Prep School For Dropouts

The U.S. Army, eager to fill its ranks amid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, doesn’t see them as dropouts. They are recruits who only need a GED before they’re ready to begin basic training.

And so, the Army formally opens its first prep school Wednesday.

That includes turning six World War II-era buildings at the base into a mini-campus of spartan classrooms and barracks. Under the yearlong pilot project, classes of about 60 soldiers will enter the monthlong program every week.

Their day begins in uniform at 5 a.m. with physical training. Then they attend about eight hours of academic review classes, followed by homework each evening. An hour of marching drills and military discipline is thrown in for good measure.

The soldiers work in small classrooms outfitted with simple desks, chairs, and dry-erase boards. In-desk computers are used for test-taking. Grouped three to four to a class, the students hunch over special GED preparation books, working on basic math, social studies and reading selections.

Recruits must score in the top half of the Army’s aptitude test to qualify for the prep school and get two tries at a General Educational Development certificate. If they still can’t pass, the Army will release them from their contract, Sanderson said

A study issued by the National Priorities Project released in January found that while the Army has a goal that 90 percent of recruits be high school graduates, it hadn’t met that percentage since 2004. In the 2007 budget year, the Project found that only 71 percent of soldiers entering the service had graduated.

Draft Of Pact To Keep Troops In Iraq

As reported in the NY Times:

Iraqi and American negotiators have agreed to a draft of a long-awaited security agreement to govern the presence of American troops in Iraq, American and Iraqi officials confirmed Wednesday night.

The agreement remains subject to approval by the political leaders in each country.

Negotiating teams have been working on the agreement for five months. The two sides have come close to an agreement before, only for their optimism to prove premature.

The difficulty in reaching a final agreement reflects its importance to Iraq and the United States. Technically, the document will provide the legal basis for American troops to remain in Iraq beyond 2008. But it will also amount to a political document, spelling out for the people of each nation the most difficult issues of this war, notably how long American troops will remain.

The main sticking points, in fact, are also the most delicate: setting a timeline for American troops to leave and declaring whether American forces would be granted immunity from Iraqi prosecution.

Eastern Europe Gets Nervous

If you can remember Hungary in the 50’s or Czech rebellion of the 60’s–then you can understand why those people in Eastern Europe are worried.

Signing a missile-defense deal with its good friend the United States has earned Poland nothing less than the threat of nuclear attack from Russia — a threat that might not sound so empty these days, given Moscow’s bloody battle with Georgia.

That conflict has plunged Europe into crisis, sending waves of jitters through Poland and other eastern nations, once-occupied parts of a Soviet empire that some fear Russia may want to reconstruct. Moscow’s actions have also succeeded in driving deeper the wedge between Europe’s East and West.

Ukraine and Moldova are worried that they could be Russia’s next targets. The Czech Republic, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of a Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring reform movement, is fretting about history repeating itself. Many Eastern European nations, Poland chief among them, are eager to find safe haven, and have turned to Washington for guidance and reassurance and partnership.

But the fact that the distracted and overly stretched Bush administration took little concrete action to protect Georgia from Russia’s wrath must also give pause to nations that would throw their lot completely with the U.S. Is the strategic alliance that many Eastern European countries have been building with the U.S. since the fall of communism nearly two decades ago still worth the risks?

The French Chef Was A Spy

Where do you look when you want to recruit spies? Just about everywhere, judging from the formerly top-secret records of the World War II agency that became today’s CIA.

There was the young woman who became TV chef Julia Child. And labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg who became a Supreme Court justice. And young scholar Arthur Schlesinger who became a presidential adviser.

The legendary chef is one of several high-profile figures who were involved with the undercover World War II intelligence agency, called the Office of Strategic Services.

Yesterday, the National Archives released the names of Americans who worked as civilian and military spies for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

Along with Child, other spies for the OSS include former Chicago White Socks catcher Moe Berg, Godfather actor Sterling Hayden, and author Thomas Braden who penned Eight is Enough, the book that inspired the popular 1970s television series.

Where have you people been?  This is common knowledge.  Julia even spoke about it in many interviews over the years before her death.  May I suggest that you people learn to pay attention and little will surprise you.

Peace!  Out!

