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david petraeus
Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster
The main message of the neocons is that the US must predominate in military power in every region of the world, and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge US global or regional dominance, most important Russia and China.
Jun 28, 2022
The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.
The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world.
The neocon movement emerged in the 1970s around a group of public intellectuals, several of whom were influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classicist Donald Kagan. Neocon leaders included Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), Frederick Kagan (son of Donald), Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert), Elliott Cohen, Elliott Abrams, and Kimberley Allen Kagan (wife of Frederick).
The main message of the neocons is that the US must predominate in military power in every region of the world, and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge US global or regional dominance, most important Russia and China. For this purpose, US military force should be pre-positioned in hundreds of military bases around the world and the US should be prepared to lead wars of choice as necessary. The United Nations is to be used by the US only when useful for US purposes.
This approach was spelled out first by Paul Wolfowitz in his draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) written for the Department of Defense in 2002. The draft called for extending the US-led security network to the Central and Eastern Europe despite the explicit promise by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1990 that German unification would not be followed by NATO's eastward enlargement. Wolfowitz also made the case for American wars of choice, defending America's right to act independently, even alone, in response to crises of concern to the US. According to General Wesley Clark, Wolfowitz already made clear to Clark in May 1991 that the US would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria, and other former Soviet allies.
The neocons championed NATO enlargement to Ukraine even before that became official US policy under George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008. They viewed Ukraine's NATO membership as key to US regional and global dominance. Robert Kagan spelled out the neocon case for NATO enlargement in April 2006:
[T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the "color revolutions" of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union--in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?
Kagan acknowledged the dire implication of NATO enlargement. He quotes one expert as saying, "the Kremlin is getting ready for the 'battle for Ukraine' in all seriousness." The neocons sought this battle. After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the US and Russia should have sought a neutral Ukraine, as a prudent buffer and safety valve. Instead, the neocons wanted US "hegemony" while the Russians took up the battle partly in defense and partly out of their own imperial pretentions as well. Shades of the Crimean War (1853-6), when Britain and France sought to weaken Russia in the Black Sea following Russian pressures on the Ottoman empire.
Kagan penned the article as a private citizen while his wife Victoria Nuland was the US Ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush, Jr. Nuland has been the neocon operative par excellence. In addition to serving as Bush's Ambassador to NATO, Nuland was Barack Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs during 2013-17, where she participated in the overthrow of Ukraine's pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, and now serves as Biden's Undersecretary of State guiding US policy vis-a-vis the war in Ukraine.
In the "battle for Ukraine," the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia's vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.
The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world. It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence. Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated. Yet in the "battle for Ukraine," the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia's vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a neocon think-tank led by Kimberley Allen Kagan (and backed by a who's who of defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Raytheon), continues to promise a Ukrainian victory. Regarding Russia's advances, the ISW offered a typical comment: "[R]egardless of which side holds the city [of Sievierodonetsk], the Russian offensive at the operational and strategic levels will probably have culminated, giving Ukraine the chance to restart its operational-level counteroffensives to push Russian forces back."
The facts on the ground, however, suggest otherwise. The West's economic sanctions have had little adverse impact on Russia, while their "boomerang" effect on the rest of the world has been large. Moreover, the US capacity to resupply Ukraine with ammunition and weaponry is seriously hamstrung by America's limited production capacity and broken supply chains. Russia's industrial capacity of course dwarfs that of Ukraine's. Russia's GDP was roughly 10X that of Ukraine before war, and Ukraine has now lost much of its industrial capacity in the war.
The most likely outcome of the current fighting is that Russia will conquer a large swath of Ukraine, perhaps leaving Ukraine landlocked or nearly so. Frustration will rise in Europe and the US with the military losses and the stagflationary consequences of war and sanctions. The knock-on effects could be devastating, if a right-wing demagogue in the US rises to power (or in the case of Trump, returns to power) promising to restore America's faded military glory through dangerous escalation.
Instead of risking this disaster, the real solution is to end the neocon fantasies of the past 30 years and for Ukraine and Russia to return to the negotiating table, with NATO committing to end its commitment to the eastward enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia in return for a viable peace that respects and protects Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
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To Make Sense of Soleimani Assassination, Media Turn to Disgraced Iraq War Gen. David Petraeus
Soleimani and the militia groups he led played a key role in defeating the Islamic State in Iraq, but Petraeus denies this reality.
