Iraq was 20 Years Ago Today…

March 19, 2023 // 13 Comments »

I was part of Iraq 2.0, heading two embedded civilian provincial reconstruction teams (ePRTs) 2009-2010 and wrote a book critical of the program, We Meant Well, for which was I was punished into involuntary retirement by my employer the U.S. State Department. The working title for the book was originally “Lessons for Afghanistan from the Failed Reconstruction of Iraq” and was meant to explain how our nation building efforts failed to accomplish anything except setting afire rampant corruption, and how repeating them nearly dollar-for-dollar in the Afghan theatre was just going to yield the same results. After all, isn’t one definition of madness doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results?

The title of my book changed to something less academic sounding, coming out as it did around the tenth anniversary of Iraq War 2.0. It is important to look back accurately; on the tenth anniversary the meme was still that the Surge was going to work, that the final push of soldiers and civilian reconstructors was going to break Al Qaeda in Iraq by coopting their indigenous Sunni partners. “Jury Still Out on Iraq Invasion” wrote Politico. My editor selfishly hoped the war would still be going on in a few months so we might sell some books. I knew we had something to worry about, not that the war would fail to drag on but that the failures would be so obvious no one would see the need to read a whole book about them.

The way it all worked was like this. Washington would determine some broad theme-of-the-month (such as women’s empowerment) aimed at a domestic American audience. The theme would filter down to us at the PRT level and we were to concoct some sort of “project,” something tangible on the ground, preferably something that showed well in the media we’d invite to see our progress. It wasn’t hard because corrupt organizations arose like flowers from the desert to take our money. Usually run by a local Tony Soprano-type warlord, the organization would morph in name alone as needed from local activist group to NGO to entrepreneur incubator depending on the project. We’d give them boxes full of dollars (nobody wanted Iraqi money, a clue) and perhaps some event would occur, or a speaker might be brought in. We funded bakeries on streets without water, paid for plays on getting along with neighbors, and threw money at all this only because no one could find a match to just set fire to it directly. Little was expected in the end outside a nice slideshow celebrating another blow for democracy. In shopping for hearts and minds in Iraq, we made bizarre impulse purchases, described elsewhere as “checkbook diplomacy.”

As Iraq morphed into a subject we were just not going to talk about very much (one journalist who read my early draft opined “So you’re the guy who is going to write the last critical book on Iraq before Petraeus takes a victory lap in his”) attention turned to Afghanistan. I knew this because suddenly I was flooded with requests to write recommendations for the same people who had failed so completely in Iraq to work in Afghanistan. As part of some escalation or another, the military was rehiring most of the civilians who had failed to reconstruct Iraq into exactly the same roles in Afghanistan, presumably to (fail) to reconstruct that sad place.

I dutifully answered each personnel inquiry accurately, fully, and as a patriot, with the hope that someone would see what was going on and put a goddamn stop to it. I was very wrong. The key element of the fantasy was the reconstruction effort, the idea that rebuilding Afghanistan via $141 billion in roads and schools and bridges and hardware stores would gut the Taliban’s own more brutal hearts and minds efforts. That was the same plan as in Iraq only minutes earlier, where between 2003 and 2014, more than $220 billion was spent on rebuilding the country. Nonetheless, the Iraqi failure on full display, the United States believed that economic and social development programming would increase support for the Afghan government and reduce support for the Taliban (the log line for the war script.)

However, as had its sister organization in Iraq, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) wrote “the theory that economic and social development programing could produce such outcomes had weak empirical foundations.” Former Ambassador to Afghanistan Michael McKinley noted, “It wasn’t that everyone, including conservative rural populations, didn’t appreciate services… But that didn’t seem to change their views.” As the Army War College wrote, “This idea that if you build a road or a hospital or a school, people will then come on board and support the government — there’s no evidence of that occurring anywhere since 1945, in any internal conflict. It doesn’t work.” As an American former advisor to President Ghani told SIGAR, “Building latrines does not make you love Ashraf Ghani.” But that was indeed the plan and it failed spectacularly, slow over its own twenty years then all at once last August. SIGAR summed up: “U.S. efforts to build and sustain Afghanistan’s governing institutions were a total, epic, predestined failure on par with the same efforts and outcome in the Vietnam war, and for the same reasons.”

No, wait, nobody said any of those things during the Afghan war, only afterwards when it was time to look around and assign blame to someone other than oneself. The Iraq reconstruction failed to account for the lessons of Vietnam (the CORDS program in particular.) The Afghan reconstruction failed to account for the lessons of Iraq. We now sit and wait to see the coming Ukraine reconstruction fail to remember any of it at all.

“It is obvious that American business can become the locomotive that will once again push forward global economic growth,” President Zelensky said, boasting BlackRock, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, and others “have already become part of our Ukrainian way.” The NYT calls Ukraine “the world’s largest construction site” and predicts projects there in the multi-billions, as high in some estimates as 750 billion. It will be, says the Times, a “gold rush: the reconstruction of Ukraine once the war is over. Already the staggering rebuilding task is evident. Hundreds of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and factories have been obliterated along with critical energy facilities and miles of roads, rail tracks and seaports. The profound human tragedy is unavoidably also a huge economic opportunity.”

We did worse than nothing. Iraq before our invasion(s) was a more or less stable place, good enough that Saddam was even an ally of sorts during the Iraq-Iran War. By the time we were finished Iraq was a corrupt client state of Iran. Where once most literate Americans knew the name of the Iraqi Prime Minister, a regular White House guest, unless he’s changed his name to Zelensky nobody cares anymore. And that’s what the sign on the door leading out of Iraq (and perhaps into Ukraine) reads — thousands of lives and billions of dollars later, no one cares, if they even remember.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq

Ukraine is America’s Afghanistan More Than Russia’s

March 6, 2023 // 5 Comments »

The thinking in Washington goes like this: for the “low cost” of Ukrainian lives and some American dollars, the West can end Putin’s strategic threat to the United States. No Americans are dying. It’s not like Iraq or Afghanistan ’01-’21. This is post-modern, something new, a clean great power war, Jackson Pollack for war. Getting a lot of foreign policy mojo at little cost. It’s almost as if we should have though of this sooner.

