'Operation Seem Like You're Achieving Something' Stalls

It's like I've been saying all along: We don't have enough U.S. troops to hold Iraqi territory which we seize, and the Iraqi military is too weak, or too unmotivated, to help us. So, we can "surge" with a few thousand more troops, and do short-term Operations here and there with tough, cool-sounding names like "Arrowhead Ripper," but at the end of the day, we've got too few boots on the ground to control Iraq. The insurgents or al Qaeda only have to melt away into areas where we are not, wait us out, then march back in when we leave, since such Operations are not sustainable.

We'd need 300,000 troops on the ground at least, and preferably 500,000, to have a chance of controlling Iraq.

(Any volunteers?...)

General: Iraqi forces may be too weak

By LAUREN FRAYER, Associated Press Writer Sun Jun 24, 6:39 PM ET

U.S. wants to replace MAD with RAD?

The "Primacy" Primate

An Invisible 500-pound Gorilla Haunts The Missile-defense Debate.

By Alexander Zaitchik

The end of the Cold War has spawned a lot of surprises that no one could have imagined, one of those being the mass nuclear-amnesia that has afflicted most of the civilized world. This has become painfully obvious in the recent debate over U.S. missile-defense installations in Eastern Europe.

Consider last week's Economist editorial "Vlad and MAD," the magazine's latest in a string of "get tough with Russia" articles. The editors point to Putin's pre-G8 summit statement that Russia would respond to the stationing of ABM systems in Poland and the Czech Republic by targeting Eastern Europe with nuclear rockets as a sign that, "The era of mutual assured destruction (or MAD) which supposedly ended when the red flag came down, could return."

That the MAD "era" ended in 1991 would be news to U.S. and Russian nuclear launch commanders. Since the end of the Cold War, neither side has even for a moment removed its missiles from their pre-'91 hair-trigger footings. MAD did not end with the Cold War because MAD was not an "era," a state of mind, a policy, or even a doctrine. MAD is a fact, one that exists when two mature nuclear powers face each other across oceans armed with a triad of nuclear missiles, bombers, and submarines. MAD simply means that if one side surprise attacks, the other side can mount a devastating second-strike in response. Not so long ago, every schoolboy and girl understood this. Now, apparently, even Economist editors can't keep their Armageddon acronyms straight.

The magazine is right about one thing. There is indeed a quiet revolution in MAD afoot; it's just not the one evoked in "Vlad and MAD." Quite the opposite. The biggest news concerning MAD since the fall of the Iron Curtain is not its sudden revival under Vladimir Putin, but its systematic burial under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

While burying MAD is a worthy and necessary goal, there is a right way to do it, and the American way.

When the Bush Administration announced its decision to scrap the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2001, Moscow squealed. But, as with the current flap over missile defense installations in Eastern Europe, the Russian response was only partially about the nascent missile defense system. There was also a 500-pound MAD gorilla in the room. Russia's initial and ongoing opposition to missile defense should be considered within the larger context of NATO expansion into former Warsaw Pact countries and Soviet republics, the modernization of U.S. conventional and nuclear forces, and the deterioration of the same in Russia.

What this amounts to has been termed, "the rise of U.S. nuclear primacy."

If this phrase rings a bell, it's because of the small firestorm created last year when two American academics, Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, published "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy" in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. The authors argued that the United States is consciously refining its nuclear forces so as to be able to knock out Russia's rump arsenal and command and control system, thereby achieving first-strike capability, or "primacy," for the first time since the early 1960s. They do not argue or imply that such an attack is in the offing, but merely state that the looming fact of U.S. nuclear primacy is potentially destabilizing and is essential to keep in mind when framing flashpoints in the U.S.-Russian security dialogue - flashpoints like missile defense. Since this larger context has gone missing lately, with U.S. officials and editorialists haughtily dismissing Russian concerns as "ridiculous" and "anachronistic," it seems like a good time to revisit their article.

Lieber and Press marshal publicly known information about U.S. and Russian nuclear forces to make their case. Against a post-Cold War background of a shrinking and rusting Russian nuclear triad,

The U.S. nuclear arsenal has significantly improved. The United States has replaced the ballistic missiles on its submarines with the substantially more accurate Trident II D-5 missiles, many of which carry new, larger-yield warheads. The U.S. Navy has shifted a greater proportion of its [nuclear subs] to the Pacific so that they can patrol near the Chinese coast or in the blind spot of Russia's early warning radar network...

