The 40 million Pathans (Pashtuns) are the world’s largest tribal group, divided by a 1,400 mile long border (the Durand Line) drawn by a 19th century British official that has never been of any interest to any one except mapmakers, certainly not to half the Pathans living in Pakistan or the other half living in Afghanistan on either side of the border. Historical and literary scholars may remember the bitter proverb quoted by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim: “Trust a Brahmin before a snake, a snake before a harlot, a harlot before a Pathan,” the modern version of which might run: “It is the classic Afghan way to smile and pocket bribe money, and tell foreigners what they want to hear, only to attack them in the night.” Pathans seem sure the Americans, like the British, the Russians, and the Greeks before them, will go home eventually.
Afghanistan is often called “The graveyard of empires” since no one has ever succeeded in conquering and holding it, not even Alexander. The first Moghul (Moslem) emperor of India, Akbar, ruled India from Kabul, which was then part of India, but he ignored everything lying south and west of Kabul, what we now call Afghanistan. Britain fought 3 Afghan wars (the last in 1919 using more or less the same technology as today - aircraft, bombs, poison gas, and so on) to little effect and ironically, the British contingent is deployed in the Helmand area where the 1st Afghan War got off to a bad start (only a Dr Brydon from the 13th Foot (Somerset Light Infantry) surviving the massacre).
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http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/02/20092158556204114.html
Russia marks Afghanistan retreat
Russian veterans warn that the US could make the same mistakes in Afghanistan [Reuters]
Remembrance ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan have been held in Russia, amid warnings the US risks repeating the mistakes Moscow made during the conflict.
Events in Russia and other former Soviet states on Sunday were low-key, with wreaths laid at memorials and medals handed out to veterans.
The war, which began in 1979, left more than 13,000 Soviets dead and may have killed as many as one million Afghans.
"It's like fighting sand. No force in the world can get the better of the Afghans," Oleg Kubanov, a former officer, said at an anniversary concert in Moscow.
"It's their holy land, it doesn't matter to them if you're Russian, American. We're all soldiers to them."
The war contributed to the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan, ending a war that Moscow initially expected to be a brief incursion to bolster its Afghan supporters.
Unwinnable war
During the Soviet invasion, Russia's military found itself bogged down in an unwinnable guerrilla war against the Mujahidin, Islamic fighters who were backed by the US and Saudi Arabia.
The last Soviet soldier to leave was the commander of its forces in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Boris Gromov, who crossed the Friendship Bridge across the Amu Darya river into Soviet Uzbekistan at midday on February 15.
"I am convinced of one thing. That it is irresponsible to forget about lessons like Afghanistan," Gromov, now the governor of the Moscow region, told Russia's Rossiskaya Gazeta daily.
The US, which led its own invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is preparing to pour more troops into the country in an attempt to tackle a surge in Taliban-led violence
Russian veterans have warned that the US is set to relive the nightmare faced by the Soviet forces.
"They'll send more in and they'll lose more," Andrei Bandarenko, a former special forces officer, said of the US plans.
"What does Obama [the US president] know about the situation on the ground?"
Shamil Tyukteyev, who lead a regiment in Afghanistan between 1986 and 1988, also said that the extra troops would only make the situation worse.
"You can't put a soldier outside every house or a base on every mountain. We saw it ourselves, the more troops, the more resistance," he said.
'Political adventure'
A study released on Friday showed that 47 per cent of Russians believed that the invasion of Afghanistan was a "political adventure into which the political leadership irresponsibly led the country".
Of those polled, 58 per cent believed there was never a reason to put Soviet troops into Afghanistan.
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http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/02/2009218233411262319.html
US warns of tough Afghan battle
The 17,000 extra soldiers will bring the US troop strength in Afghanistan to 55,000 [AFP]
The US military commander in Afghanistan has welcomed Barack Obama's "urgent" move to send 17,000 more soldiers to the country, but warned that it will be a tough year ahead.
"Even with these additional forces, I have to tell you that 2009 is going to be a tough year," General David McKiernan said at the Pentagon on Wednesday.
Obama, the US president, had said on Tuesday that the troop increase was "necessary to stabilise a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires".
The move puts troops on the ground in time for the increase in fighting that usually comes with warmer weather, and in time for national elections to be held in Afghanistan in August.
McKiernan said most of the additional troops would go to southern Afghanistan, the heartland of the battle against the Taliban and where Nato forces are struggling to hold terrain.
"What this allows us to do is change the dynamics of the security situation, predominantly in southern Afghanistan, where we are, at best, stalemated," he said.
Breakdown of Nato-led deployments
Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) troops in Afghanistan after deployment of 17,000 extra US soldiers:
US: 55,000 (south)
UK: 8,600 (Kabul, Kandahar, Helmand)
Germany: 3,500 (north)
Italy: 2,880 (west and capital Kabul)
Canada: 2,800 (south)
Netherlands: 1,650 (south)
France: 1,515 (Kabul)
Poland: 1,100 (mobile)
Australia: 1,070 (south)
Other significant deployments:
Denmark: 780 troops
Spain: 740 troops
Turkey: 675 troops
Romania: 535 troops
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KA27Df01.html
Jan 27, 2009 Russia stops US on road to Afghanistan By M K Bhadrakumar
Precise, quick, deadly - the skills of a soldier are modest. But then, US Central Command chief General David Petraeus is more than a soldier. The world is getting used to him as somewhere more than halfway down the road to becoming a statesman. Sure, there may be warfare's seduction over him still, but he is expected to be aware of the political realities of the two wars he conducts, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That is why he tripped last Tuesday when he said while on a visit to Pakistan that the American military had secured agreements to move supplies to Afghanistan from the north, easing the heavy reliance on the transit route through Pakistan. "There have been agreements reached, and there are transit lines now and transit agreements for commercial goods and services in particular that include several countries in the Central Asian states and Russia," Petraeus said.
He was needlessly precise - like a soldier. Maybe he needed to impress on the tough Pakistani generals that they wouldn't hold the US forces in Afghanistan by their jugular veins for long. Or, he felt simply exasperated about the doublespeak of Janus-faced southwest Asian generals.
The shocking intelligence assessment shared by Moscow reveals that almost half of the US supplies passing through Pakistan is pilfered by motley groups of Taliban militants, petty traders and plain thieves. The US Army is getting burgled in broad daylight and can't do much about it. Almost 80% of all supplies for Afghanistan pass through Pakistan. The Peshawar bazaar is doing a roaring business hawking stolen US military ware, as in the 1980s during the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. This volume of business will register a quantum jump following the doubling of the US troop level in Afghanistan to 60,000. Wars are essentially tragedies, but can be comical, too.
Moscow disclaims transit route
At any rate, within a day of Petraeus' remark, Moscow corrected him. Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Maslov told Itar-Tass, “No official documents were submitted to Russia's permanent mission in NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] certifying that Russia had authorized the United States and NATO to transport military supplies across the country."
A day later, Russia's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, added from Brussels, "We know nothing of Russia's alleged agreement of military transit of Americans or NATO at large. There had been suggestions of the sort, but they were not formalized." And, with a touch of irony, Rogozin insisted Russia wanted the military alliance to succeed in Afghanistan.
"I can responsibly say that in the event of NATO's defeat in Afghanistan, fundamentalists who are inspired by this victory will set their eyes on the north. First they will hit Tajikistan, then they will try to break into Uzbekistan ... If things turn out badly, in about 10 years, our boys will have to fight well-armed and well-organized Islamists somewhere in Kazakhstan," the popular Moscow-politician turned diplomat added.
Russian experts have let it be known that Moscow views with disquiet the US's recent overtures to Central Asian countries regarding bilateral transit treaties with them which exclude Russia. Agreements have been reached with Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Moscow feels the US is pressing ahead with a new Caspian transit route which involves the dispatch of shipments via Georgia to Azerbaijan and thereon to the Kazakh harbor of Aktau and across the Uzbek territory to Amu Darya and northern Afghanistan. Russian experts estimate that the proposed Caspian transit route could eventually become an energy transportation route in reverse direction, which would mean a strategic setback for Russia in the decade-long struggle for the region's hydrocarbon reserves.
Russia presses for role in Kabul
Indeed, Uzbekistan is the key Central Asian country in the great game over the northern transit route to Afghanistan. Thus, during Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to Tashkent last week, Afghanistan figured as a key topic. Medvedev characterized Russian-Uzbek relations as a "strategic partnership and alliance" and said that on matters relating to Afghanistan, Moscow's cooperation with Tashkent assumed an "exceptional importance".
He said he and Uzbek President Islam Karimov agreed that there could be no "unilateral solution" to the Afghan problem and "nothing can be resolved without taking into account the collective opinion of states which have an interest in the resolution of the situation".
Most significantly, Medvedev underlined Russia had no objections about US President Barack Obama's idea of linking the Afghanistan and Pakistan problems, but for an entirely different reason, as "it is not possible to examine the establishment and development of a modern political system in Afghanistan in isolation from the context of normalizing relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan in their border regions, setting up the appropriate international mechanisms and so on".
Moscow rarely touches on the sensitive Durand Line question, that is, the controversial line that separates Afghanistan and Pakistan. Medvedev underscored that Russia remained an interested party, as there was a "need to ensure that these issues are resolved on a collective basis".
Second, Medvedev made it clear Moscow would resist US attempts to expand its military and political presence in the Central Asian and Caspian regions. He asserted, "This is a key region, a region in which diverse processes are taking place and in which Russia has crucially important work to do to coordinate our positions with our colleagues and help to find common solutions to the most complex problems."
Plainly put, Moscow will not allow a replay of the US's tactic after September 11, 2002, when it sought a military presence in Central Asia as a temporary measure and then coolly proceeded to put it on a long-term footing.
Karzai reaches out to Moscow
Interestingly, Medvedev's remarks coincide with reports that Washington is cutting Afghan President Hamid Karzai adrift and is planning to install a new "dream team" in Kabul.
Medvedev had written to Karzai offering military aid. Karzai apparently accepted the Russian offer, ignoring the US objection that in terms of secret US-Afghan agreements, Kabul needed Washington's prior consent for such dealings with third countries.
A statement from the Kremlin last Monday said Russia was "ready to provide broad assistance for an independent and democratic country [Afghanistan] that lives in a peaceful atmosphere with its neighbors. Cooperation in the defense sector ... will be effective for establishing peace in the region". It makes sense for Kabul to make military procurements from Russia since the Afghan armed forces use Soviet weaponry. But Washington doesn't want a Russian "presence" in Kabul.
Quite obviously, Moscow and Kabul have challenged the US's secret veto power over Afghanistan's external relations. Last Friday, Russian and Afghan diplomats met in Moscow and "pledged to continue developing Russian-Afghan cooperation in politics, trade and economics as well as in the humanitarian sphere". Significantly, they also "noted the importance of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO]" that is dominated by Russia and China.
SCO seeks Afghan role
Washington cannot openly censure Karzai from edging close to Russia (and China) since Afghanistan is notionally a sovereign country. Meanwhile, Moscow is intervening in Kabul's assertion of independence. Moscow has stepped up its efforts to hold an international conference on Afghanistan under the aegis of the SCO. The US doesn't want Karzai to legitimize a SCO role in the Afghan problem. Now a flashpoint arises.
A meeting of deputy foreign ministers from the SCO member countries (China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) met in Moscow on January 14. The Russian Foreign Ministry subsequently announced that a conference would take place in late March. The Russian initiative received a big boost with Iran and India's decision to participate in the conference.
New Delhi has welcomed an enhanced role for itself as a SCO observer and seeks "greater participation" in the organization's activities. In particular, New Delhi has "expressed interest in participating in the activities" of the SCO contact group on Afghanistan.
The big question is whether Karzai will seize these regional trends and respond to the SCO overture, which will enable Kabul to get out of Washington's stranglehold? To be sure, Washington is racing against time in bringing about a "regime change" in Kabul.
The point is, more and more countries in the region are finding it difficult to accept the US monopoly on conflict-resolution in Afghanistan. Washington will be hard-pressed to dissociate from the forthcoming SCO conference in March and, ideally, would have wished that Karzai also stayed away, despite it being a full-fledged regional initiative that includes all of Afghanistan's neighbors.
The SCO is sure to list Afghanistan as a major agenda item at its annual summit meeting scheduled to be held in August in Yekaterinburg, Russia. It seems Washington cannot stop the SCO in its tracks at this stage, except by genuinely broad-basing the search for an Afghan settlement and allowing regional powers with legitimate interests to fully participate.
The current US thinking, on the other hand, is to strike "grand bargains" with regional powers bilaterally and to keep them apart from collectively coordinating with each other on the basis of shared concerns. But the regional powers see through the US game plan for what it is - a smart move of divide-and-rule.
Moscow spurns selective engagement
No doubt, these diplomatic maneuverings also reveal the trust deficit in Russian-American relations. Moscow voices optimism that Obama will constructively address the problems that have accumulated in the US-Russia relationship. But Russia figured neither in Obama's inaugural address nor in the foreign policy document spelling out his agenda.
Last Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov summed up Moscow's minimal expectations: "I hope the controversial problems in our relations, such as missile defense, the expediency of NATO expansion ... will be resolved on the basis of pragmatism, without the ideological assessment the outgoing administration had ... We have noticed that ... Obama was willing to take a break on the issue of missile defense ... and to evaluate its effectiveness and cost efficiency."
But Russia is not among the new US administration's priorities. Besides, as the influential newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted last week, "A considerable number of [US] congressmen from both parties believe Russia needs a good talking-to." The current Russian priority will be to organize an early meeting between Lavrov and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and until such a meeting takes place, matters are on hold - including the vexed issue of the transit route for Afghanistan.
Thus, while talking to the media in Tashkent, Medvedev agreed in principle to grant permission to the US to use a transit route to Afghanistan via Russian territory, but at once qualified it saying, "This cooperation should be full-fledged and on an equal basis." He reminded Obama that the "surge" strategy in Afghanistan might not work. "We hope the new administration will be more successful than its predecessor on the issues surrounding Afghanistan," Medvedev said.
Evidently, Petraeus overlooked that the US's needless obduracy to keep the Hindu Kush as its exclusive geopolitical turf right in the middle of Asia has become a contentious issue. No matter the fine rhetoric, the Obama administration will find it difficult to sustain the myth that the Afghan war is all about fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban to the finish.
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http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/02/20092209225166750.html
Kyrgyz law to close US base signed
The Kyrgyz parliament passed a bill to close the base by 78 out of 81 votes [AFP]
Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the president of Kyrgyzstan, has signed a bill to close a US air base in his country used for operations in Afghanistan.
The bill, made into law on Friday, is the final move before authorities serve a 180-day eviction notice calling for the US to leave the Manas air base, just outside Bishkek, the capital.
The base is used as a transit point for 15,000 troops and 500 tonnes of cargo monthly to and from Afghanistan.
However, the US announced on Friday that Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are to allow the transit of non-military Nato cargo by road and rail to Afghanistan to supply troops.
Payment complaints
The Kyrgyz parliament passed the bill to shut the base by 78 out of 81 votes on Thursday.
Closure of Kyrgyz base deals a blow to US
The closure was announced last month after Russia offered $2.15bn in aid and loans for Kyrgyzstan's weak economy.
