At the 11th hour, the White House indicated that it would veto this year's National Defense Authorization Act because of a provision that would potentially expose the Iraqi government to legal liability in U.S. courts. The move caught everyone by surprise, because until yesterday, the administration had signaled that it would sign the massive defense policy bill. (Note: this is not an appropriations bill; it's the annual policy bill that authorizes military end strength and sets military policy, among other things.) Now, the White House says, it can't sign the bill. What gives?

. . . The veto was an embarrassment for administration officials, who struggled on Friday to explain why they had not acted earlier to object to the provision, Section 1083 of a 1,300-page, $696 billion military authorization bill. It would expand the ability of Americans to seek financial compensation from countries that supported or sponsored terrorist acts, including Libya, Iran and Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

It was unclear how the provision had been overlooked by White House lawyers. A senior administration official told reporters in a hastily arranged conference call that the bill’s consequences for Iraq came into “acute focus” only a week to 10 days ago — after Iraqi officials complained to the American ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan C. Crocker. The White House said President Bush had recently spoken with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq about the consequences of the provision.

* * *
In a “statement of disapproval,” or pocket veto that lets the bill expire on Dec. 31, Mr. Bush said that the provision could result in preliminary injunctions freezing Iraqi assets in American banks — $20 billion to $30 billion, according to a senior administration official — and even affect commercial ventures with American businesses.

He also warned that it was written to revive dormant legal claims, including a $959 million judgment won by American pilots who were prisoners of war during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. The administration had declared the new government exempt from claims dating to Mr. Hussein’s government, which the United States overthrew in 2003.

“Exposing Iraq to such significant financial burdens would weaken the close partnership between the United States and Iraq during this critical period in Iraq’s history,” Mr. Bush said in his statement.

Right... So what was the result of this last-minute turnabout?

The decision left the Bush administration scrambling to promise that it would work with Congress to quickly restore dozens of new military and veterans programs once Congress returns to work in January.

Those included an added pay raise for service members, which would have taken effect on Tuesday, and improvements in veterans’ health benefits, which few elected officials on either side want to be seen opposing.

Mr. Bush’s veto surprised and infuriated Democratic lawmakers and even some Republicans, who complained that the White House had failed to raise its concerns earlier.

I just gotta say it — this is bullsh-t on so many levels.

For starters, this shows some incredibly poor staff work by the folks in the White House and OMB who are charged with managing this legislation. Not to mention the DoD General Counsel's legislative office, which shepherds the annual defense authorization act through the legislative process. And who suffers here? Our troops and their families.

Next, this stinks as the kind of political hypocrisy that makes Americans hate Washington. After months, no, years of browbeating Democrats for putting politics ahead of the troops, the President has now chosen to do the same thing. He is delaying an urgent piece of DoD legislation with many important provisions, including a pay raise for military personnel and an end strength bump for the Army and Marines. That's flat-out wrong. We are at war and our troops need this legislation. A piece of legislation, I might add, that the White House supported until just recently. And hell, just weeks ago, the White House was excoriating Pelosi and Reed for playing politics with the troops' resources. How exactly is this any different?

On a third level, this veto stinks because it reflects the White House's deeply flawed view of law and legal processes. I understand the legal issue created by this bill with respect to Iraqi assets that may be attached by plaintiffs seeking reparations for the sins of the Saddam govt. I get it. But let's look a the plaintiffs here — Iraqi expatriates and former U.S. prisoners of war, to name but a few. They're a hell of a lot more sympathetic than the current cast of theo-kleptocrats who make up the Maliki government in Iraq today. That doesn't sit well with me. Nor does the general argument that we should be scared of legal processes, and hold the entire Department of Defense hostage because we're scared about the possible outcome from a handful of cases. Do we really have that little faith in our federal courts, or in the Justice Department's ability to represent the U.S. Government's interests? C'mon... get real. None of these arguments justifies holding up the DoD authorization bill and making our troops (and their families) suffer.

