The Saddam Capture and Psy Ops

If something seems to good to be true, it probably is. As such, some interesting wire reports are coming out about the Saddam capture. Basically, what they are saying that what really happened was that a Saddam was staying in Tikrit, his home town, and was ratted out by a tribe who had a daughter raped by his son Uday. They turned him into Jamil Talibani's PUK Kurdish Pesh Merga, who then worked out a political deal with the Americans. They then drugged him and put him in the "rat hole" for the Americans.

My feeling is that US Army psychological warfare teams* couldn’t have created a better story of the capture of Saddam, which means it’s likely that they did. Everything about the capture perfectly resonated the feelings that the US wants to push onto the Arab world: resistance is futile. Even the Lion of Babylon, the man who defied American power for over a decade, was found in a hole amongst rats looking like an Arab Ted Kazinsky when his card was finally pulled.


Here’s an interesting excerpt from an interview with Bush:

MS. SAWYER: Was he sedated? And was it designed to humiliate him?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I don't--first of all, I don't know if he was sedated or not. I mean, that's a question you'd ask the folks in the field.

Secondly, it was designed to reflect the truth and to show--and to show the world that this barbaric person was found in a hole, hiding, cowering...

So what makes me give credence to this particular claim from the Kurds? Well, US brass and Ahmed Chalabi made several mentions of help from the Kurdish militia, but what kind of help could the Pesh Merga really offer US Special Ops? There is no comparison between a US Navy SEAL and Kurdish mountain fighter. So just what kind of help was it?

I don’t know that if this is true it will amount to a scandal. The Bush administration, armed with the mind of Karl Rove, knows how to manage image. Ever notice those little banners behind Bush with a few key words reinforcing his message? Will the American public really care that the Bush team lied about how they captured Saddam when they really don’t seem to care that no WMD has been found?

It worries me how much control this administration has over information. If you remember, the Afghanistan War was reported only as a series of Pentagon and White House press releases. The mainstream press has not given proper skepticism to the words of Bush (whereas the alternative press has never given proper credit to the truth and wisdom to any of Bush’s words). The networks need to work around being the advocater of this Administration, while still reporting on it's agenda.

* Psychological Warfare is an integral part of any modern military. Psy Ops specialists are masters of perception and deception. Their most infamous work was building a mock armored battalion out of wood along the Kuwaiti border in 1991 to feign a direct invasion instead of the left hook through Iraq that actually took place. They also arrange for soldiers only over six feet tall to guard the Korean DMZ. They’re also in charge of propaganda and publishing and help in crafting press releases and press conferences. It was recently uncovered that Psy Ops was sending letters to the editor to local news papers and forging the names of troops as the signatories.


Links:
DebkaFILE - Very pro-Israeli hawkish site
Republicons - Obviously a bit partisan
More as I find them


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq Saddam Hussein Capture Bush staged Pys-Ops Pyschological Warfare

Progress

I know it’s been forever sense I last posted. Contrary to expectations, I’ve been very busy throughout the break making new friends and catching up with old ones. It’s been a blast so far and I’m only a week and a half into it – I still have New Years in New Orleans to look forward to. This is going to be a far less formal post than normal, being that this is not a Spinnaker submission.

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My thoughts lately have been more abstract than usual, crunching the problem of justifying my linear progressive political thought. Linearism is the idea that we’re going somewhere - that progress in thought and material is making mans lot somehow better than it was before. I confronted a mad genius about a month ago who challenged my thoughts on civilization and what progress really is. Mr. Vorchek was himself an anarcho-primativist. Though I wasn’t very impressed with his Ænemiac embrace of tearing down Western modernity for fear of failure, he did stir some thoughts that I had been dormant for awhile.

The two toughest questions stirred were thus: Is life truly better now than it was a decade, century, or millennia ago? And where are we going, what is this grand and noble vision?

To answer the first question, we must get to its root. What do we mean by better off? We could take Jeremy Bentham’s direction, and simply conclude that man’s lot can be gauged through his happiness. I don’t feel that qualitive judgments on our existence should be answered with hedonism. One of the core problems with this approach is that we’re measuring an absolute gain over time and not relative gains. Happiness is relative by nature. I do not find that our psychotropic-loving modern man is much happier than his ancestor of old.

