If you agree that we organize governments at all levels to deal with (prevent and/or mitigate) the vagaries of man and nature we don't want--i.e. man-made and natural disasters, which may be categorized under the seven Is:

incineration

inundation

invasion

infestation

incarceration

injury

ignorance

--then it seems fair to conclude that, since every one of those conditions has been promoted and exacerbated in Iraq, that benighted land is a prime example of government gone wrong. And, though it doesn't get much coverage, the United States Air Force is largely at fault.
The Air Force, for example, is largely responsible for the transformation of what was or was not supposed to be a war for oil, as Robert Bryce explains in The American Conservative,

Controlling Iraq’s oil has historically been a vital factor in America’s involvement in Iraq and was always a crucial element of the Bush administration’s plans for the post-Saddam era. Of course, that’s not how the war was sold to the American people. A few months before the invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that the looming war had “nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.” The war was necessary, its planners claimed, because Saddam Hussein supported terrorism and, left unchecked, he would unleash weapons of mass destruction on the West.

that has now turned into a quest for oil to maintain the war.

But America’s presence in Iraq isn’t making use of the local riches. Indeed, little, if any, Iraqi oil is being used by the American military. Instead, the bulk of the fuel needed by the U.S. military is being trucked in from the sprawling Mina Abdulla refinery complex, which lies a few dozen kilometers south of Kuwait City. In 2006 alone, the Defense Energy Support Center purchased $909.3 million in motor fuel from the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. In addition to the Kuwaiti fuel, the U.S. military is trucking in fuel from Turkey. But some of that Turkish fuel actually originates in refineries as far away as Greece.

In 2007 alone, the U.S. military in Iraq burned more than 1.1 billion gallons of fuel. (American Armed Forces generally use a blend of jet fuel known as JP-8 to propel both aircraft and automobiles.) About 5,500 tanker trucks are involved in the Iraqi fuel-hauling effort. That fleet of trucks is enormously costly. In November 2006, a study produced by the U.S. Military Academy estimated that delivering one gallon of fuel to U.S. soldiers in Iraq cost American taxpayers $42—and that didn’t include the cost of the fuel itself. At that rate, each U.S. soldier in Iraq is costing $840 per day in fuel delivery costs, and the U.S. is spending $923 million per week on fuel-related logistics in order to keep 157,000 G.I.s in Iraq. Given that the Iraq War is now costing about $2.5 billion per week, petroleum costs alone currently account for about one-third of all U.S. military expenditure in Iraq.

Of course, the problem I have with the Air Force action in Iraq is that it's counter-productive--that, by smashing the place to smithereens, we're creating more enemies on a daily basis. Which is probably what Senator Jay Rockefeller was inartfully suggesting, as reported in the Charleston Gazette, when he observed about candidate McCain's expressed intent to spend another hundred years in the country,

Rockefeller believes McCain has become insensitive to many human issues. "McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit.

"What happened when they the missiles get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."

Though Senator Rockefeller has had to render an abject apology, in part because his reference to "laser-guided missiles" was factually false (they didn't come into use until after McCain was shot down and captured), that the destroyers up in the air or (today) sitting at computer consoles have no real idea of the impact on the people on the ground is beyond dispute; even when they can watch the effect through the eye of the camera on the front end of a drone.

5/1/2008 - SOUTHWEST ASIA (AFPN) -- Air Force unmanned aerial vehicles continued to play a key role in supporting ground troops fighting the war on terrorism in Iraq.

An MQ-1B Predator located a vehicle with loaded weapons in Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad April 26 and directed a Hellfire missile against the target.

The Predator was conducting a reconnaissance patrol when it located a group of individuals loading weapons into the trunk of a car. The Predator then followed the car for about 20 minutes when the car stopped. The Predator crew waited for a collateral damage estimate to ensure the area was cleared of innocent bystanders and then fired and destroyed the vehicle.

What the Air Force refers to as ground troops fighting the war on terrorism, might well be considered assassination by remote control designed to terrorize the families these victims of what the Iraqis refer to as "continuous bombardment" leave behind.

Moreover, when the Air Force reports that

The Predator was providing surveillance for ground forces who had been taking fire. During a recon scan, the Predator crew noted a number of individuals congregating on a street and acting suspicious. The Predator tracked these individuals for a couple hours, but was unable to determine their intentions.

Suspicions increased, however, when the individuals were seen hastily working on something in the middle of the street. The Predator detected mortars were being fired from a tube that the group had been preparing and aligning earlier to fire at friendly troops. Once given clearance to engage the target, they fired their air-to-surface missiles and destroyed the launcher and killed a number of hostile individuals.

at least this reader suspects that somewhere down the road even the pilots driving these lethal machines and "taking" out a number of individuals with a hellfire missile might develop some of those mental health problems that are only now beginning to be addressed. How does the guy sitting at the console know that an individual was hostile?

