World's sole super power bogged down by enemy without air force, navy, army = NOT VICTORY. [View All]

The Five-Sided House of Usher
Jeff Huber

The tea leaves tell me we’re about to experience a seismic event that will produce the next collapse of our five-sided House of Usher, the Pentagon.

The last time we saw a temblor of that magnitude was in November 2006. Just before the mid-term election, young Mr. Bush assured us that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would stick around long enough to “get the job done.” The day after the Democrats regained control of Congress, Bush announced that Rummy would receive a Purple Heart for the bruise he got where the door hit him on his way out. Robert Gates got the top Defense slot, the Iraq Study Group got a bruise in the same place Rummy got his, “King David” Petraeus got command of the Iraq surge, and the rest is historical fiction, especially the parts about how the Iraq surge was a success and how Stan the Man McChrystal was going to repeat that success in the Bananastans.*

The Bush administration announced its intention to escalate the Iraq fiasco in January 2007. The surge has been a dismal flop. Iraq’s government and security forces are congenitally corrupt, incompetent, and ineffective, and we will never fix that. Results of the country’s latest purple-finger poll have been rejected by both major candidates for the prime minister slot, violence is on the uptick, and the Obama administration is once again stuttering into the microphone about how American troops may not be able to withdraw from Iraq on schedule. Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno has been making that kind of boo noise since he took command in Iraq in September 2008. In February 2009, Petraeus hagiographerTom Ricks quoted Odie as saying he wanted to see 30,000 U.S. troops in Iraq until 2014 or so.

AfPak is going to Helmand in a handbag. Banana Stan’s Marjah offensive, the “test” of his strategy (Obama’s strategy, according to the Pentagon’s bull-feather merchants), went over like a lead zeppelin. The only thing McChrystal has done well in command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is what he did well for five years as head assassin of the Joint Special Operations Command: kill a lot of civilians in the process of hunting down “suspected” terrorists. Even McChrystal knows he’s knocking up the puppy. On May 13, he told Jeffrey Brown of PBS Newshour, “Well, I think that, in the last year, we have made a lot of progress,” but “I think I would be prepared to say nobody is winning, at this point.” Shades of the Great Decider. Days before the 2006 election, Bush proclaimed, “Absolutely, we’re winning in Iraq.” Shortly after he put Rummy through the uprights, Bush allowed as how “We’re not winning” but “we’re not losing.”

When you’re the world’s sole superpower, and you’ve been bogged down for eight years by pismire adversaries who don’t have an air force or a navy or an army or even a defense budget, you’re not breaking even, you’re getting your heinie handed to you on a plate with a generous helping of grilled crow on the side. What could better symbolize our humiliating defeat than the recent spectacle of Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton kissing up in public to Afghan sleaze peddler Hamid Karzai? (What a revolting development. In February 2008, then-Senator Biden stormed out of a formal dinner Karzai was giving in his honor. President Obama has called Karzai “unreliable” and “ineffective,” and Hillary has said that Karzai presides over a “narco-state.”)

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