“The invasion eliminated a brutal dictator, something many Iraqis were grateful for in itself. But it also for years eliminated even the distant vision of that good life. As one Iraqi woman told journalist Nir Rosen for his 2010 book Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World, “My message to the American people after five years, they destroyed us and didn’t help us, they didn’t reconstruct the country, they even added more destruction to us. The days during Saddam were better. Now there is killing and nothing good. Before there was security and life was going on easily…now things are getting worse and worse, killing in the streets.” As late as 2016, 93 percent of polled young Iraqis considered Americans their enemies for a war that Bush and his team framed as their liberation.”
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“The boys doing Bush’s foreign policy thinking had a prewar paper trail planning Saddam’s overthrow that stretched back a decade. It had become an article of neoconservative faith by the turn of the century that Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, should have deposed the Ba’athist dictator as the capper to the 1991 war that expelled his armies from Kuwait. In 2001, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), full of folk who would forge W.’s foreign policy, made it clear that this grand plan was much larger than a single tyrant: It was about a “need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf [that] transcends the…regime of Saddam Hussein.” The government’s official National Security Strategy for 2002, issued in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, incorporated PNAC’s thinking, pushing the principle that any country seen as credibly threatening U.S. interests should be brought to heel with hard military power, not just the softer stuff of cultural influence and diplomacy and trade.
Even before September 11, Bush Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill would later report, one of the administration’s highest priorities was finding a way to topple Saddam. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, most any military act, no matter how severe or reckless, could be framed as an urgent fight against terrorism, even if not related to 9/11 itself. The prospect of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—deploying them, selling them, maybe just handing them over to Osama bin Laden—was a bedtime story with terrifying potency for a rattled public. Newspaper publisher Knight Ridder reported as early as February 2002 that the White House was clandestinely planning to invade a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11.”
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“The WMDs were not found. They were not there. Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, commander of the I Marine Expeditionary Force, gave it to us straight: Nothing was found to justify the war on its own terms. “It’s not for lack of trying,” Conway said in a May 30, 2003, Defense Department briefing from Baghdad. “We’ve been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwait border and Baghdad but they’re simply not there.”
The administration fell back on the argument that Saddam never gave up “aspirations and intentions” toward obtaining such weapons. (Of course, nothing would inspire him more to use them if he had them than invading his country to overthrow him. But not much was said about that.) Very thin accusations that Saddam had allied with or aided Al Qaeda before 9/11 were floated and similarly did not hold water.
As head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer by then was essentially viceroy of Iraq; to flex how deeply we were obliterating the cause and memory of Saddam Hussein (who was executed in December 2006), Bremer disbanded the old Iraqi army and barred nearly all Ba’ath Party members from participation in government. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of aggrieved and unemployed young men were stalking the country, and nearly anyone with experience running schools or hospitals or water treatment facilities or oil refineries or electrical plants weren’t allowed to work on any of those things.”
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“After seven years of U.S. occupation, Rosen writes in Aftermath, “hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed. Many more had been injured. There were millions of widows and orphans. Millions had fled their homes. Tens of thousands of Iraqi men had spent years in American prisons. The new Iraqi state was among the most corrupt in the world. It was often brutal. It failed to provide adequate services to its people, millions of whom were barely able to survive.””
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“With negotiations complicated by Washington’s insistence that its troops must be able to act with complete legal impunity in Iraq, Bush, and later Obama, agreed to pull out all armed forces by the end of 2011. But with the rise of more militant chaos in the 2010s from the Islamic State group, American troops were back fighting throughout most of the 2010s. With that mission now officially over, about 2,500 troops still remain there, allegedly to merely assist and advise the Iraqis (who recently spent nearly a year trying to pull together a government, an effort marred by the usual factional rivalries, mass protests, arrests, and murders).”
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“Beyond all the misery and chaos caused in Iraq itself, the U.S. came nowhere close to the neoconservative dream of a democratic domino effect in the Middle East. What resulted from the Iraq adventure was greater power and influence for America’s sworn enemy Iran, plus weapons and experienced jihadists and sectarian rivalries spreading around the region.
“Rather than being inspired by what happened in Iraq after the invasion,” former Middle Eastern CIA man Paul R. Pillar wrote in The National Interest in 2011, “Middle Easterners were repelled by it. If the violence, disorder, and breakdown of public services in Iraq were the birth pangs of a new Middle Eastern order, most people in the region wanted nothing of it.””
“The West isn’t really saying “never” on fighter jets for Ukraine — it just wants to focus first on getting Kyiv weapons for a looming offensive.
That’s the sentiment emerging in the wake of U.S. President Joe Biden’s blunt “no” — echoed to various degrees by leaders in Germany and the U.K. — to the question of whether he would be sending Ukraine the fighter jets it is requesting. While officials have publicly remained relatively unequivocal that no jets are forthcoming, private discussions indicate it may actually just be a matter of time.”
“Chinese state-owned firms are building up their presence near the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East, a new report says, raising the risks of a future clash with U.S. interests in one of the world’s busiest oil transitways.