Jan 11, 2020
Following President Donald Trump's assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, several United States media outlets have turned to retired military general David Petraeus for "expert" commentary on Iran because he was Soleimani's "adversary" when he ran U.S. Central Command.
Not only did Petraeus empower Shiite militias to torture and ethnically cleanse neighborhoods in Iraq, but when he was CIA director under President Barack Obama, he leaked top secret information to Washington Post reporters in March 2011. He also lied to the FBI and improperly handled highly-classified "Black Books," which contained identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities, and notes from discussions with Obama.
Petraeus appeared on CBS' Sunday morning news program, "Face The Nation," on Jan. 5. He praised Trump for restoring "deterrence" by authorizing a lethal drone strike in Baghdad.
During the Iraq War, Petraeus commanded military forces that carried out the "surge," which was widely celebrated. Yet, in retrospect, it is rather clear that U.S. forces implemented a strategy of ethnic cleansing, where Shiite militias were allowed to expel hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs from Baghdad.
Shiite militias in Iraq established secret detention centers, where opponents of the U.S. occupation were tortured, and Col. James Steele, a veteran of U.S. "dirty wars" in Central America, was enlisted to oversee what essentially operated as paramilitary death squads. Col. James Coffman worked alongside Steele and reported to Petraeus.
The U.S. government largely views Shiite militias in Iraq as proxies for Iran. Back in 2015, Petraeus told the Washington Post the "foremost threat to Iraq's long-term stability and the broader regional equilibrium is not the Islamic State; rather, it is Shiite militias, many backed by--and some guided by--Iran."
Not only did Petraeus empower Shiite militias to torture and ethnically cleanse neighborhoods in Iraq, but when he was CIA director under President Barack Obama, he leaked top secret information to Washington Post reporters in March 2011. He also lied to the FBI and improperly handled highly-classified "Black Books," which contained identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities, and notes from discussions with Obama.
Petraeus granted access to his biographer, Paula Broadwell, with whom he was having an affair. Although he was forced to resign from his position as head of the CIA, he served no jail time and was issued a modest $40,000 fine.
All of the above would disqualify most people from invitations to appear on news programs. It would lead editors and producers to question their credibility. But among a media and political establishment that easily forgives and forgets the misconduct--or criminal acts--of high-ranking officials, Petraeus' insights on military operations and foreign policy are still sought after.
On "Face The Nation," Petraeus argued prior to the assassination the U.S. government lost the "component of deterrence that was seen as American will." He selectively recalled events that had transpired between the U.S. and Iran in the past year.
"Our drone, a hundred-thirty-million-dollar drone is shot down, [no] significant response; five percent of the world's oil production taken out of operation; numerous attacks on shipping and then attacks on our forces; ultimately, of course, killing an American and wounding four of our soldiers," Petraeus said. "So, ultimately, the president appears to have decided that it was necessary to take an action to shore up deterrence to show that we were not going to accept this."
As the Associated Pressreported, on Dec. 29, U.S. military forces launched strikes that killed 25 people and wounded dozens of fighters. The military said it targeted the Iranian-backed Kataeb Hezbollah militia for launching a rocket attack on Dec. 24 that allegedly killed an American contractor stationed at a U.S. military base in Kirkuk. However, Kataeb Hezbollah insisted their fighters were not in the area when the attack was launched.
Protesters responded to the attack with a demonstration at the U.S. embassy in the Green Zone on Dec. 31. The walls of the embassy were breached as they demanded an end to the U.S. military occupation. Days later, Soleimani was assassinated, along with Abu Mehdi Al Muhandis of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) of Iraq.
Soleimani And the Fight Against the Islamic State
For the most part, no media outlet bothered to disclose that Petraeus works for the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), which has assets in the military industrial-complex. KKR recently added Novaria Group, an aerospace contractor, to capitalize on Trump's increased military spending.
