Forty Years Ago Today...

Forty years ago today, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

In a 1967 speech at Riverside Church in New York, exactly one year before his death, King explained his opposition to the Vietnam War and tied it to his advocacy on behalf of the poor. The war buildup had "continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube," King said. "So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

"Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools."

One thing that I did not know--to this day, the King family believes that James Earl Ray had nothing to do with the assassination.

Successful Counterinsurgency Begins With the Family Farm

[Photo: Poppies in Afghanistan, Livestock in Iraq]

Did you know that one of the few areas where we had any success at all in Vietnam came from the policy of land reform--that is, we helped local farmers gain ownership over the plots of land that they had farmed for generations?

Sadly, we see nothing but obstacles ahead for Iraq and Afghanistan:

A provincial reconstruction team surveyed a dairy farm in a community south of Baghdad to determine its technical and financial needs.

Floyd Wood with the U.S. Department of Agriculture accompanied an area PRT to talk with local farm managers and workers to see what the farm needed to reach its full production goals.

Wood and the PRT team determined the irrigation system couldn't support the farm's full capacity following a meeting with local veterinarians and feed specialists.

The farm was designed to sustain about 8,000 cattle, but irrigation problems depleted that to around 1,000 dairy cows, the Multi-National Forces-Iraq reported.

Wood said the farm needed to have 50,000 gallons of water a week shipped in to supply the cows with drinking water, general maintenance and to irrigate the 3,500 acres of farmland.

Wood said the farm was once one of the largest distributors of milk to south-central Iraq and Baghdad, but noted now about 25 cows a month are slaughtered due to malnutrition.

The lack of milk supply means the Baghdad community has to import more products from Kuwait and Jordan, driving prices up and having a ripple effect on the local economy.

And Afghanistan:

In 2004, Afghanistan produced 87% of the world's heroin, according to UN data. Just three years later, that same group will report in September that the number is now 95%.
Between 2005 and 2006, Afghanistan increased its opium yield by 49%. In 2005, the yield was 4,100 metric tons. In 2006, it was 6,100 metric tons.

Today, that number is getting worse and worse.

The work of USAID in both Afghanistan and Iraq has been very difficult, but they are able to talk about some tentative accomplishments since the start of the war five years ago. USAID is one of the best things going for us--it is the ultimate "hearts and minds" program. This gives you some background on why this is important in Iraq:

Agriculture is Iraq's largest employer, the second largest contributor to GDP, and an effective engine for promoting stability through private sector development, poverty reduction, and food security. The revival of a dynamic, market-driven agricultural sector will strengthen private business, increase income and employment opportunities, and help meet the food requirements of the Iraqi people. From 2003 through the fall of 2006, USAID's Agriculture Reconstruction and Development Program for Iraq (ARDI) restored veterinary clinics, introduced improved cereal grain varieties, repaired agricultural equipment, and trained farmers and ministry staff. USAID recently initiated a new agriculture program, Inma. The new program will extend the production improvements made by ARDI by working at the provincial level to support the development of agribusinesses and agricultural markets, improving farmer livelihoods. Inma will Complement USAID's other economic growth programs.

And Afghanistan:

USAID ASSISTANCE
INFRASTRUCTURE
USAID is funding the construction and rehabilitation of infrastructure critical for further economic development and national integration. The primary focus is roads, including a major portion of the Kabul-Kandahar-Herat Highway and approximately 1,000 km of provincial, district and rural roads. USAID is also investing in the construction and rehabilitation of power plants, transmission lines, dams, irrigation and flood control systems, industrial parks, bridges, universities, schools, and clinics.

ALTERNATIVE LIVELIHOODS PROGRAM
The Alternative Livelihoods Program (ALP) provides Afghans with opportunities to participate in the licit economy in key poppy growing areas. In meeting immediate needs to provide economic opportunity, ALP supports labor-intensive cash-for-work projects to build or rehabilitate productive infrastructure, and funds income generation and training efforts for vulnerable households as part of Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics strategy.

Some history on why USAID is an effective means of combating terrorist insurgencies:

Mike Korin spent nearly seven years in Vietnam, from 1967 to 1973, working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture on loan to USAID. He spent two years in the city of Tam Ky in Quang Tin Province, where he shared an office with USAID civilian doctors and construction experts, U.S. military civic affairs specialists and a Vietnamese professional and support staff.

Korin worked there on a wide range of development activities, including rice production, and fisheries, forestry and irrigation systems development. "My work was with Vietnamese government officials," he said in an interview, "representing different agencies and providing USAID resources to help fund those activities."

Korin said the experience was, in most respects, a positive one. "It was exciting. We felt a sense of accomplishment," he said. "But there was also a certain degree of frustration because there was a lot of fighting going on in the province, including attacks on the provincial capital." The main problem in Korin's area was the large number of refugees. "It made things difficult," he said. "People were constantly being routed out of their villages and their villages were being burned down either by the bad guys or the good guys. People were put into refugee camps. It was very difficult for the people."

