Lessons from the Lies in Afghanistan and Vietnam

Many lessons; from the mid 60’s until now.
Zero sum learned…
What’s with that? Stupidity? I don’t think so; so, what is it?
Another lesson not learned; you’ll never change anything with a vote; period!
What’s that old saw about insanity? Doing the same thing……..

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if the Wilson Administration had been more serious in cracking down on the rampant violations of the neutrality law by US Corporations and Banks? Banks that gave out secured loans to the Aliies should have been closed. Manufacturers who supplied Britain with steel and explosives should have had their charters revoked. And the blatant and illegal blockade of the US Coast by the Entente to prevent trade with the Central Powers should have been challenged with a show of force by the USN and the Army on the Canadian Border.

Doing one of these steps would have caused France to collapse in 1916. But Wilson was weak willed and lacked the will to see his policy through while hotheads pushed the American Public towards war.

WW1 was the original sin that saw the rise of the Deep State and its entrenchment.

We live in a world where the obvious has no force until it has been stated by some appropriate, credentialed member of the Establishment. The simple fact that the US has been in Afghanistan 18 years is enough to know that US policy, strategy, and tactics have not worked. But it takes some duly christened report to make what was obvious official. There were so many things wrong in so many ways for so long with the whole exercise that this most recent coming to Damascus moment isn’t so much an indictment of a bunch of lying generals but a political system that allowed itself to be so obviously lied to for so long.

There is no deep state. On the one hand, it is supposed to all powerful, pull all the strings, yet remain completely hidden. At the same time, it seems unable to tie its own shoelaces ad woefully ineffective. Deep state is just the modern incarnation of the bogeyman. Careful! He’s over there, or there, or under your bed. Itis the representation of anything you do not like.

If you want to know who is really pulling the strings of your life, look to the rich and elites. They don’t hide. They do it out in the open, every damn day. They rub your face in it. And all you can say is “deep state.”

“Deep state” is just a dramatic way of saying that Michel’s Iron Law of Institutions has been at work for a long time, creating interlocking oligarchies in the military-industrial complex, the news and entertainment media and the financial sector. Whatever the original or nominal social purpose of the organizations, those organizations are now run by and — this is the critical driver of corruption of purpose — for their elite management. The professional managers of the complex network of complex bureaucracies composing these sectors of the political economy form a self-sustaining, self-validating social class in Marx’s sense, and neoliberalism is their rationalizing (class) ideology. (Remember that for Marx, ideology is a phenomenon of self-conscious social class defending its interests without acknowledging that it is doing so.) The personnel in these industries — not just the top management, but deep down the hierarchy — are pursuing well-worn career paths where their advancement and success are tied to both their selection for accepting and leaving unchallenged the narratives (aka lies) that organize their routines, but also on the organization’s continued ability to secure income and resources from what has degenerated into predation or parasitism, as the case may be.

The capitalist malefactors of great wealth — the “oligarchs” of Russia — the numerous billionaires of America, including the now famous financiers of Cato and George Mason Mercatus and the like, the Kochs, have a role, of course. But, it is important to realize that the capitalist class, tiny as it must always be, stumbled into a critical political innovation when the reduction of marginal taxes on high incomes made it possible and practical to offer huge incomes to corporate CEOs and their equivalents. That shift — and it was a big enough shift to dominate the changing dynamics of national income distribution documented by Piketty and Saez — changed the political position of the technocracy from one of opposition to capitalist greed to at least partial acquiescence and connivance. At the very top, the huge prize for winning the C-suite tournament attracted psychopaths well-equipped to compete and further down the corporate food chain, any policy that fed the professional bureaucracy additional complexity to manage was accepted. So, we got out-sourcing, and financialized “free trade” that sent manufacturing to China and educational institutions with burgeoning administrative ranks, impoverished teachers and students lost to debt peonage. We got media conglomerates and universal banks of enormous size and scope, in which creativity and financial integrity have no place.

I cannot agree with Hugh. “Deep state” may be a rhetorical fancy, but it also labels a very real albeit complex state of political evolution into the pursuit of “the self-licking ice cream cone” (another expressive phrase with all too much application).

I read Listen, Liberal as observing the consequences of this evolution for the Democratic Party, which is now very much the Party of banksters and the national security state, not the representatives of the cultural outsiders or the working class. It is not an accident that Nancy Pelosi and company have sought an alliance on many levels with the security state apparatus, seeking out new Representatives with military, police or intelligence backgrounds and pursuing Impeachment of an incompetent President on dubious grounds cordial to the ideology and interests of . . . the very real “Deep State”.

