Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal (defenselink.mil)

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is “not realistic,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress. To send practically all available soldiers into one of the two wars would leave the U.S. with “no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea.”

Click to Enlarge: Army National Guard combat brigade deployment data. (Source: U.S. Army)

Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well. Under current Pentagon policy, dwell time for the National Guard varies, but can be no shorter than two years, and so it is possible but not certain that two National Guard brigades composed of 6,800 National Guard soldiers might be available for deployment by March 2010 as well, beyond the 24,000 theoretically available now. Pentagon leaders had hoped to extend dwell time this year, but that was before McChrystal’s request for additional troops.

Click to Enlarge: U.S. Army combat brigade deployment information. (Source: U.S. Army)

Furthermore, not all brigades are the same. Some are built around heavy equipment like tanks, while others are primarily light, mobile infantrymen. According to a September report by the Institute for the Study of War, a pro-escalation think-tank in Washington, no so-called “heavy” brigades have been sent to Afghanistan to date, a condition likely owing to Afghanistan’s lack of paved roads, high elevations and uneven rural terrain, all of which are inhospitable to tanks and other heavy vehicles. But of the 14 brigades available as of December 2009, five of them are heavy brigades, according to the information provided by the Army to TWI, accounting for 19,000 of the available 50,600 active-duty soldiers. There is precedent in Iraq for re-tasking heavy brigades as light brigades by deploying them without their heavy vehicles, as the Institute for the Study of War’s report points out. But there is no precedent for such a thing in Afghanistan. If the Obama administration decides not to re-task heavy brigades as light brigades, the pool of active-duty soldiers immediately available for Afghanistan shrinks to 31,600 soldiers.

Andrew Krepinevich, the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think-tank in Washington, told TWI that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops required an inescapable calculation of risk. “The worst thing in the world is to have these people over there getting shot at, not being able to make progress, and the situation [in Afghanistan] just sort of gradually eroding, so it’s that versus the risk of breaking the force, [or] the risk that you’re not prepared for another contingency,” said Krepinevich. “So how do you weigh those risks? There is no formula or algorithm that’s going to give you the answer. It’s going to have to be a judgment call.”

McChrystal wrote in a late August assessment that the U.S. faces a “decisive” moment in Afghanistan. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” McChrystal wrote nearly three months ago. While deployment times vary, no brigade can be deployed to Afghanistan overnight, raising questions about how much time remains to turn the war around even if McChrystal gets the 40,000 troops that various news accounts have stated — without official confirmation — that the general wants.

Krepinevich testified on Tuesday before a House Armed Services subcommittee in favor of McChrystal’s proposed counterinsurgency strategy, and appeared to lend support to a troop increase of roughly 40,000. He said that recent steps taken by both the Bush and Obama administrations to increase the total size of the Army and Marine Corps would mitigate against prolonged deployments. “Even if Gen. McChrystal’s request is honored by the president, the combined total of our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq would still be significantly below the levels reached during the Surge,” he told the panel.

But the 2007 troop surge in Iraq was a one-time increase of five combat brigades that ended with those brigades’ tours. By contrast, a troop increase to implement McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy is more likely to be a sustained escalation lasting beyond the tours of the initially deployed brigades. And the brigades themselves called upon to implement the troop increase will have already served numerous deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 14 active-duty brigades that will be available for deployment in December, five have already served three tours abroad since 2002 and four have already served two. If either the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division or the 1st brigade of the 10th Mountain Division are asked to deploy to Afghanistan, it will be their fifth tour since 2002.*

Krepinevich said the stress on soldiers called upon to serve repeated tours was a problem for a troop escalation. “You really have to start worrying about greater incidents of post-traumatic stress disorder, [and] that we’re already seeing in terms of the the NCO corps,” he said, referring to non-commissioned officers like sergeants who play crucial leadership roles in enforcing soldier discipline and standards. “Yes, they’re experienced but they’re just so worn out. And that has to be a concern.”