Korin was based in Saigon during his last four years in Vietnam. He was among nearly 200 USAID agricultural experts in the country at the time. His Saigon office was made up of about two dozen American USAID agriculture professionals involved in land-reform programs. Korin traveled throughout the country working on the Montagnard land reform and land-to-the-tiller programs, which paid landlords to give land to peasant farmers.

Seven years in a war zone is long enough to become an expert; contrast that with the youthful and inexperienced people who are going [yes, kudos to them in any event] and the people at places like the State Department who refuse to go at all.

The USAID involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq is vital for rebuilding those countries (or bringing them out of poverty and neglect) and serves as a bastion of what is good about America. The fact that we send people and money to do mundane things like build schools, hospitals and roads and to teach people how to improve their farming methods is a basic tenet of American foreign policy.

At the height of the Vietnam War, one of the most effective methods of reducing the insurgency was to give people title to the land that they lived on:

...MACV advisors did work closely with 900,000 local GVN officials in a well-organized pacification program called CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development.) It stressed technical aid, local self government, and land distribution to peasant farmers. A majority of tenant farmers received title to their own land in one of the most successful transfer projects in any nation. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of peasants entered squalid refugee camps when CORDS moved them out of villages that could not be protected. In the Phoenix Program (part of CORDS with a strong CIA component) GVN police identified and arrested (and sometimes killed) the NLF secret police agents engaged in assassination.

Given the atrocious example of displacement of people in Iraq and the explosion of poppy growing in Afghanistan, how is it that the lessons learned in Vietnam failed to carry over?

AFGHANISTAN: Agricultural development in most of RC East proved necessary for long-term economic viability. United States Department of Agriculture officers provided development advice to the IRoA, the CTF, and, to a lesser extent, cooperatives and individual farmers. Although not present in most RC East PRTs, USUSDA officers worked on the staffs of three key posts (task force headquarters and the Ghazni and Jalalabad PRTs) for much of CTF Devil’s tenure. These officers breathed life into USAID’s alternative livelihood programs. They provided advice on which crops to substitute for the opium poppy and focused on implementing agricultural programs like micro-credit for farmers. They also helped devise high-impact but simple projects that enhanced the value of crops grown by desperately poor farmers. That said, the relatively limited USUSDA presence in RC East prevented the task force from making the most of its agricultural development programs. ["Combating a Modern Insurgency: Combined Task Force Devil in Afghanistan, Donahue & Frenzel, March-April 2008, Military Review]

IRAQ: Another example is the agricultural facet of the Iraqi economy. Our estimate was that the area around Baghdad, if resourced and irrigated, could easily feed all of Iraq. But the antiquated farming methods were only providing for 25 percent of the country’s needs, forcing imports of most foodstuffs. Although the $18.4 billion Iraqi supplemental did not provide for any agricultural improvements, we were able to import, through reprogrammed funding, over 2,000 tons of grain, fertilizer, and feed. Immunizations, coupled with rejuvenating the irrigation apparatus around Baghdad, created conditions for economic independence. [Winning the Peace The Requirement for Full-Spectrum Operations,Chiarelli & Michaelis, May-June 2005, Military Review]

From the Asia Times:

...But now Iraqi farmers struggle to get water to their crops. There is severe lack of electricity to run pumps and fuel to run generators.

"The water is there and the rivers have not dried up, but the problem lies in how to get it to our dying plantations," said Jabbar Ahmed, a farmer from Latifiya south of Baghdad. "It is a shame that we, our animals and our plants are thirsty in a country that has the two great rivers."

Iraq now imports most agricultural products because of lack of irrigation.

"I used to sell 50 tonnes of tomatoes every year, but now I go to the market to buy my daily needs," said Numan Majid, from the Abu Ghraib area just west of Baghdad. "I tried hard to cope with the situation, but in vain. One cannot grow crops in Iraq anymore with this water shortage."

So the proven tactic of agricultural reforms--and the assistance of people at USAID--could have a positive impact on what we're doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. It could help us reduce the number of people who take up arms against us AND improve their quality of life. And how do we approach it? We started off by short-changing them and focusing on their oil and on using critical resources to build the largest Embassy ever out of shit and cardboard that we can't even use.

When they write the books about Afghanistan and Iraq, and do the scholarly studies, the word "folly" comes to mind. And we could have avoided that folly if we had just remembered thousands of years of human history--farmers typically pacify and improve areas beset by violence. But here we have a perfect example of short-sightedness--it would go a long ways towards getting Iraq back on track if we could just keep a dairy farm operating. And we can't even do that. It would go a long ways towards helping people in Afghanistan grow food instead of poppies. And we haven't made a dent in that problem yet.

Is it too late to expect USAID to improve the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq? It probably is, and the symbol of that is a malnourished cow and a field of poppy plants. It's never too late to appreciate the wisdom of using a different approach from carpet bombing people from high altitudes and blowing up their homes, but five years into this war in Iraq and over six years since going into Afghanistan, it's hard to see much progress.