Russia and Kyrgyzstan both said that the closure of the air base was not a condition of the aid.
Bakiyev complained at the time that the US was not paying enough in rent for the base.
US hopeful
The US remains hopeful that the base may be reopened in the future, indicating that negotiations on the amount paid for its maintenance could be held.
Robert Gates, US defence secretary, said in Poland: "I think we are prepared to look at the fees and see if there is a justification for a somewhat larger payment, but we're not going to be ridiculous about it."
"We're prepared to do something that we think is reasonable," he said.
The US pays $17.4m annually for the base, which was opened just after its offensive in Afghanistan began in 2001, following the September 11 attacks.
Closure of the Manas base would remove the last US air base from central Asia.
Uzbekistan closed a base on its territory in 2005, following western criticism of the government.
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Afghanistan http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/14/nato-afghanistan
The causes and consequences of the Soviet withdrawal and Najibullah's eventual fall have led to some of the phoniest myths of the cold war. Claims that US-provided Stinger missiles forced the Russians to give up and that this humiliation provoked the Soviet Union's collapse are nonsense. Moscow's ally Najibullah fell four months after the USSR died, when the Kremlin's new ruler, Boris Yeltsin, cut fuel supplies to the Afghan army and Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leading Uzbek commander, defected to the mujahideen. Until that moment, they had not captured and held a single city.
Another myth is that the west "walked away" after the Russians left. If only it had. Instead Washington and Pakistan broke the Geneva agreement by maintaining arms supplies to the mujahideen. They encouraged them to reject Najibullah's repeated efforts at national reconciliation. The mujahideen wanted all-out victory, which they eventually got, only to squander it in an orgy of artillery shelling that left Kabul in ruins and produced the anger that paved the way for the Taliban. If western governments are now paying a high price in Afghanistan, they have brought the disaster on themselves.
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Afghanistan operation "worthless"
http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKTRE52618020090307
LONDON (Reuters) - A former British commander in Afghanistan has described the military operation in the south of the country as "worthless" and compared the campaign to the start of the Vietnam war.
Ex-SAS commander Maj. Sebastian Morley, who resigned last year in protest at the handling of the conflict, said operations were being undermined by a lack of troops and resources.
"I don't think we have even scratched the surface as far as the conflict goes," he told the Daily Telegraph in an interview published on Saturday, his first since stepping down.
"I think the level of casualties and attrition is only set to rise. This is the equivalent to the start of the Vietnam conflict, there is much more to come," he said.
"We hold tiny areas of ground in Helmand and we are kidding ourselves if we think our influence goes beyond 500 metres of our security bases," Morley said.
"We go out on operations, have a punch-up with the Taleban and then go back to camp for tea. We are not holding the ground."
Feb 21, 2009
Feb 17, 2009
Obama's current kill rate
Where is the horse?
Where is the rider?
Where is the horn that was blown?
They have passed like rain on the mountain.
Feb 7, 2009
Crisis at the Pentagon
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/KB04Aa02.html
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Crisis looms at the Pentagon By Chalmers Johnson
Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the United States automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools, textiles and much earth-moving equipment - and that's to name only the most obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service and fuel economy, among other things.
A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the armed forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.
Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.
Double crisis at the Pentagon
This self-destructive system of bloated budgets and purchases of the wrong weapons has persisted for so long thanks to the aura of invincibility surrounding the armed forces and a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms industry are as valuable to the economy as jobs in the civilian sector.
Recently, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen began to advocate nothing less than protecting the Pentagon budget by pegging defense spending to a fixed percentage of gross domestic product (GDP, the total value of goods and services produced by the economy). This would, of course, mean simply throwing out serious strategic analysis of what is actually needed for national defense. Mullen wants, instead, to raise the annual defense budget in the worst of times to at least 4% of GDP. Such a policy is clearly designed to deceive the public about ludicrously wasteful spending on weapons systems which has gone on for decades.
It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped and most invincible among the world's armed forces. None of these things are true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.
Equally striking is the fact that the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan - insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense (DoD) produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships and futuristic weapons systems that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.
That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners".
The air force and the army are still planning as if, in the reasonably near future, they were going to fight an old-fashioned war of attrition against the Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991; while the navy, with its 11 large aircraft-carrier battle groups, is, as William S Lind has written, "still structured to fight the Imperial Japanese navy".
Lind, a prominent theorist of so-called fourth-generation warfare (insurgencies carried out by groups such as al-Qaeda), argues that "the navy's aircraft-carrier battle groups have cruised on mindlessly for more than half a century, waiting for those Japanese carriers to turn up. They are still cruising today, into, if not beyond, irrelevance … Submarines are today's and tomorrow's capital ships; the ships that most directly determine control of blue waters."
In December 2008, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a former high-ranking civilian in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis (set up in 1961 to make independent evaluations of Pentagon policy) and a charter member of the "Fighter Mafia" of the 1980s and 1990s, wrote, "As has been documented for at least 20 years, patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision-making process. This process has produced a death spiral."
As a result, concluded Spinney, inadequate amounts of wildly overpriced equipment are purchased, "new weapons [that] do not replace old ones on a one for one basis". There is also "continual pressure to reduce combat readiness", a "corrupt accounting system" that "makes it impossible to sort out the priorities", and a readiness to believe that old solutions will work for the current crisis.
Failed reform efforts
There's no great mystery about the causes of the deep dysfunction that has long characterized the Pentagon's weapons procurement system. In 2006, Thomas Christie, former head of Operational Test and Evaluation, the most senior official at the Department of Defense for testing weapons and a Pentagon veteran of half a century, detailed more than 35 years of efforts to reform the weapons acquisition system.
These included the 1971 Fitzhugh (or Blue Ribbon) Commission, the 1977 Steadman Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986 Packard Commission, the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, the 1989 Defense Management Review, the 1990 "Streamlining Review" of the Defense Science Board, the 1993-1994 report of the Acquisition Streamlining Task Force and of the Defense Science Board, the late 1990s Total System Performance Responsibility initiative of the air force, and the Capabilities-Based Acquisition approach of the Missile Defense Agency of the first years of this century.
Christie concluded: "After all these years of repeated reform efforts, major defense programs are taking 20 to 30 years to deliver less capability than planned, very often at two to three times the costs and schedules planned." He also added the following observations:
Launching into major developments without understanding key technical issues is the root cause of major cost and schedule problems ... Costs, schedules, and technical risks are often grossly understated at the outset ... There are more acquisition programs being pursued than DoD can possibly afford in the long term ...
By the time these problems are acknowledged, the political penalties incurred in enforcing any major restructuring of a program, much less its cancellation, are too painful to bear. Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes, the US military will continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars and critical years while acquiring equipment that falls short of meeting the needs of troops in the field.
The inevitable day of reckoning, long predicted by Pentagon critics, has, I believe, finally arrived. Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their re-election campaigns.
Given the present major recession, the depths of which remain unknown, the United States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George HW Bush, launched in January 2009, our tenth such ship) or aircraft that can cruise at a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles - 2.176 kilometers - per hour).
However, don't wait for the Pentagon to sort out such matters. If it has proven one thing over the past decades, it's that it is thoroughly incapable of reforming itself. According to Christie, "Over the past 20 or so years, the DoD and its components have deliberately and systematically decimated their in-house technical capabilities to the point where there is little, if any, competence or initiative left in the various organizations tasked with planning and executing its budget and acquisition programs."
Gunning for the air force
President Barack Obama has almost certainly retained Robert M Gates as secretary of defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries to come to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates is also sympathetic to the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22 "Raptor" supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union's last proposed, but never built, interceptor.
The air force's old guard and its allies in Congress are already fighting back aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired secretary of the air force Michael W Wynne and air force chief of staff General T Michael Moseley. Though he was undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover explanation was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting and control of nuclear weapons.
In 2006, the air force had managed to ship to Taiwan four high-tech nose cone fuses for Minutemen inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM) warheads instead of promised helicopter batteries, an error that went blissfully undetected until March 2008. Then, in August 2007, a B-52 bomber carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles flew across much of the country from Minot air force base in North Dakota to Barksdale air force base in Louisiana. This was in direct violation of standing orders against such flights over the United States.
As Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times noted in June 2008, "Tensions between the Air Force and Gates have been growing for months," mainly over Gates' frustration about the F-22 and his inability to get the air force to deploy more pilotless aircraft to the various war zones. They were certainly not improved when Wynne, a former senior vice president of General Dynamics, went out of his way to cross Gates, arguing publicly that "any president would be damn happy to have more F-22s around if we had to get into a fight with China".
It catches something of the power of the military-industrial complex that, despite his clear desire on the subject, Gates has not yet found the nerve - or the political backing - to pull the plug on the F-22; nor has he even dared to bring up the subject of canceling its more expensive and technically complicated successor, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
More than 20 years ago, Chuck Spinney wrote a classic account of the now-routine bureaucratic scams practiced within the Pentagon to ensure that Congress would appropriate funds for dishonestly advertised and promoted weapons systems and then prevent their cancelation when the fraud comes to light. In a paper he entitled "Defense Power Games", of which his superiors deeply disapproved, Spinney outlined two crucial Pentagon gambits meant to lock in such weaponry: "front-loading" and "political engineering".
It should be understood at the outset that all actors involved, including the military officers in charge of projects, the members of Congress who use defense appropriations to buy votes within their districts, and the contractors who live off the ensuing lucrative contracts, utilize these two scams. It is also important to understand that neither front-loading nor political engineering is an innocent or morally neutral maneuver. They both involve criminal intent to turn on the spigot of taxpayer money and then to jam it so that it cannot be turned off. They are the de rigeur practices of our military-industrial complex.
Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and invariably involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizeable order. Assurances are always given that the system's technical requirements will be simple or have already been met. Low-balling future costs, an intrinsic aspect of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of bait-and-switch. (What is introduced as a great bargain regularly turns out to be a grossly expensive lemon.)
Political engineering is the strategy of awarding contracts in as many different Congressional districts as possible. By making voters and Congressional incumbents dependent on military money, the Pentagon's political engineers put pressure on them to continue supporting front-loaded programs even after their true costs become apparent.
Front-loading and political engineering generate several typical features in the weapons that the Pentagon then buys for its arsenal. These continually prove unnecessarily expensive, are prone to break down easily, and are often unworkably complex. They tend to come with inadequate supplies of spare parts and ammunition, since there is not enough money to buy the numbers that are needed. They also force the services to repair older weapons and keep them in service much longer than is normal or wise. (For example, the B-52 bomber, which went into service in 1955, is still on active duty.)
Even though extended training would seem to be a necessary corollary of the complexity of such weapons systems, the excessive cost actually leads to reductions in training time for pilots and others. In the long run, it is because of such expedients and short-term fixes that American casualties may increase and, sooner or later, battles or wars may be lost.
For example, Northrop-Grumman's much touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates without special hangars first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense; it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate to perform; and - at a total cost of $44.75 billion for only 21 bombers - it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.
Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the "Warthog". It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the US Air Force. Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably with the air force's hot-shot self-image.
Some 715 A-10s were produced and they served with great effectiveness in the first Gulf War in 1991. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers. The A-10 is now out of production because the air force establishment favors extremely fast aircraft that fly in straight lines at high altitudes rather than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the air force has regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately high-performance equipment.
Using the F-22 to fight the F-16
The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a particular district will lose their jobs if a particular project is canceled. Threats are also made - and put into effect - to withhold political contributions from uncooperative congressional representatives.
As Spinney recalls, "In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to build a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2's prime contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been classified showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in profits were at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts." The B-2 was not canceled.
Southern California's biggest private employers are Boeing Corporation and Northrop-Grumman. They are said to employ more than 58,000 workers in well-paying jobs, a major political obstacle to rationalizing defense expenditures even as recession is making such steps all but unavoidable.
Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well in 2009. They are, in fact, now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding the extreme age of the present fleet of air force fighter aircraft, most of which date from the 1980s. Meanwhile, the costs of the two most likely successors to the workhorse F-16 - the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter - have run up so high that the government cannot afford to purchase significant numbers of either of them.
The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life support), and the air force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable fighter.
By the time the prototype F-22 had its roll-out on May 11, 1997, the Cold War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the F-22's prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion. By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered.
The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The air force still wants to buy an additional 198 planes, but Gates and his leading assistants have balked. No wonder, according to arms experts Bill Charting and Christopher Preble, at more than $350 million each, the F-22 is "the most expensive fighter plane ever built".
The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter - that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar - but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.
The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to "fourth-generation wars" like that with the Taliban in Afghanistan - the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.
Actually, the US ought not to be engaged in fourth-generation wars at all, whatever planes are in its fleet. Outside powers normally find such wars unwinnable, as the history of Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires" going back to Alexander the Great, illustrates so well. Unfortunately, Obama's approach to the George W Bush administration's Afghan war remains deeply flawed and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the skies over that country.
Nonetheless, the F-22 is still being promoted as the plane to buy almost entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists for the air force also claim that we need the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument goes this way: We have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers that, if we ever had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our own equipment against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel's are fully equipped with F-16s and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly practice hours than ours do.
This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should instead simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed, although this is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad. Some Pentagon critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby for arms sales abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new weapons at home that are "better" than the ones we've sold elsewhere.
Thanks to political engineering, the F-22 has parts suppliers in 44 states, and some 25,000 people have well-paying jobs building it. Lockheed Martin and some in the Defense Department have therefore proposed that, if the F-22 is cancelled, it should be replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also built by Lockheed Martin.
Most serious observers believe that this would only make a bad situation worse. So far the F-35 shows every sign of being, in Chuck Spinney's words, "a far more costly and more troubled turkey" than the F-22, "even though it has a distinction that even the F-22 cannot claim, namely it is tailored to meet the same threat that … ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D [research and development] program began in 1994".
The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more easily. Its cost-per-plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upwards. The design of the F-22 involves four million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19 million lines. The Pentagon sold the F-35 to Congress in 1998 with the promise of a unit cost of $184 million per aircraft. By 2008, that had risen to $355 million per aircraft and the plane was already two years behind schedule.
According to Pierre M Sprey, one of the original sponsors of the F-16, and Winslow T Wheeler, a 31-year veteran staff official on Senate defense committees, the F-35 is overweight, underpowered, and "less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 'lead sled' that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the Indochina War". Its makers claim that it will be a bomber as well as a fighter, but it will have a payload of only two 2,000-pound bombs, far less than American fighters of the Vietnam era. Although the Air Force praises its stealth features, it will lose these as soon as it mounts bombs under its wings, which will alter its shape most un-stealthily.
It is a non-starter for close-air-support missions because it is too fast for a pilot to be able to spot tactical targets. It is too delicate and potentially flammable to be able to withstand ground fire. If built, it will end up as the most expensive defense contract in history without offering a serious replacement for any of the fighters or fighter-bombers currently in service.
The fighter Mafia
Every branch of the American armed forces suffers from similar "defense power games". For example, the new Virginia-class fast-attack submarines are expensive and not needed. As the New York Times wrote editorially, "The program is little more than a public works project to keep the Newport News, Va, and Groton, Conn, naval shipyards in business."