This whole veto is rotten. Our country needs this bill signed into law. The White House is holding the welfare of our troops and their families hostage while it fusses over one provision it should have caught earlier, and which pales in comparison to the importance of the omnibus legislation. That's just wrong.

In this month's issue of Vanity Fair, Sebastian Junger has a truly breathtaking dispatch from a combat journalism tour with 2nd Platoon, Battle Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, deployed in Afghanistan’s dangerous Korengal Valley. According to Junger, the valley is considered most dangerous place in Afghanistan: nearly one-fifth of all combat in Afghanistan occurs in this valley, and nearly three-quarters of all the bombs dropped by NATO forces in Afghanistan are dropped in the surrounding area. Junger describes the combat he saw in stark terms: "The fighting is on foot and it is deadly, and the zone of American control moves hilltop by hilltop, ridge by ridge, a hundred yards at a time. There is literally no safe place in the Korengal Valley. Men have been shot while asleep in their barracks tents."

The story continues with several vignettes from Junger's time with 2nd Platoon. Together, these pieces illustrate how tough the fighting in Afghanistan has become; how much resilience the Taliban and Al Qaeda have; the complex nature of the counterinsurgency fight there. Here's a brief excerpt:

Second Platoon is one of four in Battle Company, which covers the Korengal as part of the Second Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne). The only soldiers to have been deployed more times since the September 11 attacks are from the 10th Mountain Division, which handed the Korengal over last June. (Tenth Mountain had been slated to go home three months earlier, but its tour was extended while some of its units were already on their way back. They landed in the United States and almost immediately got back on their planes.) When Battle Company took over the Korengal, the entire southern half of the valley was controlled by the Taliban, and American patrols that pushed even a few hundred yards into that area got attacked.

If there was one thing Battle Company knew how to do, though, it was fight. Its previous deployment had been in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, and things were so bad there that half the company was on psychiatric meds by the time they got home. Korengal looked like it would be even worse. In Zabul, they had been arrayed against relatively inexperienced youths who were paid by Taliban commanders in Pakistan to fight—and die. In the Korengal, on the other hand, the fighting is funded by al-Qaeda cells who oversee extremely well-trained local militias. Battle Company took its first casualty within days, a 19-year-old private named Timothy Vimoto. Vimoto, the son of the brigade’s command sergeant major, was killed by the first volley from a Taliban machine gun positioned around half a mile away. He may well not have even heard the shots.

I went to the Korengal Valley to follow Second Platoon throughout its 15-month deployment. To get into the valley, the American military flies helicopters to the Korengal Outpost—the kop, as it’s known—roughly halfway down the valley. The kop has a landing zone and a clutch of plywood hooches and barracks tents and perimeter walls made of dirt-filled hesco barriers, many now shredded by shrapnel. When I arrived, Second Platoon was stationed primarily at a timber-and-sandbag outpost named Firebase Phoenix. There was no running water or power, and the men took fire nearly every day from Taliban positions across the valley and from a ridgeline above them that they called Table Rock.

I spent a couple of weeks with Second Platoon and left at the end of June, just before things got bad. The Taliban ambushed a patrol in Aliabad, mortally wounding the platoon medic, Private Juan Restrepo, and then hammered a column of Humvees that tore out of the kop to try to save him. Rounds rattled off the armor plating of the vehicles, and rocket-propelled grenades plowed into the hillsides around them. One day in July, Captain Daniel Kearney, the 27-year-old commanding officer of Battle Company, counted 13 firefights in a 24-hour period. A lot of the contact was coming from Table Rock, so Kearney decided to end that problem by putting a position on top of it. Elements of the Second and Third Platoons and several dozen local workers moved up the ridge after dark and hacked furiously at the shelf rock all night long so that they would have some minimal cover when dawn broke.

A Black Hawk helicopter comes in to land on the roof of a village house in Yaka China to take out Captain Dan Kearney following a village meeting to discuss insurgent activity.