Bruce, if a deep state truly exists, and Trump is its numero uno enemy as he and his supporters claim, how do you explain Trump being elected? Surely a deep state worth its salt or at least worth the accolades you and Trump and his supporters give it could have stopped the likes of Donald Trump in his tracks long before election day and yet this deep state couldn’t or didn’t. Surely a deep state that popped JFK’s head open like a ripe melon could have done, and can do, the same to its numero uno enemy Donald Trump. How do you explain this contradiction? If this Kabuki Theater put on by the deep state is choreographed for the most part then that means Trump is also part of that choreography, otherwise he’d be Six Feet Under by now. If that’s the case, for all your grand eloquence and sage wisdom, you’ve been had. They’ve used your hubris against you.

To test your sincerity, Bruce, please tell us you agree that the American military’s budget, within the span of a decade, should be cut 80% and the myriad bases around the world shuttered as part of a plan to not rollover in capitulation but to serve as an example in a new peace initiative where peace is truly the goal and not lip service to an abstract ideal.

Ché Pasa:

. . . it’s not going to stop unless everything comes crashing down and even then, somebody’s going to be making a profit. Oh my, yes.

And talk about rubbing our faces in it. Huh. Reports like this — and if you’ve been alive long enough, you’ve seen plenty of them — have a message: Suckers! There’s nothing you can do about it!

Certainly, there’s nothing we are going to do about it — we are not organized and they are, moreover, things are arranged to at least appear as if stopping would bring “everything” crashing down. There is no alternative. Haven’t you heard?

Of course you have heard. We are drowning in focus-grouped propaganda, which is now trotted out so mechanically and repetitively that I have some hope they may wear it out. Seriously, Ukraine-gate. We are now closing in on 50 years since Nixon’s scandals; who will be left alive to remember anything about the original? Was Eternal Recurrence really about sequels and reboots, forever. (Netflix a reboot stamping on a human story forever!)

How many times can we be manipulated so shamelessly? R2P. Protecting the rights of women in a modernizing Saudi Arabia. Pay no attention to the bone saw behind the curtain.

I almost fear what happens when the last tropes of “freedum” and anti-racist cant lose their potency like a drug left in the medicine cabinet unused for years. We are trained now as a People not to react to a leader lying us into war or a leader claiming the right to murder people with drones.

The faint memory of the New Deal is slandered as hopelessly racist and cruel to African-Americans. Bernie bros. The New York Times is rewriting American history in a bizarre repurposing of Howard Zinn, I suppose to serve the purposes of the complacent rich, their favored audience.

It seems like an experiment to see if they can run a country and an empire without any moral compass whatsover, the old mechanisms completely ruined by ill-use. If no one believes, if everyone is a complete cynic, what then? Zombie apocalypse?

To test your sincerity, Bruce, please tell us you agree that the American military’s budget, within the span of a decade, should be cut 80% and the myriad bases around the world shuttered as part of a plan to not rollover in capitulation but to serve as an example in a new peace initiative where peace is truly the goal and not lip service to an abstract ideal.

Sincerity and good intentions are seriously overrated in your deranged philosophy, 450.

I would reduce America’s military spending, abandon its perpetual wars and its network of bases around the globe and its ridiculously complex hardware, and look to a different strategy: probably something more of an isolationist and fortress strategy to avoid global entanglements and to resist migration as global population crashes and resource wars heat up.

I think conflict in an overpopulated and disorganized world is inevitable and violence too handy to be putting much faith in peace as either an ideal or an alternative. I am no pacifist. What I object to most in America’s wars though is that they never end. I am enough of a believer in the superiority of peace over violence that i prefer wars that end. To start a war you cannot win is bad; to start a war you cannot and will not end is worse.

The deep state is just the corporate version of “made men” as explained in Goodfellas, playing by similar rules. Instead of getting whacked physically, it happens socially. Been there done that, and seen it many times. It’s not any kind of cohesive gang but a culture of greed and power which cares nothing about the masses or any kind of social ethicality.

Since it’s so nebulous and powerful, and inherent in the psychology of the winners of power games, it’s hard for the rest of us to fight.

Eyes on the prize, 450, eyes on the prize.

What’s the prize? Faucets where water doesn’t drip out slowly and silently? A world where we don’t have to flush the toilet 10 to 15 times in order to get our quasi-digested big mac and fries to vanish from our sight on its way to the sea like a scene from Finding Nemo? A world where the EPA remedies these water flow issues in the bathroom versus protecting us from chromium and lead in our drinking water and ozone and particle pollution in the air we breath?

trump= that class of looters who enter the store for the TVs and game consoles after fires have been started to divert authorities elsewhere, and someone else has already broken the window for him.

he occasionally makes accurate observations in order to motivate his actions, but he is out for him&his all the way.

bruce wilder–bravo!