So what then is an appropriate measuring stick? Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I think the Greeks were on to something with there constant pursuit of the nature of justice. Being that we’re measuring these qualities absolutely, let us look at the advance of mankind over the past century both mentally and physically. Physically, one must look no further than the fields of medicine. Over the past century, we’ve watched the development of vaccines for Polio, Malaria, Influenza and other ailments that severely crippled and painfully killed off huge quantities of people bring these ailments under control. Government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Intergovernmental Organizations (IGO’s) like the World Health Organization stop epidemics in their tracks, like SARS last summer.

Mentally, Western Man is freer than ever. Though some like Foucault would argue that this freedom is all illusion, the very fact that I’m able to post online and have a friend across the Pacific read these ideas so that she can spread them into a “communist” country if she sees them fit speaks to one of the greatest virtues of the information age. Ideas are allowed, and do, spread like wildfire. A century ago, we were just beginning to harness the technology of relaying small messages across the Atlantic about events on either side of the lake. Common man could not spread his thoughts without getting published, where today almost anyone literate (provided they attend and use their free public education) can find a library with free internet access and self-publish just as I do.

In absolute terms, man’s general lot has improved enormously in the past century. His happiness has not. Mothers in Westernized nations don’t have to deal with high infant mortality rates, paralyzed and ostracized children with Polio, and Malarial mosquito’s. This does not mean that the pain of man has been alleviated or that new problems haven’t arisen, it’s only that problems that have solutions today are fixed. Relatively, we measure our lot not with our Great-Grandparent’s but rather with the Jones’s, our next door neighbor, which is why relative happiness will not increase with absolute gains.

To answer the second question, where are we going, I worded a horrible answer at the time. “Have you ever seen Star Trek? Imagine that, minus the interstellar travel and aliens,” was the best answer I could think of. What I meant by the answer was that in the fictional world of Star Trek, most of the problems of the industrial revolution had been resolved and mankind didn’t need to worry about the next harvest, having a roof over ones head, clothes on ones back, and consequently crime wasn’t an issue. This is not to say that men did not suffer, that spouses were always faithful, that parents and children did not die, or and that crime was never committed and that all were happy and none sad. Man would still judge his lot based on his fellow man, but by and large the plaques of the 20th century were solved. Wars, pain, and sadness still went on, but the reasons for sadness were far less severe than our reasons are today. Just AIDS is a horrible epidemic, wiping out a third the population in some African nations and affecting something like 1 in 40 Americans, it doesn’t hold a candle to bubonic plaque’s suffering.

The problem with primitivism thought, beyond that it is utopian in it’s own right, is that it goes contrary to human nature. The difference between humans and other extinct humanoids was that man was able to step outside of genetics to evolve. Unlike any other animal on earth, we don't need an extra chromosone to go from fires outside a cave to nuclear fission reactors. We were able to make tools, shelter, and clothing and improve upon them as necessity dictated. This continues today. We will find the cures for the diseases that ravage our people, we will find ways to alleviate grinding poverty, and we will work to educate children and adults. If nothing else, societies will do this to keep their competitive advantages against other societies.

For all its shortcomings, I have not lost faith in Western Civilization and the idea of progress that brought us where we are. My idea of progress has been refined over the past few weeks though. I don’t really feel that there is any one utopia that we ought to follow, but instead there are injustices to be alleviated. The essence of linear thinking in politics is problem solving and achieving goals, and there is nothing wrong with that. We will march on.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Politics Foucault Civilization Anarcho-Primativism

The Democrats....

Many people are asking me whom I support in the 2004 Democratic Primaries. Well, I’ll give you a short history of my political thought on this subject and bring you where I am today. First I was adamantly pro-Dean. I believe the only one who can take on Bush is going to have to be tough, someone who cuts the chase and tells you how it is, someone who won’t sugarcoat and meander around all the important issues. I also liked Dean because from all reports, he was a very moderate governor – fiscally conservative, but still had his social priorities straight – like health insurance for all children in the state. He also seems to know how to mobilize otherwise politically apathetic voters.

Then Dean seemed to be pandering farther and farther to the isolationist left. I don’t mind at all that he didn’t support the war in Iraq, and didn’t pull a Kerry by supporting it just so it’d look better on the campaign trail. But he started talking about repealing “every cent” of the Bush tax cut, balancing the federal budget even when the economy is sinking, and supported withdrawing US troops from Iraq to be replaced with international troops. To me, all of these are really bad ideas. Not only are they bad ideas, but they’re unelectable ideas. One cannot expect to get voted into office under the promise of taking back at least $200 from almost every American family.