The authors continue in this vein with a long and wonky litany detailing improvements in systems ranging from the B-2 bomber to ICBMs. They conclude, "[T]hese steps look like a coordinated set of programs to enhance the United States' nuclear first-strike capabilities. The current and future U.S. nuclear force...seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike against Russia or China."

Let me repeat that: The current and future U.S. nuclear force...seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike against Russia or China.

That's what two serious American academics said in Foreign Affairs last year. And yet when Putin objects to the ABM system, his fears are dismissed as "ridiculous" by the West's political and editorial elite, who react like impatient parents whose child claims there is a monster under the bed.

One of the criticisms of the article was that it overplayed the extent to which these improvements are consciously intended to develop first-strike capability. But since there is no way of knowing exactly what the intentions are, all we can judge is the consequence of this buildup: Greatly increased Russian vulnerability, and insecurity.

As for the limited missile defense system Russia is told on a daily basis it has no need to fear, Lieber and Press disagree. "Missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy," they write,

would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one - as an adjunct to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a standalone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal - if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.

The Russian response to this last year was predictably intense. It sent an already nervous General Staff into a tizzy, and the article's thesis was splashed all over Russian media as if it represented the voice of a unified American establishment "sending a message" that it now controlled the world. The Russian response demonstrated a failure to understand the role of think tanks in American society, but it's hard to blame the Russians for being startled. As soon as the issue of Foreign Affairs hit the stands, the ticker tape in Moscow went wild with details of the new American plot. It played directly into the worst nightmares and paranoid fantasies of Western encirclement and the subsequent obliteration of Russia. In the U.S., on the other hand, the article went largely unnoticed beyond the academic and national security circles who read Foreign Affairs, although the New York Times did republish the full article on its website.

The Defense Department wasn't happy with the article either, and reacted as if Lieber and Press, not its own nuclear upgrades, were to blame for Russia's anxiety over the rapidly tipping balance of nuclear terror. In the August/September issue of Foreign Affairs, Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter C. W. Flory attacked the authors for misunderstanding or misrepresenting the various refinements underway in America's nuclear arsenal. After arguing that the technical evolution of U.S. forces does not reflect a quest for primacy, Flory cites as proof a cliche-ridden May 2001 speech made by President Bush declaring his commitment to reducing nuclear dangers. Flory was joined in his attack by a former deputy assistant secretary in Rumsfeld's Pentagon, Keith Payne, who accused Lieber and Press of "a gross distortion of U.S. policy...that...is destabilizing U.S.-Russian relations."

Without going into the technical details of the charges of their critics and their response, it's enough to say that Lieber and Press emerged from the exchange with their reputations intact. (The original article and the subsequent roundtable is at foreignaffairs.org.)

Today Lieber and Press remain convinced that an examination of U.S. nuclear policy reveals a quest for nuclear primacy.

"None of our critics have successfully challenged our model," Lieber told the eXile in a recent phone interview.

Again, Lieber and Press do not argue that the United States is planning on knocking out Russia in an insane mixed conventional/nuclear first-strike (thereby triggering a suicidal global nuclear winter, among other things.) But as defense planners around the world will tell you, when it comes to hypothetical questions of national survival, intentions don't matter; capabilities do.

"One needs to look at the bigger picture of the strategic nuclear balance to appreciate Russian concerns," said Lieber. "The broader picture of rising U.S. nuclear primacy makes it easier to understand Russia's reaction to missile defense."

One thing it doesn't make it easier to understand is why the U.S. is still shadow arms racing in the first place, however quietly, in the process straining relations with Russia and bogging the world down in idiotic debates over MAD and missile defenses, while the arms control process is stuck in the mud. There is indeed a sane way to make MAD as anachronistic as the Economist thinks it already is. But it's a path that in no way resembles the one we're on.

VP Cheney is 'D: None of the above'

A Vice President Without Borders, Bordering on Lunacy

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times, June 24, 2007

WASHINGTON - It's hard to imagine how Dick Cheney could get more dastardly, unless J. K. Rowling has him knock off Harry Potter next month.

