A Decade of War

Apparently today marks the tenth anniversary of our huge embarrassing failed war in Afghanistan.

Neat. Here's to ten more.

I Got Your Death Panel Right Here

With liberty and justice for all:

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions . . . . There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council . . . . Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rulesby which it is supposed to operate. . . . The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process. . . . 

Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was asked by reporters about the killing. The process involves “going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president” . . . .Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described. They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC “principals,” meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval . . . But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals’ decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.

Read the whole thing. Due process of the law is the latest casualty of our democracy in our frenetic obsession with the War on Terror and Absolute Safety.

On Defense Spending

Every time you hear a politician talk about cutting our ridiculously bloated, bigger-than-the-rest-of-the-world-combined defense budget, think of these words by Matthew Yglesias:

If you think about, say, Denmark there’s probably some level of concern there that al-Shabab will take over Somalia and create a congenial atmosphere for Islamist radicalism. Then there’s some secondary concern that some of this radicalism might lead to efforts to infiltrate Denmark and launch terrorist attacks in Copenhagen. The proposed remedies for this, however, are going to be general considerations about physical security in Denmark. The country needs effective policing and border security agencies, and it needs to be resilient in the face of the possibility that a bomb may go off somewhere someday without wrecking the country. 

[...] 

The reporters say the “rapid expansion” of these military efforts “is a reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials view the activities of al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia.” No doubt it is that. But it’s also a reflection of a very grandiose conception of the appropriate role of the American military in the world. After all, a radical who’s in Yemen or Somalia is, by definition, not in the United States. It would be cheaper and easier to focus on making sure people can’t get from Yemen to Yuma or from Somalia to Sacramento than for us to go halfway around to try to kill them. But America’s strategic concept is basically that if there’s a problem anywhere in the world that could potentially be ameliorated by dropping American bombs, then we ought to drop the bombs. That strategy requires an extremely high level of defense expenditures. Bombs, planes, bases, “secret” airstrips, etc. are all expensive. To reduce military spending, we would need to adopt a more restrained view of the role of the American military. That hasn’t happened.

Defense spending is going no where, at least not in any meaningful capacity. Not until we discontinue our fetish for Endless Wars and piss pants reactions to anything that goes bump in the night and smells like a terrorist. And unfortunately for us, I don't see either of those things ever happening. 

Terrorist Until Proven Innocent

This is exactly the kind of shit that I was talking about in my post about the shameful legacy of our piss pants reaction to 9/11. 

And note how blithely the FBI spokesperson states that the public prefers that they overreact rather than under react. Personally, I would rather prefer they act with a modicum of sanity and not use heavily armed SWAT teams to drag innocent citizens off of an airplane for no reason other than they are brown. And let's be honest with ourselves - that is exactly what happened here.

The Onion, excellent as usual, nails it here.

The High Cost of Overreacting

I've said it before, but there is never any cost/benefit analysis to Absolute Safety. Ever. Why? Because freedom isn't free. And because shut up, that's why! And you don't want to get snuffed out in your bed at 3:00 am by a terrorist do you?!

I think someone once said something about all of this, years ago:

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.
He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.

We may have had Navy SEALs swoop in and shoot him in the face, but you can't argue that he didn't ultimately accomplish his goal. I know I'm not the first freedom hating, anti-American liberal to point this out, but it bears repeating as the ten year anniversary of September 11th nears tomorrow. We allowed two terrorists armed with box cutters and a plot that cost $500,000 to fundamentally alter the fabric of America and by extension, the world. We essentially reacted like Gotham City did in The Dark Knight at the hands of the Joker: "Look at what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets." We played right into their hands, launching two endless wars, one of which was completely unrelated to the attack on our soil, and spent billions and trillions of dollars in the pursuit of the laughable ideal of Absolute Safety. We circumvented civil liberties long enshrined by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution, to the extent that many who have grown up during the time of 9/11 now view this as normal. Even when bin Laden came out and publicly stated that this was his end game, we kept right at it anyway. And we continue to do so, and these same policies will continue into perpetuity. He got in our heads, altered our psyche, altered who we are as a people, even going so far as to justify torture as a means to an end, and gave birth to the insanity of the national security apparatus that has its tentacles firmly wrapped about America, ever wooing citizens to forego their civil liberties and basic governmental services commonly offered by other Western democracies so that we can plow billions into defense and security spending in pursuit of the specious goal of wholly preventing all future and potential terror attacks. All of this despite the overwhelming volumes of evidence that show that more Americans die in car accidents than they do as a result of terror attacks. Maybe it is time for no-drive lists and screening shoes and liquids before people get behind the wheel!

