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avanneman · 6 years

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We now interrupt this regularly scheduled bad news to bring you much much worse bad news

Several weeks ago—about a decade in Trump years, I would estimate1—I planned to write yet another article ridiculing our nation’s massive addiction to wasteful military spending, category “Star Wars”, springing off an article in Bloomsberg, by “the Editors” themselves, no less, “How to Blow North Korean Missiles Out of the Sky”, bemoaning the fact that, in fact, there’s no way to do that, no way to “hit a bullet with a bullet,” as “the Editors” so breathlessly put it.

And there isn’t. The Bloomsberg boys link to an article in Wired, titled “US Missile Defense Still Has a Long, Long Way to Go”, by Brian Barrett, a headline that I would describe as charitable in the extreme, for, based on Brian’s article, a more accurate head would be “US Missile Defense System Is A Complete Flop”. To save myself the task of rewriting what Brian has said, I’ll just quote him liberally:

“The US has tested the interceptor system [the “Ground-based Midcourse Defense” system] 19 times since 1999, succeeding about half the time. The most recent test, three years ago, marked another success, but three prior attempts fizzled. That kind of success rate is troubling, given the meticulously managed conditions.”

Brian talked with Philip Coyle, senior fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and former head of the Pentagon’s test and evaluation office, and Phil had a lot to say about the integrity of the Pentagon’s testing system, which strikes me as essentially non-existent: “They know what it [the incoming missile] looks like, they know when it’s coming”—information that neither the North Koreans nor any other “aggressor” is likely to be sharing with us when they launch a, you know, surprise attack.

But wait, there’s more—a lot more. As Brian tells us, “The tests also don’t account for decoys and countermeasures that could throw off the missile defense system—tactics that include technology that confuses the launch-detecting radar systems or infrared sensors aboard the interceptor [rocket], or a simple balloon traveling alongside the incoming missile’s reentry vehicle.”

Well, I’m sure the North Koreans wouldn’t be so sneaky—or so advanced—as to mess us up with a damn balloon, would they? That would be so unfair!

The absurdity of these tests—which cost almost $250 million apiece and do nothing more than prove that they’re a bad idea—was so overwhelming that I could do little more than chuckle over the fact that, while the Pentagon was going to waste surely several billion dollars a year for the foreseeable future, investing in such things as anti-balloon technology, on this latest edition of Star Wars folly, at least there was the consolation that, since the North Koreans were never ever going to attack us with a nuclear weapon—because they’re not that stupid!—mere folly would never turn into disaster.

Well, as I say, that was several Trump years ago. Right on cue, Vladimir Putin—aka Dr. Evil, aka Valdemort, aka Emperor Palpatine2—announced plans for a whole suite of fabulous new weapons that would totally blow the U.S. out of the water, including a nuclear-powered, ground-hugging cruise missile.

Neil MacFarquhar and David Sanger, writing in the New York Times, expressed some skepticism regarding the comrade’s claims, but swallowed whole the nonsense about our missile defense system: “While Mr. Putin may have been bluffing about these weapons, as some experts suggested, he cleverly focused on a vulnerability of American-designed defenses: They are based on the assumption that enemy nuclear missiles fly high and can be destroyed well before they reach their targets.”

In fact, Putin doesn’t need his super cruise missile to evade our missile defense systems. All he needs is a balloon.

Fortunately, there has been considerable pushback against the notion that Putin can achieve anything remotely resembling the world-beating arsenal he has proposed. Richard Aboulafia, writing in Forbes, explains why Putin’s bluff is nothing more than confirming evidence that he has, in fact, a very weak hand. But how likely is it that the Pentagon will let this bluff go unexploited. I’d say, motherfucking zero.

But wait, there’s more bad news. Chinese President Xi Jinping has decided that this president for life thing sounds pretty good to him, so that’s what he’s going to do. With two muscle-flexing autocrats in business, Pentagon planners are in Pentagon heaven. Two Cold Wars! Two Cold Wars!

