" Ah - perhaps one of the more hotter signals that hyperpuissance signals is the amazing ability to enjoy multiple conflicts in multiple nation/states (of sorts) in the sunny sunny climes of the CENTCOM Gap.

" Like the super secret War in Somalia that Great Satan and Great Britain have been indulging in!! "

" And then, late last month, Colonel Davis, 48, began an unusual one-man campaign of military truth-telling. He wrote two reports, one unclassified and the other classified, summarizing his observations on the candor gap with respect to Afghanistan. He briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members, spoke with a reporter for The New York Times, sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general — and only then informed his chain of command that he had done so.

" “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?“ Colonel Davis asks in an article summarizing his views titled “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down.” It was published online Sunday in The Armed Forces Journal, the nation’s oldest independent periodical on military affairs. “No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan,” he says in the article. “But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.” "

" Military ethicists concede that drones can turn war into a video game, inflict civilian casualties and, with no Americans directly at risk, more easily draw the United States into conflicts. Drones have also created a crisis of information for analysts on the end of a daily video deluge. "

" Unlike Braggadocchio, our warmongers are paid to involve America in foreign wars. The Libya crisis has brought forth some fine examples. Whatever the author’s past recommendations and experience, these article show the modern art of warmongering at its highest level. "

" * Do we have the wisdom to intervene, usually uninvited, in foreign lands? In the past our area experts usually have been ignored in favor of the loud and confident ideologues (from the anticommunist hawks in the Vietnam era to the neo-cons in the Bush-Af-Pak era).
* Can we charge the grateful world for this service? Or do we provide this service only until China & OPEC tire of lending us the money to provide it?
* Will our children, inheriting the bankrupt husk of America, cheer or jeer at us? "

"The two books -- "Lessons in Disaster," on Mr. Obama's nightstand, and "A Better War" on the shelves of military gurus -- have become a framework for the debate over what will be one of the most important decisions of Mr. Obama's presidency."

""It's unprecedented for the commander of an active theater to be brought back to head something like a brigadier generals board," said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, former head of the Army War College."

"Senator John McCain said that the buildup of American forces in Iraq represented the only viable option to avoid failure in Iraq and that he had yet to identify an effective fallback if the current strategy failed."

"Writing in the report, Gen Zinni, a former commander of US Central Command, says: "It's not hard to make the connection between climate change and instability, or climate change and terrorism.""

"when McCain and Graham sat down for dinner with Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki during their recent visit to Baghdad, McCain conveniently used those very calls for withdrawal from Congress as a means to “motivate the Maliki government“"

"a sharp drop in public confidence in military force as a tool for dealing with other countries developing weapons of mass destruction—even though controlling the spread of nuclear weapons is the public's top policy priority and one of its major fears."