That concern was echoed by Bing West, a Reagan-era senior Pentagon official who traveled to Afghanistan in October. “There is near-unanimous agreement that deployments on the lines over eight months are too long,” West reported for the blog Small Wars Journal on Nov. 1, citing interviews with “dozens” of soldiers and Marines. “Aggressive patrolling decreases as the length of tour increases. The troops wear down.”

Korb — who, like Krepinevich, supports the Afghanistan war — said a more realistic troop increase for Afghanistan would be 10,000 soldiers until the drawdown of troops from Iraq “begins in earnest.” There are currently 120,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq, almost twice the total in Afghanistan, though Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, told Congress in September that he plans to reduce that total to around 50,000 by August 30, 2010. Alternatively, Korb said, Obama could speed up the pace of redeployment out of Iraq in order to relieve the stress on the force, a point echoed by Krepinevich in an interview with TWI. But under current Pentagon policy, soldiers would still need to receive at least 12 months of recuperation time back in the U.S. before potential assignment in Afghanistan.

The chief of staff of the Army, Gen. George Casey, whose institutional role includes protecting the health of the force, endorsed a troop escalation earlier this month. “I believe that we need to put additional forces into Afghanistan to give Gen. McChrystal the ability to both dampen the successes of the Taliban while we train the Afghan civilian forces,” he told NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Nov. 8. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, also has responsibilities for balancing the needs of the Afghanistan war with those of the overall military and threats to the U.S. worldwide. He told Congress in September that more troops were “probably” needed in Afghanistan as well.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a key swing vote in the Afghanistan debate, has told Congress earlier this year that he would seek to lengthen dwell time for the Army in the coming years. In January, he testified that he and Army chiefs wanted to extend dwell time to 15 months at home for every 12 months deployed by October 2010, but in July, he revised that plan and indicated that the Army might be able to shift to 15-month dwell times by summer 2010. But Gates reiterated in July a commitment to ultimately giving soldiers at least two years of dwell time by 2011. The Army public-affairs officer who released this information to TWI clarified that no unit was available unless it had ended a previous deployment by at least November 2008, indicating a continued 12-month dwell time policy.

That proposal was devised before McChrystal’s request for additional forces, and it is unclear how the fulfillment of that request will impact the dwell-time policy, if at all. Spokesmen for both Gen. McChrystal and Sec. Gates did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

*Update, 4:35 p.m., Nov. 19: Maj. Stephen Platt, public affairs officer for the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, writes to inform me that the brigade has indeed been scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in “early 2010″ for what will be its fifth combat tour since 2002. I missed a press release from the Pentagon in July announcing the deployment, and word of the upcoming tour was not included in the information provided to me by the U.S. Army. I appreciate Maj. Platt’s clarification.

Unfortunately forgotten, however, has been a rarely mentioned Novak column penned in September 2002 — six months before the Iraq invasion — in which he points out the inconvenient truth (considered by some to be highly unpatriotic at the time) that Saddam Hussein’s supposedly threatening arsenal of weapons had been sold to him by the United States.

An eight-year-old Senate report confirms that disease-producing and poisonous materials were exported, under U.S. government license, to Iraq from 1985 to 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war. Furthermore, the report adds, the American-exported materials were identical to microorganisms destroyed by United Nations inspectors after the Gulf War. The shipments were approved despite allegations that Saddam used biological weapons against Kurdish rebels and (according to the current official U.S. position) initiated war with Iran.

This record is no argument for or against waging war against the Iraqi regime, but current U.S. officials are not eager to reconstruct the mostly secret relationship between the two countries. While biological warfare exports were approved by the U.S. government, the first President George Bush signed a policy directive proposing “normal” relations with Saddam in the interest of Middle East stability. Looking at a little U.S.-Iraqi history might be useful on the eve of a fateful military undertaking.

Novak went on to blast the selective amnesia of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was questioned about those weapons sales by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.).

At a Senate Armed Services hearing last Thursday, Byrd tried to disinter that history. “Did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq war?” he asked Rumsfeld. “Certainly not to my knowledge,” Rumsfeld replied. When Byrd persisted by reading a current Newsweek article reporting these exports, Rumsfeld said, “I have never heard anything like what you’ve read, I have no knowledge of it whatsoever, and I doubt it.”