Contrast this with how Norway's prime minister reacted when recently confronted with a violent attack on his nation by an unhinged extremist:

Earlier Mr. Stoltenberg said the attacks were directed at Norway's "fundamental values" - democracy and openness - and that the response would be "more democracy, more openness." He said he expected people to participate more broadly in politics.
He added it was too early to consider new security laws.
"Now is the time for comfort for those who have lost family members [and] friends, and to help those who are still wounded," he said.
"Then afterwards, and especially after the investigation is finished, there will be a time for going through all the experiences, learning from what happened and then draw the conclusions regarding, for instance, security measures."
But the prime minister said the time would come when it was necessary to move on.
"We have to, at some stage, move back to some kind of normality, and also to convey the message of sadness with a message of something positive - and that is that we have seen a very united Norwegian people."

Any American politician uttering these words would be labeled a dirty hippie, pussy-ass coward and Unserious.

I'm not even going to go into the opportunity cost of $3 trillion dollars and what we could have done with that money. Just remember during all the flag waving and high-minded, freedom loving, America #1 speechifying that will take place tomorrow, it didn't have to be this way. We voluntarily embarked on a lifelong, national policy of absolute insanity in the wake of the death of 3,000 of our fellow citizens, co-opting their deaths and memories to subvert the rest of the nation into accepting endless wars and the perpetual empowerment of the security state. Their lives and legacies deserve better than this. 

UPDATE: ThinkProgress gives the thrust of my post a leg up, noting that in the ten years since 9/11, only 33 Americans have been killed as a result of terror attacks, while 150,000 Americans have been slain in murders.

Nation Building

It only applies after you have invaded and dropped freedom bombs on brown people:

“We can’t keep spending money we don’t have,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, where deadly wildfires have charred tens of thousands of acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. [...]“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.” 

This purist principle did not stop both Cornyn and Burr for voting to fund rebuilding efforts in Iraq without a single offset. Indeed, Cornyn voted against delaying $20.3 billion in Iraq infrastructure funds even though the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) noted that such a payment would increase the budget deficit. Overall, the U.S. has spent $44.6 billion in taxpayer funds on rebuilding Iraq through emergency supplemental bills — and not a penny was cut from elsewhere in the budget.

Clearly the solution here is that we need to bomb ourselves, and then the GOP will be interested in finding money to invest in our crumbling infrastructure.

Fear Monger Like It's 2004

Fuck this guy:

LIEBERMAN: I want to indicate today to my colleagues that Senator Coburn and I are working again on a bipartisan proposal to secure Social Security over the long term, we hope to have that done in time. To also forward to the special committee for their consideration. So, bottom line, we can’t protect these entitlements and also have the national defense we need to protect us in a dangerous world while we’re at war with Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11 and will be for a long time to come.

I guess he has a point - what use is a safety net if we're all DEAD from 9/11 times a thousand?! We won't have a future if we don't fight to protect its very existence through spending a trillion dollars annually on defense!

Sometimes the stupid gives me migraines.


UPDATE: Greenwald notes that our stalwart new defense secretary (confirmed by unanimous Senate vote), also thinks that we should fuck over our citizenry to finance more freedom bombs and our ridiculous bloated military complex:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Thursday of dire consequences if the Pentagon is forced to make cuts to its budget beyond the $400 billion in savings planned for the next decade.
Senior Pentagon officials have launched an offensive over the past two days to convince lawmakers that further reductions in Pentagon spending would imperil the country’s security. Instead of slashing defense, Panetta said, the bipartisan panel should rely on tax increases andcuts to nondiscretionary spending, such as Medicare and Social Security, to provide the necessary savings.

We are just screwed.