The names of the victims of American Hellfire missiles, bombs and machine gun fire in the crowded streets of Sadr City are for the most part unknown outside of Iraq, and are far more numerous. Thanks to a wrenching Associated Press photograph, the identity of one has been publicized. He is Ali Hussein, aged two.

A photographer captured the image of his lifeless, chalk-covered body being lifted from the rubble of his home, which had been destroyed in a US rocket attack. Mouth agape and limbs hanging limp, the little boy wore a T-shirt, blood-stained shorts and a child’s sandals.

How did it happen that the practice of "taking out" people with missiles became routine? Why weren't the troops on the ground being "supported" able to effect a capture? Is it just a matter of that old flyboy, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates being enamored of killing, like erstwhile flyboy McCain, remotely?

William M. Arkin, in the Washington Post refers to it an an "unmanned" military. But, I would suggest that his concern is somewhat misplaced.

"Unmanned": That's the issue. the United States can now reliably send out drones to conduct spot surveillance, to intercept communications, to jam electronics, to remotely track over video, and even attack with precision guided weapons. From hand-held drones used by soldiers and special operations forces to long-range high-flying drones that can fly for hours over thousands of miles (Global Hawk drones fly at 65,000 feet over many hours), our military is becoming more dependent on unmanned aerial vehicles. Despite the fact that drones constitute a $55 billion business over the next decade, they are still far cheaper than satellites. They are also available to "commanders" at all levels and save lives.

But by being unmanned and remote in nature, the drones communicate an important message: that the United States is remote and heartless in the conduct of war, that it will use its technology to remain immune from the enemy's "force."

From where I sit, killing by remote control is going to have a devastating effect on the psyches of the people pushing the buttons. And while broken Predators, of which there are quite a few,

Predator crashes in southern Iraq

Staff report

Posted : Friday May 2, 2008 10:53:13 EDT

A Predator crashed in Iraq on Friday, the first to be lost since two went down in one week in early April.

This Predator was launched from Ali Air Base and crashed in southern Iraq around 4 a.m. local time, according to an Air Force news release.

Mechanical failure is suspected as the cause of the crash, the release said.

The crash marks the seventh such unmanned aerial vehicle to be lost in the past year. Each aircraft costs $3.5 million.

can be left on the ground or shrink-wrapped for the trip to the local metal scrap yard, those damaged psyches are going to be coming home and then a goodly number are going to ask how it happened that they were turned into cold blooded killers.

Chalmers Johnson suggests it started a long time ago in his review of a history of the RAND Corporation by Alex Abella. And the Air Force was a prime mover.

The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, was set up immediately after World War II by the U.S. Army Air Corps (soon to become the U.S. Air Force). The Air Force generals who had the idea were trying to perpetuate the wartime relationship that had developed between the scientific and intellectual communities and the American military, as exemplified by the Manhattan Project to develop and build the atomic bomb.

Soon enough, however, RAND became a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire. As the premier think tank for the U.S.'s role as hegemon of the Western world, RAND was instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND, our military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite different.

....

RAND was the brainchild of General H. H. "Hap" Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps from 1941 until it became the Air Force in 1947, and his chief wartime scientific adviser, the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán. In the beginning, RAND was a free-standing division within the Douglas Aircraft Company which, after 1967, merged with McDonnell Aviation to form the McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Corporation and, after 1997, was absorbed by Boeing. Its first head was Franklin R. Collbohm, a Douglas engineer and test pilot.

In May 1948, RAND was incorporated as a not-for-profit entity independent of Douglas, but it continued to receive the bulk of its funding from the Air Force. The think tank did, however, begin to accept extensive support from the Ford Foundation, marking it as a quintessential member of the American establishment.

And, not co-incidentally, as a not-for-profit RAND tasted the joys of not having to be accountable to the public treasury upon whose munificence its thinkers continued to rely. Which is not to say they weren't into counting. Though Rand didn't make anything tangible, their ideas multiplied and branched out:

RAND's golden age of creativity lasted from approximately 1950 to 1970. During that period its theorists worked diligently on such new analytical techniques and inventions as systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, the Internet, advanced computers, digital communications, missile defense, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the 1970s, RAND began to turn to projects in the civilian world, such as health financing systems, insurance, and urban governance.

Much of RAND's work was always ideological, designed to support the American values of individualism and personal gratification as well as to counter Marxism, but its ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations, which allegedly made its analyses "rational" and "scientific." Abella writes:

"If a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all -- the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical."

