Gates Calls Europe Anti-War Mood Danger to Peace

Update: NYT Editors nixed "Europe Anti-War Mood" for "European Mood."

Damn Europeans blowing off NATO refuse to acknowledge the truth that any alliance whose purpose is not the intention to wage war is senseless and useless.

Headline above is from today's New York Times. The last 15 words of my lede are from an infamous, 20th-century militarist. How about we just get these guys home and give them what they deserve? Perhaps war reparations, just a thought.

Europe says 'no' to American war machine.

"Liberal [American] intellectuals have lined up in support of the war machine in the familiar style -- discussed, for example, by Randolph Bourne in classic essays -- and since they know they do not have the intellectual competence to deal with those who refuse to go along, resort to what comes natural to the educated classes: hysterical tantrums, lies, and abuse. ... There are ... important things to do--such as continue to falsify their increasingly desperate claim that everyone is following them in their depraved subordination to power."
- Noam Chomsky on the pro-war line vis a vis the American peace movement against war in Afghanistan; April 2002, CounterPunch

By BRIAN KNOWLTON in the NYTWASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has long called European contributions to NATO inadequate, said Tuesday that public and political opposition to the military had grown so great in Europe that it was directly affecting operations in Afghanistan and impeding the alliance’s broader security goals.

“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st,” he told NATO officers and officials in a speech at the National Defense University, the Defense Department-financed graduate school for military officers and diplomats.

A perception of European weakness, he warned, could provide a “temptation to miscalculation and aggression” by hostile powers.

The meeting was a prelude to the alliance’s review this year of its basic mission plan for the first time since 1999. “Right now,” Mr. Gates said, “the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems.”

Mr. Gates’s blunt comments came just three days after the coalition government of the Netherlands collapsed in a dispute over keeping Dutch troops in Afghanistan. It now appears almost certain that most of the 2,000 Dutch troops there will be withdrawn this year. And polls show that the Afghanistan war has grown increasingly unpopular in nearly every European country.

The defense secretary, putting a sharper point on his past criticisms, outlined how NATO shortfalls were exacting a material toll in Afghanistan. The alliance’s failure to finance needed helicopters and cargo aircraft, for example, were “directly impacting operations,” he said.

Mr. Gates said that NATO also needed more aerial refueling tankers and intelligence-gathering equipment “for immediate use on the battlefield.”

Yet alliance members, he noted, were far from reaching their spending commitments, with only 5 of 28 having reached the established target: 2 percent of gross domestic product for defense. By comparison, the United States spends more than 4 percent of its G.D.P. on its military.

Dana Allin, a senior fellow with the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, called Mr. Gates’s remarks “very striking.”

“Whether this is a conscious statement to sound a real sharp warning, there’s no question that the frustration among the American military establishment is palpable regarding coalition operations in Afghanistan,” he said.

Mr. Gates did soften his message a bit, noting that, not counting United States forces, NATO troops in Afghanistan were to increase from 30,000 last year to 50,000 this year.

“By any measure,” he said, “that is an extraordinary feat.”

More sobering, he said, was that just two months into the year, NATO was facing shortfalls of hundreds of millions of euros — “a natural consequence of having underinvested in collective defense for over a decade.”

NATO’s growing problems — greatly magnified by the expansion of its mandate beyond European borders, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks — called for “serious, far-reaching and immediate reforms,” Mr. Gates said.

Neocon at Pentagon Attacked Hillary

The third man in charge at the Pentagon, undersecretary of defense for planning Eric Edelman, who accused Hillary Clinton of reinforcing "enemy propaganda" may find himself enjoying the dearth of political support in which Vice President Cheney revels, though that would make him right at home in the least popular administration since Nixon.

Though some note that one individual attacked Clinton and not the entire Pentagon, unless this individual is fired by Def. Sec. Roberts Gates next week when Gates is expected to make a response, the lone-bureaucrat theory will fall by the wayside.

