Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Iraq remains a mess from which the U.S. military seems increasingly uninterested in withdrawing fully and Afghanistan a disaster area, but it’s never too soon to think about the next war.  The subject is already on the minds of Pentagon planners.  The question is:  Are they focusing on how to manage future wars so that they won’t last longer than the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II combined? 

There’s reason to worry, especially since the lessons of both Iraq and Afghanistan are clear: it takes years after a war has been launched for the U.S. military to develop tactics that lead to stasis.  (“Victory” is a word that has gone out of fashion.)

Here, then, are three modest suggestions for recalibrating the American way of war.  All are based on a simple principle -- “preventive war planning” -- and are focused on getting the next war right before it begins, not decades after it’s launched.

1.  Make the Apologies in Advance

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The long awaited announcement of the first LOGCAP IV task order to be awarded in Iraq has been made.

KBR has been awarded Task Order 2 under KBR’s LOGCAP IV contract W52P1J-07-D-0009 for the Iraq CTP (Corp Logistics/Transportation/Postal) effort in the amount of $2.345B.

Work is to begin under this Task Order on March 1, 2010.

Interesting...just four days ago KBR received a ZERO award fee for unsatisfactory work and is now awarded a $2.3B contract. Is anyone else gong "What the hell?"

For a list of other LOGCAP IV Task Order awards click here.

I can't even imagine how devastated people like Cheryl Harris, SSG Ryan Maseth's mother is. As you may know Ryan was electrocuted and died in his shower in Baghdad. I'm sure Cheryl is thrilled that just a few days ago KBR was being punished at least financially for their shoddy work and today they are being rewarded with a new multi-billion dollar contract.

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We've all heard from the Obama WH about the fact the the Great War on Terror, sometimes called The Long War, ended shortly after Obama took office in 2010, as was evidenced by the renaming of it to "Overseas Contingency Operations" last year.

Now after seven bloody years and by some counts over a million Iraqi deaths the Obama Administration has announced that Operation Iraqi Freedom is, according to the White House and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, finally over as well.

ABC News reported Thursday evening that...

...the Obama administration has decided to give the war in Iraq -- currently known as Operation Iraqi Freedom -- a new name.

The new name: "Operation New Dawn."

In a February 17, 2010, memo to the Commander of Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the "requested operation name change is approved to take effect 1 September 2010, coinciding with the change of mission for U.S. forces in Iraq."

You can read the memo -- a copy of which was sent to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen – HERE [.pdf].

[snip]

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell had no comment on the memo, saying it speaks for itself.

The move has met with some criticism. In a statement, Brian Wise, executive director of Military Families United said, “You cannot end a war simply by changing its name. Despite the Administration’s efforts to spin realities on the ground, their efforts do not change the situation at hand in Iraq. Operational military decisions should not be made for purposes of public relations, as the Secretary of Defense cites, but should be made in the best interests of our nation, the troops on the ground and their families back home.”

If Gates was hoping that "Operation New Dawn" would convey a new period in the US-Iraq relationship, it's not clear that was the best choice of name.

After all, Operation New Dawn was the name for the bloody and grueling 2004 battle for Fallujah.

Iraqis all across their country must be cheering wildly at the prospect of being able to finally "Move Forward" with what's left of their country and sovereignty.

Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Americans have largely stopped thinking about Iraq, even though we still have approximately 110,000 troops there, as well as the largest “embassy” on the planet (and still growing).  We’ve generally chalked up our war in Iraq to the failed past, and some Americans, after the surge of 2007, even think of it as, if not a success, at least no longer a debacle.  Few care to spend much time considering the catastrophe we actually brought down on the Iraqis in “liberating” them. 

Remember when we used to talk about Saddam Hussein’s “killing fields”?  The world of mayhem and horror that followed the U.S. invasion and occupation delivered new, even larger “killing fields” that we don’t care to discuss, or that we prefer to consider the responsibility of the Iraqis themselves.  Even with violence far lower today, Baghdad certainly remains one of the more dangerous cities on the planet.  The bombs continue to go off there regularly and devastatingly, while the killing, even if not of American troops who rarely patrol any longer and are largely confined to their mega-bases, has not ended, not by a long shot; nor has the anger, suspicion, and depression that go with all of this. 

A striking recent article in the British Guardian by reporter Martin Chulov seemed to catch something of what the U.S. actually accomplished in Iraq in a nutshell.  It describes a country in “environmental ruin” (and, let’s not forget, taxed with an ongoing drought of monumental proportions).  The headline tells the story:  “Iraq littered with high levels of nuclear and dioxin contamination, study finds.”  The contamination from depleted uranium weapons, bombed pipelines, and other disasters of the years of war, civil war, and chaos seems centered around Iraq’s population centers and, perhaps not surprisingly, coincides with a massive rise in birth defects. 

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Former Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared before the official British inquiry into the Iraq War with the kind of stonewalling performance characteristic of George W. Bush after it was learned that the claim of alleged weapons of mass destruction manufactured by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had no basis in fact.

It has been reported in the media that Blair reportedly thought about the death and destruction visited on so many in the war torn nation every day.