"Bad Rabbit" asks a good question

Commenter Bad Rabbit asks, in the MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle) thread below:

How do the MRAP vehicles (as there are several under-review or for sale) fit into a Counter-Insurgency strategy?

I'm not trying to deprive US troops effective protection, but if we're officially in a counter-insurgency operation you can't use this kind of vehicle.

And that gives us a great opportunity to talk about tactics and strategy.

The mere fact that we have had to react to the tactic of using IEDs to blow up the vehicles that transport our troops means that we're giving up the initiative to the enemy. The enemy in Iraq has the initiative because they are dictating how we move on the battlefield. If you ascribe to the theory that we shouldn't be there in the first place, we should never let the enemy dictate our tactics, and we shouldn't fight a counter-insurgency war with the wrong kind of equipment, then it's hard to justify supporting the administration. And yet, there is no shortage of wingnuts who think we're winning in Iraq. Winning isn't the issue. Winning isn't the goal of the insurgency. Simply bleeding our forces white is their goal.

Consider the vast number of articles written over the past five years. There's no shortage of examples of how to figure out what's going on. I'll pick one at random, and work my way down to an examination of how counterinsurgency is supposed to work.

Here's a nice piece from Lawyers, Guns and Money:

...Matt makes what I think is an important qualification: The history of liberal democracies waging successful counterinsurgency campaigns of the sort suggested by the Field Manual is very poor. Right, but that's part of the point. For the modern military organization, nationalist insurgency is a relatively new problem. It's important to recognize that insurgency and guerilla warfare are not the same thing; the former often (but not always) employs the latter, and the latter can exist without the former. In Iraq, the Saddam Fedayeen that the US encountered early in the war quite clearly employed guerilla tactics, but were not insurgents. European military organizations of the 19th century were accustomed to dominating huge colonial tracts with extremely low troop density. If we accept that the tools that make a military good at counter-insurgency are not the tools that make an organization good at conventional continental warfare, then it becomes apparent that even during the period in which nationalist insurgencies could be expected, many organizations had better things to do. Whereas keeping the colonies down was important, defending the border was usually viewed as the more compelling mission in most military organizations. Simply put, armies haven't had that much incentive to either theorize about counter-insurgency or become proficient at executing it. The two conclusions that follow from this are first that the number of democracies executing these tactics in a competent manner has been quite small, but second that there is no very compelling evidence to think that military organizations cannot improve their counter-insurgency tactics over time. Indeed, we'd even expect it as the incentives for fighting counter-insurgency well increase. Training and doctine matter, and both can be improved over time. It is certainly well known that organizations vary in their capacity to execute counter-insurgency or peacekeeping operations; colonially experienced European military organizations (France, UK) tend to do better than continentally oriented ones (US, Germany, Russia). Finally, we can do a bit of process tracing and point to situations in which well-executed tactics worked better than poorly executed ones (see, of course, Andrew Krepinevich's The Army and Vietnam, which points out how much more successful Marine operations were than Army, despite employing less firepower).

Treating insurgency as an intractable problem opens up other difficulties. Not all insurgencies are the same; some are weak, some strong, some have a large popular base, others don't, and so forth. Even if we were to accept that defeating the Iraqi insurgency was impossible from the start (a proposition I regard as unproven) this hardly means that no insurgency can be beaten with civilized tactics. Moreover, simply suggesting that we should discard the project of improving our counter-insurgency capabilities because it's too hard disregards the possibility that the US may be required to engage in difficult counter-insurgency operations. In the case of Iraq, I can think of half a dozen different scenarios in which the US would have come into conflict with an insurgency for entirely legitimate reasons. If Hussein had openly allied himself with Bin Laden, or attacked Kuwait again, or if the state had begun to collapse, US intervention would have been both justified and necessary. It's quite possible that an insurgency would have developed anyway, and the US military would have needed to develop the tools to fight it.

Another piece from Tomdispatch:

On the April day in 2003 when American troops first pushed into Baghdad, historian Marilyn Young noted a strange phenomenon. In a single rush, the Vietnam War vocabulary had returned to our media. She promptly dubbed Iraq, "Vietnam on crack cocaine."

It's true that, for a while, the administration played an eerie opposites game, spending much of its PR time avoiding any whiff of Vietnam terminology. "Body bags" were renamed (and the homecoming dead hidden from the cameras); "body counts" were excised from the official military vocabulary -- or as General Tommy Franks, commander of our Afghan War, put it in 2002: "I don't believe you have heard me or anyone else in our leadership talk about the presence of 1,000 bodies out there, or in fact how many have been recovered… You know we don't do body counts" (except privately, of course).

But that was then, this is now. Here we are, well into the second term of Bush's Vietnam-on-crack-cocaine, Global-War-on-Terror policies. Significantly more time has passed, as Newsweek's Michael Hirsh recently pointed out, than it took the U.S. to win World War II in the Pacific:

"We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone's counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it."