I have, however, concentrated on the air force because the collapse of internal controls over acquisitions is most obvious, as well as farthest advanced, there - and because the air force has a history of conflict over going along with politically easy decisions that was recently hailed by Gates as deserving of emulation by the other services. The pointed attack Gates launched on bureaucratism was, paradoxically, one of the few optimistic developments in Pentagon politics in recent times.
On April 21, 2008, the secretary of defense caused a storm of controversy by giving a speech to the officers of the Air War College at Maxwell air force base, Alabama. In it, he singled out for praise and emulation an air force officer who had inspired many of that service's innovators over the past couple of generations, while being truly despised by an establishment and an old guard who viewed him as an open threat to careerism.
Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) was a significant military strategist, an exceptionally talented fighter pilot in both the Korean and Vietnamese war eras, and for six years the chief instructor at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. "Forty-Second Boyd" became a legend in the air force because of his standing claim that he could defeat any pilot, foreign or domestic, in simulated air-to-air combat within 40 seconds, a bet he never lost even though he was continuously challenged. Last April, Gates said, in part:
As this new era continues to unfold before us, the challenge I pose to you today is to become a forward-thinking officer who helps the air force adapt to a constantly changing strategic environment characterized by persistent conflict.
Let me illustrate by using a historical exemplar: the late Air Force Colonel John Boyd. As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he would develop the principles of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps commandant [General Charles C Krulak] and a secretary of defense [Dick Cheney] for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War ...
In accomplishing all these things, Boyd - a brilliant, eccentric and stubborn character - had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility. He had some advice that he used to pass on to his colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would say, and I quote: "One day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way and you can do something - something for your country and for your air force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision. To be or to do" ... We must heed John Boyd's advice by asking if the ways we do business make sense.
Boyd's many accomplishments are documented in Robert Coram's excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. They need not be retold here. It was, however, the spirit of Boyd and "the reformers he inspired", a group within air force headquarters who came to be called the "Fighter Mafia", that launched the defense reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their objectives were to stop the acquisition of unnecessarily complex and expensive weapons, cause the air force to take seriously the idea of a fourth generation of warfare, end its reliance on a strategy of attrition, and expose to criticism an officer's corps focused on careerist standards.
Unless Gates succeeds in reviving it, their lingering influence in the Pentagon is just about exhausted today. We await the leadership of the Obama administration to see which way the air force and the rest of the American defense establishment evolves.
Despite Gates' praise of Boyd, one should not underestimate the formidable obstacles to Pentagon reform. Over a quarter-century ago, back in 1982, journalist James Fallows outlined the most serious structural obstacle to any genuine reform in his National Book Award-winning study, "National Defense." The book was so influential that at least one commentator includes Fallows as a non-Pentagon member of Boyd's "Fighter Mafia."
As Fallows then observed (pg 64-65):
The culture of procurement teaches officers that there are two paths to personal survival. One is to bring home the bacon for the service as the manager of a program that gets its full funding. 'Procurement management is more and more the surest path to advancement' within the military, says John Morse, who retired as a Navy captain after twenty-eight years in the service ...
The other path that procurement opens leads outside the military, toward the contracting firms. To know even a handful of professional soldiers above the age of 40 and the rank of major is to keep hearing, in the usual catalogue of life changes, that many have resigned from the service and gone to the contractors: to Martin Marietta, Northrop, Lockheed, to the scores of consulting firms and middlemen, whose offices fill the skyscrapers of Rosslyn, Virginia, across the river from the capital. In 1959, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois reported that 768 retired senior officers (generals, admirals, colonels, and Navy captains) worked for defense contractors. Ten years later Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin said that the number had increased to 2,072.
Almost 30 years after those words were written, the situation has grown far worse. Until we decide (or are forced) to dismantle our empire, sell off most of our 761 military bases (according to official statistics for fiscal year 2008) in other people's countries, and bring our military expenditures into line with those of the rest of the world, we are destined to go bankrupt in the name of national defense.
As of this moment, we are well on our way, which is why the Obama administration will face such critical - and difficult - decisions when it comes to the Pentagon budget.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books.
(Copyright 2009 Chalmers Johnson.)
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Crisis looms at the Pentagon By Chalmers Johnson
Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the United States automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools, textiles and much earth-moving equipment - and that's to name only the most obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service and fuel economy, among other things.
A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the armed forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.
Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.
Double crisis at the Pentagon
This self-destructive system of bloated budgets and purchases of the wrong weapons has persisted for so long thanks to the aura of invincibility surrounding the armed forces and a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms industry are as valuable to the economy as jobs in the civilian sector.
Recently, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen began to advocate nothing less than protecting the Pentagon budget by pegging defense spending to a fixed percentage of gross domestic product (GDP, the total value of goods and services produced by the economy). This would, of course, mean simply throwing out serious strategic analysis of what is actually needed for national defense. Mullen wants, instead, to raise the annual defense budget in the worst of times to at least 4% of GDP. Such a policy is clearly designed to deceive the public about ludicrously wasteful spending on weapons systems which has gone on for decades.
It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped and most invincible among the world's armed forces. None of these things are true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.
Equally striking is the fact that the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan - insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense (DoD) produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships and futuristic weapons systems that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.
That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners".
The air force and the army are still planning as if, in the reasonably near future, they were going to fight an old-fashioned war of attrition against the Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991; while the navy, with its 11 large aircraft-carrier battle groups, is, as William S Lind has written, "still structured to fight the Imperial Japanese navy".
Lind, a prominent theorist of so-called fourth-generation warfare (insurgencies carried out by groups such as al-Qaeda), argues that "the navy's aircraft-carrier battle groups have cruised on mindlessly for more than half a century, waiting for those Japanese carriers to turn up. They are still cruising today, into, if not beyond, irrelevance … Submarines are today's and tomorrow's capital ships; the ships that most directly determine control of blue waters."
In December 2008, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a former high-ranking civilian in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis (set up in 1961 to make independent evaluations of Pentagon policy) and a charter member of the "Fighter Mafia" of the 1980s and 1990s, wrote, "As has been documented for at least 20 years, patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision-making process. This process has produced a death spiral."
As a result, concluded Spinney, inadequate amounts of wildly overpriced equipment are purchased, "new weapons [that] do not replace old ones on a one for one basis". There is also "continual pressure to reduce combat readiness", a "corrupt accounting system" that "makes it impossible to sort out the priorities", and a readiness to believe that old solutions will work for the current crisis.
Failed reform efforts
There's no great mystery about the causes of the deep dysfunction that has long characterized the Pentagon's weapons procurement system. In 2006, Thomas Christie, former head of Operational Test and Evaluation, the most senior official at the Department of Defense for testing weapons and a Pentagon veteran of half a century, detailed more than 35 years of efforts to reform the weapons acquisition system.
These included the 1971 Fitzhugh (or Blue Ribbon) Commission, the 1977 Steadman Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986 Packard Commission, the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, the 1989 Defense Management Review, the 1990 "Streamlining Review" of the Defense Science Board, the 1993-1994 report of the Acquisition Streamlining Task Force and of the Defense Science Board, the late 1990s Total System Performance Responsibility initiative of the air force, and the Capabilities-Based Acquisition approach of the Missile Defense Agency of the first years of this century.
Christie concluded: "After all these years of repeated reform efforts, major defense programs are taking 20 to 30 years to deliver less capability than planned, very often at two to three times the costs and schedules planned." He also added the following observations:
Launching into major developments without understanding key technical issues is the root cause of major cost and schedule problems ... Costs, schedules, and technical risks are often grossly understated at the outset ... There are more acquisition programs being pursued than DoD can possibly afford in the long term ...
By the time these problems are acknowledged, the political penalties incurred in enforcing any major restructuring of a program, much less its cancellation, are too painful to bear. Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes, the US military will continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars and critical years while acquiring equipment that falls short of meeting the needs of troops in the field.
The inevitable day of reckoning, long predicted by Pentagon critics, has, I believe, finally arrived. Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their re-election campaigns.
Given the present major recession, the depths of which remain unknown, the United States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George HW Bush, launched in January 2009, our tenth such ship) or aircraft that can cruise at a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles - 2.176 kilometers - per hour).
However, don't wait for the Pentagon to sort out such matters. If it has proven one thing over the past decades, it's that it is thoroughly incapable of reforming itself. According to Christie, "Over the past 20 or so years, the DoD and its components have deliberately and systematically decimated their in-house technical capabilities to the point where there is little, if any, competence or initiative left in the various organizations tasked with planning and executing its budget and acquisition programs."
Gunning for the air force
President Barack Obama has almost certainly retained Robert M Gates as secretary of defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries to come to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates is also sympathetic to the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22 "Raptor" supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union's last proposed, but never built, interceptor.
The air force's old guard and its allies in Congress are already fighting back aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired secretary of the air force Michael W Wynne and air force chief of staff General T Michael Moseley. Though he was undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover explanation was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting and control of nuclear weapons.
In 2006, the air force had managed to ship to Taiwan four high-tech nose cone fuses for Minutemen inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM) warheads instead of promised helicopter batteries, an error that went blissfully undetected until March 2008. Then, in August 2007, a B-52 bomber carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles flew across much of the country from Minot air force base in North Dakota to Barksdale air force base in Louisiana. This was in direct violation of standing orders against such flights over the United States.
As Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times noted in June 2008, "Tensions between the Air Force and Gates have been growing for months," mainly over Gates' frustration about the F-22 and his inability to get the air force to deploy more pilotless aircraft to the various war zones. They were certainly not improved when Wynne, a former senior vice president of General Dynamics, went out of his way to cross Gates, arguing publicly that "any president would be damn happy to have more F-22s around if we had to get into a fight with China".
It catches something of the power of the military-industrial complex that, despite his clear desire on the subject, Gates has not yet found the nerve - or the political backing - to pull the plug on the F-22; nor has he even dared to bring up the subject of canceling its more expensive and technically complicated successor, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
More than 20 years ago, Chuck Spinney wrote a classic account of the now-routine bureaucratic scams practiced within the Pentagon to ensure that Congress would appropriate funds for dishonestly advertised and promoted weapons systems and then prevent their cancelation when the fraud comes to light. In a paper he entitled "Defense Power Games", of which his superiors deeply disapproved, Spinney outlined two crucial Pentagon gambits meant to lock in such weaponry: "front-loading" and "political engineering".
It should be understood at the outset that all actors involved, including the military officers in charge of projects, the members of Congress who use defense appropriations to buy votes within their districts, and the contractors who live off the ensuing lucrative contracts, utilize these two scams. It is also important to understand that neither front-loading nor political engineering is an innocent or morally neutral maneuver. They both involve criminal intent to turn on the spigot of taxpayer money and then to jam it so that it cannot be turned off. They are the de rigeur practices of our military-industrial complex.
Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and invariably involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizeable order. Assurances are always given that the system's technical requirements will be simple or have already been met. Low-balling future costs, an intrinsic aspect of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of bait-and-switch. (What is introduced as a great bargain regularly turns out to be a grossly expensive lemon.)
Political engineering is the strategy of awarding contracts in as many different Congressional districts as possible. By making voters and Congressional incumbents dependent on military money, the Pentagon's political engineers put pressure on them to continue supporting front-loaded programs even after their true costs become apparent.
Front-loading and political engineering generate several typical features in the weapons that the Pentagon then buys for its arsenal. These continually prove unnecessarily expensive, are prone to break down easily, and are often unworkably complex. They tend to come with inadequate supplies of spare parts and ammunition, since there is not enough money to buy the numbers that are needed. They also force the services to repair older weapons and keep them in service much longer than is normal or wise. (For example, the B-52 bomber, which went into service in 1955, is still on active duty.)
Even though extended training would seem to be a necessary corollary of the complexity of such weapons systems, the excessive cost actually leads to reductions in training time for pilots and others. In the long run, it is because of such expedients and short-term fixes that American casualties may increase and, sooner or later, battles or wars may be lost.
For example, Northrop-Grumman's much touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates without special hangars first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense; it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate to perform; and - at a total cost of $44.75 billion for only 21 bombers - it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.
Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the "Warthog". It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the US Air Force. Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably with the air force's hot-shot self-image.
Some 715 A-10s were produced and they served with great effectiveness in the first Gulf War in 1991. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers. The A-10 is now out of production because the air force establishment favors extremely fast aircraft that fly in straight lines at high altitudes rather than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the air force has regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately high-performance equipment.
Using the F-22 to fight the F-16
The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a particular district will lose their jobs if a particular project is canceled. Threats are also made - and put into effect - to withhold political contributions from uncooperative congressional representatives.
As Spinney recalls, "In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to build a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2's prime contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been classified showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in profits were at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts." The B-2 was not canceled.
Southern California's biggest private employers are Boeing Corporation and Northrop-Grumman. They are said to employ more than 58,000 workers in well-paying jobs, a major political obstacle to rationalizing defense expenditures even as recession is making such steps all but unavoidable.
Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well in 2009. They are, in fact, now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding the extreme age of the present fleet of air force fighter aircraft, most of which date from the 1980s. Meanwhile, the costs of the two most likely successors to the workhorse F-16 - the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter - have run up so high that the government cannot afford to purchase significant numbers of either of them.
The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life support), and the air force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable fighter.
By the time the prototype F-22 had its roll-out on May 11, 1997, the Cold War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the F-22's prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion. By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered.
The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The air force still wants to buy an additional 198 planes, but Gates and his leading assistants have balked. No wonder, according to arms experts Bill Charting and Christopher Preble, at more than $350 million each, the F-22 is "the most expensive fighter plane ever built".
The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter - that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar - but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.
The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to "fourth-generation wars" like that with the Taliban in Afghanistan - the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.
Actually, the US ought not to be engaged in fourth-generation wars at all, whatever planes are in its fleet. Outside powers normally find such wars unwinnable, as the history of Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires" going back to Alexander the Great, illustrates so well. Unfortunately, Obama's approach to the George W Bush administration's Afghan war remains deeply flawed and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the skies over that country.
Nonetheless, the F-22 is still being promoted as the plane to buy almost entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists for the air force also claim that we need the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument goes this way: We have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers that, if we ever had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our own equipment against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel's are fully equipped with F-16s and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly practice hours than ours do.
This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should instead simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed, although this is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad. Some Pentagon critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby for arms sales abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new weapons at home that are "better" than the ones we've sold elsewhere.
Thanks to political engineering, the F-22 has parts suppliers in 44 states, and some 25,000 people have well-paying jobs building it. Lockheed Martin and some in the Defense Department have therefore proposed that, if the F-22 is cancelled, it should be replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also built by Lockheed Martin.
Most serious observers believe that this would only make a bad situation worse. So far the F-35 shows every sign of being, in Chuck Spinney's words, "a far more costly and more troubled turkey" than the F-22, "even though it has a distinction that even the F-22 cannot claim, namely it is tailored to meet the same threat that … ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D [research and development] program began in 1994".
The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more easily. Its cost-per-plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upwards. The design of the F-22 involves four million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19 million lines. The Pentagon sold the F-35 to Congress in 1998 with the promise of a unit cost of $184 million per aircraft. By 2008, that had risen to $355 million per aircraft and the plane was already two years behind schedule.
