The Gaming Den

The article is in German, but the pictures speak (mostly) for themselves:

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotos ... cle=625745

Wargaming is what made the Prussians great.

I also think that just a few rounds of serious-level wargaming should be a requirement of the primary cabinet positions and every damn Senator.

Every time I hear, "bomb Iran" I want to shit blood.

I don't know how I feel about that.

On the one hand, Hitler obviously never played Risk. On the other hand, MacArthur obviously never played Risk.

Oh, I meant the Pentagon-level stuff where they magic tea party shit up. You're given a fat file written by wonks and roleplay out the terrible shit that happens when someone does the kind of populist madness that whips up the troglodytes.

They did that and we still got the goddamn Iraqi war.

And you know what? When what the goddam lieberals said would happen actually did happen the people who led us into that debacle still had the temerity to blame the goddam lieberals.

I actually doubt that they did play out the Iraq war, since the experts that moderate these sorts of games (and were making all the right predictions) would have spelled out how events were going to shake out pretty plainly.

That may just be a "no true Scotsman" thing though.

Iraq was more about Cheney's infectious paranoia and rabid bulldogging than anything else. That whole Administration shit themselves and just started lashing out after 9/11 like an angry drunk. The CIA boning the state of Iraq's nuclear program at the time of the 1st Iraq war basically combined with 9/11 to turn Cheney into a madman jumping at shadows. "Reason" was probably not the #1 thing he needed; what he needed was a course of antidepressants and antianxiety medication.

9/11 had nothing to do with the motive of wanting to invade Iraq.

The neoconservatives had wanted to attack Iraq for the longest of times; 9/11 just gave them the pretext to do it with. Remember, the Bush administration intentionally tortured people to create false information to justify this war. That doesn't sound like lashing out like an angry drunk, that sounds like someone coldly forging reasons to justify what they already wanted to do.

I think 9/11 had a very large intertwining with Iraq. I'm aware of the evidence you're citing but I draw a different conclusion from it.

I don't think they were fishing for evidence so much as fishing, period, and Rorschaching themselves with what they turned up. I believe that the evidence they beat out of people was never shared with anyone, it only shored up their own confidence in their preset conclusions.

I believe that they simply were so scared and arrogant that they couldn't process the available information in a rational manner.

Perhaps I'm simply more comfortable thinking of them as fallible humans rather than cruel monsters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_fo ... an_Century

Rebuilding America's Defenses, written in 2000 wrote: "while the unresolved conflict in Iraq provides the immediate justification [for U.S. military presence], the need for a substantial American force presence in the [Persian] Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein"

"Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the [Persian] Gulf as Iraq has. And even should U.S.-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region."[13]

And as for the people on this committee?

After the election of George W. Bush in 2000, a number of PNAC's members or signatories were appointed to key positions within the President's administration:

Elliott Abrams Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations (2001–2002), Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs (2002–2005), Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy (2005-2009) (all within the National Security Council)

Richard Armitage Deputy Secretary of State (2001-2005)

John R. Bolton Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs (2001-2005), U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2005-2006)

Dick Cheney Vice President (2001-2009)

Eliot A. Cohen Member of the Defense Policy Advisory Board (2007-2009)[61]

Seth Cropsey Director of the International Broadcasting Bureau (12/2002-12/2004)

Paula Dobriansky Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs (2001-2007)

Francis Fukuyama Member of the The President's Council on Bioethics (2001-2005)

Zalmay Khalilzad U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (11/2003 - 6/2005), U.S. Ambassador to Iraq (6/2005 - 3/2007) U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2007-2009)

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States (2001-2005) under Dick Cheney

Richard Perle Chairman of the Board, Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee (2001-2003)

Peter W. Rodman Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security (2001-2007)

Donald Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense (2001-2006)

Randy Scheunemann Member of the U.S. Committee on NATO, Project on Transitional Democracies, International Republican Institute

Paul Wolfowitz Deputy Secretary of Defense (2001-2005)

Dov S. Zakheim Department of Defense Comptroller (2001-2004)

Robert B. Zoellick Office of the United States Trade Representative (2001-2005), Deputy Secretary of State (2005-2006), 11th President of the World Bank (2007-2009)

It's not a conspiracy or even secret; these motherfuckers wanted to invade Iraq long before they even heard of 9/11.

mean_liar wrote:I also think that just a few rounds of serious-level wargaming should be a requirement of the primary cabinet positions and every damn Senator.

