Dumping on the intel

Scott Horton on the Gitmo task force report. I noted this because an old associate of ours is mentioned:

"The Obama Administration came to Washington promising to clean up the Bush-era detentions policy and make it conform to the clear requirements of law. Then it seems to have decided that the law wasn’t so convenient and that simply providing for unbridled executive authority à la Bush-Cheney wasn’t such a bad idea after all. In terms of Washington power politics, that decision seems to have taken the form of letting Robert Gates make the call on all these issues. The two figures in the Administration who took the most credible stance for implementing the Obama campaign-era promises on detentions policy -- Greg Craig and Phil Carter -- resigned within a few weeks of one another, offering no believable reasons for departing. Then press reports began to appear about secret prisons, operated by JSOC and DIA and applying rules different from those applied in the "normal" DOD prisons, including plenty of torture-lite techniques under Appendix M of the Army Field Manual"

I am hardly sentimental about most of the people we have swept up in these illegal rattissages. They are unlikely to have loved us before they were imprisoned and, probably, tortured, and they are even less likely to let us alone now.But this isn't about them. This is about us, and who we are, and who we want to be. We started by warring on nations that did not attack us. We proceeded from there to violate the spirit of our national charter, which explicitly forbids bills of attainder, imprisonment without cause, and torture. We have now arrived at a place where the Chief Bobo - the mere "executive" who is supposed to do nothing more than enforce the will of the People in Congress has issued orders to murder U.S. citizens.

And the nation's response? Either approval or unconcern.

We had this discussion so many times over at the old Intel Dump. Five, six, seven years have passed, and...what? The people who worried more about our national character, about the rule of law, about the fact that whilst our enemies have no capability to destroy us we can do just that without so much as a pistol shot fired are gone, and those who see no issue with donning the morals and methods of the secret prison and the legalized assassination are still in charge.

At the old Dump even those of us who felt that there WAS a good fight to fight in central Asia pretty much agreed that the whole "why do they hate us"? question was a no-brainer. They hate us when we lie about our means and methods, they hate us when we callously violate the principles we vaunt, they hate us when we murder and kidnap and imprison without evidence or trial. All the intel we have from the places we're fighting in confirm these things. They don't hate us for our "freedoms". They don't hate us for who we are. They hate us for what we do, and this is one of the most hateful.So have good intel but we prefer to dump all over it like incontinent poodles. We know better and yet we do it anyway. We have better ways and we choose to do the worse. We have the means and methods to be smarter and yet we deliberately choose to be fools. It's worse than a crime; it's a mistake, a huge, inescapable political and foreign policy mistake, and in it we are digging our own political graves, and the People seem to see nothing but a bed of flowers.

WASF.

(h/t to Glenn Greenwald)

Buffoonery

Over at Rangeragainstwar my man Ranger and his mucker Lisa (who moonlights as the lovely and gracious Tenth Muse - "Informia, the Muse of Politics") have a good post highlighting the disconnect between the sorts of good things the Bushies say and the sorts of foolish and destructive things they do, or that occur because of their words and/or actions.

It struck me Friday as I was watching our Chief Executive watch the athletes' parade into the Olympic stadium in Beijing that this may be the salient feature of this administration. Long after the feeble attempts at despotism, the torture, the costly and interminable wars started with no strategic objectives and prosecuted with no geopolitical plans, the corruption and the lies are forgotten I am convinced that what people will remember about Dubya and his bobos are their incompetence. That these people are just plain bad at running a modern state; not just bad but bad in the way a New Guinea headhunter would be bad at piloting a 737.This almost preternatural incompetence is on display right now in the Caucasus, where our old "ally", Russia, (the one where George looked into his buddy Vladi Putin's heart and found him to be Russia's Tom Jefferson, remember?) is pounding the piss out of our "new" "ally", Georgia over a place called "South Ossetia".

