Discourse.net

We Are At War (Phillip Glass & Steve Colbert)

My elder is studying absurdism in school right now (yes, really). We had a discussion about how it differed from existentialism, but I failed to persuade him. (Does one ever persuade a teenager of anything?) If only I had had this clip to demonstrate the difference: Phillip Glass (w/ Steve Colbert), 'We Are At War'.

Iraq War & Torture: The Time for Civility Is Long Past

[I don't believe I have ever posted about a book I have not read, but I'm going to make an exception today—but keep in mind I'm working off secondary sources, which inevitably carries the risk that I may be misinformed.]

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has reportedly penned a confessional memoir admitting, inter alia, that “Bush relied on 'propaganda' to sell the war”; “the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war”; and suggesting that Rove and Libby conspired to obstruct justice.

I think the horrors of the US torture policy and the US Iraq policy have been so clear for so long that the time for civility is long past.

So, assuming the published book summaries are correct, in the main, I agree with Daily Kos: Cheers and Jeers: Wednesday where it is written:

MASSIVE JEERS to Scott McClellan. The latest former Bush lapdog—-he was press secretary from '03 to '06—-to come out of the woodwork has several juicy nuggets in his hot-off-the-presses tell-all book. Bottom line: he confirms everything that we dirty hippie bloggers were screaming about at the top of our lungs, but which the traditional media ignored because…well, because Scott McClellan stood at his little White House podium and denied it all, lying out of his fat little elitist face as the stenographers printed his crap without scrutiny.

Once again, we come face to face with a White House official who could've done the right thing…but instead decided that the lives of American troops, Iraqi civilians, Katrina victims, and a network of covert CIA operatives were worth less than the luster of his master's lapel pin. When our country needed him to tell it straight, he hid behind propaganda and spin and bogus talking points and outright bamboozlement.

He told us to our faces we could trust him, when all along he knew that he was committing deception on a massive scale with horrific consequences. The lies he left in his wake, placed end to end, could reach the moon and back. He helped put the welfare of a handful of maniacal warmongers ahead of the welfare of the country. The time to reveal the way the Bushies were “restoring honor and integrity to the White House” was back then—-years ago—-when such revelations might've done some good. Instead, he waited until 2008 for his conscience dump.

I could certainly have done without the personal appearance slur, but most of the rest of it seems a reasonable response to, as the Kos writer puts it, “341 pages of, Hey, I was just following orders.” (Although from the sound of it, the memoir is actually more along the equally ignoble lines of, “the noble good-hearted Tsar was badly served by his evil counselors.”)

But I do not agree with this absurd call to action. There are much better ways to protest.

Big Day In Congress on Iraq Votes

Matt Stoler argues that something really big happened in Congress today.

Open Left:: House Republicans Collapse on Iraq: Today, about 100 House Republicans refused to vote for more war funding, voting 'present'. They are trying to hand off the war to the Democrats, but even Democrats were able to increase their 'no' vote number on funding from 141 to 149.

…

This war is going to end because it is politically unsustainable. The Senate is going to add the funding back in and the House will make sure the money goes to the war, but recognize how big a deal this is. The Republicans in the House and the Senate are going to utterly collapse this fall, and Democrats will have a mandate to end the war. It's something Obama has promised to do, and now the political logic there is undeniable. The question is whether there will be residual troops in the country, and that is where we can have an impact.

He may be right. The “present” votes are odd and cowardly, and should make some good hay.

But this final bit of triumphalism is over the top: “The Republicans are going to face, as Tom Matzzie said, extinction, because they kept the war going.” No such luck. They may take a pasting, but as we've seen from the Democrats' return from the wilderness, it doesn't last.

McCain Thinks First Gulf War Was a Mistake (But Still Supports This One)

John McCain famously supports the war in Iraq. Today he said that the war in Iraq was about oil. Even CNN recognized this for the huge gaffe that it is — you just can't say that in the US, especially if it might be true. So they called his campaign and offered McCain a chance to explain/retract. And explain it he did: making it much worse.

See the clip for yourself.

McCain's explanation? Despite the context which pretty clearly refers to the current Iraq War, McCain now says he meant the First Gulf War—when the US came to the rescue of Kuwait after Iraq invaded it.

In other words, McCain's explanation is that what he was saying is that in a world where the US had energy independence he'd use that freedom to abandon allies like Kuwait if they were invaded, but would support a policy of attacking and occupying countries like Iraq when they don't invade their neighbors.

I. Am. Not. Making. This. Up.

In any rational media ecology this would be a million times worse than something your ex-pastor said. Can I at least hope for a little box on page one promoting the article on A24?

Why Should Petraeus's Confirmation Be a Cakewalk?

The SCLM is busy assuring me this morning that Gen. Petraeus's confirmation as the head of CenCom is a done deal.

Asked about Petraeus's prospects for Senate confirmation, Gates said he already had conferred with Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, as well as Senator John McCain of Arizona, a presidential candidate and ranking Republican on the panel, and Senator John Warner of Virginia, a top Republican voice on military issues.

`High Respect'

“I think they all have high respect for General Petraeus,'' Gates said. “He has clearly been successful in his current assignment, and so I don't really anticipate any problems.''

Levin limited his public comments to a statement saying he was “hoping to schedule a prompt confirmation hearing.''

McCain, a strong supporter of the U.S. military buildup in Iraq that Petraeus advocated and then commanded, called him “one of the great generals in American history'' who had achieved “dramatic success'' in Iraq.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was less welcoming. Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said he will be “looking for credible assurances of a strong commitment to implementing a more effective national security strategy'' when the nomination comes before the Senate. Reid said the battles against the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and the overall readiness of U.S. ground forces “have suffered as a result of the current costly Iraq strategy,'' requiring “fresh, independent and creative thinking.

Perhaps because the relevant committee is the generally pliant Armed Services Committee, the easy confirmation story may be correct. But why should Petraeus's confirmation be a cakewalk? There are three ways in which this appointment is unusual, and the combo ought to be enough to give one pause.

First, and perhaps least important, there's the Army policy issue. As I understand it, the practice in the Army is to rotate commanders in from outside the area, rather than promoting up from within. The Army justifies this on two grounds: first, it gives its top commanders the opportunity to develop a wider perspective. Second, it's a quiet way of getting rid of bad policies, as the new broom comes in and lets the bad ideas wither on the vine; promoting from within means that one gets more of the same, good or bad. I rate this 'least important' because I've long had doubts about the Army's rotation (or, if you prefer, revolving door) policy. We did it Vietnam, and it contributed to our failure there by creating a 'ticket-punching' mentality; there's a lot to be said for the WWII approach in which commanders were responsible for the consequences of their actions, and either got removed or got promoted to jobs they were most likely to understand quickly. In principle I don't necessarily object to overriding this norm, although I have doubts about both Petraeus and General Ray Odierno who will replace him as the commander in Iraq. (Seems Ray Odierno has a bit of reputation.)

Second, there is the politics of the thing. Promoting Petraeus to the theater command is like leaving a minefield for the next President, especially if s/he's one who would like to withdraw from Iraq, or even downsize our occupation there. Especially if he's angling for a GOP Presidential nomination in the future, he has every incentive to balk.

Third, and by far the most important reason to hold up the confirmation, there are some unanswered questions about Petraeus's veracity. See for example, this debate a year ago over whether Petraeus lied to a Congressional committee about US policy on arming Sunni tribes, and was at the most charitable very highly misleading to Congress about the level of violence in Iraq. Not to mention the suggestion he may recently have been less than forthcoming about discussions with Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki regarding military action in Basra.

Why should Congress confirm Petraeus to such high office at a critical time in our two ongoing military actions when he has a proven record of failing to testify fully and honestly?

But I Don't Have Any Dumb Friends

Scholars and Rogues, How to win the Iraq war debate against your dumb friends.

Recently I was arguing with one of my dumber friends about the Iraq war. He loves Bush and thinks bigger bombs is the answer in Iraq. I wasn’t gaining any ground in the argument until I used a simple analogy. I said, “Your solution is like shattering an expensive vase and then saying, ‘We need to keep smashing it until it’s fixed.’”

I stumped him. He was silent. So here’s a brief list of other analogies you can use on your dumb friends. And the truth is, I’ve seen similar ones work on some of the smartest political pundits.

Actually, I'm not sure if I know anyone who supports the war any more, although I know people with varying views about how one extricates from it. If they do support it, they're awful quiet about it. Statistically, you'd expect there would be a number in the student body, but then I don't spend that much time talking politics with students. Maybe I should?

Sick

I wasn't going to post anything on this sad milestone of 4,000 US military fatalities in Iraq. The number is at once numbing, infuriating, obscene, and vastly under-stated, as it leaves out the non-military US fatalities, many many US military casualties whose injuries will plague them and their families for the next sixty or more years, the physically raped US civilian workers with no recourse, the metaphorically raped US taxpayers, the many tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, who knows how many Iraqi civilians injured, the millions of Iraqis displaced or forced into exile, and on and on.

And then I saw this: Crooks and Liars » Cheney on 4000 American Dead: “They Volunteered”

And so I posted something after all.

Fallon Firing Fallout: Petraeus Wins

It looks to me as if the big winner in the Fallon firing (and even Steve Clemons says it is a firing) is Adm. Fallon's nominal subordinate Gen. David Petraeus. It didn't look good for Petraeus to have his boss on a different page; it revealed Petraeus's spin for what it was.

And it's important for Petraeus to look good: not primarily because he's at least a long-shot contender for the vice-presidential slot on the McCain ticket, but because Petraeus is the key to the administration's domestic strategy for the fall.

Bush desperately wants a Republican to succeed him, not just to avoid the visible repudiation but also to keep the scandals under the rug. The linchpin of the political strategy is to tar the Democrats as not just weak on defense but part of the Dolchstoßlegende (stab in the back) tendency. And the man who's going to do much of the heavy lifting for Bush is Petraeus, who's currently hoping to do another round of testimony on the Hill on or about 9/11/08 — just as the electoral season kicks into high gear.

(Why the Democrats would allow this testimony on such a charged date is beyond me, but there's no understanding the political death wishes and spinelessness of our Senators. They allowed it last year.)

[Update (3/12): I'm told this year's testimony is actually scheduled for April 8 and 9 — the dates that US forces took Baghdad and the Saddam statue came down. Another triumph of Democratic planing.]

Vladeck on Omar and Munaf

At PrawfBlawg (like the blog, hate the name), Steve Vladeck has a very insightful post on two cases pending before the Supreme Court: Did Omar and Munaf Just Become the Same Case?

Steve being a friend, I know he'll forgive me for my quoting it in full:

Over at Opinio Juris, Kevin Heller has news of an immensely important development — the Iraqi Court of Cassation's reversal of Mohammed Munaf's conviction by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (the “CCC-I”). Munaf's habeas petition is one of two brought by U.S. citizens detained in Iraq set to be argued before the Supreme Court later this month (and in which I co-authored an amicus brief in support of the federal courts' jurisdiction).

Significantly, the distinction between Munaf and the other detainee — Omar — relied upon by the D.C. Circuit was Munaf's conviction by the CCC-I… the lower courts concluded that, where the U.S. citizen-detainee had not been tried and convicted (Omar), there was jurisdiction; where he had, there wasn't (Munaf).

If Munaf's conviction has now been reversed, that has the potential to change the whole complexion of the two cases; now, both present a challenge to “pure” executive detention, without the wrinkle added by Munaf's conviction (subsequent to the filing of his habeas petition). Indeed, Munaf's almost becomes the stronger case, since his, unlike Omar's, is not in the posture of a grant of a preliminary injunction…

How will the government respond? Will the Supreme Court now just decide Omar, and vacate and remand Munaf for further proceedings not inconsistent therewith?

One thing is for sure: If this all pans out, the reversal of Munaf's conviction serves to reinforce the deep flaws in his trial in the first place, and the reason why federal judicial review of his detention via habeas was—and continues to be—so critical in his case.

I Like This Video

I like this What is this 'Iraq war' charge on my bill? video from Less Jobs. More Wars. Especially the ending.

Why Republicans Will Lose The Presidency In 2008

YouTube - Why Republicans Will Lose The Presidency In 2008

Well, that and the economy.

Lies, Lies, Lies

Lies abound.

• Lies, Damned Lies, a Searchable Database of Lies — links to and describes a new database of Bush administration lies about Iraq
• Computers piece together millions of shredded Stasi documents — unraveling Communist lies
• Why similar forensics may be needed here in the USA: Plame Investigation and Missing Emails: Analysis on Emails

Another Reason for Americans to be Proud of Our Government

Not.

Kevin Jon Heller, Bilal Hussein's Kangaroo Court (summarizing Scott Horton's excellent An Update on the Trial of Bilal Hussein).

Given how raw the US's behavior is, this case has gotten remarkably little media: You'd expect reporters to care more about the treatment of a fellow journalist. Perhaps the Pentagon's anti-reporter tactics are getting better?

Petraeus: Hero, REMF, or Model Proconsul?

Reading this rabidly negative deconstruction of Gen. Petraeus's fruit salad (the tabs and medals on an officer's dress uniform), I was struck by the extent to which it remained open to a counter-narrative. It may be that Patraeus is the antithesis of a fighting General, but it may also be that he is a very good administrator (even if he's also a man who married well and is very good at ascending in environments studded with greasy poles).

It is possible to distrust, even despise, the bootlicking of superiors — evident in the General's public and obsequious support of the Bush administration's political objectives — traits alleged in that article to be long-running hallmarks of a career, and yet admire the ability to motivate subordinates and manipulate the media. Even if one discounts for the besotted reporter factor, it seems pretty clear that the areas of Iraq that General Petraeus's troops occupied were more peaceful and stayed bought longer than other non-Kurdish areas under US control. That was an achievement, exactly the sort we hope for from our modern military Proconsuls, although not one that can easily be replicated on a larger scale now that he's starting from a worse position.

What's Big, Wet, and Can Drown 500,000 People?

A nightmare: a dam built on a foundation of gypsum —which dissolves when it comes into contact with water.

Iraqi Dam Seen In Danger of Deadly Collapse: The largest dam in Iraq is in serious danger of an imminent collapse that could unleash a trillion-gallon wave of water, possibly killing thousands of people and flooding two of the largest cities in the country, according to new assessments by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other U.S. officials.

Even in a country gripped by daily bloodshed, the possibility of a catastrophic failure of the Mosul Dam has alarmed American officials, who have concluded that it could lead to as many as 500,000 civilian deaths by drowning Mosul under 65 feet of water and parts of Baghdad under 15 feet, said Abdulkhalik Thanoon Ayoub, the dam manager. “The Mosul dam is judged to have an unacceptable annual failure probability,” in the dry wording of an Army Corps of Engineers draft report.

At the same time, a U.S. reconstruction project to help shore up the dam in northern Iraq has been marred by incompetence and mismanagement, according to Iraqi officials and a report by a U.S. oversight agency to be released Tuesday.

Right, dictator's stupid decision followed up by US incompetence and mis-management in Iraq. If only it was only a nightmare.

See also The Carpetbagger for the usual good commentary.

We Need More of This

I don't endorse every word of this, but I like the spirit of it.

Davis Fleetwood, STUDENTS: A CHALLENGE FOR YOU:

Yes, we need lots more of this.

Icelandic Army of One Heads Home from Iraq

It seems that Iceland was one of the countries counted in the 'coalition of the willing' in Iraq — even though it had exactly one soldier on the ground, a press aide. And now, the coalition is down one member because he's going home.

Comedian Andy Cobb has done a video to commemorate this event:

Spanish 'Downing Street Papers'

They're calling the scoop by El Pais the Spanish Downing Street Memo.

Just as with the UK version, the leaked Spanish transcript of a talk between GWB and Spanish PM Aznar in February 2003 shows Bush planning to invade privately while publicly denying it. This time he's saying,

Saddam Husein will not change and will keep on playing games. The time has come to get rid of him. That's the way it is. For my part, I will try, from now on, to use the most subtle rhetoric possible, while we seek approval of the resolution

In other words, as if you didn't know, the invasion decision was taken well before the authorizing resolution.

But, come on people, were there really many folks who thought Bush had sent basically the whole US Army to sit on Iraq's borders just to bring them home again?

No, the issue now is if they ever get to come home.

Rats

In 14 Spy Squirrels In Iranian Custody we learn that Iranian authorities have recently arrested more than a dozen squirrels for espionage. Unfortunately, this has no connection with the other piece of Middle-East bait-related news, U.S. Aims To Lure Insurgents With 'Bait': Snipers Describe Classified Program.

From the second story:

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

From the first story:

“In recent weeks, intelligence operatives have arrested 14 squirrels within Iran's borders,” state-sponsored news agency IRNA reported. “The squirrels were carrying spy gear of foreign agencies, and were stopped before they could act, thanks to the alertness of our intelligence services.”

One story is horrific — our tax money is now being used to shoot civilians who bend over to investigate shiny stuff on the street — and the other story is just weird. The article is silent as to what sort of bait was used to catch the squirrels.

Priorities

The Democrats (and a some Republicans) want to increase funding for medical care for poor children. The specter of healthy poor children cased by the expenditure of tax money has so terrified GW Bush that it has turned him into a born-again fiscal tightwad, or so his stennographers would have it. (Actually, for some strange reason the stenography is silent on the subject of the children…)

The debate is pretty simple: how many kids to insure in the federal scheme, with the understanding that as the number grows, the program reaches up into the working poor and even if funded to Democratic levels, substantially above the poverty line.

The Speaker's office has more on the issue, along with a nice chart comparing the cost of this program to a few weeks of the Iraq occupation. (They call it a war.)

Political Dysfunction on a Cosmic Scale

alicublog writes:

It is worth noting that today's session was mainly about a plan for withdrawal from an occupation which is disapproved by citizens of the occupying country as well as those of the occupied country. But neither the Democratic leadership nor the Republican Administration perceive a political benefit to themselves from a quick exit. So they talk about timetables and drawdown and leave it to their operatives to spin the analysis to their advantage.

I found my way there because Kevin Drum says it's one of the funniest blogs and I wanted a laugh.

Myself, I think you need a pretty bleak sense of humor to find this funny.

Hard at Work

Great compilation at The Democratic Party | It's Working? That Old Line Again?:

“The terrorists and the Baathists loyal to the old regime will fail because America and our allies have a strategy, and ours trategy is working.”
President Bush
November 1, 2003

“Our strategy is working.”
Vice President Cheney
September 28, 2004

“That's our strategy. And it is working and it is going to work, for the good of the country.”
President Bush
June 24, 2005

“Our strategy is working.”
White House's “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq”
November 30, 2005

“This approach is working.”
President Bush
December 7, 2005

“It is a concrete example of how our strategy is working.”
Frm. White House spokesman Scott McClellan
March 20, 2006

“It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality of the enemy in Iraq. Yet the strategy is working.”
President Bush
March 20, 2006

Expect to be worked over again next week when the White House issues its report under Gen. Petraeus's name.

Wesley Clark: Too Loyal To His Friends, Not Loyal Enough to the Nation?

boingboing reprints an allegation that Wesley Clark knew that the administration decided to attack Iraq (and several other countries) long, long before the actual invasion:

“About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, ‘Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re too busy.’ He said, ‘No, no.’ He says, ‘We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.’ This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, ‘We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘I guess they don’t know what else to do.’ So I said, ‘Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al Qaeda?’ He said, ‘No, no.’ He says, ‘There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.’ He said, ‘I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.’ And he said, ‘I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.’ So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, ‘Are we still going to war with Iraq?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s worse than that.’ He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, ‘I just got this from upstairs’—meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office—“today.” And he said, ‘This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.’ I said, ‘Is it classified?’ He said, ‘Yes, sir.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t show it to me.’ And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, ‘You remember that?’ He said, ‘Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!’”

Clark only told this story for the first time recently. If true, and if it wasn't just contingency planning but a real “go” order, didn't he have a duty to speak out much sooner?

How the Bush Administration REALLY Treats Soldiers

Below I quote a very disturbing story from the Army of Dude blog by Alex Horton, a 22 year old from Frisco, Texas.

Last week I heard a story of official blackmail similar to this one from a friend who is a reserve officer regarding the treatment of some career officers he knows — so this blackmail isn't limited to the enlisted ranks.

Army of Dude: Happy Dependence Day!: Four years of war and this Army is a skeleton of its former self. Equipment is broken or obsolete, thousands are dead and wounded and many of us can’t wait to get off the Hindenburg. For awhile, deployments were kept to a year, with at least twelve months back home to recuperate, to get new equipment, to bury the dead. To keep the surge going, deployments have been extended to fifteen months to keep the year at home from shrinking down to nine or less months. The number of people getting out was devastating, so the Army needed a new plan to keep people in. New slogan and advertising campaign? Check. Stop loss program? Check. Bigger bonuses? Check. Guaranteeing non-deployable positions at training posts and recruiting stations, acknowledging people are scared stiff to go to Iraq? Check. Still the numbers are low. After watching too many 80s gang movies, someone thought of such a simple, foolproof idea: good ol’ fashioned blackmail.

Before we left Baghdad, the re-enlistment briefs got a little more disturbing. Instead of letting you know what a bum you’ll become if you leave the Army after your enlistment, they put it in simple terms: if you don’t re-enlist, you’ll be thrown in 5th Brigade, the Stryker unit on Ft. Lewis that was being stood up, and yes, they were deploying as soon as they could. So you might as well stay where your friends are and come back to Iraq with them. Otherwise, you’ll be taking your chances by getting your ass stop-lossed and sent to Iraq in as little as six months to a year after you returned. Better off with the sure thing. Here’s a pen, junior. If you got out after July 2008, you were screwed. I, on the other hand, was in the clear since I was getting out at the end of 2007. The options were re-enlist, extend to meet the unit’s needs, or take no action. I checked take no action, which meant my name would be added to the pool of possible candidates for 5th Brigade. No matter. It was of no consequence if I separated from the Army in 3rd or 5th Brigade. A lot of us were in that boat. Still, it spooked us that someone could come to us with a list and a smile and say in so many words that we were fucked into another deployment unless we added years to our contracts. In short, the thanks we got for serving our country was being forced into a game of Russian Roulette. Take the risk, pull the trigger. See what happens.