There’s definitely a Deep State, though it’s far from monolithic as it’s composed of competing factions that often work against each other. I’ve even met some of its lesser members, since I used to work as a journalist on global security issues and go to Washington. And that’s all I’m going to say on the Internet.

Willy wrote: ‘The deep state is just the corporate version of “made men” as explained in Goodfellas, playing by similar rules. Instead of getting whacked physically, it happens socially.’

Well, yes. Except that it happens physically too, unless you believe three separate lone gunmen managed to be responsible for both the Kennedy brothers’ and Martin Luther King’s deaths. Or that, more recently, Jeffrey Epstein hung himself.

I don’t see deep state as a useful concept. Trump and his supporters use it to refer to anyone who criticizes him. You want to talk about the military industrial complex, then talk about the military industrial complex. Same with the intelligence community. But be aware that we need both a military and an intelligence community to survive in this world. So feel free to criticize their mismanagement and excesses but not their core missions and the vast majority of people who serve in them.

I’m not sure if it’s as formal as Henry Hill stating, that:

“You had to have a sit-down, and you better get an okay, or you’d be the one who got whacked.”

…but maybe. I know there’s a food chain, or pecking order, or whatever you’d call it, because it seems too human for it to not be so. But for the Kennedy brothers and MLK, has anybody followed the money? Daddy Joe Kennedy himself seemed pretty qualified candidate to be a deep state player. Maybe they do play rough, even with each other. Maybe the Kennedy brothers were like Billy Batts, and they just told the wrong guy to go get his shoeshine box.

Trumpian-style explanations seems to be what works out there.

the one thing Trump seems to really understand something about is how television works. some people thinks he watches Fox News and believes it all, like some overgrown child-man and that might be true as far as it goes, but i think he also sees how it works as social mechanics, what kind of thing gets people riled up. this precious knowledge makes him a ratings driver and a twitter troll par excellence, able to roil the cable news cycle with seemingly effortless precision.

the media environment is owned by and run by one decadent class of parasites for another decadent class, both of whom should be guillotined come the revolution. imho. that a billionaire reality teevee star can manipulate the celebrity talking heads does ordinary people little good, even if they may thrill to hear an occasional intelligible phrase of uncoded opinion or observation from Trump.

it is just the way things are, that very little gets thru the heavy filters of what is a media environment actively hostile to truth, reason, good will and public responsibility.

i do not think the fault is with the audience, though I think the audience for cable news is brain-damaged from watching this nonsense all the time and from having very little in the way of alternative models for political opinion. some people have a genuine capacity to stand alone, and to think alone and i admire it. i, myself, am not such. i need people — like Ian, or Atrios, or Lambert Strether — who seem to be able to keep their heads, while all about them . . . (to quote the favorite poet of those with questionable taste).

during the Democratic Presidential debates, I was actually a little shocked at how brazenly the representatives of the media pressed Sanders and Warren over how much taxes would rise to finance M4all, while riding roughshod over a central argument for M4all — that we need it to control costs, which is to say, reduce costs. but, that’s their job, isn’t it? to produce a soundbite that will sink the aspirations of millions to escape the precarity built into the costly for-profit U.S. health insurance system.

for the most part, i regard the favored narratives of CNN, Morning Joe, Fox News, the Washington Post and New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Guardian as consisting largely of a cacophony of kayfabe, each narrative line coded in a way, shading the truth, if there is any truth present (and sometimes there is very little). i suppose if you find any of those cordial, you might not grind your teeth so much as i do. i think most people find it at least hard to penetrate; obviously some people learn to incorporate the narrative lines into their personal identities and use Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow as role models for political attitudes. there should be a vaccine to prevent that.

i gave up on Crooked Timber about the time they were dumping on Nancy McLean’s Democracy in Chains while praising Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. apparently it is really naughty to slander James M Buchanan as a racist, i guess because he was an academic. (i actually admire Buchanan as an intellect, but i think he was a racist and do not know if it really matters or not for the project McLean documented.) i could not stand Jane Mayer’s book, because of the way she kept writing the narrative as if Obama, the Clintons and the Democrats were innocent, idealistic victims of Dark Money and not fellow pigs at the trough.

like I said above, i am not one of those people who easily and naturally rises above it all. i resent it so much, because of how easily sucked into it i am.

i admire Sanders and AOC for their abilities to cut thru the media b.s. flood. it genuinely worries me that they are so rare. truth-telling politicians do not usually survive long, even in safe seats and small, rural states far from corporate business interests. of course, what I hear from Sanders or AOC (or Warren on her best days) or even from people like Buttigieg, who is wonderfully articulate albeit apparently the over-privileged scum of the earth as well, — what I “hear” and what others “hear” (meaning how they respond) may be at considerable variance.

