03/04/09 – Jeff Huber – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Jeff Huber, who writes the blog Pen and Sword, and I'm now proud to say is a regular at Antiwar.com.
You can find them at Antiwar.com or Ridge slash Huber dot PHP, I think, but sooner or later it'll just be Antiwar.com slash Huber.
Welcome to the show, Jeff.
How are you?
I'm great.
How are you, Scott?
Thanks for having me on.
I'm doing great.
Thanks for coming on the show, and I'm so happy that you're now a regular writer for Antiwar.com.
It's nice sometimes to read about, you know, empire and war and all this mass destruction and get a chuckle at the same time, and your articles are always really funny, too.
I highly recommend them to everybody.
Well, thanks.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, I think it's always important to me to, you know, whenever you're talking about power, which certainly is what the war business is about, I always say the people who are leading us around by the nose here not only deserve ridicule, but they demand it, because they really do not know what they're doing.
If their objective was to get us into countless entanglements of, you know, war entanglements that we can't win and we can't get out of, then if that was what they were supposed to do, then they would be very excellent at it.
But that's all they can do.
They're no good at anything else.
It's quite bad.
I don't know when exactly.
I know my sense was at some point after the Berlin Wall came down, I was thinking, well, to what extent are we really defending the country anymore?
And I remember thinking, well, we are, in fact, I think we were, in fact, deterring the kinds of terrorist attacks we were seeing in, you know, Europe and in the Middle East and so forth at the time just by being out in the world.
But that kind of went up in smoke.
Well, that's going to sound too much like an intentional pun.
That theory was invalidated by 9-11.
And now, you know, obviously we didn't defend the country from 9-11.
The military didn't deter 9-11.
And only, you know, Bill Kristol and 10,000 of his best friends think that the military is protecting our interests overseas.
So something has gone awry.
I'm not sure.
Other people are saying this.
I'm not sure that this big announced withdrawal from Iraq plan is anything like that.
I don't know if it's just really just sort of a way to desensitize us and get us used to the idea that we're going to do what Ray of Arabia Odierno wants, which is to keep at least 35,000, 50,000 troops there until 2015 and well beyond that.
And Afghanistan, gosh, I don't know.
I think on the war page there's a link, I guess, to an article by Jack Murtha saying, well, there's no objective in Afghanistan.
And as much as I admire Congressman Murtha, I would say, well, Congressman there never has been, you know.
Well, other than just staying.
Yeah, just staying.
And, you know, let's get a quick rundown.
I'm going to do another piece on this next week.
I sometimes feel like it's redundant, but you can't say it enough.
First of all, Obama signed on to send 17,000 troops this spring and summer, which I'm not sure what that means, spring and summer, when you put these things together.
Unlike what some people would like you to believe, there really do have to be timelines in military operations.
If there weren't D-days and H-hours, the Normandy invasion would still be on hold.
At some point they're actually going to have to sit down and plan and go and figure out which troops are actually going to go.
But I don't know that they're ever going to hold – anybody's going to hold anybody to speak to the fire to say what exactly it is they're supposed to do there or how they're supposed to do it.
There's disagreement about, you know, well, what's the center of gravity?
Well, the Taliban is the center of gravity.
No, no, no.
Mike Mullen, who's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who, by the way, is not in the chain of command, he's an advisor to the president, he says, well, it's the Afghan people who are the center of gravity.
And then you've got John Kerry, who says the center of gravity in Afghanistan is Pakistan, which, you know, John Kerry, you know what his record with winning strategies is like, so you can kind of toss that one.
But it's that sort of thing where nobody agrees on what to do, and I don't see anyone's – what is the real national security goal that can be achieved there?
I really don't see it.
If you're worried about, you know, evildoers getting their hands on Pakistan's nuclear weapons, blow them up.
We can do that.
If you're worried about them getting control of the pipeline through Afghanistan, blow it up, declare victory, and bring the guys home.
Now, the closest thing I've heard to anyone expressing a coherent objective for that campaign is the president himself saying, well, I don't want to allow that to be a sanctuary where al-Qaeda, which is – and everybody knows by now al-Qaeda is a code word for anybody we want to blame for things.
I don't even know if al-Qaeda is really in there anymore.
Now, you know, you hear Taliban and al-Qaeda are used interchangeably.
