Prediction: Taliban Will Cave

Amidst all the noise of people repeating the same three ideas, of media outlets concentrating on the superficial and reporting the noteworthy, is there original thinking and analysis anywhere? Here is some original thinking.

For Gen. Anthony Zinni, one of the country’s most respected military thinkers, Iraq and Afghanistan are already yesterday’s wars. Confident that the Taliban will be at the conference table by the end of the year, he is thinking about how the United States should be preparing for its next conflict.

It is easy to forget that there are some very bright military minds. Sam Grant and Robert E. Lee were intellectually gifted and capable. Even Colin Powell is quite bright, despite his lack of social courage (he has plenty of physical courage, quite a different thing).

He hinted that there had already been backroom talks between the U.S. and the Taliban—“like Kissinger’s with the North Vietnamese”—and predicted that these would lead to formal negotiations by the end of the year. So, he told an audience of several hundred students, academic staff, and visiting military officials, now is the time for the U.S. to consider what it expects from its military in the future.

Well, the US has publicly announced that it will negotiate with "moderate" Taliban elements.

The United States must be prepared to fight both a conventional war and “that other thing,” he said. And how to define “that other thing” will occupy us for the next ten years. His own definition is a nation that needs stabilization and reconstruction because the social institutions can’t cope.

Somalia?

“But our military is not designed to handle this,” Zinni said. He has counted 54 tasks the U.S. Army is performing in Iraq that can not be defined as “military,” including running swimming pools.

Nation-building, which Republicans castigated Bill Clinton for doing.

When we touch something, we own it,” Zinni said, taking Colin Powell’s quote, ‘When we break something, we own it,’ one step further. “And when we own it, we can’t help rebuilding it in our own image. That’s the American way. But we’re not good at it and we can’t afford it.”

We won’t even be able to claim victory when the troops come home, because “we don’t come home anymore,” Zinni said. “Sixty years after the Second World War, there are still American troops in Germany, South Korea. Sixty years from now, will we still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan?”

A sobering thought.

Indexed Trove of Kissinger Phone Transcripts Is Completed

Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger gave secret orders to record their calls, each evidently without the other’s knowledge.

Not at all a surprise that this pair recorded their calls; they were both so untrustworthy they did not even trust each other.

Nixon was a criminal: he broke the Constitution by usurping power, he broke laws by ordering illegal activities for the sake of his own political power, he lied, and then he was stupid enough to not destroy the tapes.

Kissinger was a manipulator, overly impressed with his own power and skills, and, in the end, has been proven to be not much more than a petty jerk: he recorded calls with the President of the United States (even if that was Nixon, it is still an amazing display of hubris, arrogance and distrust).

The words of these two are chilling, even 35 years later.

It was April 1972, and American B-52 bombers were pummeling North Vietnam. President Richard M. Nixon got on the phone with his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, for an update on the air assault on the port city of Haiphong. The men struggled to persuade each other that the war might still be won.

Did they actually believe the war could be won?

“They dropped a million pounds of bombs,” Mr. Kissinger said.

A million pounds of bombs dropped on one city. A million pounds. It staggers the mind that this could be used as a statement meant to impress.

Nixon was pleased. “Goddamn, that must have been a good strike!” he said.

His own words reveal what a depraved human being Nixon was.

Then the president had a moment of doubt, recalling the dismal experience of his immediate predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson: “Johnson bombed them for years, and it didn’t do any good.”

Exactly: LBJ had Viet Nam bombed for four years, and it did nothing to dissuade the North or the Viet Cong from pursuing their aims. LBJ and his advisers knew that. McNamara would, 30 plus years later, confess how own doubts (In retrospect: the tragedy and lessons of Vietnam is one of his books).

Mr. Kissinger reassured his boss, saying: “But, Mr. President, Johnson never had a strategy. He was sort of picking away at them. He would go in with 50 planes, 20 planes. I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month.”

Which accomplished absolutely nothing, to just bomb and bomb and bomb. That was no strategy, to simply drop more bombs. Bombing was the same tactic Johnson had used; to simply multiply the amount of bombs did not amount to a strategy.

What the two men said 36 years ago can be known with such precision today because they worked in what was, in retrospect, the golden age of White House taping. Both Nixon and Mr. Kissinger had given secret orders to record their calls, each evidently without the other’s knowledge.

A pair of twits, of criminals.

On Tuesday, the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research group at George Washington University, published an online edition of transcripts of 15,000 Kissinger phone calls from 1969 to 1977, fully indexed and searchable for the first time. A selection was posted on the archive’s Web site, nsarchive.org, and the full collection is available to subscribers, which include many university libraries.

Hyperlinking to the NSA Archive website shows a page with this bon mot: "We can bomb the bejesus out of them all over North Vietnam.".

O, there is no doubt as to the historical import of these tapes and their transcripts; three and a half decades later my animus toward these two human beings remains intense.

The collection covers many serious policy matters, like Vietnam strategy, but includes a few calls memorable because they are so bizarre.

Nixon was bizarre; Kissinger? Ditto.

The Men Who Spied on Nixon

Glancing through the news, I came upon this startling item: The Men Who Spied on Nixon. Amazingly, I found it on a Fox News website. A search in Google News reveals only this entry, but a general Google search on Moorer Radford (rather than Moorer-Radford) returns numerous hits.