In my opinion, Abella here confuses numerical with empirical. Most RAND analyses were formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into actually functioning societies. RAND never devoted itself to the ethnographic and linguistic knowledge necessary to do truly empirical research on societies that its administrators and researchers, in any case, thought they already understood.

As Abella notes, "In spite of the collective brilliance of RAND there would be one area of science that would forever elude it, one whose absence would time and again expose the organization to peril: the knowledge of the human psyche."

And so it goes.

Among more ordinary mortals, workers in the vineyard, and hangers-on at RAND were Donald Rumsfeld, a trustee of the Rand Corporation from 1977 to 2001; Condoleezza Rice, a trustee from 1991 to 1997; Francis Fukuyama, a RAND researcher from 1979 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1989, as well as the author of the thesis that history ended when the United States outlasted the Soviet Union; Zalmay Khalilzad, the second President Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations; and Samuel Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb (although the French military perfected its tactical use).

Not having read Abella's book, it's not clear to me how much of Chalmer Johnson's discussion of Albert Wohlstetter is original with him. But, it would seem that the Air Force bases for which Iraq was identified as the ideal spot, are the descendants of the "basing study" first developed by that luminary.

Wohlstetter's ideas put an end to the strategy of terror attacks on Soviet cities in favor of a "counter-force strategy" that targeted Soviet military installations. He also promoted the dispersal and "hardening" of SAC bases to make them less susceptible to preemptive attacks and strongly supported using high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft such as the U-2 and orbiting satellites to acquire accurate intelligence on Soviet bomber and missile strength.

Which may account for why it was deemed convenient to site bases in Iraq and process the information on site, in the "hardened" embassy now being completed in the heart of Baghdad and whose continued shelling the latest "surge" is designed to stop. Also the building of walls.

Chalmers Johnson's conclusion:

Perhaps the greatest act of political and moral courage involving RAND was Daniel Ellsberg's release to the public of the secret record of lying by every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. However, RAND itself was and remains adamantly hostile to what Ellsberg did.
Abella reports that Charles Wolf, Jr., the chairman of RAND's Economics Department from 1967 to 1982 and the first dean of the RAND Graduate School from 1970 to 1997, "dripped venom when interviewed about the Ellsberg incident more than thirty years after the fact." Such behavior suggests that secrecy and toeing the line are far more important at RAND than independent intellectual inquiry and that the products of its research should be viewed with great skepticism and care.

strikes me as particularly telling because of my sense that secrecy is the cornerstone of the powers of the ruling elite, which has been, if not entirely dislodged by the Freedom of Information Act of 1967, severely challenged and prompted increasing privatization as a blowback.

On the other hand, the history of how the basing of military assets for the convenience of the Air Force and the nuclear arsenal it manages and controls, which has now left the U.S. with over 750 of these emplacements in foreign lands, does nothing to dispel my sense that they're really little more than a variant of all those shuttered highway weigh stations, with their rusting scales, darkened signage and desolate watch towers those of us who don't fly over the country encounter. Somebody's fascination with electronic systems and keeping tallies led to their erection and then, because standing watch over instrument panels that collect more data than anyone has time or inclination to analyze is really boring, their abandonment.

Which is actually an attractive perception. Because, nobody seems to have been much bothered by the obvious waste involved in building hundreds of weigh stations that are now unused. Nobody is insisting that we throw good money after bad in keeping these eyesores open. So, perhaps they can serve as a model for those Air Force bases we've set up in Iraq and which need to be dismantled before the ground forces that are supposed to secure them and the fuel convoys on which they depend can be pulled out.

What Bryce calls the U.S. military chasing its fuel tail just cannot go on:

But even the newest armored Humvees, which weigh about six tons, haven’t been enough to protect soldiers against the deadly explosives. Last year, Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon agreed on a four-year plan to spend about $20 billion on a fleet of 23,000 mine-resistant ambush protection vehicles or MRAPs. Last August, the Pentagon ordered 1,520 of the vehicles at a cost of $3.5 million each.

The MRAPs mean even greater demand for fuel from U.S. troops in Iraq. An armored Humvee covers perhaps 8 miles per gallon of fuel. One version of the MRAP, the Maxxpro, weighs about 40,000 pounds, and according to a source within the military, gets just 3 miles per gallon. The increased demand for fuel for the MRAPs will come alongside the need for an entirely new set of tires, fan belts, windshields, alternators, and other gear.

This swelling of the logistics train creates yet another problem for the military: an increase in supply trucks on the road, which demands yet more fuel and provides insurgents with a greater range of targets to attack.