re: "Obama’s Next War"

Frank Gaffney at Big Peace outlines the prospects for peace (and for war).

Money quote(s):

"(A)n extraordinary intelligence-special forces team liquidated Osama bin Laden and drones have dispatched a number of other “high value targets” in what the President calls our “war on al Qaeda.” These are morale-boosting tactical achievements, but in the great scheme of things are more like whack-a-mole than strategic victories. Much more important is the fact that Mr. Obama is in the process of losing the two wars he inherited, and making a hash-up of the one he initiated in Libya."

Nonconcur in part. Taking UBL off the board was a strategic victory just as shooting down Adm. Yamamoto was

That being said, there's a vacuum, apparently, where the grand strategy ought to be.

"Mr. Obama’s earlier insistence on withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq and his abiding determination to pull out virtually all others by year’s end has, as a practical matter, made it impossible for the government in Baghdad to ask us to stay on. Even if the Iranian puppet, Muqtada al-Sadr, were not threatening if Americans are invited to stay to relaunch his Madi army’s sectarian warfare and bring down the coalition government (in which his party is a prominent part), the Iraqis can hardly be more in favor of maintaining an American presence than we are.

The predictable result in Iraq next year (if not before) will be a vacuum of power that Iran will surely fill. State Department and other Americans left behind, in the hope that the immense investment we have made in lives and treasure in Iraq’s democratic and pro-Western future will not be squandered, stand to become endangered species. The ironic symbol of our defeat may be the takeover in due course of the immense new U.S. embassy in Baghdad by Iranians – this time by invited diplomats, not the hostage-taking “students” of 1979."

Why is Mookie still breathing? Surely this is an oversight on someone's part.

I worry about my colleagues starting assignments in Iraq these days; I don't want to find myself glued to a television screen someday in the not-to-distant future, hoping (and dreading) to see someone I know running for the last helicopter out or being paraded around as A-Jad's latest hostage. He's done it before, after all.

" In his speech last week to what he calls “the Muslim world,” the President made it U.S. policy to support whoever manages to get elected in the various nations of North Africa and the Middle East currently undergoing political upheavals. As a practical matter, that will mean legitimating, working with and underwriting the Muslim Brotherhood, since they are far and away the most organized, disciplined and ruthless of the contenders for power in country after country. History tells us that such people – from Hitler in Weimar Germany to Hamas in the Gaza Strip – win even “free and fair” elections, which then amount to one-man, one-vote, one-time. (For more on the deadly nature and agenda of the MB or Ikhwan, see last week’s column in this space.)

President Obama’s openness (to put it mildly) to bringing the Brotherhood to power was manifested not only by his pledge to forgive $1 billion in Egyptian debt and to provide it another billion in additional foreign aid. Just as he did in his last much-ballyhooed “outreach” to Muslims in Cairo two years ago, Team Obama had one of the top Muslim Brothers – Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Ikhwan’s largest front group in this country, the Islamic Society of North America – prominently seated in the audience at the State Department."

I've mentioned ISNA's Muslim Brotherhood pedigree before.

During the course of a diplomatic career, it's not that unusual to find yourself, our your side, treating with very unpleasant and sometimes quite evil folk, as you're about your country's business of state and in the pursuit of peace. That sort of thing goes with the territory, I'm afraid. Examples including treating with Yasser Arafat even though we knew he was personally responsible for the murder of (at least) one of our ambassador. (For a transcription of the document itself, see here.)

It's still troubling and bothersome. I suppose I ought to be really worried when this sort of thing doesn't bother me.

re: "Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants"

Herschel Smith at The Captain's Journal ("dedicated to the dissemination of conservative views, based on a solidly and consistently conservative world view, on matters political and military") cuts to the heart of this: money.

Money quote(s):

"So the story line is that Jordan and his cohorts were hired to build and maintain a web site similar to Iraq Slogger, except for Afghanistan. I don’t believe that charging for content on Iraq Slogger worked out very well, and they apparently worked a deal with the DoD to fund this new web site with tax dollars. Some of “their” money got diverted to use in actually developing real intelligence and killing the enemy, and they went to The New York Times, complaining and moaning about lost revenue.

Since I have gone on record demanding a covert campaign to foment an insurgency inside of Iran (as well as advocated targeted assassinations of certain figures such as Moqtada al Sadr and others), it should come as no surprise that I have no problem with dollars being spent wherever they are best utilized. It’s amusing that a government official said “no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up.” No, to the contrary, these dollars redounded to success. There is a lesson in this."

&

"(T)here is the moralistic element to this account. It’s an outrage: his information was “being used to kill people,” intoned the flabbergasted Pelton. This is the same preening, holier than thou, sanctimonious crap that we heard from the anthropologists who weighed in against the use of human terrain teams – as if war isn’t a legitimate application for anthropology. Every enlisted man and officer in war practices anthropology every day."