Message for Obama from MLK

While today's U.S. Army may be more racially balanced than it was in Vietnam, it's still largely an army of the poorer, those with less opportunities. And we still export war, and we still sell as many weapons as the rest of the world combined.

The military-industrial complex is alive and kicking or lying for Iraq dollars

All those retired general talking heads on network and cable news programs? Most of them have big-time connections with defense weapons makers, otherwise politely called “military contractors.”

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the … several dozen military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

That’s why President Bush has had no problem in the past flying some of them on Air Force 2.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

This is a long, 11-page exposé in the New York Times and well worth a read.

Some of the 75 or so brass hat talking heads are also lobbyists, for example. The whole affair was launched in large part by former Defense Department assistant secretary for PR Torie Clarke. But, the military talkers were given their own, independently-officed handlers.

Others were in charge of contract negotiation or procurement at their firms, a very direct conflict of interest in going on TV and promoting the war.

Some of them had huge anti-media axes to grind going back to Vietnam:

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

In a word, bullshit. Former DoD schmoozer and Donald Rumsfeld flunky Larry Di Rita confirms this was the attitude the Whatagon had. Other analysts, anonymously, also explicitly called this “psyops.”

Meanwhile, these talking heads coneheads were perfectly content to be led around by the nose by Paul Bremer et al on the occasions they actually did visit Iraq.

How can you be an “analyst” when you’re not actually out in the field analyzing anything?

But, most of the tin stars didn’t care. It was a way to meet U.S. mercenary companies like KBR, or Iraqi decision-makers, and try to drum up more business.

Showing their importance, one of the first things Gen. David Petraeus did after being named commander in Iraq was to meet with the group of analysts. I assume he does the same as part of his preparation for each round of Congressional testimony, so the talking heads are ready and armed.

And, for all of this bullshitting, most the analysts were being paid, in essence, on commission, by how many times they talked on TV.

And, while some of them admit soon being disillusioned about what lies BushCo was spinning, none of them saw fit to stop talking on TV. Those who were wary said “military loyalty” kept them from speaking out.

More bullshit. Fear of scorn from fellow colonels or generals is what it was, along with fear of losing contracts or lobbying access. As for loyalty to privates and noncoms, the actual military? Hah.

The few who did speak out? Well, this happened:

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, William V. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

As for the cable and network news companies? None of them asked questions about outside business dealings.

Today, of course, most these folks are ghettoized to Fox, but not all of them, and it certainly wasn’t that way in the run-up to the war and the first year afterward.

Of course, there are a few things you won’t find in the story.

One is the number of weapons contractors who give plenty of money to Democrats as well as Republicans. Indeed, one of the retired shills, Gen. John Ralston, eventually went to work for William Cohen’s lobbying group. True, Cohen was a Republican senator, but he became defense secretary in a Democratic administration.

The other is how much money some of these war merchants, war-merchant lobbyists and such, spend on advertising, both with the TV networks and in places like the NYT.

So much for China supporting African rights and democracy

Chinese troops have been seen on the streets of Mutare, Zimbabwe’s third-largest city. Zimbabwe’s democratically-ousted, but refusing-to-leave-office President Robert Mugabe signed trade pacts with China earlier this decade after Western ostracism. However, I don’t believe military forces are usually “traded” items.

Unfortunately, arms and munitions all too often are, and China has been caught trying to send a boatload of them to Zimbabwe:

China's support for President Mugabe’s regime has been highlighted by the arrival in South Africa of a ship carrying a large cache of weapons destined for Zimbabwe's armed forces. Dock workers in Durban refused to unload it.

The 300,000-strong South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) said it would be “grossly irresponsible” to touch the cargo of ammunition, grenades and mortar rounds on board the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang anchored outside the port.

Three million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades and more than 3,000 mortar rounds and mortar tubes are among the cargo on the Chinese ship, according to copies of the inventory published by a South African newspaper

According to Beeld, the documentation for the shipment was completed on 1 April, three days after the presidential vote.

That’s enough to start a war — or a civil war.

Robert Mugabe is not going to leave peacefully.

And he’s sure as hell not going to leave peacefully with blank-check support from his southern neighbor:

A South African government spokesman, Themba Maseko, said it would be difficult to stop the shipment.

Well, of course it will be difficult to stop as long as South African President Thabo Mbeki treats Mugabe with kid gloves. Which he has given no signs of stopping. What if his government reaches a deal with Beijing to take a “cut” while remaining a conduit to landlocked Zimbabwe?

Those 110,000 U.S. weapons missing from Iraq?

A notorious Russian arms dealer is behind those missing AK-47s:

Consider the case of one particular bad guy, Viktor Bout — a stout, canny Russian air transporter who also happens to be the world's most notorious arms dealer.

When the U.S. government needed to fly four planeloads of seized weapons from an American base in Bosnia to Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in August 2004, they used a Moldovan air cargo firm tied to Bout's aviation empire. The problem is that the planes apparently never arrived.

The missing Bosnian weapons could simply be a paperwork problem (and it's not certain that they are among the missing weapons the GAO discovered; they may be an additional loss). But Bout's involvement raises bleak possibilities … that the arms were diverted to another country or to Iraqi insurgents killing American troops.

For more than a decade before he landed on U.S. payrolls, Bout's air cargo operations delivered tons of contraband weapons … to some of the world's most dangerous misfits.

He stoked wars across Africa, supplying Charles Taylor, the deposed Liberian president now on trial for war crimes. He ferried $50 million in guns and other cargo, and he even sold air freighters to the Taliban. …

Bout also has a well-known record for working both sides of the fence. His planes armed both the Angolan government in Africa and rebel forces arrayed against it. He cut weapons deals with Afghanistan's Northern Alliance government before betraying it by arming the Taliban.

One thing about the Bout affair is certain. As of mid-2006, his firms were no longer flying for the U.S. in Iraq. But now he poses a new problem: "blowback," the blunt term espionage writers like to use for the deadly consequences of poor spycraft.

When the U.S. turned to the Bout network to mount its Iraq supply flights, it was already clear that Bout's network had aided the Taliban's extremist mullahs. How could the U.S. be absolutely certain he wouldn't fly for our enemies once he had left the payroll?

We couldn't and, apparently, he is.

Last summer, a jumbo Il-76 flying the Khazakh flag swooped down to a landing in Mogadishu to unload arms for radical Islamic leaders who briefly seized control of Somalia. It was one of Bout's planes, concluded U.S. military intelligence officials.

With arms-dealer friends like this, who needs enemies, eh?

Kim Jong Il goes nuclear; let’s see Bush screw up North Korean diplomacy even more

(I’m assuming this wasn’t a Rove conspiracy to drive Mark Foley off the news pages.)

According to both North Korea and South Korea, it sounds official: North Korea is a nuclear power.

Should this scare us more than, say, Pakistan’s being a nuclear power?

Perhaps, in some ways.

First, given that we don’t know whether Pakistan’s rogue nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, is under house detention, or more in the way of house leisure, who’s to say the old Pyongyang//Islamabad connection might not get a jump start?

At the least, Pakistan’s President Musharraf can threaten something like that the next time our own Maximum Leader, George W(hhhaattt?) Bush, talks to him like a 5-year-old, not a fellow head of state.

Second, who’s to say that Kim won’t try to rev up some backdoor connection even without official, or semi-official via the ISI, Pakistani agreement? Or with Iran?

I don’t know if Clinton would have stopped this or not. But, he couldn’t have bollixed up the last five-plus years of diplomacy any worse than it has been.