No, he doesn’t sound sure of himself and, despite donning his CIC chain mail for a speech at West Point, he may be be projecting weakness, just as Dick Cheney, our great, snarling former vice president, says he is.

But there may be more to it than simply cowering under Cheney’s glare, or because of the messy table which Bush and Cheney left behind.

Oh?!!  Why?

I read a stray story over the week-end about the Kennedy assassination; and the writer put forth the “grassy knoll” theory, supported by the famous Zapruder film from that time, which seemed to show at least one other shooter than Lee Harvey Oswald that day in Dallas in November 1963, a shooter who blasted a hole in the front right of Kennedy’s head as he sat in his limo, cruising through Dealey Plaza – a wound which, according to the writer, suggested a CIA conspiracy to kill the president.

Here’s another take on the Kennedy/CIA dynamic from another writer, James Douglass:

http://antiwar.com/radio/2009/12/02/james-w-douglass/

So the question raised by some is whether, in the eyes of certain people in the government, Kennedy wasn’t tough enough at the time (thus, the assassination), and – considering Obama’s dilemmas and our current wars – whether the new Democratic president, and his CIA chief, Leon Panetta, are now fearful of the CIA.

Well, gosh, I don’t know about that; but, as far as Afghanistan is concerned, it sure looks like it’s in for a dime, in for a dollar.

Cheney, in his latest armchair generalisimo comments on Obama’s leadership, has denied that he or his former boss are responsible for any backsliding in Afghanistan, just as they keep saying they kept us safe and did everything right in Iraq, including, presumably, crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s legally.

And as the Obama war policy for Afghanistan is rolled out, sure-as-shootin’, the national media will treat it all in its usual “he said, he said” manner, giving Cheney his due, tit for tat.

Yet, about Iraq, there’s more going on today, debate-wise, than many Americans may be aware of (maybe even Cheney), since there are, even six years after the invasion, new questions being asked about that war.

But the questions are not being asked here.  Can’t have that.  They’re being asked in London, at the Chilcot hearings.

Over the week-end, Jeremy Greenstock, the former UK ambassador to the UN,  said the Bush administratoin was “hell bent” on invading Iraq and didn’t want to wait for a second UN resolution on the matter.  This is not news really, but Greenstock drove the point home that, even today, while the invasion might – might - be seen as legal in a narrow sense, it was not legitimate politically because a wider consensus within the UN was never established.

Also this week-end, the Chilcot hearings heard that the former attorney general to Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, wrote opinions in 2002 which questioned the legality of a proposed, preemptive US/UK invasion of Iraq.

http://www.docudharma.com/diary/17534/iraq-war-inquiry-day-four

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6938002.ece

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/27/truth-uk-guilt-iraq-chilcot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/01/iraq-memo-smoking-gun-goldsmith

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/vickiwoods/6673300/Chilcot-Iraq-hearings-An-inquiry-with-everything.-.-.-except-answers.html

As Kurt Vonnegut would say:  And so it goes …

Frank Rich in his op-ed today really nailed the Afghanistan myths and the War Hawks deadly foolish desire to send 40-80,00 more troops into a mission and country they clearly don’t understand:

McChrystal thinks we might even jolly up those Muslims who historically and openly hate America. “I don’t think much of the Taliban are ideologically driven,” he told Dexter Filkins of The Times. “In my view their past is not important. Some people say, ‘Well, they have blood on their hands.’ I’d say, ‘So do a lot of people.’ I think we focus on future behavior.”

Whether we could win those hearts and minds is, arguably, an open question — though it’s an objective that would require a partner other than Hamid Karzai and many more troops than even McChrystal is asking for (or America presently has). But to say that McChrystal’s optimistic — dare one say politically correct? — view of Muslim pliability doesn’t square with that of America’s hawks is the understatement of the decade.

As their Fort Hood rhetoric made clear, McChrystal’s most vehement partisans don’t trust American Muslims, let alone those of the Taliban, no matter how earnestly the general may argue that they can be won over by our troops’ friendliness (or bribes). If, as the right has it, our Army cannot be trusted to recognize a Hasan in its own ranks, then how will it figure out who the “good” Muslims will be as we try to build a “stable” state (whatever “stable” means) in a country that has never had a functioning central government? If our troops can’t be protected from seemingly friendly Muslim American brethren in Killeen, Tex., what are the odds of survival for the 40,000 more troops the hawks want to deploy to Kabul and sinkholes beyond?

Rich points out that Matthew Hoh, a former active duty Marine and, until recently, a State Department official in Afghanistan, and retired three-star Army general and currently our Afghanistan ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry are asking the question of Obama no War Hawk can answer, “Do you want Americans fighting and dying for the Karzai regime? Rich’s final paras say it all:

We don’t know everything in those cables. What we do know is that American intelligence continues to say that fewer than 100 Qaeda operatives can still be found in Afghanistan. We also know that the Taliban, which are currently estimated to number in the tens of thousands, can’t be eliminated. As McChrystal put it to Filkins, there is no “finite number” of Taliban, so there’s no way to vanquish them. Hence his counterinsurgency alternative, which could take decades, costing untold billions and countless lives.

Perhaps those on the right are correct about Hasan, and he is just one cog in an apocalyptic jihadist plot that has infiltrated our armed forces. If so, then they have an obligation to explain how pouring more troops into Afghanistan would have stopped Hasan from plotting in Killeen. Don’t hold your breath. If we have learned anything concrete so far from the massacre at Fort Hood, it’s that our hawks, for all their certitude, are as utterly confused as the rest of us about who it is we’re fighting in Afghanistan and to what end.

All RWCAs (C is for Cowardly) whether in congress or the Serious national security “expert” world or the sick pundits, can counter one simple argument, even if McChrystal’s counterinsurgency proposal would eventually work (whatever work means), America simply can’t afford it. America can’t afford it economically or for the certain continuing loss of standing in the world and morally for what it will cost our brave men and women and their families in our military who will pay far too high a price and “to what end.” The end of America as we know it, not from a military win or defeat, but from an economic debt-ridden collapse and subsequent victory by our economic world competitors.

Neither al-Qaeda or the Taliban come even close to threatening our national security. America is the national security threat. The cost of continuing to go after terrorists, poses a grave threat due to a cost that is there for all to see if our “experts” and political “leaders” would just take off their arrogant, rose colored, we are better than anyone else glasses.

Our world competitors who have a great advantage because of what their workers are paid and what they don’t pay for their defense, are secretly cheering our farcical foolishness of believing we can afford the cost of staying long-term in Afghanistan. If we do, we have no chance economically but to become a failed empire full of suffering citizens who will look back and say, “How could we be so foolish to believe that fearing just thousands of terrorists and exporting American Democracy into a country that was far from ready was more important than our survival?”

In hindsight, think of what we could have accomplished and saved if we had just pumped money and technical assistance into Afghanistan after chasing al-Qaeda into Pakistan and not had political War Hawks, oil baron lovers, lie us into Iraq. Now we better have the foresight to see the utter foolishness of McChrystal’s desires as a competitive military commander to “win” and one who is not charged with considering the economic cost and where our true national security threat lies.