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Discussion point: Jack Teixeira I don’t know where to start. How much will the leaked information help the Russians and harm the Ukrainians? How much of it was not already common knowledge? How did Teixeira come to have access to information that neither his relatively low rank nor his role as an IT person justified him seeing? What about the role of the media? The New York Times tracked the leaker down then told the US government. Very 1950s.
If this were happening in the UK, I would not dare to ask the following for fear of prosecution, but since it is happening in the US and my tiny rivulet of speculation cannot possibly make any difference to the tsunami already crossing the world: which was he, or which was he more, a leaker, a whistleblower, a patsy for someone higher up, a braggart wanting to impress people online, a hero exposing US government lies, a traitor sending Ukrainians and fellow US servicemen to their deaths?
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@Natalie, would you really fear prosecution for saying that about a British “leaker”? I wouldn’t, so maybe I’m too naïve/ignorant.
Clovis Sangrail, I would fear it enough to make it not worth doing.
One thing is clear. Between Manning, Snowdon and now Teixeira, the Yanks have a problem at the institutional level with regards to their security.
Manning, Snowden, and now Teixrira. If the Americans can’t look after their secrets properly, perhaps they shouldn’t be allowed to have any!
Not sure you can be prosecuted in the UK for discussing material already in the public domain.
Whenever I hear talk about the 1950s I feel the need to remind people – should they need reminding – that McCarthy was right.
Interesting thread on Twitter about this. TLDR: Ukraine’s forces are too small. Also the Ukrainians don’t tell the Americans anything. Wise.
Or a person recruited by US authorities to spread disinformation. The disinformation would be more believable the more of it is true
I read that 1.2 million Americans may have had the security clearance to access such ‘top secret’ information of the kind leaked. Perhaps I’m missing something but in a group that large a leak is almost inevitable. The military may as well be asking for leaks to occur. So it’s hard to get too angry with the individual in question.
Sadly a restricted account
Restricted by whom, I wonder?
What concerns me more than anything is that the media is siding with the government on this and all but calling him a traitor. The same media that fought tooth and nail for the First Amendment when Daniel Ellsberg gave them the Pentagon Papers, and who never quite knew what to make of Assange, Snowden, or Manning, have now gone completely to the other side.
So much for keeping the government’s feet to the flame.
1.2 mil!ion? At that level? I doubt that. But…
There’s Secret, there’s Top Secret (TS), there’s Secure Compartmented Information (SCI), and many
divisions above that.
Texeira, who was an IT fix-it guy, had TS-SCI. Right away that tells me that management figured it was easier to “trust” him with access as a side effect of his actual ro!e, than to have a system which separated the tools from the data in a secure way. Nothing new here, but I’d argue that is where the fault lies.
Texeira is possibly a criminal, but he’s not RESPONSIBLE for the leak.
The rot’s been there, for years.
I was the Security Manager for a brigade, which means that I oversaw the process of getting clearances and making sure that they were all kept up to date across our element. Among other things…
So, I’m more than familiar with it all. Root problem is that a.) there is way too much that is classified, b.) this flows into requiring too many people to have clearances to work on all that mass of paper, and c.) because of this, there are way too many things driving the clearance train that aren’t security related at all.
Bradley Manning is a case in point. He had problems during his initial entry training with security violations, reported by fellow students and his instructors at the school he went to down at Fort Huachuca. The higher-ups pushed him through, anyway: Because, numbers. They needed bodies with his specialty and clearance level, had to produce them.
When he got to his initial assignment, he was rapidly identified as a “problem child”. To the point where his Security Manager, the guy doing my old job in his unit, wanted to pull his clearance. He felt strongly enough about this that when his boss said “No, we need bodies for the upcoming deployment to Iraq, or we can’t man the SCIF…”, he raised enough hell that they fired him. Then, the miserable bastards went after him and his successor for “not doing their jobs” in the aftermath of his activities in Iraq.
And, frankly? An awful lot of the crap they’ve classified really shouldn’t be. For example, any time we had to do a briefing on threat capabilities and so forth, a lot of the time we had to go to use the Jane’s archive over on the high side, inside SIPRnet. Because the Army wouldn’t spring for two licenses for that product, and I presume the unclassified version would have cost a lot more because more seats would have had access to it. Now, the problem with that is that while Jane’s is all open-source, anything to produce over on the high side stays classified until someone declassifies it, and ain’t nobody taking that risk with a routine briefing. So, you have to brief the unit on what things to expect in Iraq, you go to build the briefing, and because of where you get the info, it’s all classified. Automatically, unavoidably… Even though the actual data is likely out there as open-source. Which adds even more classified junk to the system you have to maintain and oversee.
Here’s a truism that the idiot class hasn’t processed, yet: If everything is classified…? Then, nothing is, really. By turning the whole system into this mass of paper, it has become unmanageable in any sensible way, which leads to this crap happening. You have to have people who can shuffle the paper, and the more paper, the more people, and that means you’re bringing in more and more people who’re security risks who you can’t manage carefully enough because there are so many of them… It’s a vicious circle.