According to Pierre M Sprey, one of the original sponsors of the F-16, and Winslow T Wheeler, a 31-year veteran staff official on Senate defense committees, the F-35 is overweight, underpowered, and "less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 'lead sled' that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the Indochina War". Its makers claim that it will be a bomber as well as a fighter, but it will have a payload of only two 2,000-pound bombs, far less than American fighters of the Vietnam era. Although the Air Force praises its stealth features, it will lose these as soon as it mounts bombs under its wings, which will alter its shape most un-stealthily.
It is a non-starter for close-air-support missions because it is too fast for a pilot to be able to spot tactical targets. It is too delicate and potentially flammable to be able to withstand ground fire. If built, it will end up as the most expensive defense contract in history without offering a serious replacement for any of the fighters or fighter-bombers currently in service.
The fighter Mafia
Every branch of the American armed forces suffers from similar "defense power games". For example, the new Virginia-class fast-attack submarines are expensive and not needed. As the New York Times wrote editorially, "The program is little more than a public works project to keep the Newport News, Va, and Groton, Conn, naval shipyards in business."
I have, however, concentrated on the air force because the collapse of internal controls over acquisitions is most obvious, as well as farthest advanced, there - and because the air force has a history of conflict over going along with politically easy decisions that was recently hailed by Gates as deserving of emulation by the other services. The pointed attack Gates launched on bureaucratism was, paradoxically, one of the few optimistic developments in Pentagon politics in recent times.
On April 21, 2008, the secretary of defense caused a storm of controversy by giving a speech to the officers of the Air War College at Maxwell air force base, Alabama. In it, he singled out for praise and emulation an air force officer who had inspired many of that service's innovators over the past couple of generations, while being truly despised by an establishment and an old guard who viewed him as an open threat to careerism.
Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) was a significant military strategist, an exceptionally talented fighter pilot in both the Korean and Vietnamese war eras, and for six years the chief instructor at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. "Forty-Second Boyd" became a legend in the air force because of his standing claim that he could defeat any pilot, foreign or domestic, in simulated air-to-air combat within 40 seconds, a bet he never lost even though he was continuously challenged. Last April, Gates said, in part:
As this new era continues to unfold before us, the challenge I pose to you today is to become a forward-thinking officer who helps the air force adapt to a constantly changing strategic environment characterized by persistent conflict.
Let me illustrate by using a historical exemplar: the late Air Force Colonel John Boyd. As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he would develop the principles of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps commandant [General Charles C Krulak] and a secretary of defense [Dick Cheney] for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War ...
In accomplishing all these things, Boyd - a brilliant, eccentric and stubborn character - had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility. He had some advice that he used to pass on to his colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would say, and I quote: "One day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way and you can do something - something for your country and for your air force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision. To be or to do" ... We must heed John Boyd's advice by asking if the ways we do business make sense.
Boyd's many accomplishments are documented in Robert Coram's excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. They need not be retold here. It was, however, the spirit of Boyd and "the reformers he inspired", a group within air force headquarters who came to be called the "Fighter Mafia", that launched the defense reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their objectives were to stop the acquisition of unnecessarily complex and expensive weapons, cause the air force to take seriously the idea of a fourth generation of warfare, end its reliance on a strategy of attrition, and expose to criticism an officer's corps focused on careerist standards.
Unless Gates succeeds in reviving it, their lingering influence in the Pentagon is just about exhausted today. We await the leadership of the Obama administration to see which way the air force and the rest of the American defense establishment evolves.
Despite Gates' praise of Boyd, one should not underestimate the formidable obstacles to Pentagon reform. Over a quarter-century ago, back in 1982, journalist James Fallows outlined the most serious structural obstacle to any genuine reform in his National Book Award-winning study, "National Defense." The book was so influential that at least one commentator includes Fallows as a non-Pentagon member of Boyd's "Fighter Mafia."
As Fallows then observed (pg 64-65):
The culture of procurement teaches officers that there are two paths to personal survival. One is to bring home the bacon for the service as the manager of a program that gets its full funding. 'Procurement management is more and more the surest path to advancement' within the military, says John Morse, who retired as a Navy captain after twenty-eight years in the service ...
The other path that procurement opens leads outside the military, toward the contracting firms. To know even a handful of professional soldiers above the age of 40 and the rank of major is to keep hearing, in the usual catalogue of life changes, that many have resigned from the service and gone to the contractors: to Martin Marietta, Northrop, Lockheed, to the scores of consulting firms and middlemen, whose offices fill the skyscrapers of Rosslyn, Virginia, across the river from the capital. In 1959, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois reported that 768 retired senior officers (generals, admirals, colonels, and Navy captains) worked for defense contractors. Ten years later Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin said that the number had increased to 2,072.
Almost 30 years after those words were written, the situation has grown far worse. Until we decide (or are forced) to dismantle our empire, sell off most of our 761 military bases (according to official statistics for fiscal year 2008) in other people's countries, and bring our military expenditures into line with those of the rest of the world, we are destined to go bankrupt in the name of national defense.
As of this moment, we are well on our way, which is why the Obama administration will face such critical - and difficult - decisions when it comes to the Pentagon budget.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books.
(Copyright 2009 Chalmers Johnson.)
Jan 31, 2009
Happy New Year
Happy Year of the Ox, starting January 26, 2009, for “Calm, hard work, resolve, and tenacity.”
*******
With only public channels to inform one, it is necessary to rely on the obvious.
*******
What is obvious is that having siphoned off as much oil as possible from Iraq, the next goal of the USA would be Iran, with equally unconvincing reasons given for the action, and that this would be blocked by China and Russia in the modern version of “The Great Game.”
*******
Everyone has noticed that the way to avoid being invaded by the US is to actually have nukes, like North Korea. If you don't, like Iraq, the US will claim you have them and invade you.
*******
Successful attacks, such as the train bombing in Spain and the bus bombings in Britain, were carried out by amateurs with family in countries being invaded by western armies, who had no discernible links to Al Qaeda or Bin Laden. Since it would remove the main reason for the war in Afghanistan, this is kept quiet.
*******
When two farmers are killed in Asia, one of them is often reported as “allegedly a senior Al Qaeda operative.” The people writing this stuff are psy ops, propaganda warfare, writers and should be ignored.
*******
The abuses at Abu Ghraib prison caused hundreds to flock to Iraq to attack US soldiers, since that is a great deal easier than getting into the United States to cause trouble. Gaza will produce thousands more.
*******
Osama Bin Laden himself has stated that he was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the Trade Towers, and the official US record of his acts includes the Khobar Towers bombings, the USS Cole, and the Kenyan embassy, for all of which he has claimed responsibility, but not the 9/11 attack.
*******
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently held at Guantanamo where he was tortured, has claimed responsibility for planning the 9/11 attack, but also for a number of other attacks, some of which he could not possibly have been involved with, illustrating why confessions obtained under torture are inadmissible in most western courts, since they are notoriously unreliable.
*******
The regular threat to destroy the entire planet with nuclear weapons if the state of Israel is in danger will have to be faced at some time, remembering Bonhoeffer. Working out how much further any of us are down the list from Gaza is not an appealing alternative.
*******
So much for “terrorism,” of which the only useful thing to be said is Chomsky’s “If you want to stop terrorism, there’s a really easy way – Stop practicing it.”
*******
My view of Obama comes from working out how a Luo from Kenya, a Kikuyu majority country, would probably set about protecting himself if he came to power. Recruiting his main potential enemies into his coalition (hence Emmanuel, followed by Gates) is an obvious move, and does not, of itself, discredit him.
*******
If Obama can move to torchium as a source for atomic power, without the Chernobyl dangers of uranium 235, or the waste disposal problems, and also without the spin off to nuclear weapons, that would be a massive advance. (Gates favors increased nukes, like Wolfowitz.)
*******
On Obama’s $850 billion bail out plan the Republicans, discredited though they are, are the more correct. Letting BoA, Merrill Lynch, AIG, old Uncle Tom Cobley an’ all go bankrupt (imprison or hang the culprits, who cares) would at least mean starting with a clean sheet. US public and private debt at 385 per cent of GDP is not sustainable, and printing another two trillion dollars for the banks to hand out in bonuses and redecorating their offices while howling that China is “manipulating its currency” seems the act of a lunatic. That China still hopes to achieve an 8% growth rate, though 6.8% is more commonly predicted, is hardly a subject for attack from an economy that contracted by 3.8%.
*******
Spain has a law on its books since 1870 allowing its courts to prosecute foreigners for such crimes as genocide, crimes against humanity, and torture committed anywhere in the world, the basis for holding General Pinochet of Chile in the UK some years ago. The Spanish High Court announced this week a war crimes investigation into an Israeli ex-defense minister and six other top security officials for their role in a 2002 attack that killed a Hamas commander and 14 civilians in Gaza. According to Ms. Tzipi Livni, the Israeli premier, Spain has now agreed to exclude Israel from the list of countries that can be charged. Burning children with white phosphorus and the use of DIME weapons, which inject heavy metals into the bloodstream to shred internal organs, will no longer be a war crime.
As Rabbi Yaacov Perrin memorably put it on page 1 of the New York Times of February 28, 1994 "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."
*******
With both Posse Comitatus (forbidding use of the military against the US population) and Habeas Corpus (forbidding arrest and imprisonment without charge and trial) essentially suspended by the Bush administration, the arrival of the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, from Iraq in the USA for crowd control on October 1, 2008 may be a reason for serious concern, especially since the removal of governments was successfully accomplished by the crowds at Bangkok Airport in Thailand, at Reykjavik in Iceland, and is in progress at Athens in Greece and currently in France.
*******
The Homeland Security introduction at the Inauguration of the measures which make airports a nightmare resulted in several hundred invitees missing the ceremony. (They actually didn't miss that much as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court flubbed the oath, getting the wording wrong - he was appointed as a fan of George Bush, after all, not for any skill in legal memory - and Obama's oath of office had to be re-done the next day in private.) The same measures at the Superbowl on Sunday February 1, 2009, although no hint of an attack made them necessary, suggest a significant tightening of controls on the civilian population in the USA.
*******
No one has yet made clear the full extent of the coming disaster, though it can easily be calculated without undue strain on mathematical skills from the UN report that an entire second planet earth - which we do not have - is required to maintain world living standards at their present level.
That means, if dividing by two can be managed without difficulty, that overall world standards of living will halve. The double whammy for the US is that with five per cent of the population it can not continue to consume thirty per cent of world resources as it has done in the past; no one will stand for it, and the US has lost the power to buy, borrow, or steal the power to insist on it, and can no longer maintain the military power to force acquiescence. (Even space transport to the space station will be done by the Russians kindly ferrying the Americans up. NASA no longer has the shuttle, says the last news report of January 2009.) So in addition to the general halving of living standards, the US will have to make a very severe additional reduction in consumption of resources, perhaps by as much as five sixths. (That doesn't mean that American ingenuity can not figure out a way to dramatically increase resources; it's best placed of all perhaps to do that. It's just that it had better get it done fairly sharpish, to avoid living at around one tenth of its previous level.)
*******
With only public channels to inform one, it is necessary to rely on the obvious.
*******
What is obvious is that having siphoned off as much oil as possible from Iraq, the next goal of the USA would be Iran, with equally unconvincing reasons given for the action, and that this would be blocked by China and Russia in the modern version of “The Great Game.”
*******
Everyone has noticed that the way to avoid being invaded by the US is to actually have nukes, like North Korea. If you don't, like Iraq, the US will claim you have them and invade you.
*******
Successful attacks, such as the train bombing in Spain and the bus bombings in Britain, were carried out by amateurs with family in countries being invaded by western armies, who had no discernible links to Al Qaeda or Bin Laden. Since it would remove the main reason for the war in Afghanistan, this is kept quiet.
*******
When two farmers are killed in Asia, one of them is often reported as “allegedly a senior Al Qaeda operative.” The people writing this stuff are psy ops, propaganda warfare, writers and should be ignored.
*******
The abuses at Abu Ghraib prison caused hundreds to flock to Iraq to attack US soldiers, since that is a great deal easier than getting into the United States to cause trouble. Gaza will produce thousands more.
*******
Osama Bin Laden himself has stated that he was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the Trade Towers, and the official US record of his acts includes the Khobar Towers bombings, the USS Cole, and the Kenyan embassy, for all of which he has claimed responsibility, but not the 9/11 attack.
*******
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently held at Guantanamo where he was tortured, has claimed responsibility for planning the 9/11 attack, but also for a number of other attacks, some of which he could not possibly have been involved with, illustrating why confessions obtained under torture are inadmissible in most western courts, since they are notoriously unreliable.
*******
The regular threat to destroy the entire planet with nuclear weapons if the state of Israel is in danger will have to be faced at some time, remembering Bonhoeffer. Working out how much further any of us are down the list from Gaza is not an appealing alternative.
*******
So much for “terrorism,” of which the only useful thing to be said is Chomsky’s “If you want to stop terrorism, there’s a really easy way – Stop practicing it.”
*******
My view of Obama comes from working out how a Luo from Kenya, a Kikuyu majority country, would probably set about protecting himself if he came to power. Recruiting his main potential enemies into his coalition (hence Emmanuel, followed by Gates) is an obvious move, and does not, of itself, discredit him.
*******
If Obama can move to torchium as a source for atomic power, without the Chernobyl dangers of uranium 235, or the waste disposal problems, and also without the spin off to nuclear weapons, that would be a massive advance. (Gates favors increased nukes, like Wolfowitz.)
*******
On Obama’s $850 billion bail out plan the Republicans, discredited though they are, are the more correct. Letting BoA, Merrill Lynch, AIG, old Uncle Tom Cobley an’ all go bankrupt (imprison or hang the culprits, who cares) would at least mean starting with a clean sheet. US public and private debt at 385 per cent of GDP is not sustainable, and printing another two trillion dollars for the banks to hand out in bonuses and redecorating their offices while howling that China is “manipulating its currency” seems the act of a lunatic. That China still hopes to achieve an 8% growth rate, though 6.8% is more commonly predicted, is hardly a subject for attack from an economy that contracted by 3.8%.
*******
Spain has a law on its books since 1870 allowing its courts to prosecute foreigners for such crimes as genocide, crimes against humanity, and torture committed anywhere in the world, the basis for holding General Pinochet of Chile in the UK some years ago. The Spanish High Court announced this week a war crimes investigation into an Israeli ex-defense minister and six other top security officials for their role in a 2002 attack that killed a Hamas commander and 14 civilians in Gaza. According to Ms. Tzipi Livni, the Israeli premier, Spain has now agreed to exclude Israel from the list of countries that can be charged. Burning children with white phosphorus and the use of DIME weapons, which inject heavy metals into the bloodstream to shred internal organs, will no longer be a war crime.
As Rabbi Yaacov Perrin memorably put it on page 1 of the New York Times of February 28, 1994 "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."
*******
With both Posse Comitatus (forbidding use of the military against the US population) and Habeas Corpus (forbidding arrest and imprisonment without charge and trial) essentially suspended by the Bush administration, the arrival of the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, from Iraq in the USA for crowd control on October 1, 2008 may be a reason for serious concern, especially since the removal of governments was successfully accomplished by the crowds at Bangkok Airport in Thailand, at Reykjavik in Iceland, and is in progress at Athens in Greece and currently in France.