Um, we did. It didn’t work out past the short run and there’s the message. Welcome to Afghanistan 1980’s edition with the U.S. playing both the American and the Soviet roles.

At first glance it seems all that familiar. Russia invades a neighboring country who was more or less just minding its own business. Russia’s goals are the same, to push out its borders in the face of what it perceives as Western encroachment on the one hand, and world domination on the other. The early Russian battlefield successes break down, and the U.S. sees an opportunity to bleed the Russians at someone else’s bodily expense. “We’ll fight to the last Afghani” is the slogan of the day.

The CIA, via our snake-like “ally” in Pakistan, floods Afghanistan with money and weapons. The tools are different but the effect is the same: supply just enough firepower to keep the bear tied down and bleeding but not enough to kill him and God forbid, end the war which is so profitable — lots of dead Russkies and zero Americans killed (OK, maybe a few, but they are the use-and-forget types of foreign policy, CIA paramilitary and Special Forces, so no fair counting them.) And ironic historical bonus: in both Afghanistan 1980s and Ukraine, some of the money spent is Saudi. See the bothersome thread yet?

Leaving aside some big differences that enabled initial successes in Afghanistan, chief among which is the long supply lines versus Ukraine’s border situation, let’s look at what followed early days.

Though NATO countries and others sent small numbers of troops and material to Afghanistan, the U.S. has gone out of its way to make Ukraine look like a NATO show when it is not. Washington supposedly declared support for Ukraine to preserve and empower NATO (despite the fact that Ukraine was not a member.) Yet, to keep Germany on sides in the Russian-Ukraine war, Washington (allegedly) conducted a covert attack on Germany’s critical civilian infrastructure that will have lasting, negative consequences for the German economy. Seymour Hersh reported the Nord Stream pipeline connecting cheap Russian natural gas to Europe via Germany was sabotaged by the United States. An act of war. The destruction of an ally’s critical infrastructure, and no doubt a brush back pitch carefully communicated to the Germans alongside a stern warning to stay put on sanctions against energy trade with Russia. It’s a helluva thing, blowing up the pipeline to force Germany to color inside the lines NATO (actually the U.S.) laid out. This, in addition to the U.S. treating NATO countries as convenient supply dumps and little more, shows that NATO will emerge from Ukraine broken. One does also wonder if the future of Europe is at stake why the greatest concern is expressed in Washington and not Bonn or Paris.

As with Afghanistan, there are questions if we Americans will ever be able to leave, about whether Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn” rules applies — you break it, you bought it. President Zelensky, portrayed in the West as a cross between Churchill and Bono, in actuality was a comedian and TV producer who won the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election. Zelensky’s popularity was due in part to his anti-establishment image and promises to fight corruption and improve the economy. He was also aided by his portrayal of a fictional president in a popular TV show, which helped to increase his name recognition and appeal to young voters.

Zelensky was preceded by the Ukrainian Revolution, also known as the Euromaidan Revolution, which began in late 2013 as a series of protests in response to then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to reject an association agreement with the European Union and instead pursue closer ties with Russia. The protests grew in size and intensity, with demonstrators occupying the central Maidan Nezalezhnosti square in Kiev, demanding Yanukovych’s resignation and new elections. In February 2014, the situation escalated when Yanukovych’s security forces cracked down on protesters, resulting in violent clashes that left dozens dead. This led to Yanukovych fleeing the country and a new government being formed in Ukraine. The revolution also sparked tensions with Russia, which subsequently annexed Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine. None of those problems goes away even if the Russia army retreats to its pre-invasion borders. The notion that there is nothing going on here except a rough land grab by a power-made Putin is shallow and incomplete.

What’s left are concerns about the level of corruption in Ukraine, and the U.S.’s role in addressing it. Despite the U.S. providing significant financial aid to Ukraine, there have been reports of corruption and mismanagement of funds. Some have argued that the U.S. has not done enough to address these issues, and has instead turned a blind eye in order to maintain its strategic interests in the region. America’s history with pouring nearly unlimited arms and money into a developing nation and corruption is not a good one (see either Afghanistan, 1980s or ’01 onward.) Corruption can only get worse.

A great fear in Afghanistan was arms proliferation, weapons moving off the battlefield into the wrong hands. Whether that be a container of rifles or the latest anti-aircraft systems, an awful lot of weapons are loose in Ukraine. In the case of Afghanistan, the real fear was for Stinger missiles, capable of shooting down modern aircraft, ending up in terrorist hands. The U.S. has been chasing these missiles through the world’s arms bazaars ever since, right into the Consulate in Benghazi. It is worse in Ukraine. America’s top-of-the-line air defense tools are being employed against Russian and Iranian air assets. What would those countries pay for the telemetry data of a shoot down, never mind actual hardware to reverse engineer and program against? There are no doubt Russian, Chinese, Iranian and other intelligence agencies on the ground in Ukraine with suitcases full of money trying to buy up what they can. Another cost of war.

It is also hard to see the end game as the demise of Putin. This would mean the strategy is not fight until the last Afghani/Ukrainian but to fight until the last Russian. The plan is for that final straw to break, that last Russian death, to trigger some sort of overthrow of Putin. But by whom? Trading Putin for a Russian-military lead government seems a small gain. Look what happened the last time Russia went through a radical change of government — we got Putin. In Afghanistan, it was the Taliban x 2.

History suggests the U.S. will lose in a variety of ways in Ukraine, with the added question of who will follow Putin and what might make that guy a more copacetic leader towards the United States. As one pundit put it, it is like watching someone play Risk drunk.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq

Will Putin Nuke Ukraine?

October 20, 2022 // 6 Comments »

To understand why the conventional nuclear paradigm suggests Putin will not use nuclear (chemical, biological…) weapons in Ukraine, you need only ask why should he?

