in South Korea and include America's close ally Great Britain (83%). On average, across all nations polled, 77 percent perceive the US as threatening. Even 71 percent of Americans agree.

...only one in four agrees that the US is "an important leader in promoting international laws and sets a good example by following them," while two-thirds say "the US tries to promote international laws for other countries, but is hypocritical because it does not follow these rules itself."

And the bad news for Obama himself is that, although Europeans trust him by wide margins, Muslim nations don't.

Views of Obama are especially positive among Europeans including 92 percent of the British, 89 percent of the Germans, and 88 percent of the French. Even a majority of the Chinese concur (55%). The exceptions are majority-Muslim nations and Russia. Those saying they have not too much confidence or no confidence at all include majorities in the Palestinian territories (67%), Pakistan (62%), Egypt (60%), and Iraq (57%) as well as Russia (55%).

Invading Muslim nations, saber-rattling at others and cozying up to Israel's foreign policy vision at an institutional level isn't going to be undone by just one speech. Who'dathunkit.

Robert McNamara's Memo To The Bush/Obama Hawks

By Steve Hynd

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam conflict, has died aged 93. Over at Hullabaloo, D-Day reminds us of McNamara's cautionary message for future U.S. leaders, comprising eleven causes and lessons he listed coming out of Vietnam.

We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.

We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for – and a determination to fight for — freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.

We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values….

Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders….No Southeast Asian [experts] existed for senior officials to consult when making decisions on Vietnam.

We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to …winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.

After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did….We had not prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced…confront[ing] uncharted seas and an alien environment. A nation’s deepest strength lies not in its military prowess, bur rather in the unity of its people. We failed to maintain it.

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action — other than in response to direct threats to our own national security – should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

…We thus failed to analyze and debate our actions in Southeast Asia - our objectives, the risks and costs of alternative ways of dealing with them, and the necessity of changing course when failure was clear….

D-Day writes:

If this isn't an accusatory note toward the practitioners of American foreign policy during the entire post-war period up through today, I don't know what is... I find these cautions from McNamara to be crucially important, but even in my most optimistic moments I don't believe America is even wired to live up to them.

Certainly in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan - and in their determination to pursue "strategic ambiguity" in the region over Iran - modern U.S. leaders seem hell-bent upon ignoring McNamara's hard-won wisdom.

Back in 2004, Douglas Saunders interviewed McNamara and asked him for his views on the Iraq invasion. The former SecDef was sure it was yet another massive mistake ignoring those 11 cautionary lessons.

"We're misusing our influence," he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."

While he did not want to talk on the record about specific military decisions made Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the United States is fighting a war that he believes is totally unnecessary and has managed to destroy important relationships with potential allies. "There have been times in the last year when I was just utterly disgusted by our position, the United States' position vis-à-vis the other nations of the world."

On Monday night, we heard the United States at its very worst with George W. Bush's caustic State of the Union address, in which he declared, over and over, that America is serving God's will directly and does not need "a permission slip" from other nations since "the cause we serve is right, because it is the cause of all mankind."

Obama's people are too busy reading Ricks, Nagl and Kilcullen to read Revelations, but the unshakeable certainty that America has the right and duty - the White Man's Burden by either divine mandate or through simple technocratic superiority - to re-shape other nations is still omnipresent.

The Name Of The Iran Game Is Still Strategic Ambiguity

By Steve Hynd

There's a story in the London Times today which says the Saudis have secretly okayed any overflight of their territory involved in an Israeli attack on Iran. The rightwing nuts for whom any day is a good day to bomb Iranians love it.

But since one of the Times' reporters is serial fabulist Uzi Mahnaimi, the other is neocon shill for war with Iran Sarah Baxter, and the only sources for the tale are anonymous, you can probably chalk it off to a continued propaganda effort which has now spanned successive U.S. and Israeli administrations. 

The aim has always been to create "strategic ambiguity" - deliberately muddying the waters about Israeli and American intentions so as to pressure Iran in its negotiations with the West by ensuring it fears an attack if it doesn't play ball. D.C. hawks have gotten on board to such an extent that it is already an accepted fact among the Very Serious Person set that Obama's idea of negotiation without preconditions will get exactly one shot, will fail, and then the bombs will begin to fall. That's why they're so keen on using Iran's election as an excuse to derail those efforts - they're sure they'll never restart and thus they will be proven correct. Self fulfilling prophecy!