In the saner world of the 1980s, Bradley Manning would have never been granted a clearance. Because of “Don’t ask; Don’t tell”, we suddenly had to grant clearances to the sexually confused. This may not seem like a big deal, but it really was: Manning is only the tip of the iceberg, and it’s not just due to concerns about blackmail. Most people with gender issues also have an accompanying cluster of other mental issues that mean they should not be granted clearances or placed in “positions of trust”. When they implemented all that touchy-feely crap, we lost the ability to keep those people away from those jobs. Manning is what resulted, and I can almost guarantee you that this Teixeira creature has some element of mental dysfunction going on that wasn’t caught because a.) looking into it and using it would be “discriminatory”, and b.) because the system is so vast and unwieldly, they didn’t have time to do a proper job of vetting this schlub. My guess is that he’s somewhere on the spectrum for autism, and forms most of his personal connections online, which is likely more “real” to him than actual, y’know… Real life. You find a lot of those sorts in MI, because they rely on the damn tests to winnow out anyone with normal mentation.
I fall into that category, myself: I’m in the top fifth percentile of the population on the tests. The difference is that while I’ve got a knack for taking tests, I’ve also had to live out in “the real” where intelligence on paper ain’t all that important or relevant. Most of the kids they put into the Military Intelligence jobs are super-smart on paper, but dumb as rocks in real life. Back in the 1980s, we had a US Army Europe-wide alert because three MI people went missing. Couldn’t be found; couldn’t be located anywhere in Germany or elsewhere inside Europe. The thought was, that they had to be kidnap victims, that the Soviets had gotten them. They did work high-classification jobs up in Frankfurt, so that theory had “legs”. There was a week or so of mass fear and panic across Europe; then the whole thing shut down. Nobody was talking about it, but it did come out a few months later that what had happened was that these three idiots-with-high-test-scores had decided that the coming “solar convergence” meant that the world was ending, and that they needed to be somewhere in Florida in order to be on the scene when everything lined up… They’d asked for leave, been refused, and then figured out how to leave Germany and get to Florida without tripping any of the usual exit and entry notifications that would have left a trail behind. Still not too sure how they pulled that off, because nobody wanted to talk about it for fear that others would follow. They got caught when the local sheriff in Florida found them in a state of despair because the world hadn’t ended with the solar convergence…
Only MI. Trust me on this, only MI can get up to that level of smart-yet-incredibly-dumb. There are reasons I distrust and discount “IQ testing”, and this was probably one of the first instances where I really began to have my doubts about the whole issue. Going to an NCO academy with those three idiot’s peers from that MI battalion sort of cemented my general view on the matter; all of those analysts and interception specialists were brilliant people, but they did the stupidest sh*t. One of them damn near burnt the castle down we used for the academy, because they’d heard something about “burning in” floor polish… Had no idea how to do it, but they’d heard of it, and decided that what you must have to do was spread a thick layer of paste wax on the floor, and then light it…
That was emphatically not the technique. The fire alarms were amusing, though…
Whatever the intentions of Jack Teixeira the guy is just a kid so someone else had to leak the docs to him. This has all the smell of a distraction from what the real issue is and that is that the USA has forces on the ground in Ukraine. And why is that? Because Biden is a crank with low self esteem and a desperate egotistical need to be seen as a real commander in chief. The leaks have exposed the MSM and democrat narrative regarding the war in Ukraine as a pack of lies.
Tucker Carlson pretty much nails it here
It’s funny that Kirk brings up how broken the intelligence and classification of materials is in the US because other countries have their own problems. For example, the Soviets classified everything with a map to the point that even the NCOs expected to take charge of platoons when their LTs got killed couldn’t do land navigation because maps were above their pay grade. Meanwhile, the US hands out maps to privates like it’s handing out candy.
On a semi-related note, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the US had Special Forces on the ground training the Ukrainian Army because that is exactly what the Green Berets are there for: training insurgencies and resistance movements. Never mind the Delta Force guys and Rambo type missions, the guys with the long tab’s bread and butter is going places they’re not supposed to be and training the locals to kill other folks for us and, ostensibly, for their own interests.
The United States government does not have secrets from its enemies – Mr Putin’s regime and the People’s Republic of China Communist Party dictatorship know everything there is to know about the American military and their allies. The United States government only has secrets from the general public.
I doubt anyone in military spaces, in any country, will be surprised by the information in the leak, if the leak is in fact genuine.
At the level of security to which this young guy had access, the Russians most likely already knew everything he spilled. The leak will mostly impact what the public thinks.
This is why the NYT/WP gang are raging – unlike the Pentagon Papers and other leak piles, this leak sullies the woke, not the cons. They treated Ellsberg a bit differently than they’re treating this guy.
And, who can say that this isn’t simply General Smith finding a neat way to get General Jones out of his way? The U.S. military marches to a different set of drums these days.
I don’t really know what the right judgement about this guy is, much as I have struggled with the (probably rather more virtuous) Snowden. But at the root is the problem that the government uses the classification system to protect itself from accountability.
The reason why so many people have Top Secret clearance is simply because the most perfunctory miscellany is classified so very highly. I used to work for the Royal Navy and had Top Secret clearance in the UK (or whatever it was called back then — it has been a while.) I was thinking I’d be reading about the aliens at Roswell, or the nuclear launch codes, but no, just the most trivial stuff.
