Say It Ain't So, Joe!

Just a small blip in the E-bird from Newsweek, incompetence again gets rewarded:

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Newsweek
December 10, 2007

Periscope An Old Face Resurfaces

The Bush administration has offered the former World Bank president a new public service position.

By Michael Isikoff

Don't ever say the Bush administration doesn't take care of its own. Nearly three years after Paul Wolfowitz resigned as deputy Defense secretary and six months after his stormy departure as president of the World Bank—amid allegations that he improperly awarded a raise to his girlfriend—he's in line to return to public service. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq War, a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, a prestigious State Department panel, according to two department sources who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters. The 18-member panel, which has access to highly classified intelligence, advises Rice on disarmament, nuclear proliferation, WMD issues and other matters. "We think he is well suited and will do an excellent job," said one senior official.

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you're hearing is me hitting my head against the table.

More of the New American Century brotherhood and the adventure continues...

Excerpts published from Craig Unger's new book say Wolfowitz was considered for DCI in 2000. I'm a bit skeptical about this story and Unger in general, but the story is that Wolfowitz's extracurricular activities while Dean of SAIS didn't sit to well with Mrs. Wolfowitz, so she started to talk about his indiscretions -- killing his shot at DCI.

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How Cheney took control of Bush's foreign policy: The new veep installed crony Don Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, and would've won Paul Wolfowitz the top post at CIA -- if not for Wolfowitz's zipper problem. By Craig Unger, Salon.com, Nov. 09, 2007

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I will admit to feeling slimy by peddling People Magazine style tabloid journalism here. But one paragraph got to me (emphasis mine):

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According to a former State Department official, Wolfowitz was quite taken with the notion that he, a secular Jew, was dating a Muslim. Their relationship put a heady, modern, and romantic face on the entire neocon project of democratizing the Middle East. As the Bush-Cheney team prepared to take office, Wolfowitz and Riza, not his wife Clare, took in the neocon social circuit together. Riza was known to Cheney. She moved in the same circles with and was admired by Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile Wolfowitz backed as a successor to Saddam. "Shaha was the embodiment of the outcome of the modern Arab political system as the neocons saw it," said the State Department source. "She was the personification of the outcome they hoped for in Iraq. She was not theoretical. She was not in a burka. She was a modern Arab feminist."

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Not to conflate this into a major insight, but don't unrelated personal matters on the periphery sometimes yield disproportionate effects in shading a decision makers thinking?

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Not to conflate this into a major insight, but don't unrelated personal matters on the periphery sometimes yield disproportionate effects in shading a decision makers thinking?

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Certainly in this guy's case--after all his companion and her position with the World Bank was what got him into trouble there. I just find it unfathomable how anyone can say, "Yeah he's the ticket. He has the track record we need, " unless of course, that anyone is Don Rickles doing his sarcastic bit.

Tom

Wolfowitz, all will remember, is the one who bullied Shinseki out of the Army. Shinseki had the nerve to say to the Congress that it would take several hundred thousand more troops than we had going into Iraq to secure and maintain the peace.

I know that the mantra here at the SWJ is that more force is counterproductive, makes more insurgents, counter to the greatest and best COIN theory, and counter the notion of COIN as armed social science. I know that regardles of the OIF II and III difficulties, many here at this forum would still claim (and do still claim) that the small footprint model is the right one. Since I don't want to get into a long winded discussion about my views concerning force projection and how it is inversely related to the actual need to use that force in COIN, I will just say "notwithstanding the view of COIN as armed social science" (and my disagreement with it) and without getting into all of the things that Wolfowitz did wrong, I consider him to be an incompetent burden on society (American and international society). This man ignored the counsel of senior military leaders in favor of pet theories, threw well treaded military doctrine under the bus, bullied men out of the service, threw the U.S. armed forces into the middle of a conflict without the necessary foresight or planning or forces, and then got out unscathed.

I am disgusted by this man, and I consider him to be a dreadful human who - one day - will have much to answer for. I am sorry to see this administration continue to protect and promote him.