I suggest you tell this story the next time anyone dares suggest that anything short of calling for withdrawal amounts to “supporting the troops.”

Iraq Vets Ask Bush to Stop Blocking Tillman Investigation

A group of Iraq War veterans invites you to sign on to their letter asking Bush to stop blocking the investigation into the death of Cpl. Pat Tillman.

Full text of the letter below.

President George W. Bush The White House
Washington, DC

Mr. President, Sir:

On behalf of the veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and those troops still in theater, we implore you to reconsider your decision to invoke claims of executive privilege in refusing to share vital documents regarding the death of Corporal Pat Tillman with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

As you know, this week the Associated Press obtained the medical examiner's finding at the time of his death that Corporal Tillman's fatal wounds seemed to indicate shots fired from ten yards away, or less. The doctors who examined Corporal Tillman urged a criminal investigation into his death be opened at that time, and were refused. Since that time, the Department of Defense has put forth two explanations for the death of Corporal Tillman, the first of which was proven false, and a second which now seems to have been proven to be a lie, as well. In both cases, the White House has actively pushed these false findings to the public.

Your administration has faithfully shared a number of documents with the committee, but has withheld a number of requested documents under the specious argument that sharing the documents would violate confidentiality among you and your staff. For instance, the Committee has requested a number of communications between senior administration officials and the Pentagon, which may offer important details into the death of Corporal Tillman, and if there was an attempt to cover them up, by some in the Executive Branch.

Respectfully, Sir, when it comes to outright lies conveyed to the public about the death of a soldier - especially one like Corporal Tillman whose service was used as a recruiting poster for the military - there is nothing which cannot be shared with the Legislative Branch or the people.

Confidence in the institution of the military from those within is at stake, the longer you withhold information. The longer questions remain about the death of Corporal Tillman and possible White House involvement in an ensuing cover-up, the more our troops will question whether this government will properly honor their sacrifice and let their families know the truth, if they are killed in action. It is simply impossible for the military to function, if those in its ranks do not have full faith in our leadership up the chain of command, all the way to Washington.

Additionally, by letting questions fester regarding the death of Corporal Tillman, you are placing an undue burden on our recruiters, at a time when our Army and Marine Corps can ill-afford more of a drop off in recruiting. Our military depends on being able to visit homes and gaining the trust of mothers and fathers to allow their 18-year old son or daughter to wear the uniform. What mother would allow her son or daughter to serve a nation she feels will not honor her child's service?

Finally, as Commander in Chief, you owe the complete and total truth to Corporal Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman. Those of us who served know that it is the duty of any officer to write to the families of those under us who were killed, and tell them the entire truth regarding their love one's death. To lie about any details or withhold any information would not just cause unjust pain to the survivors, but is to dishonor the fallen. As our nation's top commander, it is your duty to Pat Tillman and his family to release all materials related to his death.

For the good of our military, our troops, the Tillmans, and our nation, we respectfully call on you to comply with all past and future requests of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on the matter of the death of Corporal Tillman.

Respectfully,

Jon Soltz
Chairman, VoteVets.org
Iraq War Veteran, US Army
New York, NY

Michael Breen
Former US Army Ranger
Iraq and Afghanistan War Veteran
Seattle, WA

Brandon Friedman
Iraq and Afghanistan War Veteran, US Army
Dallas, TX

Elliot Anderson
Afghanistan War Veteran, US Marine Corps
Las Vegas, NV

Lt. Col. Andrew Horne (ret.)
Iraq War Veteran, US Marine Corps
Louisville, KY

Peter Granato
Iraq War Veteran, US Army
Washington, DC

John Bruhns
Iraq War Veteran, US Army
Philadelphia, PA

Joseph Kramer
Iraq War Veteran, US Army
Pittsburgh, PA

The Past Is Not Past

Charles Pierce links the current Iraq debacle to our national failure to punish the people behind Iran-Contra—in part due to an earlier round of presidential pardons. There more than something to that, but I think it goes deeper.

Today's brazenly pardoned crimes may be linked to yesterday's brazenly pardoned crimes, but today's policy blunders have their roots a bit earlier: it was much worse for your career (both iin the bureaucracy and in the legislature) to be right too early about Vietnam than it was to be wrong too long. And too many people in DC have learned all those lessons all too well.

Had Enough?

Four years ago, GW Bush told US attackers in Iraq to bring them on. And they did.

Since then, 3,372 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, and tens of thousands more injured or wounded. (Details.) Not to mention the civilian death and destruction.

And for what, exactly?

Memorial Day (III)

I'm very happy to be in Italy today for this interesting conference, but I'm just a little bit sorry that as a result I can't join in with any of the activities designed to Support the troops. End the war.

If you're in the US today, you can.

Memorial Day (II)

Juan Cole has some thoughts about Memorial Day 2007.

Memorial Day

Daily Kos: Numbers

Q: “Tony, American deaths in Iraq have reached 2,500. Is there any response or reaction from the President on that?”

MR. SNOW: “It's a number, and every time there's one of these 500 benchmarks people want something.” — White House Press Conference, 15 June 2006

Things Are Looking Up in Iraq -- Official

(via Jim Henley)

A General Takes a Strong Stand on Torture

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the US military commander/viceroy in Iraq may be “overrated”, but he's done at least one thing right: taking a strong stand against torture.

John Edwards to Organize War Protest Memorial Day Weekend

Democratic Presidential hopeful John Edwards is starting a new effort to “support the troops and end the war” and he's registered a very long domain name to organize it: supportthetroopsendthewar.com: Support the troops. End the war. Take action May 26th, 27th, 28th.

Take Action May 26th, 27th, 28th

As citizens, we honor and support our troops for their service and sacrifice.

As Americans, we are blessed by that sacrifice and support, which keeps us safe and keeps us strong.

As patriots, we call on our government to support our troops in the most important way it can - by ending this war and bringing them home.

This Memorial Day weekend, we will all take responsibility for the country we love and the men and women who protect it. We will volunteer, we will pray, and we will speak out. Each of us has a responsibility to act, a duty to our troops and to each other. Support the troops. End the war.

The site invites people to sign up for demonstrations and other activities in their neighborhoods.

I heard about this because for reasons never explained to me I was invited onto a very brief one-way conference call in which Edwards announced the initiative. He didn't talk long, but he said all the right things: that the movement to end the war was more important than a political campaign, that the point of the event was to support the troops by bringing them home.

“We're going to reclaim patriotism.”

…

“The best way to serve our troops is to end this war.”

Edwards also has a YouTube promo for the event.

Now I feel bad that I'm going to be at a conference in Bologna over Memorial Day weekend. So I won't be demonstrating in Miami. But I do agree that the time has come to be visible, and I'm going to have to find other ways to do that.

I'm Part of the Majority

TPM Cafe, New Poll: Solid Majority Wants Congress To Send Bush Another Bill With Timetables,

Fifty four percent of Americans oppose President Bush's veto of Congress' Iraq withdrawal bill, and a solid majority wants Congress to send Bush another Iraq bill containing withdrawal timetables

I am part of the majority. Why is it so silent?

Silent or not, I do think that the electorate will take its revenge at 2008. Bush is making Hoover look good. And Hoover defined his party for over a generation. We'll get the enablers.

Basic Lessons in Democracy

“…democracy: Politicians run countries. You got a problem with that?”

Well, yes, some Leo Straussian right-wing types do have a problem with that.

A Grim Prognosis for Iraq

Juan Cole has an anonymous guest commentator, described as “a canny Vietnam veteran” who has a grim prognosis for Iraq. Not pleasant reading. If even half of these thing are right…

Do The Numbers

Some statistics from Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office:

Number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq as of May 1, 2003: 139 [DoD, 5/1/07]

Number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq: 3,351 [DoD, 5/1/07]

Number of U.S. troops wounded in action in Iraq: 25,090 [DoD, 5/1/07]

Number of wounded in action and unable to return to duty: 11,215 [DoD, 5/1/07]

Number of troops killed so far this month (April): 104 [icasualties.org, 4/30/07] 

Number of troops killed in December 2006: 112 – the highest since November 2004 [icasualties.org, 4/30/07]

Percent of U.S. troops killed by Improvised Explosive Devices in March 2007: nearly 60 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Number of insurgents in Iraq in November 2003: 5,000 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Number of insurgents in Iraq in March 2007: 70,000 (Sunni only) [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Number of multi-fatality bombings in May 2004: 9 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Number of multi-family bombings so far this month (April): 41 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Estimated number of people killed by multiple fatality bombings since May 2003: 12,108 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Number of civilian casualties in Iraq since U.S.-led invasion: estimates range from 54,000 – 76,500 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]
 
Average number of daily attacks by insurgents in July 2003: 16 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Average number of daily attacks by insurgents between November 2006 and February 2007: 149 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]


Cost of the War to American Taxpayers

“The annual cost of the Iraq war has more than doubled between 2003 and 2006, according to a new U.S. government report. With 20,000 more troops being prepared to go to Iraq, the costs will rise even more.”
— “Annual Iraq war cost has doubled since '03,” UPI, 1/10/07

Amount appropriated for the Iraq War so far: $379 billion [House Appropriations Committee]

Approximate amount U.S. currently spending in Iraq per month: $8 billion [CRS, 9/22/06]

Amount in President Bush’s request for new DOD spending for the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan: $235 billion (including a FY 2007 supplemental of $93 billion and a FY 2008 supplemental of $142 billion) [Bush budget]


Strain on the Military

“The thousands of troops that President Bush is expected to order to Iraq will join the fight largely without the protection of the latest armored vehicles that withstand bomb blasts far better than the Humvees in wide use, military officers said.”
— “Better armor lacking for new troops in Iraq,” Baltimore Sun, 1/10/07

Number of U.S. troops currently in Iraq (approximate): 146,000 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Projected number of U.S. troops in Iraq when the “surge” is completed (by summer 2007): 160,000 [Palm Beach Post, 4/16/07]

Number of soldiers in the Army that have served more than one tour in Iraq: 170,000 [Christian Science Monitor, 1/9/07]

Percent of the Army’s available active duty combat brigades that have served at least a 12-month tour in Iraq or Afghanistan: 100 [Washington Post, 9/14/06]

Number of active duty or reserve brigades in the U.S. considered “combat ready”: 0 [Christian Science Monitor, 9/22/06]

Number of active duty military who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001: 1.1 million [DoD, 3/31/07]

Number of National Guard and Reservists who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001: 421,981 [DoD, 3/31/07] 

Number of National Guard and Reservists deployed more than once since 2001: 84,198 [DoD, 8/31/06]

Percent of troops currently deployed who are in the National Guard and Reserves: 22 [DoD, 3/31/07]

Number of months longer Army troops in Iraq will have to serve as a result of a blanket tour extension order issued by the Pentagon: at least 3 months [Pentagon News Briefing, 4/11/07] 

Length of average mobilization for Reserve and National Guard members: 18 months [Washington Post, 11/5/06] 

Percent of National Guard or Reserve units so poorly equipped they are rated “not ready”: 88 [Washington Post, 3/2/07]

Amount of essential equipment the Army National Guard has on-hand here at home: 30% [GAO Testimony, 9/21/06]

Amount Army needs to repair or replace equipment destroyed/deteriorated in Iraq: $66.1 billion [CBS/AP, 9/25/06]

Amount of time Army needs to catch up on backlog of equipment repairs generated from Iraq war: 3 years [ABC News, 2/10/07] 


Reconstruction Problems and Lack of Accountability

“A recent Defense inspector general investigation into interagency purchases placed through the Treasury Department's FedSource program uncovered major problems, including inadequate competition. Every award examined by the IG was flawed. Other problems included missing contracting agreements, insufficient price documentation and a lack of market research. Defense auditors also identified 21 potential violations of the Anti-Deficiency Act, which bars spending in excess of available resources.”
— “Defense IG finds major flaws in contracts issued via Treasury,” National Journal, 1/3/07

Amount Iraqi government says is needed over the next 4 years to rebuild country’s infrastructure: $100 billion [Reuters, 10/31/06]

Amount of Iraqi reconstruction funds unaccounted for by the Coalition Provisional Authority: $8.8 billion [Boston Globe, 4/6/06]

Tons of cash shipped to Iraq in December 2003 and June 2004 under the authority of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority: 363 [Reuters, 2/12/07]

Amount of the $11.8 million worth of U.S.-financed electrical generators at Baghdad airport that are no longer working: $8.6 million [NYT, 4/29/07]

Number of hours per day of electricity in Baghdad prior to the war: 16-24 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Number of hours per day of electricity in Baghdad, April 2007: 5.8 [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Oil production – barrels per day – prior to the war: 2.5 million [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Oil production – barrels per day – April 2007: 2.1 million [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Unemployment rate in Iraq (December 2006): estimates range from 25% to 40% [Brookings Institution, 4/26/07]

Average rate of inflation in Iraq in 2006: 50% [DoD, 3/07]

Amount the U.S. has allocated to private contractors for reconstruction and rebuilding efforts in Iraq since the beginning of the war. $50 billion [60 Minutes, 2/12/06]

Amount of taxpayer dollars squandered by the government in reconstruction contracts according to U.S. auditors: $10 billion [CNN, 2/15/07]

Amount of taxpayer money spent by Halliburton that the Defense Contract Audit Agency has deemed either excessive or insufficiently documented:  $1.47 billion [Boston Globe, 6/28/05]

White House office that helped facilitate a no-bid Iraq reconstruction contract worth $7 billion to Halliburton: Vice President Cheney [GAO, June 2004]

Amount Halliburton has received in “cost plus” contracts for Iraq reconstruction: $25.7 billion [House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Democratic Staff, 3/07]

Amount the “virtual pandemic” of corruption costs Iraq each year according to the Special Inspector General of Iraq Reconstruction: more than $5 billion [Associated Press, 4/30/07]
 
Number of weapons bought by the U.S. intended for Iraqi troops that are now missing: 14,030 [SIGIR, 10/29/06]


Public Opinion

“Only 12% of Americans back a troop increase, compared with 52% who prefer a timetable for withdrawal, a recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found.”
— “Democrats will soon get a say on Iraq,” Los Angeles Times, 12/27/06

Percent of Americans who are disapprove of the way President Bush is handling the situation in Iraq: 66% [Wall Street Journal/NBC, 4/25/07]

Percent of Americans who favor setting a timetable that provides for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2008:  64% [CBS News/New York Times, 4/26/07] 

Percent of Americans who believe that Congress, not the President, should have the last say when it comes to setting troop levels in Iraq:  57% [CBS News/New York Times, 4/26/07]


Terrorism & Weapons of Mass Destruction

“A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.”
— “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,” New York Times, 9/24/06

Days since 9/11 attacks that Osama bin Laden has remained free: 2,058 [4/30/07]

Estimated minimum number of nuclear weapons likely produced by North Korea during the Bush Administration: 7 [Reuters, 10/26/06]

Percent decrease in funding for the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to contain loose nuclear material under the President’s Fiscal Year 2007 budget: 10.4 [Center for American Progress, 5/3/06]

Tell Me Again About the 'Good News' from Iraq

One of the more tiresome talking points from the administration and its fellow travelers is that the (so-called) liberal media just doesn't report enough of the good news from Iraq. You know, all the great new schools and hospitals. The electricity that now works four hours a day. And so on.

Well someone went out and looked at some of the so-called good news (the parts in the areas where it isn't suicidal to go look) and found that the news wasn't all that good in many cases: Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling.

Failing to build in mechanisms for maintenance is one of the most common errors in development assistance. And here, as in everything else to do with Iraq, this administration has not only failed to learn from experience, it has demonstrated a total lack of interest in it.

Yes, more money down the rat hole. And remember that we're borrowing to pay for all this while giving the richest 1% of the population big tax cuts. These deferred taxes mean that my kids will be stuck with the bill.

For an equally depressing example of administration cluelessness and financial waste that hurt people — in this case the victims in New Orleans, see this exposé of how the U.S. failed to utilize foreign assistance for Katrina — in some cases turning it down, in others just letting it rot.

What's Doing (Reptiles Dept.)

I just want to thank all the people who have kept the comments lively at The Buck Doesn't Even Stop By For Visits while I've been somewhat distracted by work.

If I know what's good for me, blogging will be light for the next few days — I have to write an exam and do major surgery to a paper.

The world certainly is doing its best, however, to be very distracting.

For one thing, there's a good-sized scaly toothed reptile back in the campus lake. I saw about seven eights of it, but not the snout which it had lodged under something at the bank of the lake, so I don't know if it's a gator or a croc, but I'd guess gator. The whatever-it-was had beached the front of its face, nose first, only 100 feet or so from the Rathskeller where students were happily boozing it up on a Friday afternoon, but there was a campus cop keeping the passing students from getting too close. He didn't seem to be enjoying the job, and gave a rather grim smile when I observed that the gator had a police escort.

Previous posts on our toothy friends include Crocodile Reminder, Crocodile Coincidence, What? A Croc?, Croc II !, Cold Front Flushes Out UM Croc, Fair Warning (Alligator Dept.), Who Gets Custody of the Alligator ? and of course Exam Question: Is an Alligator a Deadly Weapon?. It's not an obsession, really, just a fact of life.

Speaking of reptiles, the DoJ has done another Friday evening document dump.

Speaking of sinking your teeth into things, or maybe it's man-bites-dog, don't miss Army Officer Accuses Generals of 'Intellectual and Moral Failures' an amazing article about a Lt. Col. attacking his superiors (generically, not by name) in a prestigious army journal for incompetence and dishonesty in their prosecution of the Iraq war and for misleading Congress about it.

“After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public,” he writes. “For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq.”

Yingling said he decided to write the article after attending Purple Heart and deployment ceremonies for Army soldiers. “I find it hard to look them in the eye,” he said in an interview. “Our generals are not worthy of their soldiers.”

Next to last, but not least, the Bush administration war on the rule of law continues apace with its latest attempt to make it impossible for lawyers to provide meaningful or effective representation for Guantanamo detainees. I would write about this but words fail me to describe the petty viciousness of this idea and the manifest hostility to the very due process that I would have thought was one of the great achievements of our civilization. The NYT has an editorial which says part of what needs saying; some more of it is found in this Conversation with Gitmo Lawyer on Proposed DOJ Rules. Don't look to the Supreme Court to do anything fast — in tangentially related cases, it's not rushing the process, which is Shakespearian in its delay:

“For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,”

Meanwhile, only the willful blindness of one or two men (Bush, Chaney, take your pick), ensures that the US Army will continue to bleed itself dry in Iraq, to no visible benefit to anyone outside the White House. I understand that our departure could lead to horrors — and think we have a duty to mitigate them, especially be admitting a very large number of refugees here in order to protect all the people who have helped us. If there were a plausible scenario by which staying on would allow us to enact the 'Pottery Barn rule' (you broke it, you pay for it), I could support that. But the occupation is as big a failure as the initial military campaign was a success. No one arguing for staying on has a winning strategy that they can articulate other than “retreat is not an option”.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.

Iraq: Bad to Bad (or Worse)

If the administration were smarter it wouldn't let anyone intelligent visit Iraq, as they tend to report that the emperor has no clothes — or at least no realistic Iraq policy.

Lawrence Korb just got back from a trip to Iraq. “Unreal” seemed to be his overall reaction to the PowerPoint-laden presentations he heard from various American and Iraqi officials, most of which were entirely divorced from the ground-level reality of day-to-day life in Iraq. In a different sense it also applies to his conclusions about the surge:

Getting through Iraqi customs was a chore….The long wait did allow me to speak to some of the contractors about the situation on the ground. When I assured them I was not a member of the press, they were unanimous that the surge was not working….The most optimistic projection was “maybe temporarily.” But most people speaking off the record believe that the insurgents will shift to other areas and lay low for a while in Baghdad.

Actually, wasn't the ban on brains the initial US occupation strategy?

IRAC and Ruin

Concurring Opinions: IRAC in Iraq. Great and wrenching post.

The Five Stages of Rightist Iraq Commentary

Sadly, No! brings us a modified Kübler-Ross process, Iraq edition:

1. Denial: “The media doesn’t show the good news in Iraq.”

2. Anger: “The treasonous far-left-liberals and their media lapdogs are making us lose in Iraq.”

3. Bargaining: “If we send x-thousand more troops to Iraq, victory will be ours.”

4. Depression: “Did you catch 300 yet? [munch-munch-burp] God, it made me hate liberals even more. [channels flipping] They wouldn’t last a day in ancient Sparta.”

5. Advanced Literary Theory: “The hegemonic binary of ’success’ and ‘failure’ traumatizes the (re)interpretive possibilities of an ethos of jouissance regarding the War in Iraq.

Introducing the iRack

OK, this is really funny.

YouTube - MADtv - iRack :

There Must Be Peace

There Must Be Peace, a video photo montage and commentary by Stirling Newberry.

The music, incidentally, is from the last three movements of Newberry's own Piano Sonata in C, “Ares”.

Florida's Troop-Killers

The other day, Republican members of the House Appropriations Committee unanimously opposed requiring that the troops sent to Iraq be properly prepared for their mission and protected with armor. As they've done often before, and as they will undoubtedly do again.

Over at Daily Kos, one of the diarists has come up with a name for the Representatives who send troops into harm's way without adequate equipment, training or rest.