That suggests Rumsfeld also has not read the sole surviving copy of a May 25, 1994, Senate Banking Committee report. In 1985 (five years after the Iraq-Iran war started) and succeeding years, said the report, “pathogenic (meaning “disease producing”), toxigenic (meaning “poisonous”) and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq, pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce.” It added: “These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction.”

The report then details 70 shipments (including anthrax bacillus) from the United States to Iraqi government agencies over three years, concluding, “It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program.”

With Baghdad having survived combat against Iran’s revolutionary regime with U.S. help, President George H.W. Bush signed National Security Directive 26 on Oct. 2, 1989. Classified “secret” but recently declassified, it said: “Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East. The United States government should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and to increase our influence with Iraq.”

Bush the elder, who said recently that he “hates” Saddam, saw no reason then to oust the Iraqi dictator. On the contrary, the government’s approval of exporting microorganisms to Iraq coincided with the Bush administration’s decision to save Saddam from defeat by the Iranian mullahs.

“Such recollections of the recent past,” Novak added, “make for uncomfortable officials in Washington and Jerusalem today.”

Any historians writing the Iraq War chapter pertaining to journalism’s complicity in the invasion shouldn’t fail to include mention of these words.

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Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (AP Photo)

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki opened the door for the first time Thursday to the prospect of a U.S. military presence in Iraq after the December 2011 deadline for troop withdrawal set by last year’s bilateral accord — something President Obama appeared to rule out during a joint appearance on Tuesday.

Speaking to an audience at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, Maliki said the accord, known as the Status of Forces Agreement, would “end” the American military presence in his country in 2011, but “nevertheless, if Iraqi forces required further training and further support, we shall examine this at that time based on the needs of Iraq,” he said through translation in response to a question from The Washington Independent. “I am sure that the will, the prospects and the desire for such cooperation is found among both parties.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Maliki continued, “The nature of that relationship — the functions and the amount of [U.S.] forces — will then be discussed and reexamined based on the needs” of Iraq.

The Iraqi prime minister’s allowance for a post-2011 U.S. troop presence comes despite his increasingly nationalist tone to a domestic audience in advance of parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for January. He resisted the advice of Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, to keep a U.S. combat presence in volatile areas like Mosul after June 30, the date set by the Status of Forces Agreement for their evacuation from Iraqi cities and towns. Instead, when they departed, Maliki declared a national holiday. He called the withdrawal a “great victory” for Iraq, language reminiscent of his oft-stated declarations of victory over Iraq’s various insurgent groups. In his remarks at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Maliki moderated that remark, saying the U.S. “withdrawal from the cities is a victory, not a failure for either the Iraqis or the Americans.”

In a joint appearance with Maliki at the White House on Tuesday, President Obama gave no indication that he envisioned a place for U.S. troops in Iraq after 2011, instead pledging to “fulfill our commitment to remove all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.”  Using language that signaled an end to the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, Obama said the departure of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities was an “unmistakable signal” that his administration will “keep our commitments with the sovereign Iraqi government.” There are currently about 130,000 U.S. troops in the country.

Senior administration officials have denied any intent to keep U.S. forces in Iraq past that period as well. “It would require a new agreement, a new negotiation — almost certainly an Iraqi initiative — to provide for some presence beyond the end of 2011,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in February after Obama announced a schedule for staggered U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in accordance with the Status of Forces Agreement. “So in the absence of that agreement, in the absence of any negotiation for such an agreement, it is in keeping with the SOFA that, to say definitively, that we will be out at the end of 2011.”

But some former officials and analysts close to the administration have envisioned small non-combat residual U.S. forces remaining in Iraq past the 2011 deadline to advise Iraqi security forces, echoing the notes Maliki struck on Wednesday. Doug Ollivant, who left the National Security Council as an Iraq director last month, told TWI that the U.S. military will retain ties with its Iraqi counterparts after combat forces depart similar to the “ties we have to many other countries in the region,” which are often for officer training, coordination and advice. (While some countries in the region, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, host U.S. military bases, Obama reiterated Wednesday that “we seek no bases in Iraq.”)