And in saying this, I am not really being completely forthright on exactly how I truly feel about this man because of the public nature of this forum. 'Nuff said.

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Originally Posted by Danny

Wolfowitz, all will remember, is the one who bullied Shinseki out of the Army. Shinseki had the nerve to say to the Congress that it would take several hundred thousand more troops than we had going into Iraq to secure and maintain the peace.

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Not true. Shinseki had already set his retirement date by the time of the exchange over Iraq troop numbers. If anything, it was the relationship with Rumsfeld that led Shinseki to retire.

I believe that Shinseki and the civilian leadership (both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) were at odds for quite some time over the force size, with Shinseki unwilling to go along. The problems between them didn't just surface with his congressional testimony. I was going to supply links (URLs), but there are so many I didn't know where to start and how many to give.

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Originally Posted by Danny

I believe that Shinseki and the civilian leadership (both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) were at odds for quite some time over the force size, with Shinseki unwilling to go along. The problems between them didn't just surface with his congressional testimony. I was going to supply links (URLs), but there are so many I didn't know where to start and how many to give.

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SECARMY White was fired after backing Shinseki. But again, this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. The myth that the congressional testimony got Shinkseki fired has been repeated by people like Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry (Pelosi on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," November 30, 2005; Kerry, Press Conference, Tipton, IA, October 5, 2004).

Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward and Mike Gordon have covered the issue extensively. Also useful is David Rieff, "Blueprint for a Mess," New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003, and Jim Fallows, "Blind Into Bagdad," Atlantic, January/February 2004 touch on it.

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I know that the mantra here at the SWJ is that more force is counterproductive, makes more insurgents, counter to the greatest and best COIN theory, and counter the notion of COIN as armed social science.

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Danny, your statement above is not correct either. OIF I was not a counterinsurgency, it was all out war, state versus state, so we obviously didn't go into OIF I with a counterinsurgency force. It was an Air-Land battle approach with a little Boyd thrown in (run up the middle and get inside their OODA loop, destroy them before they can react).

I also think many participants in this council agree with GEN(R) Shinseki that more force was required. The planning assumption back then was that the Iraqi Army was going to switch sides and work with us, but when the Iraqi Army refused to act like the Italians during WWII, we had a huge problem on our hands, now we had to secure all of Iraq with our minimal forces, and we were still in denial that we were doing COIN for a few months. Then Wolfowitz II came in (Bremer) and simply demobilized the Iraqi Army with apparently little thought about the impact (resulting in several hundred dead Americans and a quagmire).

If the plan was simply to topple Saddam and leave (which many in the land forces thought it was), then Wolfowitz's force ratio was adequate, because it worked, we toppled the regime, but when our objectives starting changing under our feet, "hey good job, now I need you to develop a stable democracy.....", we obviously were not prepared. COIN requires a very large security presence, either host nation or other, and since we disbanded the host nation's military, we should have surged immediately in an attempt to secure the population and get Iraq's security forces stood up again.

Paul will go down in history as an idiot, but that does us little good, as the damage has already been done.

As for him pushing Shinseki out, I have to agree with Steve, because I recall Shinseki telling us in 2001 (prior to 9/11) that he would be fishing in JUL 03.

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Originally Posted by Tom Odom

Just a small blip in the E-bird from Newsweek, incompetence again gets rewarded:

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Un-F'ng-Believable.

Johns Hopkins and corrupt young minds. Total loser...

Of course, believing there's always a pony in there somewhere, I would point out that in his new appointment, he will be ostensibly working with the boys and girls from Foggy Bottom -- who probably have a more rabid reaction to him than I do. I suspect (and hope) his tenure will not be pleasant -- death by a thousand cuts.

Maybe that's Bush's subtle idea of payback for screwing things up at DoD... ;)

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Originally Posted by JeffC

Un-F'ng-Believable.

