Death Star Strategery

by digby

So Newtie’s getting serious about running. And he’s going to be running as the kinder, gentler, smarter GOP. I kid you not. Of course, he’s as insulting as ever:

When Americans look at the current roster of Republican and Democratic leaders, Gingrich said, they face an unappealing dilemma.

“We have a choice between those who are failing to deliver and those who are unthinkable,” he said, adding that he would put “even money” on the Democrats taking back the House this fall. “Neither party currently is where the country is.”

President Gingrich? Unthinkable, all right.

There’s a lot in this article to guffaw over and I’ll leave it up to you to enjoy it on your own. I have to mention this one little part though, because I’ve written extensively about this subject and Newtie and I honestly can’t believe he’s still pushing the idea. It should disqualify him (among many other things) from ever holding any office again:

Gingrich also questioned some of the administration’s tactics, noting that he had warned the White House privately in the fall of 2002 to put only a small force on the ground in Iraq and move quickly to install Iraqis in power. Given the current situation, however, he said the United States can take just one course of action in Iraq: “Grind it out.”

Newt was for the original Rumsfeld plan which was to put about 40,000 troops on the ground and install Ahmad Chalabi as the puppet president of Iraq. He is nuts on this RMA (revolution in military affairs) bullshit and always has been.

…their [old] answer has been to design campaign plans that are so massive – I mean the standard plan in Afghanistan was either Tomahawks or 5 divisions, and that’s why Rumsfeld was so important. Cause Rumsfeld sat down and said, “Well what if we do this other thing? You know, 3 guys on horseback, a B-2 overhead.” And it was a huge shock to the army. I mean, because it worked. Now I’ll tell you one guy who does agree and that’s Chuck Horner who ran the air campaign.

You can still find people out there who are warriors who came up during the Reagan years, all of whom will say flatly to the Secretary of Defense, “The right model is simultaneous, massive, immediate combined air and land forces, period.”

And there’s this:

Gingrich, who also is a member of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, said he was confident that General Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, would not be swayed by suggestions that he include more reinforcements and plan a more cautious attack.
He said that Franks, an army general, “will probably have a more integrated, more aggressive and more risk-taking plan.”

“If the chiefs wanted to be extremely cautious, extremely conservative and design a risk-avoiding strategy, that would be nothing new,” he said in an interview.

This guy takes himself very seriously as a military historian and strategist. He also likes dinosaurs. In other words, he’s a twelve year old geek who wants to play with real soldiers. Like many wingnut “intellectuals” he seems to have some serious developmental problems.

Admittedly, I am no military strategist. But I read up on Rummy and Newtie’s RMA back in 2002, and while it is not entirely bullshit, this particular aspect of it certainly is, especially in the hands of people who simply refuse to accept reality. In Newtie’s little fantasy Iraq, perhaps using even fewer troops than we did could have worked. Here on planet earth, the results of sending in too few as it was are manifest and horrifying.

In this article at Antiwar.com called “Off With His Head” William S. Lind discusses the fallacy of Rumsfeldian “transformation:”

While Rumsfeldian “Transformation” represents change, it represents change in the wrong direction. Instead of attempting to move from the Second Generation to the Third (much less the Fourth), Transformation retains the Second Generation’s conception of war as putting firepower on targets while trying to replace people with technology. Its summa is the Death Star, where men and women in spiffy uniforms sit in air-conditioned comfort zapping enemies like bugs. It is a vision of future war that appeals to technocrats and lines industry pockets, but has no connection to reality. The combination of this vision of war with an equally unrealistic vision of strategic objectives has given us the defeat in Iraq. Again, Rumsfeld lies at the heart of both.

And his little dog Newt too, who served on the Defense Policy board with Richard Perle and the rest and advised Rummy every step of the way. Gingrich may not be the only one who refuses to see reality on this. But he’s one of the most flamoyantly “optimistic” about this transformation after our massive tactical and strategic blunder in Iraq. He still believes that we could have “taken” Iraq with a cell phone and a couple of special forces guys on camels. That is nothing short of delusional.

I doubt that he can win. He’s an iconic figure of loathing in American politics. (I think the Dickensian name alone disqualifies him.) But you never know. The American people elected Nixon twice.

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