i appreciate that real politicians live in dire fear of saying something true (or false) that gets a reaction not a response. real political discourse is a conversation, a dialog, an educational venture and it isn’t enough to just break thru once in a while. in our political environment, that may mean turning off the teevee. it certainly requires a larger cadre of politicians willing to be hostile and at odds with the lying and corruption than we have offering themselves for office at every level.

in our political media environment, too much worrying over what may be practically possible over and against the hostility of the oligarchs is also bad for one’s sanity. i watched Paul Krugman go from clear understanding of the need for single-payer health care to tortured rationales for Obamacare as fourth or fifth-best reform. stupid and stubborn can wear you down. watch what it does to climate change “debates”.

i am afraid that any realistic political reform can only work to the extent that those backing it are willing to back it with extensive violence against the rich and their neoliberal minions. Ian has made this point many times. fear of conflict, and concomitant fighting (even of a figurative kind) afflicts many people who are mere voters and occasional observers of politics. someone like Sanders has a narrow path to a majority and many attempts will be made to knock him off it based in part on even his mild rhetorical willingness to engage in class warfare from the bottom, something many at the bottom fear instinctively (and not without reason).

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, it was said that politics in Washington, D.C. was Hollywood for ugly people. Politicians aspired to be powerful, not model spokespersons for giant corporations. Jack Kennedy, as President, was leading a faction of rich people who genuinely feared Communist Russia and felt authorized to put into place highly capable people to do genuinely good things. Sometimes, the best and the brightest disappointed mightily as we know, but he put some impressive people in place in ambassadorships for example, where Presidents usually place donors only.

Lots of people suspect that what got him killed was Cuba. Eisenhower, apparently, was just fine with Meyer Lansky as the face of American interests in Cuba. Kennedy suspected that Castro might be more popular and more competent than the vicious elite Castro had overthrown and acted with restraint. Not what the Mafia or the CIA wanted, apparently, selfless patriotic servants of the American ideal that they were.

. . . be aware that we need both a military and an intelligence community to survive in this world. So feel free to criticize their mismanagement and excesses but not their core missions and the vast majority of people who serve in them.

Oh, yes, we cannot have criticism of the “vast majority of good people who serve”. We cannot have genuine criticism at all because we might hurt their feefees.

I think the core missions of the military and many of the so-called intelligence agencies, as they are understood in those institutions, are very much at odds with the interests of the country. This is especially true of the CIA and NSA. The apparatus of secrecy by classification and the authority to censor are very dangerous to the Constitution. The CIA’s capacity for covert intervention has led to a string of foreign policy disasters; that’s a core mission they ought to lose, in my opinion. At CIA headquarters they have a memorial wall of people killed in the line of service. They ought to have a memorial wall for the foreigners they induced into betraying their countries and then betrayed in turn, getting them killed. They ought to have a memorial wall to all the people they tortured to death or imprisoned for years on end.

We don’t have to have a global net of military bases from which to provide mercenary services free to global business corporations — that’s a core mission we could lose. We don’t have to develop insanely costly, fragile and incapable Rube Goldberg military hardware to sell all over the world, draining developing world economies and fueling violent conflicts. That’s another core mission we could lose.

And this is why those on the left have no credibility on defense and foreign policy issues.

the role of the left should be to press against the authoritarian impulses disciplined, hierarchical military and police institutions otherwise tend to breed. the left has to be for truth-telling, for ethics and the prosecution of war criminals and torturers. we don’t do any of that. partly because people like Hugh think we are going to hurt someone’s feelings or no one will take us seriously if we do not foam at the mouth whenever Russia is mentioned.

and failing to play our assigned role from that kind of cowardice, we do indeed lose credibility.

Nice post Ian;

Upon reading this, I have to note, I miss conversations with “Mark from Ireland” on these posts….

…for the folks that post rabidly here every presidential election, Mark & I used to be at each other but, in the end, sans the now common place polemics, in the spirit of true discourse he moved me and I in turn moved him.

Merry Christmas Ian…and if you are listening in Mark, you as well!