The very nature of government classification is a very dangerous thing and there very much needs to be aggressive procedures to prevent over classification and to declassify as soon as possible. Today the agency that classifies the document gets to declassify it. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse! Of course some things, like the identity of foreign agents and weapons secrets are justifiably kept secret, but since there isn’t an effective mechanism then an alternative mechanism arises, namely the whistleblower. And the state’s immune system kicks in immediately, so that this kid will be punished more aggressively than any mass murderer. Sometimes a brave individual falls on his sword to commit treason; the very best kind of treason.
One of those mechanisms was the press, but they have become little more than state propaganda here in the US. It used to be they’d go to jail to protect their sources, in this case it seems that they HELPED the government track this kid down. It used to be they demanded more information, more accountability, now they seem to demand less information and less accountability. It is like something out of a novel so dystopian as to be met with a “come on, let’s be realistic.”
And let’s not buy the old saw that such treason “put’s lives at risk”. The thing that puts life most at risk is an out of control military with no accountability to the people. Had Snowden’s revelations been made through proper channels, to spark the conscience of Americans earlier without the fog of “treason” to cloud their judgement, no doubt tens of thousands of lives in the middle east, including the lives of many western military personnel, would have been saved.
Let’s be clear, over a billion documents are classified as Top Secret in the USA, even a lot of the Kennedy assassination documents are still hidden. Clearly the latter has NOTHING to do with any current active secrets, but just to save embarrassing some people and the state itself.
Sir Humphrey Appleby explained it best when he explained to Bernard “The Official Secrets Act isn’t to protect secrets but to protect officials.”
I read recently that there are still a handful of documents from the First World War that are under lock and key in Washington and they just went under an official review to see if they still warranted being kept classified. At this point, even if the documents said Wilson personally put a hit on the Archduke, who cares? Everyone who was involved is long dead, but here we are.
One of the things that nobody is noticing is that many of the documents he “leaked” are documents that had no business being available to anyone at the relatively low-level SCIF he worked at. Cape Cod? WTF? What are they doing with high-level briefing documents from the CIA…?
The fact that those documents were even available to him in order for him to leak them raises a whole lot of other questions, like “Why were they even there…?”
The most that SCIF should have had was operational-level stuff for the Air National Guard working out of that facility. That doesn’t include most of the laundry list of crap he supposedly leaked.
So, either there was another layer of breach going on, or… Who knows? All I can say for sure is that it’s really odd that stuff that should have been compartmented up at damn near executive office level should not have been accessible to someone working at that specific SCIF.
As with most of this crap, of late, all this does is raise even more questions for anyone who knows anything about how all of this crap really works. I have no earthly idea what is really going on, and about all I can say is that the publicly available information does not match what I know of the internal workings of the system.
The only thing that could possibly make any sense is if someone had all that crap at Cape Cod in order to brief high-level people living at Martha’s Vineyard, like the former President Obama. But, then… Why on earth would current stuff like that be using to brief him, when he’s supposedly been out of government for some 6-plus years?
I’m honestly having a hard time wrapping my head around some schlub at a relatively low-level facility like Cape Cod even seeing this stuff, let alone why it might have been there in the first damn place. Who is using that SCIF besides the Massachusetts Air National Guard? That’s the real question… I don’t think some of those CIA documents are things that would necessarily be shown to anyone in the Massachusetts congressional delegation, and why the hell would they have been pushed out there, and not to the various SCIF facilities in DC?
Something about all of this just isn’t right. No idea what, but I can see the outlines of “WTF?” all over it.
Ragingnick said:
Most of the stuff he had was the sort of thing you’d find left out after a major briefing. It’s entirely possible that he was tasked with cleaning it up, and instead of putting that material into the shredder, he took it home. Which is, frankly, nuts… You shouldn’t have been able to get that crap out of the SCIF, but if you worked there and had everyone’s trust at a facility like the one at Cape Cod, then maybe it’d be possible to just get hand-waved through the facility departure process.
Steven R said:
The Soviets went so far as to put false data on anything published and released to the public, which led to a couple of minor tragedies due to people getting lost or hitting things that the maps they had said weren’t there… I have no idea what happened to that mentality, because of all the OPSEC violations Russian forces are committing in Ukraine. I think there’s a bunch of Stalin-era NKVD types who are spinning in their graves at the offenses they see on Telegram and TikTok… They ought to look into that; there’s probably a ton of energy out there for use, if they hooked them up to generators…
Paul Marks said:
Probably true. I think the entire classification and security system has gotten out of hand, and is basically there to keep the voters from knowing what’s being done in their name, and to prosecute the people they don’t like. Look at what happened with Trump’s supposed violations, for an example.
It is possible that this latest thing is intended to serve as an opening wedge in order to discredit the entire classification system in order to provide cover for people like Trump and Biden… Who knows?
Fraser Orr said:
Exactly. That’s what most of it is, along with mendacious CYA… If the public never knows it happened, they can’t be held accountable for it. And, if you can shut the people who know about it up by threatening their clearances for revealing it…? Useful tool, that classification thing.
