The Grumpy Forester

IRAQI HENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

...and so now we have authoritative insider criticism of the oxymoronic effort of military planning for the post war recovery and stabilization of Iraq. In addition, we also now know that Colin Powell as little as a month ago was still trying to convince Bush and Blair that the so-called coalition of the willing has insufficient forces to maintain security. While the recent revelation of Powell's insistence comes as no surprise, given that this was the considered opinion of several generals - with only Tommy Franks being the notable exception, the revelation by Major Isiah Wilson that there really was no such thing as a post-war plan until months after Gee Dub's little publicity stunt on the USS Abraham Lincoln where he declared (while hedging his bets by not saying so) that the war was essentially over...

...somewhat surprisingly, Wilson reserves the majority of his horsewhipping for the uniformed military staff that should have had some sort of plan in place, instead of taking the cheap, easy, and much more pleasurable path of dumping all the blame in Rumsfeld's lap. What Wilson's report demonstrates most clearly is what the major complaint about this whole Iraqi mess since the spring of 2003: there were insufficient troops secure the country immediately after the collapse/disappearance of the Iraqi army and no particular plan what to do with this cow once we got the rope around its neck. We weren't capable of moving in quickly to restore infrastructure or provide aid and, once the insurgency began, we had insufficient troops to keep it tamped down and - according to Wilson - our military planners were incapable of coming to the conclusion that there may be more than a few disgruntled Bathists behind the attacks that began to drag us into quagmire. How the Bush Administration decided to publicly proclaim the same conclusion is in hindsight a chicken or egg discussion; it doesn't really matter whether or when one side led the other to that conclusion, it just matters that they both got there and that conclusion misdirected our actions in Iraq to the point where the matter of just specifically who was wrong was way less important than the fact that this baby had sprung more leaks than we may be able to truly fix...

...bottom line: the system failed. Maybe it failed through incompetence or maybe through hubris. It may not be Donald Rumsfeld's direct responsibility to assure that all the nuts and bolts of an adequate Phase IV plan is in place, but it is his responsibility to figure it out when things are so publicly not working and see to it that his commanders take steps to fix the problems. The aftermath of the Iraqi invasion was so hopelessly incompetent that it's hard to imagine some sharp teenager with a refined taste for the game "Risk" couldn't have slopped together something more adequate during "South Park" commercial breaks. The military is depressingly defensive about this whole mess...

Air Force Capt. Chris Karns, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which as the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East oversaw planning for the war in Iraq, said, "A formal Phase IV plan did exist." He said he could not explain how Wilson came to a different conclusion.

...so you planned it this way? Let's not lose sight of the costs here: a thousand extra Americans dead, maybe ten thousand more wounded, not to mention the uncountable millions of dollars of destroyed equipment and wasted billions spent on operations that didn't have to be conducted, all that added to the not inconsiderable fact of our contribution to the exhortations of anti-western fundamentalist Muslims that will serve them in good stead for years - if not generations - to come if this whole "flower of democracy" thing doesn't work out. Wilson's main thesis is that we went to war to remove Saddam Hussein, not to invade and defeat Iraqi military forces. That too-narrow focus, combined with the inability to adequately plan and adapt to, much less understand, what was actually happening may well lead to a failure that would be far worse for everybody than had we simply maintained the sanctions and no-fly zones until God decided what to do with Saddam. What the hell, we've put up with Castro almost as long as I've been alive, and he has caused far more mischief at times than anything Hussein could crank up...and, no, I don't care about the WMD discussion and won't take it seriously until somebody digs up some meaningful amount of the stuff...we're talking tons and tons here, not jars or boxes or even a few barrels. We're on the fast track to a washed out bridge, and the only thing we may be left with at the end will be the discussion over whether the Pentagon or the White House was more to blame for landing us in this mess....

THAT'S WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT!

...to all of my Washingtonian relatives and friends acquired by marriage, this is what it was all about four years ago. Victory snatched from my sweaty mitts by a seemingly inconceivable court ruling that went against my candidate, turning the tables completely and irreconcilably, leaving me and millions of others no recourse but to grit our teeth and mutter "wait till next time, buddy." The best thing for you to do right now is to go find your quiet place, sit there for awhile, and feel the powerful emotions that will be pounding at your brain at the very thought that you had victory and the seldom-offered chance to have one of your guys in a leading statewide elective office ripped from your grasp. This is what I was so pouty and angry about four years ago, and this is how it feels...

...never fear, this isn't over for you folks. Never let it be said that Republicans will leave any stone unturned or any grandmother un-run-over in order to win an election. All of the past lofty statements of the Rossi band have already flown out the window, and the movers and shakers for your man will do whatever necessary, spreading any faintly plausible lie, attempting to bring faux public pressure on county election officials (maybe some of those fake Florida bussed-in protesters from four years ago are up to a road trip), and - if necessary - inappropriately involving the Federal courts (just like Bush and his monkeys did in 2000) in order to attempt to interfere with the state's right to conduct it's election. You never know, maybe you can pull a stolen election off again...

...but for now, just be in the moment. Feel what it's like when the other side refuses to roll over to your (in this case) haughty demands that their candidate concede, even though there were verses left to go in this particular song. Experience the abuse to your soul when the other team lays an irrefutable legal whipsong on you and plunges your candidate from the hot new ticket in town to little more than months of collected fishwrap who has done little more than contribute uselessly to the Gross Domestic Product. This has been a much more righteous, clean, and legally supportable game than the one your folks ran in Florida back in ought-ought, and - for the moment, at least - I'm feeling much better about all those cheap shots you laid on me back then...

...have a happy holiday season, and we'll be seein' ya soon...

THE LONG ROCKY ROW TO HOE

...maybe it's true that the faint fragrance of promise is hanging in the air in Palestine. Perhaps the unlamented loss of Arafat has truly allowed the turning of a corner that could lead to some sort of peaceful resolve to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has roiled the Middle-Eastern soil for over half a century. A little crack of opportunity seems to have opened up that could, if the cards all fell the right way, do more to bring calm, if not true peace, to this dangerous piece of land than could half a dozen unprovoked US invasions. The odds still aren't good, and bad action like this shows why all the blame shouldn't fall on hot-headed Muslims with more explosives than good sense...

...there are - at a minimum - two sides to every story, but the enduring problem with the Israeli - Palestinian conflict has been that...and let me say this delicately...long-term US support for Israel has created a situation where it becomes difficult to criticize official or unofficial actions of the government or certain citizens of Israel. I'm not going to have that problem here. These are children. They are not the cause of any of the violence, they are just little kids. They are, more to the point, little West Bank kids with a rightful historic claim to live in the land once known as Palestine who are being harassed and attacked by residents of a West Bank Israeli settlement whose very existence is in all likelihood indefensible on the international stage. If we were talking about UN resolutions that Gee Dub and his gang really cared about in a combative sort of way, air assets of the 82nd Airborne in the form of Apache attack helicopters would be dealing with these epithet- and rock-hurling settlers...but they aren't, and there aren't. Instead, a handful of Israeli soldiers are forced to escort these children on what should be their rightful journey to and from school every day to protect them from attacks from adult Israeli settlers...

...I wouldn't expect Jewish settlers to recall or even much appreciate Jesus's comments on the treatment of children, but I would expect them to have enough sense to figure out that there isn't anything positive that can come from this harassment and abuse of children. They are teaching hatred, hatred for themselves and everything they represent, and guaranteeing for themselves and their children a future of conflict that could probably only be resolved byh the forceful removal of Palestinians from the narrow remainder of their ancestral homeland. Given the likelihood that the international community wouldn't tolerate that solution, their actions only guarantee more lifetimes of hatred, murder, and violence...

...But there is a bottom line here that I just can't work past: these are children who these adults are harassing and attacking. I can't even imagine anybody I know in our society tolerating such behavior today (not that it hasn't happened in the past). It is at the point of considering my children being subjected to such behavior that all that big "Mr. Christian" talk falls all apart, because if some adult was beating up (no, let's be honest here...even laying a hand) on my 9-year-old outside of a setting of which I approve, all those years of well-studied "turn the other cheek" personal pacifism would go out the window, forgive me God, and I would be pulling the "special" firearm out of the gun safe and beginning an immediate effort to convince the neighbors that their actions were inappropriate. I would never make a good Michael Dukakis...

...that's the bottom line: these are children. They are not Palestinian or Israeli or good-guy or bad-guy children, they are just simply children. They have not earned nor do they deserve such treatment, and the subhuman cretins that inflict such treatment on them do not deserve either human sympathy for the inevitably ugly harvest of these seeds they are sowing nor do they deserve the support of any decent human being for whatever the hell objective they are trying to achieve...

IS THIS A JOKE?!

...can it really be that Gee Dub wants to burn some of that much discussed political capital of his, earned on the strength of a 2 1/2 percent electoral margin and the lowest approval ratings at inauguration of any US president since the numbers have been kept, to install Antonin Scalia as the friggin' Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court? Are the true brains behind the vast enamel facade that is George W. Bush so interested in engaging in social combat with the evil minions of the left that they would nominate the least collegial, least collaborative, most abusive and insulting of the nine current Justices as the Guy in Charge? If this is the fight they want, let's get that one on right now...

...on the face of it, one is forced to assume that this is some sort of Rovian bait and switch maneuver. Despite Gee Dub's constant insistence that Scalia and Clarence Thomas (the man who ruined pop cans for me forever) are "his kind of Justices", it's impossible to imagine that these Bush-monkey clowns would be so overreaching that they would jump on this as a policy and ideology move. Given the misapprehension of the strength of that whole "red state" thing, this would be a battle that any person to the left of Zell Miller would love to take on. If you are a part of the majority of Americans who think that there is some room for some sort of legalized abortion, Justice Scalia thinks you are wrong, and stupid besides. If you are a crippled person who thinks that, since the circumstances of your job led to your infirmed state, your employer should exhibit some sense of responsibility and help you maintain your status as a productive employee (albeit in a different position), Scalia thinks that life sucks and that's too bad and you should get out of the way. If you think that there is some sort of right to avoid the danger of self-incrimination in a police situation, he thinks you were probably guilty anyway (those of us of a certain age call this the Ed Meese principle). If you are poor or downtrodden or faced up against the powers opposed to social justice, Antonin Scalia thinks you are a mope who oughta just get over it...

...in Scalia's world there is no such thing as affirmative action. There is no right to privacy. There is a personal right to keep and bear arms, which is starting to look like a tremendously attractive choice these days. In this world, the legislative advances of the last 60 years that have worked to make this a more inclusive country are wrong-headed, if not unconstitutional. In this Justice's world, the government in all of its manifestations is a colorblind institution, which indicates either a patrician's view of how things should be or the institutionally naive observations of a sheltered person having no particular experience in how life actually works out in the real world...

...this has just got to be a joke; some mean-spirited effort to ruin Christmas for those that the Bush-monkeys view as "the enemy" by making them divert attention to this nonsense. Let 'em try; there will be plenty enough of time and material to deal with this little tempest if and when they decide to stir it up...

...as for me, I think they're kidding....

FOR SOME, THE END OF CHRISTMAS

...one of my annual yule-season tasks is producing the family Christmas letter. Over the years, having received and produced any number of these chatty, incredibly formulaic and profoundly middle-class missives in annual Christmas cards to and from friends and relatives, I realized that this almost prototypical vestige of yuppie-dom had some promise if approached in a...let's say, different way; don't talk about the honor roll or the spouse's latest corporate victory, but instead combine a heretofore unseen combination of the writing styles of Dave Barry and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (without the raw obscenities and drug references) and talk about the little disasters and slights that had afflicted the family through the year in a humorous fashion. The outcome, over the last dozen years, has been a big hit. If we are running late on the Christmas cards (we have finally settled on Valentine's Day as being the last possible mailing date for the annual Jack K. family holiday letter), we start getting impatient e-mails demanding to know where the card - and more importantly, the letter - is. Some years it's easy; some years, like a couple of years ago when my father died in late November, it's hard. This year, I don't know how I'm going to do it because I don't feel very funny right now...

...today, as of the most recent count I've seen, 19 US soldiers died. They didn't die as a result of being engaged in pitched combat; they didn't even die from improvised explosive devices planted along a road on incredibly hazardous convoy or patrol duty. They died eating lunch. Nineteen troops gone, and unknown numbers of others with grevious wounds that will alter forever how they procede through and manage their lives. Nineteen families will be informed, just a couple of days before Christmas, that a child, a sibling, a parent, a spouse, a lover will never be coming home...

...Christmas, in my heart and mind and family, isn't about trees or songs or parties or presents. Christmas is about the birth of Jesus, The Prince of Peace, the basis for the religion that our Happy Christian President claims as his most important advisor and philosopher, even though he has displayed so precious little in his public life that would suggest such to be the case. In this season of celebration of the that birth, the loss of American soldiers sent to fight in a conflict that was sold and started under false pretenses and has been prosecuted more as a Donald Rumsfeld experiment rather than a serious effort of conquer and pacify an ivaded nation just keeps ticking along like some grim bloody metronome. Now, during what should be the happiest and most promising season of the year whether or not the focus is on that one important birth or on the presents and the cookies and the tree and all the other trappings of the season that can make it special in their own right, a couple dozen more families - and maybe more - will discover the promise sucked out of their lives and will have to come face to face with the reality of a war of choice that has robbed them of many, if not all, of the choices that they thought they had...

...it's really hard to be humorous with this rattling around in my mind...

SO NOW IT'S A PROBLEM??!!

...so now Gee Dub says that his next budget is going to be a tough, fiscally disciplined effort on the journey down the road to halving the budget deficit in five years...

"The first step in this process is for members of Congress to realize we have a problem," he said.

...did somebody look behind those fat sumptuous curtains in the press briefing room? Didn't anybody notice Grover Norquist's finely-polished wingtips sticking out out below a wall-hanging? The first step in the process was for the President to recognize that it wasn't possible to cut taxes to the degree he did while maintaining his own budgetary requests at normal levels, but forget about that. How the hell did this become Congress's problem? This all seems to be following Norquist's gameplan for eliminating most social program aspects of federal spending. Suddenly, all at once, the budget deficit is a problem for the President who said such deficits were a normal and expected component of this war that he claims we're in...

...Congress certainly does have a realization that they must arrive at, but it's not the one Gee Dub mentioned. Their needed realization is that there are now going to be powerful forces afoot seeking to tear apart the long-established social contract between the government and the country's citizens. Bill Clinton explained over and over that - in a budgetary circumstance where there are certain relatively fixed costs like defense, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid, the remaining playing field for making a difference in appropriation reductions was going to be relatively small and would have to absorb a disproportionate share of the cuts in order to get to the desired Point B of deficit elimination. Congress's realization needs to be that Gee Dub's past policies and current conversion to deficit hawk will put at risk the programs that people really care about when the deal goes down: things like police and potholes and schools and programs to give the poor a hand up and training for the unemployed and a host of other items that don't show up in election-day exit polls. Last year's phrase du jour was "tipping point". The upcoming effort to hammer out an F.Y. 2006 budget just might be a tipping point. Stay tuned; this oughta get interesting...

CHEAP IMAGERY AND FALSE CONCERN

...Donald Rumsfeld told you all that you needed to know about his fundamental underlying concern for the troops with his off-the-cuff answer to the Tennessee Guardsman's question about vehicle armor last week. Having never served in a branch of the military where concern for the troops down in the mud at the pointy end of the spear was ever a consideration, it simply never crosses his mind that..maybe..just perhaps...the folks on the ground aren't fully comfortable with the idea of simply saluting and marching forth to sacrifice their lives just because they were ordered to, in spite of deficiencies in weapons and defensive material (it's also why troops are risking their lives every day in Stryker fighting vehicles and Humvee's upgraded to combat theater status - even though Humvees were never intended to be combat vehicles - while hundreds and hundreds of M-113 armored personnel carriers that would do the job better are sitting moth-balled all over the US, but that's another story). Rumsfeld has a feudal warlord's view of ground troops: nameless faceless setpieces to be employed and sacrificed as necessary to acheive the desired goal. This particular little tempest, therefore, should come as no particular surprise...

...of course Rumsfeld has been using an auto-signature device to sign all those sad terrible letters to the families of the 'Terra' War dead. These weren't important people, the kind of folks that Rummy has been hanging out with most of his adult life at the top of the power pyramid. These were the little folk, mostly young men and women earning salaries just above the poverty level for a family of four for the priveledge of laying it all out there on behalf of their country. In another life, they would be the people who wash the car, care for the landscaping around the estate, or provide the services that move great men seamlessly through life. The fact that it simple never occurred to Rumsfeld or one of his supposedly bright aides that there may be something demeaning about receiveing a condolence letter that has the same sort of personal touch as does the latest letter from Publisher's Clearing House says all that needs to be said about just how much these failed humans actually support our troops...

...Donald Rumsfeld simply got caught with his pants down in the Kuwait question/answer dry-gulching. He didn't know the answer, which is a failure of leadership, and decided to try to the old soft shoe to get out of it. A week in the stocks and ample baskets of rotting vegetables to satisfy throwing arms of the passing public would be sufficient punishment for that, since the ultimate failure resides in the laps of government procurement specialists who didn't have the simple gumption to ask a couple valuable questions of their suppliers. The failure to personally sign the condolence letters, however, is a complete failure of faith, honor, and decency on the part of Rummy and the fixers and hatchetmen with which he has surrounded himself. Rumsfeld needs to go; to claim that this would be "disruptive" accords him far more power than a Defense Secretary should have in any case. To say, however, that he and his minions "just didn't know" the impact that cheap form letters would have on grieving relatives when he and his little band of monkey boys have been at the forefront of charging opponents of Gee Dub's Excellent Iraqi Adventure of not supporting the troops...that is a offense for which he should be fired...