S Brennan

I am glad you all agree among yourselves. You comprise what? Maybe 5% of the population? How are you going to appeal to the other 95%? US awful, yeah, that’s a winner. How deluded are you? A lot of American foreign policy sucks, but the idea that there would be this great kumbaya moment around the world if the US suddenly disappeared is beyond stupid. You simply are ignoring a few thousand years of their history and their conflicts that have nothing to do with the US, that pre-date the US, and that a US hegemony for all its problems has for a while suppressed or limited. Other than the virtual signaling, I do not see what you get out of it. When I say you have no credibility, it is because you simply refuse to see, or even try to see, the world as it is, or how power is actually used in the real world. It is all terrible this and terrible that. Great, fine, now give me real policy options. Tell me how the world is really going to work once we are out of it, as if we can actually write ourselves out of it. Don’t worry, aside from doubling down on the virtue signaling, I don’t expect anything real.

Now, that sounds more like the Hugh that I used to admire and respect so much for his honesty and clarity of perception. As exemplified by your various scandal lists. ((Hugh))

Nice to see you focus on the modern prevalence of virtue-signalling. And the realities of violence in the world.

Now, can you extend that pragmatism to the issues of personal self-defense as well, or would that be a bridge too far?

Grateful for any flashes of the old Hugh that I can get. 🙂

No, what they really want is to keep the structure in place — at least to the extent they’re aware of one — but to be able to operate it purely to their benefit and liking alone. Putting their own partisans in power, and having full and unquestioned authority over the entire apparatus.

Exactly, Ché. Here’s an example. All the whining and bemoaning of the impeachment proceedings by Trump and his defenders/supporters is so entirely hypocritical. They’re the other side of the same coin I despise. They were set to impeach Hillary before she even won. I would have supported that impeachment if the case was as solid as the case against Trump is. That’s the difference between me and bruce and brennan and the other cowards around here who hide behind the orange fascist’s apron strings. You support a fascist, or vote for him even, you are one. How many more fascists are laying in wait in the disillusioned liberal ranks? More than we think, apparently.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-gop-is-already-working-on-how-to-impeach-hillary-clinton-if-she-wins-2016-11

Here’s the pedophile Jim Jordan implying impeachment of Hillary Clinton before the election. This guy makes me want to puke.

GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a leading conservative in the House, said in a statement that regardless of who wins the election, “we need to continue investigating Secretary Clinton’s email scandal, and alleged impropriety between the State Department and Clinton Foundation. We must also move forward with impeaching IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.”

I can’t speak to thousands of years when the U.S. didn’t exist, but I note that the period when the U.S. was close to being isolationist, say 1814 to 1914, had far less mass violence than the following hundred years.

Unless you were black. Perspective’s a bitch and it means EVERYTHING. The Civil War was substantial in regard to mass violence.

About 625,000 men died in the Civil War. That’s more Americans than died in both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam combined. This amounted to 2 percent of the population at the time, which would be the equivalent to about 6 million Americans dying today.

Ironically, or not, the Hamiltonian Federalists were pleased as pie with the Civil War. It consolidated federal power and significantly strengthened the power of the Unitary Executive. Not coincidentally, William Barr (who’s father hired Epstein by the way) is a Hamiltonian Federalist who is an ardent Trump defender precisely because he would like to see an even stronger more fervent Unitary Executive, or, in otherwords, a full-fledged fascist dictatorship. What does Bill Barr say about the Deep State? If he’s not the Deep State, no one is and the Deep State doesn’t exist. And yet he defends and supports Trump. But I thought the Deep State was out to get Trump? Deep State is a lot like the “anti-semitic” label, isn’t it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMwdtbPR6g

So we’re fighting them over there so we won’t have to fight ourselves here? Fair enough. Foreign enemies are the best friend of a powerful state. As James Madison noted

In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both.

No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Gary Larson, the cartoonist who drew The Far Side had a trope comparing what we say to dogs with what dogs hear.

Someone — and it may be a writer more or less on the left though right-wing writers may claim it as a means of self-promotion — will introduce a term with subtle and nuanced meaning and connotations, like “virtue-signalling” or “Deep State” or “The Blob” and then it may migrate the dog pound of the Right with seemingly lightening speed.
.
It doesn’t even have to migrate to lose any useful meaning; it just has to encounter someone who refuses to engage with it, refuses to even try to unpack the new term, someone who thinks stupid makes a good argumentative tactic.

I am not going to apologize for using the leverage of these terms to write short(er) comments that still have some kind of actual argument embedded in them. Yes, if you want to understand the reference to “the Blob”, the reader might have to reference, say, https://theweek.com/articles/623576/fear-foreign-policy-blob

Virtue-signalling would be a slightly tougher case as it references concepts from economics and evolutionary biology that lots of people have difficulty grasping the essence of; people easily confuse it with moral hypocrisy and/or moral hectoring and preaching. In a political context, I would say that an defining element of virtue-signalling is that it is an essentially empty act of political activism, to show alignment with a widely shared political creed or outlook without actually acting effectively to achieve a political objective or outcome. The purpose is simply to enhance personal status within some political grouping or culture. Anyone who genuinely wanted to could figure this out quickly enough with a Google Search for the entry in the Urban Dictionary. I say it is a tougher case, only because its meaning is being actively debased on-line by loads of essays that take as a premise a deliberate misunderstanding of the term.