Harry's cloak of invisibility would be no match for Vice's culture of invisibility.

I've always thought Cheney was way out there — the most Voldemort-like official I've run across. But even in my harshest musings about the vice president, I never imagined that he would declare himself not only above the law, not only above the president, but actually his own dark planet — a separate entity from the White House.

I guess a man who can wait 14 hours before he lets it dribble out that he shot his friend in the face has no limit on what he thinks he can keep secret. Still, it's quite a leap to go from hiding in a secure, undisclosed location in the capital to hiding in a secure, undisclosed location in the Constitution.

Dr. No used to just blow off the public and Congress as he cooked up his shady schemes. Now, in a breathtaking act of arrant arrogance, he's blowing off his own administration.

Henry Waxman, the California congressman who looks like an accountant and bites like a pit bull, is making the most of Congress's ability, at long last, to scrutinize Cheney's chicanery.

On Thursday, Mr. Waxman revealed that after four years of refusing to cooperate with the government unit that oversees classified documents, the vice president tried to shut down the unit rather than comply with the law ensuring that sensitive data is protected. The National Archives appealed to the Justice Department, but who knows how much justice there is at Justice, now that the White House has so blatantly politicized it?

Cheney's office denied doing anything wrong, but Cheney's office is also denying it's an office. Tricky Dick Deuce declared himself exempt from a rule that applies to everyone else in the executive branch, instructing the National Archives that the Office of the Vice President is not an "entity within the executive branch" and therefore is not subject to presidential executive orders.

"It's absurd, reflecting his view from the first day he got into office that laws don't apply to him," Representative Waxman told me. "The irony is, he's taking the position that he's not part of the executive branch."

Ah, if only that were true. Then maybe W. would be able to close Gitmo, which Vice has insisted he not do. And Condi wouldn't have to worry every night that she'll wake up to find crazy Dick bombing Iran, whispering to W. that they have to do it before that weak sister Hillary takes over.

"Your decision to exempt your office from the president's order is problematic because it could place national security secrets at risk," Mr. Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote to Cheney.

Of course, it's doubtful, now that Vice has done so much to put our national security at risk, that he'll suddenly listen to reason.

Cheney and Cheney's Cheney, David Addington, his equally belligerent, ideological and shadowy lawyer and chief of staff, have no shame. After claiming executive privilege to withhold the energy task force names and protect Scooter Libby, they now act outraged that Vice should be seen as part of the executive branch.

Cheney, they argue, is the president of the Senate, so he's also part of the legislative branch. Vice is casting himself as a constitutional chimera, an extralegal creature with the body of a snake and the head of a sea monster. It's a new level of gall, to avoid accountability by saying you're part of a legislative branch that you've spent six years trying to weaken.

But gall is the specialty of Addington, who has done his best to give his boss the powers of a king. He was the main author of the White House memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects, and he helped stonewall the 9/11 commission. He led the fights supporting holding terrorism suspects without access to courts and against giving Congress and environmentalists access to information about the energy industry big shots who secretly advised Cheney on energy policy.

Dana Perino, a White House press spokeswoman, had to go out on Friday and defend Cheney's bizarre contention that he is his own government. "This is an interesting constitutional question that legal scholars can debate," she said.

[It's not like the President of the United States ought to tell us what he thinks or anything. I mean, it's just not the done thing to contradict Darth Cheney, even if you're G.W. Bush. -- J]

I love that Cheney was able to bully Colin Powell, Pentagon generals and George Tenet when drumming up his fake case for war, but when he tried to push around the little guys, the National Archive data collectors — I'm visualizing dedicated "We the People" wonky types with glasses and pocket protectors — they pushed back.

Archivists are the new macho heroes of Washington.

In Praise of Gov't. Bureaucracy

In Praise of Red Tape

by CHRISTOPHER HAYES

[from the July 9, 2007 issue of The Nation]

Is there any figure in American political discourse more reviled than the bureaucrat? Say the word and a potent caricature leaps to mind: the petty and shiftless paper pusher who wields his small amount of power with malice and caprice. Whatever the issue--from school reform to overhauling the nation's intelligence apparatus--the bureaucrat is on the wrong side of it.