The Biden arguments (“Don’t. Don’t. Don’t is Joey’s message to Moscow) are that Putin is irrational, a mad man of sorts, pressed into a corner facing imminent defeat in Ukraine and with that the likelihood of regime change. Except nothing could be further from the truth. Go ahead, name one irrational act, one mad man-level policy decision Putin has made. No, no, quite the opposite. He is not facing “defeat” in the Ukraine as territory trades hands, and can retreat to stable pre-invasion lines in the Donbas and elsewhere with little more than egg on his face, nothing close to defeat (if you’re interested in what defeat looks like, see Kabul 1989 or 2021.) As for regime change, Putin owes nothing to whatever Russian public opinion exists around him, and his pals in power, the so-called oligarchs, have, minus a yacht or two, plundered mightily off sanctions, which have driven up prices for Russian energy exports.

The primary reason to avoid a nuclear escalation is that it would bring the U.S. or some subset of NATO into the Ukrainian war zone, and this is something Putin would fear, and indeed depending on how much force is applied, could lead to a full-on “defeat” in Ukraine. The U.S. and NATO have been preparing to fight the Soviet Union on the plains of Ukraine for some 70 years (the fall of the Soviet Union, terrorism, Iraq, etc., not withstanding) and the 19th artillery duels that characterize the current conflict would be replaced by endless U.S. precision air strikes. Imagine American A-10s, or even B-52s practically at the edge of space, tearing into those long Russian columns. About the last thing Putin wants is to fight NATO directly over chunks of the Ukraine instead of by (weaker) proxy.

With those arguments dismissed, we look to the battlefield to see the role a nuclear escalation would play. Looking back at the historical use of nuclear weapons (solely by the United States of course) Putin has roughly four options.

— One would be a demonstration nuke, say a sea-level low-yield blast outside Odessa designed to rattle the windows, shut off the lights, but otherwise do little harm. As the U.S. concluded in late WWII, demonstrations translate into proving you lack resolve, not that you are committed to nuclear war. Plus the mere use of the nuke pulls the U.S. into the conflict with nothing gained by Russia.

— Second would be a nuclear attack against a large concentration of Ukrainian troops. Apart from irradiating the territory he hopes to conquer, Putin could achieve something similar, close enough for government work, with an extreme massing of artillery and airpower. A big boom to clear a path, but without the U.S. coming in as an aftereffect. Why go nuclear when the same outcome is available via conventional weapons?

— Third would be a leadership decapitation strike based on good intelligence that would eliminate President Zelensky. This one a) presumes near-perfect intel (see the American’s failure trying the same gag at the start of two Gulf Wars, shock and awe, which missed Saddam despite all of the resources of the United States) b) that the same could not be accomplished with massed artillery and most importantly c) that Zelensky is really the one-man Washington-Churchill-Patton the western media portrays him as and his loss would have the impact the western media believes it would. If a Zelensky deputy rises from the literal ashes and demands revenge from the people, the gambit fails, maybe even backfires.

— Last would be the destruction of a Ukrainian city, causing mass civilian casualties and creating nuclear terror to force a swift surrender, the same as with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the other Japanese cities which would have fallen if surrender had not happened fast enough. Despite the firebombing of Tokyo (never mind Coventry and Dresden) WWII proved to America nothing raises terror like the use of nuclear weapons. Skin melted in Coventry same as at Hiroshima (which used to be known as Ground Zero until a one and only successful air strike hit America) but it is Hiroshima we remember most. In Ukraine this would be intended less as a Strangelovian exchange than a tactical escalation.

The problem with option four, the nuclear destruction of Kiev, or of the western city of Lviv (to destroy the supply chain providing arms through Poland) is world opinion. By the time the U.S. destroyed two Japanese cities’ worth of women and children the world was weary, weary with war itself and weary of earlier atrocities. Compared with the Holocaust, Nanjing, and the firebombing, the nuclear end of WWII allowed the U.S. to get away with it by taking place within the context of horrific violence. Nothing such is a factor in 2022; Putin was after all the aggressor in this latest fight and there is no Auschwitz to distract. And as much as Putin is less dependent on world opinion than say the U.S., he is dependent. He needs India and most of all China to see him as a good enough guy to buy and resell his oil and gas. If anything would drive Germany to suck it up and endure a frigid winter without Russian energy it would be such an atomic attack on Ukrainian civilians.

President Biden has made it clear any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences.” But his administration has remained publicly ambiguous about what those consequences would be. The key element would be to press Putin to back down, not to force him to double down. For example, a nuclear demonstration explosion by Russia could see the U.S. sinking another Russian ship in the Black Sea and the tit-for-tat might be complete. But a more robust American response, say the carpet bombing of a Russian field division, might only press the Russians to try again.

For risk of escalation, Biden should not respond to nukes with nukes. The risk is too great. Neither Putin nor Biden should be the one history books record as the man alongside Harry Truman neck deep in WWII to use nuclear weapons. Having come of political age during the Cold War, Biden should know better than to talk loosely of nuclear weapons, as should Putin. It is crudely reassuring the people who see the greatest possibility of nuclear combat are the MSM hoping to generate clicks and views off the increase in tensions, not the two men who know in their bellies nothing in the Ukraine is worth it.

At some point in every war gamed scenario where one side does not just call STOP the lizard brains take over and one thing leads to another until someone starts wondering in Washington and Moscow if they’ll live to see their kids go off to school Monday morning. We are already playing a lower-level game of chicken with the Russians in Ukraine and should not look to opportunities to really see who swerves first should come that threatened nightfall.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq

Who’s Winning in Ukraine? Orwell (and Baghdad Bob)

September 2, 2022 // Comments Off on Who’s Winning in Ukraine? Orwell (and Baghdad Bob)

Score another point for author George Orwell as his masterwork 1984 continues to serve as an instruction manual for our society.