Memo to the White House

YOU MORONS ARE NOT WINNING THIS INCREDIBLY STUPID ARGUMENT:

The debate over the constitutionality of U.S. involvement in Libya's civil war has obscured what could be a far harder sale for the president. Come the end of September, the costs borne by the American taxpayer for the country's intervention in Libya will surpass $1.1 billion, according to the administration's own accounting.

In the age of austerity, this is hardly chump change. And while the major gripes with U.S. policy center on the strategic purpose of getting involved -- or the legal rationale for choosing to do so -- it is the cost that could bring it all to an end.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Thursday defended the $716 million that had already been spent on Libya by June 3.

"It is also important to note that the money that you mention is coming from existing funds," Carney said, during the daily briefing. "There is no request for a supplemental. And it is money that would have been spent on other things like training missions that are being fulfilled by the actual missions being performed. So this is not new money. And we believe that it continues to be in the U.S. interest to participate in this mission in the limited manner that we are participating in it because it is in our interest, within this multinational coalition, to continue to protect Libyan civilians, to continue to enforce the no-fly zone and an arms embargo to give the opposition the time and space that it needs to organize."

So Libya is not really a war because there are not really any "hostilities," and oh by the way guys! It's okay that it's already exceeding our initial cost estimates (because that wasn't wildly fucking obvious to anyone with a pulse). Besides! We already had this money set aside in our existing budget for freedom bombs!

I wonder if misguided, endless wars are part of Obama's vision of Winning the Future.

It Depends On What Your Definition of "War" Is

I'm a couple of days late in getting to this, but this is a joke:

The White House, pushing hard against criticism in Congress over the deepening air war in Libya, asserted Wednesday that President Obama had the authority to continue the military campaign without Congressional approval because American involvement fell short of full-blown hostilities.

In a 38-page report sent to lawmakers describing and defending the NATO-led operation, the White House said the mission was prying loose Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s grip on power.

In contending that the limited American role did not oblige the administration to ask for authorization under the War Powers Resolution, the report asserted that “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.” Still, the White House acknowledged, the operation has cost the Pentagon $716 million in its first two months and will have cost $1.1 billion by September at the current scale of operations.

This is how far we've fallen. We have now reduced ourselves to debating the legal definition of a war. Let's turn this around for a second - let's assume that a Middle Eastern/North African country decided that it had enough of the United States and started bombing random US cities for a sustained period of time Do you think for one second that we would not constitute that as 'hostilities' or an act of war? 

This is absolutely insane and ludicrous and a really stupid fucking move on Obama's part. Because this was 100% his call:

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

Someone get the man another Nobel Peace Prize.

We're Gonna Put This On the White House Refrigerator

So we can look at it eeeeeeeeevery daaaaaay:

Mr. President, according to our own intelligence officials, al Qaeda no longer has a large presence in Afghanistan, and, as the strike against bin Laden demonstrated, we have the capacity to confront our terrorist enemies with a dramatically smaller footprint. The costs of prolonging the war far outweigh the benefits. It is time for the United States to shift course in Afghanistan.

We urge you to follow through on the pledge you made to the American people to begin the redeployment of U.S. forces from Afghanistan this summer, and to do so in a manner that is sizable and sustained, and includes combat troops as well as logistical and support forces.

We look forward to working with you to pursue a strategy in Afghanistan that makes our nation stronger and more secure.

You could, you know, put it to a vote. But in general, the situation is hopeless, and we are not leaving no matter how many strongly worded letters the Senate pens. Amurikans don't lose wars and these colors don't run - we throw soldiers and money at the problem til the job is done even as our own populace suffers the worst economy since the Great Depression.

And The Military Industrial Complex Grinds Onward

Blood and empire - as American as apple pie. We are never leaving:

American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which is likely to see US troops, spies and air power based in the troubled country for decades.

Though not publicised, negotiations have been under way for more than a month to secure a strategic partnership agreement which would include an American presence beyond the end of 2014 – the agreed date for all 130,000 combat troops to leave — despite continuing public debate in Washington and among other members of the 49-nation coalition fighting in Afghanistan about the speed of the withdrawal.

[...]

Although they will not be "combat troops" that does not mean they will not take part in combat. Mentors could regularly fight alongside Afghan troops, for example.