And in a paper for the Center for a New American Security, a think tank with close ties to the Obama Pentagon and State Department, John Nagl, the think tank’s president, wrote last month that developing Iraqi security capacity for air and naval operations “always required some level of American support beyond the SOFA deadline, but now the United States may need to provide continued air and naval protection for an extended period beyond 2011″ owing to the global economic crisis. Both Ollivant and Nagl have longstanding relationships with Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia.

While antipathy for the U.S. military presence remains a popular Iraqi sentiment — the streets of Baghdad resembled a “carnival” when U.S. troops withdrew, according to reporters on the ground — some Iraqi legislators and security officials have questioned whether the Status of Forces Agreement provides a sufficient amount of time for Iraqi forces to take control of the still-violent country. Qassim Daoud, a Shiite parliamentarian and former national security adviser to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, has said the accord should be renegotiated to allow U.S. troops to stay until 2020 or 2025. Last year, Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul Qadir al-Obaidi, suggested in a press conference that the less-mature elements of the Iraqi security forces, like the Air Force, might require American assistance after 2011.

Most of Maliki’s remarks to the U.S. Institute of Peace described a post-2011 U.S.-Iraqi relationship in non-military terms. In keeping with a companion according known as the Strategic Framework Agreement, which spells out terms for a U.S.-Iraqi alliance after 2011, Maliki said he sought a relationship on “all levels — political, economic, educational, cultural.” He extended his thanks to “the international community and all the countries that have cooperated and helped Iraq,” saying Iraq would enjoy a “solid relationship with a great and strong country like the United States.”

A Gallup poll released last week found that 58 percent of Americans consider the U.S. invasion of Iraq to be a mistake.

Prime Minister Maliki  answered Spencer Ackerman’s question at a press meeting held Thursday, not Wednesday as we originally reported. We regret the error.

While the crowd reacted positively, their applause was much more tepid than I would have expected given that he’s still considered one of the rising stars in the party. Public speaking, as far as I can tell, is not one of his political strengths.

Jindal’s goals were to 1) do better than his Obama response speech and to 2) engage with the press and the base on the question of whether Republicans really wanted the president to “fail.” Jindal called this “political correctness run amok” and argued that Republicans only want the president to fail if his agenda is hurting the country. But this part rang hollow:

The very Democrat leaders who are now asking this phony question, are the ones who for so long wanted to see the last President fail, regardless of the issue, and regardless of whether he was right or wrong.

This is Limbaughism, and it’s both partially untrue and rhetorically tricky. At the start of George W. Bush’s presidency, he won major Democratic support for two of his big initiatives—Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) on tax cuts, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) on education. After Sept.11, of course, Democrats fell completely in line with Bush on the war on terror, giving him honeymoon political support that lasted for months. At the end of Bush’s presidency, it was Democratic votes (including that of then-Sen. Barack Obama) that passed the Wall Street bailout — not the action of a party that wanted the president to fail, even as they blamed his party for the crisis.

The “regardless of whether he was right or wrong” bit of this is, of course, nonsense — can any Republican name an instance of Democrats opposing Bush when they thought he was right? They’d probably cite some Iraq War votes, but it’s re-writing history to say that Democrats opposed the war, or the funding, or the surge, out of hope that Bush would fail. The Democrats who voted “no” on the war didn’t think it would work. They opposed former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld because he was a failure, and opposed the surge because they thought it would fail. In retrospect they were right on the former and wrong on the latter. But it’s a stretch to accuse them of acting in bad faith. They believed what Jindal now says Republicans believe: “That they are completely wrong, and that their path will have dire consequences for not only this time, but also for the future of America.”

The Jindal speech (text here) was the latest step in the evolution of a rather interesting political figure into one who knows what he must say, true or untrue, to win over the national GOP base.

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This, however, is kind of an unfortunate way of putting things:

Perkins added that on Feb. 20, no Iraqi civilians were killed or even targeted in attacks.

