The Incompetent CIC

You read so much stuff on the Internet it's sometimes too much to remember and sometimes you let a good story get away.  That's what happened with this piece that I ran across last December...I thought it was a pretty good story then, and stumbling across it again I can revive it here.  It does reveal the ineptness of Obama as a Commander-In-Chief.  Of course, many of us knew he was incapable of performing such tasks  simply by the fact that he surrounds himself with such capable people (sic). ~ Norman E. Hooben

OBAMA IGNORES HARD LEARNED LESSONS

By Geoff MetcalfDecember 16, 2009NewsWithViews.com

"There are three kinds of men. Those that learn by reading. Those that learn by observation. And the rest of them who have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.” --Will Rogers

Predator drones have been successful in killing over a dozen al Qaeda and or Taliban honchos. That is a good thing. Drones are working…however, one person reportedly is standing in the way of expanded missile strikes and it is none other than President Obama.

According to NEWSWEEK, five administration officials report “the president has sided with political and diplomatic advisers who argue that widening the scope of the drone attacks would be risky and unwise” (in other words…successful). This is the same kind of counter-intuitive politically correct brain flatulence that set the stage for the Fort Hood disaster.

The RQ-1 Predator drone is the primary unmanned aerial vehicle used for offensive operations in Afghanistan and those nefarious adjoining Pakistani tribal areas. The Predator is both cool and effective. It can fly 400 nautical miles to a target; hang around snooping overhead for 14 hours, then return.

Reportedly, Obama is concerned that firing missiles into urban areas “would greatly increase the risk of civilian casualties.” However, they conveniently ignore the potential collorary that the perceived threat to civilians could actually cause the indigenous populations to refuse to support the drone magnets, and actually deny access to refuges for the bad guys.

The administration is also supposedly hinky drone attacks would draw protests from Pakistan. However, these are the same Pakistani politicians and military leaders who frankly have been more than diffident to solve the problem (whereas drones have been attriting bad guys regularly). To date Pakistani dissent has been quiet about the drone attacks. Most of the drone activity is out in the boondocks and as long as they remain confined to the country's out-of-sight border region no harm/no foul…yet.

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I’m confused. To date, Obama has made more aggressive use of drones than Bush did. There were 43 drone attacks between January and October 2009. There were a total of 34 in all of 2008, President Bush’s last full year in office. Drones are doing the job…so why park them? Frankly, given all the flak the administration has taken, it is odd they don’t claim bragging rights for the Predator successes.

The White House has allegedly been overly encouraged by Pakistan's recent military efforts to root out militants along the Afghan border, and it supposedly doesn’t want to risk that cooperation. However, there hasn’t been any Pakistan posturing about the boondocks drones, so why unilaterally eliminate an effective tool without even protestations? Hey, here’s a thought…how about partnering with the Pakistani’s to complement their reported efforts to crack down?

Deja vu! Hell-o? Once upon a time we were engaged in a counter insurgency war in Southeast Asia. It was called Vietnam and even Senator John Kerry was there. Chairborne Foggy Bottom wonks, and spitless politicians decided that Laos and Cambodia were off limits. Despite the stark reality that Viet Cong and NVA soldiers routinely used the 'safe havens' of the border countries to avoid US forces, despite the official policy on avoiding the safe havens, MACV-SOG actually did engage in covert operations in Laos and Cambodia with considerable success while clinging to the fiction of plausible deniability. Both the CIA and Studies and Observation Group have been excoriated for doing outstanding work under insane rules of engagement. Allowing an enemy a safe haven is as dumb as announcing to the enemy when you are leaving.

The internal debate about the drone program reportedly has been going on for nearly a year. A former senior intelligence official says that, within days of his inauguration, Obama and his top aides began talking about actually “expanding the operation from a relatively limited area along the AfPak border to a broader range of targets.” Attaboy!

So is a ‘drone surge’ supported or opposed by the administration? Obama supposedly has not closed the door on wider drone attacks. However, he also hasn’t kicked it open. In what has become classic Obama style, the talking continues ad nauseum.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee recently, “These programs are expensive, but they are extraordinarily effective and extraordinarily value-added.”

General Petraeus has said the main goal of a counterinsurgency operation is to win over the human terrain – the local population, “the US wants to make use of its best weapons.” And we have…“So all of that … argues against the idea that you would deny yourself those very effective platforms, particularly when it comes to the most senior leaders of organizations that are trying to carry out attacks in our homeland,” said the Central Command chief.

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So why are they still talking about whether they will or whether they won’t continue to deploy effective killing machines?