The concept of Deep State has an ironical connotation, built I suppose on references to movies with a paranoid premise. I like that about it, ymmv, but I am not someone who thinks much of the debating tactic of dismissing pattern recognition as “conspiracy theories”. “Conspiracy” implies a small group deliberately plotting with a self-conscious intent to violate constitutional norms for how decisions can and should be made, and I would not say that is what is happening with neoliberalism (another rich term the meaning of which is often simply denied for tactical advantage by argumentative trolls) or whatever you would call the ideology and shared delusions of the so-called intelligence community or the military-industrial complex. Still, vast bureaucracies are apparently put in motion, coordinated by ideologies impervious to democratic criticism.

In an earlier comment, very sketchily, I tried to connect “Deep State” with Michel’s Iron Law of Institutions: that the founding purpose of institutions tends to be subverted over time by the emerging of a self-serving oligarchy focused on preserving the institution as a vehicle that serves the interests of its leadership even at the expense of its nominal founding or social purposes. That’s a model that I believe fits the observable case of the military-industrial complex, where outcomes like weapons systems that cost too much and do not work well, or perpetual wars that can never be won or ended, are regularly produced as an epi-phenomenon of people pursuing careers thru the military ranks and into consultancies and massive business corporations acting as contractors.

The other obvious references for “Deep State” include the conspicuous role of Brennan and Clapper in running the intelligence agencies, but more importantly, misleading the public about lots of things, but including about the nature and weight of Russia’s role in American politics and the 2016 election. Another reference would be Comey’s clumsy and unprofessional (but melodramatically self-justified) participation in keeping alive the allegations of security breaches in Clinton’s use of a private email server and in keeping alive the allegations of collusion of Trump with Russia. (Comey was either a comically bi-partisan incompetent or a figure of Deep State aggression against electoral democracy — I am inclined to say, both.)

On the trait of institutional self-delusions:

This can happen even when you’re in an existential war. One of the reasons Germany lost WWII, where Germany *was* fighting for its very continuance, was that they lied to themselves about everything. They lied to themselves about the prowess of their weapons. They lied to themselves about their losses. They lied to themselves about the losses they inflicted upon their enemies.

Instances of the above:

The Germans cheated, so to speak, on their antitank gun testing. Everyone–US and British, German, and Soviets–did it differently and so the numbers come out a bit differently, but the US/British and Soviets were consistent with their sampling, while the Germans were not. The US, British, and Soviets when they were testing the antitank capabilities of their guns, of Lend-Lease equipment, or of captured German weapons, simply would open up the ammo boxes and start shooting. The Germans did this as well–for US, British, and Soviet guns–but for *their own guns*, they would carefully screen and cherry-pick the best rounds in the box for testing. Thus German anti-tank guns outperform their peers in, uh, German tests, but when the British or US evaluated captured German anti-tank guns they came up with penetration data ~ 10 % or so less than what the Germans claimed–even though in theory the Germans used a slightly more rigorous test otherwise (ideally, a US test claiming a gun penetrated 100 mm of armor at a given range would result in a 97 mm penetration if German criteria were used, if done fairly).

Likewise, the Germans lied to themselves about their own losses. I have the November 1944 report compiled by Heinz Guderian on German armor losses by type. In it you notice that on all the Eastern front, the Germans admitted to only 8 King Tiger tanks lost and on the Western front, only 7. However, perusing the diaries of the German heavy tank battalions reveals this to be impossible–the Germans lost 14 King Tigers alone in the fighting around Sandomierz bridgehead (some of these King Tigers made it to the Kubinka for testing, you can see the Soviet test reports and photos of them online), some 7 in the fighting in Gumbinnen East Prussia, and 16 in the fighting in Hungary alone, for a total of 47–which is probably not the complete list. Likewise, some people have detailed the King Tiger losses in France, down to the serial number of each tank, and come up with 45–again, with photographic evidence. Yet the official report claims only “8” and “7” lost, respectively.