In the world of the future, war was a constant feature, though the sides changed frequently. Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia are the three fictional super nation states in George Orwell‘s 1949 dystopian novel. Using the government’s near-perfect control of the media and ability to rewrite history on the fly, whenever an old ally became the new enemy, everything was switched around to make it appear “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” Lies were the news. We are close to something similar with Ukraine, where it has become impossible to know who is advancing and who is retreating. The American media has become so entangled with the unreality of the war that Ukraine should have defeated Russia many times over and again by now.

Start with that nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia. We are told the Russians hold the plant. We are also told by the Ukrainian side that a mass nuclear incident is ready to happen if the shelling of the plant does not cease. UN inspectors are on the ground to tsk tsk over what might happen if more bombs hit the plant and the cooling systems fail. Left wholly unsaid is if the Russians hold the plant and the Ukrainians want it back, exactly which side is doing the dangerous shelling? Are the Russians shelling themselves? Yet even while Ukraine attacks the plant the western media buy into the narrative that it is the Russia who are endangering all of Europe. It makes no sense but then again neither does the phrase “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia” when you clearly still remember (but dare not say out loud) that last month you were sure the war was not with Eastasia but with Eurasia. And no matter the Russians have held the plant since March. Six months later it is time for this story to surface.

Articles wringing their hands over the danger openly mock our common sense, beginning by saying “The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv was quick to call the shelling of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant a ‘war crime.'” “We survived a night that could have stopped the story, the history of Ukraine, the history of Europe,” said Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. “An explosion at Zaporizhzhia would have equaled ‘six Chernobyls,'” he said, upping the odds by a factor of six with just words. But… but…

We are told the Ukrainians, when not not shelling the nuke plant, are engaged in a titanic offensive to recapture areas to the east previously taken by the Russians. None of it matters in the details, the tiny towns being fought over either strategic points when Ukraine captures them or unimportant hamlets when still held by Russia. Sources for this information are equally mocking, made-for-the-internet organizations like Kyiv Independent (Bodies Exhumed from Mass Grave Show Signs of Violence), The New Voice of Ukraine (World must be ready for Russia’s disintegration), Institute for the Study of War (Russia’s ‘strategic defeat’ could threaten his regime) or Ukrayinska Pravda (Ukrainian forces destroy Russian Mi-8 helicopter and kill over 120 Russian soldiers.) These sources have all the credibility of a late night infomercial — order within the next ten minutes and we’ll double the number of Russians claimed killed! There are also some curious patterns if you watch closely — when Zelensky stopped showcasing photos of kids with guns and old women making Molotovs the Russians stopped targeting “civilians” an apartment complexes.

As for the hamlets, the video reminds one of the earliest days of the conflict when six months ago bodies in the streets were labeled freedom fighters willing to stand up to Russian tanks while bodies buried were the results of atrocities. It all lacks context. Here’s eight seconds of a tank blowing up. Where was it shot? When? Was the explosion caused by a mine, a missile, or something internal to the tank? Is the tank Russian or Ukrainian? In most cases the media outlet has no real idea of the answers to those questions, never mind who shot the video towards what end. Even if they stumble on to the basic who-what-where, the exploding tank video is devoid of context. Was that the lead tank hit, stopping the Russian advance toward a village? Or was it a Russian tank that lingered in an open field and got picked off in a lucky shot, strategically without much consequence. One assumes clever hands can change a mini-Ukrainian flag to a spray-painted Z as necessary, because most of the hardware used by both sides is the same. Some of the video might as well be doctored Ohio State-Michigan footage. It would accomplish the same goal.

Ask Baghdad Bob how it works. As one commenter put it, he’d likely mimic Western press reports about Ukraine’s “lightning offensive.” Nearly all of MSM use the word “humiliating” to describe Russia’s losses. Russian defenses “collapsed” and they “fled in panic.” This was widely attributed to the supposed “exhaustion” and “low morale” of Russian troops. As a result, the battle lines have been “redrawn,” the war’s contours “reshaped.” Putin is said to be “livid and “isolated.” The “Ukrainian victory shattered Russia’s reputation as a military superpower.”

At one point Ukraine boasted it destroyed 509 Russian tanks using shoulder fired missiles. Maybe; one of the techniques of modern propaganda is to throw out some outrageous number, challenge people to disprove it, and then shout “you can’t disprove it so I’m right.” So no proof. But history suggests 509 man-on-tank kills is ridiculous. During Gulf War 1.0, one of the largest tank battles of modern times at 73 Easting saw Coalition forces destroy only 160 Iraqi tanks, and that was using the M-1 tank with its sophisticated aiming tech and night vision. Even at the famed Battle of the Bulge only 700 tanks from both sides were destroyed.

American media has mostly pulled its correspondents out of the fighting; all the network stars got themselves some images of shells whizzing by for their sizzle show reels and every refugee seemingly was interviewed at least twice. The refugees proved marvelously articulate, speaking in talking points and wrapping up with slogans to never see defeat or something equally polished. Apparently audiences in America lapped it all up; tickets to this show run in the billions while you can go see Top Gun again for under 20 bucks.

The rest of the victory over Eastasia has long been forgotten. But remember Snake Island’s defense? Remember all the times Russia was going to just run out of bombs or missiles? (Russia Turns to Old Tanks as It Burns Through Weapons in Ukraine; Russian Troops Stay on Border with No Food and Communications) Remember the stalled Russian convoy, the columns which supposedly had plumb run out of gas, the mighty drones which killed a hundred times their weight in Russians (Wolverines!) and all the other bloodthirsty tidbits served up. But coincidence as Ukrainian victories seem to coincide with U.S. announcements that another couple of billion dollars in aid are inbound.

So who is winning? Who knows?

Here are some Twitter resources for alternative views from the MSM on the conflict in Ukraine. All are interesting and worth reading with an open mind; none are guaranteed correct, not all claim to be neutral, and not all are endorsed. Try @mtracey, @imetatronink, @FOOL_NELSON, @ErnestLemingway, @WaywardRabbler, @witte_sergei, @RWApodcast, @TheWillPorter, @aaronjmate, @caitoz, @Antiwarcom. Also https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexanderMercourisReal, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiBR6Z16tXxC5mQO3nsSBEg, and https://bigserge.substack.com.