And Joe Biden gets to play too:

Vice President Joe Biden seemed to give Israel a green light for military action to eliminate Iran's nuclear threat, saying the U.S. "cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do."

..."Israel can determine for itself -- it's a sovereign nation -- what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else," Biden told ABC's "This Week" in an interview broadcast Sunday.

"Whether we agree or not. They're entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that. But there is no pressure from any nation that's going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed," Biden said.

Video from Crooks and Liars here.

Everybody, from Obama on down, is ignoring as hard as they can the opinion of successive heads of the IAEA - el Baradei and now Yukiya Amano - that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. It doesn't fit the domestic narrative, which is all about hanging tough to gain votes. As usual, foreign policy is domestic gamesplaying inflicted upon foreigners. But then again, that's true of Iran's leaders too.

No sign Iran seeks nuclear arms: new IAEA head

By Steve Hynd

Promising to be neither a "soft" Director-General or a "tough" Director-General," the next IAEA chief, Yukiya Amano, has already rained all over the neocon parade. (H/t Kat)

VIENNA (Reuters) - The incoming head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday he did not see any hard evidence Iran was trying to gain the ability to develop nuclear arms.

"I don't see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this," Yukiya Amano told Reuters in his first direct comment on Iran's atomic program since his election, when asked whether he believed Tehran was seeking nuclear weapons capability.

That's a bit of a blow to folks like John "bomb them" Bolton and the Weekly Standard's Peter Berkowitz, who have busily been claiming that - despite and indeed because of Iranian election protests and the following clampdown - "the central question for Middle East politics" namely, "what to do about Iran's illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons," is best answered by an immediate Israeli attack because "relying on prayer for Mousavi and the Iranian people to overthrow the mullahs is no option at all, at least not for the state of Israel, the front line in Islamic radicalism's war against the West."

They go on to claim, beyond all credibility, that Israel could attack with relative impunity as far as Iranian blowback is concerned - using as part of their data for this wargames conducted by the neocon Heritage Foundation back in 2007 (which of course found the result the participants most wished to find) and for the rest wishful thinking.

So, this statement by the next atom watchdog head severely undermines their narrative, as it removes that first premise beloved of neocons and Clintonistas alike: that Iran is in "illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons." Expect the warmongers to ignore Amano as much as possible, just as they always ignore contrary expert advice and evidence. The point is to justify an attack by someone on Iran, not prevent a war.

And these warmongering, lying, cherry-picking Wormtongues are why I want to urge caution on the likes of Fareed Zakaria and Trita Parsi. I respect Trita immensely but he's forgotten the wolves in the wings when he says that the important criterion for American policy right now has to be to reject Ahmadinejad’s attempts at portraying his victory as final and that the best way to do that is by holding no negotiations for now. Steve Clemons points to pieces by Robert Dreyfuss and former UK ambassador to Iran Richard Dalton today and writes " I very much agree with Dreyfuss' kicker on engaging Iran and ignoring the John Bolton types who want to launch a new war." Ignore as in sideline, not hand them ammunition by derailing negotiation attempts.

I'd like to ask Trita - would he rather Obama talked or Israel bombed? Because I think those are going to be his choices. The meme that the election protests humanized Iranians and made an attack harder to justify - as repeated by Zakaria - didn't play at all in Tel Aviv or in US rightwing circles. White House opposition to an attack may also not be a meaningful deterrent factor if Obama himself has already implied, by disengagement, that the current Iranian government cannot be talked to. As long as Netan-yahoo, his Likudniks and their American neocon co-conspirators think US opinion is usefully split on an attack and that the waters of international opinion can be thus muddied, they will be highly tempted to tell themselves there will be no repercussions in the U.S. or internationally.

Progressive Realism And Iran

By Steve Hynd

In my last post, I gave my opinion that Iran 2009 will be more like the repressed damp squib of Tiananmen 1989 than the revolutionary tsunami of Tehran 1979.

So what next? Is Obama's talk of negotiating even with America's enemies dead in the water? Matthew Yglesias thinks so.