By their very nature, German tank loss claims are misleading. The Germans only counted a tank as “lost” if it was irreparably damaged or it could not be reclaimed off the battlefield. Even if one had to pick up the pieces of the tank and ship them back to the factory to be completely rebuilt, it wasn’t a a loss, only “damaged”. By contrast, the Soviets counted as a “loss” anything that took the tank out of action: irreparable damage, repairable damage, mechanical failure, or mishap. If a T-34 blows a gasket, if an IS-2 rolls off a bridge, if an ISU-152 gets stuck in a bog, it’s a loss by Soviet accounting, even though perhaps in a few hours these vehicles could be back in service. This is why Soviet losses look so extreme when compared to German–say, 2nd Tank Army in Poland in August 1944 at hthe Battle of Radzymin losing some 550 tanks out of 810, when the “irreparable damage” (the same metric as the Germans used) was only 111 of that total.

By contrast, the German 503rd heavy tank at Kursk only “lost” 6 out of its 45 Tiger tanks; however, when the Soviets counterattacked some three weeks later, the Soviet attack rolled over the 503rd as if it wasn’t there–as indeed, it wasn’t, to a large extent, as its strength even three weeks after the battle was only *6 tanks*–the other 33 being still back at the shops undergoing repairs (which means the repairs aren’t trivial; a road wheel needing replaced or a gun barrel having been blown off would have been fixed in a day or so, cannibalizing parts from another tank if need be). By Soviet standards the 503rd would have been considered almost wiped out, which would have been a far more accurate appraisal. Moreover, one gets the impression that, given the decline in German operational tank strength from mid-43 to the end of the war, these “only damaged” tanks were never being repaired, just being scrapped or cannibalized without ever having been removed from the books. By January 1945, the Germans have something like 5000-6000 “tanks” on the Eastern front on the books, facing some 15,700 Soviet machines, but only like 2500 of those German tanks are listed as operational. One gets the feeling most of the non-operational tanks don’t exist anymore but have been quietly scrapped.

This, I believe, had a major effect on the decision-making of Germany’s leadership in WWII. Hitler is being told German forces are killing Soviet tanks and men at 4:1 or 5:1 ratios, and he’s not a dummy–he knows the Soviets don’t have 5 times as many men and tanks. Thus Hitler’s “no retreat, stand and fight” orders would actually have made military sense–as the Germans would have been *winning* the war of attrition. Hitler would always say “we must bleed the Soviets white” and I believe he certainly thought his forces were doing so. In the famous conversation in January 1945 with Guderian, when Hitler first compliments Guderian on the strength of the Eastern Front then explodes in anger when Guderian calls the Eastern Front “a house of cards”–I think this is because Hitler believed that he has as many as 6,000 tanks facing 15,700 Soviet, and they have been killing their Soviet counterparts at a ratio of 4:1 or 5:1, so the front should be in ok shape to weather the next Soviet offensive. But if he knew the truth, that there were only like 2500 German tanks facing 15,700 and the true kill ratio through 1944 was more like 3 Soviets for every 2 German instead of 4:1 or 5:1, resulting that the Soviet tank park ballooned up to over 35,000 vehicles because the Soviets were easily building more tanks than the Germans were destroying by a wide margin, his response would have been more like “oh shit…” Likewise, German generals later claiming in their memoirs that Hitler moved around phantom divisions, corps, and armies–well, what do you expect when he’s been told all along these forces are real, because the true extent of their losses have been covered up?

This lying, BTW, was not limited to just leadership and those doing the bean-counting. It spread down to the ranks and ordinary soldiers participated. The memoirs of SS Tiger tank crews are often fantasy (even the German bean counters didn’t believe them all, and would divide their claims by a factor of two). There are a number of tales told by individual Tiger tanks and their crews who just happened to be conveniently isolated from their mates (and thus no one around to confirm or deny their tales), running into hordes of Soviet tanks and slaughtering them with ease before returning back to their lines. My own favorite is the Tiger tank crew at Kursk who, when isolated, slaughtered dozens of T-34s–my question was “at Kursk one-third of Soviet tank strength was still dinky little unimpressive T-70 light tanks; how come destroying oodles of T-70s never makes it into such reports?”

Now that the Russian archives have been opened, it’s been possible to cross-check these claims, and they usually turn up bogus. Not only do the units in the area not report the losses the Tiger tankers claimed, in some cases they don’t even have the tank types the Tigers claimed to have destroyed attached to them. Peter Samsonov, who runs the Tank Archives site which is an excellent source of this kind of information, jokes about the Tiger tank battalions typically “entering a battle, claiming dozens or hundreds of Soviet tanks destroyed with only small losses to themselves, then mysteriously having to be pulled out of the front afterwards for an extended period of time for refitting despite those “small losses”.