He calls them “troop-killers”.

Harsh? You bet. Justified? Yes. It has come to that. There really is no 'nice' name for people from a country as rich as ours who send other people's children, spouses, and parents into combat without basic necessities like body armor, armor for their vehicles, or the weapons they trained with. I recognize that there might be conflicts — like World War II — in which the Army would have to suspend its rotation policies and send units that have served a tour of duty back into theater without the year's rest, rehab and equipment refit that our doctrine says is needed. But I don't accept that Iraq, a war of (erroneous) choice, is a conflict on which national survival depends.

• Ander Crenshaw, 4th District in Jacksonville;
• Dave Weldon, 15th District - Melbourne & Vero Beach;
• C.W. “Bill” Young, 10th District - Pinellas County.

If you happen to be reading this from their neighborhood, why not give them a (polite) call and tell them what you think of this sort of behavior.

What Have I Done to End the War Today?

Richard Landeck, 56, of Wheaton, IL recently sent off a letter to President Bush, signing it as the “proud father of a fallen soldier.” Landeck’s son, Captain Kevin Landeck, died this past February in Iraq.

You can read the full painful text of the letter at A Father Addresses George Bush.

Then ask yourself what you will do to end the war today.

Notes From An Alternate Reality

Someone has a very active imagination. If only this video was real:

Soldiers Claim Medically Unfit Being Resent into Combat Theater to Make Up Shortages

This is an amazingly serious charge. It seems credible given that it's corroborated by several soldiers.

The Army is ordering injured troops to go to Iraq: As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's “physical profile,” an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems — from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

Read the whole thing. I suppose it might not be true — but we'll never know for sure unless Congress (or SecDef Gates) investigates. And if true, it's just further black irony on the “support the troops” mantra.

Very Ugly War Stories. But Are They True?

Joshua Key is said to be a US Army deserter who fled to Canada (which, incidentally, has an extradition treaty with the US for deserters and draft dodgers now). He's published a book, The Deserter's Tale, which purports to be an account of atrocities he witnessed while serving in Iraq. An excerpt — very ugly if true — is online at Why I fled George Bush's war.

As a deserter, Key has an obvious interest in justifying himself. So I think these very serious allegations require corroboration before we can safely rely on them. But serious charges of random violence and apparent gang rape demand at least some investigation. Especially as the book is going to have Canadian, Australian, French, German, Dutch, Indian, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish and Japanese editions.

Unfortunately, that sort of investigation is not at all easy. And the US Army presumably has no great interest in risking corroboration. I fear we may never know for sure.

A Good Question

Steve Vlakeck would like to know How many U.S. citizens are being detained by the U.S. military in Iraq?.

It's a good question. Actually, Steve has a whole raft of them up at Niemanwatchdog.org.

Two Weeks is Forever in PR

If a week is a long time in politics, then two weeks must be forever in PR.

New Evidence Clouds U.S. Case against Iran: Two weeks ago, the Bush administration organized an intelligence briefing for journalists in Iraq to demonstrate that Iran was providing weapons to Iraqi insurgents. According to the anonymous briefers, the weapons — particularly explosively formed penetrators or E.F.P.s — were manufactured in Iran and provided to insurgents by the Quds Force — a fact that meant direction for the operation was “coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government.”

Well. A raid in southern Iraq on Saturday seems to have complicated the case.

It seems the Iraqis were making the stuff that the US had been saying could only have come from IraqIran. And from the markings on the boxes, it seems most of the key parts came straight from non-Iranian factories.

I hope the Times and Post put this on their front pages with the same prominence they gave the scare stories two weeks ago.

If True, There is No Way to Spin This as a Smart Move

The following item is from the Inter Press Service, an organization that I don't know much about. According to the not-100%-reliable Wikipedia, IPS is an Italian-based organization dedicated to giving third world news and journalists more prominence. The fact of the raid is also reported by the International Federation of Journalists. What is most disturbing, though, is the all-too-plausible account of what motivates these raids quoted below; how much credence you give this, despite its plausibility, must turn at least in part on what one makes of the source.

IRAQ: Another U.S. Military Assault on Media

BAGHDAD, Feb 23 (IPS) - Iraqi journalists are outraged over yet another U.S. military raid on the media.

U.S. soldiers raided and ransacked the offices of the Iraq Syndicate of Journalists (ISJ) in central Baghdad Tuesday this week. Ten armed guards were arrested, and 10 computers and 15 small electricity generators kept for donation to families of killed journalists were seized.

This is not the first time U.S. troops have attacked the media in Iraq, but this time the raid was against the very symbol of it. Many Iraqis believe the U.S. soldiers did all they could to deliver the message of their leadership to Iraqi journalists to keep their mouth shut about anything going wrong with the U.S.-led occupation.

“The Americans have delivered so many messages to us, but we simply refused all of them,” Youssif al-Tamimi of the ISJ in Baghdad told IPS. “They killed our colleagues, closed so many newspapers, arrested hundreds of us and now they are shooting at our hearts by raiding our headquarters. This is the freedom of speech we received.”

Some Iraqi journalists blame the Iraqi government.

“Four years of occupation, and those Americans still commit such foolish mistakes by following the advice of their Iraqi collaborators,” Ahmad Hassan, a freelance journalist from Basra visiting Baghdad told IPS. “They (the U.S. military) have not learned yet that Iraqi journalists will raise their voice against such acts and will keep their promise to their people to search for the truth and deliver it to them at any cost.”

There is a growing belief in Iraq that U.S. allies in the current Iraqi government are leading the U.S. military to raid places and people who do not follow Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's directions.

And these same people think they are smart enough to avoid become Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz's puppets? (Have you read Sy Hersh’s latest yet? You really should.)

Bombs Give Exam Stress a New Meaning

Law students are notorious for suffering from exam stress — and complaining about it.

She, like thousands of university students in Iraq, is taking her mid-term tests, starting today. They have a fixed schedule, i.e. are sitting ducks - for ten days. Since the beginning of this academic year, the students in her college have been led quite a dance; a deadly dance. The college is situated in an area that has become more like a war zone than a normal neighborhood; it is too near Haifa Street for it to quiet down for more than a few days at a stretch.

They started out by going to college every day. Their college more like a fortress for its security, than an educational facility.

Attack after attack on the surrounding residential area frightened the Dean into improvising a random lecture schedule that allows them to attend their lectures in no pattern that lasts more than one week.
…
With heavy heart I am won over by her insistence, and she attends the random lectures for three weeks.

A great big double explosion takes place at the main entrance of Al-Mustansiriya one Tuesday, killing more than 120 students and wounding more than 200, most of whom were female students. One car bomb and one explosive belt … body parts were brought down from the date palms, as were remnants of their uniforms.

Although hurting for all the families that weredevastated that afternoon, I thanked God my daughter was not harmed.

At home for another two weeks.

Go attend Baghdad University. Also protected. No way.

All this time studying at home and online, doing her best not to lose yet another year to chaos, she is now taking her mid term exams at her college. A sitting duck.

She is mad to continue.

I am mad to let her.

US Bombing Outskirts of Baghdad

air strikes were aimed at insurgent strongholds in Bo'aitha, a sparsely populated neighbourhood on the west bank of the Tigris, south of the city centre.

While lying within the city limits, Bo'aitha is a district of farms and smallholdings, whose scattered villages are known to house the hideouts of Sunni insurgent gangs linked to al-Qaeda.

Late Saturday, the US Air Force launched a series of bombing raids on southeast Baghdad. This is absolutely shameful, that the US is bombing from the air a civilian city that it militarily occupies. You can't possibly do that without killing innocent civilians, as at Ramadi the other day. It is a war crime. US citizens should protest and write their congressional representatives. It is also the worst possible counter-insurgency tactic anyone could ever have imagined. You bomb people, they hate you. The bombing appears to have knocked out what little electricity some parts of Baghdad were still getting.

As near as I can make up by comparing this map, which shows Bo'aitha as region 89, but lacks a legend showing the scale, with this map which has a scale but no marking for Bo'aitha, that region is about six kilometers from the city center, which is roughly the distance between the University of Miami and the center of downtown Miami.

Regardless of the legal issues, this doesn't seem to be a tactic well-calculated to win the hearts and minds of the average Baghdad resident.

And, hey, since that's all going so well, let's plan to attack Iran! (link is to Sy Hersh's latest). How long before we start calling this a 'tilt' to the Sunnis?

Iraqi Oil Law?

A bunch of evening clicking around led to me to what purports to be an unofficial English translation of the latest draft text of a proposed Iraqi Oil Law. Apparently, this draft text has been a closely held secret.

Please feel free to widely distribute this document. It's important to start a stronger debate and to try to educate Iraqis and Americans about this catastrophic law that will facilitate the further looting of Iraqi oil, and will achieve nothing other than increasing the levels of violence and anger in Iraq. This law legalizes PSAs (production sharing agreements) in Iraq. Iraq will be the only country in the middle east with such contracts privatising Iraqi oil and giving foreign companies crazy rates of profit that may reach to more than three fourth of the general revenue. Iraq and Iraqis need every Dinar that comes from oil sales. In addition to the financial aspects of this law, it can be considered the funding tool for splitting Iraq into three states. It undermines the central government and distributes oil revenues directly to the three regions, which sets the foundations for what Iraq's enemies are trying to achieve in terms of establishing three independent states.

Nor am I so sure that dividing Iraq yet sharing oil revenue is necessarily such a terrible outcome, at least compared to the other imaginable outcomes. As for PSAs, I'd think the devil is in the details — Iraq is presumably short of capital for exploration and development (the capital having been destroyed, denuded. and of course stolen) so unlike its neighbors it may need these deals — if somehow they were concluded in an equitable fashion…which I admit is not all that likely in the current circumstances where the government has such a weak hand to play.

By raising these questions I don't want to sound like I'm claiming the blog quoted above is wrong. I simply don't have enough information to form a judgment either way. And, for what it's worth, the same bout of clicking did bring to me to Digby's quotation of this line by conservative she-guru Ann Coulter, “Liberals are always talking about why we shouldn't go to war for oil. But why not go to war for oil? We need oil.”

The Mountain Has Labored and Brought Forward ...

I suppose I ought to be happy that the House has passed a non-binding Measure Opposing Troop Surge.

But. It seems clearer each day that there is no serious strategy for victory in Iran — however defined (and it usually isn't defined by those who shout for it most loudly). There is no serious plan for how we will staff the conflict other than extending the rotation of troops who have suffered enough. There is no serious plan even for equipping the troops on the ground, many of whom are being deployed without the armor that might protect their vehicles against IEDs and the like.

There is, at last, some sort of plan in the next budget for paying to replace the equipment this war is chewing up. The contractors will be OK; if only we had equally good plans for the soldiers and families being chewed up by this war. Not to mention the Iraqis.

Otherwise, what planning we find in the White House seems to be about rattling sabers at Iran and hoping they take the bait, allowing massive air strikes in retaliation. This is the sort of planning you expect from drug addicts scheming for a new fix.

In this atmosphere, the House of Representatives has labored hard. Members debated for 44 hours and 55 minutes. Over the past four days, a total of 393 Members spoke on the House Floor: 221 Democrats, and 172 Republicans. And then they voted. And now we have a totally precatory resolution aimed at the surge that doesn't even condemn the war, and doesn't address the Iran situation.

The radio said “Bush suffers a major political defeat.” Let me tell you how much that defeat matters: while the House was debating today, the Pentagon shipped off another 1,000 troops.

Wee, sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!

And, yes, it could be even worse: the Senate tomorrow will vote on whether it can even vote on a similar, equally precatory, resolution. UPDATE: And may not even pass the resolution with the 60 votes needed to allow debate.

I'm so excited and heartened I can't hardly stand it.

Bush Iraq Plans Were 'Delusional'

Iraq invasion plan 'delusional': The US invasion plan for Iraq envisaged that only 5,000 US troops would remain in Iraq by December 2006, declassified Central Command documents show.

The material also shows that the US military projected a stable, pro-US and democratic Iraq by that time.

The August 2002 material was obtained by the National Security Archive (NSA). Its officials said the plans were based on delusional assumptions.

The US currently has some 132,000 troops in the violence-torn state.

Terribly Upsetting Photo

Don't click to view this terribly upsetting photo unless you have your handkerchief ready. (Via CorrenteWire).

Yes, there is hope here as well as tragedy, but the tragedy was so unnecessary…

GOP Senators Are Now the Ostrich Party

A long-awaited Senate showdown on the war in Iraq was shut down before it even started yesterday, when nearly all Republicans voted to stop the Senate from considering a resolution opposing President Bush's plan to send 21,500 additional combat troops into battle.

Almost every Republican Senator — including Lieberman but excluding endangered Collins and Coleman — voted to prevent debate on even the watered-down precatory Warner resolution on Iraq. Even Senator Warner voted against (debating) his own resolution! And that Chuck Hagel, talking so brave last week about the moral imperative of ending the war, why, suddenly he's against debate too.

In the short run, this means that today — after serious arm-twisting by the capo di tutti capi (Cheney) — a slim majority of the Senate is for debate, but far too little for cloture. But more importantly, unless it does something to clean off this taint soon, the Senate GOP has just taken ownership of what used to be Bush's war and McCain's escalation. This has the potential to be a party-defining vote. And it significantly increases the odds that the GOP nominee will not be a Senator or Congressman — a big boost to Romney and Giuliani, and even the hapless Huckabee, I suppose. Not to mention harming the electoral hopes of several Senators.

I believe that the country is way ahead of the Senate on this one.

The Place of War Criticism

This post by Glenn Greenwald, Our little Churchills, is unusually good even by the exalted standard we've come to expect from him.

Veterans Against Escalation

VoteVets Action Fund has a harrowing spot out opposing the escalation. The cameo by Iraq war veteran Robert Loria is pretty devastating.

Hagel

An honest man who's had enough:

It's All About Metrics

archy asks,

Remember the days when we used to kill the number three guy in al Qayda very few weeks? It seems like months since we last killed him. Does this mean we're losing our edge?

Jim Morin on Bush's Speech

The Herald's Jim Morin is frequently predictable, but now and then he hits one out of the park:

Posted by Michael at 12:53 PM | Link | Comments (1)

A Hypothesis about Irbil

rc3 asks, Anyone have any light to shed on the US arrest of Iranian "diplomats" in the Kurdish area of Iraq on Wednesday?

I think I have a hypothesis, but it sort of fits the facts. From what I can gather, the so-called "consulate" at which these Iranian officials worked was not accredited to the national Iraqi government headquartered in Baghdad. Rather, they were there at the invitation of the Kurdish authorities. While the Kurdish authorities operate what is almost a defacto state, and indeed have invited diplomats from their nearby neighbors to come and set up 'consulates' neither the US nor Iraq-in-Baghdad nor most of the world recognizes the independence of Kurdistan and thus those governments also do not recognize the validity of any diplomatic credentials or immunities issued by what they see as a mere provincial government.

Thus, from the US point of view, the building in question had no special legal status, regardless of whether it was flying (as reported) an Iranian flag.

As to what motivated the US action, I still have no more idea than I did yesterday, when I worried that this might be a deliberate provocation of Iran in the wake of Bush's bellicose speech. And I don't see why the US forces would be willing to act in a way that would doubtlessly anger (and did anger) the local Kurdish authorities.

But I'm starting to think that I understand the US legal position -- and that if the facts are as I hypothesize, even to agree with it as regards the non-diplomatic status of the building and its occupants. (None of this of course speaks to whether there was justification for the raid, its motives, or how the persons detained may be being treated.)

The Speech

Bush looked scared.

The so-called new tactics are not new, the escalation while large in human terms is too small to matter in strategic terms, the troops being sent over will not in the main have proper equipment (the armor hasn't been built yet), and they will not "win" the conflict -- whatever "win" means in this context.

Rattling the saber against Iran and Syria is sort of new -- it's been policy for a while, but this is more open.

Overall, I see this as a bookend to Bush's post-9/11 speech, about a week after the attack. I cried at that one -- I saw it as making an open-ended commitment to an endless, formless, armed conflict against vague enemies, a conflict so prolonged it would eat my children, then quite young. I didn't cry today, I'm too numbed by all that's led up to this.

Best case: Today is the day that Bush started to lose his base, at least as much on body language as on bankrupt policy. But will the loss come quickly enough to slow or stop the carnage?

Worst case: We're all seriously f***ed.

Update: image via Gen. JC Christian, Patriot.

A Different Iraq Metric

Cosmic Iguana - Voice of the Evil Doers says,

US SPENT $1 MIL FOR EVERY DEAD IRAQI - CIVILIANS INCLUDED:
GUARDIAN:

Early this year the Bush administration is to ask Congress to approve an additional $100bn for the onerous task of making life intolerable for the Iraqis. This will bring the total spent on the White House's current obsession with war to almost $500bn - enough to have given every US citizen $1,600 each... with over half a million dead, it means that the world's greatest military superpower has spent a million dollars for every Iraqi killed... [*]

Last year I posted that the US had shot 250,000 bullets per dead insurgent [*]. I suggested sarcastically that our kill ratio was not that bad when you consider how many civilians we have knocked off. Now it appears that even taking that into account we're not dreadfully efficient.

One commenter suggested it would be cheaper to kill people by dropping the bundles of money we're spending directly on their heads.

Historians Make News!

Riveting Highlights from the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association.

On Thursday, just after noon, the Tufts historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto was arrested by Atlanta police as he crossed the middle of the street between the Hilton and Hyatt hotels. After being thrown on the ground and handcuffed, the former Oxford don was formally arrested, his hands cuffed behind his back. Several policemen pressed hard on his neck and chest, leaving the mild-mannered scholar, who's never gotten so much as a parking ticket, bruised and in pain. He was then taken to the city detention center along with other accused felons and thrown into a filthy jail cell filled with prisoners. He remained incarcerated for eight hours. Officials demanded bail of over a thousand dollars. To come up up with the money Fernandez-Armesto, the author of nineteen books, had to make an arrangement with a bail bondsman. In court even the prosecutors seemed embarrassed by the incident, which got out of hand when Fernandez-Armesto requested to see the policeman's identification (the policeman was wearing a bomber jacket; to Fernandez-Armesto, a foreigner unfamiliar with American culture, the officer did not look like an officer). The prosecutors asked the professor to plead nolo contendere. He refused, concerned that the stain on his record might put his green card status in jeopardy. Officials finally agreed to drop all charges. The judge expressed his approval. The professor says he has no plans to sue. But the AHA council is considering lodging a complaint with the city.

The interview with Prof. Fernandez-Armesto is at once hysterically funny and a cringe-making embarrassment to Atlanta,

At the annual Business Meeting, a proceeding usually featuring dry reports by the organization's leaders, the members approved an anti-war resolution, the first in the AHA's existence. The voice vote at the packed meeting was nearly unanimous. It was sponsored by Historians Against the War.

Why Put an Admiral at CENTCOM?

CENTCOM has traditionally been a ground soldier's job. Why give it to an admiral? Especially as there are two ground wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) going on in its theater of responsibility.

Here's one worrying theory --

Pen and Sword: Navy Admiral Goes to CENTCOM: Be Very Afraid. It seems highly unusual for a navy admiral to take charge of CENTCOM until you consider two interrelated things. First is that Bush needs a senior four-star in the CENTCOM job who hasn't gone on record as opposing additional troops in Iraq. Second is that Fallon's CENTCOM area of responsibility will include Iran.

A conflict with Iran would be a naval and air operation. Fallon is a naval flight officer. He flew combat missions in Vietnam, commanded an A-6 Intruder squadron, a carrier air wing and an aircraft carrier. As a three-star, he commanded Second Fleet and Strike Force Atlantic. He presently heads U.S. Pacific Command. His resume also includes duty in numerous joint and Navy staff billets, including Deputy Director for Operations with Joint Task Force Southwest Asia in Riyahd, Saudi Arabia.

If anybody knows how to run a maritime and air operation against Iran, it's "Fox" Fallon.

Meanwhile, Military commanders have apparently told President Bush that only 9,000 troops are available for escalation, with an additional 10,000 soldiers who would be "on alert in Kuwait and the U.S."

Richard Falk on "The Flawed Execution of Saddam Hussein"

Richard Falk, who among many other things is Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University, published the following essay in the Turkish daily, Zaman. As it's not online anywhere, he kindly allowed me to publish it here.

THE FLAWED EXECUTION OF SADDAM HUSSEIN (Dec. 31, 2006)

By Richard Falk

Given the harsh brutality of Saddam Hussein’s political career I would never have anticipated a certain measure of sympathy for the man at the end of his life. It was not only the unseemliness of executing a Muslim leader in the midst of the Hajj pilgrimages, but the perverse insensitivity of hanging Saddam Hussein on the eve of Eid al-Adha. As one Iraqi political analyst, Nazem Jassour, was quoted as saying, “[t]here was no good reason why the execution could not be delayed until after Eid..Its going to be perceived by Iraqi Sunnis as one more example of how the Shia government is trying to humiliate them.” But why would Shia leaders themselves not want to defer this vindictive moment until after this period of intense religious devotion by those of Islamic faith? It is true that Saddam Hussein was responsible for years of severe criminality against the Shia, possibly explaining the claim by some religious leaders in Najaf that the execution at this sacred time was ‘a gift of God.’

Another approach is to consider the American angle. Reme Allaf, a specialist on Iraq associated with the British expert body on international relations, Chatham House, noting that the Iraqi government lacks independence, explains the strangeness of legal approach as a result of the leadership’s need “to follow an American agenda.” This makes a bit more sense of the timing. After all the Iraq policy pursued by the Bush presidency is increasingly unpopular with the American people, enjoying real support from only about 20% of the public. Despite this stark political fact, reinforced by the escalating violence and rising body counts in Iraq, the Bush White House gives no sign of changing course on Iraq, even to the limited extent recommended recently by the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, and mandated by the outcome of the American mid-term elections in November.