And, as if giving up in its titanic struggle against the undead of our Vietnam experience, the Bush administration is now openly recycling in ever more chaotic, violent, and disastrous Iraq ancient, failed Vietnam-era policies. It's enough to give old-timers that Post-Traumatic-Stress-Syndrome feeling, as Vietnam-era war correspondent Judith Coburn explains vividly below.

Of course, we all know that Iraq is not Vietnam -- and not just because of the lack of jungle or the different language. But here's one difference between the two eras that is perhaps worth a little more attention:

In Vietnam, the U.S. military, the mightiest force then on the planet, was fought to a draw and defeated politically by a remarkably unified Vietnamese national resistance movement led by North Vietnamese communists, but with a powerful southern guerrilla element. The guerrillas in the south were backed by the North Vietnamese (and, as the war went on, by enormous chunks of the North Vietnamese military); North Vietnam was supplied with weaponry and massive support by a superpower, the Soviet Union, and a regional power, emerging Communist China.

Now consider Iraq. The U.S. military -- even more now than then the mightiest force on the planet -- has been fought to something like a stalemate by perhaps 20,000 relatively underarmed (compared to the Vietnamese) insurgents in a rag-tag minority rebellion, lacking a unified political party or program, or support from any major state power. Now consider Lebanon, where the mightiest regional military in the Middle East, the Israeli Army, which in 1982 made it to Beirut in a flash before bogging down for 18 years, has in the last three weeks not managed to secure several miles on the other side of its own border against another relatively isolated minority guerrilla movement. This perhaps tells us something about the way, in this new millennium, we are not in the Vietnam era, but you'd be hard-pressed to know that from the Bush administration's recent policies.

What's so grimly fascinating, as Coburn indicates below, is that our old counterinsurgency policies, which didn't work in Vietnam, have now proved utterly bankrupt against vastly weaker forces. On guerrilla war, our leaders, political and military, are evidently nothing short of brain-dead. Now, consider Coburn's striking piece on two failed wars, two disastrous eras of U.S. military policy abroad, and wonder whether we aren't really in Hell.

And the article referenced above says:

When General George William Casey, Jr. -- whose father, a major general, died in Vietnam in July 1970 -- announced in June 2006 that the Pentagon might soon begin the first American troop withdrawals from Iraq, I couldn't help wondering where the Iraqi version of that sign might eventually go up. In the desert? On the Iranian or the Syrian border? (The "withdrawals" were, however, rescinded before even being put into effect in the face of an all-out civil war in Baghdad.)

However it feels to anyone else, it's distinctly been flashback city for me ever since. One of the great, failed, unspeakably cynical, blood-drenched policies of the Vietnam era, whose carnage I witnessed as a reporter in Cambodia and Vietnam, was being dusted off for our latest disaster of an imperial war. Some kind of brutal regression was upon us. It was the return of the repressed or reverse evolution. It was enough to drive a war-worn journalist to new heights of despair.



While brooding about Iraqification, I was reminded of what historian and Vietnam-era New York Times journalist A.J. Langguth said about Vietnamization. "By [1970], well over a hundred thousand [South] Vietnamese soldiers were dead, crops destroyed, cities in ruins, and we're talking about Vietnamization as though the Vietnamese weren't already bearing the brunt of the war," he told historian Christian G. Appy for his oral history of the Vietnam War, Patriots. "It was one of those words that gave a reassuring ring in Washington, but it was really insulting."

As you, the reader, start to digest all of that, let's go to this account from the Washington Post, and consider the tactics applied by Colonel H. R. McMaster in Iraq early in the war:



Colonel H. R. McMaster

U.S. military experts conducting an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005 privately concluded that of all those units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment performed the best at counterinsurgency, according to a source familiar with the review's findings.

The regiment's campaign began in Colorado in June 2004, when Col. H. R. McMaster took command and began to train the unit to return to Iraq. As he described it, his approach was like that of a football coach who knows he has a group of able and dedicated athletes, but needs to retrain them to play soccer.

Understanding that the key to counterinsurgency is focusing on the people, not the enemy, he said he changed the standing orders of the regiment to state that in the future all soldiers would "treat detainees professionally." During the unit's previous tour, a detainee was beaten to death during questioning and a unit commander carried a baseball bat that he called his "Iraqi beater."

"Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy," McMaster said he told every soldier in his command. He ordered his soldiers to stop using the term hajji as a slang term for all Iraqis, because he saw it as inaccurate and disrespectful. (It actually means someone who has made the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.)

One out of every 10 soldiers received a three-week course in conversational Arabic, so that each small unit would have someone capable of basic exchanges with Iraqis. McMaster, who holds a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina and is an expert on the Vietnam War, distributed a lengthy reading list to his officers that included studies of Arab and Iraqi history and most of the classic texts on counterinsurgency. He also quietly relieved one battalion commander who didn't seem to understand that such changes were necessary.