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You know, I'm actually afraid that in my current job I'm actually going to meet the SOB and have to follow through on doing what I've always said I would do if I met him - punch him in the face and knee him in the balls. Hardly conduct for an officer and a gentlemen.

Too many people I know are dead from his (and his cronies) wishful thinking.

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Originally Posted by Cavguy

You know, I'm actually afraid that in my current job I'm actually going to meet the SOB and have to follow through on doing what I've always said I would do if I met him - punch him in the face and knee him in the balls. Hardly conduct for an officer and a gentlemen.

Too many people I know are dead from his (and his cronies) wishful thinking.

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Well, maybe fate will catch up with the SOB, and even better, maybe we'll hear about it.

Not to defend Rumsfeld or Wolfewitz, but I thought I'd mention a little political history of nearly a decade with Iraq.

for instance, post Desert Storm, we had incited the Shi'ites to rise up against Saddam. Whether through real or implied promises of assistance, the Shi'ites took it to mean we would support them. Our coalition partners of the time resisted an expansion of the mission beyond the ejection of iraqi forces from Kuwait. Our own politicians believed they could not get support for the mission at home and were concerned about the number casualties we might take. JCoS Powell's own doctrine rejected it, even as we had over 400k troops on the boarder. In the end, our lack of response turned into the Shi'ite "bay of pigs". It took months to get approval to do fly overs and ground Saddam's airborne forces. Even then, it wasn't enough to keep the genocidal massacres from happening. (which, of course, is one of the reasons that many Shi'ite were less than friendly to us, unwilling to give us time to resolve their issues and suspicious that we were complicit with the Sunni/al Qaida mass murders of Shi'ite).

in 1993, after Desert Storm and into the sanctions, national and international opinion was castigating the effects of the war, various tomahawk strikes and sanctions on the Iraqi people. This same issue continued over several years with politicians of all levels and nations continually insisting that there was nothing but great sorrow for the plight of the Iraqis. They consistently called for Saddam to comply with sanctions and inspection regime in order to lessen the plight of his people. While, at the same time, international opinion was painting the US now as the great aggressor against an innocent and defenseless people.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton signs the Iraq Liberation Act. its premise states that the Iraqis are oppressed by Saddam's regime and the US would act to depose the regime and "free" the Iraqis.

From that point on, all language consistently labels Saddam as an illegitimate ruler, his regime as oppressive and the Iraqi people as the victim of this terrible government. Not forgetting, of course, our European allies who were reluctant to act against Saddam or accept our action with an overwhelming public outcry against the human fallout of the sanctions. Not forgetting, either, that our ME friends were reluctant to have war simply declared on Iraq without a cause they could sell their own people. That cause being heavily reliant upon the terrible acts of the Iraqi army in Kuwait and the long term selling of Saddam as the oppressor and aggressor.

My point being that, in our discussions about troop numbers, force projection and over all lack of destruction on initial invasion cannot be viewed through some simple disagreement between the military and civilian leadership at the time as the best way to conduct war, some desire to do "war on the cheap" or misconstruing the intent of the Iraq army to "flip" or stay in place.

Clausewitz, war as the continuation of politics. Based on over a decade of watching our political and military dealings with Iraq as well as the reaction to even the strictest targeting, I believe we had painted ourselves into a political corner than insisted we approach Iraq as a "liberation", reducing all possible collateral damage to about nil and acting largely to protect the Iraqi people and the Iraqi nation, even from our own forces.

In fact, our naming the operation "Iraqi Freedom" was not simply a consequence of our shaping the battle space in 2003 in an attempt to reduce iraqi resistance or insure the cooperation of local governments or the assistance of coalition partners. It was also a consequence of a decade of national and international politics, including the "iraq liberation act".

In the end, I believe this had a significant impact on how we presented and organized our attack with limited forces with the intent of limited destruction and limited casualties. you can't simply pretend that those years did not exist or that we could suddenly turn around a decade of painting the Iraqis as "victims" and now make the entire nation complicit in Saddam's acts and targetable.