I think everyone who gets to make a 'lets have a war' decision should be forced to play one of the various WW2 shooters. Every time the die they get tasered. See whos willing to send kids off to get shot at in something a lot worse than a game after that.

let's start simple... checkers or chess... maybe some dominoes...


until they understand actual strategy. by playing checkers a 1000x, no war.or military action.

The thing is, playing wargames doesn't make you good at figuring out socio-political currents. The biggest flaw in the Iraq planning wasn't that the military didn't know how to march to Baghdad. The problem was that the politicians seriously thought we'd be greeted with flowers and candy and wouldn't need to occupy the country.

I'm aware of PNAC. I simply feel that they truly believed that Iraq had WMDs and it only added fire to their earlier assumptions.

Like I said, I don't think that they manufactured evidence so much as Rorschached themselves with the meager intel they managed to acquire.

A similar situation exists with Iran. Lots of people want to attack Iran, but they're still not going to do it without a better fig leaf than what they have - and nuclear power is going to be it. If the Iranians had a better counterintelligence apparatus they'd be the black hole that Iraq was and we'd be left guessing... but their brazenness is a bit of a shield in the sense that its clear they don't have the tech or the bomb yet.

Certainly Hussein didn't go out of his way to be open about not having WMDs, which is a strategic blunder I still don't understand. I mean, I know why he expelled the UN teams due to CIA infiltration and that makes sense, but once it was obvious that the US was going to invade I don't know why he was still blocking investigations, other than pride.

I think that your conclusion is a valid one: it has a certain probability of being the true story, but I don't think its the most-probable conclusion. I assume it applies to some people in the situation who perhaps realized the intel was shit but didn't care. However, I don't believe that the White House folk fall into that category, given some of the things Woodward pulled out of interviewees.


...


I'm not talking "move minis around" wargames.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_simulation

These are the sorts of games where the actual experts tell the players: "they're not greeting you with flowers, they're forming partisan cells and fighting for the power vacuum", rather than the echo chamber most ideologues cook up their schemes in.

The thing is that we know that Tony Blair was lying. We know that a lot of the testimonies that they gave to Congress both in meetings and in personal conversations were full of lies. Lies. Not mistakes. And then there's the torture thing. We know torture doesn't work. The only thing you get out of Torture that you can't get other ways is "intelligence" that you make up.

The Bush administration announced years before they even got into office that they would invade Iraq. Once they got in, they fabricated evidence from whole cloth to support invading Iraq. Then they invaded Iraq. What part of that makes you think there is any meaningful chance at any level that they were behaving in good faith?

-Username17

As far as torture goes, not everyone thinks it doesn't work. Those people that believe it is effective are stupid and were, for a short while, in charge of policy regarding intelligence gathering. That it produced poor results is self-evident, but the fact that it was implemented because it generated poor results is not.

Additionally, I would not say that they fabricated evidence "whole cloth". There was an entire poorly-functioning intelligence apparatus churning out shit that flowed to the White House and it was competing with a CIA that not only had fumbled Iraq's WMD program assessments in Gulf War 1, but was also saying, "there are no WMDs", "we have no real way to assess this conclusion", and "its entirely possible we're wrong". The CIA was basically discredited at this point and their only meaningful contribution at the time was to say that, in final analysis, they had no idea what was going on in Iraq.

The Plan B folks were weaving together shadows and bullshit but there was a LOT of them, an entire bureaucracy, that was carrying water for this WMD idea. It wasn't manufactured "whole cloth", it was just grade A bullshit paranoia and fear.

If this was some kind of autocratic decision with "gut feelings" to back it up, then I could entertain the idea of malicious intent. However, I go back to the idea of Bush being scared and without Washington contacts or experience being in the same room as Cheney, off his rocker with paranoia and waving an ever-burgeoning stack of intelligence reports that he believes proves an imminent Iraqi threat. The rest were either out of the loop (Powell) or spineless (Rice) or just there to take America to war without really thinking too much about it (Rumsfeld). Bush just got steamrolled by a batshit Cheney.