When the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment moved into northwest Iraq last May, it faced a mess. Just as Fallujah had become a major staging point for attacks into Baghdad, Tall Afar was being used as a base to send suicide bombers and other attackers 40 miles east into Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq.

Instead of staging a major raid into the city for suspects and then moving back to operating bases, McMaster said he took a sharply different tack, spending months making preparatory moves before attacking the entrenched insurgents in Tall Afar. That indirect approach demonstrated tactical patience, a key to effectively battling an insurgency and a skill that doesn't come easily to the U.S. military.

McMaster had his unit bolster the security operation along the Syrian border, in an effort to cut off support and reinforcements coming into Iraq. He also sought to eliminate havens in the desert, beginning in June with a move against the remote desert town of Biaj, which had become a way station and training and outfitting post for fighters infiltrating from Syria. As he made the move, he brought Iraqi troops with him.

Immediately after taking Biaj, Iraqi forces set up a small patrol base there for U.S. troops. "This was the first 'clear and hold,' " McMaster recalled in an interview in his plywood office just southwest of Tall Afar. State Department officials heard about this move and briefed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. A month later, she mentioned it in her congressional testimony.

One of the keys to winning a counterinsurgency is to treat prisoners well. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment polled all detainees on how they were treated and interviewed some about their political views.

"The best way to find out about your own detainee facility is to ask the 'customer,' " said Maj. Jay Gallivan, the regiment's operations officer. Some Iraqis told the Americans why they were angry with the U.S. military presence. None of the soldiers from the unit have been charged with abuse during the regiment's current tour in Iraq, McMaster said.

In late summer, McMaster started receiving greater cooperation from Sunni leaders who had been sympathetic to the insurgency. One reason, according to U.S. military intelligence analysts, was that some insurgents were unhappy with foreign allies who seemed determined to start a civil war.

Another was that McMaster was willing to admit that U.S. forces have made mistakes in Iraq. "We understand why you fight," McMaster recalled telling Sunni Arab leaders with ties to the insurgency.

"When the Americans first came, we were in a dark room, stumbling around, breaking china," he said. "But now Iraqi leaders are turning on the lights." The concession helped break down barriers of communication, he said, and made Iraqis willing to listen to his belief that the time for resistance had ended.

With the insurgency's support infrastructure weakened in outlying areas, McMaster moved on the city. But even then he didn't attack it. First, following the suggestion of his Iraqi allies, he ringed the city with dirt berm nine feet high and 12 miles long, leaving checkpoints from which all movement could be observed. This was a nod to the counterinsurgency principle of being able to control and follow the movement of the population.

Building on that idea, U.S. military intelligence had traced the kinship lines of different tribes, enabling the unit to track fighters traveling to likely destinations just outside the city. About 120 fighters were then rounded up from among those fleeing the impending attack.

Next, McMaster and his subordinates recalled, civilians were pressured to leave the city for a camp prepared for them just to the south. Some more insurgents were caught trying to sneak out with them.

In September, after four months of preparatory moves, McMaster launched the attack. By that point, there were remarkably few insurgents left in the city. Many had fled or been caught. They seem to have expected a swift U.S. raid that they would counter with scores of roadside bombs. Instead, U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies moved slowly, clearing each block of the city and calling in artillery strikes as they spotted enemy fighters or explosives.

McMaster had a clear plan in hand for his next step. He also knew how he wanted to measure his success: Would Iraqis -- especially Sunni Arabs -- be willing to join the local police force? Would they "participate in their own security," as he put it?

The first step in this phase was to establish 29 patrol bases across the city. That, along with steady patrolling, gave the American military and its Iraqi allies a view of every major stretch of road in the compact city, which measures about three square miles. And that amount of observation made it extremely difficult for insurgents to plant bombs.

"It gives us great agility," said Lt. Col. Chris Hickey, a 1982 graduate of Chantilly High School in Virginia, who commands the U.S. troop contingent in the city. Hickey said that he can order an attack to come from two or three of the patrol bases instead of predictably rolling out the front gate of his base.

Hickey also has spent months living in the city, perched in the Ottoman-era ramparts that dominate it. He slept at the base only rarely. From his position downtown, he said, "I hear every gunshot in the city." His conclusion: "Living among the people works, if you treat them with respect." When the electricity goes out for Iraqis, he noted, it does for him too, even though he has a generator for military communications.

Hickey also moved a U.S. firing range out of earshot of the city. "I like quiet," he said.

Ultimately, 1,400 police officers were recruited, about 60 percent of whom were Sunni Arabs, many of them from elsewhere in Iraq. In addition, the city has about 2,000 Iraqi troops, and a working city council and an activist mayor. A few feet from where the city council meets is a new Joint Operations Center, set up to collect intelligence tips and act on them. The Army officer running the center, Lt. Saythala Phonexayphoua, said he has been surprised by the amount of "actionable intelligence" troops receive.