"We'd never gone after [Soleimani] before, although I hasten to add that he never dared set foot inside Iraq to my recollection, when I was commanding the surge, nor in the time that I was the commander of U.S. Central Command," Petraeus declared on "Face The Nation." "He only really became visible in the way that he has in more recent years after the Arab Spring, supporting the murderous Bashar al-Assad in Syria and then very actively supporting the Iranian-supported militia inside Iraq that were helping to contend with the Islamic State invasion of northern and western Iraq."
Part of this remark was echoed in an NBC Newscolumn from Bill Rivers, the speechwriter for former U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, who asserted assassinating Soleimani was the "smart thing to do."
"Soleimani intervened to salvage the Syrian civil war for President Bashar al-Assad, organizing more than 100,000 fighters to prop up the crumbling, corrupt regime and planning the infamous campaign to retake the city of Aleppo from Syrian rebels in 2016. That siege redefined carnage in the modern era, while the civil war overall sent thousands of refugees fleeing to Europe," Rivers wrote.
Rivers entirely ignores the fact that al Qaida-linked fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra controlled parts of Aleppo. Secretary of State John Kerry said during a 2016 meeting with Syrian regime change activists: "Nusra makes it hard. Nusra and Daesh [ISIS] both make it hard, because you have this extreme element out there and unfortunately some of the opposition has kind of chosen to work with them."
Kerry revealed that the U.S. watched Islamic State forces grow in strength because they believed they could "manage" the threat, and it would hopefully force Assad to negotiate an end to his administration in Syria.
"We were watching. We saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, we could probably manage, that Assad would then negotiate. Instead of negotiating, he got [Vladimir] Putin to support him."
Both Russia and Iran intervened to prevent the collapse of a government. In spite of U.S. operations, they mounted operations to ensure the Islamic State did not take control of more territory in Syria and become an even greater threat to the region.
Soleimani and the militia groups he led played a key role in defeating the Islamic State in Iraq, but Petraeus denies this reality. "Make no mistake about it, those militia and the Iraqi security forces could not have defeated the Islamic State in Iraq without our enabling forces, our drones, our precision munitions, and our intelligence and advice."
Yet, as PBSreported, when the U.S. was gone and Iraq was threatened by the Islamic State, the PMF--armed, funded, and trained by Iran--saved the country.
Correspondent Reza Sayeh said, "It was Soleimani who led many of the PMF brigades in a three-year ground campaign that overpowered ISIS and eventually set the stage for Iraqi forces to defeat the extremist group in Mosul, its last major stronghold in Iraq."
Blaming Iran For the Rise Of the Islamic State
Robin Wright, a contributing writer to The New Yorker, featured Petraeus in her coverage of the Soleimani assassination. Wright helped Petraeus spread propaganda about the number of American troops Soleimani allegedly killed.
"To counter U.S. influence in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, he provided Iraqi militants with rockets, bombs, and explosively formed projectiles that could slice through the armor of an American M1 tank. 'He has the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands,' Petraeus said."
Journalist Gareth Porter wrote in June 2019, "After General David Petraeus took over as commander of coalition forces in Iraq in January 2007," his command argued "Iran was providing Shiite militias with the powerful roadside bombs called Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs) that were causing [an] increasing number of U.S. casualties in Iraq. But the evidence proved otherwise."
Porter added, "Hezbollah--not Iran--had been well known as the world's most knowledgeable designer and user of EFPs." And, a 2007 military briefing later confirmed "Iraqi extremist group members" and not Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were behind the explosives.
"Major General Rick Lynch, the U.S. commander for southern Iraq, admitted in a July 6 press briefing, his troops had not 'captured anybody that [they could] directly tie back to Iran,'" he wrote.
NPR also had Petraeus on their "Weekend Edition" on Sunday, Jan. 5. Host Sarah McCammon asked the retired general about his role in overseeing militias that developed into paramilitary death squads.
MCCAMMON: You mentioned the Shia militia's general. But there are those who see your role as instrumental in the influence of the Shia militias inside Iraq's U.S.-backed security forces because they were absorbed into the police. How do you respond to that?
PETRAEUS: Well, there's no question that, again, there was a presence of these different militias that was emerging during my time as a three-star. There is also no question that I insisted on the removal of key leaders--all of the brigadier generals and above in the police forces, for example. There was--these were actually paramilitary police forces, not just cops on the beat--two full divisions of them.