The growing footprint of Chinese commercial activity in the area, including billions of dollars in investments in oil pipelines and storage terminals alongside the Persian Gulf, is fueling worries from U.S. national security hawks who fear it could provide Beijing with dangerous influence over a major choke point for petroleum shipments.”
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“China has previously used spending on pipelines, ports and other commercial facilities to pave the way for military bases near strategic locations such as the mouth of the Red Sea, the CSIS authors write. Now, China’s investment in regional ports and infrastructure in Oman and the United Arab Emirates could provide an entry point for Chinese naval ships in the strait. Such ships already travel nearby waters to patrol against pirate vessels.”
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““Everything in the private industry in China is somewhat connected to the larger CCP or the PLA,” said the official, who was granted anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to be quoted in the media. “Even if you’re a private company, you might be called upon by the Chinese government to share intel.””
“The big Russian winter offensive that Ukrainians have been warning about has been underway for about two weeks.
This is partially if not largely the Wagner Group doing this — the Russian mercenary organization that recruited extensively from Russian prisons last summer and fall. They’re using these former prisoners on the front lines in the central Donbas in human-wave attacks. They’re poorly trained, poorly armed, and poorly led — if they’re led at all — and they’re pushed forward to the Ukrainian lines. And the Ukrainians are mowing these guys down.
Wagner is using these human-wave attacks to find the stronger and weaker points in the Ukrainian lines. Then the Russian army — again, the Wagner group, mostly — is sending in better-trained, better-equipped, and better-led Wagner forces to exploit the weaker areas.
It’s working — but very slowly and at an incredibly high cost. Russian casualty figures are around 5,000 a week. Those casualty figures can’t be sustainable over the long term. It seems like these human-wave attacks are the first stage of the big Russian winter offensive.
The Russians are gaining tens to hundreds of meters a day along the front line in the central part of the Donbas region, but I don’t see that it could lead to a major breakthrough, and I don’t see that it’s sustainable over the long term.”
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“The Russians are gaining territory along the lines around the city of Bakhmut, which has been in the news a lot because it has become a focal point for both sides. Strategically, it’s neither negligible nor significant. It allows access to larger cities farther west in the Donbas, such as Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, which are more important.
Bakhmut has huge symbolic significance for both sides. The Russians have been unable to take it for several months, and both sides have pushed more and more forces into the area. Ukraine is determined to hold it, just to deny the Russians the PR victory of saying that they captured it.”
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“The Russian economy has proven to be a little more sanctions-proof and resilient than a lot of people expected.
The sanctions impacted the military most on the very high-end semiconductor chips required for precision weapons. Before the sanctions, Russia had been able to get these chips. But those sanctions appear to be airtight. No one but Taiwan, the Netherlands, and the US can make those chips.
As the Russians draw down their stocks of precision long-range missiles, they’re not able to replenish them. They could use lower-end semiconductors, but then the weapon is not as precise. For months, the Russians have been using S300 surface-to-air missiles in surface-to-surface mode, which means they’re using missiles meant to knock down airplanes to attack ground targets because they’re running out of precision surface-to-surface ballistic missiles.”
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“One of the most interesting things about this war is we have a better understanding of the state of the Russian military now than we do of the state of the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainians have been very tight-lipped with their operational security. They tell us only what we need to know to help them. We don’t have a good understanding of their casualty rates.”
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“The Ukrainian military is battered, but its morale is unbroken, and its leadership is still mostly alive and very effective. They captured much Russian equipment early in the war; they don’t have a problem with the amount of equipment. Western equipment, then, has been important to Ukraine not in terms of numbers but in raising their capabilities.
Ukraine is in a better position with equipment than Russia — and will be in a better position as Western equipment continues to arrive.”
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“Russia is expending a lot of energy and resources — and losing a lot of capability in this grinding, attritional offensive underway now. I think they should let Russia continue to expend energy, capability, and resources in ways that don’t do the Ukrainian military a whole lot of damage in operational or strategic capability.
The Ukrainians may end up having to abandon Bakhmut. They’ll fall back to their defensive line around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. They’re well dug in there. Their military headquarters were there before the war. They’ve been fighting there since 2014; they know the area very well.
It’s going to be months before the capabilities that the West is offering are integrated into the Ukrainian forces. Their moment of peak capability will come in the mid to late summer, which is a good time for an offensive. The Russians may expend so many resources that they’ll be incapable of further decisive offensive operations right when the Ukrainians reach the peak of their capability.”
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“The most likely scenario is the Russian offensive will continue in a similar fashion to these last two weeks. It may gain more ground, but I don’t see a massive breakthrough where Ukrainian lines dissolve and the Russians drive deep into central Ukraine. I don’t think they have the capacity to do it.
The attritional offensive will stall out, and then you’re likely to see a Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer or early fall that won’t have the capability to end the war. Unless the Russian army dissolves and leaves the battlefield, I don’t think the Ukrainians have the capability to end the war by regaining all Ukrainian territory inside its internationally recognized borders.”