Phonexayphoua noted: "We get cell phone calls -- 'There's an insurgent planting an IED.' "

Last summer, there were about six insurgent attacks in the area each day. Now there is about one, according to U.S. military intelligence.

Even now, McMaster said, he understands that his success is "fragile." The city's mayor, Najim Abdullah Jabouri, is unhappy that McMaster and his unit are leaving Iraq this month. "A surgeon doesn't leave in the middle of the operation!" the mayor said intently to McMaster over a recent lunch of lamb kabobs and bread. He waved his finger under the colonel's nose. "The doctor should finish the job he started."

Here's why all of this matters--despite all of the academic research, despite all of the rhetoric, we aren't learning any lessons in Iraq. We're stuck using MRAPs and giving up the initiative to the enemy.

Oh, and Colonel McMaster? His career is essentially over because he "criticized" his superiors. He's been passed over twice for his star. Now if a man can successfully command an ACR in Iraq, and understand the future of counterinsurgency warfare, and then write about it--you can be rest assured that the US military will reject him out of hand and stop him in his tracks.

That inability to learn from our mistakes and accept criticism dooms us to a world where we have to build better and better MRAPs because we don't understand that the correct path is to never put our troops in a position where they need to have an MRAP in the first place.

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

Case in point:

The Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read, cutting off access to just about any independent site with the word "blog" in its web address. It's the latest move in a larger struggle within the military over the value -- and hazards -- of the sites. At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so "utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream."

Until recently, each major command of the Air Force had some control over what sites their troops could visit, the Air Force Times reports. Then the Air Force Network Operations Center, under the service's new "Cyber Command," took over.

The best way to make sure no one is exposed to the kinds of radical things I write about here and that countless other people write about much better than I could is to block access and put your head in the sand. What better way to make sure no one gets exposed to Colonel McMaster?

Sampley Ridiculous

I don't have anything to add, except that this is an excellent compendium of facts about Ted Sampley and his efforts to make money at the expense of the truth. Shadowy organizations and nefarious deeds seem to be his stock and trade. --Pale Rider

Ultimately, Sampley, Red Hawk, Inc. and Homecoming II were sued for copyright infringement by artist,Frederick Hart, and the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Fund for using the image of The Three Brothers on tee shirts without paying royalties. A judgment was levied against Sampley in the amount of almost $360,000. There are slightly different accounts of the dissolution of Red Hawk and Homecoming II. According to Susan Katz Keating,a reporter at The Washington Times who had written extensively on Sampley and his activities, Sampley told her that he had liquidated all assets and rolled the money into another 501c3 to avoid having to pay any part of the judgment.

Red Hawk, Inc was the for-profit business owned by Ted Sampley that printed the tee shirts and sold them to Homecoming II. Originally, it was a construction company Sampley used to renovate properties. The history behind these two operations can be found in the original story with links to original sources. Ted Sampley gives his accounting of these two in this piece found in U.S. Veteran Archives, Sampley's own paper.

Red Hawk, Inc. as Sampley referred to his business in the above linked piece, was formed on May 8, 1984. It was incorporated under the name Red Hawk Corporation by Sampley. Not one annual report is showing on file for Red Hawk and administrative dissolution was dated June 11, 1993. A revenue suspension took effect January 14, 2004. A revenue suspension prevents Sampley from conducting business as Red Hawk Corporation, until he settles his tax issues with the state.

U.S. Veteran Dispatch started as a news sheet and was originally called U.S. Veteran News and Report. Sampley wrote, edited and published it himself. He has been highly critical of the government by his own claim and has used the Dispatch to voice his political views. The close association with Homecoming II is questionable since it is a violation of the tax code for a 501c3 to participate in political activity.

Sampley defended the political nature of the Dispatch at one point claiming that it was owned by Red Hawk,

However in Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry he says something a bit different.

The problem with these two conflicting accounts of how U.S. Veterans Dispatch receives its funding is that Red Hawk, Inc. only printed the tee shirts. It was the Last Firebase Vigil booth that sold the bracelets and other trinkets that Sampley claimed supported the printing of the U.S. Veteran Dispatch. The vigil booth was the sales arm of the 501c3 and no monies earned from sales at the booth should have been used to support a political organization or newspaper. It was also possibly a violation of the tax code for the politically slanted news sheet to be distributed at the vigil sight.

In 1992 Sampley testified in front of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIAs where he had some of his first confrontations with Senators McCain and Kerry. Sampley's intentions and tactics are questioned and a much darker side of Ted Sampley is exposed.

The year 1992 appears to be a turning point for Ted Sampley. In his biographies Sampley says he testified before the Senate Select Committee on MIA-POWs in 1991. Most of the hearings were held in 1992. Senator John McCain and Senator John Kerry were involved in the hearings and both drew the ire of Ted Sampley.

The Senate Select Committee on POW-MIAs covered many issues. One of the topics was fundraising of the POW-MIA organizations. Several were singled out as using unscrupulous tactics and having dishonorable intentions. Sampley's Homecoming II was among those singled out.