Yet More “Surge” Good News

Headed by Moqtada al-Sadr, a firebrand anti-Western cleric, the Mahdi Army has long controlled large swathes of the capital Baghdad.

Its decision to disarm, expected to be announced this week at Friday prayers, will help to further stabilise Iraq.

The document promises to adhere to the principles of the Mumahidoon - those who pave the way for the coming of the Mahdi, a messianic figure in Imami Shia Islam after whom Mr Sadr’s militia is named.

Analysts have speculated that the switch has come about because the Mahdi army has lost much of its popularity in recent months after failing to impose central discipline on its fighters, some of whom have turned to crime.

Yes, this will be seen and used as part of the surge is working campaign.

There Has Never Been a US Naval Nuke Accident! (OOPS)

Water with trace amounts of radioactivity may have leaked for months from a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered submarine as it traveled around the Pacific to ports in Guam, Japan and Hawaii, Navy officials told CNN on Friday.

The leak was found on the USS Houston, a Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine, after it went to Hawaii for routine maintenance last month, Navy officials said.

The problem was discovered last month when a build-up of leaking water popped a covered valve and poured onto a sailor’s leg while the submarine was in dry dock.

An investigation found a valve was slowly dripping water from the sub’s nuclear power plant. The water had not been in direct contact with the nuclear reactor, Navy officials said

Officials with knowledge of the incident could not quantify the amount of radiation leaked but insisted it was “negligible” and an “extremely low level.” The total amount leaked while the sub was in port in Guam, Japan and Hawaii was less than a half of a microcurie (0.0000005 curies), or less than what is found in a 50-pound bag of lawn and garden fertilizer, the officials said

This is just ducky!  But the pro-nuke people point to the Navy as an example on how safe the energy source is—all they can say now is oops!

No More Blank Checks For Iraq

Damn, this is the same thing that the Dems said after the 2006 election and seems that the President has had is way regardless of their feeling.

Sen. Jack Reed says America can’t afford the Republican strategy of continuing to write blank checks for the Iraq war.

“At a time when the war in Iraq costs $10 billion each month, Americans are paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, and our economy is struggling, we cannot continue down the path that President Bush and Senator McCain propose: writing blank check after blank check,” Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, said Saturday in his party’s weekly radio address.

Reed said Democrats have outlined a better plan to carefully redeploy combat troops out of Iraq and give them missions such as counterterrorism and training Iraq’s military.

“Make no mistake: This is a plan that seizes on the progress and sacrifices our troops have made in Iraq, and it recognizes the desire of the Iraqi people to take control of their own destiny,” he said.

Please, stop promising things that you cannot deliver, at least right now.

Brzezinski Warns On Afghanistan

Listen to this man–the day of the Iraq Invasion he warned the US of what was to come and the man was dead on (no pun intended).  An article in Examiner.com by Jay McDonough:

wrote a post a couple weeks ago outlining Juan Cole’s concern over the emerging U.S. strategy to send more troops to Afghanistan in light of the increasing level of violence and a resurgence of Taliban influence.  From that post:

If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don’t think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.

Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai’s army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. “Al-Qaeda” was always Bin Laden’s hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

Beware.

Former National Security Advisor, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, is expressing concerns as well:

“I think we’re literally running the risk of unintentionally doing what the Russians did. And that, if it happens, would be a tragedy,” Brzezinski told the Huffington Post on Friday. “When we first went into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, we were actually welcomed by an overwhelming majority of Afghans. They did not see us as invaders, as they saw the Soviets.”

However, Brzezinski noted that just as the Soviets were able to delude themselves that they had a loyal army of communist-sympathizers who would transform the country, the U.S.-led forces may now be making similar mistakes. He said that the conduct of military operations “with little regard for civilian casualties” may accelerate the negative trend in local public opinion regarding the West’s role. “It’s just beginning, but it’s significant,” Brzezinski said.

His own program for improving the state of affairs in Afghanistan — where U.S. casualties have surpassed those in Iraq for two months now — revolves around pragmatism. He believes Europe should bribe Afghan farmers not to produce poppies used for heroin since “it all ends up in Europe.” Moreover, he thinks the tribal warlords can be bought off with bribes, with the endgame being the isolation of Al-Qaeda from a Taliban that is “not a united force, not a world-oriented terrorist movement, but a real Afghan phenomenon.”