Sure enough, daylight brought bursts of heavy-machine-gun fire that sent the men diving into the shallow trenches they had just dug. They fought until the shooting stopped and then they got back up and continued to work. There was no loose dirt up there to fill the sandbags, so they broke up the rock with pickaxes and then shoveled pieces into the bags, which they piled up to form crude bunkers. Someone pointed out that they were actually “rock bags,” not sandbags, and so “rock bags” became a platoon joke that helped them get through the next several weeks. They worked in 100-degree heat in full body armor and took their breaks during firefights, when they got to lie down and return fire. Sometimes they were so badly pinned down that they just lay there and threw rocks over their heads into the hescos.

But rock bag by rock bag, hesco by hesco, the outpost got built. By the end of August the men had moved roughly 10 tons of dirt and rock by hand. They named the outpost Restrepo, after the medic who was killed, and succeeded in taking the pressure off Phoenix mainly by redirecting it onto themselves. Second Platoon began taking fire several times a day, sometimes from distances as close as a hundred yards. The terrain drops off so steeply from the position that their heavy machine guns couldn’t angle downward enough to cover the slopes below, so the Taliban could get very close without being exposed to fire. Lieutenant Piosa had his men lay coils of concertina wire around the position and rig claymore mines hardwired to triggers inside the bunkers. If the position were in danger of getting overrun, the men could detonate the claymores and kill everything within 50 yards.

On the shelf of nearly every Army officer, you'll find a book by retired Col. T.R. Fehrenbach on the Korean conflict titled This Kind of War. At the end of World War II, confronted by the military revolution brought on by the atomic bomb, America cut its military from a wartime high of 16 million down to a few hundred thousand. Bombs and airplanes — not soldiers — would now protect America's shores and cities. After fighting as a grunt in Korea, Fehrenbach thought otherwise. Transformation was great for the Air Force and Navy, but for the Army and Marine Corps, the essential nature of warfare remained unchanged. Unfortunately, many in the defense community have still not learned this basic lesson, that humans are more important than hardware, and that the human element of warfare is paramount.

"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life," wrote Fehrenbach. "But if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."

That was true 55 years ago in the harsh mountains of Korea; it remaisn true today in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan.

A bit of a firestorm has erupted in the veterans community over a rather vicious blog attack against Sen. Barack Obama by the blog No Quarter. (It apparently also ran on DailyKos) The attack criticizes Sen. Obama's voting record and action record on veterans issues, and ends with something of a schoolyard taunt: "There are people who do the work. Then there are people who just talk. Screw hope. Give me the one who gets it done."

Uh huh.

This assault reminds me of a vignette from the National Training Center in the California desert, where I spent many months training and learning what it meant to perform when you're cold, wet, tired, hungry and pissed off at being in the desert. (Those lessons were very useful to me 5 years later in Iraq.) On one day, my brigade had the mission to attack into a strong enemy defensive position arrayed between two hills, and to exploit the gap if we were able to open it. My brigade commander, then-Col. Randy Anderson, got with his armor battalion commaner, then-Lt. Col. John Hadjis, and put together an audacious attack plan that aimed to throw the enemy (played by NTC's permanent OPFOR) off base through speed and violence of action.

Our scouts went out almost immediately and won the reconnaissance fight, penetrating deep into OPFOR territory and pinpointing the enemy's defensive positions. My platoon was part of this effort, conducting counterreconnaissance to kill the enemy's scouts in our territory. He who wins the recon fight often wins the battle — our eyes helped our artillery and close air support hit the OPFOR hard before the fight even started. At oh-dark-hundred on the appointed day, 3-66 Armor (Hadjis' battalion) attacked, racing their M1 tanks and M2 fighting vehicles down into the gap. They quickly broke the back of the OPFOR defensive position and moved so fast that the OPFOR had no time to regroup or move into their secondary defensive positions. Our brigade's vanguard moved 1, 5, 10 km through the gap, racing towards the OPFOR command post.