It is against this background that the timing of the execution can be best understood. Bush seems as determined as ever to carry on with the war, and even now seems inclined to increase the number of American troops on the ground in Iraq. At the same time he is facing a hostile American public opinion and a Congress now controlled by the Democratic Party that has everything to gain by opposing the president on Iraq. To cope with this likely firestorm of opposition, the execution of Saddam Hussein at the end of 2006, and no later, accomplishes two important goals: it allows Bush to claim as he has, that putting the former Iraqi leader to death is yet another ‘milestone’ on the road to Iraqi democracy, and that despite the appearances of failure, the Iraqi policy is actually succeeding. All that is required for ‘victory’ is more American troops and more American patience. Beyond this the execution at this moment distracts attention from an awkward statistic, that the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq has crossed the 3,000 threshold, which is truly a milestone that President Bush had best ignore as it is a signpost pointing directly to ‘defeat.’

I think when the full story of the trial, sentencing, and execution of Saddam Hussein is told it will have a simple story line, ‘made in the USA.’ At each stage of this flawed judicial process, it is the effort to use the criminal prosecution of Saddam Hussein in a futile attempt to rebuild American support for the Iraq policy that mainly explains the terrible distortions of the rule of law in the name of rendering justice. President Bush’s reaction to the execution, as reported from his ranch in Crawford, Texas where he was spending the Christmas holidays, is supremely ironic, accomplishing an exaggeration of Orwellian rhetoric. Bush praised Saddam’s execution as “..the kind of justice he denied victims of his brutal regime. Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people’s resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people’s determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.”

This trial of Saddam Hussein could have been and should have been a positive experience for both Iraq and the world, but to reach such a result would have required independent and international auspices from start to finish. It would have required avoiding the imposition of the death penalty, a form of punishment not available under the statute of the International Criminal Court, and increasingly abandoned by democratic countries. And it would certainly have required avoiding the unseemly spectacle of death by hanging, projecting an ugly imagery around the world that will satisfy some unhealthy appetites for vengeance, but will also ensure that this terrible political figure will be revered as a martyr by many Muslims around the world. As Robert Fisk expressed it, “Saddam died a ‘martyr’ to the will of the new ‘Crusaders.”

But more significantly, the trial and punishment should certainly have addressed the full panoply of Saddam Hussein’s crimes rather than concentrating on a single incident back in 1982 when 148 Iraqis were killed in the town of Dujail as a collective punishment in response to a failed coup attempt against the Baghdad regime. Not considered were Saddam Hussein’s more serious crimes associated with the infamous Anfal campaign in the late 1980s when as many as 180,000 Kurds were killed in northern Iraq, many by chemical weapons, the genocidal policies directed at the ‘marsh Arabs’ of the South after the First Gulf War of 1991, the aggressive war waged against Iran in the 1980s that took over a million lives on both sides, and the widespread torture and killing of political opponents during the course of his entire reign. It is likely that the adjourned separate trial on the allegations concerning the Kurds will be continued, but without the presence of Saddam Hussein as the principal defendant, it will be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark! As the Nuremberg trial of surviving German leaders after World War II made clear, the main achievement of such criminal prosecutions is not punishment of the now disempowered leaders, but political education by way of compiling evidence of the terrible wrongdoing of those accused and showing that the contrasting way of the victors is one of fairness and due process.

Again, we need to ask why was this truncated and dysfunctional approach used, leading to the execution of the main culprit before the worst crimes of his regime were even considered. The only credible explanation is that such an approach conformed to the needs of the occupying power. A fuller exposure of Saddam Hussein’s crimes would have awkwardly exposed American complicity. Iraq was a strategic ally of the United States in the 1980s, the decade in which the worst excesses of Baathist rule took place, including the persecution and execution of religious leaders. It was the United States that encouraged the attack upon Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran in 1980. It was the United States that supplied many of the components of the chemical weapons used against the Kurds, and then relied on its diplomatic influence to shield Baghdad from censure in the aftermath of these shocking events. And later it was the United States in 1991 that authorized the bloody crackdown of the Kurds in the North and the marsh Arabs in the South. These background realities show clearly that it was not politically possible to have a proper trial of Saddam Hussein at this time under these auspices, but it was also not politically acceptable to create the sort of auspices that would have exposed the full range of Saddam Hussein’s criminality. And so the reliance on the Dujail incident was a clever solution, concentrating exclusively on an incident involving purely internal Iraqi facts, which would provide the legal basis for executing Saddam Hussein, and forever avoid a formal rendering in a court of law of the awkward parts of this dictator’s story.

Even aside from these considerations, it was never appropriate to rush the process. To move from prosecution to execution so quickly in a major political trial of this sort is unprecedented. To organize such a trial process while the country is enmeshed in civil strife and a war of resistance is further delegitimizing. And if this is not enough, Saddam Hussein was removed from power and captured by an invading power that was guilty of waging a war in flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter, as well as in opposition to world public opinion.

Rather than provide a milestone for the rule of law and Iraqi democracy, the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein raises high the banner of vindictive justice that obscures the very criminality that is supposedly being punished. It shifts anger from the accused to the accuser, and incredibly cedes the high moral ground to the criminal voice of Saddam Hussein. His farewell remarks calling for a renunciation of hate on the part of Iraqis toward one another, and even toward the invader, however self-serving his motives, express an admirable moral sentiment. A remarkable feature of this entire legal drama is to point the compass of moral accountability away from Saddam Hussein, at least for now.

Defund GITMO - Justice in the USA

Here's my modest proposal for the Democratic Congress: defund Gitmo. Bring all the prisoners into the US, where they will be guaranteed due process or POW status depending on whether they are civilians or foreign fighters.

Too simple? Why?

I wish I could make a similar proposal for the legal cesspools in Iraq, but there are two reasons why I can't. First, the Geneva conventions impose limits on the occupying power's ability to remove civilians from the jurisdiction. Second, the numbers involved are simply too large.

But we could at least require that any US citizen arrested in Iraq be released within 48 hours or repatriated for trial.

Saudi Ambassador's Abrupt Departure from DC

When I saw the headline Saudi Ambassador Abruptly Resigns, Leaves Washington, I jumped to a conclusion. But maybe it's wrong.

Here's the Washington Post's summary of the facts,

Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, flew out of Washington yesterday after informing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his staff that he would be leaving the post after only 15 months on the job, according to U.S. officials and foreign envoys. There has been no formal announcement from the kingdom.

And here's the Post's speculation as to the reason,

The exit -- without the fanfare, parties and tributes that normally accompany a leading envoy's departure, much less a public statement -- comes as his brother, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the highly influential Saudi foreign minister, is ailing.

...

As Saud's health has declined, Turki has increasingly been rumored as a possible replacement for his older brother.

That is certainly a more benign explanation than the thought that jumped into my head. I was afraid that it has something to do with the Bush administration's looming decision to tilt towards the Shi'ites (and Kurds) in the Iraq civil war, and against the Sunni groups seen by the US as supporting the "insurgents". [Corrected.] And, indeed, a seemingly authoritative Saudi academic suggested that the Saudi Arabians were bankrolling the Sunnis, and would be ramping up their support to include weapons if the US were to tilt towards the Shi'ites.

The Post version is buttressed by the recent Saudi denial that they have any intention to ship weapons into Iraq. And the academic who wrote that article, Nawaf Obaid, got fired.

The Saudis are not our friends. But we don't need them angry, either.

[Update (12/13): In addition to correcting the above, I've now seen the Wednesday NY Times, which has a front page article disagreeing with the Post version of the analysis on Saudi motives and plans, Saudis Say They Might Back Sunnis if U.S. Leaves Iraq:

Saudi Arabia has told the Bush administration that it might provide financial backing to Iraqi Sunnis in any war against Iraq's Shiites if the United States pulls its troops out of Iraq, according to American and Arab diplomats.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia conveyed that message to Vice President Dick Cheney two weeks ago during Mr. Cheney's whirlwind visit to Riyadh, the officials said. During the visit, King Abdullah also expressed strong opposition to diplomatic talks between the United States and Iran, and pushed for Washington to encourage the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, senior Bush administration officials said.

...

Arab diplomats said Tuesday that Mr. Obaid's column reflected the view of the Saudi government, which has made clear its opposition to an American pullout from Iraq.

So, who knows, maybe my first impression was correct after all?

Phil Carter Spots Something Missing from the Iraq Study Group Report

So when I read the Iraq Study Group report yesterday, I read through the panel's 79 recommendations and eventually made my way to the report's appendix. There I found a list of persons consulted by the Iraqi Study Group — a long and distinguished list, to be sure. But one group of people seemed to be conspicuously absent from the list.

Grunts. Not just infantrymen, but military enlisted personnel and junior officers generally. I don't see any officers below the military rank of Lieutenant Colonel listed in the ISG's report. And there are zero enlisted personnel listed.

Update: Kevin Drum noticed something else that isn't there.

Shorter Iraq Study Group Report

Shorter Iraq Study Group report:

GW Bush has gotten us into a mess that neither he nor we know how to get out of.

Iraq Study Group Report Online

The Iraq study group has posted its report online (links on its site). The NYT also has a copy.

Gen. Odom (Reagan NSA Chief) Pulls No Punches

I don't know what the Augusta (GA) Metro Spirit is exactly, but its national security blog landed an interview with Lt. Gen. William Odom (Ret.), Reagan's NSA chief speaks out. It's a doozy:

Retired general asks, What’s wrong with cutting and running?
By Corey Pein

Metro Spirit: What are your feelings on the NSA’s program of warrantless wiretapping of American citizens?

William Odom: It didn’t happen under my watch. And I’m still puzzled why somebody hasn’t tried to impeach the president for doing it. Any conservative in the United States who values his life [ought to be outraged]. In fact, the South seceded in defense of minority rights — why the hell have they forgotten them now? Ben Franklin said, “somebody who values security over liberty deserves neither.”

MS: What do you say to people, and there are plenty here in Augusta, who say that cutting and running from Iraq is traitorous act?

WO: Well, just tell ‘em they’re full of shit. They're traitors. You know what lemmings are? Yeah, they’re lemmings. We went to war for our enemies’ best interests. You ask those people why it makes sense that we went to war to advance the interests of Iran and Al Qaeda.

Le Plus Ça Change

Commenter Karen McL points us to this excellent, justly vitriolic, post by Glenn Greenwald, The Tom Friedman disease consumes Establishment Washington.

It skewers not just the internal illogic and moral cowardice of the Iraq war's current (and past) cheerleaders, but reminds us that the same curious phenomenon that occurred after the Vietnam War is already playing itself out among the governing and chattering classes: the people who were wrong about the war try to claim that the people who were right about the war "too early" (i.e. from the start) should be treated by all right-thinking folk as political lepers.

Banquo's ghost will not be banished so easily.

It does all remind me of the classic six stages of policy development (also sometimes called the stages of the product cycle):

1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusion
3. Panic
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Punishment of the Innocent
6. Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants

Washington Post Says Iraq Study Group Sorta Has a Deadline

According to the Washington Post's Iraq Panel to Urge Pullout Of Combat Troops by '08, the Iraq Study Group did not just hint around the Bush, but put an actual target date for withdrawal into its report: shortly before the '08 Presidential election.

Even so, in this version -- which makes it sound a bit better than the NYT version I blogged about a couple of days ago -- the target date would "be more a conditional goal than a firm timetable, predicated on the assumption that circumstances on the ground would permit it."

In other words, given Bush's oft-expressed attitudes, fuggedaboutit.

Iraq Panel Makes Incoherent Recommendation

It's too little, too late.

The so-called “The bipartisan Iraq Study Group” (actually heavily weighted to the right wing, and including zero progressive Democrats) has produced its recommendation. And while they deliberated, Iraq slid into chaos.

The NYT has the leak at Iraq Panel to Recommend Pullback of Combat Troops.

The report recommends that troops move away from the heart of combat (“a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq”). Some day.

The report recommends that Mr. Bush make it clear that he intends to start the withdrawal relatively soon, and people familiar with the debate over the final language said the implicit message was that the process should begin sometime next year.

Uh-huh.

And that would be the same George W. Bush who said just two days ago that, “there's one thing I’m not going to do: I’m not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.”

(Remind me again what “the mission” is please?)

“I think everyone felt good about where we ended up,” one person involved in the commission’s debates said after the group ended its meeting. “It is neither 'cut and run' nor ‘stay the course.'”

No, it's “stay the course” for a while then “cut and run.” With “run to where” left open — maybe to laagers in the Iraqi desert — just don't call them “permanent bases”. (“The report leaves unstated whether the 15 combat brigades that are the bulk of American fighting forces in Iraq would be brought home, or simply pulled back to bases in Iraq or in neighboring countries.”)

It's amazing that anyone involved could feel “good” about this report: if followed, it will have hundreds of our soldiers killed and wounded before the now inevitable departure. And for what exactly? Or even approximately?

Larry Lessig Has a Good Idea

OK, so the headline is a bit like, "Dog Bites Man".

But I really think this idea of Larry Lessig's deserves take-up: CARE packages for Iraq as means to reduce post-war Iraqi anger at the US.

The only problem I can see offhand is that from what I read, the real problems in Iraq are infrastructural, e.g. the electricity keeps going off and people are trying to blow up the pipelines. That stuff won't fit in a CARE package. But perhaps there are real shortages of things we could fit in a box. And, even if there are not shortages, perhaps it is the thought that counts.

And, of course, we need to get to the post-war...

Cut and Run Before the Next Election?

The not utterly reliable Times of London says there is a secret plan to end the war -- by leaving Iraq before 2008.

American and Iraqi officials have set a date for giving Iraq’s forces responsibility for security across the country.

Under a plan to be presented to the UN Security Council next month, the Iraqi Government would assume authority from coalition troops by the end of next year.

Only hours after Donald Rumsfeld was replaced as US Defence Secretary, American, British and Iraqi officials spoke openly about accelerating the handover process.

If, as increasingly seems to be the case, our troops are not actually doing any good and are being pounded for it, then ignominious retreat is the right thing to do. And I'd just as soon it be done sooner rather than later. On the other hand, I accept that having wrongly invaded and created a mess brings with it some moral duty to try to sort it out if there seems a way that can be achieved. At present, however, I don't know anyone who knows how to do that.

On the radio yesterday, someone said that a majority of the American people no longer support the Iraq war. However, a majority also don't support pulling out. That will change as casualties mount. I hope, without much hope, that the reason for staying another 12 months or more, is something more substantive than saving face, or the PR war, but is tied to achievable objectives on the ground.

The Military's Scream

I've said before that there's something disturbing when the spooks start trying to undermine their civilian masters by leaking against them or otherwise. Even when I agree with the spooks.

And I have to say more or less the same thing about the news that the Army Times, the Air Force Times, and the Navy Times are all running an unprecedented editorial tomorrow -- the day before the election -- calling for the ouster of the Secretary of Defense.

On the merits, they are right of course, but late to the party. And a great part of our military predicament appears to be due to the promotion of a clique of yes-man generals, and the sidelining of those with the guts to stand up to demented requirements of Rumsfeld and the (now, too late, repentant) neo-cons.

But the merits are not in doubt. The issue is the politics. This coordinated editorial will be seen as representing the voice of the officer corps. And why not? Rumsfeld is killing their troops, sending them in meaningless circles -- taking and abandoning cities -- without a strategic plan that anyone can understand.

The service magazines are technically private. But they will be seen, as they have been for at least two generations, as speaking for their readers. Their readers have more sense than their leaders, and have no great desire to keep being herded over the cliff.

So while I agree with the sentiment, it's not a happy moment, not at all. This is bad for discipline, bad for morale, bad for the country. The trouble is that the service papers may have correctly decided that silence might have been even worse.

This deserves to be devastating in Tuesday's election.

Let's hope the long-run consequences are not devastating in a different way.

Vote Democratic

It's official -- Iraq is rushing towards chaos. This was certainly avoidable by not invading; and probably avoidable by actually bothering to plan for the aftermath of military victory over the Iraqi army.

Click the picture for a larger image.

What He Said

The Carpetbagger has today's best one-liner in a long and worthwhile post about the scandal of the US sending weapons to Iraq which then vanish without a trace -- or even an attempt to trace them:

There's some irony, I suppose, in the fact that we went to Iraq to find Saddam's weapons that weren't there, and ended up losing track of our own weapons that were there.

David Letterman, Patriot

By his own defiant admission, David Letterman is not one of our nation's intellectuals, nor is he going to be on anyone's top-10 list of foreign policy thinkers.

Usually he's just out to crack some jokes and give us a slightly goofy and sardonic good time. But darn it if the man's not a patriot. It's clear that the war in Iraq bothers him, casualties for no discernible purpose, and he's willing to use his pulpit to show that angst.

Witness this clip of an eleven-minute (that's long by TV standards) set-to with Bill O'Reilly, the serial fabricator from Fox, and poster child for Republican family values.

I'm not a great Letterman fan, but I think Letterman does himself, and the rest of us, proud here. It's a long download, but worth it.

Incidentally, I was impressed to discover that Letterman is not just talk when it comes to worrying about the way our leaders treat the US military: according to the Wikipedia,

Letterman, along with bandleader Paul Shaffer and Late Show stage manager Biff Henderson, celebrated Christmas 2002 in Afghanistan with United States and international military forces stationed there. The three visited Iraq around Christmas in 2003 and 2004 as well.

'Stay The Course'

The 'Stay the Course' video. Much better than news stories that miss the point.

Incredible that the NYT story doesn't even mention that Bush claimed "we've never been stay the course" and instead just ran with the White House line that they were changing the rhetoric.

We have always been at war with Oceana.

But of Course!

Bush caught on tape denying saying what he says all the time.

Annals of News Management

Here's on way to keep the Iraqi death toll down: Iraq Aims to Limit Mortality Data:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office has instructed the country's health ministry to stop providing mortality figures to the United Nations, jeopardizing a key source of information on the number of civilian war dead in Iraq, according to a U.N. document.

Justice MIA

The Horse's Mouth, United States Military Conducts Several Hearings On Detained Associated Press Photographer -- Without Defendant Knowing About Them:

One of the interesting things about the case of Bilal Hussein, the Associated Press photographer who's been detained by the U.S. military in Iraq without charges, is that it is giving us as close to a behind-the-scenes look as we're going to get of what happens to "enemy combatants" when the U.S. military decides to disappear them from view.

...

So there have now been three hearings held by the U.S. Military against Hussein. And if the AP's correct, the defendant himself has been at none of them. The defendant has not had a chance to present any evidence on his own behalf, or to argue his own case, or to have his representatives argue his case. Nor was he even informed of two of the hearings. In the case of the third hearing, he learned about it after it happened.

Makes you feel proud, don't it?

What You Don't Know Can Hurt Someone

If you put stuff like this in a movie, no one would believe it: Tristero at Hullabaloo, in a post called Scandalous Ignorance, points to an op-ed in the NYT that notes how few of our decision-makers even know the difference between a Sunni and Shiite. Among the folk unclear on the concept is the Vice Chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence. Yes, the subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.

Tristero's explanation is that these guys are not curious or smart enough to find out about the enemy. Digby, though, has a more plausible and more chilling explanation in Beautiful Minds: they were reading books all right, or rather all read the same book, but it was a very nutty (and discredited) book.

Either way...

Little Miss Sunshine

Cheney: ‘General Overall Situation’ In Iraq Is Going ‘Remarkably Well’.

I would hate to see something he called a bad overall situation.

Almost 2.5% of Iraqi Population Victims of "Excess Deaths" in Iraq Since Invasion

Via Kevin Drum:

A team at Johns Hopkins has done another study of the post-invasion death rate in Iraq:

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

....Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence....Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

The study has uncertainties, but the estimate is a mid-range one surrounded by fuzz on both sides. If it's at all right, it's a shocking number. Consider the context: The CIA estimates the Iraqi population at at 26.7 million. So I make that almost 2.5% of the population!

Think about that. Five out of every two hundred. One out of forty. That's one person out of every full-sized major league baseball roster. As a war-related death. Not to mention the injuries.

100 Tortured Each Day in Iraq

It is of course a great faux pas in current political discourse to suggest that just maybe the Iraqi people are even worse off today than they were under Saddam.

I would guess that the Kurds may be better off (so far); my sense is that in many other parts of the country it's not so clear at all given the physical destruction of a good chunk of several cities, the damage to the oil and electrical systems, the escalating casualties, the slide into civil war, the new enjoyment of civil liberties such as freedom of the press (not) and, now, news of widespread torture by the Iraqi government and others.

Time to dig out my Edwin Starr and my Bruce Springsteen. (Wikipedia suggests that "War" is one of the most popular protest songs ever recorded..)

It's Time to Be Rude

I've written before that while I prefer to see public debate conducted politely and decorously, there do come times -- bad wars in particular -- when other things are more important. (See When Bad Taste is Acceptable.)

It's in that spirit that I bring you this long quote from Atrios,

Eschaton: I know regulars understand this, but for those coming in late and wondering what all the discussion of Friedman Units of time is about, it began with FAIR pointing out that Friedman was forever labeling the next six months in Iraq as a critical, decisive time. But the real issue isn't about prognostication, but about the perpetual punting of The Iraq Question to a future date. It allows the pundit, or politician, to seem Real Concerned About The War without actually bothering to take it seriously.