After discussing tactics and intentions, they turned to look at amounts raised. This is in the record for Homecoming II:

Homecoming II reported to the IRS that it paid Ted Sampley, its founder and the publisher of U.S. Veteran News and Report, more than $300,000, ostensibly for t-shirts sold at Homecoming II's stand at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Sampley has fought all efforts by the National Park Service to stop merchandising the t-shirts and other merchandising on national park property, and at publication time was involved in a lawsuit over his right to use the picture of the memorial statue without paying the artist. Another lawsuit, against the National League of Families, also is pending. Despite promises of cooperation, Sampley refused to provide financial records to the Committee for his tax-exempt organization.

Some say it was the questioning of his intentions that angered Sampley. The Boston Globe reported on February 29, 1992 that Senator Bob Smith (R-NH) and Senator John Kerry (D-MA) defended Senator McCain on the floor of the Senate after Sampley had accused McCain of working as an agent for either Hanoi or Moscow. The Washington Times reported that Sampley ran a composite picture of Kerry shooting an MIA with a caption claiming it was Kerry eliminating another man from his discrepancy list. On December 3, 1992 Kerry had Sampley removed from the hearings after he disrupted a speech from someone claiming that some POW-MIA groups were taking advantage of donors.

On December 12 of 1992 Sampley walked the halls of the Senate distributing his U.S. Veteran News and Report with the Manchurian Candidate article he wrote about John McCain. He went to McCain's office to deliver a copy and was confronted by a McCain staffer. Stories differ, but there was a scuffle and Sampley spent two days in jail and 180 days on probation. He was also ordered to stay away from McCain and his staff. The article mentioned above gives Sampley's version of events.It's interesting to note that Sampley attacks McCain and accuses him of colluding with the enemy while at the same time serving as an apologist for Bobby Garwood, a man actually court-martialed for colluding with the enemy in Vietnam. Sampley refuses to believe reports of McCain's resolve in the face of torture and months of solitary confinement. One last bit from the Phoenix New Time's piece on the behavior of the more radical POW-MIA activists like Sampley:

Stanley Kutler, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin and editor of The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, calls the behavior of these people "Sick. If it weren't so sick, it would be laughable. These are not nice people.

Once again, it is easiest to start the story of The Last Firebase Veterans Archive in the words of Ted Sampley.

On December 10, 1992, Judge Charles R. Richey, entered a judgement of $359,442.92 against Homecoming II Project, Red Hawk Inc. and Ted Sampley.

From a separate Sampley piece we find this:

In 1993 Homecoming II changed its name to the Last Firebase Veterans Archives Project.

Those are Sampley's own words on two different sites that he runs. However, he gave an interview for a book written by Susan Katz Keating. According to Ms. Keating, this is the accounting he gave her when she asked Sampley how he had been able to avoid following the court's order:

"I immediately put Red Hawk out of business," he said. "I sold everything they owned, and paid bills. I closed down Homecoming II. I heard that Scruggs was planning to levy the vigil site, so I gave it away. I put everything into another nonprofit group."

This particular version of the story, if true, lays bare another possible problem for Sampley. It is illegal to hide,liquidate, redistribute, assign, etc. assets in order to avoid satisfying a judgment. I have not investigated the laws on the books back in 1992/1993, so can't say with certainty that he was violating any laws at the time. Sampley tells other versions of the events as well. Here is one that is posted in the archives of the U.S. Veteran Dispatch.

...Regardless of the version of the story you choose to believe, The Last Firebase Veterans Archive was formed and still exists as a 501c3 charitable organization. According to the date/time stamps on the copies scanned for public view, Sampley has consistently been late filing the required 990 tax forms. In 2006 Sampley filed the 990s for 2003. These papers show an income in public money(contributions) of over $60,000.

Once a charitable organization receives $25,000 in public contributions it is required to become licensed to accept contributions in the state of North Carolina. To date, Sampley has not registered The Last Firebase Veteran's Archive in the state of North Carolina to my knowledge.

...Ted Sampley has put himself out in the community as the leader of a charitable organization. He runs a 501c3 and solicits money from the public and receives favorable tax treatment from the state and from the IRS. He owes it to the town of Kinston and to the taxpayers of this state to be a good steward of the money with which he's been entrusted.

Ted Sampley ramped up the rhetoric with the web site DefeatMcCain.com, to keep John McCain away from the GOP's presidential nomination in 2000. He resurrected his accusations that McCain was a KGB spy and "The Manchurian Candidate". McCain obviously took notice. Sampley might be a bit player in the overall picture, but the viciousness of his attacks is hard to ignore. From John McCain's book, Worth Fighting For:

Ted Sampley, a war veteran and veteran POW-MIA activist, who favored fatigues and feather earrings as his costume of choice, was quite a character. I took him for a charlatan within five minutes of meeting him. And nothing he has done since has caused me to change that opinion.