*******
The Homeland Security introduction at the Inauguration of the measures which make airports a nightmare resulted in several hundred invitees missing the ceremony. (They actually didn't miss that much as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court flubbed the oath, getting the wording wrong - he was appointed as a fan of George Bush, after all, not for any skill in legal memory - and Obama's oath of office had to be re-done the next day in private.) The same measures at the Superbowl on Sunday February 1, 2009, although no hint of an attack made them necessary, suggest a significant tightening of controls on the civilian population in the USA.
*******
No one has yet made clear the full extent of the coming disaster, though it can easily be calculated without undue strain on mathematical skills from the UN report that an entire second planet earth - which we do not have - is required to maintain world living standards at their present level.
That means, if dividing by two can be managed without difficulty, that overall world standards of living will halve. The double whammy for the US is that with five per cent of the population it can not continue to consume thirty per cent of world resources as it has done in the past; no one will stand for it, and the US has lost the power to buy, borrow, or steal the power to insist on it, and can no longer maintain the military power to force acquiescence. (Even space transport to the space station will be done by the Russians kindly ferrying the Americans up. NASA no longer has the shuttle, says the last news report of January 2009.) So in addition to the general halving of living standards, the US will have to make a very severe additional reduction in consumption of resources, perhaps by as much as five sixths. (That doesn't mean that American ingenuity can not figure out a way to dramatically increase resources; it's best placed of all perhaps to do that. It's just that it had better get it done fairly sharpish, to avoid living at around one tenth of its previous level.)
Jan 30, 2009
The meltdown - Twenty five people
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/26/road-ruin-recession-individuals-economy
Twenty-five people at the heart of the meltdown ...
The worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression is not a natural phenomenon but a man-made disaster in which we all played a part. In the second part of a week-long series looking behind the slump, Guardian City editor Julia Finch picks out the individuals who have led us into the current crisis
Julia Finch, with additional reporting by Andrew Clark and David Teather
The Guardian, Monday 26 January 2009
********
Greenspan Testifies At Senate Hearing On Oil Dependence
Alan Greenspan, chairman of US Federal Reserve 1987- 2006 Only a couple of years ago the long-serving chairman of the Fed, a committed free marketeer who had steered the US economy through crises ranging from the 1987 stockmarket collapse through to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was lauded with star status, named the "oracle" and "the maestro". Now he is viewed as one of those most culpable for the crisis. He is blamed for allowing the housing bubble to develop as a result of his low interest rates and lack of regulation in mortgage lending. He backed sub-prime lending and urged homebuyers to swap fixed-rate mortgages for variable rate deals, which left borrowers unable to pay when interest rates rose.
For many years, Greenspan also defended the booming derivatives business, which barely existed when he took over the Fed, but which mushroomed from $100tn in 2002 to more than $500tn five years later.
Billionaires George Soros and Warren Buffett might have been extremely worried about these complex products - Soros avoided them because he didn't "really understand how they work" and Buffett famously described them as "financial weapons of mass destruction" - but Greenspan did all he could to protect the market from what he believed was unnecessary regulation. In 2003 he told the Senate banking committee: "Derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so".
In recent months, however, he has admitted at least some of his long-held beliefs have turned out to be incorrect - not least that free markets would handle the risks involved, that too much regulation would damage Wall Street and that, ultimately, banks would always put the protection of their shareholders first.
He has described the current financial crisis as "the type ... that comes along only once in a century" and last autumn said the fact that the banks had played fast and loose with shareholders' equity had left him "in a state of shocked disbelief".
*******
Politicians
Bill Clinton, former US president Clinton shares at least some of the blame for the current financial chaos. He beefed up the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act to force mortgage lenders to relax their rules to allow more socially disadvantaged borrowers to qualify for home loans.
In 1999 Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which ensured a complete separation between commercial banks, which accept deposits, and investment banks, which invest and take risks. The move prompted the era of the superbank and primed the sub-prime pump. The year before the repeal sub-prime loans were just 5% of all mortgage lending. By the time the credit crunch blew up it was approaching 30%.
********
Gordon Brown, prime minister
The British prime minister seems to have been completely dazzled by the movers and shakers in the Square Mile, putting the City's interests ahead of other parts of the economy, such as manufacturers. He backed "light touch" regulation and a low-tax regime for the thousands of non-domiciled foreign bankers working in London and for the private equity business.
********
George W Bush, former US president
Clinton might have started the sub-prime ball rolling, but the Bush administration certainly did little to put the brakes on the vast amount of mortgage cash being lent to "Ninja" (No income, no job applicants) borrowers who could not afford them. Neither did he rein back Wall Street with regulation (although the government did pass the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the wake of the Enron scandal).
********
Senator Phil Gramm
Former US senator from Texas, free market advocate with a PhD in economics who fought long and hard for financial deregulation. His work, encouraged by Clinton's administration, allowed the explosive growth of derivatives, including credit swaps.
In 2001, he told a Senate debate: "Some people look at sub-prime lending and see evil. I look at sub-prime lending and I see the American dream in action."
According to the New York Times, federal records show that from 1989 to 2002 he was the top recipient of campaign contributions from commercial banks and in the top five for donations from Wall Street. At an April 2000 Senate hearing after a visit to New York, he said: "When I am on Wall Street and I realise that that's the very nerve centre of American capitalism and I realise what capitalism has done for the working people of America, to me that's a holy place."
He eventually left Capitol Hill to work for UBS as an investment banker.
********
Wall Street/Bankers
Abi Cohen, Goldman Sachs chief US strategist
The "perpetual bull". Once rated one of the most powerful women in the US. But so wrong, so often. She failed to see previous share price crashes and was famous for her upwards forecasts. Replaced last March.
********
"Hank" Greenberg, AIG insurance group
Now aged 83, Hank - AKA Maurice - was the boss of AIG. He built the business into the world's biggest insurer. AIG had a vast business in credit default swaps and therefore a huge exposure to a residential mortgage crisis. When AIG's own credit-rating was cut, it faced a liquidity crisis and needed an $85bn (£47bn then) bail out from the US government to avoid collapse and avert the crisis its collapse would have caused. It later needed many more billions from the US treasury and the Fed, but that did not stop senior AIG executives taking themselves off for a few lavish trips, including a $444,000 golf and spa retreat in California and an $86,000 hunting expedition to England. "Have you heard of anything more outrageous?" said Elijah Cummings, a Democratic congressman from Maryland. "They were getting their manicures, their facials, pedicures, massages while the American people were footing the bill."
*********
Andy Hornby, former HBOS boss
So highly respected, so admired and so clever - top of his 800-strong class at Harvard - but it was his strategy, adopted from the Bank of Scotland when it merged with Halifax, that got HBOS in the trouble it is now. Who would have thought that the mighty Halifax could be brought to its knees and teeter on the verge of nationalisation?
*********
Sir Fred Goodwin, former RBS boss
Once one of Gordon Brown's favourite businessmen, now the prime minister says he is "angry" with the man dubbed "Fred the Shred" for his strategy at Royal Bank of Scotland, which has left the bank staring at a £28bn loss and 70% owned by the government. The losses will reflect vast lending to businesses that cannot repay and write-downs on acquisitions masterminded by Goodwin stretching back years.
*********
Steve Crawshaw, former B&B boss
Once upon a time Bradford & Bingley was a rather boring building society, which used two men in bowler hats to signify their sensible and trustworthy approach. In 2004 the affable Crawshaw took over. He closed down B&B businesses, cut staff numbers by half and turned the B&B into a specialist in buy-to-let loans and self-certified mortgages - also called "liar loans" because applicants did not have to prove a regular income. The business broke down when the wholesale money market collapsed and B&B's borrowers fell quickly into debt. Crawshaw denied a rights issue was on its way weeks before he asked shareholders for £300m. Eventually, B&B had to be nationalised. Crawshaw, however, had left the bridge a few weeks earlier as a result of heart problems. He has a £1.8m pension pot.
*********
Adam Applegarth, former Northern Rock boss
Applegarth had such big ambitions. But the business model just collapsed when the credit crunch hit. Luckily for Applegarth, he walked away with a wheelbarrow of cash to ease the pain of his failure, and spent the summer playing cricket.
*********
Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin
Cioffi (pictured) and Tanninn were Bear Stearns bankers recently indicted for fraud over the collapse of two hedge funds last year, which was one of the triggers of the credit crunch. They are accused of lying to investors about the amount of money they were putting into sub-prime, and of quietly withdrawing their own funds when times got tough.
**********
Lewis Ranieri
The "godfather" of mortgage finance, who pioneered mortgage-backed bonds in the 1980s and immortalised in Liar's Poker. Famous for saying that "mortgages are math", Ranieri created collateralised pools of mortgages. In 2004 Business Week ranked him alongside names such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as one of the greatest innovators of the past 75 years.
Ranieri did warn in 2006 of the risks from the breakneck growth of mortgage securitisation. Nevertheless, his Texas-based Franklin Bank Corp went bust in November due to the credit crunch.
**********
Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products
Cassano ran the AIG team that sold credit default swaps in London, and in effect bankrupted the world's biggest insurance company, forcing the US government to stump up billions in aid. Cassano, who lives in a townhouse near Harrods in Knightsbridge, earned 30 cents for every dollar of profit his financial products generated - or about £280m. He was fired after the division lost $11bn, but stayed on as a $1m-a-month consultant. "It seems he single-handedly brought AIG to its knees," said John Sarbanes, a Democratic congressman.
*********
Chuck Prince, former Citi boss
A lawyer by training, Prince had built Citi into the biggest bank in the world, with a sprawling structure that covered investment banking, high-street banking and wealthy management for the richest clients. When profits went into reverse in 2007, he insisted it was just a hiccup, but he was forced out after multibillion-dollar losses on sub-prime business started to surface. He received about $140m to ease his pain .
*********
Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide Financial
Known as "the orange one" for his luminous tan, Mozilo was the chairman and chief executive of the biggest American sub-prime mortgage lender, which was saved from bankruptcy by Bank of America. BoA recently paid billions to settle investigations by various attorney generals for Countrywide's mis-selling of risky loans to thousands who could not afford them. The company ran a "VIP programme" that provided loans on favourable terms to influential figures including Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee, the heads of the federal-backed mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and former assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke.
*********
Stan O'Neal, former boss of Merrill Lynch
O'Neal became one of the highest-profile casualties of the credit crunch when he lost the confidence of the bank's board in late 2007. When he was appointed to the top job four years earlier, O'Neal, the first African-American to run a Wall Street firm, had pledged to shed the bank's conservative image. Shortly before he quit, the bank admitted to nearly $8bn of exposure to bad debts, as bets in the property and credit markets turned sour. Merrill was forced into the arms of Bank of America less than a year later.
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Jimmy Cayne, former Bear Stearns boss
The chairman of the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns famously continued to play in a bridge tournament in Detroit even as the firm fell into crisis. Confidence in the bank evaporated after the collapse of two of its hedge funds and massive write-downs from losses related to the home loans industry. It was bought for a knock down price by JP Morgan Chase in March. Cayne sold his stake in the firm after the JP Morgan bid emerged, making $60m. Such was the anger directed towards Cayne that the US media reported that he had been forced to hire a bodyguard. A one-time scrap-iron salesman, Cayne joined Bear Stearns in 1969 and became one of the firm's top brokers, taking over as chief executive in 1993.
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Others
Christopher Dodd, chairman, Senate banking committee (Democrat) Consistently resisted efforts to tighten regulation on the mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He pushed to broaden their role to dodgier mortgages in an effort to help home ownership for the poor. Received $165,000 in donations from Fannie and Freddie from 1989 to 2008, more than anyone else in Congress.
*********
Geir Haarde, Icelandic prime minister
He announced on Friday that he would step down and call an early election in May, after violent anti-government protests fuelled by his handling of the financial crisis. Last October Iceland's three biggest commercial banks collapsed under billions of dollars of debts. The country was forced to borrow $2.1bn from the International Monetary Fund and take loans from several European countries. Announcing his resignation, Haarde said he had throat cancer.
**********
The American public
There's no escaping the fact: politicians might have teed up the financial system and failed to police it properly and Wall Street's greedy bankers might have got carried away with the riches they could generate, but if millions of Americans had just realised they were borrowing more than they could repay then we would not be in this mess. The British public got just as carried away. We are the credit junkies of Europe and many of our problems could easily have been avoided if we had been more sensible and just said no.
**********
Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England
When Mervyn King settled his feet under the desk in his Threadneedle Street office, the UK economy was motoring along just nicely: GDP was growing at 3% and inflation was just 1.3%. Chairing his first meeting of the Bank's monetary policy committee (MPC), interest rates were cut to a post-war low of 3.5%. His ambition was that monetary policy decision-making should become "boring". How we would all like it to become boring now. When the crunch first took hold, the Aston Villa-supporting governor insisted it was not about to become an international crisis. In the first weeks of the crunch he refused to pump cash into the financial system and insisted that "moral hazard" meant that some banks should not be bailed out. The Treasury select committee has said King should have been "more pro-active". King's MPC should have realised there was a housing bubble developing and taken action to damp it down and, more recently, the committee should have seen the recession coming and cut interest rates far faster than it did.
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John Tiner, FSA chief executive, 2003-07
No one can fault 51-year-old Tiner's timing: the financial services expert took over as the City's chief regulator in 2003, just as the bear market which followed the dotcom crash came to an end, and stepped down from the Financial Services Authority in July 2007 - just a few weeks before the credit crunch took hold. He presided over the FSA when the so-called "light touch" regulation was put in place. It was Tiner who agreed that banks could make up their own minds about how much capital they needed to hoard to cover their risks. And it was on his watch that Northern Rock got so carried away with the wholesale money markets and 130% mortgages. When the FSA finally got around to investigating its own part in the Rock's downfall, it was a catalogue of errors and omissions. In short, the FSA had been asleep at the wheel while Northern Rock racked up ever bigger risks. An accountant by training, with a penchant for Porsches and proud owner of the personalised number plate T1NER, the former FSA boss has since been recruited by the financial entrepreneur Clive Cowdery to run a newly floated business that aims to buy up financial businesses laid low by the credit crunch. Tiner will be chief executive but, unusually, will not be on the board, so his pay and bonuses will not be made public.
**********
Dick Fuld, Lehman Brothers chief executive
The credit crunch had been rumbling on for more than a year but Lehman Brothers' collapse in September was to have a catastrophic impact on confidence. Richard Fuld, chief executive, later told Congress he was bewildered the US government had not saved the bank when it had helped secure Bear Stearns and the insurer AIG. He also blamed short-sellers. Bitter workers at Lehman pointed the finger at Fuld. A former bond trader known as "the Gorilla", Fuld had been with Lehman for decades and steered it through tough times. But just before the bank went bust he had failed to secure a deal to sell a large stake to the Korea Development Bank and most likely prevent its collapse. Fuld encouraged risk-taking and Lehman was still investing heavily in property at the top of the market. Facing a grilling on Capitol Hill, he was asked whether it was fair that he earned $500m over eight years. He demurred; the figure, he said, was closer to $300m.
*********
... and six more who saw it coming
Andrew Lahde
A hedge fund boss who quit the industry in October thanking "stupid" traders and "idiots" for making him rich. He made millions by betting against sub-prime.