George Bush is president. He is incompetent and a bit nuts. He is in charge of running the war. One half an F.U. or a full F.U. or even four F.U.s from now things in Iraq will be pretty much as they are, only a bit worse. If you are concerned about things in Iraq you'll stop furrowing your brow while pontificating about how we're, once again, At A Really Critical Moment, and start accepting the fact that the only thing which could possibly improve things is new leadership. This involves, at the very least: the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld and his replacement by a competent person, the resgination of Condi Rice and her replacement by a competent person, the permanent relegation of Dick Cheney to an undisclosed location far away from any actual power to make decisions, the replacement of the current military leadership who have been chosen for their loyalty to their incompetent civilian leaders, and the election of Democrats to Congress who can hopefully engage in some of the meaningful oversight that the Republicans have shown no interest in having in order to force some of these changes.

I didn't back this war, but those who did have an extra moral responsibility to the troops they sent there, their families, and the people of Iraq to prevent President Bush from continuing his incompetent leadership there. But most of them don't. They continue to punt the issue one F.U. at a time, while their little sociopathic brains dream of ponies.

One F.U. from now, what are you going to suggest we do differently? If you don't have a realistic answer to that, then I politely suggest you S.T.F.U.

Not that it's an easy question. But we should stop running away from it while our fellow citizens, and other fellow beings, are being killed by the dozen daily.

Must Read: Retired Military Officers On Rumsfeld, Iraq (and Congress)

True patriots howling in pain.

AlterNet: Blogs has a partial video and full text.

Here's a tiny sample:

My name is [Maj. Gen.] John Batiste. I left the military on principle on November 1, 2005, after more than 31 years of service. I walked away from promotion and a promising future serving our country. I hung up my uniform because I came to the gut-wrenching realization that I could do more good for my soldiers and their families out of uniform. I am a West Point graduate, the son and son-in-law of veteran career soldiers, a two-time combat veteran with extensive service in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, and a life-long Republican. Bottom line, our nation is in peril, our Department of Defense's leadership is extraordinarily bad, and our Congress is only today, more than five years into this war, beginning to exercise its oversight responsibilities.

Update--Full videos:

• Major General John Batiste
• Major General Paul Eaton
• Col. Thomas Hannes

Progress in Iraq

The war may not be going well, but the scapegoating exercise just took a major leap forward.

The Toll

More Americans have now died in Iraq than died on 9/11.

And it is getting worse:

July appears to have been the deadliest month of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, reinforcing criticism that the Baghdad security plan started in June by the new government has failed.

An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures. The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll in January.

The rising numbers suggested that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control, and seemed to bolster an assertion many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have made in recent months: that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just slipping toward one, and that the American-led forces are caught between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.

And, even when they tell you some part of it is getting better...

Aug 31 ... On Monday, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell said the murder rate in Baghdad had fallen by 46 percent from July to August and "we are actually seeing progress out there."

The decline in Iraqi deaths has not been matched by a drop in American casualties. At least 62 U.S. service members died in Iraq in August, compared with 43 in July.

Sept 7 -- Baghdad's morgue almost tripled its count for violent deaths in Iraq's capital during August from 550 to 1,536, authorities said Thursday, appearing to erase most of what U.S. generals and Iraqi leaders had touted as evidence of progress in a major security operation to restore order in the capital.

Political Stalemate in the Iraq Endgame

George Bush yesterday:

The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad

As far as I can tell, there is no longer any plan for 'victory' however defined in Iraq, not even of the Potemkin village variety. The military itself has begun to admit that the US has suffered a political defeat, even if it remains undefeated militarily:

The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.

If there is not in fact any credible strategy for victory (and there are basically no more troops to send), then staying the course is reduced to the Mr. Micawber strategy of trusting that 'something will turn up' -- or of holding on in a death grip so that the next administration must make the hard choices.

"It's hard to be optimistic right now," said one Army general who has served in Iraq. "There's a sort of critical mass of tough news," he said, with intensifying violence from the insurgency and between Sunnis and Shiites, a lack of effective Iraqi government and a growing concern that Iraq may be falling apart.

Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The US involvement in Iraq has now taken on the look of that kind of insanity.

"In the analytical world, there is a real pall of gloom descending," said Jeffrey White, a former analyst of Middle Eastern militaries for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who also had been told about the pessimistic Marine report.

Certainly the public has lost patience. And the media, smelling blood, show signs of waking from their torpor. I suspect that the political elites in DC who have not lost their minds now believe that retreat from Iraq is inevitable, but they are afraid to say so before an election. There are scenarios in which this retreat is accomplished with more or less loss of life, more or less loss of face. But if there is a realistic victory strategy, its proponents are being unusually modest. Do not mistake: this is the key. Even when the public comes to believe, as it seems to be doing, that the invasion of Iraq was both a fraud on the US public and a strategic error of historic proportions, most people will find it hard to support withdrawal so long as they can persuade themselves that victory is attainable. The problem for the war party is that any such claims look increasingly threadbare. And once it decides we are spending lives for nothing, the sleeping giant of US public opinion will lash out.

The Iraq debacle has harmed and will harm the United States (and let's not forget it's not so great for all those dead Iraqis either). Retreat seals the deal; at that point it is no longer possible to pretend that things will get better. For the people responsible, that means they must either shoulder the blame or find someone to pass it to -- and the most obvious candidate is those who call for withdrawal. The tendency to run with the 'stabbed in the back' line feeds in to a common confusion in which the withdrawal itself is blamed for the entire war's damage to the national interest. But in fact, if the situation is really hopeless, then withdrawal only staunches the self-inflicted wound caused by an unnecessary invasion, poorly planned, under-resourced, badly executed, and characterized by war profiteering and outright theft on a scale unimagined in either the Vietnam or Korean conflicts.

Indeed, we are less safe because of the battle in the streets in Baghdad -- and in Ambar province. If there truly is no plan for victory more subtle than continuing to lose ground bit by bit, then it's high time to bring our men and women home.

And yet, I don't expect it to happen soon. One of the truer maxims in politics is that you cannot beat something with nothing. Sadly, both sides in the largely subterranean debate over Iraq offer what amounts to nothing: the war party offers the daily dose of casualties, the retreat to Baghdad, the bunker strategy amidst civil war. The light at the end of the tunnel is going out, but inertia remains the policy.

The other side, however, has little concrete to propose. Like the war party, it knows the end-state it desires, but not how to achieve it. There is not at present any serious plan for withdrawal on the table; partly that is because the most competent planners in the military cannot (if they are even allowed to contemplate it) discuss it. And partly, I suspect, it is because any plan for withdrawal, even a slow one, would leave chaos in its wake, a poor departure gift indeed. If leaving would create a vacuum filled by disaster, and thus seem to cause it, it may seem the better part of political valor to wait for the disaster to mature fully before leaving.

And thus our current gridlock: the public now wants us out of Iraq by an almost two to one majority. Yet the large majority of both our pro and anti war political leaders agree to temporize, wasting blood and treasure.

Like Vietnam, the most critical questions in Iraq are political, not military. Arguably the political war in Vietnam may have been lost in Dien Bien Phu, but it was undoubtedly over by the end of the Tet offensive in 1969 -- a political disaster despite a military defeat for the North. The costly endgame lasted four years and ended ignominiously.

Are we condemned to repeat it?

'The Best War Ever' Publicity Video

The publicity video for 'The Best War Ever'

Yet Another 'Al-Qaeda Number Two' Captured

It must be election season again: we've captured yet another 'Al-Qaeda number two'.

Optimistic 2005 myDD article: Media Finally Sees Through Bush's 'Number 2 Man' Myth

Optimistic Feb. 2006 Onion article: Eighty Percent Of Al-Qaeda No. 2s Now Dead.

Slightly padded Sept. 2006 List of Captured or Killed al Qaeda in Iraq #2's (actually has 3's and 4's in there...).

The First Thing We Do...

...if we're setting up a lawless state ... is kill all the lawyers.

Iraqi police Wednesday discovered the bullet-riddled body of Khamees al-Ubaidi, a lead defense attorney for former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

His body was found in a Shia neighborhood near the Sadr City section of Baghdad, police said.

An hour earlier, a group of men dressed as Iraqi police stormed al-Ubaidi's home and asked him to come to the Ministry of Interior of questioning, according to Najib al-Nouemi, a fellow defense counsel for Hussein.

Things are getting better in Iraq every day. That nice Mr. Cheney says so, and he wouldn't lie to me.

Sun-Sentinel Is Against The War

The Sun-Sentinel is a quality newspaper a bit north of here. It has a justly deserved reputation as being pretty conservative editorially, and even in some of its political coverage. (A long-time state political reporter just got reassigned for being too overtly Republican, showing both that there's a tilt, and that the place has some standards.)

So it's interesting that the Sun-Sentinel editorial page, which I gather has been a big cheerleader for the Iraq war, is now not only vehemently against the Iraq war, but trying to suggest it was always against it. That's right: the war is now so unpopular that former backers are obfuscating their prior support.

Incidentally, the paper's April 7 editorial is real strong stuff. Here's how it starts:

Three years, 19 days. And counting.

More than 2,300 Americans killed. More than 16,000 wounded, many of them maimed for life. And then there are the tens of thousands of Iraqi victims.

Almost $400 billion spent so far, followed by another $330 million every day.

These are the tangible costs of the Iraq war. There are other costs that are harder to measure precisely, but they are many and they are mounting. It can be strongly argued that they are largely the fault of a president who is stubborn, intractable, dogmatic, exclusionary and intellectually dishonest, and who appears reluctant to operate outside his inner circle.

Gen. Odom Looks at Iraq and Sees Vietnam -- but Worse

Gen. William E. Odom (ret.), ex NSA Chief, looks at Iraq through the prism of Vietnam and what he sees is not pretty:

Will Phase Three in Iraq end with helicopters flying out of the "green zone"� in Baghdad? It all sounds so familiar.

The difference lies in the consequences. Vietnam did not have the devastating effects on U.S. power that Iraq is already having. On this point, those who deny the Vietnam-Iraq analogy are probably right. They are wrong, however, in believing that "staying the course"� will have any result other than making the damage to U.S. power far greater than changing course and withdrawing sooner in as orderly a fashion as possible.

But even in its differences, Vietnam can be instructive about Iraq. Once the U.S. position in Vietnam collapsed, Washington was free to reverse the negative trends it faced in NATO and U.S.-Soviet military balance, in the world economy, in its international image, and in other areas. Only by getting out of Iraq can the United States possibly gain sufficient international support to design a new strategy for limiting the burgeoning growth of anti-Western forces it has unleashed in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

History repeats itself, this time as tragedy.

The Republicans Are Losing the War

I rarely link to Daily Kos (and some other huge traffic sites) on the theory that the whole world reads it anyway. But I can't resist this post, Voices Carry, which seems to me not only to sound an obvious and necessary warning, but also to provide the sort of pithy solution which makes the perfect political frame:

As Glenn Greenwald and others have recognized, the newest note in the chorus of whining GOP harpies frantically evading accountability, is that the critics of the Bush strategemary somehow lost, or are losing, the war in Iraq.

[Link] Those who insisted on this war, who started it, who prosecuted it, who controlled every single facet of its operation - they have no blame at all for the failure of this war. Nope. They were right all along about everything. It all would have worked had war critics just kept their mouths shut. The ones who are to blame are the ones who never believed in this war, who control no aspect of the government, who were unable to influence even a single aspect of the war, who were shunned, mocked and ridiculed, and who have been out of power since the war began. They are the ones to blame. They caused this war to fail.

Expect this, plan on it. Anyone who thinks that it's not coming, that the sinking GOP wouldn't have the nerve to try, is possibly as delusional as the 34 percent who still think George Bush is doing a heckuva job. In fact, Kevin Drum notes that at least one right-wing cheerleader with a megaphone is already laying the groundwork with a trial balloon to blame the media; a stone's throw away from going after critics of the White House's Iraq War.

There's a lot of ways someone can respond to this tactic, after they stop laughing hysterically of course, as it really is quite desperate. But voices do carry, so a response is in order. The best response for anything is usually the simplest, the most direct, the most truthful. In this case the simple truth is that The Republicans are Losing the War.

US Iraq Policy: Total Failure

The administration is fond of throwing statistics about how there are 100 or so Iraqi brigades in the new refored Iraqi army. Subtext: the US can pull out soon, leave things to the Iraqis. Progress.

In fact, however, not at all:

The only Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support has been downgraded to a level requiring them to fight with American troops backing them up, the Pentagon said Friday.

It reminds me of a Vietnam war cartoon which unfortunately I've been unable to find online: as I recall it, Herblock's everyman is pointing to traintracks that lead to a dark tunnel into the mountain and saying, "No there isn't: There's a tunnel at the end of the tunnel". (I couldn't find that one, but I did find this classic Herblock cartoon, which is similar.)

Calendar of US Military Dead in Iraq War

Calendar of 2,319 US Military Dead in Iraqi War. (Somewhat slow to load.)

Remember that this is only part of the casualties. You have to add

• Allied military
• Civilians
• 'Insurgents' and other opposing forces
• Domestic civil rights

Seymour Hersh Will Depress the Hell Out of You

Writing in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh has a must-read temporarily online. Among the main points: allegations by (CYAing?) unnamed former policy people that Bush sees Iraq as a holy war, or at any rate that he is not listening to any bad news about it. More credible stuff about how the armed forces are not reporting key statistics to the public, and how the US is dumping tons of bombs where the media isn't looking; plus bonus info on who decides where they should be dropped today, and who may be doing that tomorrow.

The general tone is that Iraq is now a full-fledged Vietnam, complete with a case for bugout and a late Nixon in the White House. There's even a suggestion that Syria is being treated like Cambodia, complete with covert border raids by US special forces. (If not Syria, then it would be Iran, wouldn't it?)

Sen. Intel Deal Fails to Produce Results (Yet)

Josh Marshall, unlike most of the media as far as I can tell, notices a deadline passing:

Talking Points Memo (November 16, 2005 03:02 PM): So it looks like the November 14th deadline Bill Frist set for a plan to pursue "phase two" of the senate Iraq intel investigation has come and gone. There's been progress apparently. But no resolution. No plan on looking into what happened in Doug Feith's office. And apparently no agreement from the majority as to whether the committee will actually be able to interview any of the key people in the administration. Roberts, Frist and Co. are still stonewalling for the White House.

William Arkin on White Phosphorus in Fallujah: "It is a representation of a losing strategy"

William Arkin not only organizes what we know about the use of white phosphorus in Fallujah, but he puts in context -- which just makes it all the more depressing. This is a rich posting, and I urge you to go read more than the excerpt below. (More kudos to the Washington Post for giving Arkin a platform!)

"White Death" Is A Losing Strategy: ... When used in artillery ammunition, "Willy Pete" as it is called, can produce white smoke and illumination, and is particularly useful for target marking. It has been a standard and inexpensive weapon in world arsenals for decades.

... The [Italian TV] documentary shows close-ups of Fallujah civilians, badly burnt, their skin dissolved or caramelized. An Iraqi biologist in Fallujah is interviewed, saying "a rain of fire fell on the city," burning people's flesh, but strangely leaving "their clothes intact."

...White phosphorus, though used, the Pentagon said, is "simply another conventional munition" that is neither outlawed nor illegal.

Well not simply. ...

I for one am reluctant to pronounce whether the use of white phosphorous for "shake and bake" missions in Fallujah and the evident blundering use of white phosphorous in areas known to be occupied by civilians is illegal. Neither am I buying the State Department's line that the use of white phosphorous in this way -- that is, to possibly inflict unnecessary suffering -- is not "illegal" use. What I'm sure of is that the use of white phosphorous is not just some insensitive act. It is not just bad P.R. It is the ill thought out and panicked use of a weapon in an illegitimate way.

U.S. military forces have the most stringent legal rules, the most aggressive internal lawyer class, the most constraining rules of engagement with regard to the laws of war and civilian casualties -- even under the shoot-em-first-ask-questions-later Bush administration. Those rules are scrupulously followed, as long as everything is going well and the chain of command is strong and in control.

When the chain of command breaks down and military formations turn into a mob, Abu Ghraib's result. ...

When soldiers and commanders are discouraged and following a losing strategy, "taking" Fallujah, let's say, not for the first or second or even third time; when they are trying to use "psychology," that is, demoralize the enemy, then it is not enough to just defeat them. That is where shake and bake comes in, the desire to do something in a different way, to "shock and awe" the opposition, to sow chaos. ...

In Fallujah, the Army employed a terribly ill-conceived method for using white phosphorous, evidently interested only in the immediate tactical gain and its felicitous shake and bake fun. Higher level commanders were either absent or oblivious to the larger issues. They did not impose order and encourage precision. They should be held accountable. They won't.

It really is Vietnam all over again, isn't it?

Rebuttal on White Phosphorus Allegation

Someone has been going around the blogs posting a quite detailed and plausible rebuttal to the allegations raised by Italian TV and noted here under the title US Admits White Phosphorus Use In Fallujah. The core of it is that the white phosphorus artillery rounds in question are to make light or smoke, and that in any ordinary case you are more at risk if the cannister lands on your head than you are from the phosphorus itself. You can see a copy of it in the comments to that item, and on other blogs too. I would be delighted if this rebuttal proves correct.

Even so, alas, the other point remains: what did our bloody fighting in Fallujah achieve in the end, and was it worth the US and Iraqi casualties, not to mention the destruction of the city?

US Admits White Phosphorus Use In Fallujah

It was a year ago. Fallujah had become a battleground, many -- but by no means all -- residents had left; a substantial number were cowering in their homes or other buildings. The fighters opposing the US were mounting a stiff resistance.

It appears that the US has admitted that faced with this situation, it used white phosphorus. "We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out." If, as appears to be the case, they were used in artillery rounds, this spreads the stuff over a wide area. It lands on the skin of everyone within range. And it's now alleged that children in the area had their skin melted/burned off.

See Daily Kos: Melting the Skin Off of Children [GRAPHIC] for details. Like the commentator at Daily Kos says, the US obviously doesn't consider melting the skin off children to be a military or political goal; the problem is that the US failed to make NOT melting the skin off children and other civilians a greater priority.

If George Bush is going to continue his policy of sending troops into hostile urban areas, it is almost inevitable that the troops will either suffer more casualties, or kill/maim more civilians (or fail in their mission). Take away an effecitve weapon because it is so horrible in its effects on civilians -- and there are times when one must -- you risk getting more troops shot. These are stark choices, tragic choices -- and thus yet again call into further question the wisdom of the entire enterprise.

And what are the conditions in Fallujah today? Were they improved by the US military foray? Was all that sacrifice -- civilian and military -- of any value? Did it even rise to the level of a 'famous victory'?

After Blenheim
By R. Southey

IT was a summer evening,
   Old Kaspar's work was done,
And he before his cottage dome
   Was sitting in the sun;
And by him sported on the green
His little grandchild Wilhelmine.

She saw her brother Peterkin
   Roll something large and round,
Which he beside the rivulet
   In playing there had found:
He came to ask what he had found
That was so large and smooth and round.

Old Kaspar took it from the boy,
   Who stood expectant by;
And then the old man shook his head,
   And with a natural sigh—
"'Tis some poor fellow's skull," said he,
"Who fell in the great victory.

"I find them in the garden,
   For there's many here about;
And often when I go to plough
   The ploughshare turns them out.
For many thousand men," said he,
"Were slain in that great victory."

"Now tell us what 'twas all about,"
   Young Peterkin he cries;
And little Wilhelmine looks up
   With wonder-waiting eyes;
"Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for."

"It was the English," Kaspar cried,
   "Who put the French to rout;
But what they fought each other
   I could not well make out.
But everybody said," quoth he,
"That 'twas a famous victory.

"My father lived at Blenheim then,
   Yon little stream hard by;
They burnt his dwelling to the ground,
   And he was forced to fly:
So with his wife and child he fled,
Nor had he where to rest his head.

"With fire and sword the country round
   Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then
   And newborn baby died:
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.

"They say it was a shocking sight
   After the field was won,
For many thousand bodies here
   Lay rotting in the sun;
But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory.

"Great praise the Duke of Marlbro' won,
   And our good Prince Eugene"—
"Why 'twas a very wicked thing!"
   Said little Welhelmine;
"Nay—nay, my little girl," quoth he,
"It was a famous victory.

"And everybody praised the Duke
   Who this great fight did win"—
"But what good came of it at last?"
   Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why that I cannot tell," said he,
"But 'twas a famous victory."

Cost of Bush's War Is Paid in Lives

Leading By Example (Not)

If this report is true -- Bush plea for cash to rebuild Iraq raises $600 -- it certainly suggests that the Bush family is not leading by example. You would think that somewhere they could find a four-figure sum to donate to this cause for which GW is shilling?

Related post: Just Wondering. And, AFAIK, we still don't know how much if anything the Bush family has given to hurricane relief.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

One to Two Billion Dollars Missing at Iraqi Ministry of Defense.

Just think of it as prequel to the Hurricane Katrina reconstruction. After all, it's being run under the supervision of the same people.

Jim Morin Hits a Home Run

Generally, I'm not the greatest fan of the Miami Herald's cartoonist, Jim Morin, who too frequently draws cartoons that don't say much, or pretty much illustrate the obvious rather then amusing or provoking. But once in while he does a beaut, and Friday was one of those days:

(Title typo fixed, sorry.)

Robert Waldman Annotates the Iraqi Proto-Constitution

The first draft of history: Robert Waldman points out key clauses of the Iraqi proto-constitution.

Vigils for Cindy Sheehan

MoveOn.org is encouraging (and providing meetup-like services to enable) a set of nation-wide candlelight vigils in support of Cindy Sheehan this evening.

Only problem is that the one around here starts at 5, when it's still bright daylight. And, oh yes, it's already oversubscribed.