The hope behind an engagement strategy was that the Supreme Leader might be inclined to side with the more pragmatic actors inside the system—guys like former president Rafsanjani and former prime minister Mousavi. With those people, and most of the Iranian elites of their ilk, now in open opposition to the regime, any crackdown would almost by definition entail the sidelining of the people who might be interested in a deal. Iran would essentially be in the hands of the most hardline figures, people who just don’t seem interested in improving relations with other countries.

Under the circumstances, the whole subject of American engagement may well wind up being moot.

Yglesias explicitly endorses Robert Farley's view that

the repression has opened greater opportunity for what might be termed a non-interventionist coercive strategy; this is to say that more and tougher sanctions against the regime are on the table now than was the case two weeks ago.

And Kevin Drum agrees.

I agree with my friend Robert Farley that more and tougher sanctions are probably going to be the kneejerk result of American foreign policy thinking after these Iran elections - but I disagree that sanctions can be described as "non-interventionist" when they invariably impact the poorest and disenfranchised, not the rich elite. Especially when US foreign policy interventionists from both left and right always see more and tougher sanctions as merely a necessary step along the path to military action.

And I definitely disagree with Yglesias's implication that more and harsher sanctions would be a good idea. Ygelsias, who originally supported the invasion of Iraq and now broadly supports Obama's benchmarkless, Bush retread of a plan for the Af/Pak theatre, is almost certainly echoing the listserve-discussed views of others he shares a generally interventionist view with at think-tanks like the Center for American Progress, Center for a New American Security and the National Security Network - all of whom have provided key national security or foreign policy staff and policy planning to the Obama administration.

In arguing against the incrementalist interventionism implicit in saying before the fact that "American engagement may well wind up being moot", I'd cite - as many already have, including Obama - the simple truth that whether a regime is repressive or not it's still better to talk than not. Indeed, over the years America has negotiated with many other nations, including both the Soviet Union and China, when they were at their most repressive, totalitarian and recalcitrant.

Moreover, I'd argue that engagement is exactly the strategy needed. In 2006, Robert Wright set out the beginnings of what has become to be known as "progressive realism" in a seminal piece for the NY Times entitled "An American Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists Should Fall in Love With" in which he wrote that "It’s now possible to build a foreign policy paradigm that comes close to squaring the circle — reconciling the humanitarian aims of idealists with the powerful logic of realists." Shortly thereafter, he sent an email to Kevin Drum in which he outlined a progressive realist stance that's very applicable to Iran now. In that email Wright acknowledges that there's going to be a lot of anti-American sentiment fuelling geopolitics for decades to come, no matter how much America changes now. That's something that short-term thinkers like Thomas Jocelyn use to argue for more interventionist policies - if we’re going to get blamed for it anyway, we might as well do some stuff in support of the opposition - but Wright correctly characterises a longer term solution.

America's security will best be served if all nations are by then free-market democracies, because ... the entanglement of such nations in the global economy strengthens their incentive to preserve world order and their inclination toward international cooperation — including, crucially, highly intrusive arms control.

...Making free-market democracy pervasive is only crucial to America's interest in the long run, over decades. Hence: no need to rush into, say, the Iraq war.

...Progressive realists (unlike neocons) believe that economic liberty strongly encourages political liberty. So (a) America should economically engage, rather than isolate, countries like Iran and North Korea, and (b) more generally, economic engagement offers a path to peacefully fostering the free-market democracy that neocons are inclined to implant via invasion.

In other words, the correct answer is less sanctions and more engagement, not the obverse. Wright ended his email to Drum:

I reject the "premise common in Democratic policy circles lately: that the key to a winning foreign policy is to recalibrate the party’s manhood — just take boilerplate liberal foreign policy and add a testosterone patch." The problem is more subtle than that, and Democrats aren’t doing America a service when they fuel a Democratic-Republican arms race on the macho front.

Now that Democrats hold power, that macho race has become even more of a problem instead of less - perhaps a measure of the perennial fear Democratic leaders have of losing the next election because they've been painted as "weak", perhaps simply a reflection of their belief that they don't have to pander to their "peacenik" base any more. Whatever the reason, kneejerk incrementalist interventionism has always been the order of the day among the VSPs and the wannabe-VSPs are now following suit.

Obama's statement today is a careful bit of fence-sitting that could be used to justify either engagement as planned or a turn towards a more hostile policy towards Iran. I'm not optimistic that, given the pressures for hostility, we'll see a progressive realist strategy as the outcome. But we should.