Many historians believe the 9 year long Soviet-Afghan War became one of the factors leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The resistance from the (U.S. backed) Afghani Mujahadeen forces took the Soviets completely by surprise and was a significant embarrassment to the mighty Soviet army.  From a paper by Rafael Reuveny and Aseem Prakash (The Afghanistan war and the breakdown of the Soviet Union):

The war impacted Soviet politics in four reinforcing ways: (1) Perception effects: it changed the perceptions of leaders about the efficacy of using the military to hold the empire together and to intervene in foreign countries; (2) Military effects: it discredited the Red Army, created cleavage between the party and the military, and demonstrated that the Red Army was not invincible, which emboldened the non Russian republics to push for independence; (3) Legitimacy effects: it provided non-Russians with a common cause to demand independence since they viewed this war as a Russian war fought by non Russians against Afghans; and (4) Participation effects: it created new forms of political participation, started to transform the press/media before glasnost, initiated the first shots of glasnost, and created a significant mass of war veterans (Afghansti) who formed new civil organizations weakening the political hegemony of the communist party.

The Soviets had no idea what they were getting into when they invaded Afghanistan.  Nine years later, they were forced to retreat with the tail between their legs.

I just wish I had more confidence the folks currently running the show are, at least, thinking about these issues.

The Surge Is Working–So Stop Worrying

This has been the call of the McCain campaign for months.  The surge is working and all is well in Iraq.  Yes, the “surge” is working, but not because of anything that was accomplished by the US efforts.  Sunni tribes made it the fragile success that all are witnessing.

The lull of violence here has encouraged people to appear in the street, which used to be one of hottest turf war battleground when Baghdad’s sectarian conflicts were rampant.

Life seems to have gone back to normal here, where people jostle on the sidewalk; families spend good hours wandering in front of shops and stalls showcasing various goods; old men gather in cafes, smoking water pipes, drinking tea and socializing, while teenage girls stand giggling and gossiping in ice-cream shops.

The boost of U.S. troops, and uprising of Sunnis against al-Qaida and the ceasefire of a major Shiite militia are the major factors contributing to the security pickup.

The U.S. military says violence has dropped to a four-year low across Iraq. The Iraqi government is also calling for expediting the political reconciliation and the return of refugees.

However, doubt about whether it is a real and sustainable peace is still pervasive among Iraqis.

“I am not sure that we will have a real peace, because nothing tangible happened that may change the violent course of life in Baghdad. To me I think the reason behind the violence is that the country was not ready for the change the Americans and their allies want after the invasion, “said Nu’man Jabir, a 48-year-old electronic engineer.

The U.S.-led coalition forces handed over security control of the Diwaniyah province to Iraq on Wednesday, making it the tenth Iraqi province retrieved from the control among the 18 provinces in Iraq.

However, those ten provinces belong either to Kurdish or to Shiite Iraqis. In the mixed regions, like Baghdad, Nineveh and Diyala, the situation is still unstable and unpredictable.

In Baghdad, Sunnis and Shiites live in separate neighborhoods walled up by concrete. Checkpoints still strew the streets.

“I agree, the walls are effective in protecting the neighborhoods, but my district seems more like a prison or a military camp, because we can leave or enter the neighborhood only through one entrance where soldiers and local Awakening Council members search the cars and everything that get in or out the district,” said Abbas.

The news that all get back in the USA, is from a perspective of that all is well and good in a war zone.  The media is selling the Ameriucan people a line of crap…and they are buying it!

Now I Have Heard Everything Department

The Pentagon not only told the world yesterday that it would keep on using cluster bombs — it called the controversial weapons life-savers, too.

The Defense Department unveiled its new policy on cluster munitions. In it, the weapons, which scatter tiny bomblets over huge swaths of territory, are described as “legitimate weapons with clear military utility.” Not only do “they provide distinct advantages against a range of targets,” a Defense Department press release notes, but “their use reduces risks to U.S. forces and can save U.S. lives.” The Pentagon says the munitions will continue to be used, “in a manner consistent with the law of armed conflict.”

But the law is changing. In May, just about every country on the planet signed a treaty banning cluster bombs. The U.S. was one of four holdouts.

Can anyone say that a bomb, any bomb, saves lives?