“This is a very significant event, and we are seeing more and more days like that throughout Iraq,” he said.

If you were an Iraq, would you really want to hear an American general highlighting one day in six years of war that no civilians were targeted for murder? The Iraq war is a confusing and frustrating thing, and Perkins undoubtedly meant nothing by the statement, but that’s rather tin-earned.

Interestingly, Perkins added that the results of the provincial elections are being accepted by the losers, but NPR’s Corey Flintoff reports that members of the Iraqi Islamic Party — the recently-deposed party in Anbar Province — are being targeted for assassination, suggesting that the winners are having a hard time settling for mere political victory.

It’s not as high profile as stumping for McCain, but Lieberman’s performance as oversight chairman was also a betrayal of the Democratic Party– and, more important, Congress’ role as a check on executive power.

While colleagues like Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) and Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) spent the past two years investigating the Iraq war and torture, Lieberman never probed any Bush administration conduct related to national security.

A piece I did in February looked at how Lieberman refused a request to investigate Blackwater after its security employees opened fire on civilians in an Iraq public square. Since February, the Senate oversight committee has held hearings on important topics like FEMA’s response to Hurricane Ike and the workplace rights of government employees. But Lieberman has steadfastly refused to use his subpoena power to investigate the biggest administration scandals.

Besides foreign policy, Lieberman was also noticeably silent on the financial crisis. Maybe he would be more interested in investigating an Obama administration. But it looks like he won’t get the chance.

From its awesome bit of fake news, entitled, “Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress”:

Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.

“Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, ‘Things are finally as terrible as we’re willing to tolerate,” said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed, uninsured, and debt-ridden supporters. “To elect a black man, in this country, and at this time—these last eight years must have really broken you.”

Added Obama, “It’s a great day for our nation.

Lions Gate Entertainment

Perhaps the most impressive trick the director Oliver Stone pulls off in his new biopic “W.” is giving Bush-hatred a bad name.

Historians are sure to debate whether George W. Bush is the worst president in U.S. history or merely among the worst. Not since James Buchanan, whose lassitude in the face of a national crisis over slavery and secession is credited with making the Civil War practically inevitable, has there been a credible contender for that supreme dishonor.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But no president has ever waged two wars at the same time without winning either; lost a major U.S. city in a flood of incompetent bureaucracy; unconstitutionally declared that detaining suspects without trial, spying on domestic communications without a warrant or torturing foreign nationals was an inherent power of his office; transformed a record budget surplus into an unprecedented deficit, and contributed to a global financial catastrophe.

Given all that, Stone might be expected to register more of a case against Bush. But Stone has protested that his new film, which opened Friday, isn’t intended to be an indictment of the president. That claim rings hollow, however, when faced with how relentlessly buffoonish and venal Stone presents Bush, particularly in a film that purports to explore the 43rd president.

More bizarre, however, is the fact that a viewer unfamiliar with the past eight years would leave the movie thinking nothing happened during Bush’s tenure except the Iraq war. There’s a cursory mention of torture, domestic surveillance and Guantanamo Bay — other articles in the case against Bush — but they pass from the screen in less time than it takes to walk to the concession stand.

The war overhangs everything in “W.,” which may not be surprising, given that Stone is a Vietnam veteran. But unfortunately, Stone doesn’t provide a particularly accurate view of the war, either.

“W.” marks the third movie about national politics from Stone. “JFK” was a litigants’ brief against the idea that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman. “Nixon” presented Richard M. Nixon as the corrupted Shakespearean demon, Richard III. “W.” is more like “Nixon” than “JFK,” except it doesn’t have much patience with narrative coherence, though it is less operatic than either of Stone’s previous political movies.

“W.” opens and closes with Bush standing in center field at Arlington Stadium, former home to the Texas Rangers franchise that Bush once owned, attempting to catch a fly ball. At about the film’s mid-point, Bush, played by Josh Brolin, walks through the outfield with his father, played by the chisel-jawed James Cromwell, and tells him center field is where he finds peace. Naturally for such an unsubtle film, the final scene of the film is a nightmare in which Bush can’t find the ball. Get it?