So I then threw my conditional support to Clark, someone who just recently joined our fair party. He’s a four-star general, which is about at tough as it comes, and an intellectual as well. He even taught economics at West Point, which is not exactly a bad trait for a President. He seemed to hold all the best traits of Dean, but also seemed very electable. Who better than a former NATO commander to refocus the war on terror, and not sound like a hippy peacenik by opposing the Iraq war?

Well, my support for him has fizzled. I still think he’s the most electable of this motley ensemble. But he’s come out against financing the rebuilding of Iraq, which is a terrible idea. Even as an ardent fighter against this war, it is our mess nonetheless and I believe we need to clean it up – no matter what the cost. This is war, and this is the price of war. Furthermore, he stumbles around – he flip-flopped on his position on Iraq. Now I hear he supports a flag burning ban amendment to the Constitution. Wow... (not that I support flag-burning, but a Constitutional Amendment?! When we learn out lesson about prohibitive laws against the citizenry in the Constitution)

Most of the Democratic candidates, Lieberman aside, are in pure reactionary mode. They want to revoke and undo everything that Bush has done in his 3 years thusfar, and that’s just empty rhetoric. I want substantive ideas, not regression. We need to work with what we have, not pretend we’re going to pick up where Clinton left off in 2000. The fact of the matter is Bush has changed the course of America in his 3 years, and doing a 180 in reaction wouldn’t be more disasterous than his own foreign policy.

I don’t fully support any of them. I almost trust Bush better with foreign policy now, simply because he’s obviously contained/preoccupied – if not humbled – and will more than likely not embark on any more “regime change” adventures in the Middle East. He broke it, he needs to fix it. I honestly would feel very queasy about handing Iraq over to Dean, who will muddle it up worse by withdrawing under fire. One does not withdraw from combat because of a 2/10ths of a percent casualty rate. That’s a surefire way to ensure the war on terrorism is skewed towards to Jihadist.

Dean is right that the Democrats lost the mid-term elections because they did not distinquish themselves from the Republicans. Bush-lite is not a viable option for a Democratic presidential candidate who wants to win the general election, but it unfortunately like only the Anti-Bush will win the nomination. We Democrats need to learn some lessons from the the Republicans - find leadership, create a solid agenda and push it hard , let the American public see these leaders push and explain this agenda, and maintain tighter party discipline.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Democrats Primaries 2004 election Dean Kerry

The V-Word

The V-word seems to have become the first “politically incorrect” word that the rightwing has adopted. It carries with it the painful memories of their generation, and a painful legacy taught to ours. There are as many theories as to what went wrong in Vietnam as there are people who experienced or studied it.

I fear that because the memory is so painful, and carries with it so much weight, that it has become impolite, if not taboo, to talk about it in context to our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hear people on the radio allude to Vietnam, then quickly write it off – bring up shallower points of pointing out just how different the geography is between arid desert plains and jungle. Though the geography and enemy are different, I have questioned how different the military strategies are in this war of terrorism with the military strategies of the Cold War.

Though we ended up winning the cold war, we won all of our battles politically – not militarily. Let us remember that Korea was no great victory. We were pushed out of Pyongyang by the Chinese and came to a stalemate at the 38th parallel. This is now the DMZ between North and South Korea still zealously guarded by over a million troops on both sides, even though the Berlin Wall has long sense come down. Vietnam was... well, Vietnam. Central America was a covert bloody mess for us too. Let us not forget whom we empowered to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, lest we forget September 11. I think there are strong lessons and parallels that we must draw from to learn from our mistakes for sounder victories in the war on terror.

Secretary of State Colin Powell fought in Vietnam, and applied our lessons their to a self-named doctrine that I hope the Bush Administration is working with today. The doctrine consisted of understanding your political objectives, matching political objectives with military objectives if necessary – creating a clear and concise mission, with a clear and concise exit strategy. Following this would prevent open-ended wars like Vietnam, with military goals that were impossible to accomplish without working against political objectives.

Unfortunately, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was recovering from a rocket attack on his hotel in Baghdad, he continued to speak of “transformation” of the Middle East. Though indeed a democratic and libertarian transformation of the Middle East would be amazingly helpful in the war against terrorism, we must ask how well this can be accomplished with Abram’s tanks and Apache gunships and how long that would take. Though these machines were meant to end the cold war, we must remember that World War III never happened – it was statecraft and triumphs of will that brought an end to that affair.
Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq, Terrorism Insurgency Vietnam Quagmire Exit Strategy