Bolton Stuck In A Timewarp

By Steve Hynd

John Bolton takes to the pages of the WSJ to advocate for allowing, nay encouraging, Israel to attack Iran. (No really, you don't say?)

Bolton's arguments boil down to: Do it soon, everything will be OK. There's a slam-dunk intelligence case for the threat, the war itself will be a cakewalk and we'll be greeted as liberators.

Amazing. I just saw the last eight years flash before my eyes.

Economic Inefficiency as Damning Evidence....

By Fester:

The United States massively and expensively subsidizes local sugar production which means consumers pay higher prices and my soft drinks don't taste quite as good as they could.  We do this because of domestic political constraints and interest group politics that lock in preferential treatment to small, vocal and wealthy groups who are able to scream far louder for concentrated benefits than the mere murmurs from the vast majority of people who are minimally harmed by this policy. 

It is a stupid policy, but there is a rational explanation for the policy that is rooted in internal domestic politics.  There are plenty of policies that are less than economically efficient but make ideological or political sense. 

Dave Schuler is arguing that economic inefficiency is an indictment on Iranian nuclear ambitions:

Finally, while Iran has a right to pursue the peaceful application of nuclear energy doing so to maintain energy independence makes little sense and it’s a waste of Iran’s resources to do so. They can get more results for less money simply by modernizing their oil production facilities.

National prestige projects, of which nuclear energy is one, rarely have to pass cost benefit analysis.  It would be far more efficient for Iran to open up its entire energy sector to foreign investment and control, but there are strong ideological constraints that prevents this from happening.  It would be more efficient for the US Navy to buy foreign designed and built corvettes but ideological and political constraints prevent this as well.

Dave assembles a bit more evidence to argue against peaceful Iranian nuclear intentions, and that evidence is more convincing, but the economic efficiency angle is damn weak. 

MoveOn, CAP and The Wars

By Steve Hynd

Tom Hayden at The Nation is highly critical of the way in which anti-war groups like MoveOn have suddenly gone quiet following Obama's election, and accuses them of political expediency.

Silence sends a message. The de facto MoveOn support for the $94 billion war supplemental reverberates up the ladder of power. Feeling no pressure, Congressional leadership has abdicated its critical oversight function over the expanding wars, not even allowing members to vote for a December report on possible exit strategies.

Michael Hastings, who was Newsweek's Baghdad correspondent, backs up Hayden today in no uncertain terms:

I’ve mentioned this before: the startling lack of indignation by the anti-war left over our current course in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Obama wins, and the most influential online liberal organization obediently shuts up. Remember, we’re going to be in Iraq and Afghanistan at least until 2019. We still have over 130,000 soldiers in Iraq and we’ll have close to 70,000 in Afghanistan by the end of the year. (Which rivals the highest total number of Americans deployed overseas in the past eight years.)

Why has it been so easy for Moveon to just, uh, move on, from what had been their signature issue of Bush era? Part of it has to do with the fact that with an all volunteer force, the war is solely a political issue for them. (For the most part.) No skin is on the line for the folks at Moveon; they don’t have to fight the war, and never really feel the impact of the war. There’s not a draft, no real sense on the home front that we’re fighting a war at all. So it’s much easier to give Obama the benefit of the doubt when a sudden silence in opposing the war can be rationalized away as an expedient political position, despite all the worrying signs that these wars are nowhere near conclusion. The issue becomes intellectual, not actual. It’s easy to make political compromises when only your principles are at stake.

But it's not just MoveOn. Other groups like theCenter for American Progress have been far less vocally critical than they should have been about the benchmarkless, Bush-repeating Af/Pak plan or about what it is becoming more and more clear is an Obama administration attempt to ready for staying in Iraq past the SOFA's cut-off date by slight-of-hand and mission creep.

It's worth quoting Jeremy Scahill's snarky explanation of just what these groups are defending so hard again:

Ah, good thing the US quest for violent global domination was brought to a screeching halt with the November presidential election. Without Obama’s election, we’d still have an occupation of Iraq, mercenaries on the US payroll, torture of prisoners, an unending and worsening war that kills civilians in Afghanistan, regular airstrikes in Pakistan, killing civilians and an embassy the size of Vatican city in Baghdad, which was built in part on slave labor. Not to mention those crazy “Bush/Cheney” neocons running around trying to become the “CEOs” of foreign nations. Wow, glad that’s all over. Whew! And, it’s a really good thing Bush is no longer in power or else the US would come up with some crazy idea like building a colonial fortress in Pakistan to defend “US interests” in the region.