Our relationship with Georgia is a textbook Bush foreign policy fuckup. Here's a place that's basically a kleptocracy, marginally stable with a lot of "failed state" characteristics perched perilously in the ex-Soviet "near abroad", the southern and southeastern rind of Caucasian and Central Asian states ravished by the Russians in the mid- to late-19th Century that as Soviets and now as "Russians" again the rulers in Moscow wish to retain or regain. Its leader, a man named Saakashvili, appears to be almost as incompetent as his pal Dubya, and this is NOT a part of the world where its good to be a fool.

The fool appears to have tried to take advantage of Putin's visit to Beijing and the traditional Russian August holiday to move a conventional force into South Ossetia, a former-Soviet, former-Georgian, semi-criminal entity that has been defying him for some time.

This MIGHT have worked, in the same way that Dubya's Middle East wars "worked", if it had been done intelligently AND if the West and the U.S. had been willing to carry Saakashvili's water. It wasn't, they/we weren't, and now Georgia is in serious trouble. They have pulled their brigade from Diyala Province in Iraq (a fairly troublesome loss to MNF-I), they look to get hammered perhaps even to the point of capitulation and reabsorbtion into Russia, and they are loudly and publicly blaming us for their problems.

And, frankly, they have a point.

An administration run by adults would have treated these guys like a party girl with open sores. We have no real influence with the Russians, particularly in their former Soviet near abroad, and should have made this clear to the Georgians. We also should have reminded them that while they can make kissy-kissy with the eagle they sleep in the cave with the bear: the smart thing to do is NOT slap the bear in the nuts if you can't kill it.

But no: we've been feeding these guys military advisors and political support. If we knew that they were going to try a South Ossetian coup de main (and given the U.S. Army Georgian advisory mission my guess is that either a) we did, and didn't get the word out in time or b) we didn't and as such being further proof that our Central Asian intelligence couldn't find an elephant if it was in the room with them pissing on their heads) and we didn't immediately advise them of what a bad idea that was we were kidding either ourelves or them or both. My guess is that we did know - but because of their willingness to be "The Willing" (as in coalition of) we let them slide; just another example of the Bushies fucking "phony war on terror" blinders forcing us into dumb geopolitical postures to advance this idiotic crusade. There was a Children's Crusade; can we call this the "Crusade of the Childishly Stupid"?

Anyway, the handwriting looks like its on the wall; our Georgian "ally" is going down hard and is going to publicly blame this Administration for a Vietnam- or 1956 Hungarian-style desertion. We will have pointlessly antagonized the Russians, made our other Central Allies nervous, and have spent a little more economic and political capital for nothing.It's worth recalling that history isn't kind to even well-intentioned losers, never mind venal, egotistic, delusional losers. Stalin is a nightmare out of history; a murderous, savage animal - but nobody looks at Stalin and pities him in the condescendng way we look at Kerensky. Mao is another of history's horrors, but no one looks at him with his millions of victims and shakes his head ruefully with the comment "What a fucking tool, what a dumbass loser, what a maroon..." the way we think of his old enemy Chang Kai-shek.

Napoleon strides through the early Nineteenth Century like a bloodyhanded butcher and a tyrant, and yet we respect him in a way we don't his predecessor Louis XVI, whose combination of arrogance and ignorance managed to lose him a dynasty and a nation in less than twenty years.

It'd be enough to make you laugh if it wasn't enough to make you weep.

Anyway, at this rate Dubya is going to be lucky if he ends up remembered as a lesser fool than Nicky Romanov, Maximilian of Mexico or our own James Buchanan.And, of course, the really unlucky ones are the rest of us; the "little people" who will pay with our youth, our hopes or our lives for his foolery.

Update 8/11: Apparently the poor fools in Georgia thought that Dubya was Iron Man:

"In other news, the Georgians appear to be displeased at the lack of a more forceful American response. This, as much as anything, gives an indication as to what Georgia thought it was buying with its Iraq deployment: As a Russian jet bombed fields around his village, Djimali Avago, a Georgian farmer, asked me: “Why won’t America and Nato help us? If they won’t help us now, why did we help them in Iraq?”

Because you can fool some of the people all of the time...