*********
John Paulson, hedge fund boss
He has been described as the "world's biggest winner" from the credit crunch, earning $3.7bn (£1.9bn) in 2007 by "shorting" the US mortgage market - betting that the housing bubble was about to burst. In an apparent response to criticism that he was profiting from misery, Paulson gave $15m to a charity aiding people fighting foreclosure.
*********
Professor Nouriel Roubini
Described by the New York Times as Dr Doom, the economist from New York University was warning that financial crisis was on the way in 2006, when he told economists at the IMF that the US would face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, oil shock and a deep recession. He remains a pessimist. He predicted last week that losses in the US financial system could hit $3.6tn before the credit crunch ends - which, he said, means the entire US banking system is in effect bankrupt. After last year's bail-outs and nationalisations, he famously described George Bush, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke as "a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the United Socialist State Republic of America".
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Warren Buffett, billionaire investor
Dubbed the Sage of Omaha, Buffett had long warned about the dangers of dodgy derivatives that no one understood and said often that Wall Street's finest were grossly overpaid. In his annual letter to shareholders in 2003, he compared complex derivative contracts to hell: "Easy to enter and almost impossible to exit." On an optimistic note, Buffett wrote in October that he had begun buying shares on the US stockmarket again, suggesting the worst of the credit crunch might be over. Now is a great time to "buy a slice of America's future at a marked-down price", he said.
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George Soros, speculator
The billionaire financier, philanthropist and backer of the Democrats told an audience in Singapore in January 2006 that stockmarkets were at their peak, and that the US and global economies should brace themselves for a recession and a possible "hard landing". He also warned of "a gigantic real estate bubble" inflated by reckless lenders, encouraging homeowners to remortgage and offering interest-only deals. Earlier this year Soros described a 25-year "super bubble" that is bursting, blaming unfathomable financial instruments, deregulation and globalisation. He has since characterised the financial crisis as the worst since the Great Depression.
*********
Stephen Eismann, hedge fund manager
An analyst and fund manager who tracked the sub-prime market from the early 1990s. "You have to understand," he says, "I did sub-prime first. I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn't give a shit what it sold."
*********
Meredith Whitney, Oppenheimer Securities
On 31 October 2007 the analyst forecast that Citigroup had to slash its dividend or face bankruptcy. A day later $370bn had been wiped off financial stocks on Wall Street. Within days the boss of Citigroup was out and the dividend had been slashed.
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Kathleen Corbet, former CEO, Standard & Poor's
The credit-rating agencies were widely attacked for failing to warn of the risks posed by mortgage-backed securities. Kathleen Corbet ran the largest of the big three agencies, Standard & Poor's, and quit in August 2007, amid a hail of criticism. The agencies have been accused of acting as cheerleaders, assigning the top AAA rating to collateralised debt obligations, the often incomprehensible mortgage-backed securities that turned toxic. The industry argues it did its best with the information available.
Corbet said her decision to leave the agency had been "long planned" and denied that she had been put under any pressure to quit. She kept a relatively low profile and had been hired to run S&P in 2004 from the investment firm Alliance Capital Management.
Investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York attorney general among others have focused on whether the agencies are compromised by earning fees from the banks that issue the debt they rate. The reputation of the industry was savaged by a blistering report by the SEC that contained dozens of internal emails that suggested they had betrayed investors' trust. "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters," one unnamed S&P analyst wrote. In another, an S&P employee wrote:
"It could be structured by cows and we would rate it."
• Tomorrow in part three of the Road to Ruin series - The Barons of Bankruptcy - how going bust can be a profitable business
Twenty-five people at the heart of the meltdown ...
The worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression is not a natural phenomenon but a man-made disaster in which we all played a part. In the second part of a week-long series looking behind the slump, Guardian City editor Julia Finch picks out the individuals who have led us into the current crisis
Julia Finch, with additional reporting by Andrew Clark and David Teather
The Guardian, Monday 26 January 2009
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Greenspan Testifies At Senate Hearing On Oil Dependence
Alan Greenspan, chairman of US Federal Reserve 1987- 2006 Only a couple of years ago the long-serving chairman of the Fed, a committed free marketeer who had steered the US economy through crises ranging from the 1987 stockmarket collapse through to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was lauded with star status, named the "oracle" and "the maestro". Now he is viewed as one of those most culpable for the crisis. He is blamed for allowing the housing bubble to develop as a result of his low interest rates and lack of regulation in mortgage lending. He backed sub-prime lending and urged homebuyers to swap fixed-rate mortgages for variable rate deals, which left borrowers unable to pay when interest rates rose.
For many years, Greenspan also defended the booming derivatives business, which barely existed when he took over the Fed, but which mushroomed from $100tn in 2002 to more than $500tn five years later.
Billionaires George Soros and Warren Buffett might have been extremely worried about these complex products - Soros avoided them because he didn't "really understand how they work" and Buffett famously described them as "financial weapons of mass destruction" - but Greenspan did all he could to protect the market from what he believed was unnecessary regulation. In 2003 he told the Senate banking committee: "Derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so".
In recent months, however, he has admitted at least some of his long-held beliefs have turned out to be incorrect - not least that free markets would handle the risks involved, that too much regulation would damage Wall Street and that, ultimately, banks would always put the protection of their shareholders first.
He has described the current financial crisis as "the type ... that comes along only once in a century" and last autumn said the fact that the banks had played fast and loose with shareholders' equity had left him "in a state of shocked disbelief".
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Politicians
Bill Clinton, former US president Clinton shares at least some of the blame for the current financial chaos. He beefed up the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act to force mortgage lenders to relax their rules to allow more socially disadvantaged borrowers to qualify for home loans.
In 1999 Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which ensured a complete separation between commercial banks, which accept deposits, and investment banks, which invest and take risks. The move prompted the era of the superbank and primed the sub-prime pump. The year before the repeal sub-prime loans were just 5% of all mortgage lending. By the time the credit crunch blew up it was approaching 30%.
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Gordon Brown, prime minister
The British prime minister seems to have been completely dazzled by the movers and shakers in the Square Mile, putting the City's interests ahead of other parts of the economy, such as manufacturers. He backed "light touch" regulation and a low-tax regime for the thousands of non-domiciled foreign bankers working in London and for the private equity business.
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George W Bush, former US president
Clinton might have started the sub-prime ball rolling, but the Bush administration certainly did little to put the brakes on the vast amount of mortgage cash being lent to "Ninja" (No income, no job applicants) borrowers who could not afford them. Neither did he rein back Wall Street with regulation (although the government did pass the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the wake of the Enron scandal).
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Senator Phil Gramm
Former US senator from Texas, free market advocate with a PhD in economics who fought long and hard for financial deregulation. His work, encouraged by Clinton's administration, allowed the explosive growth of derivatives, including credit swaps.
In 2001, he told a Senate debate: "Some people look at sub-prime lending and see evil. I look at sub-prime lending and I see the American dream in action."
According to the New York Times, federal records show that from 1989 to 2002 he was the top recipient of campaign contributions from commercial banks and in the top five for donations from Wall Street. At an April 2000 Senate hearing after a visit to New York, he said: "When I am on Wall Street and I realise that that's the very nerve centre of American capitalism and I realise what capitalism has done for the working people of America, to me that's a holy place."
He eventually left Capitol Hill to work for UBS as an investment banker.
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Wall Street/Bankers
Abi Cohen, Goldman Sachs chief US strategist
The "perpetual bull". Once rated one of the most powerful women in the US. But so wrong, so often. She failed to see previous share price crashes and was famous for her upwards forecasts. Replaced last March.
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"Hank" Greenberg, AIG insurance group
Now aged 83, Hank - AKA Maurice - was the boss of AIG. He built the business into the world's biggest insurer. AIG had a vast business in credit default swaps and therefore a huge exposure to a residential mortgage crisis. When AIG's own credit-rating was cut, it faced a liquidity crisis and needed an $85bn (£47bn then) bail out from the US government to avoid collapse and avert the crisis its collapse would have caused. It later needed many more billions from the US treasury and the Fed, but that did not stop senior AIG executives taking themselves off for a few lavish trips, including a $444,000 golf and spa retreat in California and an $86,000 hunting expedition to England. "Have you heard of anything more outrageous?" said Elijah Cummings, a Democratic congressman from Maryland. "They were getting their manicures, their facials, pedicures, massages while the American people were footing the bill."
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Andy Hornby, former HBOS boss
So highly respected, so admired and so clever - top of his 800-strong class at Harvard - but it was his strategy, adopted from the Bank of Scotland when it merged with Halifax, that got HBOS in the trouble it is now. Who would have thought that the mighty Halifax could be brought to its knees and teeter on the verge of nationalisation?
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Sir Fred Goodwin, former RBS boss
Once one of Gordon Brown's favourite businessmen, now the prime minister says he is "angry" with the man dubbed "Fred the Shred" for his strategy at Royal Bank of Scotland, which has left the bank staring at a £28bn loss and 70% owned by the government. The losses will reflect vast lending to businesses that cannot repay and write-downs on acquisitions masterminded by Goodwin stretching back years.
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Steve Crawshaw, former B&B boss
Once upon a time Bradford & Bingley was a rather boring building society, which used two men in bowler hats to signify their sensible and trustworthy approach. In 2004 the affable Crawshaw took over. He closed down B&B businesses, cut staff numbers by half and turned the B&B into a specialist in buy-to-let loans and self-certified mortgages - also called "liar loans" because applicants did not have to prove a regular income. The business broke down when the wholesale money market collapsed and B&B's borrowers fell quickly into debt. Crawshaw denied a rights issue was on its way weeks before he asked shareholders for £300m. Eventually, B&B had to be nationalised. Crawshaw, however, had left the bridge a few weeks earlier as a result of heart problems. He has a £1.8m pension pot.
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Adam Applegarth, former Northern Rock boss
Applegarth had such big ambitions. But the business model just collapsed when the credit crunch hit. Luckily for Applegarth, he walked away with a wheelbarrow of cash to ease the pain of his failure, and spent the summer playing cricket.
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Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin
Cioffi (pictured) and Tanninn were Bear Stearns bankers recently indicted for fraud over the collapse of two hedge funds last year, which was one of the triggers of the credit crunch. They are accused of lying to investors about the amount of money they were putting into sub-prime, and of quietly withdrawing their own funds when times got tough.
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Lewis Ranieri
The "godfather" of mortgage finance, who pioneered mortgage-backed bonds in the 1980s and immortalised in Liar's Poker. Famous for saying that "mortgages are math", Ranieri created collateralised pools of mortgages. In 2004 Business Week ranked him alongside names such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as one of the greatest innovators of the past 75 years.
Ranieri did warn in 2006 of the risks from the breakneck growth of mortgage securitisation. Nevertheless, his Texas-based Franklin Bank Corp went bust in November due to the credit crunch.
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Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products
Cassano ran the AIG team that sold credit default swaps in London, and in effect bankrupted the world's biggest insurance company, forcing the US government to stump up billions in aid. Cassano, who lives in a townhouse near Harrods in Knightsbridge, earned 30 cents for every dollar of profit his financial products generated - or about £280m. He was fired after the division lost $11bn, but stayed on as a $1m-a-month consultant. "It seems he single-handedly brought AIG to its knees," said John Sarbanes, a Democratic congressman.
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Chuck Prince, former Citi boss
A lawyer by training, Prince had built Citi into the biggest bank in the world, with a sprawling structure that covered investment banking, high-street banking and wealthy management for the richest clients. When profits went into reverse in 2007, he insisted it was just a hiccup, but he was forced out after multibillion-dollar losses on sub-prime business started to surface. He received about $140m to ease his pain .
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Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide Financial
Known as "the orange one" for his luminous tan, Mozilo was the chairman and chief executive of the biggest American sub-prime mortgage lender, which was saved from bankruptcy by Bank of America. BoA recently paid billions to settle investigations by various attorney generals for Countrywide's mis-selling of risky loans to thousands who could not afford them. The company ran a "VIP programme" that provided loans on favourable terms to influential figures including Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee, the heads of the federal-backed mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and former assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke.
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Stan O'Neal, former boss of Merrill Lynch
O'Neal became one of the highest-profile casualties of the credit crunch when he lost the confidence of the bank's board in late 2007. When he was appointed to the top job four years earlier, O'Neal, the first African-American to run a Wall Street firm, had pledged to shed the bank's conservative image. Shortly before he quit, the bank admitted to nearly $8bn of exposure to bad debts, as bets in the property and credit markets turned sour. Merrill was forced into the arms of Bank of America less than a year later.
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Jimmy Cayne, former Bear Stearns boss
The chairman of the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns famously continued to play in a bridge tournament in Detroit even as the firm fell into crisis. Confidence in the bank evaporated after the collapse of two of its hedge funds and massive write-downs from losses related to the home loans industry. It was bought for a knock down price by JP Morgan Chase in March. Cayne sold his stake in the firm after the JP Morgan bid emerged, making $60m. Such was the anger directed towards Cayne that the US media reported that he had been forced to hire a bodyguard. A one-time scrap-iron salesman, Cayne joined Bear Stearns in 1969 and became one of the firm's top brokers, taking over as chief executive in 1993.
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Others
Christopher Dodd, chairman, Senate banking committee (Democrat) Consistently resisted efforts to tighten regulation on the mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He pushed to broaden their role to dodgier mortgages in an effort to help home ownership for the poor. Received $165,000 in donations from Fannie and Freddie from 1989 to 2008, more than anyone else in Congress.
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Geir Haarde, Icelandic prime minister
He announced on Friday that he would step down and call an early election in May, after violent anti-government protests fuelled by his handling of the financial crisis. Last October Iceland's three biggest commercial banks collapsed under billions of dollars of debts. The country was forced to borrow $2.1bn from the International Monetary Fund and take loans from several European countries. Announcing his resignation, Haarde said he had throat cancer.
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The American public
There's no escaping the fact: politicians might have teed up the financial system and failed to police it properly and Wall Street's greedy bankers might have got carried away with the riches they could generate, but if millions of Americans had just realised they were borrowing more than they could repay then we would not be in this mess. The British public got just as carried away. We are the credit junkies of Europe and many of our problems could easily have been avoided if we had been more sensible and just said no.
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Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England
When Mervyn King settled his feet under the desk in his Threadneedle Street office, the UK economy was motoring along just nicely: GDP was growing at 3% and inflation was just 1.3%. Chairing his first meeting of the Bank's monetary policy committee (MPC), interest rates were cut to a post-war low of 3.5%. His ambition was that monetary policy decision-making should become "boring". How we would all like it to become boring now. When the crunch first took hold, the Aston Villa-supporting governor insisted it was not about to become an international crisis. In the first weeks of the crunch he refused to pump cash into the financial system and insisted that "moral hazard" meant that some banks should not be bailed out. The Treasury select committee has said King should have been "more pro-active". King's MPC should have realised there was a housing bubble developing and taken action to damp it down and, more recently, the committee should have seen the recession coming and cut interest rates far faster than it did.