That said, Snowden was a tool, a patsy. I think his clearance was probably frauded into the system by people taking advantage of the OPM breach, and because they were overloaded doing the background security checks during the era he got his done. Frankly, the fact that he was dating a stripper…? LOL… Dude… That would never, in a million years, have flown with a military member looking to get a TS/SCI clearance. I honestly don’t know how the hell he got past even the initial background checks; if he’d been sitting across from me in my office, I’d have been like “Yes, PFC Snowden… Please send your boss to talk to me, please…?”, and then ripped said mental midget a new asshole for wasting my time with Snowden as even a Secret clearance holder. Stripper? WTF? Making the money she did? Yeah; sure, you bet… Give that boy a clearance. That whole thing had “honey trap” all over it, along with “somebody’s asset”. The fact that she’s living in Russia with him? LOL… Yeah. The public story is ever so believable…
I keep hearing this crap about how the Iraq thing wasn’t justified, but… I was there. I know the guys who were on all the WMD and other post-war inspection teams. I know they all found incriminating stuff, but none of that ever came out into public view. I have no idea why. I speculate that there was enough of it to provide ample blackmail material to various European governments that suddenly changed their tunes about helping with the reconstruction, many of which made a lot of money on all the post-war contracts for the oil industry.
There was a hell of a lot of chicanery going on with regards to Iraq. We found tons of evidence that the sainted “European Community” was sanctions-busting like a mofo; hell, I wandered through abandoned buildings on FOB Speicher on my off-duty hours, just looking around, and found stuff proving that major defense contractors in Europe had been shipping things into Iraq through Jordan…
Along with that, our EOD guys were constantly getting called out to go deal with things like nerve agent rounds being built into IEDs, “lost” cargos found buried out in the desert, and there was an entire installation to the west of Baghdad that was so badly contaminated that we just put a fence up around it and patrolled the perimeter to keep people out. I had an estimate for clean-up come across my desk that was in the tens of billions of dollars, on that one. So, yeah, you say there were no WMD in Iraq? I know that you’re either a very facile liar, or just ignorant. All this crap was out there, open source, reported in public briefings down in the Green Zone. None of the media attended. Ever.
So… I dunno that what transpired in Iraq was the ideal way to handle the situation, but something needed to be done. And, I hate to tell you this, folks… But the major reason for that? Your sainted European sanctions-busting governments, who were eyeballs-deep in the whole Oil-for-Food scam with the UN. Y’all can sanctimoniously claim that it was wrong, but ya know what? Your profit-taking politicians and industrialists were the primary reason something like what happened had to have happened. And, until Obama f*cked it all up, we were on a decent path; Saddam’s fate was one of the primary motivators for Khadafy to disarm and shut down his WMD programs. Where’d that get him, again? What, do you suppose, will be the likelihood that anyone else at all will do the same, knowing he died with a bayonet up his ass because he’d gone all noble and gave up his attempts to get The Bomb?
Yeah, get back to me on all that virtue you imagine on the part of y’alls sainted leadership. I’m not buying it.
Steven R said:
There are reasons they do that, and you’d be surprised at how much damage you’d do to current operations by declassifying those. Imagine that there was an informant telling British Intelligence stuff that was going on in Germany whose later career would have been compromised, calling into question a bunch of other stuff… The backtrail on these things can be lengthy, and you often don’t know when you’re giving things away that someone could use, simply by connecting dots they didn’t even know about.
That’s why everyone considers these things too risky to release. Sources and methods may be obsolete, but the things that they reveal about your work won’t be. Better to remain silent. A hundred years might not be enough time, in order to reduce the risks. A thousand years? Better…
Ragingnick, like Tucker Carlson, demonstrates that elements of the “right” are just as prone to the idiocy of tribal thinking as the left. Just because Biden is a jackass, if he said the earth was round, they’d become flat earthers.
The one thing I have to disagree with a lot of the contrarians about Ukraine about is whether or not we should be there.
Fact is, we underwrote to guarantee Ukraine’s borders with the Budapest Memorandum. It’s that damn simple; we should have put troops on the ground confronting Putin’s “Little Green Men” in 2014, but our government was run by the same set of idiots we have now, who were entirely on board with his work. Don’t forget who was Vice President, back then.
1994, people. The UK and the US undertook to guarantee Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus borders. Either you uphold what was signed, or you kiss goodbye to the last vestiges of the nuclear non-proliferation scheme.
Personally, I think Ukraine was nuts to ever trust anyone. Kravchuk had it right; they should have kept their nukes.
Interesting little detail about the site where this stuff first surfaced outside the Discord chat rooms:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/social-media-account-overseen-by-former-navy-noncommissioned-officer-helped-spread-secrets-a4b5643b?st=hkh3fc6anj640vl&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
This woman is a former senior Navy NCO who was just promoted to E-7 back in 2020. She left the Navy somewhat later as an E-5, with an honorable discharge. You don’t get busted from E-7 without being courtmartialed, and the fact that she got an honorable discharge, yet was reduced two pay grades? WTF?