This lying is a large part of the myth of the prowess of German WWII arms that has made it to Hollywood, wargaming conventions, and sad to say, TeeVee history. I know there is a political tilt to this as well, as it’s the Right who wants to make champions of ‘lost causes’ such as the Germans and the Confederacy by making inflated claims about the achievements of their arms.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, American Exceptionalism rubs both ways. America isn’t the shining city on the hill it’s been proclaimed to be and it’s not Mumbai either. America shouldn’t by default get the benefit of the doubt and garner all the praise and accolades just as it shouldn’t bear the brunt and entirety of criticism to be doled out to rogue, tyrannical countries. If America contracts domestically and retracts globally per a ten, or twenty even, year plan, that plan must take into account the dirty, under-handed tactics that will be utilized by many of the bad actors on the global stage as they seek to fill the burgeoning power vacuum and shoot America in the back as it withdraws from the imperium. For those of you who say America deserves to be shot in the back on its way out and sabotaged from within by China and Russia, I say go f*ck yourself and I’d ask, why are you even here commenting if that’s your sentiment? Nothing constructive will come of that sentiment. All it will do is inculcate a doubling down of hegemony until the last drop of oil is extracted.

I would have thought, naively perhaps, that forever war, at its enormous cost in treasure, blood and honor, would be something we would all agree should end.

I agree it should end. There is no disputing that as far as I’m concerned. But it should be done for the right reasons and the right way. This is where you and I differ substantially. For the right reasons and the right way is not the way Russia would do it for America and why Russia would do it or want it for America. That’s your way, not my way. Lavrov in the Oval Office tells me, symbolically at least, that Russia is calling the shots with American foreign policy at the moment and that WILL NOT STAND!!!!!!

Why we should do it is for the reasons nihil states and plus the implications of climate change and how we should do it is via a well-thought-out, strategic, graduated plan where we wean the world of its inculcated material dependence on America.

It should not be the end of Statecraft. Statecraft is still vitally important for stability in an increasingly unstable world but it cannot and should not be carrot and stick with the veneer of cheerleading for democracy and human rights as cover for so-called “free-market” crony capitalism which is effectively Neocolonialism.. Diplomacy should replace gunboats. Diplomacy is paramount. Let’s take India and Pakistan as just one example of why diplomacy is vital. If India and Pakistan go to war they will empty their respective nuclear arsenals and consequently promulgate a global nuclear winter that will kill hundreds of millions if not billions. Without SKILLED (The Sondlands of the world need not apply) diplomacy, the probability of this nuclear conflict between Pakistan and India manifesting rises substantially. In this sense, a permanent government that you call the Deep State is paramount. To be a SKILLED diplomat requires many years of training and on the job experience that transcends multiple administrations and partisan politics. It should be renamed The Department of Global Peace and it should replace the abomination that is The Department of Homeland Security.

This article explains.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321070662_DIPLOMACY_AVERTS_1990'S_CRISIS_BETWEEN_INDIA_AND_PAKISTAN_A_CRITICAL_ANALYSIS

The crisis between India and Pakistan in 1990 was so severe that the two states slightly missed a major war which could also result in the nuclear catastrophe. Pakistan less confident of its conventional capabilities found no other option but to go for a nuclear strike if it faced any Indian aggression. The nuclear deterrence was not successful in deterring the two sides from pursuing their war oriented policies. The democracy also failed to avert war between India and Pakistan. The credit only goes to diplomacy which averted war between these two South Asian nuclear weapon states. The United States became the most successful stateto influence the two South Asian nuclear powers not to pursue the path of war. It convinced the two sides that war is not going to benefit any side and will result in major catastrophe. The US assurances to the two sides played a major role to reduce the tension during the times of the crisis. The crisis in 1990 clearly indicated that nuclear deterrence was not workable between the two South Asian nuclear powers. It also portrayed a message to the both sides to have their dependence on other stakes and not the nuclear deterrence.

Therefore, the diplomacy became more successful in reducing tension between India and Pakistan during 1990 crisis. The nuclear deterrence didn’t work to avert war between India and Pakistan. The crisis of 1990 also portrayed two messages that there is greater role for the United States to play in the future as it has done in the past to avert war between the two South Asian nuclear weapon states and these two states should depend on other stakes such as trade, inter-state diplomacy, democracy, people to people contact and cultural as these stakes will prove helpful in reducing the chances of any war and will lead them to peace.

just a side-note on U.S. diplomatic efforts vis a vis Pakistan: massive military aid from the U.S. underwrote the dominant role of the military in Pakistani politics and economy. Pakistan has been the great font of nuclear proliferation, lending critical technical support to North Korea and Libya. Pakistan has been the base for horrific terrorist attacks on India since 1990 and lends support to Kashmiri militants openly and terrorists with implausible deniability. Pakistan, while working against the U.S. in Afghanistan hosted Osama bin Laden.

I would not sing kumbaya too loudly on account of a paean to diplomacy without details.