His testimony at the Iraq inquiry revealed someone more interested in sticking with the official self-serving line than anyone who has done any soul searching. In fact, the January 29 New York Times account reported by John F. Burns and Alan Cowell referred to Blair’s testimony as “(a)t times spirited and at times prickly.”

In describing his bond with George W. Bush, Blair’s testimony can be synthesized in one statement that ended with a question that was meant to serve as an answer, a compelling reason for launching the Iraq War:

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

You can already see a new style of writing about China emerging in our American world.  The New York Times set it off recently by publishing a front-page piece on a $3.4 billion Chinese investment in one of the planet’s last great copper reserves -- in Afghanistan.  In passing, reporter Michael Wines also pointed out that Chinese energy companies had gained a stronger foothold in the future exploitation of Iraq’s massive oil reserves than had U.S. multinationals.  The ironies were legion and painfully visible. 

Our two wars have been sucking us dry in two countries where state-owned Chinese companies have just scored significant economic victories.  “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda [in Afghanistan],” wrote Wines, “China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”

Already, the follow-up pieces are starting to come out and heady cocktails they are:  one part awe and one part bitterness mixed with one part despair.  In Esquire online, Thomas P.M. Barnett put it this way:  “Worse still: Will the rest of the world end up profiting from our blood and money?... The reason why Obama neglects to mention any regional interests like Pakistan's? Admitting the larger logic of regionalization would make too painfully obvious the nature of our current strategic bankruptcy. Because it would suggest that the only 'victory' to be found would be 'won' by those neighboring powers who did nothing to stabilize the situation. In other words, their 'treasure' and our 'blood.'"  At Foreign Policy online, Stephen M. Walt chimed in:  “While we've been running around playing whack-a-mole with the Taliban and 'investing' billions each year in the corrupt Karzai government, China has been investing in things that might actually be of some value, like a big copper mine.”

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Originally published at Asia Times

BEIJING - Former United States vice president Dick Cheney, ex-defense minister Donald Rumsfeld and assorted US neo-cons will have plenty of time to nurse their apoplexy. One of their key reasons to unleash the war on Iraq in 2003 was to seize control of its precious oilfields and thus shape a great deal of the new great game in Eurasia - the energy front - by restricting the access of Europe and Asia to Iraq's staggering 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

After at least US$2 trillion spent by Washington and arguably more than a million dead Iraqis, it has come to this: a pipe dream definitely buried this past weekend in Baghdad with round two of bids to exploit a number of vast and immensely profitable oil fields.

The bids, supervised by the Oil Ministry, were presented on a live TV game show. Instead of American Idol, Iraqis got "Oil Idol". In a raucous carpet bazaar atmosphere, the ministry played "my way or the highway" and forced 44 foreign Big Oil corporations to cut to the max the fee they collect on every barrel extracted in Iraq and submit to 20-year contracts. These multinationals were not given a share in Iraqi oil production; they will be paid a $2 fee per barrel for raising output above a mutually agreed level.

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(Originally published HERE on MsSparky.com) By now everyone knows the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program IV (LOGCAP IV) has been split up and three contractors have been approved to submit bid proposals for the individual task orders. The three companies are Fluor, Dyncorp and KBR. I know...old news. But I keep getting asked who has been awarded which task orders. Especially the task orders Dyncorp has been awarded, after the PWC/Agility FUBAR came to light. I figured I could just "google it" get an easy answer and that would be it. Boy was I wrong. The more I read the more confused I got.

I decided to share what I've learned. (If you are a LOGCAP contract expert and find I'm in error, please contact me so I can correct it.) Not only are there three companies who have been approved to submit proposals, each company has their own LOGCAP IV contract number. Evidently task order numbers are assigned the next consecutive number under the winning companies contract after they have been awarded. That's where I got confused, duplicate task order numbers and multiple contract numbers. Unlike LOGCAP III, one company, one contract number.

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Leave it to Ohio's Dennis Kucinich to do what no one else in Congress has the courage to do. The Representative from the Buckeye State's tenth Congressional District is looking to force a vote on withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to a report by RAW Story.

For congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Afghan President Hamid Karzai's announcement Tuesday that his country would need the US's military support for another 10 or 15 years seems to have been the last straw.

The outspoken House representative says it was Karzai's statement that prompted him to draft a resolution calling for a House vote on the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We shouldn't be there another 15 to 20 months, let alone 15 to 20 years," Kucinich told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "When I'm in my district talking to people, nobody has come up to me and said we need to be in Afghanistan for the next 15 to 20 years. They do say we need jobs, we need to protect our basic industry, we need education, we need to protect retirement security. I'd like to see us start taking care of things here at home."

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There are times in everyone’s life where you are presented with a choice; you can continue to support a policy or an idea against all the evidence or you can reevaluate and take a new position. The Dog is at that place on our war in Afghanistan. Unlike many of the folks on the left side of the blogosphere, the Dog has supported the renewed focus on the war in Afghanistan.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

Besides the clear interest the United States has in not having an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban (given their willingness to help old allies in Al Qaeda) in being there. The Dog has always maintained that a conquering power (defined as a nation that removes an existing government by force) has the responsibly of putting in place some form of stable government before they withdraw. More specifically, they are the responsibility to try to do so. Like so many of the things the criminal Bush administration did, they went after this responsibility in a totally half assed way.

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