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It was also a consequence of a decade of national and international politics, including the "iraq liberation act".

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you'll find it was, indeed, an act -- in the theatric sense. State fought it tooth and nail and bureaucratically stalled, spent money on a lot of conferences and generally did nothing. Not to mention that the CIA and DoD wanted no part of Iraq. They all did what they were told but they did it at the bare minimum level and effectively accomplished very little. All political theater.

I think you'll also find that the name and the footprint were predicated on being out of there by the fall of 2003 -- and that in early May of 2003, something (and I have no clue what) happened to change the plan.

Watch for short articles by neo-conservative magazines that will start to provide a counterfactual explanation tied to the current Surge with the idea of resurrecting the former Secretary from mistakes made during the early months of the war. The counterfactual will pose that if the American Army would have had a better command team in place with a better understanding of Coin doctrine, cultural awareness, HTT teams, etc then the policy goals that the former Secretary was trying to accomplish could have been achieved. These writers will use the current and apparent successes of the Surge to show how things might have been different back in 03. All of this with the idea in mind to resurrect the former Secretary and detach him from purported mistakes made by the American Army earlier in the War.

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Originally Posted by Gian P Gentile

Watch for short articles by neo-conservative magazines that will start to provide a counterfactual explanation tied to the current Surge with the idea of resurrecting the former Secretary from mistakes made during the early months of the war. The counterfactual will pose that if the American Army would have had a better command team in place with a better understanding of Coin doctrine, cultural awareness, HTT teams, etc then the policy goals that the former Secretary was trying to accomplish could have been achieved. These writers will use the current and apparent successes of the Surge to show how things might have been different back in 03. All of this with the idea in mind to resurrect the former Secretary and detach him from purported mistakes made by the American Army earlier in the War.

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Gian

Already in play with a recent weekly standard article by Ms. Kagan that is making the rounds of email.It is posted here.

Best

Tom

Tom:

Thought so, and thanks for the link.

Best to you too.

gian

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Clausewitz, war as the continuation of politics. Based on over a decade of watching our political and military dealings with Iraq as well as the reaction to even the strictest targeting, I believe we had painted ourselves into a political corner than insisted we approach Iraq as a "liberation", reducing all possible collateral damage to about nil and acting largely to protect the Iraqi people and the Iraqi nation, even from our own forces.

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Kat,

In Clauswitzian fashion I believe we had done just the opposite with regards to Iraq since 1991. GEN Zinni had it right when he stood up and said we do not need to take down Baghdad. We had Saddam effectively contained.
Packer best relates the pressures of the neocons and their maneuvers to implement a dreamer's ideas on changing the Middle East. Theconfluence with 9-11 and the fevered thinking afterward will keep historians employed for the next 100 years.

The "we" which insisted that it would be a liberation was a very select group, none of whom know a damn thing about the Middle East in general or Iraq specifically. In any case, widespread destruction would not have served our purpose in the "plan" as it existed. From my take I see that plan as more a series of assumptions about getting the Army and the Iraqi government up and running that Bremer ultimately obviated.

Best

Tom

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Originally Posted by Gian P Gentile

the early doing of history (a prediction by a student of history)Watch for short articles by neo-conservative magazines that will start to provide a counterfactual explanation tied to the current Surge with the idea of resurrecting the former Secretary from mistakes made during the early months of the war. The counterfactual will pose that if the American Army would have had a better command team in place with a better understanding of Coin doctrine, cultural awareness, HTT teams, etc then the policy goals that the former Secretary was trying to accomplish could have been achieved. These writers will use the current and apparent successes of the Surge to show how things might have been different back in 03. All of this with the idea in mind to resurrect the former Secretary and detach him from purported mistakes made by the American Army earlier in the War.

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Gian,
As another student of history (and historiography to boot), I have a different name for what you are describing. But, I will be polite and just call it revisionist history, which in accounting is known as "cooking the books." Congress jumped on the bandwagon after the Enron debacle and created Sarbanes-Oxley. Is there any hope that they will every legislate full and open discosure of political policy-making? I think not.

