The Massachusetts SpyVolume CCXLI, Number 316 March 14, 2011

Dispatches from the War Fronts:

HOT AIR FORCE ORDERS
AN ATTACK ON LIBYA 

By Douglas MacArthur
War Correspondent

To the halls of Tripoli!
The Hot Air Force is ready to relive those glory days in Tripoli.

WASHINGTON, D.C. –
From the halls of Saddam's palaces/
to the shores of Tripoli,/
we will send your children into war and/
if it flops, well, don't blame me.

Once again, the stirring chords of the 101.1st Hot Air Force Battle Song were heard ringing up and down the TV studios, newsrooms, parents' basements, Bizarro think tanks, and other battle stations of the Hot Air Force, those brave soldiers who selflessly write, blog, editorialize, and bloviate 24 hours a day without surcease. Their mission: send someone's else children into harm's way to vindicate their wet dream of American military supremacy. 

Fresh from their, um, triumphs in Afghanistan (ten years of war, over 1,700 Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans dead, zero chance of victory) and Iraq (over 4,700 Americans dead, tens of thousands wounded and scarred for life, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or missing, total failure), the HAF'ers have once again found a Muslim dictator that they think they can beat. (For earlier sorties by the HAF, see here, here, and here.)

Deploying a day's worth of verbiage on on the HAF's favorite battlefield – the Washington Post editorial page under the command of HAF Generalissimo Freddie Hiatt '76 – Col. Charles Strangelove [Surely, Krauthammer? – Ed.], hearing the same voices that assured him that Saddam Hussein was sitting on 20 A-bombs or something, now claims a chorus in support of his decision to invade Libya with your children. 

Pretty much on the same beach former Bush Administration coatholder, now rattling his sabers for the HAF, Captain Marc Thiessen suggested doing to Libya what Ronald Reagan did to Nicaragua, although he didn't specify who would commit the kinds of atrocities perpetrated by the Contras in the name of, well, making ol' Ron look like a tough guy. (For an appreciation of Reagan's visionary – in the literal sense of the word, meaning based on seeing visions – leadership, click here.)


Nonstops from Tripoli to Dover AFB coming soon?The HAF's latest sortie may be bad news for American youth but the makes of aluminum boxes are probably pretty amped about it.

Not to be outdone, the well-groomed Chief of War Planning for the Hot Air Force, former Bush Administration prevaricator Gen. Paul Wolfowitz, has with his customary lack of intellectual honesty deployed 750 words on another favorite HAF battlefield – the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal – in the service of sending either your kids or boatloads of weapons to some guys in Libya.

Hey, why not send advanced weaponry including shoulder-fired missiles that could bring down a 747 with one push of a button to a bunch of guys we know nothing about? It's not like arming a motley bunch of Islamic rebels could ever lead to weapons being diverted to terrorist organizations bent on killing Americans. Well, OK, that's exactly what happened in Afghanistan, but world-historical gasbags like Gen. Wolfowitz don't repeat history, they repeal it. At least in their own minds.

Yet some leading armchair HAF patriots have strangely withheld their rhetorical fire this time around.  Where is Gen. Tom Friedman, whose repeated verbal salvos proved vital in sending so many young Americans to death or grisly injury in Iraq? Where is Corporal Rush "Oh my achin' back" Limbaugh? Back in rehab? And what about all those grizzled veterans of Bush Administration verbal fireworks who did so much or so little when W. wanted to play General in Iraq?  Too busy shopping for shoes or donor hearts?

Fortunately, there's never a shortage of loudmouths volunteering for service in the Hot Air Force and for shipping off your children as cannon fodder.  The La Passionata of the HAF, Gunnery Sergeant Sarah "Grandma" Palin, has already called for sending more troops although, given the propensity of her verbal armament to jam and misfire, it's not too clear what Grandma wants to do with young people who had to enlist in the military to support their children because no one picked them for Dancing With the Stars.

And yet, it's hard to avoid the sense that this time out, having been blown out of the water in the last two wars they started and ignored when they ran out their verbal guns to assault the paper tiger that is Iran, the HAF's have hunkered down in the bushes preparing to wage a long-term guerrilla war against the Obama Administration.

Typical of these hit-and-run tactics was a recent e-mail assault mounted by veteran warmonger and HAF Major Danielle Pletka, still looking for those Iraqi WMD's. She bashed Obama for doing "nothing" on Libya, without actually stating where she and her fellow HAF's want to lead the younger brothers and sisters of those who gave too much in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why the reluctance? Maybe, having sustained lethal injuries to their credibility in the twin Middle Eastern infernos of their creation, they need time to rearm, refuel, and recaffinate. After all war is hell, even if you don't get any closer to it than a microphone on K Street. Or, as in the case of new HAF recruit PFC Michele Bachmann, the hallowed fields and woods of Concord and Lexington, New Hampshire.




[Why? – Ed.] 

WHY WE FIGHT ON 

BAGHDAD — In the two weeks since President Barack Obama declared the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, a series of bloody skirmishes has sharpened the questions about the Iraqi security forces' ability to protect the country.

In three incidents in different parts of Iraq, American forces stepped in with ground troops and air support when their Iraqi counterparts were threatened by suicide attackers or well-armed gunmen, according to U.S. and Iraqi military accounts.

The incidents suggest that the 50,000 U.S. soldiers who remain in Iraq, far from merely "advising and assisting" Iraqi forces, as the Obama administration has described their new role, are still needed on the battlefields as insurgents try to exploit the diminished American military presence and the six-month political stalemate that's failed to produce a new Iraqi government since the country's March 7 elections.

In one example of the challenges facing the Iraqi forces, an operation against at most 25 fighters dug into a palm orchard in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, escalated into an intense, three-day battle that left 11 Iraqi soldiers dead and 22 wounded. On the third day, Iraqi forces called for help from an American Army brigade, which sent Special Forces troops, Apache attack helicopters and Air Force F-16 fighters that dropped two 500-lb. bombs, the U.S. military said.

"If it wasn't for the American air support and artillery," said an Iraqi lieutenant, who described the battle to McClatchy on condition of anonymity to protect his job, "we would never have dreamed of entering that orchard."

Despite years of training by the U.S. military at a cost of some $24 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, the Iraqi forces have failed to win the public's confidence. Their performance lately has generated only criticism.

On Friday in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad in the heart of Sunni Muslim Anbar province, protesters condemned Iraqi security forces for a raid Wednesday that killed seven people, including a fifth-grade boy, and badly injured a woman in her 90s. U.S. ground troops and helicopters accompanied the Iraqis on the raid, which targeted a suspected Sunni insurgent, the U.S. military said.

. . . .

Rashwan al Hiti, 33, whose brother-in-law, an Iraqi Army sergeant, worked on the second floor of a building in the compound and was found shot in the head, was stunned that insurgents could penetrate a supposedly well-guarded government facility.

"Where are the guards, where are the (workers at) reception?" al Hiti said. "How do terrorists enter that building?"

 . . . .

The fight in the village of al Hadayda, just west of the city of Baqouba, began on Sept. 11 after police reported fighters and a possible bomb-making site in the area, the lieutenant said. Fighters were dug into trenches in a one-acre grove, and the lieutenant's battalion called for backup when the 19th Brigade of the Iraqi Army immediately came under fire from snipers.

Reinforcements failed to stop the barrage of sniper fire and grenades. On the second day, when the Iraqis called for a mortar battery, the soldiers were "shocked" to find that the team wasn't armed with any mortars.

"Morale was down to the ground," he said.

. . . .


"The number of fighters we faced wasn't more than 15," the lieutenant said in frustration.

"Three-quarters of our soldiers only care about their salaries. They have no readiness to fight. And to add to it, we have no good command that can plan and lead the army to victory."

Another soldier from his brigade had a simpler take.

"Bottom line," he said, "if it wasn't for God and the Americans, we would never have won this."


 – McClatchy.com, September 17, 2010.