The US military is self-destructing before our eyes, and mostly due to crap like this. The fact that someone who’s as unstable as this woman obviously is became a senior non-commissioned officer in charge of aircraft avionics maintenance? WTF? What’s going on with the selection and supervision, here? I’d almost guarantee you that she was an “affirmative action” promotion, in order to pump the numbers up for females in that specialty, followed by failure at actually performing at that level, and the resultant fallout. If you’ve worked in the system, you can see the likely outlines of it.
Sane people don’t do these things, like cosplay as ethnic Russians from a conflict zone for whatever unknown reason. I’m not even sure I can see money as a motivating factor, TBH, as there can’t be all that much cash floating around for people like her… Can there?
Nonetheless, this nutter was selected as a senior NCO in the Navy. That fact alone is terrifying.
I am going to steal that, Bell Curve 😀
@Kirk
Absolutely!
Kirk:
As ever, you are a mine of information as to what actually goes on inside the military. It is surely no accident this is where the terms FUBAR and SNAFU came from.
I suppose the military is an example of a world where the government really does control everything, and there are no private sector incentives to get things right, such as customer satisfaction or the profit motive. I think this is the future the WEF types have in mind for us all, when we own nothing and eat bugs.
As to Iraq, I bow to your knowledge of WMD out there. I think the British government, and specifically liars such as Alastair Campbell, re-wrote intelligence to make it seem as if Saddam had much more capability than he really did. For example, the claim he could launch WMD equipped missiles at 45 minutes’ notice which could hit Cyprus. This was false.
I think the reason the British did this was to make a sort of “respectable” case for war. The real case was that Saddam Hussein was a lunatic in charge of a state, and needed to go.
The amazing thing is that the US seems to have had no plan as to what to do next. Impose democracy? Iraq is a tribal state divided between Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs and Kurds. Good luck with that. Disband the army? How sensible.
I think the Iraqi Army should have been kept in being and given double pay to be good guys. It would have been cheaper in the long run. Some general should have been told “You’re the president now, sort it out or we’ll find someone else who will.”
Nor perfect, but it might have worked. Couldn’t have been worse than what actually happened, could it?
Before I deployed to the Gulf in 1990 we were shown pictures of the aftermath of the Kurds Saddam gassed. We were all jabbed up to the eyeballs with Anthrax and Pneumonic Plague vaccines , as well as taking Nerve Agent Pre-treatment tablets. I therefore assumed Saddam had then and continued to have WMDs. How does that tally with several years later we must invade Iraq because they have WMDs. He had WMDs the whole time. Why invade when we did?
@JohnK,
Look… I was there. I was part of the preparation for the whole post-war deal, which my unit was slated to be an integral part of. The planning wasn’t done badly; there was a plan, with multiple branches and sequels, all very rationally done. We had from December until April to be doing the prep work for it, and we did everything we could. There was a plan, it was executed, and it was just utterly, completely inadequate in the face of conditions in Iraq.
Almost everything started from the baseline assumption that there were civil authorities to work with, and hand governance over to. There were not; everything, absolutely everything was run from Baghdad. Case in point would have been the water plant there in our sector. You would think that it being in Tikrit, the heartland of Saddam’s power base, that they’d have kept that thing up. Nope; last real maintenance work on it was when the British colonial authorities built the damn thing back in the 1950s; it hadn’t had even the basics like the sand filtration beds or charcoal changed in that entire intervening period. The facilities virtually had to be rebuilt from the ground up; then, once that was done, you had to find someone local to hand it off to, for management and maintenance. There wasn’t anyone, because a.) the Iraqis were used to there being people parachuted in from the center at Baghdad, and b.) the “insurgents” killed anyone who stepped up to try and self-govern. You have no idea how many decent, upright Iraqi citizens that could have helped rebuild the damn country were slaughtered by the “insurgents”; the number had to have been in the hundreds of thousands across the country, and when you eliminate that fraction of the population? LOL… Good luck fixing things.
Iraq was nothing like anything else anyone had ever experienced in the last century. You went back and looked at WWII post-conflict governance, and there were always Italian, German, or Japanese local authorities to work with and hand things over to. Not in Iraq. The entire population was basically feral; there was nothing to work with, when it came to local authority. What there was was tribal, and the US simply did not comprehend that until late in the game, and even then it was more like dealing with warlord-era China.
So… We got excoriated for “no plan”, but the reality was, the plan we went in with was predicated on Iraq being a semi-functional country underneath it all. It was not; there was nothing even remotely resembling bottom-up authority anywhere except in the Kurdish northern areas. There was nothing to engage with or work with.
As for the ludicrous idea of keeping the Iraqi army under arms? Oh, man… The stupid… It burns, it BURNS.
Most of the then-extent Iraqi Army was Sunni. Most of the Iraqi population was… Shia. The idiocy of British colonial policy was to make the Sunni powerful and put them in charge of a majority-Shia country. The Sunni promptly did what such ethnic minorities did, and made things great for themselves and ensured that they stayed in power, keeping the Shia down. If the US had kept the Sunni military up and running, and then used that to run the place…? It might have worked. For a little while, and then the Iranians would have had a massive opening wedge into creating chaos, because I’m here to tell you, the Shia were f*cking done with Sunni domination and abuse. If we’d have kept the Iraqi Army in existence, even just “confined to barracks”? That would have been a huge signal to the rest of the Iraqi population that things hadn’t changed, weren’t going to change, and they had nothing to lose by being even more ungovernable. In the final analysis, shutting that sh*tshow down was the only way to go. There was nothing there to build on; nothing in Iraq looked like the Arab Legion. It was all venal corruption, all the way down.
