Needlenose

North Korean soldier looking for Repair_Man_Jack's house

…no, just seriously stoopid.  I’ve noticed that of late, as the HuffPos and PajamaMedias of the blogosphere emerge, fewer and fewer people ‘cross over’ to visit blogs and media of the opposing camp.  With all this Tea Party noise about the deficit, I thought I’d take a peak at one of the bigger conservative blogs to see what they had to say about it, and perhaps, as a self-professed ‘balanced budget’ guy, I might find some common ground.

Quite randomly, I found this diatribe by Repair_Man_Jack on RedState with the premise that we can’t cut the U.S. Defense budget without increasing security risk.  The crux of his argument is that there are some potential flashpoints out there such as the Korean Penninsula and the recent Chinese military buildup, and that we need to keep the sea lanes open for trade.

I’m guessing Repair_Man_Jack hasn’t really his homework if he thinks all of the defense budget goes to the cordon sanitaire around N. Korea and into policing the sea lanes.  I can think of many potential cuts that we can take immediately to tip the scales back in the direction of balance.

First, what are we paying per year for Shrubya’s occupations of Iraq & Afghanistan and other misc overseas adventures?  Something like $171 Billion a year….that’s a lot of scratch!  Presumably Jack the Repair Man is still a Believer in these invasions, otherwise undoubtedly he would have seen the Elephant in the budget room.

Then there is Shrubya’s unproven ‘Missile Defense” program, a costly $18B/year!!  Beyond the fact that what few tests that have been conducted have had extremely dubious results, I’m hard-pressed to understand exactly what threat this is supposed to protect us  from – the North Korean missiles might have the range now, but their guidance is questionable.  If either China or Russia get pissed at us and decide to send missiles our way, most likely those would come out of subs off the coast, a ‘use case’ not covered by Shrubya’s Star Wars.

And what of the $8+ Billion a year we are paying to support our nuclear weapons program?  Weren’t we supposed to be decreasing the number of bombs in our stockpile? ConservObama is not just continuing Shrubya’s handouts to aerospace in this filthy industry, but actually increasing the size of the defense and energy budget to support nuclear weapons and nuclear power research.  We haven’t hit the point where the US can get rid of all our stockpile and do no further maintenance, but seriously, how many H-Bomb-equipped MIRVs do we need to wipe out N. Korea, China and Iran?  Let’s close down one of the weapons lab and pare the remaining one back to a core function of reducing our stockpile further, and maintaining a enough weapons to wipe out Jack the Repairman’s overblown threats abroad.

Anyway, I’ll spare you further commentary, just take a look at this list of astronomical military boondoggles if you want to find another trillion or so (over time) in defense spending cuts that we can safely make without provoking a N. Korean invasion of the Fatherland.

As for Repair_Man_Jack, I suggest you stick to repairing drywall.

There have been a couple of important articles discussing the New Plutocracy, first the seminal piece by Chrystia Freeland who describes the rise of a new global elite who have achieved an Anti-Marxian class consciousness and have transcended the nation state, leaving workers increasingly in the dust about the planet, and another by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones about how the current battle in Wisconsin over public employees’ colleective bargaining rights is the Waterloo of class warfare (in which, I am interpreting, Drum is suggesting the workers are playing the part of Napolean’s forces).

I really need to see if I can dragoon the busy (and now possibly mythical) Fubar into helping me restore our posts between ’04 and ’08 – I had been musing along these lines for some time.

Neither article cited outlines any possible solutions to this dilemma, they are both along the lines of “woe is us, with unions in their death throes, there is no significant funding of a liberal agenda on Capitol hill, and any progessive agenda without funding is dead on arrival.”

In the archived posts, I had posited some thoughts.  First, that the future of American labor lies in the sweat shops of Asia.   If American Unions continue in the grand American tradition of navel-gazing, they’ll quickly starve to death and leave a shriveled husk.  Labor needs to take a page from the turbulent years of the end of the 1800s and early 1900s, and start organizing the overseas sweatshops. 

Dangerous?  Hell yes, “Communist” China is every bit as nasty and anti-labor as America during the guilded age, except they are perhaps a bit more prone to just shooting outside agitators.  Necessary?  Of course.  As long as there is a pool of desperate workers willing to take any work at any wage under any conditions, in a   world of ‘free trade,’ then how can American Labor hope to compete?   Kinda reminds me of the mess in Afghanistan – porous border with a nuclear nation we can’t invade that harbors insurgents and has an unlimited, opium-fueled cash source…unwinnable.