“”the military’s ability to respond to balloons and similar craft is constrained by physics and the capabilities of current weapons,” The Washington Post reports, and you can’t really pop a giant balloon with gunfire at 40,000 feet.
“You can fill a balloon full of bullet holes, and it’s going to stay at altitude,” David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and fighter pilot, tells the Post. The air pressure that high up doesn’t allow helium to freely escape through small holes, even if fighter jets flying by at hundreds of miles per hour can riddle the near-stationary balloon with bullets.”
“Japan’s new security posture will increase the nation’s military budget by 56 percent, from about 27.47 trillion yen over five years to about 43 trillion yen (an increase from about $215 billion to $324 billion as of market close on Friday). Historically, Japan has kept security spending low due to its constitutional commitment to avoid war, but the country does have a defense budget and has maintained the Self-Defense Forces since 1954.”
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“doubts remain as to whether Kishida can convince the Japanese people to agree to commit both the financial and human capital that his proposed scale-up would require.”
“By signing the bill, Biden will be forced to agree to a repeal of the Pentagon’s policy requiring troops to receive the Covid vaccine or face expulsion from the military.
The repeal is a victory for Republicans who pushed to do away with the policy during negotiations on a final defense bill. Conservatives have hammered the administration for forcing out thousands of military personnel and piling onto an already rough recruiting environment.
Rescinding the August 2021 mandate is a black eye for Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who still back the policy as a matter of health and readiness for the armed forces.”
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“The bill, however, doesn’t prohibit a new vaccine requirement in the coming months, meaning Austin could implement a new policy when the 2021 directive is repealed. Doing so, however, would spark a battle with the Republican-controlled House next year.”
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“Both parties roundly rejected Biden’s $813 billion military spending plan as too low to meet worldwide threats and counter the impacts of inflation on the Pentagon.
Instead, Congress endorsed that hefty $45 billion increase to Biden’s budget, which already would have boosted defense by about $30 billion over last year’s level. The final bill amounts to an increase of roughly $75 billion, or nearly 10 percent, from the previous year.
The additional money went toward buying more weapons as well as efforts to blunt the effects of inflation on Pentagon programs, troops and construction.
This marks the second straight year that Congress has significantly rewritten Biden’s budget. Defense legislation approved last year authorized an increase of $25 billion to the administration’s first proposal. It’s a pattern Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), who is set to chair House Armed Services next year, chalked up to Congress and the White House rarely seeing eye to eye on federal spending.”
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“Congress foiled one of the few major changes Biden proposed to the nuclear arsenal, keeping alive a sea-launched cruise missile first proposed by the Trump administration.
Proponents of canceling the developmental program criticized it as costly, destabilizing and redundant, because Biden kept low-yield nukes fielded by the Trump administration deployed aboard ballistic missile submarines. A 2021 report by the Congressional Budget Office estimated the missile will cost $10 billion through 2030.
But lawmakers ultimately authorized $45 million to continue the program after top military brass, including Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley, publicly expressed support for the weapon, in a split with Austin and other top civilians who argued the missile isn’t needed.”
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“Lawmakers also voted to require the Pentagon to keep most of its inventory of B83 nuclear gravity bombs, which Biden proposed retiring. The agreement prohibits retiring or deactivating more than 25 percent of the stockpile until the Pentagon provides Congress with a study on how it will field capabilities to strike hard and buried targets.”
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“Lawmakers authorized $32.6 billion to buy new ships, boosting the budget by $4.7 billion and ordering up three new hulls the Navy didn’t ask for.
The additions include a third unrequested Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which the White House said it “strongly opposes” when the House approved it. Navy leaders have questioned whether a strained shipbuilding base can handle a rate of three destroyers per year. The bill also set a legal floor of 31 amphibious warships for the Navy, which the administration also opposes, arguing it would “unduly constrain” military planning.
Congress also threw a wrench into Navy plans to retire two dozen ships. The move was aimed at saving money but it also drew criticism on Capitol Hill because the plans would have scrapped some troubled littoral combat ships relatively early in their service lives.
The compromise bill ultimately bars the Navy from retiring a dozen warships it had planned to decommission, including five littoral combat ships and a Ticonderoga-class cruiser.
The legislation also crimps efforts by the Pentagon to retire dozens of aircraft. It jams up the administration’s plans to retire Navy EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets, requiring the service to maintain a fleet of at least 158 aircraft through fiscal 2027. The bill similarly blocks efforts by the Air Force to retire some F-22 fighters through fiscal 2027.
Lawmakers also limited the Air Force’s ability to reduce its fleet of E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System planes below a certain level. Those restrictions would be eased if the service submits an acquisition strategy or awards a contract for its successor, the E-7 Wedgetail.
Lawmakers, meanwhile, boosted procurement for a swath of aircraft across the military services. Most notably, Armed Services leaders approved $666 million for eight Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets the Navy didn’t seek in its budget, keeping the production line active.”