Senior Nato officials also predict that the insurgency in Afghanistan will continue after 2014.

And why are we staying there? Because the benefits of having a massive empire is that it provides for convenient staging grounds for advancing the national policy of additional endless wars:

There are at least five bases in Afghanistan which are likely candidates to house large contingents of American special forces, intelligence operatives, surveillance equipment and military hardware post-2014. In the heart of one of the most unstable regions in the world and close to the borders of Pakistan, Iran and China, as well as to central Asia and the Persian Gulf, the bases would be rare strategic assets.

[...]

Another is the question of US troops launching operations outside Afghanistan from bases in the country. From Afghanistan, American military power could easily be deployed into Iran or Pakistan post-2014. Helicopters took off from Afghanistan for the recent raid which killed Osama bin Laden.

Afghanistan is key for when we need a convenient logistical hub for when we decide that Ahmadinejad has pissed us off enough, or he has weapons of mass destruction, or he's being insufficiently deferent to Western oil needs. I can't even believe how fucking glibly the Guardian states this - "American military power could be easily deployed into Iran." It just rolls off their tongue, as if it's a certainty. Not that it isn't entirely likely, because there is nothing we Americans love more than a costly, protracted war in a Muslim nation. But still - it's pretty damning to see it written so nonchalantly in print, especially considering the Guardian is normally one of the better papers. 

It's also funny to read the parts of the article where the Afghans are attempting to object to certain terms of the negotiations. Clearly they have not been paying attention to how these things work. We still have troops in Japan and Germany. 

But I Thought It Was a Humanitarian Mission?

We just heart the Libyan people so much more than the Syrians, Yemenis, and Bahrainis and couldn't bear to see the former being gunned down in the streets by their own government. The latter? Meh. Not so much.

On that note, Glenn Greenwald excerpts the following from this Washington Post article:

Yet even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. He sought big bonus payments up front. Moreover, upset that he was not getting more U.S. government respect and recognition for his earlier concessions, he pressured the oil companies to influence U.S. policies. . . .

When Gaddafi made his deal with Bush in 2004, he had hoped that returning foreign oil companies would help boost Libya’s output . . . The U.S. government also encouraged American oil companies to go back to Libya. . . .

The companies needed little encouragement. Libya has some of the biggest and most proven oil reserves -- 43.6 billion barrels -- outside Saudi Arabia, and some of the best drilling prospects. . . . Throughout this time, oil prices kept rising, whetting the appetite for greater supplies of Libya's unusually "sweet" and "light," or high-quality, crude oil.

By the time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited in 2008, U.S. joint ventures accounted for 510,000 of Libya's 1.7 million barrels a day of production, a State Department cable said. . . .

But all was not well. By November 2007, a State Department cable noted "growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism." It noted that in his 2006 speech marking the founding of his regime, Gaddafi said: "Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money." His son made similar remarks in 2007.

Oil companies had been forced to give their local subsidiaries Libyan names, the cable said. . . .

That's more the recent history of American-Libyan interaction. The article states this on the current state of the conflict:

But Libya's oil production has foundered, sagging to about 1.5 million barrels a day by early this year before unrest broke out. The big oil companies, several of which had drilled dry holes, felt that Libya was not making the best exploration prospects available. One major company privately said that it was on the verge of a discovery but that unrest cut short the project.

With the country torn by fighting, the big international oil companies are treading carefully, unwilling to throw their lot behind Gaddafi or the rebel coalition.

Yet when representatives of the rebel coalition in Benghazi spoke to the U.S.-Libya Business Council in Washington four weeks ago, representatives from ConocoPhillips and other oil firms attended, according to Richard Mintz, a public relations expert at the Harbour Group, which represents the Benghazi coalition. In another meeting in Washington, Ali Tarhouni, the lead economic policymaker in Benghazi, said oil contracts would be honored, Mintz said.

"Now you can figure out who’s going to win, and the name is not Gaddafi," Saleri said. "Certain things about the mosaic are taking shape. The Western companies are positioning themselves."

"Five years from now," he added, "Libyan production is going to be higher than right now and investments are going to come in."