Absent support from the top levels of government, Edelman should be gone; absent Edelman's firing, Edelman is just another example of an administration gone out-of-control.

Some updates:

- via Election Central/Talking Points Memo

Defense Secretary Roberts Gates Distances Himself from Hillary Attack

“I have long been a staunch advocate of Congressional oversight, first at the CIA and now at the Defense Department. I have said on several occasions in recent months that I believe that congressional debate on Iraq has been constructive and appropriate. I had not seen Senator Clinton’s reply to Ambassador Edelman’s letter until today. I am looking into the issues she raised and will respond to them early next week.”

And Juan Cole's analysis is spot-on:

You might gather from a cursory examination of the wire services that "the Pentagon" has attacked Senator Hillary Clinton for requesting a briefing for her committee from the Department of Defense on contingency plans for withdrawal from Iraq.

But as Fred Kaplan of Slate pointed out, it was a specific bureaucrat who criticized her, undersecretary of defense for planning Eric Edelman. Edelman wrote to Senator Clinton (text at Talkingpointsmemo):

' Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. … Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risk in order to achieve compromises of national reconciliation. '

Edelman moved into government in the Reagan era, as RightWeb explains. He was close to Richard Perle, among the inventors of the warmongering Neoconservative ideology. In 1992 he was part of the Neoconservative team (which included Paul Wolfowitz) that co-authored a security doctrine for the United States that aimed at perpetual hegemony and implied perpetual aggression to prevent the emergence of "peer" powers.

He served as Dick Cheney's national security adviser in the early zeroes and, along with convicted felon Irv Lewis Libby, was heavily involved in getting up the fraudulent and illegal Iraq War.

He was then sent as ambassador to Turkey to shore up that front in the war effort, after the Turkish parliament denied the US military permission to march through Anatolia into neighboring Iraq. He was denounced by Turkish commentators for behaving in Ankara like a colonial viceroy rather than like an ambassador. And then when arch-Neocon and then deputy secretary of defense Doug Feith was forced out under a cloud after one of his subordinates was caught spying for Israel, Edelman was installed as his successor. In other words, Cheney arranged for one Neoconservative to replace another.

Lest anyone doubt Edelman's conversion to the Neoconservative cause, it should be remembered that when the Government Accounting Office lambasted Feith's open interference in intelligence analysis and his practice of actually briefing his superiors on intelligence (which is forbidden to and probably illegal for defense department bureaucrats), Edelman wrote a long defense of Feith's corrupt practices and forced the GAO to drop actual policy recommendations for ensuring they did not recur.

In my view, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates should have fired Edelman on the spot, since his subordinate was basically announcing his commitment to the kind of shady and illegitimate practices that Feith (whom then Secretary of State Colin Powell called 'a card-carrying member of the [Israeli] Likud [Party]') and his allies such as Cheney used to drag the United States into an Iraq War.

So, Hillary was not criticized by a military officer. No evidence Edelman knows one end of an M-16 from another. She was not criticized by a Defense Department veteran. Edelman is just a recently installed understudy to Feith.

Who was she criticized by? Just one of the last Neoconservatives who hasn't yet been forced out of office because he abused the public trust or who hasn't yet slid into a criminality fostered by sublime arrogance.

By implying that Clinton is a traitor, Edelman inserted himself into a presidential campaign on the Republican side. That is not a legitimate role for the third man in charge of the Pentagon.

Edelman knows the score and knew exactly what he was doing. Gates now has a second opportunity to do the right thing and fire Edelman. Otherwise, his already difficult task of restoring morale to the Pentagon will be complicated by the realization on the part of many DoD employees and military personnel that the Pentagon is once again being deployed for petty partisan purposes that leech out the meaning and morale of their institution.

As a civil servant, Edelman is supposed to be working for you and me. We pay his salary. Instead, he is working for some narrow partisan interest. He has forfeited his right to his taxpayer-supported office.

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