Afterwords If we’re lucky, trillions of dollars, but not millions of lives, will be wasted in this brave new world of unconscionable military conspicuous consumption, but only if we’re lucky. As I recently noted, the U.S. is addicted to a “Forward” foreign policy because it fertilizes the careers of tens of thousands of bright, ambitious, hard-working people—and subsidizes the jobs of hundreds of thousands more—even as it wastes our nation’s substance in unnecessary and often spectacularly counterproductive pursuits (e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya). Both China and Russia seem anxious to get in on the game. The great danger is that muscle boys like Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping, by making a cult of not backing down, run the risk of backing both themselves, and each other, into a corner from which there is no escape other than either war or career-ending humiliation and failure. Back during the Cuban missile crisis, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev rather bravely chose the latter, and paid the price, being deposed only a year later. Would any of the three worthies aforementioned display Nikita’s self-sacrificing good sense? Time will tell.

UPDATE North Korea is now talking about talking about doing something about its nuclear program. If something comes of this, Trump will have a right to crow, and he certainly will, but a real agreement would be worth having to endure even that. It's "amusing" (so many things are these days) that über hawk Eli Lake warns us not to get our hopes up.3

A “Trump year” is a flexible amount of time defined as the amount of bad news that, in the past, would typically occur in a given year. A Trump year typically lasts between a week or a month, but occasionally will shrink to a day, or even less. ↩︎

Since I bailed on the Star Wars franchise early on, I had to look this guy up, but I’m assured that he’s worse than Darth Vadar. ↩︎

Eli doesn't want a nuclear war, but he does want a regime change, because that's always worked out so well for us in e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. ↩︎

#missile defense #military spending #Russia #China

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politicaltheatre · 7 years

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The Mouths That Roared

What's the difference between a campaign and a movement? It's actually a really good question to ask, especially after the past week, with the president's "campaign event" in Florida and the CPAC appearances by Trump and his staff, and tonight, with the president preparing to unveil his first budget before a joint session of Congress.

The thing about politicians, and doubly so for politicians claiming not to be politicians, is that they are always campaigning, each campaign setting up the next, each word said and action taken setting up the next. A campaign has short term goals with short term decisions made to attain them, all of which necessarily and inevitably leads to short term thinking and all of the flaws that come with it.

A movement, on the other hand, is made of people who share and work towards a long term goal. Think of the abolition of slavery or women's suffrage or civil rights. Think also of the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life movements and, sadly, the too focused Wall Street deregulation movement and the too unfocused gun control and gun rights movements. These movements have encompassed many campaigns, with new generations still fighting wars that may never see an end.

The reason to explore the differences between those two terms is because they tell us something about the motivation and tactics on ample display by the Trump administration (and in their allies in Congress and in the media) over the past week and the year and a half leading up to it. What we have seen from them is a series of campaigns, seemingly chaotic but rooted in a single, all-encompassing belief: the right and virtue of selfishness.

A lot of good analysis has already been made on the tactics the president and his staff have been using, going back years, even before they knew each other. It's almost as though they were drawn together by fate, their aggressively selfish world views and ability to talk around facts both complimenting and reinforcing each other.

It wasn't fate, of course. Much like the little Duchy of Grand Fenwick in "The Mouse That Roared", Trump and his original team launched what they imagined was an insurgent campaign, something, if they could be honest, they expected to lose but not before getting just enough shots in to garner headlines and earn their candidate and themselves a nice wad of money when it was over.

That was Grand Fenwick's plan, too. All they wanted was the money America had paid to the countries it had defeated in World War II. It would have worked, too, but then Grand Fenwick ran into sheer dumb luck. First, no one took them seriously. Then, having not taken the threat seriously, they didn't bother defending themselves from Grand Fenwick's so-called "army", a band of ill-equipped, poorly trained buffoons.

How could they know that they'd face such weak resistance? How could they know that they'd stumble into possession of a doomsday weapon and face even more incompetent resistance? Before anyone knew what had happened, the campaign was over and the mighty United States had been defeated.

Having won, though, Grand Fenwick found that they had to keep the campaign going. They were now a superpower, with all of the threats and responsibilities that come with it. What to do? Some of Trump's most prominent advisors didn't join his campaign until he had already dispatched with the historically weak Republican field.

Reince Priebus, for example, scoffed - SCOFFED - at those who doubted the Donald when interviewed at CPAC this week. Yet when the White House Chief of Staff was still Chairman of the Republican Party, he attacked Trump on the very issues he now defends, such as the anti-Muslim travel ban. At the time, Priebus worried that Trump might hurt whomever might be the eventual nominee's chances against Hillary Clinton. Now, well, now Priebus works for the guy.