Iraq was what it was because that entire country was f*cked up beyond possible Western comprehension. I’ve heard Iraq likened to what happens when the cops have to intervene in a particularly nasty and vicious domestic dispute, and while I’d agree with that, the reality was that it was rather more like sending social workers in to deal with one of those inbred feral clans like we sometimes generate out in the countryside of Australia and here in the US: There was no “there” there, in order to engage with reasonable, sane people. I mean, for the love of God, we rebuilt the water plant there in Tikrit, and inside of six months, it had to be rebuilt again and again, because people kept stealing things like pipes and stockpiled filter media from it, often with the connivance of the people we put in charge of it. They’d call in and complain “No water is coming; it’s contaminated…”, and then you’d go out and look, and the same assholes calling in to complain would be the ones who’d stolen the piping (that they couldn’t use…) and the filtration media (that they had no earthly use for, because that’s all it was, and was useless without the plant itself…).
Iraq in the early days wasn’t an occupation. It was an intervention into one of those homicidal inbred batf*ck crazy little communities out in the deep countryside, where civilization never reached and never got itself embedded into the psyche. You’d be going over the daily reports in those days, and it wasn’t like anything anyone had ever experienced, anywhere–This was like working in Antarctica, if the penguins had guns and kept blowing up your attempts to give them modern things like water and sewer service. If you weren’t there for any of it, you simply cannot comprehend how bad it was, and how impossible any of it was to foresee. I think we took “Sicily, 1943-4” as our worst possible case to use as a baseline, and I’m here to tell you, it was exponentially and actively worse.
I have to blame the Turks for a lot of it. Without their recalcitrance about using the ports (now destroyed by earthquake…) that we were promised until Erdogan took over, we had to run everything from and through Kuwait at enormous expense and inconvenience. Because of that, the delays in getting troops on the ground in northern Iraq was delayed, and the whole plan for fixing the place in a year and getting out went to sh*t. Not to mention, all the delays in logistics that created, which only increased the chaos and confusion. You also had all the pre-war assumptions about getting international aid engaged, which didn’t materialize until (I speculate…) the US threatened to release all the things we’d found in Iraq, proving European sanctions-busting efforts.
Iraq wouldn’t have been half the problem it was, had the sorry bastards of European politics and industry lived up to their commitments in terms of sanctions. They did not, and that was why Iraq was a necessity, else there’d have been a festering sore centered on it for a very long time, with all that implies for human suffering. Let me tell you… Simply removing Saddam and the Ba’ath Party was reason enough to do what we did. The sheer sadism and glee with which they operated was something that really can’t be seen outside of your average clinical setting for the criminally insane here in the West. You can’t comprehend it, until you meet someone whose wife caught the eye of one of Saddam’s minions, at her wedding, which led to her kidnapping by the bodyguards, rape, and then later suicide. One of our translators had that happen to him, and I heard the story first-hand. No corroborating evidence, but either he was the most facile lying bastard I’ve ever met, fully deserving of an Oscar for his performance, or he actually had that happen.
You really cannot even begin to wrap your head around Iraq of that period, unless you were there. I can’t fault any of the planners, or the poor bastards who wound up executing it. None of the pre-war assumptions, even the worst-case ones, could have foreseen what it was actually like. Iraq wasn’t a country, at that point: It was more a total vacuum of civilization and civilized values.
“You really cannot even begin to wrap your head around Iraq of that period, unless you were there. I can’t fault any of the planners, or the poor bastards who wound up executing it. None of the pre-war assumptions, even the worst-case ones, could have foreseen what it was actually like. Iraq wasn’t a country, at that point: It was more a total vacuum of civilization and civilized values.”
Shame the people who were gung ho to invade it hadn’t managed to work that out then.
Unfortunately, clairvoyance isn’t a real thing.
Never ceases to amaze me, the people who think they know better than everyone else, sitting on the sidelines and just letting bad things happen to other people because there is no solution “perfect” enough for them to get behind.
The real truth? There isn’t any such thing as a “perfect solution”, to anything, and the reality was there was only a series of increasingly bad choices. The actual invasion and how it worked out? Not, by far, the worst of them.
Doing nothing, with the Europeans doing everything they could to break down the “humane sanctions regime” that the US was talked into after Desert Storm, by all the great and the good? Wasn’t an option; Saddam and his clique represented an actual ongoing threat to the world’s oil supply. Which all of you seem to forget doesn’t just affect Western jet-setters; you remove Saudi Arabia’s cheap oil from the market, you’re kissing goodbye to the vast majority of Third World agriculture, and literal billions would starve. With that on the scales to balance out the way the whole thing was executed in actual fact? I can’t really fault anyone involved; at the least, they were trying to do a “right thing”. Maybe it didn’t work out perfectly, but there wasn’t much else that would have.