It's difficult to say.
But, I mean, the fact of the matter is that if – first of all, apparently they've left Afghanistan and gone to Pakistan.
If we invade Pakistan, they'll just pack up and go off to one of the other banana stands.
And the truth of the matter is, if you can execute a terror attack in the United States, high atop the Himalayas on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, you can do it from any square inch on the globe.
So it's a nonstarter objective.
Well, and it really doesn't make any sense, does it, to – even if the only mission was searching for – what if they defined al-Qaeda as narrowly as we could hope for and said, we're looking for Arabs hanging out in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and we're sending the Marine Corps to get every last one of them, including bin Laden and Zawahiri.
That's basically not even an option, sending the Marine Corps into those mountains.
That's unconquerable terrain, is it not?
Well, you know, ostensibly I'm going to say yes.
Now, somebody would have to come back and convince me otherwise.
But the thing to keep in mind about that, there's a tendency to think that we, the great United States military, have somehow conquered the physical universe and can go in and operate anywhere.
That just isn't the case.
And if you look around for stories about these guys who are operating up there in the hills, they're pretty much – that's like real for-whom-the-bell-told stuff.
And the other thing to keep in mind is our helicopters – I'm not giving anything away.
Generally speaking, those kinds of helicopters, military helicopters, have a practical service ceiling of 11,000 feet.
And that's – you know, after this, they just start to, you know, not catch enough wind to fly and not catch enough air to fly.
So, you know, when the guys go up there to fight, they've lost their advantages.
And they're guerrillas too.
So, no, what you said, no, I don't think that's – like you said, it's not conquerable terrain.
To use another – it's not a perfect analogy, but there's a reason that everyone has agreed to let Switzerland stay neutral in all of Europe's wars.
No, we're not going in there.
No, you can't fight in there.
You know, and they've got all the gold, so, you know.
Well, if any Americans have ever been to the Rocky Mountains or seen the movie Red Dawn, I mean, does anybody really believe that anyone could ever take the Rocky Mountains from the Americans who own them now, short of just carpeting them with hydrogen bombs, I guess?
No, and what good would that do?
It gets back to the thing of, like I said, that whatever they're doing up there, they could do anywhere on the planet.
I personally – you know, you could live anonymously and do those kinds of things from, you know, the French Riviera, which I think is what's actually happening.
But I have nothing to base that on.
So I want to hear what you know and have to say about Petraeus and his pet ox, as you call him, Rea Dearno.
But first, and of course, like many things, I've got to give the hat tip to Gareth Porter for this one.
I went and Googled it up and found this at Crooks and Liars.
It's a video of Jim Michalczewski, the longtime Pentagon correspondent for NBC News, talking to David Gregory right before Barack Obama's speech.
And I think this only runs a minute or so, Jeff.
I'll ask you to hang on and listen, and then I'll try to get your comment.
Great.
Live pictures now from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
We're awaiting President Obama's discussion, his speech and address, really, about his timeline for troop withdrawal from Iraq.
Been widely reported on.
We'll hear from the president just moments from now.
We have a terrific team here assembled to talk about and preview this announcement, including our Pentagon correspondent, Jim Michalczewski.
Jim, I'd like you to take a moment and talk about Secretary Robert Gates.
I should mention, again, he'll be my guest exclusively on Meet the Press Sunday.
Talk about his role, a carryover, obviously, notably from the Bush administration, very active in the surge strategy.
What role has he played in arriving at this decision about troops for President Obama?
Well, I want to make two quick points about Secretary Gates.
Even during the campaign, if you listen to what Secretary Gates was saying about the U.S. military operations in Iraq and what Barack Obama was saying, they were not that far apart.
Secretary Gates, as early as 18 months to two years ago, was saying, look, everybody understands that we're going to have to start withdrawing from Iraq.
But at the same time, Secretary Gates adds this caveat that, in fact, he believes significant numbers of troops will remain in Iraq for years to come.
And, in fact, military commanders, despite the standard of forces agreement with the Iraqi government that all U.S. forces would be out by the end of 2011, are already making plans for a significant number of American troops to remain in Iraq beyond that 2011 deadline, assuming that that SOFA agreement would be renegotiated.
