Incipient Sanity; More Please

Sanity from Intel Director Avril Haines: “Climate change can’t be addressed by one nation on its own.” Dare she add that lies regarding the threat from Russia/China and the HUGE carbon footprint from our military are major obstacles? Does “Threat Briefing” point to new honesty?

Ray addresses Haines’ comments, as well as Putin’s major address to the Russian Parliament, here:
https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2021/04/21/putin-isnt-bluffing-on-ukraine/

Afghanistan: ‘White Man’s Burden’ Lifted?

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.”  Kipling

Afghanistan: ‘White Man’s Burden’ Lifted?
By Ray McGovern

English poet Rudyard Kipling’s spirit may breathe a sigh of relief now that President Joe Biden has decided to end the latest March of Folly into Afghanistan. Kipling immortalized the phrase “White Man’s Burden”, used as an excuse for European-American imperialism. (And Barbara Tuchman’s, “March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam”, published in 1984, is a well worth reading again.)

There can be many a slip between cup and lip but, for the nonce, it does seem as though the Western White (U.S. and NATO troops) will be out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 — leaving widespread rubble for which the countries who sent them there will be responsible, yet miserly in helping repair.

Artificial ‘Light At the End of the Tunnel’

In Afghanistan, as was the case with the war in Vietnam, U.S. generals and courtier pundits lied through their teeth. They continually lied about the progress they were making, as Craig Whitlock makes clear in excruciating detail in his Dec. 2019 Washington Post report The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war: At war with the truth (See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/ )

You did not have to go through the crucible of Vietnam — or wait for honest reporting from the very few like Whitlock — to discern how Americans, including some presidents, were being misled on Afghanistan. The experience of Vietnam, though, did throw rather clear deja-vu light on this latest folly and its spurious justifications.  With a modicum of experience in media analysis, it was not difficult to penetrate the deceit and piece together what was really going on.

You Can Do It Without Spies?

I am almost amused thinking back on how President Reagan’s CIA Director, Bill Casey, was astonished to learn that over 80 percent of intelligence analysis was based on open sources. When today’s journalists ask the agency’s PR unit about me, the standard answer is that, since I no longer have access to classified reporting, I cannot possibly know what is going on.

But at a time when Gen. David Petraeus prevented my former analyst colleagues from having input into decisions on the relative merits of “surging” tens of thousands more troops into Afghanistan, I did not need intelligence from sleuths, surveillance, spies, or satellites to warn President Obama 12 years ago that:

“Gallons of blood are likely to be poured unnecessarily in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan — probably over the next decade or longer.”
(See: Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President, March 28, 2009, https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/07/welcome-to-vietnam-mr-president-3/ )

Back to Kipling

Kipling himself came to recognize the dangers — and ultimate folly — of imperialism.  He wrote:

It is not wise for the Christian white
To hustle the Asian brown;
For the Christian riles
And the Asian smiles
And weareth the Christian down.

At the end of the fight
Lies a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased;
And the epitaph drear,
A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East.

When Kipling’s only son John was killed in battle in France in 1915, Kipling saw things still more differently.  He wrote:

“If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.”

Sadly, Kipling’s aphorism applies as aptly to the roughly 2,400 U.S. and 1,200 “coalition” troops killed in the latest March of Folly into Afghanistan — not to mention many times as many Afghans.

Still more sadly, although President Joe Biden personally knows, all too well, the generals who lied, he could not hold them accountable even if he had the courage to try. MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank) complex is in charge.

DID YOU KNOW WHAT FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS, ESPECIALLY THE RUSSIANS, DO?!

By Ray McGovern (plagiarizing the latest “Intelligence Community Assessment”)

“Foreign governments or other foreign actors often try to influence the politics and policies of other countries. They may, for example, advocate for and try to shape other countries’ foreign policies in ways that benefit their political, economic, and military interests.” 

Thus begins the inspiring formal Intelligence Community Assessment released today, “Foreign Threats to the 2020 U.S. Federal Election”, which has already inspired headlines like this predictable one (from the NY Times): “Russian Interference in 2020 Included Influencing Trump Associates, Report Says”.

Good God! We pay these “Intelligence” folks to write such drivel, assessing this, and assessing that; and always assessing “Russian interference”?

See: https://twitter.com/raymcgovern/status/1371933732798672899 

The Times also recorded for posterity a profound warning from President Biden’s neophyte Director of National Intelligence:

“Foreign malign influence is an enduring challenge facing our country,” Avril B. Haines, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement. “These efforts by U.S. adversaries seek to exacerbate divisions and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.”

Haines comes highly lauded by one of her distinguished predecessors, James Clapper. A former Air Force general, Clapper seems to have matriculated at The Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay School of Russian Studies.  Clapper, you see, knows all about the Russians; I imagine he left graffiti on his office walls to warn successors not to succumb to the wiles and snares of those devils.

During an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd on May 28, 2017, Clapper provided his own “assessment”, referring back to the 2016 election: “In the context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election, and just the historical practices of the Russians who, typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So, we were concerned.” (sic)

Comparisons can be invidious. Haines is supposed to be smarter than Clapper.  Hard to tell the difference so far.