An American Lion

Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul-Qadir al-Ubaidi, center, inspects the site of a suicide attack accompanied by soldiers at a military headquarters in Baghdad, on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.

Yes, there’s still something of a war in Iraq:

Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq’s ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.

It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting.

The attack also made plain the kind of lapses in security that have left Iraqis wary of the U.S. drawdown and distrustful of the ability of Iraqi forces now taking up ultimate responsibility for protecting the country.

Sunday’s hour-long assault was the second in as many weeks on the facility, the headquarters for the Iraqi Army’s 11th Division, pointing to the failure of Iraqi forces to plug even the most obvious holes in their security.

Duck, Cletus. Those sons of bitches are still shooting at you. Apparently, no one told the Iraqi Army that it was their turn to get their hands dirty fighting to preserve and protect their own country. How much do you want to bet that the ones that ran away will still get paid next month to do nothing?

We may not have a very large footprint in Iraq (although, 50,000 troops is a hell of a lot of troops to me) and we may have ended combat operations, but let’s not forget this one very salient fact—there is no middle class in Iraq anymore. Anyone with the means to do so has fled. What’s left are a lot of very scared people at the mercy of whatever happens in their general vicinity. It is the collision of a corrupt government, an ally in retreat, and an entrenched opposition that thrives on murder and mayhem. It is not a recipe for sunshine and puppy dogs and happy times.

Thomas McInerney, wearing two stars but you already knew thatIf this doesn’t put an end to the lucrative career that retired General Thomas McInerney has enjoyed since getting out of the United States Air Force in 1994, then I do not know what will:

I try to ignore the birther movement unless it inducts someone important — a congressman, for example. The (sigh) American Patriot Foundation’s announcement that Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (ret.) has signed an affidavit supporting court martialed birther Lt. Col. Terry Lakin is actually a pretty big coup.

How wild is McInerney’s statement? This wild: 

[I]t is my opinion that LTC Lakin’s request for discovery relating to the President’s birth records in Hawaii is absolutely essential to determining not merely his guilt or innocence but to reassuring all military personnel once and for all for this President whether his service as Commander in Chief is Constitutionally proper. He is the one single person in the Chain of Command that the Constitution demands proof of natural born citizenship. This determination is fundamental to our Republic, where civilian control over the military is the rule. According to our Constitution, the Commander in Chief must now, in the face of serious— and widely held— concerns that he is ineligible, either voluntarily establish his eligibility by authorizing release of his birth records or this court must authorize their discovery. The invasion of his privacy in these records is utterly trivial compared to the issues at stake here.

And is McInerney a serious person? Yes. He’s a West Point graduate who ran the Alaskan air command during the Exxon Valdez disaster. As recently as August 5, he was featured on Fox News and referred to as a network contributor — he’s typically referred to as a network military analyst. He writes and comments fairly frequently about how America could bomb Iran.

I believe that “all military personnel” are sufficiently relieved to know that their Commander in Chief is President Obama. You can’t help but note that we have civilian control over the military and these challenges to civilian authority cheapen that control. When President Bush was Commander in Chief, there was no nonsense allowed. The anti-Bush elements in this country never hesitated to denigrate his authority to command; there should be no tolerance for any effort to denigrate President Obama. You may not support the man, but partisan politics have no place when it comes for the principle of civilian control of the military.

General McInerney is engaging in a form of sedition, one that probably pleases his media handlers but does not put him in serious legal jeopardy. Good for him. He has the free right to align himself with people who engage in semantics and nonsense (these people are the version of Al Gore was elected President! that has never been adequately stamped out).

Never expect consistency when money is on the line. General McInerney is counting on being able to make money off of this move. That’s the only explanation for making this public. The individual in question, LTC Lakin is a decorated Veteran but he missed movement and cannot follow orders; he should be court-martialed and stripped of his rank.

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It's useful to note that David Gregory has lost nearly every speck of credibility he may have once had climbing, literally, over the cold, dead body of Tim Russert to become the voice of reason and the Establishment for NBC News. This man is being used to sell things and even he knows what those things are. He has that knowing smirk that tells you what's what. I think he's far too glib in this interview, but that's my taste. I tend to prefer the people who talk to newsmakers to have a bit of dignity. Dignity can't sell a war anymore to the American people. We need telegenic news celebrities to accomplish this.

President Obama has been fairly succinct on this front:

As a candidate, Obama called Afghanistan a war worth fighting, as opposed to Iraq, a conflict he opposed and has since begun easing out of.

A new survey by the Gallup organization, released Tuesday, showed only 35 percent of Americans now approve of Obama’s handling of the war; 55 percent disapprove.

He made no direct reference to public opinion Tuesday night, although he seemed to touch on it when he said, “The American people are understandably focused on rebuilding our economy and putting people to work here at home.”

“After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home,” he said flatly.

When speaking publicly, that "conditions" clause becomes more evident, however:

Our overarching goal remains the same:  to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.

To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan.  We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven.  We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.  And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future. 

We will meet these objectives in three ways.  First, we will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban's momentum and increase Afghanistan's capacity over the next 18 months.