We would refuse to reconstitute these forces, to retrain them, to fill them back up with people, equipment, and weapons and so forth until the toxic leaders were removed. Sadly, those leaders were returned to their positions several years later. And unfortunately, these toxic leaders were a large part of the undoing of Iraq that allowed the Islamic State to get back up on its feet and ultimately to come back into Iraq and to defeat the Iraqi security forces in the north and the west.
But revelations based on evidence of torture--contained in military incident reports published by WikiLeaks and disclosed by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning--showed Petraeus looked the other way when he learned of this brutality.
Even former British Prime Minister Tony Blair conceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq fueled the rise of the Islamic State. "Of course, you can't say those of us who removed Saddam [Hussein] in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015."
Journalist Patrick Cockburn previously wrote: "U.S. policy has an Alice in Wonderland absurdity about it, everything being the opposite of what it appears to be. The so-called 'coalition of the willing' is, in practice, very unwilling to fight [the Islamic State], while those hitherto excluded, such as Iran, the Syrian government, Hezbollah, and the PKK, are the ones actually fighting."
That largely explains why Petraeus hypes the effectiveness of U.S. military strategy while seeking to discredit operations by groups the U.S. opposes, even though they achieved success.
On Jan. 5, after the Iraqi parliament backed a resolution to expel U.S. troops, the Boston Heraldspoke with Petraeus. He said the outcome was "disappointing, given all that we did over the years to defeat (al Qaida in Iraq) and then to enable defeat of ISIS" and that the vote is "very concerning given that many Iraqis--if not most--do not want to see Iraq 'Lebanonized,'--that is, controlled by Iran."
Petraeus further suggested "a portion of the Iraqi Parliament is controlled by Iran and many others are intimidated by Iranian proxy militias."
This is the same imperial hubris that the U.S. media fell for when the Bush administration lied America into a war in Iraq. Neoconservatives like Petraeus accuse Iraqi politicians of being ungrateful, like they should thank the U.S. for the sanctions, bloodshed, and terrorism that was unleashed on their country.
The reality is Iraqis would like to be free from U.S. military occupation because all these forces do is attract extremist groups, which want to fight a superpower viewed as responsible for countless acts of aggression in the past decades. If they have to look to neighboring countries for help in restoring their sovereignty and independence, they will.
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Reverse Darwinian Selection Afflicts Trump's Washington
This administration always chooses the worst and the dumbest
Jun 26, 2019
In the 1960s, at the very dawn of the New Right rebellion, William F. Buckley, Jr., declared that he would rather be governed by persons selected from the phone directory than the faculty of Harvard. Conservative egghead bashing has a long pedigree, and even Buckley, an aspiring patrician with one of the most laboriously affected accents ever heard, felt obliged to join in the populist trolling.
Over the succeeding five decades, the conservative movement and its chosen vehicle, the Republican Party, have substantially achieved the goal of systematically devaluing expertise, thereby accomplishing one of their most cherished ideological goals: to prove to the American people that government doesn't work.
As I have written before, the Republican push for non-expertise got a big boost during the Gingrich speakership. It continued its long march through institutions during the riotously incompetent planning and conduct of the Iraq war under George W. Bush, and has reached ghastly perfection with Donald Trump.
Just look at a few of the uniquely awful Trump personnel at the top tier: Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Stephen Miller, Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, departing Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Their unsuitability is matched by Trump appointees at lower levels.
The conclusion is inescapable: one could get better people for the jobs by recruiting candidates from the checkout line at a dollar store. Would such people be qualified for their positions? Probably not. But they might occasionally heed reasonable advice rather than reflexively doing the opposite, and they almost certainly would not unanimously possess the iron and unerring resolve of the current Trump team always to do the stupid, unethical or immoral thing.
Recently leaked vetting documents show what the Trump administration looks for in personnel. Despite warnings that former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and former HHS Secretary Tom Price had considerable ethics and management problems, they were hired anyway. In their jobs, they proceeded to demonstrate just those same qualities the administration had been warned about.