:::snip:::

Sampley had recently married the daughter of an MIA, who sensibly divorced him a few years later, but his MIA in-law status gave him claim to membership privileges in the associations of POW-MIA families, which privileges he would use to make as much of a nuisance of himself at their conventions as he did during our hearings.

:::snip:::

........ I realized that although he was detestable for his influence on families who wanted to grasp at anything, even his palpable nonsense, to nurture their hopes for recovering their loved ones, he was really little more than a buffoon, and that my self-respect wasn't threatened by his antics."

It's difficult to imagine what Sampley would have done if McCain had won the GOP nomination and had run for President against Al Gore. It's hard to imagine a man like Sampley, who will whip out his veteran status to save his own hide and illicit sympathy, attacking another veteran with the gusto and joy he seems to get from attacking John McCain and John Kerry. One thing is certain, these attacks are the only thing keeping Sampley in the larger public eye.

As the 2004 presidential election took shape, Sampley prepared for all-out war against John Kerry. He designed several web sites to help spread the viscious messages coming from the swiftboat veteran's group. Sampley told the Boston Globe that he was prepared to attack Kerry if he won the South Carolina primary.

"If Kerry wins the South Carolina primary on Tuesday, we'll be coming after him," said Sampley, a POW advocate who is organizing opponents to Kerry through a new website, Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, and who was rebuked by Kerry a decade ago for alleging that Senator John McCain was brainwashed by Communists while a prisoner in Hanoi.

The following is a listing of as many of the web sites as we could uncover.
www.kerrystreason.com
www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnkerry.org
www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnkerry.com
www.impeachhanoijohn.com

Aside from the web sites, Sampley continued to heckle and disrupt events. He doctored photographs and spread them through right-wing radio(yes, even Rush Limbaugh described the pictures on his radio show), television and publications. One of the best articles that mentions Sampley's efforts against Kerry gives us this quote. It's by Joe Conason at Salon. Give it a read.

The Web site for Ted Sampley's Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry offers a pungent example of the right's rhetorical style: The Viet Cong's National Liberation Front flag is the background to a shot of a young, fatigue-clad Kerry. That picture is pure computer magic -- in other words, a fake.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell slammed Sampley on Scarborough Country in a 2004 interveiw. Media Matters has the video. For those of us who have not had the pleasure of meeting Sampley, it won't improve your opinion of him.

Senator John McCain was so incensed by Sampley's antics that he released a stinging press release.

"I strongly caution reporters who may be contacted by or are interested in Mr. Ted Sampley and the various organizations he claims to represent, and his opinions on the subject of Senator Kerry, or any subject for that matter, to investigate thoroughly Mr. Sampley's background and history of spreading outrageous slander and other disreputable behavior before inadvertently lending him or his allegations any credibility."

"I am well familiar with Mr. Sampley, and I know him to be one of the most despicable people I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I consider him a fraud who preys on the hopes of family members of missing servicemen for his own profit. He is dishonorable, an enemy of the truth, and despite his claims, he does not speak for or represent the views of all but a few veterans. The many veterans I know would think it a disgrace to be considered a comrade or supporter of Ted Sampley."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

All of the information on Sampley was gleaned verbatim from posts made by Betsy Muse at the Website Blue NC. Original posts here, here, and here.

Six hours later, and I'm still in shock

He just stood in front of the VFW and did a backflip with a 180 and stuck the landing - and nobody noticed! I actually think he freakin' believes his own bullshit!

After rejecting parallels with Vietnam, he is suddenly stripping to his skivvies and ready to climb into the sack with those very comparisons, albeit with a kinky twist. Now it seems he thinks that we should have stayed in Vietnam - you remember Vietnam - that was the war that he, draft-dodging, war-mongering, chickenhawk that he is - refused to fight, the draft he dodged - you remember Vietnam. I certainly do, and so do my aunt and uncle who lost their oldest son....And Veterans of that conflict embarrassed me today by clapping for that sonofabitch who so spectacularly failed the test back then.

"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Mr. Bush said. "Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields."'

And the idiots who voted for this clown called Kerry a flip-flopper. None of you should EVER call a Democrat a flip-flopper in my presence again. Not with this fucking political gymnast representin' y'all.

Well - I am not the only one who was stunned speechless by the "say anything, what do I have to lose?" resident's speech. Noted UCLA historian Robert Dallek, who has written extensively about the conflict in Iraq as compared to Vietnam, accused Bush of playing fast and loose with history.

"It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president," he said in a telephone interview.

"We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn't work our will," he said.

"What is Bush suggesting? That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion," he continued. "We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out."

So - will the mainstream media give him a[nother] pass, or will they finally call him on his delusional bullshit? What will you bet he gets a pass? But I think I have maybe figured out why...it is that he is just so fucking wrong, wronger than anyone has ever been, so wrong that in the history of incompetence and failure he gets a special category...That there is just an air of "Holy shit. Where do I even start???"

Well - enough already with the feeling overwhelmed. Pick a point and start making sense, and don't stop.