Kellyanne Conway, whose ability to contort any question to suit her choice of answers is becoming legendary, could be viewed shilling for other, non-Trump candidates not too long before she joined the cause. She's a merc with a mouth, after all, not a true believer. Sean Spicer, forever one eye twitch away from losing his grip, is one, too.

And Nigel Farage, the racist, misogynist instigator of Brexit now representing the United Kingdom in Europe? He sees in Trump not merely vindication in his own cravings for power, but as a means of increasing his power by association. How else to explain the Swedish rape fantasies Farage was peddling last week on his way to Trump's dinner table? If Trump had made something up about Zimbabwe, rest assured Farage would have offered up something about evil Zimbabweans or evil refugees in Zimbabwe to help his man out.

Trump may appreciate the shows of loyalty, but this isn't the behavior of someone with a plan. Offers of bullshit to back up Trump's bullshit mark all of them firmly as hangers-on, and hangers-on lose their grip (looking at you, Spicer).

Trump's true inner-circle, therefore, are those who were with him from the start, such as chief speech- and executive order-writer Stephen Miller, son-in-law and real estate protégé Jared Kushner, and daughter, Ivanka. Trump clearly trusts and relies on each of them far more than mere hangers-on. Short of a full-blown scandal, each will continue to be by his side.

Then there's Steve Bannon, the spider perched on Trump's shoulder whispering poison in his ear. OK, maybe it's more like listening to Trump's own poison, laughing, and whispering a condensed, even more toxic version of it back into Trump's ear. This is a man who found in Trump not just a kindred spirit but, truly, a vehicle for his own aggressively selfish mind.

Like the others in Trump's inner circle, Bannon genuinely believes in the virtue of never having to be accountable to anyone, of those specific ends truly justifying any means. Bannon himself is a kind of opportunist, someone who took that toxic worldview of a spoiled childhood and sought out people and things throughout his life that would not only justify and reinforce that worldview but help him gain enough power to proselytize it.

It's hard to call it a movement, though. It's hard to imagine, even when they are together behind closed doors that any of them, Trump, Bannon, Miller, or the Kushners, openly acknowledge what they do and for what true reason. So they campaign, hopping from one stone to another, grasping for the next rung up any ladder, always afraid to look down at who they're stepping on.

When Bannon used his speech at CPAC to denounce the "administrative state", his intent was to launch a new campaign to "deconstruct" it. He's packaging his plans as part of a movement but also as something new, as the way for the aggressively selfish finally to win their war.

The truth, however and not shockingly, is quite different. Bannon's new campaign is really just based on other right-wing campaigns that came before. What he, and the right-wing think-tankers he's cribbing from, mean by "administrative state" is a central, federal government with too much power over the states. Rather than restore balance, they argue, it is better to reverse the imbalance, making the federal government permanently weak.

Another discarded term for this doctrine was "states rights", and if you recall that having something to do with protecting the right to own slaves and later to segregate water fountains, housing, schools, and busses, well, you understand Bannon and those he's appealing to very well. Deconstruct far enough and you have a master and his castle, and no one with the power to stop him from his appetites.

Bannon doesn't expect to take things that far, of course. Who needs a castle? His presence by Trump's side, though, is still a means to that end, just as the campaign to "deconstruct the administrative state" is, just as Breitbart is, just as the antics of his protégé Milo Yannopoulos are. Each is a separate campaign, something grasped for its short term potential and left behind in favor of the next rung on the ladder. Each reveals the man behind them and the world he desperately wants to see. Each reveals the truth behind the jargon, the euphemisms, and the bald faced lies.

Tonight, when the president speaks to Congress, telling them, us, and the rest of the world how great and unprecedented his budget is going to be, how taxes will fall and incomes will rise, how our enemies will come to fear us, how safe we will all feel in our homes and streets and new jobs, and most of all how he made it all possible with his greatness, we must remember that however much Trump believes or wants to believe in the goals his budget may achieve, the fingerprints of others, especially Bannon and Miller, are all over it.

What we'll get tonight is another campaign, in this case an advertising campaign for cuts to taxes and regulations spending that we cannot afford, least of all because of the damage they will do to us and the rest of the world in the long term. Whatever so many Americans have held onto in the hopes of turning a campaign slogan on a hat into a movement, what they and us will get is one more sales pitch, and not a terribly convincing one.

This is a small troop of poorly equipped, badly trained men and women reaching out for the doomsday weapon. If we're foolish enough to give it to them, we deserve what we get.

- Daniel Ward

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