They did lie, though. For sure. To me its about the same as the LAPD setting up OJ: they were convinced already and didn't want to give the opposition any room to maneuver so they oversold some things they shouldn't have. I understand where they were coming from: they were afraid that shit was going to hit the fan and they weren't going to roll those dice.

I just don't think they sat around, said, "let's make up shit to invade Iraq" and then did that. I imagine it was more, "well, Iraq is a real threat, aren't they?" (because they had convinced themselves that was the case) and then they started sniffing for intel that wasn't there, bullshit conveniently and predictably filled that gap and then they were slapping the table saying, "see, this is an imminent threat" and they just ran with it.

There were other things, too. I imagine the idea of a democratic US-loving Iraq gave them a raging hard-on. The idea of US bases close to Iran gave them a hard-on. Proving American power in the Middle East gave them a hard-on. So I imagine it was an easy sell, but fundamentally I still think it was a sell and not a con.

I bet there were folks who thought it was a con that didn't mind. Maybe that includes Cheney - I don't think so, I think he was just DSM-IV paranoid - but I certainly don't think that extended to Bush.

I just cannot see the argument for giving those assholes that much credit. Cheney advocated exactly the same policy all the way through. Let us not forget: Dick Cheney worked with Rumsfeld to pressure the CIA to make up facts back in the 1970s to justify military adventurism. Military adventurism that he personally made money from - just as he did in the 21st century.

So at what point was Cheney so "scared" that he felt he had to cut corners and lie to congress in order to do exactly the things he'd been trying to do for three decades and made millions of dollars from? Why the fucking hell should I believe that there was any emotional component to those crimes when he was working on them for longer than I've been alive and personally profited to the tune of eight figures of US dollar fucking bills?

Cheney likes to play the fear card. It works for him. It makes him money. It buys him time, and he can move a lot of shells if he has some time. But the only thing he's scared of, the only thing he has ever been scared of - is being brought to jail for his egregious and extensive list of crimes against humanity and the United States of America.

-Username17

mean_liar wrote:Certainly Hussein didn't go out of his way to be open about not having WMDs, which is a strategic blunder I still don't understand.

Actually, that one's easy. Mustard gas was how Saddam kept the Shiites and Kurds in line. The only way to keep the majority of the country from rising up against him was to make them think he still had chemical and biological weapons. Now, since the weapons inspectors were never going to find what wasn't there, he figured the sanctions would eventually be lifted in spite of his wink-wink-nudge-nudge-I-might-really-have-WMDs dance.

Frank -

I agree that Cheney is afraid of prison and is basically daring the gov't to come and get him. Someday someone may have enough stones to actually enforce the law but it won't be an American. "Don't rock the boat" will continue to be a mantra so long as a substantial minority of our populace are well-armed and convinced that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Antichrist.


Absentminded_Wizard -

Ah. I wish I had thought of that - makes sense.

That's actually the official stance of the CIA on the subject; that he was pretending to have them because to not have them would show his administration was weak.

-Crissa

FrankTrollman wrote:Cheney likes to play the fear card. It works for him. It makes him money. It buys him time, and he can move a lot of shells if he has some time. But the only thing he's scared of, the only thing he has ever been scared of - is being brought to jail for his egregious and extensive list of crimes against humanity and the United States of America.

-Username17

It's a damned shame that this will never come to pass...

Crissa wrote:That's actually the official stance of the CIA on the subject; that he was pretending to have them because to not have them would show his administration was weak.

-Crissa

They also served as a deterrent against military conflict with Iran. People are a lot less inclined to start a war with you when they think you have a sizable arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and are both capable and crazy enough to use them in a conflict.

I'd heard that he was pretending that more than just internationally, but even to his own generals. There was apparently some chatter to the effect of "launch the WMDs". There were also some indications that Hussein actually believed it and his scientists were lying to him.

There is some evidence the scientists were lying, but there's no evidence that Hussein didn't know they were faking... As in, he was there for all the tests, so he rather knew what worked and what didn't.

-Crissa