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John Tiner, FSA chief executive, 2003-07
No one can fault 51-year-old Tiner's timing: the financial services expert took over as the City's chief regulator in 2003, just as the bear market which followed the dotcom crash came to an end, and stepped down from the Financial Services Authority in July 2007 - just a few weeks before the credit crunch took hold. He presided over the FSA when the so-called "light touch" regulation was put in place. It was Tiner who agreed that banks could make up their own minds about how much capital they needed to hoard to cover their risks. And it was on his watch that Northern Rock got so carried away with the wholesale money markets and 130% mortgages. When the FSA finally got around to investigating its own part in the Rock's downfall, it was a catalogue of errors and omissions. In short, the FSA had been asleep at the wheel while Northern Rock racked up ever bigger risks. An accountant by training, with a penchant for Porsches and proud owner of the personalised number plate T1NER, the former FSA boss has since been recruited by the financial entrepreneur Clive Cowdery to run a newly floated business that aims to buy up financial businesses laid low by the credit crunch. Tiner will be chief executive but, unusually, will not be on the board, so his pay and bonuses will not be made public.
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Dick Fuld, Lehman Brothers chief executive
The credit crunch had been rumbling on for more than a year but Lehman Brothers' collapse in September was to have a catastrophic impact on confidence. Richard Fuld, chief executive, later told Congress he was bewildered the US government had not saved the bank when it had helped secure Bear Stearns and the insurer AIG. He also blamed short-sellers. Bitter workers at Lehman pointed the finger at Fuld. A former bond trader known as "the Gorilla", Fuld had been with Lehman for decades and steered it through tough times. But just before the bank went bust he had failed to secure a deal to sell a large stake to the Korea Development Bank and most likely prevent its collapse. Fuld encouraged risk-taking and Lehman was still investing heavily in property at the top of the market. Facing a grilling on Capitol Hill, he was asked whether it was fair that he earned $500m over eight years. He demurred; the figure, he said, was closer to $300m.
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... and six more who saw it coming
Andrew Lahde
A hedge fund boss who quit the industry in October thanking "stupid" traders and "idiots" for making him rich. He made millions by betting against sub-prime.
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John Paulson, hedge fund boss
He has been described as the "world's biggest winner" from the credit crunch, earning $3.7bn (£1.9bn) in 2007 by "shorting" the US mortgage market - betting that the housing bubble was about to burst. In an apparent response to criticism that he was profiting from misery, Paulson gave $15m to a charity aiding people fighting foreclosure.
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Professor Nouriel Roubini
Described by the New York Times as Dr Doom, the economist from New York University was warning that financial crisis was on the way in 2006, when he told economists at the IMF that the US would face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, oil shock and a deep recession. He remains a pessimist. He predicted last week that losses in the US financial system could hit $3.6tn before the credit crunch ends - which, he said, means the entire US banking system is in effect bankrupt. After last year's bail-outs and nationalisations, he famously described George Bush, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke as "a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the United Socialist State Republic of America".
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Warren Buffett, billionaire investor
Dubbed the Sage of Omaha, Buffett had long warned about the dangers of dodgy derivatives that no one understood and said often that Wall Street's finest were grossly overpaid. In his annual letter to shareholders in 2003, he compared complex derivative contracts to hell: "Easy to enter and almost impossible to exit." On an optimistic note, Buffett wrote in October that he had begun buying shares on the US stockmarket again, suggesting the worst of the credit crunch might be over. Now is a great time to "buy a slice of America's future at a marked-down price", he said.
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George Soros, speculator
The billionaire financier, philanthropist and backer of the Democrats told an audience in Singapore in January 2006 that stockmarkets were at their peak, and that the US and global economies should brace themselves for a recession and a possible "hard landing". He also warned of "a gigantic real estate bubble" inflated by reckless lenders, encouraging homeowners to remortgage and offering interest-only deals. Earlier this year Soros described a 25-year "super bubble" that is bursting, blaming unfathomable financial instruments, deregulation and globalisation. He has since characterised the financial crisis as the worst since the Great Depression.
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Stephen Eismann, hedge fund manager
An analyst and fund manager who tracked the sub-prime market from the early 1990s. "You have to understand," he says, "I did sub-prime first. I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn't give a shit what it sold."
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Meredith Whitney, Oppenheimer Securities
On 31 October 2007 the analyst forecast that Citigroup had to slash its dividend or face bankruptcy. A day later $370bn had been wiped off financial stocks on Wall Street. Within days the boss of Citigroup was out and the dividend had been slashed.
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Kathleen Corbet, former CEO, Standard & Poor's
The credit-rating agencies were widely attacked for failing to warn of the risks posed by mortgage-backed securities. Kathleen Corbet ran the largest of the big three agencies, Standard & Poor's, and quit in August 2007, amid a hail of criticism. The agencies have been accused of acting as cheerleaders, assigning the top AAA rating to collateralised debt obligations, the often incomprehensible mortgage-backed securities that turned toxic. The industry argues it did its best with the information available.
Corbet said her decision to leave the agency had been "long planned" and denied that she had been put under any pressure to quit. She kept a relatively low profile and had been hired to run S&P in 2004 from the investment firm Alliance Capital Management.
Investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York attorney general among others have focused on whether the agencies are compromised by earning fees from the banks that issue the debt they rate. The reputation of the industry was savaged by a blistering report by the SEC that contained dozens of internal emails that suggested they had betrayed investors' trust. "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters," one unnamed S&P analyst wrote. In another, an S&P employee wrote:
"It could be structured by cows and we would rate it."
• Tomorrow in part three of the Road to Ruin series - The Barons of Bankruptcy - how going bust can be a profitable business
Jan 28, 2009
Gaza
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/20/gaza-israelandthepalestinians
Israel wanted a humanitarian crisis
Targeting civilians was a deliberate part of this bid to humiliate Hamas and the Palestinians, and pulverise Gaza into chaos
Ben White guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 January 2009 12.30 GMT
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The scale of Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip, and the almost daily reports of war crimes over the last three weeks, has drawn criticism from even longstanding friends and sympathisers. Despite the Israeli government's long-planned and comprehensive PR campaign, hundreds of dead children is a hard sell. As a former Israeli government press adviser put it, in a wonderful bit of unintentional irony, "When you have a Palestinian kid facing an Israeli tank, how do you explain that the tank is actually David and the kid is Goliath?"
******
Despite a mass of evidence that includes Israel's targets in Operation Cast Lead, public remarks by Israeli leaders over some time, and the ceasefire manoeuvring of this last weekend, much of the analysis offered by politicians or commentators has been disappointingly limited, and characterised by false assumptions, or misplaced emphases, about Israel's motivations.
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First, to what this war on Gaza is not about: it's not about the rockets. During the truce last year, rocket fire from the Gaza Strip was reduced by 97%, with the few projectiles that were fired coming from non-Hamas groups opposed to the agreement. Despite this success in vastly improving the security of Israelis in the south, Israel did everything it could to undermine the calm, and provoke Hamas into a conflict.
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Israel broke the ceasefire on 4 November, with an attack in the Gaza Strip that killed six Hamas members, and the following day severely tightened its siege of the territory. Imports were reduced to 16 trucks a day, down from 123 daily just the previous month (and 475 in May 2007). Following the unsurprising surge in Palestinian attacks, Israeli officials claimed that an all-out war was unavoidable; without mentioning that an operation had been planned for some months already.
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Second, the current operation is only in a limited sense related to both the upcoming Israeli elections and restoring the IDF's so-called deterrence. While it has been pointed out that a hardline approach to Palestinian "terrorism" can play well with the Israeli public, wars are not necessarily Israeli politicians' tactic of choice – the Lebanon war was fought a few months after one.
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Israel is also supposed to be restoring the reputation and "deterrence factor" of its armed forces, after their humiliation in Lebanon in 2006. Suffice to say that until this weekend's unilateral ceasefire, in an aid-dependent enclave defended by an almost entirely isolated militia, Israel's operation had already lasted three times longer than the 1967 war when Israel defeated its Arab neighbours and occupied the rest of Mandate Palestine.
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These three suggested motivations have sometimes reached the level of assumed knowledge, providing the background for further comment and reporting. Based on this kind of analysis, then, criticism of Palestinian civilian casualties is framed as "disproportionate" or "heavy-handed", but fundamentally a case of self-defence. It is understood that any democratic nation would have to respond to terrorist rocket fire, but Israel has gone a bit too far.
********
There is, however, no shortage of evidence available that points to rather different Israeli aims. Estimates for the proportion of civilian deaths among the 1,360 Palestinians killed range from more than half to two-thirds. Politicians, diplomats and journalists are by and large shying away from the obvious, namely that Israel has been deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians and the very infrastructure of normal life, in order to – in the best colonial style – teach the natives a lesson.
********
Given the enormous scale of what Palestinians have described as a "war of extermination" – it appears that some 15% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip were completely destroyed or collapsed and there is an estimated $1.4bn worth of destruction to vital civil infrastructure – it is impossible to list every atrocity. Israel has repeatedly hit ambulances, medics, clinics, and hospitals, while last week, aid volunteers who tried to douse a fire in a Red Crescent warehouse (attacked by Israel) were then shot at by Israeli forces.
*********
UNRWA facilities have also been attacked, including several schools sheltering civilians – just this last weekend, a civilian refuge was repeatedly shelled. Last week, the UN headquarters was also shelled, hitting a vocational centre, a workshop, food warehouse, and fuel depot. Like the massacre of 6 January, Israeli officials quickly began to produce a confusing fog of denials, apologies, promised enquiries and contradictions.
********
Those are just some of the more shocking examples from a military operation that has targeted everything from schools, money-changers and a bird farm, to entire apartment blocks, harbours, and a market. Palestinians have been killed when Israeli tanks fired shells at residential neighbourhoods. Every day has brought fresh horrors; last Wednesday, for example, 70 unarmed civilians including 18 children were killed by the Israeli military. This week's Observer carried a story alleging Israel bulldozed homes with civilians inside (not for the first time) and shot those waving white flags. Little wonder that Israeli officials predicted with concern that "negative sentiment" towards the state would "only grow as the full picture of destruction emerges".
********
Much of this is widely known, and easily accessible; yet still the analytical emphasis has remained on Palestinian rockets, Israeli elections, and deterrence. I would like to suggest three alternative purposes for Israel's Operation Cast Lead that go beyond the usual perspectives, and presuming with Yale professor David Bromwich that "if Israel in 2009 reduces to rubble a large portion of the Gaza Strip and leaves tens of thousands homeless, there is a strong chance that this was what it intended to do".
********
The first aim is to humiliate and weaken Hamas. On the one hand, this seems obvious, but contrary to how the goal is often understood, this is not primarily to protect the Israeli public – as pointed out previously, ceasefires and negotiations are far more likely to deliver security for Israeli citizens – but rather it is a political goal. Hamas had withstood isolation, a siege, mass arrests, and an attempted western-backed coup. Moreover, cracks were appearing in the international community's resolve to parrot Israel's line on Hamas. The group, with its resilience and ability to deliver on negotiated ceasefires, was threatening the chance to make a deal with the Ramallah "moderates", and so:
********
A hammer blow that shattered the movement, launching some of the resulting splinters in directions that once again put all of them beyond the pale, was the most effective way to keep at bay those third parties reaching the conclusion that engaging rather than excluding Hamas could enhance the prospects of peace.
*******
Back in December, before both the end of the six-month truce and the start of Operation Cast Lead, foreign minister Tzipi Livni stated that an extended truce "harms the Israel strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognizes the movement". By the end of the month, Livni would be telling a press conference that "Hamas wants to gain legitimacy from the international community" and stressing that it is "important to keep Hamas from becoming a legitimate organisation" (apparently winning a democratic election isn't enough to confer legitimacy).
********
Just as Israel chose "blood over diplomacy" in order to avoid enhancing "Hamas's image as a responsible interlocutor", so this weekend, Israel chose a unilateral ceasefire for the same reason, "hoping to send the message that Hamas is not a legitimate actor". A war begun in order to delegitimise Hamas would not make way for a ceasefire in which Hamas was a partner at the negotiating table.
********
Hence Israel decided to shortcut the Egyptian-driven efforts at securing a ceasefire, and opt for a unilateral approach that allows Israel, the US, Egypt, Mahmoud Abbas, Britain – in fact, every interested party, except the Gaza Strip authorities – to work together on an apparent solution. It is also worth pointing out that the unilateral nature of the ceasefire frees Israel to define an infringement or collapse on its own terms.
********
The second aim of Israel's war is to teach a lesson to the Palestinians in Gaza, and elsewhere, that the only way to avoid the wrath of the Israeli military is to accept Israel's idea of a two-state solution, a generous concession to be gratefully received by Abbas and fellow moderates. It is a reflection of the approach outlined by the IDF chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, in 2002 that "the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people".
*******
On 4 January, Israeli President Shimon Peres said that Hamas needed "a real and serious lesson"; days later, he was more explicit, reportedly declaring Israel's aim to be "to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel". The next day, the Washington Post also described how Israeli officials were hoping that the attacks would mean "that Gazans become disgusted with Hamas and drive the group from power".
********
This Israeli strategy was previously deployed in Lebanon in 2006, when senior military commanders redefined civilian villages as "military bases" which would be subjected to "disproportionate force" causing "great damage and destruction". As I previously noted, the lessons learned in Lebanon were not just wrong, but criminal: a retired IDF major general and former adviser to the prime minister, Giora Eiland, reflected in a paper that "the destruction of homes and infrastructure and the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people are consequences that can influence Hezbollah's behaviour more than anything else".
********
Ironically, the same Peres who now justifies collective punishment, in 2002 chastised Avigdor Lieberman for suggesting that the IDF should bomb civilian targets, warning the minister that such a tactic would be a war crime. The last three weeks show that proposals made by Israel's political extremists and originally considered outlandish, do not take long to become normal policy.
********
Deliberately targeting civilians and vital infrastructure for political purposes links smoothly, into the post-conflict phase, with the Israeli and US plan to try and rescue the deeply discredited image of the Palestinian Authority through a politicised reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. As US state department spokesman Sean McCormack coyly put it, the "military solution" must be followed up by investing in infrastructure and helping the population "so that they can make a different kind of political decision".
********
The third aim of Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip is to further "catastrophise" the territory, reducing the capacity for continued existence to the barest of minimums – perhaps to bring about "an end to the persistence of Gaza's ordinary people in wanting the chance of a peaceful and dignified life". One obvious benefit to Israel of pulverising "civilian Palestinian infrastructure" is that "people who lack collective institutions and are reduced to scrabbling for their very survival are easier to dominate".
*********
Yet, there is more going on here. Israel seeks to turn the Gaza Strip into a depoliticised humanitarian crisis, always on the brink of catastrophe, always dependent; its population reduced to ration-receiving clients of international aid. Yitzhak Rabin famously wished that Gaza "would just sink into the sea", but perhaps the best Israel can do is to share the problem with the international community, possibly to the extent of troops on the ground.
*********
Increasingly focusing on Egyptian responsibility is also part of this, whether in terms of arms smuggling, aid supplies, or for some, direct rule.
********
In all of this, the Gaza Strip has become a laboratory for future possible scenarios in the West Bank (where a process of "development-isation" and NGO-funded occupation is well established). All three of these Israeli aims – to delegitimise and sideline Hamas, to persuade Palestinians to give up their resistance and to shirk responsibility for a shattered Gaza Strip – require the deliberate commission of war crimes and gross human rights abuses. As time will tell, they are also doomed to fail.