Lions Gate Entertainment

Perhaps the most generous way of describing Stone’s narrative structure is to say that it avoids convention. Bush is explored through a series of scenes: one moment he’s president in a pre-Iraq war Cabinet discussion; the next he’s drunk on the morning of his 40th birthday, and soon he’ll be railing against his father’s “weakness” for losing the 1992 presidential election.

The film’s jumps through time aren’t merely problematic for their own sake. “W.” is supposed to provide the introspection into Bush’s character that the president himself rarely exhibits. Stone has a reputation for being an un-introspective filmmaker — the film critic Elvis Mitchell on NPR once remarked that Stone was the only great director with A.D.D. — but presenting little more than vignettes, it’s difficult for the Stone to establish consistent themes to explain Bush’s behavior.

For example, one of the longest sustained scenes concerns Bush’s conversion to Christianity. Frustratingly, Stone doesn’t follow the thread through, aside from the superficial treatment of showing Bush ending war-cabinet meetings with a prayer. It’s easy enough to establish that Bush is an entitled buffoon who disappoints his father — Cromwell’s George H.W. Bush says he’s “deeply disappointed” in his son twice in the film so you don’t miss it — but that’s not enough to sustain a movie.

It’s the Iraq war that truly drives Stone’s outrage, though. Yet his depiction of the war is as much a caricature as his depiction of Bush is. This is all the more disappointing considering that Stone is himself a Vietnam veteran. He may not have served in Iraq, but he has a deeper knowledge of the reality of war than most, if not all, of his contemporaries.

Stone’s style is to research his subject matter exhaustively, as “JFK” demonstrated. His choice of scene shows a deep familiarity with the seminal moments of the war. An August 2002 meeting of the war Cabinet on Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex. — one of the last big pre-war discussions, and reportedly the one in which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell fatefully signed on to the invasion — is meticulously recreated. No detail escapes Stone: Tommy Franks, the general in charge of planning the war, is chewing an unlit cigar, a real-life habit of Franks. This is an obscure fact even among Iraq-war obsessives.

But Stone’s attention to detail is undone by his indifference to context. The two key scenes between Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — played over the top by Richard Dreyfuss — present the vice president as mouthing lines attributable to his critics. In the first, a lunchtime discussion with Bush, Cheney enthusiastically pushes Bush to embrace aggression when there’s a “one-percent chance” of things going wrong in its absence — journalist Ron Suskind’s distillation of Cheney’s views.

In the second, Cheney delivers a frothing-mad speech in the situation room, larded with Googled facts about military bases all around the Middle East, urging for the U.S. to maintain a permanent presence in the Middle East to establish “true empire.”

What’s more, Iraq itself is a pure abstraction, never present in the film. The closest it comes to appearing is during a teleconference with Franks, in which the general tells Bush that the war is a tougher fight than expected. A single scene in which Bush visits wounded soldiers is the only reference to the war’s human cost. The millions of Iraqis whose lives have been forever changed by the war have no place in “W.”

It’s a stunning choice for a movie so heavily motivated by anti-war fervor. The central error of the Bush administration — indeed, the only actual governing decision given any screen time — does not actually appear. Stone is overtaken with the process of its decision-making: the meetings in which the war is mooted.

But even in those interminable scenes, all Stone offers is easily-Googled punch lines from Bush’s principal aides, without attempting to explain why each character acts as he or she does. Powell appears as something of a Cassandra, issuing his famous “you break it, you bought it” line, but acquiescing to the invasion. Stone expends no effort at explaining Powell’s behavior.

Even a polemicist is obligated to, at least, offer an argument for what motivates his subject. A movie that offers pure polemic is boring enough. But a movie that offers poor polemicism, bizarre presentations of its indictment and narrative incoherence is a waste of time.

In the end, W. is an election gimmick: rushed to deliver an authoritative excoriation of Bush just as the country votes to elect his successor. It fails as completely as a political movie can fail. Even Bush haters are forced to admit that Bush, Cheney — and the country — deserved better treatment.