As an example of alternate thought, try this: “People, to put it bluntly, don’t know anything about war. They don’t know that armies use up lots of vehicles in a high intensity conflict, and so a picture of a burning tank seems very important to them. They had never heard of MLRS before this year, so the HIMARS seems like a futuristic wonder weapon. They don’t know that ammo dumps are a very common target, so videos of big explosions seem like a turning point. Ukraine enthusiasts eagerly propagate Ukrainian claims, no matter how absurd, but the information coming from the Russian side mostly takes the form of dry briefings from the MOD. Ukraine is playing a Marvel movie, Russia is putting on a webinar.”

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq

Biden Wants All the Points Due a Wartime President without Actually Going to War

April 4, 2022 // 7 Comments »

The view that war is politics by other means, the realist idea nations pursue strategic goals with some sort of calculation behind them, is not for us. Americans must reduce everything to good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, light versus dark. Leaders throughout history have sold wars with this b.s.; America’s problem is we seem to actually believe it’s true. Let’s see how it plays out in the real world.

Imagine facing an enemy who refuses to surrender despite overwhelming odds, leaving the other side the choice between a protracted urban war or an air attack to resolve the situation. In the case of Putin and Kiev, our nightly news is flooded with images of the targeting of civilians and screams from Washington of war crimes. The American answer in an earlier war, however, was the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two targets at the end of a long and ugly war where women and children were casually incinerated to save we were told additional casualties on the ground. It was OK because America is basically good. If you twist that logic hard enough it comes out we did the Japs a favor by nuking their cities. The cries of “but it’s different!” because of whatever, Pearl Harbor, are left unanswered by the blackened ghosts of the Japanese who died not knowing what a favor the US did them.

And that action in 1945 (amplified by the destruction by policy of whole villages in Korea and Vietnam, never mind the scorched earth of Fallujah) leaves the United States in a unique position it pretends not to know about. As Putin and others may talk about nuclear threats, history records that we alone actually used nuclear weapons, against civilian targets. Little bitches like Putin or Kim may issue threats but only the United States has carried through with it. It’s a helluva basis for morality.

America’s simplistic morality means it cannot ascribe a legitimate strategic goal to an adversary; he must instead be crazy, insane, new Hitler, bonkers, thug, bully, war criminal, driven to restore Imperial Russia, a danger to his own people, bent on world domination, Saddam, Assad, Qaddafi, anything out of the Bond villian community. Local or regional problems thus self-inflate into existential threats to democracy. We can’t just beat Putin in Ukraine, we have to destroy his economy, regime change him, murder him outright to even the moral score since he dared challenge our world view. This causes us to make serious mistakes.

In Putin’s case, few allow that maybe he really is scared of NATO forces walking right to his border and seeks a buffer zone in the Ukraine. That is certainly what he has said (we don’t believe him.) At the end of the Cold War the west denuclearized new nation states like Ukraine, redrew their borders in line with western aims, and added Poland and the Balkan states to NATO. Most of all, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the west did not dismantle NATO. The alliance, formed for the collective defense of western Europe against the Soviets, was left not only to stand after the Soviet Union was gone, but thrust eastward, claiming territory that would have been among NATO’s first targets had the Cold War gone hot.

Imagine the reaction inside Moscow to its worst fears being shoved at it at its weakest moment, and if you can, you may understand Putin’s not-crazy goals. As the west turned up the heat instead of bringing Russia in from the cold, NATO went from a defensive alliance to a political cudgel. From Putin’s point of view, he faces an adversary which actually believes it has the moral responsibility to dictate global political arrangements, even in regions that are more important to him than they are to the Washington.

Putin tried to make his needs known, that Ukraine should stay neutral. His proffer was met by a coup (likely abetted by the US) which brought pro-US nationalists to power. The response was, almost had to have been, Putin’s invasion of Crimea. These are not wars of choice in the way say Putin invading Iraq might be, but wars of strategic necessity to him. Had the US had the philosophical ability to understand this, it might have found a reasonable negotiating strategy instead of poking the bear in one of his most sensitive areas until he reacted.

That is the background, but why attack Ukraine now? In its arrogance America has decided it all has to do with America, actually the least important factor here. So we hear about Trump and Putin’s bromance, wonder if Biden is weak, speculate the horrible ending in Afghanistan is at fault. But if you think like Putin, your focus is elsewhere. He looks at the warpigs in charge today, the same Obama team from the 2014 overthrow, Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland, and Susan Rice. And it was then-VP Biden who personally ran Obama’s Ukraine policy. He knows CIA paramilitaries are on the ground in Ukraine. Then in November 2021 the US and Ukraine signed the Charter on Strategic Partnership, asserting Kiev’s right to NATO membership. The Charter was a policy statement by the Biden administration, and an intolerable prospect for Russia. By imagining Putin as nothing but a megalomaniac, America unknowingly drew a red line for him. It is easy to imagine a future historian uncovering documents showing the planning for the current invasion began at that same time.

Convinced NATO will never reject Ukraine, Putin took his own steps to block it. By invading, he created a “frozen conflict” knowing NATO cannot realistically admit countries that don’t control their borders (how to apply Article Five when a country is already at war as it joins NATO?) Such frozen conflicts already cripple Georgia, Crimea, and Moldova, as well as the semi-independent areas of Donbas and Luhansk. Add now Ukraine to that list. If you understand this, you also know what happens next in Ukraine: not much apart from better defining borders and the new lines of control. No need to drive much further west, Putin has already got most of what he wanted. And no need to worry about nukes, they are not needed for Putin’s strategic purpose.