Israel wanted a humanitarian crisis
Targeting civilians was a deliberate part of this bid to humiliate Hamas and the Palestinians, and pulverise Gaza into chaos
Ben White guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 January 2009 12.30 GMT
******
The scale of Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip, and the almost daily reports of war crimes over the last three weeks, has drawn criticism from even longstanding friends and sympathisers. Despite the Israeli government's long-planned and comprehensive PR campaign, hundreds of dead children is a hard sell. As a former Israeli government press adviser put it, in a wonderful bit of unintentional irony, "When you have a Palestinian kid facing an Israeli tank, how do you explain that the tank is actually David and the kid is Goliath?"
******
Despite a mass of evidence that includes Israel's targets in Operation Cast Lead, public remarks by Israeli leaders over some time, and the ceasefire manoeuvring of this last weekend, much of the analysis offered by politicians or commentators has been disappointingly limited, and characterised by false assumptions, or misplaced emphases, about Israel's motivations.
*******
First, to what this war on Gaza is not about: it's not about the rockets. During the truce last year, rocket fire from the Gaza Strip was reduced by 97%, with the few projectiles that were fired coming from non-Hamas groups opposed to the agreement. Despite this success in vastly improving the security of Israelis in the south, Israel did everything it could to undermine the calm, and provoke Hamas into a conflict.
*******
Israel broke the ceasefire on 4 November, with an attack in the Gaza Strip that killed six Hamas members, and the following day severely tightened its siege of the territory. Imports were reduced to 16 trucks a day, down from 123 daily just the previous month (and 475 in May 2007). Following the unsurprising surge in Palestinian attacks, Israeli officials claimed that an all-out war was unavoidable; without mentioning that an operation had been planned for some months already.
*******
Second, the current operation is only in a limited sense related to both the upcoming Israeli elections and restoring the IDF's so-called deterrence. While it has been pointed out that a hardline approach to Palestinian "terrorism" can play well with the Israeli public, wars are not necessarily Israeli politicians' tactic of choice – the Lebanon war was fought a few months after one.
******
Israel is also supposed to be restoring the reputation and "deterrence factor" of its armed forces, after their humiliation in Lebanon in 2006. Suffice to say that until this weekend's unilateral ceasefire, in an aid-dependent enclave defended by an almost entirely isolated militia, Israel's operation had already lasted three times longer than the 1967 war when Israel defeated its Arab neighbours and occupied the rest of Mandate Palestine.
*******
These three suggested motivations have sometimes reached the level of assumed knowledge, providing the background for further comment and reporting. Based on this kind of analysis, then, criticism of Palestinian civilian casualties is framed as "disproportionate" or "heavy-handed", but fundamentally a case of self-defence. It is understood that any democratic nation would have to respond to terrorist rocket fire, but Israel has gone a bit too far.
********
There is, however, no shortage of evidence available that points to rather different Israeli aims. Estimates for the proportion of civilian deaths among the 1,360 Palestinians killed range from more than half to two-thirds. Politicians, diplomats and journalists are by and large shying away from the obvious, namely that Israel has been deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians and the very infrastructure of normal life, in order to – in the best colonial style – teach the natives a lesson.
********
Given the enormous scale of what Palestinians have described as a "war of extermination" – it appears that some 15% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip were completely destroyed or collapsed and there is an estimated $1.4bn worth of destruction to vital civil infrastructure – it is impossible to list every atrocity. Israel has repeatedly hit ambulances, medics, clinics, and hospitals, while last week, aid volunteers who tried to douse a fire in a Red Crescent warehouse (attacked by Israel) were then shot at by Israeli forces.
*********
UNRWA facilities have also been attacked, including several schools sheltering civilians – just this last weekend, a civilian refuge was repeatedly shelled. Last week, the UN headquarters was also shelled, hitting a vocational centre, a workshop, food warehouse, and fuel depot. Like the massacre of 6 January, Israeli officials quickly began to produce a confusing fog of denials, apologies, promised enquiries and contradictions.
********
Those are just some of the more shocking examples from a military operation that has targeted everything from schools, money-changers and a bird farm, to entire apartment blocks, harbours, and a market. Palestinians have been killed when Israeli tanks fired shells at residential neighbourhoods. Every day has brought fresh horrors; last Wednesday, for example, 70 unarmed civilians including 18 children were killed by the Israeli military. This week's Observer carried a story alleging Israel bulldozed homes with civilians inside (not for the first time) and shot those waving white flags. Little wonder that Israeli officials predicted with concern that "negative sentiment" towards the state would "only grow as the full picture of destruction emerges".
********
Much of this is widely known, and easily accessible; yet still the analytical emphasis has remained on Palestinian rockets, Israeli elections, and deterrence. I would like to suggest three alternative purposes for Israel's Operation Cast Lead that go beyond the usual perspectives, and presuming with Yale professor David Bromwich that "if Israel in 2009 reduces to rubble a large portion of the Gaza Strip and leaves tens of thousands homeless, there is a strong chance that this was what it intended to do".
********
The first aim is to humiliate and weaken Hamas. On the one hand, this seems obvious, but contrary to how the goal is often understood, this is not primarily to protect the Israeli public – as pointed out previously, ceasefires and negotiations are far more likely to deliver security for Israeli citizens – but rather it is a political goal. Hamas had withstood isolation, a siege, mass arrests, and an attempted western-backed coup. Moreover, cracks were appearing in the international community's resolve to parrot Israel's line on Hamas. The group, with its resilience and ability to deliver on negotiated ceasefires, was threatening the chance to make a deal with the Ramallah "moderates", and so:
********
A hammer blow that shattered the movement, launching some of the resulting splinters in directions that once again put all of them beyond the pale, was the most effective way to keep at bay those third parties reaching the conclusion that engaging rather than excluding Hamas could enhance the prospects of peace.
*******
Back in December, before both the end of the six-month truce and the start of Operation Cast Lead, foreign minister Tzipi Livni stated that an extended truce "harms the Israel strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognizes the movement". By the end of the month, Livni would be telling a press conference that "Hamas wants to gain legitimacy from the international community" and stressing that it is "important to keep Hamas from becoming a legitimate organisation" (apparently winning a democratic election isn't enough to confer legitimacy).
********
Just as Israel chose "blood over diplomacy" in order to avoid enhancing "Hamas's image as a responsible interlocutor", so this weekend, Israel chose a unilateral ceasefire for the same reason, "hoping to send the message that Hamas is not a legitimate actor". A war begun in order to delegitimise Hamas would not make way for a ceasefire in which Hamas was a partner at the negotiating table.
********
Hence Israel decided to shortcut the Egyptian-driven efforts at securing a ceasefire, and opt for a unilateral approach that allows Israel, the US, Egypt, Mahmoud Abbas, Britain – in fact, every interested party, except the Gaza Strip authorities – to work together on an apparent solution. It is also worth pointing out that the unilateral nature of the ceasefire frees Israel to define an infringement or collapse on its own terms.
********
The second aim of Israel's war is to teach a lesson to the Palestinians in Gaza, and elsewhere, that the only way to avoid the wrath of the Israeli military is to accept Israel's idea of a two-state solution, a generous concession to be gratefully received by Abbas and fellow moderates. It is a reflection of the approach outlined by the IDF chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, in 2002 that "the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people".
*******
On 4 January, Israeli President Shimon Peres said that Hamas needed "a real and serious lesson"; days later, he was more explicit, reportedly declaring Israel's aim to be "to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel". The next day, the Washington Post also described how Israeli officials were hoping that the attacks would mean "that Gazans become disgusted with Hamas and drive the group from power".
********
This Israeli strategy was previously deployed in Lebanon in 2006, when senior military commanders redefined civilian villages as "military bases" which would be subjected to "disproportionate force" causing "great damage and destruction". As I previously noted, the lessons learned in Lebanon were not just wrong, but criminal: a retired IDF major general and former adviser to the prime minister, Giora Eiland, reflected in a paper that "the destruction of homes and infrastructure and the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people are consequences that can influence Hezbollah's behaviour more than anything else".
********
Ironically, the same Peres who now justifies collective punishment, in 2002 chastised Avigdor Lieberman for suggesting that the IDF should bomb civilian targets, warning the minister that such a tactic would be a war crime. The last three weeks show that proposals made by Israel's political extremists and originally considered outlandish, do not take long to become normal policy.
********
Deliberately targeting civilians and vital infrastructure for political purposes links smoothly, into the post-conflict phase, with the Israeli and US plan to try and rescue the deeply discredited image of the Palestinian Authority through a politicised reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. As US state department spokesman Sean McCormack coyly put it, the "military solution" must be followed up by investing in infrastructure and helping the population "so that they can make a different kind of political decision".
********
The third aim of Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip is to further "catastrophise" the territory, reducing the capacity for continued existence to the barest of minimums – perhaps to bring about "an end to the persistence of Gaza's ordinary people in wanting the chance of a peaceful and dignified life". One obvious benefit to Israel of pulverising "civilian Palestinian infrastructure" is that "people who lack collective institutions and are reduced to scrabbling for their very survival are easier to dominate".
*********
Yet, there is more going on here. Israel seeks to turn the Gaza Strip into a depoliticised humanitarian crisis, always on the brink of catastrophe, always dependent; its population reduced to ration-receiving clients of international aid. Yitzhak Rabin famously wished that Gaza "would just sink into the sea", but perhaps the best Israel can do is to share the problem with the international community, possibly to the extent of troops on the ground.
*********
Increasingly focusing on Egyptian responsibility is also part of this, whether in terms of arms smuggling, aid supplies, or for some, direct rule.
********
In all of this, the Gaza Strip has become a laboratory for future possible scenarios in the West Bank (where a process of "development-isation" and NGO-funded occupation is well established). All three of these Israeli aims – to delegitimise and sideline Hamas, to persuade Palestinians to give up their resistance and to shirk responsibility for a shattered Gaza Strip – require the deliberate commission of war crimes and gross human rights abuses. As time will tell, they are also doomed to fail.
Jan 18, 2009
Jan 17, 2009
Jan 14, 2009
Nuremberg principles
Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Adopted by the International Law Commission of the United Nations, 1950, and forming the cornerstone of international law:
Principle I
Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.
Principle II
The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.
Principle III
The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.
Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.
Principle I
Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.
Principle II
The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.
Principle III
The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.
Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.
_____________________________________________
The SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) signed with the Iraqi government over the objections of many Iraqis, significantly Muqtada Al Sadr, is in many respects a meaningless document, according to many US commentators. US forces will not, apparently, move out of Iraqi cities as agreed; they will stay where they are, but be called “Support troops” rather than “Combat troops.”
*************
Similarly, the fifteen thousand or so prisoners in US jails, which must, now they fall under Iraqi, not US, law, be either charged with a crime or released, will continue to languish in their prisons, if the Iraqi government agrees to this, as demanded by the US.
************
By coy admission of US news reports, it is the US which is behind Ukraine’s blocking of the gas which Russia had turned on again. A very odd situation, since Russia now insists that only a new pipeline completely bypassing Ukraine can solve the problem. Not only missiles aimed at it from Poland and the Czech Republic, but the cause of freezing people throughout eastern Europe, and probably of the complete disarming of its Ukrainian proxy. The bankrupt US clearly has no wish for friendly relations with the main depositary of oil and gas in the world, far larger than Saudi Arabia.
************
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that Iran is not trying to make nuclear weapons, and that even if Iran had them, they would be useless against the two hundred Israel has, and the thousands in the USA. Iran’s real crime is the proposed Oil Bourse, trading oil in currencies other than dollars: no more “mint in your backyard” by possessing the only petrocurrency. That horse has already bolted, however. Only one third of China's trade is export business. Two thirds is domestic consumption, and the current financial chaos has resulted in a fall of three per cent in export business. The dire predictions of financial disaster for China as exports to the US dry up are something of a joke - in its reporting as in its treaties and agreements, US statements are hardly worth the paper they are written on or the breath required to make them. China has allowed its currency to be used for inter Asian trade, and the best Washington can hope for is to be included in a basket of currencies used as the new reserve.
**********
Timothy Geithner is by no means “the only man in Washington who understands the TARP program.” Many people understand it very well. Mr. Hank Paulson, previously head of Goldman, Sachs was made head of the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) as a temporary hire of the federal government, and given power to over rule all existing government agencies. $350 billion was distributed to the banks. Many institutions rushed to declare themselves banks, including GMAC, the department of General Motors previously arranging financing for purchasers of GM cars. Space for parking all the GM cars that no one wants to buy is running short, and GMAC is advertising on TV for people to deposit money with them, with what success is not known. By one professional estimate, $200 billion would have been sufficient to buy all the troubled mortgages overhanging the economy. None of the banks have said what they have done with their share of the $350 billion, and the Treasury has similarly given vague and repetitive answers to congressional questions on what happened to the $350 billion. No one is willing to say what happened to the money. (Mr. Bernie Madoff is mailing boxes of jewellery and checks to his friend and family and Ms. Condy Rice has a very large haul of diamonds presented to her during official visits to Middle Eastern countries.) A second tranche of $350 billion for Mr. Obama to dispose of is waiting.
************
The coming administration of the little Luo certainly needs to protect its own existence, and the limitation of inauguration contributions to $50,000 and the complete banning of contributions from lobbyists were very impressive. An honest man, apparently. The closing of Guantanamo is also positive. The US refused to give up its lease of the land from the Batista regime that Castro overthrew, and Castro has never cashed any of the checks regularly sent by the US under its Batista agreement. Will they now admit the Batista regime has gone, and hand the land back to Cuba?
********
Above all, the incoming administration can not dodge the question whether they are going to investigate, and punish, contraventions of the law by the previous administration. (The appointment of Admiral Blair, who aided and supported the slaughter of the Timorese by General Wiranto, - How dare they vote for independence! - as Obama’s head of Intelligence is not promising.)
*********
Without that, any administration can use the Bush continuation of Nixon’s “If the president did it, then it's legal” as precedent.
*********
“Mr. Obama’s pick for attorney general, the mild-looking Eric Holder, may be the key figure in the early months of the new government. If he doesn’t commence some aggressive investigations and prosecutions – beginning with Henry Paulson for insider trading when he was in charge of Goldman Sachs and shorting his own company’s mortgage-backed securities – [which he invented, by the way – ed.] then the whole Obama enterprise could fall under suspicion of illegitimacy.” The Daily Reckoning 12/23/08
***********
Iraqi victims are unanimous that US torture is far, far worse than that of Saddam. Hillary Clinton’s hearing in the US Congress (“protecting women”) makes it clear that the Pathan treatment of women a thousand miles away will be used as the justification for the Palestinian slaughter, and the Congressional “non-binding resolution” is a gleeful, jeering support of the Israeli campaign in Gaza. What disgusting people!
**********
What goes around comes around – don’t whine then.
_____________________________________________
The people at the Pentagon better hope they win, since at the Nuremberg Trial the Charter of the International Military Tribunal shows what is a hanging offense if they lose.
Quote:
Quote:
(a) CRIMES AGAINST PEACE: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
*******
(b) WAR CRIMES: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
******
(c) CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
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