So essentially we have a war being waged for the sole purpose of deposing a dictator for the crime of being insufficiently deferent to the needs of Western oil consumption. That WaPo article should terrify anyone who reads it. To me, the fact that we're already a billion dollars deep in yet another war concocted practically overnight in an overwhelmingly toxic political environment, in a predictable complete defiance of public support, and in the midst of a vicious debate on the federal budget and deficit says that our energy supply is much more dire than our leaders are willing to admit. As Greenwald states, Britain and France are much more reliant on Libyan oil, but I still have a feeling that this does not bode well. 

Freedom & Democracy: America's #1 Export

Troop withdrawals should not be significant or immediate, because Afghanistan is going swimmingly and we probably just need a few more months and another trillion dollars or so and then we can win this thing, because that's what America does - it wins its wars, bitch, and these colors don't run. There is no cost-benefit analysis to war. Ever.

But hey, if anything, at least we are setting records.

We Are Broke: Defense Spending Edition

4.8 percent of a GDP of $14 trillion is a lot of fucking money. 

(arugula eating elitist librul rag The Economist, via ThinkProgress)

America's Gun Fetish

Guns are one of those rare things in American culture that you just can't mess with. It doesn't matter how modest or truly conservative (not in the teatard batshit context - I mean the literal sense) the policy is; the only acceptable gun policy in America is no policy at all, or that which seeks to deregulate or fundamentally loosen the already insanely lax laws we have in place. 

That being said, we now have Al Qaida cheering jihadists to exploit the aforementioned insanely lax gun laws. The same laws that have previously been proven by Michael Bloomberg to be insanely lax and dangerous and reckless. As Digby notes, gun policy was one of the few facets of American domestic policy left untouched by the collective legislative pants shitting that succeeded the days and months following 9/11. 

It's another reminder of how completely ignorant and futile are our security policies in the wake of 9/11.  We're terrified of someone sneaking a bottle of killer shampoo onto an airplane when there are a myriad of other ways in which an attack could cause widespread terror and casualties - gun violence being prime among them. We've seen the horror caused by years of innumerate school shootings, the Mumbai attacks three years ago, and even as recently as Jared Loughner's attack in Tucson earlier this year. 

But for god's sake, whatever you do - stay the fuck away from America's firearms. Real Amurikans know you need 'em for when that day comes to refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and over throwin' the tyrannical federal gubmint and not treadin' on me and stuff. And don't call them crazy either - god fearing Amurikans just really, really love Jebus, guns, and the Constitution:

h/t to Kos for the awesome pics.

Also, in true characteristic asshole fashion, the NRA opposes closing the gun show loophole, and has up until this point declined comment on the Al Qaida video.

Blood and Empire

Remember how we're not in Iraq anymore? Or that the fake/pretend troops that we left stationed there are "non-combat" so we could focus on other miserably failed wars? Or something?

Five U.S. soldiers were killed Monday in an attack in central Iraq, the U.S. military said in a statement. It was the deadliest single attack this year against U.S. forces in Iraq and an indication of how dangerous the country remains for American troops as they prepare to withdraw by the end of 2011.

An Iraqi security source said that the five U.S. soldiers had been working as advisers on a base for Iraqi national police in eastern Baghdad when their quarters were targeted by rocket fire shortly before 7 a.m. local time.

The U.S. military declined to comment when asked about the information and referred back to their statement.

[...]

Eleven U.S. soldiers were killed in April, and two died last month in attacks.

There are an estimated 46,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq.

To me, the definition of non-combat would mean not actively serving in a war zone. But that probably makes me crazy. 

Also really encouraging to see that casualties continue to mount in Iraq, yet you never hear so much as word one about it anymore on any of the news networks.

Barney Frank on Libya

The outspoken Congressman has a point:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) bashed the White House on Friday for intervening in Libya to oust dictator Muammar Gaddafi, saying the United States does not need to be the "9-1-1 for the world.""We have got to stop subsidizing the rest of the world," he said on the House floor. "Particularly now. When members from the Appropriations Committee come up and tell us, you got to go and do this, but let's cut police in Massachusetts, let's cut housing in Ohio, let's cut transportation in California, we cannot reduce our deficit in a way that allows us to maintain any concern for the quality of life here if we continue to spend money promiscuously over there."