This is why sanctions won’t accomplish much besides raising the price of gas for Americans. Putin is chasing a goal which has eluded Russia for three decades. Sanctions will not cause him to give that up, any more than previous sanctions caused him to hesitate striking. Russia and America are talking past one another, identifying different motivations and different end games.

The sad news is Ukraine does not realize it is a pawn in a larger struggle. The Ukrainians bought the big lie in the 90s that if they denuclearized America would protect them. They now join the long list of countries goaded by the US into fighting to the last man in support of American foreign policy goals (ask the Iraqi Kurds, and later the Sunnis, how that worked out.) Ukrainians are very brave, but it was Americans that put them in harm’s way by using their country as a crush zone, with little consideration for the people now paying the price.

Biden wants all the points due a wartime president without actually going to war; he is practicing political opportunism not statecraft. That will collapse mightily on old Joe if Putin declares victory first. So soon enough Zelensky will get the call from the White House letting him know time is up, he’ll have to take a deal with Russia to reset the status quo for a faux “win.” Biden needs the war to end before it starts to look like he lost. Zelensky can reject this and go down hard, like Diem in Vietnam in the 1960s who didn’t realize his time in America’s lap was up, or he can leave Ukraine a “hero,” beaten but never broken, book and biopic movie deal, presidential medal ceremony in the White House, yada yada.

Biden at some point (it took decades in Afghanistan) will realize he misunderstood his adversary and seek to cut and run. It seems we are close. Zelensky’s propaganda campaign, the atrocity of the day/hero of the day scheme, has failed to bring NATO into the war. Americans get bored easily. He’s just about jumped the shark. If Russians bombing a children’s hospital isn’t enough, there is no enough.

International affairs researcher Matthew Waldman wrote, “‘strategic empathy’ isn’t about agreeing with an adversary’s position. It is about understanding it so you can fashion an appropriate response.” That is the key to some sort of resolution in Ukraine, and the key to a more effective foreign policy for the US going forward. This is all uncomfortable for most Americans, raised on a steady diet of if we do it is right and moral, if they do it it is evil. But given the dubious success record of this policy across US-supported dictatorships of the Middle East, and Central and South America, and failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and likely soon, Ukraine, maybe a new way forward is worth a look.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq

Tell Me How This Ends in Ukraine

March 21, 2022 // 5 Comments »

In the opening days of Iraq War 2.0, a wiser but not yet-General David Petraeus famously asked “Tell me how this ends.” Petraeus understood how wars end is more important than why they started or how they were carried out. So how does the current war in Ukraine end?

Petraeus, for his part, said with a straight face “Russia doesn’t have the numbers and beyond that everyone in the entire country hates them and most of the adults are willing to take action against them, whether it’s to take up weapons or to be human shields.” While accurately describing the roots of his own failure in Iraq, Petraeus misses the point. America’s goal was to create a neocon version of democracy in the Middle East. Putin seeks something much simpler: a classic buffer territory between him and NATO. He does not care about hearts and minds. He only has to break things.

The early days of the Ukraine war have been dominated by propaganda riven with sympathy for the plucky defenders. This purposefully created a false sense Russian setbacks and a misunderstanding of Russian strategy. The Russians are executing a standard mechanized warfare maneuver in line with their goals, attacking south from Belarus to link up with forces attacking northward from Crimea. When they link up south of Kiev, Ukraine will be split into two. Kiev may be bypassed, or it may be destroyed, but that is secondary to the larger strategic maneuver. Another Russian thrust from east to west seeks to cut the nation into quarters so Ukrainian forces cannot reinforce one another. Forget all the silliness about the Russians running out of gas; their supply lines are short (many Russian forces are within 70 miles of their own border), protected, and over decent roads. This is what is happening on the ground and Ukrainian forces are in no position to do anything but delay it. Watching war through a smartphone from a peaceful country may help you believe the Russian assault is going poorly but that is at odds with the facts. So here’s how that all ends.

The Best Case for Everyone is the Russians, perhaps under the guise of some humanitarian gesture, withdraw to the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine and some strategic points, things like bridges and airports. Ukraine is essentially divided into two semi-states, the western half nominally under NATO control and the eastern half a Russian buffer zone with a new Iron Curtain in place. Putin settles back into his easy chair. His brush back pitch to Ukraine dealt out a serious spanking, he holds some new territory as a prize, he can announce victory at home, and his troops are better positioned if he needs to push west ever again. NATO meanwhile can also claim some measure of victory, validating all the propaganda about the valiant Ukrainian people. The status quo of Europe resets and after a decent interval the oil and gas restart flowing westward.

Putin made this strategy clear in his asks for a cease fire, that Ukraine accept demilitarization, declare itself neutral, and drop its bid to join NATO. He does not really want the cities, and he does not want to occupy a hostile population. That is why he agreed to safe corridors westward for refugees and why he has held back sustained shelling and rocketing of Kiev, for now. Depopulation aids Putin in neutering eastern Ukraine, and avoids later ethnic conflict between Ukrainian nationalists and the local Russian population.

The Next Best Case is NATO makes a secret agreement to keep Ukraine out of the alliance in return for Putin withdrawing in whole or in part (see above.) This is very tricky diplomacy, as it cannot appear NATO appeased Putin and it cannot seem in the eyes of the world that Putin “lost.” The Russians would be very tempted to leak the secret agreement to show they had achieved their goal, and the resulting denials from NATO and the US would seem shallow. The rest of eastern Europe would take note on who they could trust. This scenario is also unlikely, as it requires Russia to trade land for a promise from the West. Putin knows nothing short of a NATO strike can dislodge him from eastern Ukraine and thus has no incentive to leave.

A Very Bad Case would be a decision by Putin to occupy or destroy Ukraine, install a puppet government, and roll his army right to the Polish border as if it was 1975 all over again. Putin certainly is holding this out as a threat if Zelensky ignores western pleas to cut a deal. Russian troops are positioning to assault the cities. Ask people of Aleppo and Grozny if they think Putin would turn them loose.