Then they slimed us. Persistent nerve gas all over the battlefield. We went from MOPP 2 to MOPP 4 and began to coordinate for decon. Game over.

What happened? In the after-action review, the NTC's senior observer-controller (known as the "COG") lauded our brigade's performance and said we performed brilliantly. The audacity, speed and synchronization of our assault threw the OPFOR into such disarray that they had no other options available but to use chemical weapons. In essence, the OPFOR's use of persistent chem against us was a sign that we had succeeded — we'd knocked them back on their heels so hard that they had to resort to (literally) dirty tricks.

War, according to Clausewitz, is the continuation of politics by other means. The converse is probably also true. War and politics share many common denominators, particularly if one steps back to look at tactics and strategy in the abstract.

The Clinton campaign's recent tactics remind me a great deal of this vignette from NTC. They are the equivalent of the OPFOR launching persistent chem at us; a sign that the Obama campaign has succeeded in seizing the initiative and knocking the Clinton campaign back onto its heels. There have been many other assaults like this. The Boston Globe reported last week that, in Iowa, Clinton's "surrogates and supporters have been increasingly busy sharpening their knives for Obama." A Huffington Post story echoed that same theme, reporting that "With the January 3 Iowa caucuses fast approaching, Hillary Clinton is now being forced to publicly disguise hardball opposition research and other bare-knuckled combat tactics." The Nation found that one of the Clinton campaign's chairs was pushing a particularly pernicious smear about Sen. Obama, and there are reports of widespread involvement by the campaign in spreading smear e-mails and other negative information about Clinton's primary opposition.

As a veteran, I support Barack Obama because of his deeds, not his words. Up front, I'll agree that he's been absent from Washington and on the campaign trail for a significant part of the last few months. That's no surprise. However, it'd be wrong to leap from that observation to concldue that Sen. Obama has not fought hard for America's veterans. During his time in Washington, and before in the Illinois state legislature, Obama has led the way on a number of important initiatives for veterans, earning my support and the support of many other veterans I know. Here are just a few of his deeds:

Homeless Veterans: As a United States Senator, Obama has authored legislation to extend and expand critically important programs to stop homelessness among American veterans. He's worked with other Senators on the Veterans Affairs committee, ranging from Daniel Akaka (D-HI) to Larry Craig (R-ID), to pass legislation providing comprehensive services and affordable housing options to veterans through the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Housing and Urban Development and community organizations.

Fighting for IL Veterans: After learning of reports that Illinois veterans were receiving less in disability than those from other states, Sen. Obama worked with Sen. Dick Durbin to engage with the VA and correct these gross disparities. As a result of his efforts, the VA opened an investigation into the issue and took steps to fix it including the hiring of more claims specialists for the Chicago VA office and the reexamination of vets' claims upon request.

Traumatic Brain Injury: Crossing the aisle once again to help vets, Sen. Obama also worked with Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) to pass an amendment ensuring that all service members returning from Iraq are properly screened for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). And Sen. Obama fought to include a requirement in this year's National Defense Authorization Act that the VA must provide combat veterans with a mental health care screening within 30 days of an appointment request. This provision originated in another Obama bill, the Lane Evans Veterans Health and Benefits Improvement Act, which he introduced in both the 109th and 110th Congress.

And the list goes on — deeds not words. In addition to these accomplishments, Sen. Obama's agenda includes significant proposals to take care of America's sons and daughters whom we send into harm's way. These include, but aren't limited to, proposals to improve post-discharge transition; requiring interoperability between DoD and VA medical records systems; fully funding VA medical care; eliminating the means test which keeps middle class veterans out of the VA medical system; improving mental health care, particularly for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans; continued research and innovation for TBI; fixing the VA benefits bureaucracy and eliminating the VA claims backlog; and continuing the VA medical system's tradition of excellence that's made it one of the nation's leading health care systems. He's also pledged to crack down on discrimination against veterans and to commit significant resources to the enforcement of the SCRA and USERRA statutes to protect active and reserve military personnel and their families.