And now today we have Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett scathing about Obama's Iran policy in the New York Times. "Unless President Obama and his national security team take a fundamentally different approach to Tehran, they will not achieve a breakthrough," the pair write. Yet there are elements within the Obama administration who see that as a feature, not a bug.

President Obama has made several policy and personnel decisions that have undermined the promise of his encouraging rhetoric about Iran. On the personnel front, the problem begins at the top, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As a presidential candidate, then-Senator Clinton ran well to the right of Mr. Obama on Iran, even saying she would “totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel. Since becoming secretary of state, Clinton has told a number of allies in Europe and the Persian Gulf that she is skeptical that diplomacy with Iran will prove fruitful and testified to Congress that negotiations are primarily useful to garner support for “crippling” multilateral sanctions against Iran.

First of all, this posture is feckless, as Secretary Clinton does not have broad international support for sanctions that would come anywhere close to being crippling. More significantly, this posture is cynically counterproductive, for it eviscerates the credibility of any American diplomatic overtures in the eyes of Iranian leaders across the Islamic Republic’s political spectrum.

Even more disturbing is President Obama’s willingness to have Dennis Ross become the point person for Iran policy at the State Department. Mr. Ross has long been an advocate of what he describes as an “engagement with pressure” strategy toward Tehran, meaning that the United States should project a willingness to negotiate with Iran largely to elicit broader regional and international support for intensifying economic pressure on the Islamic Republic.

In conversations with Mr. Ross before Mr. Obama’s election, we asked him if he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail? Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past “diplomacy” would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate.

On all of this, groups such as CAP and MoveOn have either been silent or broadly supportive, excusing the obvious duplicity of Obama administration rhetoric.

Two weeks ago, former congressman Tom Andrews wrote that "Democrats in Washington can do much better; it's our job to make sure that they do." The trouble is, these pressure groups simply aren't doing that job.

I'll be straight up and unsubtle, as is my wont, and say why I think that's the case. I don't think MoveOn or CAP would have done anything essentially different if Clinton had been the Dem nominee. Their leaderships are wannabe Very Serious Persons and they see cheerleading as the path to Villager status or sinecures within the administration. There's more than a few other prominent Democrat voices who fit in that category too, having turned on a dime to support from Obama what they never would have from Bush. None are willing to bite the hand that feeds them, so they sacrifice their principles instead.

Afghanistan Timeline: Decades

By Fester:

Building on what Steve wrote earlier, the US strategy for Afghanistan is optimistically only a decade long strategy so the Afghanistan War will be eligible to vote when victory can be declared.

Here is some more from David Kilcullen, the leading COIN advocate on an optimistic Afghanistan time-line: h/t Bruce R

As of mid-2008 only about one quarter of Afghanistan was under government control, half was disputed, and the remaining quarter was Taleban-controlled. Should everything go well this year, we will succeed — at best — in stopping the rot, stabilising the country and setting the conditions for progress from next year onwards. Either way, we can expect at least another year or two of serious combat before we can begin handing over more fully to newly expanded Afghan police and military units; these will become available around 2011 as current schemes to increase their numbers come to fruition. This handover process could take another three to five years, and we may then be in a position, after (say) 2015, to drop back to a mentoring, partnering and overwatch role — a role we may need to maintain for several more years to come.

And here is the problem with COIN as a strategic doctrine in and of itself; it neglects the political constraints in barging forward.  As I wrote in March on the weakness of COIN as a preferred policy:

COIN today promises the same type of inputs --- ten to twenty year wars, operational costs of one to two points of annual GDP at a time of structural deficits and domestic fiscal crisis --- with the same type of outcomes --- weak, client states in need of continual support in secondary or tertiary areas of interest.

And shockingly the public of democracies don't like COIN nor do they want to spend those resources for minimal real gains in security that operational and tactical successes may or may not generate. 

So if we assume that democracies are not likely to support doctrines, strategies and techniques  that produce long term ongoing costs with minimal prospects of producing desired long term political benefits, the problem in the Clauswitzian perspective is not the grand strategic level, but at the strategic and operational levels where the COIN doctrine is implemented in disregard to the grand strategic appreciation of forces and reality. 