The idea may prove tempting to Putin. He can claim full victory, be done forever with the Ukrainian problem, leave NATO looking emasculated, strike fear into the other former satellites, and leave Joe Biden out of a job in his self-proclaimed role as leader of the free world. Biden has overplayed his hand, not recognizing there is almost nothing he can do to affect the situation on the ground. Sanctions did not stop Putin from invading (Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine…) and sanctions will not cause Putin to retreat. Biden, like Putin, knows most Russian oil and gas exports are untouchable if he wants to keep the Europeans on the team.

But the biggest problem for Biden is history (and voters) remembering him as the president who watched the Iron Curtain rebuilt. Unlike Obama’s cool reaction to Putin invading Crimea in 2014, Biden has vowed to “save” Ukraine as if he was fighting Corn Pop again. By claiming in his State of the Union address that Putin had “shaken the very foundations of the free world,” Biden has created the impression he is going to put a stop to something of that scale. Such predictions carry an incredible political risk, especially for a commander in chief who also promised a weary America it is not going to war. As NBC’s Chuck Todd put it “I fear this is going to feel like a speech that didn’t age well.” Following the sad, embarrassing finale in Afghanistan, any ending in Ukraine that looks like a Putin win after all this saber rattling pretty much ends the effective portion of the Biden presidency.

That leaves only to consider The Horrible Case, where someone in NATO tries for a no-fly zone, or sets up a refugee protected zone, as was done in the former Yugoslavia. Ukrainian propaganda is aimed at making this happen; Zelensky knows partisans with rifles are only going to get him so far. He needs direct Western military intervention to survive. And a non-partisan 74 percent of Americans say NATO should impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine.

Consider the tinder in place. If you believe the CIA and US special forces are not on the ground already in Ukraine, parsing intel and advising, well… We know US spy planes and drones are overhead. Imagine an incident where an American is taken prisoner by the Russians. Imagine the US providing a weapons system that requires “trainers,” in the way Russian trainers manned ground-to-air facilities in past Cold War wars in South East Asia and the Middle East. Or maybe a border incident, real or imagined, with NATO member Poland to try and force NATO into the fight. Or a UN demand for some peacekeeping force stop Putin’s war crimes. Maybe a “one time surgical strike” for humanitarian reasons on a Russian column threatening a hospital?

Not on a menu is another Afghanistan (US or Soviet version) or some sort of open-ended Ukrainian insurgency. What Putin is doing is an old school war to grab territory, not changing allegiance among the Taliban. His supply routes are short, his troops fighting the modern battle they trained for, albeit outside Kiev and not in the Fulda Gap. Unlike Afghanistan, Ukraine has cities dependent on modern infrastructure, and cities are easily encircled, besieged and starved out, or just leveled.

Equally not going to happen is some sort of regime change inside Russia. Putin has been in charge for 22 years and controls the media, the military, and the intelligence services. Those were the people who brought Putin to power in Russia’s last coup. There is no means to the end the West wishes for, and no clear evidence the people of Russia want such as outcome in the first place. After all, a million pink hats in Washington accomplished… very little. A few protests scattered across the vastness of Russia are exaggerated for a Western audience. Western sanctions will not drive ordinary Russians to demand change. Remember how well US sanctions to bring about regime change have gone in Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea? Decades of sanctions have not changed Putin, and the new ones have no beef on them to change that. And as for the West’s dream of a coup, what could make life more interesting than the world’s second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons having no one firmly in charge?

Anything can happen, but Putin “losing” in Ukraine seems among the most unlikely of scenarios.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq

Deterrence Works, Propaganda Fails in Ukraine (So Far)

March 18, 2022 // 7 Comments »

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq

The Case for Impeachment Is…

November 5, 2019 // 10 Comments »

On Thursday Nancy Pelosi held a vote to, well, reaffirm her impeachment inquisitiveness. It was theatre; everyone knows the hyper-politicized Democratic House will impeach. It’s a weak case, but that doesn’t matter. A partisan Senate (who will also see a weak case but that doesn’t matter) won’t convict. America will leave that steaming mound of democracy aside the road and reflect forever which side stepped in it after we’re done arguing who won in November 2020.

So looking at the actual evidence for impeachment is mostly academic. Call it… quaint.

Forget the whistleblower; he had one job, to start this all into motion in August in time for the autumn session of Congress and he did it even without any first hand knowledge of a “high crime and misdemeanor,” just an opinion on a phone call he wasn’t party to. Yet even after DOJ ruled the whistleblower revealed no criminal act, Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment “inquiry.”

Trump then released the memorandum of conversation between himself and Ukrainian president Zelensky. This is the U.S. government’s record of what was said. That record will form near 100 percent of what Dems will use to impeach Trump. After all, it is the only primary document/first hand “testimony” in the case. Yet despite its short length, some five pages, many people prefer to characterize what it says instead of just reading the thing. So follow along if you like.

The call was a routine congratulatory message to Zelensky on his election. So the first couple of exchanges are chit chat along those lines. We’re on page three before the first bit of possible significance comes. Here it is in its entirety:

“The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows alot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are alot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance. But they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”

Zelensky gives a generally positive reply. There is nothing to indicate he feels pressured, bothered, evasive, defensive or concerned.

Trump again: “Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney·General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.”

That’s it for substance.

To impeach, one must be willing to conclude from the text above

a) Trump asking for information, however far-fetched one may believe it is, on possible foreign interference in the 2016 election was wrong (and then explain why the Dems conducted a three year investigation of the same);

b) Trump asking for an investigation into whether then-Vice President and perhaps soon President Biden used his office for personal gain is of no interest to the people of the United States, even if that same information were also of great interest to Trump (and account for Dems asking in 2018 the Ukraine to cooperate with Mueller to dig up dirt on Trump, and allowing that a Ukrainian investigation would exonerate Biden as Dems claim); and

c) that Trump made it clear to Zelensky aid was contingent on conducting these investigations given Trump made no mention of that.