The 30,000 additional troops that I'm announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 -- the fastest possible pace -- so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers.  They'll increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight.  And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans. 

Because this is an international effort, I've asked that our commitment be joined by contributions from our allies.  Some have already provided additional troops, and we're confident that there will be further contributions in the days and weeks ahead. Our friends have fought and bled and died alongside us in Afghanistan.  And now, we must come together to end this war successfully.  For what's at stake is not simply a test of NATO's credibility -- what's at stake is the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.

But taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.  Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.  We'll continue to advise and assist Afghanistan's security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul.  But it will be clear to the Afghan government -- and, more importantly, to the Afghan people -- that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country. [bold=emphasis mine]

The man is quite a lawyer, in any case. He has his escape hatch and General Petraeus has seized upon it. Too bad there is still this pesky detail:

CIA Director Leon Panetta's assessment comes as President Barack Obama advances a risky new war plan that relies on 98,000 U.S. troops to prop up the Afghan government and prevent al Qaeda from returning. No longer overseeing the commander in chief's mission is Gen. Stanley McChrystal, sacked this past week in a stunning shake-up in U.S. military leadership after his critical comments about the White House.

"We're seeing elements of progress, but this is going to be tough," Panetta told ABC television's "This Week."

He said al Qaeda's evolving attack strategy increasingly relies on operatives without any record of terrorism involvement or those already in the U.S. As for Osama bin Laden, Panetta said it's been years since the U.S. had good intelligence about his whereabouts.

Panetta estimated there are fewer than 100 al Qaeda militants operating inside Afghanistan, with the rest hiding along Pakistan's mountainous western border. He said U.S. drone strikes and other spy operations have helped to "take down" half of al Qaeda's senior leaders.

If there really are "fewer than 100" then the President has met his goals and all he has to do now is order the withdrawal. There is no justification to keep fighting the Taliban when there are virtually no al Qaeda left. We cannot invade Pakistan openly, but we can continue to use drones and Special Forces troops to continue to assassinate key leaders (as much as I hate the use of drones, I am a realist and I doubt they will stop being used). We don't need over 130,000 men and women in Afghanistan to accomplish that task. There is a strong case to be made that making peace with the Taliban is preferable to another decade of war--except that Hamid Karzai and his narco-trafficking brother probably wouldn't survive a reordering of the political establishment in Afghanistan. Is anyone bothering to ask the Pakistani ISI what we should do? Don't we need their permission nowadays?

There is simply no reason, military or otherwise, to keep all of those troops in Afghanistan. Just by using the logic laid out by the President, there are more al Qaeda in Yemen, North Africa, and probably in a few other hotspots around the globe than there are in Afghanistan, but most of our troops are now tied down in the one place al Qaeda has been defeated. How did General Petraeus get his job and how does he keep it after openly speculating that we will need to "change" the timeline of the July 2011 withdrawal?

Anyway, it's President Obama's war now, and it has been for some time. I hope he figures out that the way out of a war is to stop listening to the Generals and the Admirals and to start listening to the diplomats.

Here's to paying attention to those pesky details.

Three federal police agents were gunned down along a highway in Puebla state in July. (Ulises Ruiz Basurto, EPA)Few things bother me more than the out of control drug war in Mexico. Well, that's a misnomer. This war spans most of Mexico and the American Southwest. It has spread into the suburbs of Phoenix, throughout Texas, and is being played out wherever the drug cartels operate. So, really, this is a war that has real implications for the safety and security of American citizens and, to be be really real, it has nothing to do with illegal immigration. The illegal immigrants are too poor to buy the prime weed being smuggled into this country, you see.

My friends at Stratfor have long been on top of this issue, but here's a particularly good piece from the Los Angeles Times:

Nearly four years after President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led crackdown against drug traffickers, the cartels are smuggling more narcotics into the United States, amassing bigger fortunes and extending their dominion at home with such savagery that swaths of Mexico are now in effect without authority.

The groups also are expanding their ambitions far beyond the drug trade, transforming themselves into broad criminal empires deeply involved in migrant smuggling, extortion, kidnapping and trafficking in contraband such as pirated DVDs.

Undeterred by the 80,000 troops and federal police officers arrayed against them, gunmen frequently take on Mexican forces in the open. Operatives of one group, the Zetas, did so in northern Mexico this spring when they blockaded army garrisons. In June a group believed to be linked to another organization, La Familia, ambushed federal police in the western state of Michoacan, killing 12 officers in early morning light.

If three or five or twelve law enforcement officers were gunned down in this country by the Zetas, it I want to believe that it would cause a sensation. It would spark outrage. It would motivate us to do something, no matter how feeble or misguided. And yet, this is happening on a regular basis in Mexico as this war spins off into new areas of corruption and greed. It is, in fact, being played out here now but not on a scale necessary to draw the American people into a substantive debate on whether or not our government is doing enough. In fact, we are not doing anywhere near enough. This fellow Calderon is no partner and he is no leader. He is symptomatic of Mexico's corrupt political establishment.

When will someone in a position of power wake up and realize just how devastating this problem could be if the wrong gunmen shoot the wrong law enforcement officers on the wrong side of that porous border?