I would really love for some of these snide perfectionists of the world to be put in charge of things for a bit, just to let them see how hard it is to get anything done in the real world. Then, I could sit things out, snipe at them, and do everything I could to make trouble for them and their “imperfect” attempts at getting anything at all done. That’d be loads of fun. It’d be like being French, or Russian…
The men in the Pentagon and the White House really thought we’d show up, overthrow Saddam and Iraq would suddenly be the USA in the Middle East. I remember Colin Powell later saying about Iraq “you broke it, you bought it” when the problem was we didn’t break it. We bombed Germany and Italy and Japan flat. The locals didn’t care what we did or which faction was in charge or who prayed to which god so long as the bombing stopped. That wasn’t the case in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“The men in the Pentagon and the White House really thought we’d show up, overthrow Saddam and Iraq would suddenly be the USA in the Middle East.”
The irony being that the USA is now fast becoming the Middle East itself……
Kirk, the world doesn’t revolve around what America does, or does not do. You all think it does, but (as you’re going to find out eventually) no empire lasts forever.
Steven R… Both wrong and simplistic. The people setting things out from on top never thought it would be a cakewalk, nor did they think it would be “USA in the Middle East” overnight. They never set the orders out to the military like that, either; everyone I ever heard talk about it at any level was saying it was a minimum 50-year commitment, that we’d be seeing Iraq as a regular deployment tour just like Germany or Korea.
Where they were dishonest was in not making this commitment clear to the public, and in allowing the media to portray the whole thing as a “one-and-done” affair. Which it was never, ever going to be. Why they allowed that false narrative to get started, and then didn’t challenge it? No idea; the Bush administration basically gave up on the media ever telling the truth, and just defaulted to ineptitude. The fact that the whole “No WMD in Iraq” thing ever even got started? Sheer stupidity; if it had been me, I’d have lined up every one of those lying bastards from the international media who were hiding away in Baghdad and taken them out at gunpoint to “observe” the various WMD sites. Without any form of protective gear, because, obviously, those WMD didn’t exist. When they were in the hospital for exposure to nerve agents and various other fun things, then we could have discussed whether or not Iraq had been in possession of WMD…
Bush did not communicate well. That doesn’t change the realities, and I don’t think he should have committed us to the project of “fixing” Iraq or Afghanistan, unless he could be certain that the whole thing wouldn’t be abandoned halfway through, as Obama did. His incompetence at managing the media led directly to someone like Obama getting into office in the first damn place, and for all the detrimental things that followed from that. Like, ISIS and Syria going tits-up.
I do agree that we didn’t do enough damage to either Iraq or Afghanistan, in order to convince them that they’d been defeated. The problem with that, I’m afraid, is that “international public opinion” simply won’t allow that to happen. Look at what ensued after the “Highway of Death” during Desert Storm; had we delivered similar devastation across the whole of Iraq, how many bleeding hearts would have been coming out of the woodwork to excoriate the people doing it?
Thanks to the essential fecklessness of the Western general public these days, the ability to do that which is effective and righteous is seriously degraded. They don’t want to punish criminals, so they won’t do it, and keep electing politicians who actively aid and abet the destruction of civil society. What’s the end state of that sort of thing? People like Bush, who utterly lack the forthrightness and willpower to tell people what they need to do.
The way things worked out, I think Iraq and Afghanistan should have both been punitive expeditions that went in, broke things, and then left with an admonition not to do that crap again. Trying to reform either area (not nation, because neither one is…) without being willing to make a multi-generational effort of it? Waste of money, time, and human life on all sides.
Kirk:
I agree with your last paragraph. Short termism was never going to work in Iraq or Afghanistan. As you say, after doing the hard grind, the US under Obama and Biden then decided to up and leave. I suppose it worked out so well in South Vietnam in 1975, why not do it all over again.
There is something very wrong about American foreign policy.
Jim,
Can’t wait to hear the whinging and carping when the US isn’t doing the thankless job of maintaining and defending the international commons, any more. Just like the US was ever so asinine about the old British Empire doing the same thankless task, back when…
It’ll be loads of fun watching, as the Chinese or whoever the actual successor state takes things over. Both the British and the US were far more humane and decent as hegemonists than they’ll likely be.
And, again… It’s the f*cking perfectionists that irritate me the most. Mostly, they’re useless bastards who can only criticize, and do whatever they can to cause problems for the people who’re actually stuck in trying to fix things. Y’all bitch incessantly about the US and its vices; wait until you no longer have the US to do the things your lazy asses haven’t been willing to pay for, across Europe. Your population is bigger, your GDP is bigger, but without the US around to subsidize your security? You’d be a lot worse off, and your economic contradictions would have caved in a long, long time ago. For examples? See “Bosnia”, “Kosovo”, “Libya”, and a whole host of other international issues that the US got into only because “Europe” is essentially a parasite.
Hell, most of y’all can’t even be bothered to maintain 2% of GDP for defense, free-riding on things going back to the 1950s. Absent Poland and the UK, and now Finland, most of NATO free-rides on US logistics and combat forces.