Their downfall was less the result of their grifting and self-dealing than the fact that the capo in the White House was irritated by the conspicuous swaggering of these two arrogant underlings. They ought to have realized that such public flaunting of their bad-assery is reserved for the mob boss and his immediate family.
The vetting criteria for General David Petraeus, who was mooted for either secretary of state or national security adviser, are particularly telling. There were legitimate grounds for rejecting Petraeus: he was a major player in the Iraq debacle, a policy disaster that Trump roundly condemned during his campaign. The general's government career as CIA director ended abruptly when the FBI found he had been sharing code-word level classified information with his lover, who just happened not to be his wife. Petraeus compounded the damage by lying to the FBI.
But why was he rejected for a position in the Trump administration? Vetting personnel at the Republican National Committee "red flagged" Petraeus because he opposed torture - possibly the one unambiguously praiseworthy thing about the man.
As with personnel, so inevitably with policy. Flipping a coin before deciding among critical policy options would seem statistically to produce a better result than what we have seen in the Trump administration. By some strange reverse-Darwinian principle, Trump and his coat-holders invariably default to the worst conceivable option. Examples follow.
Let us imagine you are in charge and want to improve this country's terms of trade with China. Three broad options present themselves:
- Enact long-term, non-tariff, World Trade Organization-compliant measures to restructure the US economy, such as tax benefits for manufacturing, programs for apprenticeships, tax incentives for companies that hire manufacturing labor, and various encouragements to American firms for on-shore production.
- Risk a tariff war with China by imposing duties on its imports, but first get our allies (who are also damaged by Chinese behavior) on board so that there is a united policy front. This move would prevent export shifting by China to those countries, and hinder it from working side-deals with them that would undermine U.S. economic goals.
- Get into a tariff war with the second-largest economy in the world on our own because we made superhuman efforts to systematically alienate our allies and non-Chinese trading partners.
Of course, Trump picked option 3 because it was objectively the worst option.
Now, let's try tax cuts:
- Enact tax cuts for low and middle income people, but make them revenue neutral by increasing marginal rates on the rich, taxing non-productive or destructive Wall Street practices, and by closing absurd loopholes like the one that results in a hedge fund manager paying taxes at a lower rate than his secretary or a cab driver.
- OK, let's now assume you're not fiscally responsible: tax cuts for everybody and they're not paid for, but the cuts are heavily biased towards low and middle income people on the principle that the wealthy already got a huge windfall from the Bush tax cuts.
- Enact tax cuts that are theoretically for everybody, but in reality 83 percent of the dollar value will go to the top one percent of individuals. Oh, and the revenue loss blows the deficit through the roof, even in a nominally booming economy.
Naturally, Trump, with united assistance from the Republican Congress, chose option 3.
Now let us assume that for some reason you are dissatisfied with the Iran nuclear agreement (The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) that your predecessor signed. Let us run though the options:
- Recognize that for all the generalized railing against it because the plan was the handiwork of the Obama administration, and for all the massive financial pressure of the Israel Lobby, Iran had been compliant with JCPOA's terms. The agreement is the best single means of preventing that country from becoming a nuclear-armed state, and, like our arms agreements with the old Soviet Union, it is inherently imperfect but better than other options, like war.
- Articulate which provisions of the agreement are technically defective rather than just ranting about JCPOA without ever having read it. Engage diplomatically with the other signatories of JCPOA to amend the agreement.
- Unilaterally withdraw from the agreement, alienate the other countries guaranteeing JCPOA by making them potentially subject to the additional sanctions you are imposing on Iran (which, it must be repeated, was complying with the agreement), and engage in juvenile trash talk and saber-rattling. Put a cherry on the cake, even as you claim you want a diplomatic solution, by sanctioning the leader and foreign minister of Iran, thus making it impossible for the Europeans or anyone else to engage with the country diplomatically.
The answer to the Iran policy conundrum is of course now playing out in the news headlines.
Throughout American history, there has always been a strident minority opinion that aggressive and self-righteous stupidity is nobler and more virtuous in the sight of God than prudent and circumspect intelligence. This view now controls most of our government and is in a position to make its will the law of the land. Sooner or later, we shall see whether the higher laws of natural selection act to weed out stupidity in as spectacular and unpleasant a fashion as occurred with the Habsburg and Ottoman empires.
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