These are the reasons why I support Sen. Obama, and why I am encouraging my fellow veterans to support him too. Notice that I haven't attacked the Clinton campaign at all; I think quite highly of Sen. Clinton and her work on the Armed Services Committee. However, I support Barack Obama because he inspires me, and because I believe he has the character, judgment and vision to lead this country. Attacking his rivals won't help veterans, nor will it help America. Electing Barack Obama will.

History professor Joseph Ellis writes in today's Washington Post about "what George Washington would do" with respect to the mess in Mesopotamia. It's a fascinating question, because Washington served both an insurgent (as commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution) and a counterinsurgent (as an officer fighting Native Americans and the French during the Seven Years War). In fact, he probably ranks as one of history's most successful insurgents ever. After noting that it's impossible to divine the dead president's policy preferences for Iraq because of the passage of time, Ellis goes on to accurately (in my opinion) assess the state of the matter today:

[The question] is not "What would George Washington do about Iraq?" Rather, it is "How are your own views of Iraq affected by your study of Washington's experience leading a rebellion against a British military occupation?" The answer on this score is pretty clear. Washington eventually realized — and it took him three years to have this epiphany — that the only way he could lose the Revolutionary War was to try to win it. The British army and navy could win all the major battles, and with a few exceptions they did; but they faced the intractable problem of trying to establish control over a vast continent whose population resented and resisted military occupation. As the old counterinsurgency mantra goes, Washington won by not losing, and the British lost by not winning. Our dilemma in Iraq is analogous to the British dilemma in North America — and is likely to yield the same outcome.

This is popularly as the "counterinsurgent's dilemma," perhaps best written about by David Galula in his classic Counterinsurgency Warfare — Theory and Practice. Setting aside those insurgencies which ripen into open warfare, like Mao's famous three-phase model, the goal of the insurgent is not to "win" in any conventional sense. Rather, the goal is to "win" by not losing. Either the insurgent bleeds the counterinsurgent to the point where his will to fight is gone, or the insurgent wins politically by earning the support of the people and alienating the people from the counterinsurgent.

So do we have the political will to be a counterinsurgent? To be an empire? Prof. Ellis thinks not, based on his reading of the Founders and their imprint on American DNA:

Finally, and somewhat more problematically, an understanding of the founders' mentality complicates our view of our role as Britain's successor as the world's dominant power. The United States began with a conspicuously anti-imperial ethos, and we have had it imprinted on our political DNA from the very start. We were the first former colony to win a war for independence (against Britain, no less) and the first large-scale republic committed to the principle of government by consent rather than coercion.

In that sense, our primal values make us a very reluctant world power in the Roman or British mode. For good historical reasons, we lack the requisite imperial stamina of the British Empire in its "sun-never-sets" phase. Our origins are at odds with all previous versions of a world power. The Romans and British would have experienced no twinges of conscience in leaving a substantial military garrison in Iraq for an indefinite period. But we do, which is one reason why a healthy majority of U.S. citizens want us to leave Iraq as soon as possible. A republic, the world's first large-scale republic, simply cannot be an empire of the conventional European sort. This legacy of the founders complicates our status as the reigning world power.

One could counter with the claim that our anti-imperial origins were always more rhetorical than real. Just ask the Native Americans, or call attention to our apparently permanent military garrisons in Germany and South Korea. They certainly have the look and feel of old-style Roman and British imperialism, wholly compatible with the apparent current plan of the Bush administration to leave a garrison of about 50,000 troops in Iraq.

What would Washington do? Well, he did speak of a prospective American empire, though he was thinking primarily of our eventual domination of the North American continent, not the globe. On a few occasions, he seemed to suggest that if we played our cards right in the 19th century, the United States might replace Britain as the dominant power in the 20th. That indeed happened. But would he have endorsed a hegemonic U.S. foreign policy based on military power? Probably not. But that's my opinion, not necessarily Washington's.

What do you think?