Without Europeans playing games with the Russians, a lot of our current security issues also wouldn’t even exist. Who the hell subsidized Russia building up its post-Soviet armies, again…? Oh, yeah… Germany and everyone else buying cheap Russian gas and oil. And, then selling them nice things like night vision sights for their armored vehicles (Thales being a major offender, here… Rheinmetall another.) Thanks, guys.
I’m actually looking rather forward to the next major bout of American isolationism. All y’all will be taking it in the ass, good and hard. Deservedly so, just like with Europe’s incessant bitching about American politics that brought us wonders like the Obama administration. Europe talked a broad swathe of Americans into committing to a self-destructive course, and only now does anyone wonder if that was really a good idea… You think the riots in France are ugly now? Wait until Europeans are forced with paying entirely for their own security needs, and all that wunnerful socialism has to be cut back, in order to afford it.
Gonna be interesting to observe, when the choice is “NHS, or national defense?”
The thing that absolutely enrages me is Europeans contrasting their generous “social benefit” package with American ones, and utterly missing the fact that the only reason they can afford such things is because the US has underwritten their security since WWII. Every dollar we put into defense was one that didn’t get spent on health care, and when we finally see people over here listen to you lot, and actually divert that money into social benefits… I’ll be laughing long and hard, because all of yours will evaporate once they have to make the budget choices to either have adequate defense or free health care.
The overall fecklessness of the chattering classes never ceases to amaze me. Open borders? Nice idea… Who pays for it all? Free trade, shipping industry to cheap labor sites around the world? Who pays for it all, in the end? How long can the fraud stand, before it all crashes? Well, we’re about to see. I honestly can’t see this crap lasting much past my lifetime, and I’m pretty sure I’ll see at least the beginnings of the collapse of the current “system”. Mostly thanks to the idiot class that thinks good intentions count for all…
JohnK,
Yeah, but do take the point that a great deal of what is “wrong” with American foreign policy stems from us listening to and trying to please our putative “allies”. Who didn’t want us in Iraq, in the first damn place? Oh, yeah… Europe. ‘Cos “money”; they were too busy making bank off selling proscribed items to Saddam, going back to Chirac.
Anyone remember who it was that sold Saddam his nuclear reactor…? Anyone remember who played a major role in the fall of the Shah, turning Iran from a solid Western ally into a major threat to world stability…? Mmmmm… Yeah, that was the French, wasn’t it? Who wanted to break into the Iranian arms market, then locked up by the Americans?
I’m still rather suspicious of the entire Jimmah Cahtah “humanitarian concern trolling” about the Shah’s abuses of the Iranian people. Factor that in with all the Saudi money that washed into his political campaigns and Presidential Library, and I think we can see the outlines of what went on behind the scenes. The sheer humor of it all is how badly burnt they were when the Ayatollah turned out to be a bigger threat than the Shah ever was… Not to mention, how the fall of Iran led directly to Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.
Ah, the ever-so-smart and brilliant Europeans. What would we do, without them to help guide our foreign policies?
A hell of a lot better.
Kirk:
Obviously, you cannot ever trust the French. No argument there.
As to the Shah, quite moderate by Middle Eastern Standards, and much better than anything which came after him. His fall in 1979 was one of the worst events in recent history.
A major failure of British policy was to withdraw from the Gulf in 1971, to save a comparatively small amount of money. How did that work out? There is a terrible cost to weakness.
Well there was other great powers who were also quite happy helping Saddam Hussein when it was convenient.
Curiously, it was the French who helped with Israel’s nuclear programme, and the former’s work with it ended due to American pressure.
@Kirk
I recognise your righteous anger and I am now better informed, thanks to the information you’ve shared, but I think you make a mistake when you lump all the Europeans together.
The UK is part of Europe, for example, and although I yield to no-one in my contempt for the FCO, I think our policy has not been quite how you describe the European one.
I have very much enjoyed Kirk’s insight, especially about Iraq.
“most of NATO free-rides on US logistics and combat forces”
In some sense Europe as a parasite is believable. But Perun’s analysis here also makes sense: https://youtu.be/eUL8EvZkfEY
There remains mutual benefit. NATO’s contribution is higher in manpower and machinery than you might think from just looking at expenditure due to purchasing power parity. The USA undoubtedly benefits from, say, Finland, helping to keep Russia in check.
So this “I’m actually looking rather forward to the next major bout of American isolationism. All y’all will be taking it in the ass, good and hard.” … might be cathartic but not smart.
So this “I’m actually looking rather forward to the next major bout of American isolationism. All y’all will be taking it in the ass, good and hard.” … might be cathartic but not smart.
I don’t think anyone is looking for catharsis, or looking to see the European nations suffer in the charming manner you suggest. Rather I’d like to stop being taken advantage of and have them step up to the plate. When you stop giving money to your drug addicted kid, you don’t do so because you want them to die, or suffer withdrawal, or for you to feel some catharsis, but because you want to force them to change, to do the right thing. Maybe they won’t, but you sure hope they will.
Every little dispute is not the business of the USA. Our business is business. Our way of asserting influence is through trade relationships, making great products, making positive partnerships. As Jefferson said in his first inaugural address:
“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”
Apparently Jefferson was a MAGA guy (though in fairness, unlike Trump, he was an ACTUAL white supremacist.)