Pictures of Camp Casey

Cryptome carries photos of Cindy Sheehan's Bush Ranch Protest. Her campaign is getting lots of coverage in the press and a lot of national support. Digby has the best theory I've seen yet as to why so many people support Cindy Sheehan, and why, as he puts it, "she's driving the Republicans crazy" (example).

Gorgeous George Galloway, Sub-Loony

Via Crooked Timber, Gorgeous George, how are ya, part 2, a link to this extended clip of George Galloway saying wicked and stupid things.

It's ok to be mad at Bush, Blair and Berlusconi. It's ok to to accuse the US of imperial designs on the Middle East, although these days it's probably shifting fast to tail-between-legs time.

But telling an Arab Muslim audience that Jerusalem and Baghdad are their beautiful daughters being raped by westerners? And that they and their governments should do more to protect those daughters? Inciting the audience with the suggestion that Western leaders (and one presumes, their soldiers?) are really just terrorists?

I called Galloway a raving loon back when he made mincemeat of Senator Coleman a few weeks ago, to some criticism. I wish now to apologize to the fine folks in the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, as I now appreciate that the Loony Party has standards; I accept that Galloway wouldn't qualify.

2000 Coalition Soldiers Dead in Iraq

Iraq Coalition Casualties reports the 2000th uniformed victim. Not to mention the civilian deaths and infrastructure carnage. (And the monetary cost to the US taxpayers of the future.)

And to what benefit?

Iraq Body Count

The people at the Iraq Body Count project and the Oxford Research Group have released what appears to be a quite careful and judicious report counting and analyzing Iraqi civilian casualties since the beginning of the war. They count 24,865 civilians (just civilians, not soldiers or recruits or insurgents) killed in Iraq in the two years stretching from March 20, 2003 to March 19, 2005, and they estimate that there have been more than three injuries for every death. Nearly half of the reported deaths were in Baghdad (likely that proportion is so high in part because Baghdad is the best-reported of Iraq's conflict-ridden areas, and because of the good quality of mortuary data there); about one in every 500 Baghdad civilians has been killed violently since March 2003. Baghdad didn't have the highest number of civilian deaths per capita, though; that honor, among the larger cities, went to Fallujah, where the number rose to 1 in 136.

About 37% of those folks were killed by U.S. forces. Just under 11% were killed by insurgent forces, and about 5% were caught in cross-fire in which both groups participated. That leaves 36% killed in the continuing wave of violent crime that followed the war, enabled by the absence of police and the easy availability of weapons (this is an “excess” figure, subtracting out the average number of pre-war killings over a two-year period), and 11% who could not be classified.

The vast bulk of the 9,270 civilian killings by U.S.-led forces took place either in March 20-April 30 2003 (6882 reported civilian deaths, or 164 per day), or in April-November 2004 (2038 civilian deaths, or between eight and nine per day for the eight-month period). During other calendar periods, U.S.-led forces have killed, on average, fewer than one Iraqi civilian per day.

On the other hand, the number of civilian killings by insurgent forces, criminals, and unclassifiable actors (14,337 in all) has steadily increased over the two-year period, from a low of under 10 per day in April 2003 to a high of 35 per day in February 2005 (the last complete month in the study). As a result, the total number of civilians killed in the second year following the announced end of major hostilities was almost twice as high (11,315) as in the first (6,215).

(I should note that this was an actual count of actual deaths, not an estimate. It's limited to deaths that actually got reported to somebody whose records were good enough that they could be counted. For a more wide-ranging estimation, see Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample study, published last fall in the Lancet, and concluding that “about 100 000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion”).

Iraq News Archive

Check out, if you haven't, the White House's Iraq News Archive. Go ahead; do it. Then come back. Doesn't seem to be a lot of news about the glorious progress of “Renewal in Iraq,” sure. But the big question is: What's with all the Latin? Why is the White House, in lieu of any good news from Iraq, instead educating us with quotes from Cicero on the philosophy of pleasure and pain? Well, Mr. Answer Man has the answer (courtesy of The Red Pencil Diaries). It appears that compositors historically (that is, for about 500 years) have used Cicero texts for mocking up typeset pages when the actual content isn't ready. Pagemaker and other typesetting programs still have the relevant passages from Cicero built right in. (The world is a strange and wonderful place.) In the case of the White House's Iraq News Archive, the “greeked” text was there to make sure that lines positioned properly. But there was a dearth of Iraq news that the White House wanted to print; the web designers apparently abandoned the page; and it went/stayed online with the “Greek” still there …

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, this is called “greeking.” Why is it called greeking, given that the text itself (natch) is in Latin, not Greek? I have no idea.

Operation Yellow Elephant

Operation Yellow Elephant.

I am not making this up. (Someone else did.)

Iraq Rhymes With Vietnam

How is the Iraq War like the Vietnam war? Let us count the ways. Oh, wait, the Cunning Realist has done it for us, riffing off a Mark Twain line that “History doesn't repeat itself; at best it sometimes rhymes”:

S/he finds fifteen similarities between the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, and then issues a challenge:

If someone—-perhaps a supporter of this war—-can come up with fifteen ways in which the two conflicts differ materially, I look forward to reading your list in the comments section:

Well, let's see. I'm no supporter of the war, but I like a challenge.

1. It was wet in Vietnam, it's dry in Iraq.

2. There's much more oil in Iraq and more money to be made there.

3. In the case of Vietnam, the US government made up or exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in order to spook Congress and justify its actions. In the case of Iraq, the US government latched on to a real but irrelevant attack on the US to spook Congress and justify its actions.

4. In Vietnam the US fought against nationalists and a political ideology (Communism). In Iraq, the US fights against nationalism and a religious ideology (radical Islam). The Islamicists have more allies with less to lose who are thus more willing to help them.

5. I give up.

What He Said (Gen. Sanchez edition)

I was going to fulminate about the trial balloon launched regarding promoting Gen. Sanchez. But Billion already did the job. So go see Whiskey Bar: Rewarding Failure.

One tiny footnote: as I understand it, Gen. Sanchez technically may not have perjured himself in front of Congress as he said he hadn't authorized highly coercive interrogation methods in the past year. It may have been just over twelve months since he'd done it.

That's very misleading, and certainly prevarication, but I'm not sure if it's technically perjury.

More "Downings Street Memos"

Newsday has the AP story: Newsday.com: Memos show U.S. push for war, describing another six unvarnished pre-invasion memos now leaked from the UK.

Money quote is from Toby Dodge, identified as an Iraq expert who teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London:

Dodge said the memos also confirm that “soon after 9/11 happened, the starting gun was fired for the invasion of Iraq.”

Even though, as UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw then wrote, “there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with OBL [Osama bin Laden] and al-Qaida.”

Spiking a Rumor

I frequently run into this rumor that the Pentagon is trying to keep down the US casualty count by not including deaths which happen outside Iraq (e.g. wounded who die on the evac plane). And, alas, I don't have much any faith in the integrity of the Rumsfeldian spinmeisters. So it's nice to have an authoritative debunking from a neutral source: 9,000 dead and the Reality-Based Community:

For two solid years now, Michael White and I have followed the deaths in Iraq literally on a daily basis. We haunt the CENTCOM, MNF-Iraq and DOD websites … as well as all of the major news feeds. In fact, the two of us have grown adept at finding death notices in the news media prior to the military issuing them. For about the past year and a half, Michael and I have been joined in the research by Evan D., an historian in the Washington D.C. area, and by Lynn L., another researcher whose husband is in the 4th ID. So that makes 4 of us searching the news media and the military sites, each and every day mind you, for deaths.

And after all this time, we all four of us concur. Yes, there are a few unreported deaths, which I'll explain in a minute. But not thousands. We'd have found them if there were.

[…] there's no truth to the rumor that if you die outside of Iraq, the DOD automatically ignores you. Yes, occasionally it does … especially if the death happens months after the soldier gets back from Iraq (Lynn's husband knows of 5 men that this applies to). And I am told that occasionally Special Forces deaths may be hush-hush. But as a rule, no. It's just a wild rumor.

Settles that.

Gorgeous George Galloway MP Dukes it Out With Senator Norm Coleman (Updated)

How dreadfully horrible and sad that it takes a raving loon like George Galloway, MP to read the riot act to the Senate. WATCH THIS VIDEO. I don't like the guy, and have a 'where there's smoke there's fire' feeling about him that may come from reading UK newspapers, but as regards the disaster of Iraq policy generally, I think Senator Norm Coleman had it coming in spades. “Pack of lies” sums it up.

Both the Washington Post story and especially the Reuters report (perishable link) are worth a look too.

Update: Great coverage at the Guardian. The straight news story, 'I am not, nor have I ever been, an oil trader', is fine and the color commentary, Galloway and the mother of all invective is super. The Telegraph's coverage is oddly subdued, perhaps because their ideological soulmates got roughed up a bit. [Probably not: see update 3 below]

Update2: A partial transcript. Includes goodies not in the video snippet linked above.

PS. Galloway claims the committee never sought to contact him before publishing its accusations. Wouldn't it be nice if some reporter could find out if there are actual letters from the Commitee addressed to him, say at his Parliamentary office? I'd think that ordinary decency, not to mention respect for a trusted ally's legislature, would require a Senate committee to at least seek his response before going nuclear.

I see there's also a separate controversy as to whether Galloway tried to contact the committee:

Mr Galloway also insisted the committee had never responded to his requests to give evidence in person.

Today a spokesman for the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations denied it had received correspondence from the MP, who was elected on an anti-war ticket last week to Bethnal Green and Bow in east London. The spokesman said the committee had offered to allow Mr Galloway to appear before them on Tuesday.

…

A spokesman for the US Senate committee earlier told the Press Assocation that “at no time” did Mr Galloway contact them by any means “including but not limited to telephone, fax, email, letter, Morse code or carrier pigeon”.

Republican senator Norm Coleman, the head of the committee, denied that Mr Galloway had made contact last year.

[Galloway spokesperson] Mr [Ron] McKay promised to produce evidence in letter or email form that Mr Galloway had attempted to contact the committee.

I hope some reporter will actually try to get to the bottom of who is lying here. I am not placing any bets.

Update3: Oops. I think the real reason the Telegraph's coverage might be a little weak here is that last December, Galloway won £150,000 in libel damages from the Daily Telegraph over stories claiming he received money from Saddam’s regime — the same charges being repeated by Senator Coleman's subcommittee.

Iraq: The Untold Story

Here's a reporter, Home from Iraq, explaining why it is we never, ever, see an article in our newspapers that explains why, from their own point of view, the 'insurgents' in Iraq are fighting. (If there's been one in the media I read, I certainly missed it.)

If nothing else, it demonstrates that the US military has total message control. Given the extreme danger for an American of venturing anywhere in Iraq these days, I don't find it that easy to blame the media here — except for failing to level with us about what they aren't doing.

Update (5/12): A really interesting and very spirited debate over this editorial is currently running at Romenesko's letters forum at poynter.org. Alas, the forum doesn't allow permalinks to current stuff, so you'll have to hunt for the May 10-11 content.

Blair Publishes Legal Advice On Legality of Iraq Invasion

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose re-election campaign has been dogged by charges that he joined the invasion of Iraq in the face of advice by his Attorney General that the invasion would be illegal, has published the final draft of the legal advice sent to his office.

I've only had time to read this very quickly, but here are my preliminary thoughts. I invite corrections and amplifications.

To the extent that Blair may have claimed in the past that the advice told him the invasion was legal, the document reveals a somewhat more equivocal endorsement, more of the form of “maybe” or “good arguable case, might not ultimately convince a tribunal.' But the memo clearly doesn't forbid it.

In domestic UK terms, this may still be damaging, since Blair didn't disclose the existence of the doubts to Parliament, and thus can be accused of lack of candor. In US terms, the memo is pretty middle of the road, and won't make partisans on either side terribly happy.

More About Grounds for Iraq War Were Imaginary

Readers who would like to salt the debate that arose in the comments to my item on It's Official: Grounds for Iraq War Were Imaginary might like to look at Juan Cole's Guest Comment: “Bush is Lying” by Kevin McMillan, and especially the links he gives regarding WMD in Iraq.

It's Official: Grounds for Iraq War Were Imaginary

The CIA has at last admitted the obvious: there never were WMDs in Iraq:

In his final word, the CIA’s top weapons inspector in Iraq said Monday that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction has “gone as far as feasible” and has found nothing, closing an investigation into the purported programs of Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the 2003 invasion

Contrast to this in June 2003:

Bush confident of finding banned Iraqi weapons: President hits back at critics on WMD question. President Bush dismissed what he called “revisionist history” about the war in Iraq on Tuesday, and his spokesman said the president is still confident a Pentagon-led search will find Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction.

How many soldiers and civilians died in pursuit of this mirage?

Update: Here's a fuller account of the Iraq Survey Group's final report and a link to the GPO's official edition of the Comprehensive Revised Report with Addendums on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (Duelfer Report).

'Mission Accomplished' (ver. 2.0)

Reuters.com—Bush: U.S. Actions on Iraq Made America More Secure: CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has made America more secure and inspired movement toward democratic reforms across the Middle East, President Bush said on Saturday, the second anniversary of the military action that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Uh-huh. And why are we still on yellow alert? And how exactly have higher oil prices and a bigger trade deficit, not to mention a bigger government defict (fueled in part by the costs of the Iraq war) made us safer or stronger? And let's not even ask the families of the casualites how they feel….

Mission Accomplished? I've heard that one before. By the way, anyone seen my exit strategy anywhere?

The Most Powerful Man in Iraq

Newsweek runs a good profile of the most powerful man in Iraq, What Sistani Wants.

Some Election!

First Draft - Deomocrazy reports that a full five — count them, five! — days before the election, the Iraqi voters get to know who the candidates are! Such great democracy.

In a few days, they'll even get to know where some of the polling places are! (I am not making this up—many voters, except of course for those in the three provinces where we aren't bothering with elections at all, will be eligible to learn where the polling places are on election day.)

And no cars, just in case you wanted a ride to the polls.

And we closed down a major opposition newspaper months ago. And are enforcing Saddam's anti-union laws.

And… oh, what's the point?

Winning Hearts and Minds in Iraq

Every day, we're getting better in every way, and yes, the good news is that they just love us in Iraq.

Or, then again, maybe not: When even your hand-picked cabinet members resign in disgust, you're really doing great.

So Much for Denials About Explosives Really Being at Al Qaqaa

The LA Times has the story a couple of days late: Soldiers Describe Looting of Explosives.

Four more years of incompetence to look forward to. Followed in each case by coveups and lying. What a delight.

Actually, the next act in this play, if it follows the script, is the 'breaking of the President' moment, whose ordinary run was delayed by 9/11. But consider that the 9/11 commission will be getting to the good stuff, the Plame investigation should lead somewhere, and perhaps now that the election is over some honest Republican in Congress will start to investigate torture by US armed forces and (I can dream, can't I?) by the CIA.

100,000 Iraqi Civilians Dead -- Most From Bombing

Huge banner headline in the (left-of-center) Guardian today: 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, says study. The study to which it refers was published by the Lancet, Britain's most respected (and peer reviewed) medical journal. It used sampling, but looks serious.

Although some of the casualties are due to things like an increase in infant mortality because women are unable or too frightened to go to hospitals to deliver, the great bulk of the deaths is civilians killed by aircraft bombings or helicopter-launched munitions.

The amount of civilian casualties is sufficiently high to call into question whether the US has complied with the (rather vague) laws of humanitarian warfare.

Update (10/30): Slate has a good article noting the gigantic margin of error admitted by the authors of the report — so large as to call into question their publicizing the midpoint of a range of possibilities from 8,000 to almost 200,000.

Operation Truth Seems Like a Good Cause

Operation Truth, the makers of this video, seems like a good cause.

In the unlikely event you have a few dollars to spare…

Kerry's Iraq Plan May Be Much Less Daft Than It Sounds

John Kerry was not my first choice candidate, but I've always thought he was basically ok. And after the debates I felt better about him. Nevertheless, as is inevitably the case, there are a handful of policy areas where I disagree or find him wanting. One is the slightly protectionist tinge to his rhetoric (but note that the other guy is even worse on fair and free trade: actions, like the steel tariff, speak louder than words).

Probably my least favorite Kerry policy has been his 'plan' for Iraq, which I took to be a politically expedient non-starter. About the only thing I found plausible in Bush's reactions to Kerry was his question as to why on earth any ally of ours would want to step into the Iraqi quagmire caused by Bush's horrible errors of judgment. Ok, that's not exactly how Bush put it, but it's close enough to make the point.

But see reality: It turns out Kerry may know what he's talking about (spotted via Talkleft): the Germans have opened the door to entering the Iraq coalition in a Kerry administration. Advantage Kerry.

It may be of course that the Germans are just blowing smoke because they so hate GW Bush that they want him out of office. Think about that: Normally incumbents support each other internationally, or at least stay neutral. Now here's another one of our major allies who so hate the current administration that they're willing to go out on a limb for the challenger. (South Korea is an earlier example: they loath and despise current US policy on North Korea and regional security. I bet they don't like Bush protectionism either.)

More from the 'Buck Stops WHERE?' Dept

Newsweek has an informative article about the apostasy of L. Paul Bremer III and the White House attempt to put the lid back on. But it buries the lead lede, and misses the real point in an interesting and sadly predictable way.

MSNBC - Inner Circle No More? At the heart of the controversy is a still-unresolved dispute over who was mainly responsible for one of the biggest mistakes of Bremer's 15-month tenure in Iraq, one that is commonly ascribed to him. This was the decision in May 2003 to reverse the efforts of Bremer's predecessor, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, to put the ragged elements of the Iraqi Army to work. After Bremer formally disbanded the army, some disaffected soldiers were believed to have joined the insurgency, which still rages.

Administration officials said today that this decision was made on the ground in Iraq, rather than in Washington. Before the war, the plan was to get rid of Iraqi Army officers but use regular troops for security and reconstruction after Saddam's ouster. But Bremer “flipped that around,” said a White House official. He added that Bremer and his deputy, Walt Slocombe, made the decision by themselves.

But Bremer and Garner have previously indicated the decision was made in Washington. According to one official who attended a meeting that Bremer had with his staff upon his arrival in Baghdad in mid-May of 2003, Bremer was warned he would cause chaos by demobilizing the army. The CIA station chief told him, “That's another 350,000 Iraqis you're pissing off, and they've got guns.” According to one source who was at the meeting, Garner then asked if they could discuss the matter further in a smaller meeting. Garner then said: “Before you announce this thing let's do all the pros and cons of this, because we are going to have a hell of a lot of problems with it. There are a hell of a lot more cons than there are pros. Let's line them all up then get on the phone to [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld.” Bremer replied: “I don't have any choice. I have to do this.” Garner then protested further, but Bremer cut him off. “The president told me that de-Baathification comes before the immediate needs of the Iraqi people.”

That Bush himself is directly and personally responsible for one of the major boneheaded judgments of the post-invasion period explains a lot. It should have been the lead lede of the story, not that poor Mr. Bremer can expect a horse's head in his bed Real Soon Now.

But lurking behind the story is yet another example of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Somehow, GW Bush is only potentially responsible for errors he personally orders? He has no responsibility for how his team screws up? Even when he keeps them around?

Talk about teflon!

The Bush Reality Distortion Field Has Many Victims

Donald Rumsfeld tells the Council on Foreign Relations — the striped-pants elite, and not the province of fools — that “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links” al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein. Then he gets back to the office, gets beat up, and says he was “misunderstood”.

What possessed Rumsfeld to tell the truth without thought of the Rovian consequences? Having done it, how was he whipped [in the political sense] into taking it back?

Or, perhaps, is this whole line of speculation mistaken? Perhaps Rumsfeld has some more basic and widespread psychological problem coping with, or denial of, reality?

Or, maybe Bushness is catching? If your Leader carries his own reality distortion field, there must be a powerful groupthink pressure to deny reality too. And there sure seems to be a lot of reality denial in this crew. Consider just this week's examples, the cases of Paul Bremer and of course Dr. Condoleezza Rice.

But the emperor really doesn't have any clothes….

Smoking Gun: Admin Was Warned Early that Iraq Nuke Claims Were False

New York Times: How the White House Embraced Disputed Iraqi Arms Intelligence—it seems the administration knew (or, for those who didn't read intelligence reports, should have known) that “the government’s foremost nuclear experts had concluded” that the aluminum tubes on which the administration based much of its claim that Iraq was trying to build nuclear weapons “were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all.” Oddly, though, CIA head George Tenet seems for a long time to have made no effort to learn about the views of his most expert subordinates, or to understand the reasons for their disagreement with the analysts favored by the White House.

I think that chunks of this article collate facts already in corners of the public record, e.g. the 9/11 commission report or previously-ignored and buried Washington Post reports, rather than breaking new ground. [Update: did the Daily Show scoop everyone?] Even so, in putting the pieces together into a narrative, the article paints a new and even more disturbing picture of a deeply dysfunctional administration. These guys shouldn’t be trusted with your dollar, must less your lives, fortunes, or sacred honors.

What a pity we didn’t get this article before the debate on international issues. Still, I suppose it’s fair game for the Vice-Presidential debate.

Guess Who's Shrill Now

Guess who said this:

• Four years from now, America will have 5,000 dead servicemen and women and an untold number of dead Iraqis at a cost of about $1 trillion, yet still be no closer to success than we are right now, or
• The U.S. will be gone, and we will witness the birth of a violent breeding ground for Shiite terrorists posing a far greater threat to Americans than a contained Saddam.

Nope. Not Howard Dean. Nope not Kerry or Edwards. Nope, not a politician. Not some wild-eyed radical. A military planner: MSNBC - 'Staying the Course' Isn't an Option brings you this radical thought from “Retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner” described as “a former military planner who served on the U.S. Central Command planning staff for operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.”