If you can prove that from the memorandum of conversation, well then pilgrim, you have a case. And remember, you have to use Trump’s words. You can’t do it with Godfather references to consiglieres, third-party opinions of this all, or by characterizing Trump’s words — pressured, demanding, weaponized, implored, forced, quid pro quo — to your advantage.

The base problem is  Trump never said anywhere in the July 25 call he was withholding aid for Ukraine and there is no evidence Zelensky knew Trump had been slow walking it at the time of the call. The earliest tick the Ukrainians even knew the aid was being delayed was “early August” and even those claims are based on anonymous sources in the NYT who somehow have not been found to testify by the Dems. Official U.S. and Ukrainian sources instead say knowledge the funds were held up didn’t get to the Ukranians until late August, shortly before they were released. (Dems made a stink then claiming the funds were held up by Trump to favor Putin. It’s always something.)

It is thus supposition at best that Trump’s requests, assuming they were pressure at all and Zelensky’s easy going responses suggests he was not bothered by them, were connected in any way to the aid. Correlation is not causation. This was the big gap in Russiagate; because A happened before B, Democrats rushed to claim A must have caused B, and thus collusion!

And that leads to a second base problem. Nothing happened. Trump never even asked the Attorney General to contact Zelensky. It is unclear who if anyone Guiliani spoke with, but either way there is no evidence the Ukrainians ever investigated anything. This impeachment will be the first in American history without any underlying crime asserted. Democrats seek to impeach Trump for talking about something, and never doing something, that itself may not be a real offense anyway. If you hear echoes of Russiagate, of obstructing something that wasn’t actually obstructed, you have sharp ears.

When you have a smoking gun you usually don’t need to keep searching for evidence, but that is exactly what the Democrats are doing. Knowing the weakness in their case — it is literally based on a partisan reading of Trump’s own words and the supposition that two events, the call and the aid holdup, are causational — Dems are engaged in a process of finding someone to claim Trump’s policy was to (not) withhold aid to force the Ukraine to do something they never did.

Ambassador Gordon Sondland stated specifically, under oath recently and in a leaked text from around the time of the original call, there was no such quid pro quo. So did Trump and Zelensky.

The Dems in turn produced a series of angry State Department people to testify they had been sidelined out of the decision making process and thus knew very little first hand. The noisiest witness, Ambassador William Taylor, made it clear he was cut out of the White House’s backchannel for Ukrainian policy, and only knew what insiders Ambassadors Volker and Sondland told him second hand. His other knowledge of the supposed quid pro quo came when he heard “a [unnamed] staff person from the Office of Management and Budget say that there was a hold on security assistance to Ukraine but could not say why. Toward the end of an otherwise normal meeting, a voice on the call — the [unnamed] person was off-screen — said that she was from OMB and that her boss had instructed her not to approve any additional spending of security assistance for Ukraine until further notice.”

Taylor even went on to impeach himself a little, admitting he had no evidence aid was connected to investigation. He testified National Security Council Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs Fiona Hill and the NSC’s Director of European Affairs Alex Vindman “reassured me that they were not aware of any official change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine, OMB’s announcement notwithstanding.”

Taylor never spoke to the president. He did not speak to the Secretary of State, or any other senior White House official. He was cut out of the loop. His testimony was just his opinion. Deep Throat that is not.

What else? The media found a way to wordtrick Ambassador Sondland’s attorney into saying what his client described in testimony “amounted to” a quid pro quo, possibly thinking they would use a client’s own lawyer’s recharacterization of testimony to impeach.

There are no documents, policy papers, notes, memcons, texts, or anything at all to support the claim the White House policy was aid for investigation.

Imagine in a real trial how a defense lawyer would cross examine Taylor, or any of the other witnesses who have no actual knowledge:

Did you ever speak directly with Trump about this quid pro quo? How do you know it was his policy? Pompeo? Mulvaney? Exactly who in the WH did you ever speak to to learn this is the policy?

If the answer is “no one in the WH” how do you know this was the policy? Who told you in explicit terms?

So where is the investigation into Biden you say we paid for? Why would Trump demand that quid pro quo but never follow through?

Why wasn’t Ukraine told the aid was being withheld? Wouldn’t it be necessary for Ukraine to clearly and explicitly KNOW the aid was being withheld for this to be a quid pro quo?

Isn’t it true there is no quid, and no pr quo at all, except in your supposition? What the heck grounds of impeachment is that?

Actually, why was the aid paid out without an investigation?

Why are you claiming something happened when it did not happen?

Isn’t your testimony about what you personally thought Trump was thinking about something that didn’t happen, even though it never happened?

Other than your own supposition, how exactly do you know Trump’s intent? Any documents? Any evidence besides saying we should believe you over others?

Do you have any documents, notes, Memcons, texts, anything at all to support your supposition that the White House policy was literal aid for investigation? If not, why not? Because they do not exist? Because this is all your interpretation?

Why does Ambassador Sonderland say the intent was different? Is he lying? Are you?

Much is also being made of Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman allegedly telling impeachment investigators the July 25 memcon omitted references to tapes of Biden discussing Ukrainian corruption, and Zelensky mentioning the company Biden’s son worked for in Ukraine.

Reminiscent of the high hopes once held that Flynn, Manafort, Cohen, et al, would flip, Democratic plans for a slam dunk currently rest on John Bolton, a deep conservative nearing the end of his public life. They hope he will testify such that the last lines of his biography will call him “the man who more than any other individual helped elect Elizabeth Warren.” Sorry, Bolton is not gonna be your Fredo.

Unlike with Nixon and Clinton, the House is not building its case on the foundation of an existing law enforcement investigation. That was supposed to be what happened with the Mueller saga. Instead, this time the case is built on a single phone call, with the “investigation”jerry-rigged in real-time consisting of a semi-secret, stage-managed parade of credentialed hostile witnesses interpreting what Trump said in the call. Imagine a room full of critics impeaching Bob Dylan by telling us what his lyrics really mean to him. Opinions are not evidence. Case closed.

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq