The Syrian Attractor

I would start with Juan Cole re our situation: "Sometimes you are just screwed." Bad things afoot towards the Syrian border, on the road to Damascus if you will. "Insurgents plotted in Syria, U.S. says." I love how our threat construction these days works a bit like the Kremlinology of old. There is civil war breaking out (Sunni v. Shiite) at Tal Afar, on said Damascene road.

What are those moustache-twirlers up to?? Reuters yesterday reported that Syria has officially broken off intelligence work with the CIA and other agencies. Of course this is a true pity, since Syria originally offered such help against Al Qaeda earlier. (The Syrian government is in a bit of a deathmatch with Al Qaeda--it hates secular governments.

Our hawks are officially fantasizing about insane Lebanon-like solutions on television. Let that alarm bell go off... I was stunned to watch this exchange about Syria on CNN the other night:

DOBBS: And the U.S. counterterrorism, counterinsurgency forces that are in Iraq working with the population there, the intelligence is obviously still woeful and is still not adequate to forestall what are now rising, not diminishing, bomb attacks against Iraqis and Americans.

GRANGE: Rising because right now it's having a tremendous effect on the morale and attitude of the units, the attitude of the people to support the government, to support the insurgency. And when you have, let's say, if it's true, the reports are true, that you have meetings going on in Syria to plan new offensive actions and car bombings, or improvised explosive devices along roads, a surge of these things, you have to nip it in the bud somewhere. Maybe in Syria. But they are coming from someplace.

DOBBS: The United States military already hard-pressed. Is it a fact within the region, whether one is talking about Syrian leaders or Iranian, that they are watching the drain on both the U.S. forces and the will of the U.S. government, at least in their own projections and assessment, that we have come up with a situation where we are limited in what we can actually -- in the ways in which we can actually extend the United States political will in that region?

GRANGE: Well, it's going to be tough for the political will, because it's a long -- it's going to take a long time to solve -- solve the situation. Counterinsurgencies last a long time. And that's hard to swallow when you want to get in there and get out.

But if the other forces aren't trained to standard yet, then the U.S. or someone has to do that. And you sure don't want to quit now. You want to win this thing. And if some things are happening, let's say supported by Syria, personally, I wouldn't let Syria get away with it.

DOBBS: What would you do?

GRANGE: Well, I would put more pressure on Syria than we have now.

DOBBS: Militarily?

GRANGE: I would use a lot of pressure. There's some behind-the- scenes pressure, but maybe you need a zone of separation that's partly into the country of Syria to stop some of this movement. Maybe 10 kilometers or so deep.

DOBBS: General David Grange, thanks for being with us.

GRANGE: My pleasure.

What an excellent justification to get Cable out of my life. CSM Article ponders the possibilities of a Colombia-like bleeding disaster or the eventual stabilization of other Central American countries. Hey, it's the End of Secularism. A depressing note from Riverbend in Baghdad. The Iraqi police forces still not measured as cohering very well. "U.S. generals issue grim outlook on Iraq".

Justin Raimondo is saying exciting things about "The Franklin Affair: A Spreading Treason." Catchy headline:

Rozen, a perceptive reporter who has been following this story from the start, gives us the essential context of the Franklin affair by showing that he was very much a part of a small, tightly-knit network inside the Pentagon dedicated to provoking war not only with Iraq but also igniting a regional conflict including Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and beyond. She does a very good job, in her piece, of showing how Franklin was at the center of this group's covert machinations: he had a penchant, as she puts it, for "showing up at critical and murky junctures of recent history":
"He was part of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which provided much-disputed intelligence on Iraq; he courted controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, who contributed much of that hyped and misleading Iraq intelligence; and he participated with a Pentagon colleague and former Iran/contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar in a controversial December 2001 meeting in Rome – which, in a clear violation of US government protocol, was kept secret from the CIA and the State Department."
"In all these endeavors," Rozen writes, "Franklin … was hardly acting as a lone wolf." These rogue operations were projects of the neoconservative matrix in Washington, which reaches not only into the bowels of the Pentagon but also seems to have gained access to the higher echelons of this administration, and virtually taken over the Vice President's office lock, stock, and barrel.
Douglas Feith, Franklin's boss, is close to Israel's Likud party, and in 1996, he and Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser prepared a position paper for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break," that outlined a strategy for extracting Israel from its strategic dilemma: the invasion of Iraq, followed by the elimination of Syria, and the neutralization of Iran, topped their agenda. What they didn't say in the policy paper was that the United States would be doing their dirty work for them, but in retrospect we can see plainly enough that utilizing American military power figured prominently in their plan.

And so on and so forth. Worth looking at. So this British memo has caused some things to come up about whether Bush intended to topple Iraq way back in 2000. A fine story by Juan Cole in Salon outlines the charges. A classic Guardian link from 2003 states that "Blair 'dissuaded Bush from attack after 9/11' "...

Galloway kicked Norm Coleman's ass, (CNN link) and we are better for it. Of course, Norm is trying to peddle goods that he seems to have gotten from Chalabi and the Neo-cons, so we know it must be reliable stuff. More on Galloway. The Newsweek flap has receded a little now but it's still a small matter when compared with how crazy our government is.

The military is having trouble hanging onto young officers, especially Lieutenants and Captains, people who want to find some stability, not to keep getting churned in the system. Of course, they are also getting swooped up by Privatized Military Firms.

"At no time before has the Army had LTs [lieutenants] who have made decisions like that on a daily basis," he said. As he sees it, the military now has an entire generation of young officers who are battle-hardened and knowledgeable about battling insurgencies.

Even in Iraq, he said, senior commanders were keenly aware of those officers who might be considering leaving the military and applied various degrees of pressure to persuade them to remain in uniform.
....
Yet Tuohey, who was promoted to captain upon returning to Ft. Hood, said he was not sure whether he would stay in the Army when his commitment ended next year. He said he was tempted to work on Wall Street.

It's not the money he's after. It's the fact that an Army that was gutted after the Cold War was promising him a future of perpetual deployments fighting a war that could last for decades. That is not a future he is sure he can commit to. "What's the end point?" he asked. "When do you declare victory?"

A little more on the stuff in Uzbekistan altho of course Raimondo has something on that too. Check out Registan.net for ongoing news on that matter.