And one senior military commander told us that he expects large numbers of American troops to be in Iraq for the next 15 to 20 years, David.
Fifteen to 20 years.
I think that really takes a moment to really sink in with a mission that is primarily what over that kind of time horizon, Nick?
Well, it would evolve from a day-to-day combat mission to more of an oversight mission.
And we mustn't forget that the U.S. is providing nearly 100 percent of all combat air support over Iraq, and that the Iraqi military is not going to be able to assume that mission within the next 18 months to two years.
It's going to be impossible.
And there are some discussions.
I know Richard Engel mentioned the area of Kirkuk up in the north recently.
There are some discussions among Iraqis, and I know some military commanders, to establish what could end up as a permanent air base, U.S. air base, in Kirkuk.
All right, it's Anti-War Radio.
That was a report from Jim Miklaschewski on NBC News, just preceding Barack Obama's big Iraq speech last week.
And we have Jeff Huber on the line.
What do you make of that?
Fifteen to 20 years, they stole Iraq and they're keeping it fair and square.
It belongs to America now.
Well, I mean, that was the plan all along, and I've said this several times.
You follow the PNAC paper trail, PNAC meaning Project for a New American Century.
You follow the paper trail, particularly if you look at the Rearming America's Defenses, which came out in September 2000, just before that election.
It was pretty obvious that the goal was a permanent military occupation of Iraq.
Why Iraq?
Iraq's in the center, you know, geostrategically.
Aside from sitting on top of a lot of oil, Iran does too.
Iraq is the geostrategic center.
From Iraq, if you have a base there, you can go beat up on just about everybody.
In a way, it's sort of like the Germany of that part of the world.
Well, now, am I just too cynical in thinking that Barack Obama means to abide by the PNAC agenda just as much as any of the rest of these guys?
Or are Petraeus and Odierno basically, and even Robert Gates, working to undermine the president?
Well, there's a lot of mind reading involved with that.
I'm not completely averse to reading tea leaves, but there's a point where I have to back off.
First of all, I always go, I kind of run a Will Rogers shop here.
All I know is what I read in the paper, so I don't have all kinds of insider information about that.
Just sit back and look at the big block things that are going on.
I think that, like a lot of people have observed, Obama was kind of set up.
This whole thing of, as the election came along, and boy, I'll tell you, the economy falling apart right there at the end is about the best thing that could have happened for the warmongering agenda.
Because at this point, Obama has, he's got to deal with that.
His ability to pay attention to what the herd of cats in uniform behind his back are doing is going to be quite limited.
So it's basically, it sets the whole thing up of, if Obama doesn't go along with what the generals say, whatever goes wrong will be Obama's fault for not listening.
And something I pointed out, let's talk a little bit about Gates, because Gates has succeeded as Secretary of Defense, I think, and this is, I don't have insider information, this is just watching what anybody else can see in the papers.
He's a career bureaucrat who rose to the top.
Okay, guys who know how to do that are very good at a number of things, not the least of which is what I call leadership a la carte, which is you take advice from Advisor A, you adopt the suggestion of Advisor B, you turn a blind eye to the intern that Senior Advisor C is horsing around with, and voila, you've got a program that nobody can assail because it confuses everybody else just as much as it does you.
Now I don't really think Gates, Gates was good at team building, and really all he had to do to be more successful in Rumsfeld was to be less hated in Rumsfeld, and how hard was that?
Yeah, not very.
So I think he tends to go with the flow, but to a great extent he sort of, in a sense, I think he bought the love of his generals, and at this point all of the big generals left are the guys who are more or less on the Petraeus team.
I think there was a big Stephen King to Stan magnitude showdown between him and Admiral Fox Fallon in Central Command, and Fallon lost, and Petraeus won.
He went on to the CENTCOM job.
The overall plan is to repeat the success he had in Iraq, or to attempt to, in the Bananastands, which is really a recipe for staying there forever.
And even his chief publicist, Tom Ricks, admits that Petraeus did what he did.
All he did was go in and bribe the Sunnis, and now he's basically created a place that's more dangerous than it was when Saddam Hussein was there.
Yeah, well, he's actually put himself in the position of Saddam Hussein, basically, keeping everybody mollified with money and guns, and trying to keep all the different sides appeased long enough to keep him looking good, but he's not really solving any problems.
Yeah, you start off with Mosul, which is where he first started getting praise for the great job he did there.
Well, the great job he did there was bribe everybody.
And a couple months after he left, and the money dried up, and he wasn't there to schmooze the payola, the chief of police went to the other side, and the place went up for grabs, and it's still a disaster.
But to hear it told, he was the model of the modern major general, and he was Mr. Counterinsurgency.
If you've got enough money, you can buy a lot of people.
He comes back as the guy in charge of training Iraqi security forces, who are mostly Sunnis.
And you later find out that while he's there, he sort of loses track of about 190,000 Kalashnikov rifles and pistols, trains up a bunch of, did I say Sunnis?
I meant Shias.
These guys all sort of disappear, so he basically arms the Shia militias and gets away with it.
And then he comes back as the commander in charge of everything, and he arms and bribes all the Sunnis, and then blames everything that's wrong on the Iranians for doing basically what he's done, which is give everybody money and guns.
And of course he takes credit for, even if he admits that he's just bribing them, he takes credit for bribing the Sunni militias into taking on al-Qaeda, and yet a simple Google search will reveal articles from the beginning of, or I guess early spring at least, 2006, where the local Sunnis were already turning on the foreign fighter types, because they had pushed their luck too far.
There was only a small percentage of the Sunni insurgency, and the local Sunnis decided to start liquidating them, long before Petraeus even came with the money and the surge and the rest of this.
Oh sure, plus when you talk about foreign fighters, the best numbers I ever thought, and this is from people who probably had reason to lie about it, at most there were maybe 1,000 or 2,000 foreign fighters in the country.
Among those numbers would have been al-Qaeda in Iraq, and maybe they got some locals, but the way that this myth is talked about, it's as if somehow al-Qaeda has either Star Trek transporter technology, or maybe they have a magic bottle that they rub and a genie comes out and transports 10,000 evildoers from one side of Iraq, clear over to Afghanistan, and it's just ridiculous.
Oh, we've got fighters coming in from blah, blah, blah.
These guys are getting in, they're dribs and drabs, unless they're flying out of Baghdad International by the plane load, which I assume they're not.
Well, maybe they're the only ones who can get back and forth from Baghdad to the airport safely.
But the whole thing of foreign fighters, it defies what's really going on there.
And it also, pretending that America is the center of the universe, ignores the fact that those guys had their own blowback to deal with, in doing suicide bombings and banning smoking and conscripting people's kids.
They were a bunch of foreigners, just like the Americans, coming and trodding all over the locals.
That's not going to last.
Not in Iraq.
We've seen that.
And that's a whole other thing to take a look at.
If we leave a vacuum and everybody else will come in there to fill it, the Chinese will send 50,000 troops and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, hey, who in their right mind, after watching us, would want to come in and try to take that place over?
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
And of course, they've always said that al-Qaeda could take it over.
That's why Obama has to leave 50,000 counterterrorism forces there, keep al-Qaeda from taking the place over.
Which, it seems like that was Dick Cheney's lie four years ago.
It doesn't even ring hollow anymore.
It rings in a void.
It's ridiculous.
No, you can't go in there.
Plus, the other thing that people need to keep in mind when they talk about, oh, the whole country, the whole place will go up for grabs in a general regional war.
Those guys, they don't have the kind of militaries that can fight those kinds of wars.
Their armies can't fight more than a few miles away from their borders.
Their air forces is the same basic thing, and the biggest navy anybody there has is Iran, and those guys are very good at, they're what you call a sea denial navy.
It's a coastal navy.
The idea is they can harass in the Gulf.
They could shut off for some period of time, I don't know how long.
They could shut off the Strait of Hormuz and do things like that.
They're not going to do this huge flotilla and go popping up the Red Sea and attacking Israel.
They'd think of natural causes before they got halfway there.
I'm sorry, Jeff.
We've got to leave it right there.
We're all out of time.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
You betcha.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody.
That's Jeff Huber.
You can find what he writes at www.antiwar.com or www.orig.huber.php and look at his blog, Pen and Sword, which is at www.zenhuber.blogspot.com and his novel is called Bathtub Admirals, which sounds like it's probably pretty funny.
That's it for Antiwar Radio today.
See you tomorrow, 11 to 1, California time.