(ex-Pentagon spotted via Pandagon)

Shameless

Remember June 28? Here is how PBS' News Hour reported what happened that day: (emp add)

The U.S.-led coalition in Iraq transferred sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government two days ahead of schedule, in an effort to avert possible insurgent attacks.

The unexpected handover ceremony came at mid-morning Baghdad time, the middle of the night in the U.S. The event was convened hastily and secretly inside Baghdad's heavily guarded green zone.

Sounds grim, doesn't it? But here is what Bush had to say about it in today's radio address: (emp add)

We're making steady progress in implementing our five-step plan toward the goal we all want: completing the mission so that Iraq is stable and self-governing, and American troops can come home with the honor they have earned.

The first step was achieved on June 28th, not only on time, but ahead of schedule, when the coalition transferred full sovereignty to a government of Iraqi citizens.

Not only was it "ahead of schedule" but it was done in such a manner that the people in Baghdad were not inconvenienced. Since the handover was performed "secretly", that meant no traffic jams or other problems that a public event would have caused. But somehow Bush failed to mention that this morning.

I Hate It When She's Right (III)

The facts in the column may be substantively cribbed from innumerable blogs, but it has that trademark Dowd cattiness. And, oh yes, it's so true:

Dance of the Marionettes: It's heartwarming, really.

President Bush has his own Mini-Me now, someone to echo his every word and mimic his every action.

For so long, Mr. Bush has put up with caricatures of a wee W. sitting in the vice president's lap, Charlie McCarthy style, as big Dick Cheney calls the shots. But now the president has his own puppet to play with.

All last week in New York and Washington, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of Iraq parroted Mr. Bush's absurd claims that the fighting in Iraq was an essential part of the U.S. battle against terrorists that started on 9/11, that the neocons' utopian dream of turning Iraq into a modern democracy was going swimmingly, and that the worse things got over there, the better they really were.

…

Every time the administration takes a step it says will reduce the violence, the violence increases.

Mr. Bush doesn't seem to care that by using Mr. Allawi as a puppet in his campaign, he decreases the prime minister's chances of debunking the belief in Iraq that he is a Bush puppet - which is the only way he can gain any credibility to stabilize his devastated country and be elected himself.

Actually, being the president's marionette is a step up from Mr. Allawi's old jobs as henchman for Saddam Hussein and stoolie for the C.I.A.

It's hilarious that the Republicans have trotted out Mr. Allawi as an objective analyst of the state of conditions in Iraq when he's the administration's handpicked guy and has as much riding on putting the chaos in a sunny light as they do. Though Mr. Allawi presents himself as representing all Iraqis, his actions have been devised to put more of the country in the grip of this latest strongman - giving himself the power to declare martial law, bringing back the death penalty and kicking out Al Jazeera.

Bush officials, who proclaim themselves so altruistic about bringing liberty to Iraq, really see Iraq in a creepy narcissistic way: It's all about Mr. Bush's re-election.

The only odd thing is that Dowd is surprised. With this crowd everything is about their re-election. It's part of why they are so dangerous. With the Reaganites you frequently believed that large swatches of policy might actually be dictated by some crazed belief they were good for the nation (not environmental policy, and arguably not Stockmanomics, but much defense and foreign policy at least).

The effort required for any well-informed person to hold that belief about this lot is much more than mere cognitive dissonance could describe. It needs at least a Marcuse to encompass it.

Perfect Summary of the Allawi Visit

Josh Marshall has the perfect summary of Iyad Allawi's “state” visit to the US.

Talking Points Memo: Here we have a US-installed foreign head of state, whose travel schedule is determined by the US State Department, visiting the US to buoy the president's election campaign and spouting demonstrable lies in order to support a retrospective rationale for war that the White House wants Americans to believe but lacks the gall to state explicitly.

(As someone said, Bush has a 100% approval rating among foreign leaders he appointed.)

What They Bought With Their Lives and Bodies

When you want cost-benefit analysis, go to an economist.

Edward of Obsidian Wings asks a straightforward question: “What have our 1,000 troops died for?”

This question has a straightforward answer. The first 100 died (and the first 500 were maimed) to liberate Iraq from a dreadful tyrant who had no operational ties with Al Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, posed no threat to the U.S., and posed little threat to his neighbors.

The next 900 died (and the next 4500 were maimed) because:

1. Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted to show that we could conquer, occupy, and control Iraq with a small force all by ourselves so that the Syrians and the Iranians would be scared of what we could do with the rest of our army.
2. Nobody in the White House dared propose any change in policy when it became clear to everybody that Cheney and Rumsfeld were wrong.

Further conclusions to draw from this straightforward answer are left as an exercise for the reader.

Juan Cole is *Very* Shrill Today

Juan Cole is so shrill today that we need a new term for it.

Read If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?.

There's really only one thing you can say about this: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Juan Cole R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn!. (Talk about dumb slogans…)

Oh heck, I'm going to quote the whole thing.

If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?

President Bush said Tuesday that the Iraqis are refuting the pessimists and implied that things are improving in that country.

What would America look like if it were in Iraq's current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.

And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?

What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire? What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings, and considered it dangerous to go over to Crystal City or Alexandria?

What if all the reporters for all the major television and print media were trapped in five-star hotels in Washington, DC and New York, unable to move more than a few blocks safely, and dependent on stringers to know what was happening in Oklahoma City and St. Louis? What if the only time they ventured into the Midwest was if they could be embedded in Army or National Guard units?

There are estimated to be some 25,000 guerrillas in Iraq engaged in concerted acts of violence. What if there were private armies totalling 275,000 men, armed with machine guns, assault rifles (legal again!), rocket-propelled grenades, and mortar launchers, hiding out in dangerous urban areas of cities all over the country? What if they completely controlled Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Denver and Omaha, such that local police and Federal troops could not go into those cities?

What if, during the past year, the Secretary of State (Aqilah Hashemi), the President (Izzedine Salim), and the Attorney General (Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim) had all been assassinated?

What if all the cities in the US were wracked by a crime wave, with thousands of murders, kidnappings, burglaries, and carjackings in every major city every year?

What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target “safe houses” of “criminal gangs”, but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?

What if there were virtually no commercial air traffic in the country? What if many roads were highly dangerous, especially Interstate 95 from Richmond to Washington, DC, and I-95 and I-91 up to Boston? If you got on I-95 anywhere along that over 500-mile stretch, you would risk being carjacked, kidnapped, or having your car sprayed with machine gun fire.

What if no one had electricity for much more than 10 hours a day, and often less? What if it went off at unpredictable times, causing factories to grind to a halt and air conditioning to fail in the middle of the summer in Houston and Miami? What if the Alaska pipeline were bombed and disabled at least monthly? What if unemployment hovered around 40%?

What if veterans of militia actions at Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing were brought in to run the government on the theory that you need a tough guy in these times of crisis?

What if municipal elections were cancelled and cliques close to the new “president” quietly installed in the statehouses as “governors?” What if several of these governors (especially of Montana and Wyoming) were assassinated soon after taking office or resigned when their children were taken hostage by guerrillas?

What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?

Ouch.

Update: rc3.org:“Cole also fails to ask perhaps the most important “What if?” question, which is: How would Americans react if, amid the chaos, there were 1,650,000 foreign, non-English speaking soldiers in our country.”

British to Withdraw 1/3 of Troops from Iraq

News you only see in the foreign press: Britain to cut troop levels in Iraq.

The British Army is to start pulling troops out of Iraq next month despite the deteriorating security situation in much of the country, The Observer has learnt.

The main British combat force in Iraq, about 5,000-strong, will be reduced by around a third by the end of October during a routine rotation of units.

…

The forthcoming 'drawdown' of British troops in Basra has not been made public and is likely to provoke consternation in both Washington and Baghdad. Many in Iraq argue that more, not fewer, troops are needed. Last week British troops in Basra fought fierce battles with Shia militia groups.

The reduction will take place when the First Mechanised Infantry Brigade is replaced by the Fourth Armoured Division, now based in Germany, in a routine rotation over the next few weeks.

Troop numbers are being finalised, but, military sources in Iraq and in Whitehall say, they are likely to be 'substantially less' than the current total in Basra: the new combat brigade will have five or even four battle groups, against its current strength of six battle groups of around 800 men.

A military spokesman in Basra confirmed the scaling back of the British commitment.

This ran in the Observer on the 19th. The Observer has fallen on hard times, and isn't as reliable as its stablemate the Guardian, which is one of the UK's best newspapers. Still, this story hasn't, AFAIK, been contradicted by the UK government. Yet, as far as Google and I can tell, this story has gotten no traction at all in the US media except for Salon, which reprints the Observer story.

You would think that our #1 ally beginning to thin its troops on the ground merited a small mention in your local paper maybe? Or 30 seconds on the nightly news?

Maybe if we issue a press release in a new font?

On This, GW Bush Told the Truth

On this blog I have often suggested that GW Bush's relationship to the truth is somewhat opportunistic. So I suppose it's only fair to point out that today's news demonstrates that on one issue at least GW Bush did tell us the truth during the 2000 campaign: When push comes to shove (and when investigations into Halliburton make it an unlikely candidate for further contracts in Iraq) Bush does not believe in 'nation building'. Even when it's going to create more chaos:

Iraqi officials in charge of rebuilding their country's shattered and decrepit infrastructure are warning that the Bush administration's plan to divert $3.46 billion from water, sewage, electricity and other reconstruction projects to security could leave many people without the crucial services that generally form the backbone of a stable and functioning democracy.

…

But the move comes as a grievous disappointment to Iraqi officials who had already seen the billions once promised them tied up for months by American regulations and planning committees, consumed by administrative overhead and set aside for the enormous costs of ensuring safety for the workers and engineers who will actually build the new sewers, water plants and electrical generators. Of the $18.4 billion that Congress approved last fall for Iraq's reconstruction, only about $1 billion has been spent so far.

“Nobody believes this will benefit Iraq,” said Kamil N. Chadirji, deputy minister for administration and financial affairs in the Iraqi Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works, which has responsibility for water and sewage projects outside Baghdad.

“For a year we have been talking, with beautiful PowerPoint documents, but without a drop of water,” Mr. Chadirji said, waving a colorful printout that he received from American officials.

The decision to shift the money, which had been earmarked for rebuilding everything from roads and bridges to telecommunications and the outdated equipment pumping oil, appears to signal an abandonment of the administration's original plan for putting Iraq back on its feet as a functioning nation.

They can't even spend the money they run around saying Kerry opposed?

Winning Hearts and Minds in Iraq

From the generally pro-Iraq-war UK Telegraph:

Mazen al-Tumeizi, a Palestinian working for Al-Arabiya, one of the main Arab satellite television channels, was among 12 people - all believed to be civilians - killed in the incident on Haifa Street.

…

On Haifa Street, a main road in central Baghdad that has long been under the effective control of Saddam loyalists, there were several hours of gunfire during a United States mission to capture 21 men the Iraqi government described as terrorists.

A Bradley fighting vehicle was damaged by an apparent car bomb. A total of five American soldiers were wounded in the explosion and during the operation to evacuate the crew.

Later, a crowd of Iraqis gathered round the burning vehicle and some began dancing in celebration.

…

Tumeizi was describing the incident on camera when two helicopter gunships were seen flying down the street and opening fire. Tumeizi was hit by a bullet and doubled over, shouting: I'm dying, I'm dying.” About 50 people were wounded, the health ministry said, among them a Reuters cameraman and an Iraqi reporter for the Guardian.

Through the day, United States officers offered contradictory accounts of the incident and ordered an investigation.

“As the helicopters flew over the burning Bradley they received small arms fire from the insurgents in the vicinity of the vehicle,” said Major Philip Smith of the 1st Cavalry Division. “Clearly within the rules of engagement, the helicopters returned fire destroying some anti-Iraqi forces in the vicinity of the Bradley.”

However, witnesses said there were no Iraqi fighters in the area at the time.

Does the so-called Iraqi government have a view on this?

It doesn't really matter if this was policy or an error. Errors happen over time, and they have political consequences. We are gradually loosing territory on the ground in Iraq to various types of 'insurgents'. And I don't see how getting into bed with Baathists is helping us either.

We've seen this movie before, folks. It not only hurts while it's running, but it ends badly.

Here's a relatively mild Arab press version of the same incident,

US Missile Kills Journalist: Mazen Al-Tomaizi, a Palestinian television journalist working for Saudi news channel Al-Ekhbariya and Arab satellite channel Al-Arabiya, was killed yesterday by an American missile as he was reporting live from Baghdad on deadly clashes between US forces and insurgents.

…

Most of the young Iraqi men and boys mingling around the burning wreckage of the US tank were unfazed by the clattering of an American helicopter gunship overhead. Moments later they were under fire.

Some had pointed to the Apache helicopter. Others jogged slowly from the burning Bradley fighting vehicle. None expected it would shoot at them. “I didn’t imagine the helicopter would fire on the crowd,” Reuters cameraman Seif Fouad said from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from two shrapnel wounds. He had been recording the scene and was standing near Mazen.

“I looked at the sky and saw a helicopter at very low altitude,” Seif said. “Just moments later I saw a flash of light from the Apache. Then a strong explosion,” he said.

The first explosion sent Seif crashing to the ground. “Mazen’s blood was on my camera and face,” Seif said. Mazen screamed to Seif for help: “Seif, Seif! I’m going to die. I’m going to die.”

A second blast hit some 15 seconds later, lodging shrapnel in Seif’s leg and waist as he was trying to pull Mazen from harm’s way. Seif’s camera, its lens stained with blood, filmed the chaos. Reuters footage showed the crowd to be made up of unarmed boys and men, two of whom were standing on top of the Bradley.

Jon Stewart Is a National Treasure

If anything persuades me to buy a TV, it's going to be the Daily Show.

Via Over/Spun, a link to Stewart acting as a one-man truth squad.

How come the respectable media tip-toes around this stuff?

Iraq, the Chicken Version

Juan Cole's dark sense of humor brings us Iraq-themed chicken jokes. This being about Iraq, things do not usually go very well for the chicken. Let's hope Heidi Bond doesn't see these.

Juan Cole Despairs: Becomes Head-Banger (But Not Against Wall)

Double-barreled despair is spreading about the Iraq morass. On the one hand are folks like me who know they don't understand the strategic situation, but suspect it is going to hell in a handbasket. On the other hand are the people who do understand the strategic situation and have concluded it is already a basket case. To Robin Wright add Juan Cole: All Bush Wants to do is Dance, his absurd response to an absurd situation.

Iraq Exit Strategy Revisited

As things in and about Iraq go from bad to evil, and the no exit meme takes root (in the Existentialist not the Pottery Barn sense), it may be time to revive my Modest Dinner-Party-Based Proposal For An Iraqi Exit Strategy:

According to the CIA Factbook, Iraq today has an estimated population of just over 24,683,000, and (in 2002) had a GDP estimated at US$58 billion in purchasing power parity, giving it an estimated GDP per capita of about $2,400. …

Counting just the reconstruction grant [$20.3 billion], that makes a subsidy about equal to 40% of Iraq’s former GDP, and about $960 for every Iraqi. Throw in what we are spending to occupy the country, and it’s more than last year’s Iraqi GDP, and about $3,230 per Iraqi.

Having seen these numbers, I’ve now cooked up a modest proposal for a US exit strategy from Iraq. Bring all the troops home. Give each Iraqi $3000 a year for the next year or two, and count on the free market to conduct the reconstruction for us at much greater efficiency than we would otherwise achieve.

I was mostly sorta kidding when I proposed giving every Iraq $3000 and going home, but the idea had legs.

This blog was a baby then and had no readers (now it's a toddler and has 500+ daily readers directly plus I'd guess about 1000 via the full-text feeds), but the idea either got picked up or, more likely, independently imagined by The Onion (which raised it to $3,544.91, a much funnier number).

But of course it isn't that funny any more. They and we have lost lives; the occupation has shamed and humilated both nations (and our troops have retreated, and seem on road to being defeated, with very bad long run consequences). The search is on for an exit strategy. Meanwhile, the projected costs keep going up: The projection for next year is either $50 billion or much more, depending on what day it is); yesterday's estimate was at least $65 billion for 2005 alone.

At $65 billion/year we can give each Iraqi $2,689.65 per year, which is more than the per capita GDP before the war. Compare this to an Iraqi disability pension of between $18-47 per month, or what ABC news touts as the new, way above market Iraqi salaries (for those not unemployed) paid by US contractors — an average wage of $4 to $5 per day.

In my original post, I did note that “We can’t do that until shortly before the election”. Maybe given current events we move up the timetable?

NYT Says $25 Billion Iraq Supplemental is no Big Deal

Which is a better, fuller, explanation of the state of play?

Is it the account offerd by Notes on the Atrocities:

Nickel and Diming

February. Bush's budget comes out with no additional request for funds for Iraq.

Monday. A senior administration official says there's no “resource problem in Iraq.”

Today.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration asked Congress Wednesday for an additional $25 billion for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, congressional Republicans said, a retreat from the White House's earlier plans not to seek such money until after the November elections….

It seemed likely that the $25 billion proposal would be only the first portion of funds that will be needed for next year.

Or is it the account (on page A15!!!) of the New York Times, White House Asks G.O.P. in Congress to Add $25 Billion which begins with the line,

“The Bush administration, which once said it had enough money for the military's role in Iraq through 2004, asked Republican leaders of Congress on Wednesday to add $25 billion for the military beginning Oct. 1.”

… but nowhere notes that the administration was saying last week that no more money would be needed. Rather the article says over and over and over that this request was “not a surprise” and quotes (Republican) politicians as saying “we knew it was comming.”

Talk about soft coverage.

Shorter William Safire

Shorter William Safire:

The Cruelest Month: If we get out of Iraq by June 30, there's a good chance that voters will forget about the late unpleasantness by November. And as for Iraq itself, who knows, maybe the horse will learn to sing.

The US Casualty List

We don't have a TV so even though Sinclair doesn't have a station to black out in the Miami market, I wasn't able to see Nightline's list of the US casualties in Iraq. The web site doesn't offer a stream of it, but they do have an online list of U.S. Military Deaths in War With Iraq.

It's long.

More on Fallujah

It seems I wasn't real clear in the previous post. I don't mean to suggest that the right answer to the Fallujah crisis was starting a major urban campaign and killing lots of civilians. I do mean to say that:

1. If this is the end state, the seige was a blunder.

2. But, because I don't think the administration is willing to accept the likely consequences of this move — it will be seen as the weakness that it is — I fear even more what this seems likely to lead to, which is bloodier consequences in Fallujah and especially elsewhere. And I suspect that the US administration's response to those facts — when faced with possible widespread chaos as Iraqis decide the US can be driven out — will end up with more casualties on both sides. Therefore, I think that leaving in these circumstances has very bad side-effects. That doesn't mean that turning up the violence (“going in” to urban warfar) made any sense either.

3. Putting a Baathist in charge doesn't seem real smart unless he's a very unusal one. Is this a calculation that Baathists are better than Islamicists? Is the best-case exit scenario now reduced to a Saddam-like regime without Saddam? Is Saddam lite really the best we can do?

Another Such Victory and We Are Undone

George W. Bush today, defending the famous flight suit speech announcing the end of major combat operation in Iraq:

“we're making progress, you bet” in bringing stability to Iraq.

What the grunts say about about today's pullout from Fallujah, turning the town over to a Baathist general (source: UK Daily Telegraph, Saddam's man takes over in Fallujah )(reg. req.):

Many ordinary marines said they did not believe the initiative would work and it could endanger their lives when they had to revert to the “plan A” of a full-scale offensive to take Fallujah.

“Honestly, I don't think they're going to be able to do it,” said Cpl Elias Chavez, 28.

“We had the insurgents cordoned off, they couldn't go anywhere, we had a chance to get them. Now they can flee wherever they want and we're still going to have to deal with them.”

He said the new force, largely made up of Fallujah residents, would be unlikely to apprehend or clamp down on anti-coalition fighters.

By leaving without defeating the insurgents, their deployment since April 5, following the killing and mutilation of four US defence contractors, “was a waste of time, of resources and of lives”.

“Everyone feels the same, especially those who know someone who was killed.”

L Cpl Julius Wright, 20, said: “Now it's going to get worse. We pulled out when we should of gone in.”

I'm with the grunts on this one. This is “progress”?

Latest US Plan for Interim Iraqi Government Envisions 'Sovereignty' Without Any Power

The White House's overriding goal for Iraq is to keep the lid on it until after the election. This is not easy. Cutting and running would, in the best case, leave Islamic fundamentalists in charge (bad TV), and in the worst case lead quickly to civil war (very bad TV if reporters are brave).

Staying in charge leads to casualties like we are seeing. They can keep the images off TV, but probably not the newspapers. Staying in charge incites the militants.

The original plan was to transfer sovereignty on June 30, declare victory, and bring a few thousand troops home. This would allow Bush to say that the rest would be home soon — see the downpayment. Meanwhile, in the background, there would be a Status of Forces agreement with the new Chalabi government in which the US got to have nice forward bases well suited for defending or quietly (or not quietly) menacing strategic oil reserves. [The very original plan had been to sign the SoF agreement with the current Governing Council, but that proved too raw for everyone.]

That's all gone pear shaped. The administration is now reduced to forlornly chanting that it is staying on schedule for a handover of sovereignty, although it no longer has control over to whom that will be, the initiative having passed either to the UN or to the arab street (funny we don't hear about that street these days, isn't it? that meme was all over the papers a year ago).

One obvious consequence of handing over sovereignty in ten weeks to unknown parties is that it's no longer certain they will be the tame poodle that the administration persists in believing it has in Chalabi (despite the contrary evidence). If serious Islamicists are going to be in charge, or even in partial charge, they are not going to sign a status of forces agreement, and they are not going to do what the US tells them.