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Originally Posted by wm

Gian,
As another student of history (and historiography to boot), I have a different name for what you are describing. But, I will be polite and just call it revisionist history, which in accounting is known as "cooking the books." Congress jumped on the bandwagon after the Enron debacle and created Sarbanes-Oxley. Is there any hope that they will every legislate full and open discosure of political policy-making? I think not.

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Nothing new in most of this. Take a look at the stuff that came out about Vietnam and the various twists and turns the history of that conflict has taken at the hands of instant pundits and "scholars" with agendas. We'll see the same thing here, too. Or the constant efforts by some to paint JFK as a saint and Nixon as the devil, no matter what the actual record shows.

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In Clauswitzian fashion I believe we had done just the opposite with regards to Iraq since 1991. GEN Zinni had it right when he stood up and said we do not need to take down Baghdad. We had Saddam effectively contained.
Packer best relates the pressures of the neocons and their maneuvers to implement a dreamer's ideas on changing the Middle East. The confluence with 9-11 and the fevered thinking afterward will keep historians employed for the next 100 years.

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I think my point was not about whether a decade of politics led to war or if containment was fine, but that a decade of politics, once we decided to go to war, effected our decisions on how we would prosecute it, what we would call it and our objectives. Of course, I could have played that better by selecting some other quote about political objectives in war, but I think Clausewitz was pretty straightforward. War is politics by another name. One shapes the other and vis-a-versa.

I have further thoughts on the whys and wherefores that are not so limited as to imagine it was simply the wants of some conspiratorial, rabid, warmongering kabal within the administration. Of course, I wasn't an insider nor do I have any allegiances to any particular political or military leader's views on the "right strategy". But, I am pretty familiar with creating "buy in" with large groups who are not in the military and you can't simply order by fiat. In which case, what you start out with as the "objective" and "plan" is not what you end with, nor does it necessarily reflect your own idea of optimal outcome.

Yet, it functions and might even be more successful than thought.

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The "we" which insisted that it would be a liberation was a very select group, none of whom know a damn thing about the Middle East in general or Iraq specifically.

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Possibly the "we" was select, but it doesn't mean that past decade did not color their views on conducting the war.

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In any case, widespread destruction would not have served our purpose in the "plan" as it existed. From my take I see that plan as more a series of assumptions about getting the Army and the Iraqi government up and running that Bremer ultimately obviated.

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Yes. I believe the failure was in having assumptions, watching them fail, being slow to recognize they failed and slow to change course. Then again, I don't believe we control every body and every reaction. It's simply a matter of who can react effectively.

by the way, I always liked Tommy Frank's "catastrophic victory" (culmination point?), but I thought it applied to Afghanistan the most.

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Originally Posted by SteveMetz

SECARMY White was fired after backing Shinseki. But again, this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. The myth that the congressional testimony got Shinkseki fired has been repeated by people like Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry (Pelosi on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," November 30, 2005; Kerry, Press Conference, Tipton, IA, October 5, 2004).

Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward and Mike Gordon have covered the issue extensively. Also useful is David Rieff, "Blueprint for a Mess," New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003, and Jim Fallows, "Blind Into Bagdad," Atlantic, January/February 2004 touch on it.

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Having worked for Shinseki, albeit indirectly, twice, I thought he was fired because there actually IS a God in the world.

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Originally Posted by Ken White

I think you'll also find that the name and the footprint were predicated on being out of there by the fall of 2003 -- and that in early May of 2003, something (and I have no clue what) happened to change the plan.

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I'm glad Ken brought this up. I've never quite understood how we made/make key decisions in this ongoing democracy project in Mesopotamia, or for that matter, who is making the decisions.

This amounted to a pretty significant change of plans...by somebody.