The successes at the lower levels of importance do not align with the grand strategic interests of a democracy. At that point, COIN is an attempt to use tactical and operational success to ignore divergent grand strategic aims.

 

They Just Won't Go Away

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The neocon ideology and policy has proven to be a disaster.  Their paranoia driven wars of choice have bankrupted the US both financially and morally.  But it seems like they are still in charge.  Well guess what -  this is deju vu all over again.  The following is an excerpt from a book I am currently reading, Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story, and hope to finish in time for a complete review this weekend.

Proving with 59,000 American fatalities that the use of force in securing victory was nothing more than an illusion, in the final summer of their power the remains of Richard Nixon's secretive brain trust, embodied in men such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, struggled to lay a foundation for rebuilding America's military mythology In response to a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal and Strategic Review by University of Chicago professor, RAND theorist, former Trotskyite, and neoconservative icon Albert Wohlstetter, Gerald Ford's CIA director George H. W. Bush opened an outside door to a small, rightwing corps of like-minded defense intellectuals. Well known as a harsh opponent of the strategic principle of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)and a perennial advocate of the kind of policy that had failed in Vietnam,Wohlstetter's attack was intended to send a message to Soviet and American policy makers, alike.                                                  

Anne Hessing Cahn writes, "Wohlstetter's charges were the opening salvo of a movement determined to destroy detente and to steer U.S.foreign policy back to a more militant stance vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. The critics of detente were certain that the Cold War was far from over and were determined that American hegemony should not disappear.

Known as Team-B, Wohlstetter's hand-picked men brought to work in 1976 revived assumptions that were as old as the Soviet Union itself It might even be said that the thinking of the group-mind represented by Team-B was so old-world and elitist as to predate the very existence of the Soviet Union. Led by an obscure Harvard professor of Czarist Russian history named Richard Pipes and composed of a unique combi nation of ex-U.S. military men, retired cold warriors, neoconservatives and right-wing ideologues, the members of Team-B-Lt. Gen. Dame Graham (Ret) Dr. Thomas Wolfe of RAND, General John Vogt, (Ret.)Ambassador Fay Kohler, Paul Nitze, Ambassador Seymour Weiss.Maj. Gen Jasper Welch of the USAF, and Paul Wolfowitz of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency - shared the conviction that detente and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks were nothing more than a Soviet scheme. That scheme was to bargain and talk America into a false sense of security while Soviet agents and proxies subverted American influence both political and military around the globe. Drawn together by their anticommunism and mutual affiliations with a well-established consortium of Wall Street brokerage houses, think tanks, universities and defense contractors (otherwise known as the military-industrial complex,the Team-B members were driven to cast off the hard-won institutional, financial and moral restraints to waging a nuclear war, and their critique of that year's National Intelligence Estimate or NIE left the intelligence establishment reeling.

The Soviets were preparing for a "third world war and were nakedly expansionist, they claimed in their top secret 1976 report. Given military superiority and the will to use it, they reasoned, at some point in the near future the Russians would make a strategic move that the United States would be militarily unable to stop. "The intensity and scope of the current Soviet military effort in peacetime is without parallel in twentieth century history," they wrote that December, "its only counterpart being Nazi remilitarization of the 1930s.                                                         

The assessment at the time was considered radical and, by many, intentionally misleading. Paul Nitze had done this sort of thing originally in NSC 68 and again in the late 1950S with the help of like-minded defense intellectuals at RAND, hounding President Eisenhower to advance the use of nuclear weapons and play "catch-up" with an imagined Soviet threat in the now infamous "missile gap."

The scary assumptions of Soviet strength had been wrong, as the first satellite reconnaissance photos revealed in January 1961. "Even Air Force analysts were embarrassed by the pictures. The images starkly rebutted the estimates of Air Force Intelligence." But the fear they generated had put John Fitzgerald Kennedy into the White House, renewed an arms race that had been slowed to a standstill by Eisenhower, and brought the United States to the brink of nuclear war.

It not only sounds familiar many of the names are even the same.  This "rightwing corps of like-minded defense intellectuals" manages to remain in the policy making loop even though they are nearly always wrong.  As we look at the foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration we can see it's as true now as it was after the Vietnam war.  The result will be many more sad Memorial Days where we remember those who shouldn't have died.