It's slander with a long pedigree--Cicero called the bureaucrat "the most despicable" of men, "petty, dull, almost witless...a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog"--but in the last forty years, conservatives have converted this casual contempt into an ideological fixture. Since as far back as the Goldwater campaign, the American right has generally found that "the government" is too abstract an entity for most people to actively loathe. It's far more effective to demonize the people who execute its daily functions. Bureaucrats are to conservatives what the bourgeoisie was to Marx: an oppressive class of joyless knaves. Milton Friedman quipped that "hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned"; Ronald Reagan said in 1966 that "the best minds are not in government" because if any were, "business would hire them away"; and George Wallace expressed his desire to "take those bearded bureaucrats" in Washington who were in the process of desegregating the South, "and throw them in the Potomac."

But a funny thing has happened over the past six years. At a time when the press failed to check a reactionary Administration, when the opposition party all too often chose timidity, it was the lowly and anonymous bureaucrats, clad in rumpled suits, ID badges dangling from their necks, who, in their own quiet, behind-the-scenes way, took to the ramparts to defend the integrity of the American system of government.

It was the midlevel intelligence professionals in the CIA whose expertise led them to argue that Iraq had no means of acquiring nuclear material; it was the planners and country experts at the State Department who prepared a 1,200-page document about postwar Iraq outlining in depressing detail the many challenges and brutalizing exigencies our occupying forces now face. It was professional scientists in the bowels of the Environmental Protection Agency who pushed their reports warning of the effects of climate change, only to have them censored and purged. It was concerned and conscientious spooks and cryptographers at the National Security Agency who contacted reporters to raise alarms about the warrantless wiretapping of Americans. It was a midlevel career bureaucrat at the Department of Education named Jon Oberg who spent his own time -- nights and weekends -- studying the student loan program and discovered that taxpayers were being ripped off by private lenders to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite warnings from his (appointed) superiors, he published his results in an internal memo sent to the entire department. He retired shortly thereafter.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the virtue of bureaucracy came during the recent revelations of James Comey's late-night confrontation with the President's henchmen in the hospital room of the drugged and groggy Attorney General John Ashcroft. True, Comey and Ashcroft were both appointed apparatchiks, but ones who acted, for this moment, like bureaucrats, responsible to the integrity of their office and the rules and processes by which those offices were governed. And they were no doubt pressured by the fact that many of the career civil servants in the Justice Department had reportedly vowed to quit if the wiretapping program in question was approved.

But one could easily imagine the Comey story slightly altered to bolster the Goldwater-Reagan-Bush II worldview. Imagine that Jack Bauer, hero of television's 24, has a suspect ready to confess to the location of a ticking bomb but runs up against a maddening bureaucratic regulation that prevents him from employing the necessary interrogation techniques until the obstructionist, stickler-for-the-rules Attorney General signs off. But the pathetic AG has fallen ill, and is in the hospital, drugged, which means Bauer has to waste precious time while he waits for some of the President's associates to visit the stricken AG and get the needed signature. When they arrive, however, they realize they're too late: they've been beaten to the punch by a quisling bureaucrat who's persuaded the Attorney General not to sign off, because Bauer's tactics would be "illegal."

After all, what could be a more absurd example of mindless red tape than a midnight drive to a hospital to obtain...a supervisor's signature? But the moral of the Comey story specifically, and of the failures of the Bush Administration more broadly, is the sublime value of bureaucracy. Not only is governance of any kind impossible without it; so too are the checks and balances of a constitutional republic. Red tape is what binds those in power to the mast of the law, what stands in the way of government by whim. That's why an Administration hostile to any checks and balances has sought to reconstitute the federal civil service as just another lever in its machine.

As hard as Rove & Co. have tried to remake the bureaucracy in their own partisan image, though, their changes have been by and large cosmetic. Like teachers at a high school who watch classes of students come and go, the bureaucrats remain while the administrations change. When the current occupant of the White House leaves, his appointed hacks will leave with him, and whether or not someone actually committed to governing takes his place, the bureaucrats will be there, as always, to do their duty.

Canadians waiting to death for health care?

Defenders of the status quo in America try to scare us with medical horror stories from Canada and Britain about long waits and lack of choice.

Yet Canadians and Brits overwhelmingly approve of their respective country's health care systems.

Meanwhile, 44.8 million Americans, or 15.3% of the population, have no health insurance coverage. Debates about choice and waiting times couldn't be more irrelevant to them.

If America were to adopt a "socialist" single payer system like Britain or Canada, it's not like people who have the money suddenly wouldn't be able to opt for private medical procedures if they didn't like what they were getting under the national system. Both Canada and Britain have private health clinics.

Britain's National Health Service (NHS) even incorporates competition. The NHS is run by several trusts, and clinics and hospitals are members of one of these various trusts. The trusts compete on the basis of performance and patient satisfaction for money from the government.

There is no single best way to ensure that all Americans have quality medical care. There are several ways to make it happen -- publicly, privately, or mixtures of the two.


Socialized Medicine is Sicko

by Stuart Browning

Posted 06/21/2007 ET
HumanEvents.com

I'm an independent filmmaker with no ties to the health insurance or healthcare industry -- only a personal concern about American liberty and medical freedom. I've made a number of short films about health care policy -- specifically for the internet -- and featured on a new website: www.freemarketcure.com.

Michael Moore's new movie, "Sicko", is set to inject a large dose of misinformation and propaganda into our national dialog about health care policy. According to one observer, Michael Moore has created a love letter to the Canadian system. However, Americans should know that Canada rations health care and that many Canadians wait inordinately long periods of time for urgent medical treatment. The Fraser Institute's annual report "Waiting Your Turn" estimates that Canadians are waiting for nearly 800,000 medical procedures. If the Canadian system was adopted in the U.S. -- and you assume one person per treatment - that would translate to nearly 7.3 million Americans. Not 7.3 million Americans theoretically without health care due to a lack of insurance -- but 7.3 million Americans who need medical treatment but cannot get it without being on long waiting lists.

How long? In Canada, it depends on the province and the type of treatment. The median wait time for medical treatment in Canada in 2006 was 17.8 weeks. However, this doesn't tell the whole story. It's not hard to find Canadians who have waited months to get an MRI, and years for some types of treatments. There are multiple kinds of waits in the Canadian system: the wait to see a specialist, the wait to get a diagnostic test, the wait to get surgery -- and then the wait for rescheduled surgery after one's initial surgical appointment has been cancelled -- sometimes multiple times -- a routine phenomenon. Waits for orthopedic surgery can be multiple years - and in the case of some elderly Canadians - forever. Waits for things like gastric bypass and sleep apnea treatment are routinely 4-5 years.

My short movie, "A Short Course in Brain Surgery," highlights the plight of Lindsay McCreith, a Canadian with a suspected brain tumor who had to wait four months for an MRI. Instead, he crossed the border to the U.S and got it in two days. He then faced another four month wait just to see a specialist in order to schedule surgery which would represent yet another wait. Instead, he had the tumor removed in the U.S. -- immediately. It turned out to be early stage brain cancer.

Another short, "Two Women," chronicles the sad story of Janice Fraser who, unable to urinate, needed to have a pacemaker-type device implanted to control her bladder. Unfortunately, the hospital arbitrarily rationed the operation by doing only one per month. Janice was number 32 on the list -- nearly a three year wait. She ended up waiting so long that she developed life-threatening infections, had to have her bladder removed in an emergency procedure, and will now wear a urine bag for the rest of her life.

"The Lemon" tells the story of Shirley Healey who was suffering from a near total blockage of her mesoenteric artery, which feeds blood to the bowels. She was slowly starving and risked death by waiting in Canada. She came to Bellingham, Washington where she got her life-saving operation immediately. The American surgeon who operated said that the Canadian patients are the worst, most dangerous cases he sees -- due to the long waits.

Consider this: across Canada, thousands of baby boomers and the elderly often wait years for knee and hip replacements; often in great pain while taking powerful narcotics. However, a dog in Canada can get a joint replacement operation at a veterinary hospital done in a matter of weeks.

The real danger of adopting a system like the one in Canada is not just long waits for medical treatment. Americans would pay much higher taxes and lose important liberties while turning over personal life-and-death decisions to government bureaucrats.