But speaking of free trade, that’s the thing we can influence.   While we are helping the sweatshop workers of Asia to unite, why not agitate at home to weaken the various ‘free trade’ treaties here at home?  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to restore the other 1800s bad tradition of industry protectionism, with all that entails.  Rather, I would like to see the ability of a country to restrict and/or tariff goods on the basis of environmental and labor standards.  Sure, it’s easy for Chinese goods created in the midst of massive pools of toxic filth and clouds of noxious air and greenhouse gases to compete against American-made goods – but would they do so well if their price included a carbon tax or a pollutions ‘uplift?’  Ditto goods slapped with a ‘Fair Labor’ tax based on level of compliance with some basic labor standards.   I would imagine that would make U.S. manufacture of many goods quite competitive.

But in the face of Roberts V. Common Sense, which completed the final stages of Corporate takeover of the U.S. Government, how might we get any such laws passed?  By the only tool that remains to us, sadly, the power of the Boycott.  It’s folly to attack the Congressional Whores directly.  It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of thousands of folks show up to big peaceful rallies with their quaint, hand-lettered signs, they will just do what their Corporate bosses tell them – it’s how they will get elected, or failing that, where their next job/paycheck will come from in the revolving door of Plutocracy.

Nope, we need to bring pressure on the global elites themselves, in the only way they care about – their revenues.  Where to start?  How about sending a message to Koch Industries.  As Robert Reich points out, they are doing an exceptional job of trying to divide and conquer the other 99% of us.  About the only power we have right now, as (for a brief remaining period anyway) the world’s richest group of consumers, is the power of our pocketbooks.

In the meantime, we also need to update those old class conflict theories to the 21st Century to get something we can use to raise our own class conciousness and work to raise awareness both here and abroad.

Yesterday, the New York Times offered this in an article on the evolving relationship between President Obama and Gen. David Petraeus:

Come December, when the president intends to assess his Afghan strategy, he will be able to claim tangible successes, General Petraeus predicted by secure video hookup from Kabul, according to administration officials.

The general said that the American military would have substantially enlarged the “oil spot” — military jargon for secure area — around Kabul. It will have expanded American control farther outside of Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. And, the aides recalled, the general said the military would have reintegrated a significant number of former Taliban fighters in the south.

“He essentially promised the president very bankable results,” one administration official said. (Others in the room characterized the commander’s list more as objectives than promises.)

Are we really far enough past the financial industry’s free-fall in late 2008 that it’s safe to use “bankable” as a synonym for something meaningful (in a positive sense)?  You’d think, if nothing else, that officials from this politically hypersensitive administration would know better.  For most of us ordinary folks, to say that something is “bankable” still carries connotations of “You might as well cut out the middleman and flush it down the toilet yourself.”

Then again, especially given the immediate caveat that Petraeus’s assurances could prove illusory, maybe the anonymous official’s choice of words was unintentionally accurate.  Certainly our ongoing attempt at occupying Afghanistan would meet a worst-case-scenario definition of a “troubled asset.”

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

(Note: I had this title last night, when I read the New York Times article discussed below and started to write a post… then procrastinated until everybody else in the world had posted about it waited to consider other viewpoints.  So even though Spencer Ackerman and probably others have riffed on the same obvious gag, I’m not changing it!)

In an apparent burst of nostalgia for the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney administration, when anonymous “senior administration officials” would bluff high-profile journalists for major newspapers into peddling dubious propaganda (somehow puffed up into sounding like a major scoop), the New York Times reported last night:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

Showing that a Democratic president is now in office it’s no longer the early 2000s, even mainstream journalists have reacted to the NYT “scoop” with skepticism bordering on outright scorn.  Meanwhile, among progressive bloggers, the reflexive hue-and-cry has predictably arisen: This is just a pretext to stay in Afghanistan forever to control its mineral wealth, just like we’re staying in Iraq forever to control its oil!

Which might be more persuasive were it not for the fact that we aren’t staying in Iraq forever (even as wrangling over forming a government continues, the withdrawal of U.S. troops is proceeding on schedule, with American influence fading concomitantly), and Iraqi politicians — who, unsurprisingly, covet the benefits of the country’s black gold for themselves — never have gotten around to signing over major oil fields wholesale to U.S. corporations.

Nor do I think Obama wants to stay in Afghanistan forever — certainly not long enough for him to reap the downsides of an endless, unsuccessful war while U.S. megacorporations in future decades garner the benefits.  To me, the president’s seemingly contradictory announcement last December of an immediate escalation combined with a hoped-for exit timetable was clearly designed to mimic Dubya’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq… that is, not so much a plan to win the war as an attempt to postpone the inevitable while being able to say we gave it our best shot (and, perhaps, take public-relations advantage of any unexpected lucky breaks, as occurred in Iraq).

In fact, although today’s NYT story is undoubtedly propaganda of some sort, its intent may be the opposite of what everyone is assuming.  Instead of providing an excuse for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, what if it inspires other forces in the region to hasten our exit? Karzai is known to be greedy and dishonest; why would reports of vast mineral wealth encourage him to be a loyal and scrupulous American puppet rather than tempting him further to ditch his former benefactors and cut a deal with the Taliban to split the booty?

Even more intriguing is the Chinese angle acknowledged by the Times:

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

Anyone else get a whiff of Br’er Rabbit from that passage?  “Oh, no, whatever you do, don’t push us out and entangle yourselves deeper in Afghanistan’s problems — please, anything but that, China!”

Hell, if we could get out of the business of providing armed security for Chinese-owned copper mines and lure the People’s Republic into taking our place, battling the Taliban and miscellaneous warlords for control of all those buried minerals, that would be nearly a best-case scenario at this point.  (It would be even more entertaining if the reported mother lodes turned out to be illusory… hasn’t someone written a science-fiction novel or something to that effect?)

That’s my conspiracy theory, and I intend to stick with it.

There’s always one newbie who falls for the “Easter egg hunt in the IED field” gag…

“Yes, sir, I understand you asked that no one talk trash to you about your NCAA tournament picks, but you know how enlisted men are…”

(President Obama in Afghanistan this morning, via the White House.)

I’m with Karzai on condemning the recent NATO attack on a convoy that included women and children.  I seriously doubt we’re going to win this war anyway, but I’m positive we won’t win it by dropping bombs on civilians.

It didn’t work for the Soviets and it won’t work for us.  If we must pursue this war because of our Leader’s peculiar obsessions, then let’s do with with more (multinational) boots on the ground.  At least a sniper would be more likely to see the lil’ kid waving from the back of the mini-van.

*Update 2/25/10* It’s not just air attacks that are killing civilians.  Check out these statistics on the kids killed by both sides in the Afghanistan conflict.

It’s gonna cost us about a $1 million per year for every soldier we send to Afghanistan.  Seems like a crappy investment for a war we are going to lose.

Update on that Pakistan thing (from the link) – their push against the Taliban strongholds appears to have limits, and they are concerned that our escalation will break those limits.

*Update 11/25/09* Juan Cole believes Afghanistan ‘escalation’ will be the albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party in 2012

Well at least I’m glad they are finally talking about the ‘new strategies” for the Afghanistan war.  Not sure why they waited so damn long though.

Frankly I’m with Colin Powell on this one – Mr. Obama, please be clear on what you hope to accomplish with U.S. Troops, and what conditions will trigger the end of the operation – give us a frickin’ exit strategy!!

The unspoken exit strategy, of course, is the neutralization of the Taliban & the destruction of Al Qaeda’s safe haven in the region, which as I’ve suggested before, is impossible without expanding the conflict into Western Pakistan.

Since the Pakistani government is scared to death of inviting US troops into the country to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the ground, and since we can’t invade without their permission, this pretty much rules out the current exit strategy.

So I imagine the conversation is pretty much revolving back to the old Nixon standby “how do we translate ‘Peace with Honor’ into Pashtun.”

The conventional wisdom is that the “McChrystal leak” is the Obama Administration getting blindsided by “some on the Obama team [who are] are dismayed at the White House’s slow response and fear that this is an indication that President Obama is leaning towards rejecting the inevitable requests for additional U.S. forces that this report tees up.”

Another possibility is that Obama is trying to backtrack from his campaign promises and early moves to escalate the war, perhaps giving some time for public opinion and debate while he comes up with a new strategy.

Maybe he’s finally come around to my realization that this war was doomed from the get-go.

I know I had a brief twinge of hope when Pakistan entered the fray and whacked some Taliban moles in the Swat Valley that maybe the Taliban could be put down, but even with the occasional capture of a few high-profile leaders, I’m back to my former pessimism – too little, too late.   McChrystal certainly figured out that the real front is in the tribal lands of a weak and untrustworthy ally.  As before, I certainly don’t see how throwing more bodies on the fire on the other side of the border will put out this fire.

*Update* In the spirit of pithiness, I want to rebut McChrystal more succinctly:  Adding more troops to Afghanistan will only postpone the inevitable defeat.