[...]

"I heard one of my colleagues on the other side say, well, the Europeans are there, but let's not poke them in the eye," he said. "Poke them in the eye? We have for years, since the beginning of NATO, been subsidizing them so they have military budgets less than half of ours as a percentage of their GDP, so they can do better than us in health care and competitiveness and every other way."

But let's be honest - there is not a lot of concern in the Beltway for the quality of life here in the U.S. Libya is just the latest symptom of that.

I'm In Ur Base, Killin Ur Doodz

Via TPM, just in time for Memorial Day, the Pentagon is already ratcheting up its justification of the next round of decade-long, speciously planned exportation of Jebus, freedom, and democracy:

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military.

In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," said a military official.

It's probably just a coincidence that the origin of cyber attacks are often difficult to determine, prone to misdirection, and without allegiance or connection to a given nation. Sounds strangely like our current wars of choice, does it not? Uniform-less combatants that we pursue until the ends of the earth in pursuit of Absolute Safety utilizing a grossly overmatched military force with a 20th century strategy that costs a fuckton of money - hackers quickly become tomorrow's terrorist.

This shift in policy is obviously not aimed at any two-bit hacker with a Dell and a cursory knowledge of Trojan horses. But it's a reaffirmation of our continued insistence on using American military power as a response to pretty much anything. And you are going to love the yard stick for how this will be applied:

The report will also spark a debate over a range of sensitive issues the Pentagon left unaddressed, including whether the U.S. can ever be certain about an attack's origin, and how to define when computer sabotage is serious enough to constitute an act of war. These questions have already been a topic of dispute within the military.

One idea gaining momentum at the Pentagon is the notion of "equivalence." If a cyber attack produces the death, damage, destruction or high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause, then it would be a candidate for a "use of force" consideration, which could merit retaliation.

So in other words, use of force will be commensurate with the damage which the cyber attack caused. And in case you haven't been paying attention, we are not particularly adept at measured, 'equivalent' responses. A single terrorist attack that killed 3,000 American citizens gave way to two wars that continue to this day  almost a decade after the fact, not to mention the trillions of dollars we have pissed into the wind, the complete erosion of our moral character through indefinite detention and torture, and the ways in which average Americans now accept the persistent extraconstitutional intrusions into their privacy, civil liberties and even the very act of boarding a fucking airplane. And that list goes on and on - it is by no means conclusive, but just a small list of the number of insanities we allowed 9/11 to entrench in American policy.

The DoD is just gearing up for the 21st century and beyond. If we ever get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, we are going to need another hopeless military conflict to softly caress our national trigger finger and something else on which to spend our $800 billion defense budget. The cyber attack policy is just the framework for that.

Memorial Day

Remember not just the departed, but also the fact that there is no abiding purpose for which we should remain in Afghanistan or Iraq. And maybe that makes me not a real 'murikan or a dick, but I think it's also important to not get wrapped up in the mindless nationalism that inevitably accompanies such holidays. Today should serve as a day of remembrance, and in the midst of our introspection, also powerful reminder that war is an incredibly destructive, unnecessary, disgusting act and something we ought to do a better job of avoiding.

*Update*
This.

Legalizing Freedom Bombs

Looks like we are planning on making an honest war out of Libya:

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama on Friday invited Congress to approve U.S. intervention in Libya, expressing "support" for a bipartisan resolution drawn up by a group of senators authorizing the military operation.

Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, passed amid the turbulence of the Vietnam War, presidents must obtain congressional approval for the use of force within 60 days, or else begin withdrawing. That deadline was Friday for the Libya operation.

[...]

"Congressional action in support of the mission would underline the U.S. commitment to this remarkable international effort," Mr. Obama wrote in a letter to congressional leaders. "It has always been my view that it is better to take military action, even in limited actions such as this, with congressional engagement, consultation and support."

[...]

The president cited a resolution of approval drawn up by Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), the top Republican on the Armed Services panel; and others. Mr. McCain predicted recently that the resolution would get 80 votes in the Senate.

It's only mean old man McCain's estimate, but name one legislative item that would garner 80 votes in the Senate. America loves itself some war, and it's the one national priority for which we will always justify the cost.