The writing being on the wall, it is being read. And folks in the administration don't like what it says. Thus, the logical next move is to float the trial balloon that maybe the handover — still on schedule, you understand — will be somewhat more formal and less substantive than in version 1.0.

White House Says Iraq Sovereignty Could Be Limited. The Bush administration's plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws, administration officials said Thursday.

Sovereignty without meaningful control. A 'sovereign' government that can neither change existing laws nor command the armed forces. Sounds like Cuba in Guantanamo to me. The administration's position in front of the Supreme Court this week was that the Cubans have 'sovereignty' over the base, but the US has control. In this view, as a result of the lack of this metaphysical 'sovereignty' the US courts have no power there … but neither do the Cubans.

It appears that the administration now proposes a transfer of 'sovereignty' for Iraq that will give the recipients the same great powers over their country that Castro enjoys over Guantanamo—and for the same sorts of reasons. The locals cannot be trusted to do what they are told.

How nice that we are instructing the Middle East on the finer points of democracy. What a shame that the lesson is so expensive, especially in lives, both for us and for them.

Ten weeks is a long time in warfare, and the situation remains very fluid on the ground. The diplomatic position, however, may be less fluid, and the administration's trial balloon is likely to be shot at by numerous foreign governments—and even our own. As the NYT describes it,

These restrictions to the plan negotiated with Lakhdar Brahimi, the special United Nations envoy, were presented in detail for the first time by top administration officials at Congressional hearings this week, culminating in long and intense questioning on Thursday at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearing on the goal of returning Iraq to self-rule on June 30.

…

The administration's plans seem likely to face objections on several fronts. Several European and United Nations diplomats have said in interviews that they do not think the United Nations will approve a Security Council resolution sought by Washington that handcuffs the new Iraq government in its authority over its own armed forces, let alone foreign forces on its soil.

These diplomats, and some American officials, said that if the American military command ordered a siege of an Iraqi city, for example, and there was no language calling for an Iraqi government to participate in the decision, the government might not be able to survive protests that could follow.

The diplomats added that it might be unrealistic to expect the new Iraqi government not to demand the right to change Iraqi laws put in place by the American occupation under L. Paul Bremer III, including provisions limiting the influence of Islamic religious law.

Democratic and Republican senators appeared frustrated on Thursday that so few details were known at this late stage in the transition process, and several senators focused on the question of who would be in charge of Iraq's security.

Asked whether the new Iraqi government would have a chance to approve military operations led by American commanders, who would be in charge of both foreign and Iraqi forces, a senior official said Americans would have the final say.

“The arrangement would be, I think as we are doing today, that we would do our very best to consult with that interim government and take their views into account,” said Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs. But he added that American commanders will “have the right, and the power, and the obligation” to decide.

That formulation is especially sensitive at a time when American and Iraqi forces are poised to fight for control of Falluja.

In another sphere, Mr. Grossman said there would be curbs on the powers of the National Conference of Iraqis that Mr. Brahimi envisions as a consultative body. The conference, he said, is not expected to pass new laws or revise the laws adopted under the American occupation.

Sovereignty, but no control over the major military force in-country, and no power to pass laws or revise old ones. At least it should make the Iraqi interim government's task of 'governing' quite easy…

Spain Says Adiós to Iraq

Spanish PM Jose Zapatero announced today he's pulling Spain's militarily small but politically significant contingent out of Iraq.

BBC—Full text: Spain's PM calls troops back: Good evening. This morning, once the defence minister [Jose Bono] was sworn in, I gave him the order to make the necessary arrangements for the Spanish troops stationed in Iraq to return home in the shortest time, and with the greatest security possible.

Combine this with the British commander in southern Iraq saying The moment that Sayid Ali says, 'We don't want the Coalition here', we might as well go home, plus the very confused reports as to whether negotiations are going well, poorly, or not at all, and it doesn't look good.

It now appears that the Bush 'strategy' is to hand off the whole mess to anyone who will take it and cut and run on June 30. The theory being that no amount of Islamic zealotry on TV from Iraq (a three day wonder at best) could be as bad as the endless casualty news. The original plan was to keep bases in country after June 30 under a status of forces agreement, but it looks certain there will be none — so the only fig leaf left would be protecting whatever international contingent stepped in for the US. If one does.

This sort of tail-between-the-legs defeat—which although not inevitable looks more likely today than it ever has yet—would be an international political disaster for the US, and I would say a domestic disaster for the Iraqis who would most likely end up with civil war or theocracy. What's so awful to contemplate is the real possibility that this disaster would be better than any of the alternatives (for the US) that may be on offer next as soon as next week if the simmering civil war boils over. (Optimistic fact: the Iraqi community leaders appear to understand how much they all have to lose if this happens.)

Perhaps it's more fair to say that if the US suffers a political defeat it will be the realization — in the economic sense of the term — of the political disaster that Iraq has been for the US since the decision was made to invade without UN backing. It has also in some sense been a military disaster, not in terms of military defeat, but in counting the cost in lives, resources, and attention better spent elsewhere.

More from Zapatero's speech:

In March 2003, more than a year ago, I made a public commitment, which I repeated in February.

I said then that in the event of my being elected prime minister by citizens, I would order the return of the Spanish troops from Iraq if the UN did not take charge of the political and military situation.

With the information we have available and which we have gathered in the course of recent weeks, it is not foreseeable that a UN resolution will be adopted that matches the content [as heard] on which our presence in Iraq was made conditional.

Neither the public statements of the main players involved in this conflict nor the contacts held by the defence minister at my request in the course of the last month provide any evidence allowing one to foresee a substantial variation in the political and military situation existing in Iraq within the period envisaged, and in the manner demanded by the Spanish people.

These circumstances have led me to take the decision to order the return of our soldiers with the maximum security and consequently in the shortest possible time.

British (Officers) Describe Ugly Americans

I have no idea if it is true that US forces in Iraq are acting like a bunch of racist Rambos; I would hate to have it be so. But even if it isn't true, it ought to worry people just a little that our closest allies, the British, a people not renowned for their progressive attitudes about foreigners and non-whites, believe it to be true.

British commanders condemn US military tactics - Iraq

Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.

One senior officer said that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of “unease and frustration” among the British high command.

The officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for “sub-humans”.

Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: “My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are.”

(via Juan Cole)

Eyewitness in Iraq

The American Street links to The Alamo is over-rated as a tourist attraction, dammit by 'A View from A Broad' — a livejournal blog by a woman in the field of fire in Iraq.

Very compelling reading.

Depressing & Effective

American Leftist has produced a very effective and depressing piece of agitprop: a photomontage of GW Bush made up of photos of US service men and women who have died in Iraq.

Viewable in : small, medium, or large.

(found via Boing-Boing, which is on a roll this week).

Update: There's a clickable thumbnail in the right margin above, which I see fine on firefox (and in Movabletype preview mode)…but I don't see it in Explorer.

Soldier for the Truth

Via the elegantly redesigned Whiskey Bar, a pointer to Soldier for the Truth, the story of Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski (Ret.), who was in the Pentagon at the time that the Veep's office started running its own rogue intellegence analysis operation designed to slant reports in favor of the Iraq invasion. Disgusted by what she saw, she chose to resign when she hit the 20 year mark, and is now on a mission to expose what she calls “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.” And she has a way with words.

Q: You gave your life to the military, you voted Republican for many years, you say you served in the Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it feel like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old bosses?

Kwiatkowski: It feels like duty.

That said, she also has some very odd friends.

Connect the Dots: How Iraq's Chalabi-ites Have BushCo By the Short & Curlies

• The Bush administration is desperate to transfer sovereignty to someone, anyone, in Iraq by June 30. The date is important because, now that a Constitution, elections, and caucuses are all off the table in the short run, it's about the only shard of the original policy left standing. Also, the administration hopes that letting go (formally) of Iraq can be spun as progress, can be an occasion for bring home a token number of troops, and thus will have dividends in the US's November election.
• A critical part of the neocon's rationale for the Iraq invasion was to set up permanent US bases
• Item: This remains an official objective of US policy.
• There is currently no long-term agreement, commonly called a “status of forces agreement” with any Iraqi authority.
• The current governing council — little of which would survive an election — would probably be willing to sign a status of forces agreement favorable to the US in exchange for an extension of its life into the post-sovereignty period. But the agreement would not be perceived as legitimate (nor would the council).
• If a representative Iraqi government is seated by June 30, it's not at all clear that it would agree to a long-term US presence in Iraq.
• France has signaled that it might be willing to approve a NATO force in Iraq, but that “NATO can only be involved at the behest of an Iraqi government and with the prior agreement of the United Nations.”

Conclusion: As noted in the Dreyfus Report, this is a major looming headache for the neoconservative tendency in US foreign policy. There is now a serious danger that a radical Islamic regime will win a free election. Meanwhile, the US's insistence of the fixity of it's June “handover” date — for all that the handover may be primarily semantic — severely weakens its hand in dealing both with the Governing Council and with opposition figures like Ayatollah Sistani. The Governing Council figures it can demand a hold on power in exchange for a status of forces agreement. Sistani surely figures that time is on his side, reducing his incentive to be cooperative.

Irony: The people in the US who were most vociferous about going into Iraq tend to be those most desperately anxious to find a way out, fast. The people, like me, who opposed the invasion, are now uncomfortable with a premature departure that might either entrench the power of the kleptocrats like Chalabi who suckered in the Bush admnistration and continue to profiteer from the positions our troops created for them. Even worse would be any sort of departure that would cause chaos or empower a militant, regressive, theocratic regime. In the abstract, transferring sovereignty ASAP to the Iraqi people sounds like a really good idea; in practice it seems there needs to be some legitimate institutions to exercise it, and to the extent that those institutions are in fact representative, they may not be very pretty. And the only possible way out may involve some crawling to France and to the UN.

CIA Lied To Congress, Admin Lied to Us All, On Key Iraq Fact

So it seems the CIA lied when it told Congress it was giving the UN Inspectors the info they needed to do a good hunt for the alleged WMD. That means that US policy was to hamstring the inspectors, then blame them for doing a bad job.

Smart Washington insiders always release the really bad news late on Friday in the hopes that everyone will forget it by Monday.

I've boldfaced the key point in the quote from the New York Times below. This would be a major bombshell were it not for the fact that we've already had so many bombshells about Bush administration falsifications about Iraq/WMD/threat-to-the-USA not to mention false al Queda ties, that we're all a bit, well, shellshocked.

Then again, agencies that lie to Congress and get caught doing it, usually get at least a nice public grilling.

Intelligence: C.I.A. Admits It Didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.: The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled out by American intelligence before the war as the most highly suspected of housing illicit weapons.

The acknowledgment, in a Jan. 20 letter to Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, contradicts public statements before the war by top Bush administration officials.

Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on all of the sites identified as “high value and moderate value” in the weapons hunt.

The contradiction is significant because Congressional opponents of the war were arguing a year ago that the United Nations inspectors should be given more time to complete their search before the United States and its allies began the invasion. The White House, bolstered by Mr. Tenet, insisted that it was fully cooperating with the inspectors, and at daily briefings the White House issued assurances that the administration was providing the inspectors with the best information possible.

In a telephone interview on Friday, Senator Levin said he now believed that Mr. Tenet had misled Congress, which he described as “totally unacceptable.”

Chalabi Unrepentant

Here's today's compare and contrast: an item in the UK Daily Telegraph with an item in The Dreyfuss Report, which looks to be yet another great blog without an RSS feed (grrr).

Telegraph, Chalabi stands by faulty intelligence that toppled Saddam's regime:

Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. “We are heroes in error,” he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.

“As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. …”

…

Last week, US State Department officials admitted that much of the first-hand testimony they had received was “shaky”.

“What the INC told us formed one part of the intelligence picture,” a senior official in Baghdad said. “But what Chalabi told us we accepted in good faith. Now there is going to be a lot of question marks over his motives.”

Mr Chalabi is now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, but his star in Washington has waned.

Dreyfuss Report, Chalabi Scandal (Yes, Another One):

Thanks to Newsday, and to Knut Royce, one of the all-time great reporters, we now know that Chalabi is not just a liar. He's also on the take. Royce reports that Chalabi-connected cronies—including members of his enormous family—have pocketed contracts from the Pentagon worth more than $400 million. One of them, Royce reports, allows former INC militiamen to provide security for Iraq's oil industry, giving huge power to a “private army” and giving Chalabi a lot of clout over Iraq's single most important source of cash. The second one is a deal to supply Iraq's fledgling armed forces.

Interestingly, one of Chalabi's named cronies in the Newsday story also was the beneficiary during the 1980s of millions of dollars from Chalabi's Jordan-based Petra Bank. It was Chalabi's looting of Petra Bank back then that led to the seizure of the bank by Jordanian authorities, Chalabi's fleeing from justice, and his eventual conviction (in absentia) for embezzling and fraud, for which he was sentenced to 22 years at hard labor. (The sentence still stands.)

US CPA Adopts Bunker Mentality in Iraq

A very interesting interview of an anonymous journalist working in Iraq: “People are forgetting Iraq and focusing on hooking up with each other…” (the title refers to US civilians working at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq).

Press Manipulation and the Iraq War: US Was Not 'Duped' By British Disinformation -- It Duped Itself

In light of stories spilling the beans on a British campaign of lying to foreign (mostly third-world) media about the dangerousness of Iraq, Zbig is putting out the meme that the US got duped into the Iraq war by British disinformation. This is not credible, as can be seen from every “insider's” account (e.g. Seymore Hersh's article in the New Yorker last October).

In the Bad Old Days, around the Vietnam War era, the CIA had an ongoing program of putting US reporters on retainer. That got stopped. And it had another program of dropping disinformation into foreign newspapers, often third world. Some of the disinfo may have been for legitimate intelligence purposes (to confuse the Bad Guys), but a fair amount of it was designed in the hopes that the disinfo would find its way back to the US and be picked up by our newspapers. The goal was nothing less than to subtly manipulate the US electorate. That was supposed to have stopped too.

Perhaps now we do it by proxy. This past weekend the world press reported on a campaign by the British CIA-equivalent, MI6, in which it 'misled' media on Iraq.

But wait! The right wing is already spinning the story! Here comes Zbigniew Brzezinski calling for an investigation into how the US was manipulated into the Iraq war. See, it wasn't our fault! Those perfidious British with their media manipulation and unverified intel about irrelevant non-existent yellowcake purchases! They are responsible, not that nice George W. Bush!

I personally find the idea that the US administration—which by all reputable accounts was lusting for this war since at least 9/11 if not since it took office (or in some cases, since the cease-fire in Gulf War One)—could possibly be manipulated into Gulf War Two to be laughable. Will anyone buy into Zbig's weird spin? Probably.

Gen. Zinni on Iraq Planning: Deception and Ignorance

Washington Post, For Vietnam Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory, tells the tale of Gen. Zinni, a reluctant spokesman for the view that the Bush-Cheney people lied to us about WMDs (and/or lied to themselves), and screwed up the occupation. And it was all preventable.

Joshua Marshall Throws Cold Water on the 'Saddam Was a Prisoner' Theory

I think Marshall is one of the very best political journalists active in the US today, so I give his views a lot of weight. He's very negative about the Saddam-was-a-prisoner theory. Well, ok, it was just a theory. But someone please explain why he was in a hole that he couldn't get out of on his own. And where all the money went….

DEBKAfile Argues that Saddam Hussein Was NOT in Hiding -- He Was a Prisoner

DEBKAfile - Indications Saddam Was Not in Hiding But a Captive This is a long article, worth reading. Here's only part of it:

1. The length and state of his hair indicated he had not seen a barber or even had a shampoo for several weeks.

2. The wild state of his beard indicated he had not shaved for the same period

3. The hole dug in the floor of a cellar in a farm compound near Tikrit was primitive indeed – 6ft across and 8ft across with minimal sanitary arrangements - a far cry from his opulent palaces.

4. Saddam looked beaten and hungry.

5. Detained trying to escape were two unidentified men. Left with him were two AK-47 assault guns and a pistol, none of which were used.

6. The hole had only one opening. It was not only camouflaged with mud and bricks – it was blocked. He could not have climbed out without someone on the outside removing the covering.

7. And most important, $750,000 in 100-dollar notes were found with him (a pittance for his captors who expected a $25m reward)– but no communications equipment of any kind, whether cell phone or even a carrier pigeon for contacting the outside world.

According to DEBKAfile analysts, these seven anomalies point to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein was not in hiding; he was a prisoner.

After his last audiotaped message was delivered and aired over al Arabiya TV on Sunday November 16, on the occasion of Ramadan, Saddam was seized, possibly with the connivance of his own men, and held in that hole in Adwar for three weeks or more, which would have accounted for his appearance and condition. Meanwhile, his captors bargained for the $25 m prize the Americans promised for information leading to his capture alive or dead. The negotiations were mediated by Jalal Talabani’s Kurdish PUK militia.

These circumstances would explain the ex-ruler’s docility – described by Lt.Gen. Ricardo Sanchez as “resignation” – in the face of his capture by US forces. He must have regarded them as his rescuers and would have greeted them with relief.

From Gen. Sanchez’s evasive answers to questions on the $25m bounty, it may be inferred that the Americans and Kurds took advantage of the negotiations with Saddam’s abductors to move in close and capture him on their own account…

It's an intriguing theory.

As for the capture itself, (1) It's good; (2) It is orthagonal to the justice of invading in the first place; (3) Better now than later; (4) In itself this has almost no medium much less long-term political significance…although if it were to change the casualty rate in Iraq, that might matter.

Our Friends Are Getting Worried that Bush Plans to Cut and Run on Iraq (Like Afghanistan)

Former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil visits Washington D.C. and finds….doom, gloom and a sense that the Iraq invasion is falling apart with appalling consequences: Scotsman.com News - International - Inside story of how Washington is losing its bottle

“In both places it is worse than you think,” I was warned before arriving in the US capital for a series of off-the-record briefings. The warning was accurate.

Take Afghanistan first. You don’t read or see much about it these days. The reality is grim. The Taliban is resurgent; al-Qaeda is there too, but not as relevant as it was. Attacks on aid workers are soaring; many are refusing to leave the urban areas. The warlords are back in control of the countryside, where opium production is already above pre-invasion levels. “Afghanistan is a narco-economy once more,” said one intelligence analyst.

The Taliban regularly mounts attacks in the rural areas and is expected to hit urban centres with greater force. “If they knew how weak we were,” confided one intelligence source, “they would have done it already.” Coalition forces are confined to Vietnam-style strategic hamlets from which they emerge for operations only in great force, before returning to their enclaves. Hamid Karzai’s grip on power is tenuous.

It is not much better for Iraq. There are now an average of 130 attacks a day on coalition (mainly American) forces; almost 100 coalition troops have been killed in November, the grimmest month so far. “We only have a third of the forces we need to fight the insurgents,” one former US diplomat told me. The intelligence is threadbare too: US commanders have no real idea who they are up against, except that they are well-organised remnants of Saddam’s Ba’athist regime, supplemented with some al-Qaeda-type Islamo-fascists. “We still don’t really know who is behind the attacks,” I was told. “So we just go around kicking doors in - which is exactly what the enemy wants us to do.”

The US forces might lack purpose or direction but there are plenty of both to the insurgents’ attacks. The UN was specifically targeted; it is now effectively gone from Iraq. Next were the various non-government organisations trying to assist in building a better Iraq; they, including the Red Cross, have also headed for the exit. Then it was the turn of what few allies America has in Iraq, specifically the Italians. Those most at risk now are Iraqis co-operating with the US. Last week a US commander reported a slackening of attacks on his own troops because the insurgents were concentrating on assassinating those they see as quislings.

Now it is the Americans themselves who seem to be in a rush for the exit. On September 22 Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, attacked France for suggesting a speedier transfer of power to Iraqis. Yet since President Bush summoned Paul Bremer, his Iraqi governor general, to the White House, that is exactly what is happening. Bush wants a substantial withdrawal of US forces before next November’s elections. Former Pentagon favourite, Ahmad Chalabi, is dismayed: “The whole thing [the speedier transfer of power] was set up so President Bush could come to the airport in October [2004] for a ceremony to congratulate the new Iraqi government.”

The consequences on the ground are apparent. Until recently, US forces took 12 weeks to train Iraqis for the new police force; that has been speeded up to one week. No proper checks on individuals are being done, so trainees have been infiltrated with insurgent spies. US intelligence officers were horrified to discover recently that the insurgents even had details of Bremer’s schedule.

Bush is fond of saying that America did not spend so much in men and materiel to liberate 25 million Iraqis only to succumb to a ragbag of insurgents. Yet it looks as if that is exactly what is happening. The insurgents have noted that a few very big bombs have already forced Washington to speed up its exit strategy; that can only result in even bigger bombs.

No wonder the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration are in retreat: their policy of replacing Middle East tyrants with democracy and functioning economies is in grave danger of falling at the first hurdle, largely from lack if American willpower. The consequences of defeat and retreat, of course, are so grave that I cannot believe any US president can contemplate it for long; but what exactly Bush plans to do about it is a mystery which nobody I met in Washington was able to resolve.

Domestically, the administration may be able to get people to ignore what is happening on the ground and instead concentrate on a speech, or a nice telegenic image. But it appears that the hostiles in Afghanistan and Iraq may not be watching Fox news.

Unhappy Troops

Clinton left Bush a great Army, and Bush is destroying it.

Iraq

I've added three items to the left column:

• A link to the military casualty count maintained by lunaville.org based on this methodology;
• [Update: Just a link to, see comments for details] A chart of civilian casualties provided by iraqbodycount.org based on this methodology;
• A dollar estimate of the cost of the war to the US from costofwar.com based on this methodology;