One of the hits is from Watergate.com website. On closer look the site seems, well, weird. But the point here is Moorer-Radford. Still, this is what I mean by weird: a search on the name Len Colodny, who seems to be the force behind the site, returns this: Len Colodny is a journalist. In 1992 he co-wrote with Robert Gettlin Silent Coup: The Removal of Richard Nixon. In the book the authors claim that John Dean ordered the Watergate break-in because he knew that a call-girl ring was operating out of the Democratic headquarters. The authors also argued that Alexander Haig was not Deep Throat but was a key source for Bob Woodward, who had briefed Haig at the White House in 1969 and 1970. Weird.

And how about the military spying on the President? Weird in a very different way.

A Navy stenographer assigned to the National Security Council during the Nixon administration "stole documents from just about every individual that he came into contact with on the NSC," according to newly declassified White House documents.

From whom did he steal?

The two-dozen pages of memoranda, transcripts and notes – once among the most sensitive and privileged documents in the Executive Branch – shed important new details on a unique crisis in American history: when investigators working for President Richard Nixon discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, using the stenographer as their agent, actively spied on the civilian command during the Vietnam War.

Quite a twist on history: Nixon being spied on, and by his own military.

The affair represented an important instance in which President Nixon, who resigned in 1974 amid wide-ranging allegations that he and his subordinates abused the powers of the presidency, was himself the victim of internal espionage. In adding to what has already become known about the episode, the latest documents show how the president and his aides struggled to "get a handle on" the young Navy man at the center of the intrigue and contain the damage caused by the scandal.

Eventually the stenographer, Charles Radford, admitted to pilferage.

Radford's espionage took many forms: making extra photocopies of documents entrusted to him as courier; retrieving crumpled drafts from "burn bags"; even brazenly rifling through Kissinger's briefcase while the national security adviser slept on an overseas flight.

Some nerve, eh? Looking through Kissinger's briefcase. Which, of course, begs the question: what about security?

the young stenographer did eventually break down and tearfully admit to Nixon's investigators that he had been stealing NSC documents and routing them to his Pentagon superiors. Radford later estimated he had stolen 5,000 documents within a 13-month period.

"Radford has admitted that he stole documents from just about every individual that he came into contact with on the NSC," wrote Young.

Security, anyone?

Now, here is an interesting point: David R. Young, an Ehlichman aide, who led the Plumbers's investigation into Radford's activities, wrote a memorandum to his boss in advance of Ehrlichman meeting with Radford boss; one point he made was to urge Ehrlichman to determine the extent to which Kissinger's top NSC deputy – Alexander Haig, who had personally selected Radford to accompany Kissinger on his overseas trips, and who later went on to become secretary of state in the Reagan administration – was "aware of Radford's activities."

An interesting point that Haig selected Radford.

Nixon and his men eventually concluded that Haig had been complicit in the Pentagon spying, but opted not to take any action against him.

Park Avenue Diplomacy

Maureen Dowd can be tiresome, but she can also be brilliant. Here, she's brilliant.

I don’t agree with those muttering darkly that the picture of Gov. Sarah Palin with a perky smile and shapely gams posing with a pleased Henry Kissinger, famous for calling power the ultimate aphrodisiac, is a sign of the apocalypse. It isn’t even a sign of the apocalipstick.How the mighty 85-year-old Henry the K has fallen from his days chasing Jill St. John and running the world to his hour briefing of a 44-year-old Wasilla hockey mom who may end up running the world.

One can imagine how Dr. K felt: pleased he could get a 44 year0old women in skirts genuflecting to him. yet possibly also incredulous that life has come to this boob running for VP. Well, K did see Spiro Agnew.

After losing its moral superiority abroad with phony evidence for attacking Iraq, the U.S. has now lost its moral superiority in the financial arena. Once more, W. took the ball, carried it off the cliff and went biking. Doctor K prolonged the war in Vietnam to help Nixon get re-elected and then advised W. on Iraq that the only way to beat an insurgency and save face is to stick it out, no matter how many American kids and foreign civilians die.

Once a cynic, always a cynic.

(A senior Palin campaign aide told CBS News’s Scott Conroy that the governor’s foreign-policy experience was atmospheric, akin to the way someone from Miami might obtain a feel for Latin America. “It is very much being able to look off the tip of Alaska,” the aide said. “Metaphorically, I’m talking about.”)

Atmospheric? How much Russian atmosphere is there in Juneau?

Kissinger probably explained détente and Metternich to Palin, while she explained the Iditarod and moose carving to him. They talked Russia, which is relevant.

Metternich and moose; what a combination.

Republicans, who have won so many elections painting Democrats as socialists and pinkos, have now done so much irresponsible deregulating and deficit spending that they have to avoid fiscal Armageddon by turning America into a socialist, pinko society with nationalized financial institutions and a financial czar accountable to no one and no law.

Socialism is dead, and so is the free market. Power to the people!

Even if she blows off the First Amendment — and lets McCain’s Rove, Steve Schmidt, demonize the press even though she disdains women politicians who whine — Bill Clinton is still a fan. Besides talking about what a great man John McCain is on “The View” and “David Letterman,” Bill praised Palin at his Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York and will receive her there on Thursday.

Bubba gets around.

On “The View,” he said he understood that some women might vote for Palin on the basis of gender, even if it was against their economic interest. “You can’t tell someone else that the ground on which they make their voting decision is irrational,” he said primly. Well, actually you could, if you weren’t still sulking and plotting for 2012.

I began to get that feeling a week or so ago, when Bam's numbers were getting weak. I'd dismissed that, especially after Hill's convention speech, but I'm not dismissing that any longer.