I'm just amazed that Mr. Wolfowitz seems to be unfazed about how wrong he has been proven to be on various things. My personal favorite is his plan for paying for the Iraq War:

On March 27, 2003, Wolfowitz told a Congressional panel that oil revenue earned by Iraq alone would pay for Iraq's reconstruction after the Iraq war; he testified: "The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. Now, there are a lot of claims on that money, but … We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.” By March 2005, two years later, oil revenues were not paying for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, Wolfowitz's estimation of 50 to 100 billion US dollars had not materialized, and, in light of his miscalculation, detractors criticized his appointment to head of the World Bank.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wo...o_the_Iraq_War

In June 2004, as reported on the MSNBC television program Deborah Norville Tonight, Tom Clancy asked about Paul Wolfowitz: "Is he really on our side?", narrating the context: "I sat in on—I was in the Pentagon in '01 for a red team operation and he came in and briefed us. And after the brief, I just thought, is he really on our side? Sorry."[74]

^ Qtd. on Deborah Norville Tonight, MSNBC, June 3, 2004, accessed April 18, 2007.


Now there is a thought for you. He is an Al Qaeda mole?? That would explain a few things in retrospect. Just have to wonder what that briefing was that he gave Tom Clancy.

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Originally Posted by Tacitus

In June 2004, as reported on the MSNBC television program Deborah Norville Tonight, Tom Clancy asked about Paul Wolfowitz: "Is he really on our side?", narrating the context: "I sat in on—I was in the Pentagon in '01 for a red team operation and he came in and briefed us. And after the brief, I just thought, is he really on our side? Sorry."[74]

^ Qtd. on Deborah Norville Tonight, MSNBC, June 3, 2004, accessed April 18, 2007.


Now there is a thought for you. He is an Al Qaeda mole?? That would explain a few things in retrospect. Just have to wonder what that briefing was that he gave Tom Clancy.

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Clancy could be a mole too...you never know.....

My favorite was the 2002 testimony to Congress during which he dismissed ethnic schisms in Iraq as being much less serious than they were in the Balkans.

Although I doubt he is an AQ mole, there is probably a caveat in AQ targeting guidance which says, "whatever you do, do not hurt this guy." :wry:

Tom

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Originally Posted by Tom Odom

. . .
Although I doubt he is an AQ mole, there is probably a caveat in AQ targeting guidance which says, "whatever you do, do not hurt this guy." :wry:

Tom

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Along that line, just ran across this LINK. I'm personally convinced Feith, like Wolfotwits, is one of those super intelligent idiots that abound and should never be in charge of anything but in this case, I think the evidence I've seen backs his version as stated at the link rather than the Bremer version.

I've always thought Bremer sold the Admin a bill of goods, got himself an ego-trip job and proceeded to screw it up totally.

Now Bremer as mole... :rolleyes:

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The speech reunited Iraq hawks, with former Pentagon official Richard Perle introducing Feith, as former deputy defense secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz sat in the front. After Feith's talk, Wolfowitz commented that he thought it was "pretty much on the mark."

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Oh what a gathering of stellar intellects; only at AEI.

And the books just keep coming...

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Originally Posted by Tacitus

Now there is a thought for you. He is an Al Qaeda mole?? That would explain a few things in retrospect. Just have to wonder what that briefing was that he gave Tom Clancy.

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I imagine Mr. Clancy had a particular country, of which we have a special relationship with, in mind when he made that comment. It has been reported that questions of Mr. Wolfowitz’s security risk go back to his Arms Control and Disarmament Agency days.

I'm sorry I came in late to this one. My personal favorite is from Ricks' Fiasco. My friend Paul Arcangeli on page 17:

" 'I actually was surpised to find, the first time I met him, that he was pretty likeable, which surprised me, because I hate him,' said Paul Arcangeli, who served as an Army officer in Iraq before being medically retired. (His loathing, he explained, is a policy matter: 'I blame him for all this s@#t in Iraq. Even more than Rumsfeld, I blame him.' His bottom line on Wolfowitz: 'Dangerously idealistic. And crack-smoking stupid.')"

Cheers,