John Burns has an excellent article in the New York Times on the situation in Western Iraq:
While American troops have been battling Islamic militants to an uncertain outcome in Najaf, the Shiite holy city, events in two Sunni Muslim cities that stand astride the crucial western approaches to Baghdad have moved significantly against American plans to build a secular democracy in Iraq.Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert's edge. What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy safe houses identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths.
American efforts to build a government structure around former Baath Party stalwarts - officials of Saddam Hussein's army, police force and bureaucracy who were willing to work with the United States - have collapsed. Instead, the former Hussein loyalists, under threat of beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly resigned or defected to the fundamentalists, or been killed. Enforcers for the old government, including former Republican Guard officers, have put themselves in the service of fundamentalist clerics they once tortured at Abu Ghraib.
In the past three weeks, three former Hussein loyalists appointed to important posts in Falluja and Ramadi have been eliminated by the militants and their Baathist allies. The chief of a battalion of the American-trained Iraqi National Guard in Falluja was beheaded by the militants, prompting the disintegration of guard forces in the city. The Anbar governor was forced to resign after his three sons were kidnapped. The third official, the provincial police chief in Ramadi, was lured to his arrest by American marines after three assassination attempts led him to secretly defect to the rebel cause.
Prof. Juan Cole on how the Bushies are helping to breath new life into Shiite fanatics:
The debates about Iraqi Shiism seem to me to occur often in a sort of historical vacuum in which everyone ignores the elephant in the living room. That is Ayatollah Khomeini and his movement, the central tenets of which were rejected by Najaf but accepted by the Sadr movement.That American neo-imperialists like Richard Perle, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz thought they could remove Saddam and step in to reshape Iraq without having to grapple with Khomeini's legacy is an index of their ignorance and arrogance. Perle and Feith and David Wurmser even wanted to try to bring back the Hashimite monarchy in Iraq, seeming to think that it might still have influence with Iraq's Shiites. But the central idea of Khomeinism was that Shiite Islam is incompatible with monarchy, and the Sadrists would have made endless trouble about this. (Perle, Feith and Wurmser even thought a revived Hashimite monarchy could be used to "moderate" Hizbullah in Lebanon, which is ridiculous on the face of it, and you wonder in what world do these people live?)
It is true that Khomeinism seemed to have run its course in Iran, where it is now only a governmental ideology but lacks much popular support. But US actions like repeatedly bombing Najaf's sacred cemetery (where a lot of Iranians' loved ones are buried) and generally reducing much of this pilgrimage site to rubble, is strengthening Iran's hardliners and the Bush administration is succeeding in breathing new life into Khomeinism in Iran, as well. Khomeinism was ultimately about trying to construct a nativist cultural and political barricade against American-led globalization. As the chaos in Iraq gives the latter a black eye, it encourages the former.
Despite what you've read in the "mainstream press" an Army report due out soon will implicate military leadership right up the chain for the prisoner torture scandal at Abu Ghraib.
An Army investigation into the role of military intelligence personnel in the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison reports that the scandal was not just caused by a small circle of rogue military police soldiers but resulted from failures of leadership rising to the highest levels of the U.S. command in Iraq, senior defense officials said.The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the report has not yet been completed, said the 9,000-page document says that a combination of leadership failings, confounding policies, lack of discipline and absolute confusion at the prison led to the abuse. It widens the scope of culpability from seven MPs who have been charged with abuse to include nearly 20 low-ranking soldiers who could face criminal prosecution in military courts. No Army officers, however, are expected to face criminal charges.
Officials also said that the report implicates five civilian contractors in the abuse, and that Army officials plan to recommend that their cases be sent to the Justice Department for possible prosecution in civilian courts.
Of course, no one in charge will actually be punished for their role in all this, so they'll never be tried or punished for it. Instead, we'll just have to pay the price in endless wars in the Middle East as our infintessimal credibility wafts away in the breeze.
The Atlantic Monthly has a powerful and disturbing article about information taken from a Taliban hard drive in November of 2001. It contains emails from Usama bin Laden and Taliban leaders that reveal the quirks and inside conflicts of these groups (al-Qaeda and Taliban), and how they played out. Very insightful and of course, always frustrating to see how despite our highly regarded electronic easedropping technology, we couldn't read Usama's email.
On August 24th many veterans from the lastest made-for-TV war will be involved in a new campaign: Operation Truth.
Operation Truth will educate the American public about the truth of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the perspective of the soldiers who have experienced them first-hand. We will provide returning veterans with national, regional, and local podiums from which they will expose the preventable hardships that they endured as a result of failures at the top levels of leadership. We intend to publicize how poorly-planned policies and approaches have manifested themselves as problems on the front lines and back at home. We will act domestically to protect our troops and to aid them in their fight to protect us.
The CIA's, er, Iraq's new PM Allawi has reinstated the death penalty.
Does this mean that he'll be tried and put to death for murder after shooting, point blank, six insurgents in front of several witnesses? Not very likely, I'd wager.
Asia Times is running an article that claims that Pakistan has already captured many "high value targets (HVTs)" wanted by the United States and is doling them out, piecemeal, to keep Washington (as it were) on the hook. Since the U.S. has a nasty history of 'catch and release' with it's foreign policy (e.g. Afganistan, Iraq, Libya), the theory goes that Musharraf is holding these HVTs to keep on Washington's good graces (and by that, we do mean the money train).
The contacts say that Pakistan's strategic circles see the high-value al-Qaeda operators as "bargaining chips" to ensure continued US support for President General Pervez Musharraf's de facto military rule in Pakistan. Had Pakistan handed over top targets such as Osama bin Laden, his deputy Dr Aiman al-Zawahir, Tahir Yuldash (leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) and others - assuming it was in a position to do so - the military rulers would have lost their usefulness to the US in its "war on terror".
Considering that President Bush is running on a platform of security and against terror, the fact that his Administration is propping up a corrupt regime that already has many of the terrorists we seek in custody but which won't hand them over is appalling. His record on the "war on terror" is bad enough, but now with Karl Rove and Musharraf deciding when and how Al-Qaeda operatives are to be transferred to U.S. custody is digusting and it politicizes the entire issue to the point of absurdity.
As we reported a while back, Pakistan was under intense pressure from the Bushinistas to bag an al-Qaeda bigwig by this week. Rove just had to have Osama's head to wag in the public square this week to take the shine off the Democratic National Convention and especially John Kerry.
Well, the Pakistanis delivered ... sort of.
The AP has reported Thursday afternoon that "Pakistan has arrested a Tanzanian al Qaeda suspect wanted by the United States in the 1998 bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the interior minister said Friday. He said the suspect was cooperating and had given authorities 'very valuable' information."
The only problem is ... the timing. Pakistan claims it captured this man on Sunday. In this age of, oh say, satellites and the Internet, why does it take three days for the word to get out ... the night John Kerry delivers his nomination speech?
And get this: The arrest was actually made Sunday, the AP reported from Islamabad. But the capture was announced Thursday. The bulletins hit the wires soon after 3 p.m., or about seven hours before John Kerry delivers his acceptance speech.Coincidence?
Obviously, I have no evidence that there's any connection between the timing of the arrest and the allegations made by the New Republic, which White House officials dismissed at the time. But the way the announcement was handled raises questions, to say the least. If you nabbed Ghailani on Sunday, why on earth would you wait until hours before Kerry's speech to tell the world -- and open yourself up to charges of politicizing the war on terror?
Coincidence? I think not!
This article was brought to my attention by a fellow alumnus. In short, it says that the invasion of Iraq ruined the United States' credibility in the Arab world after the 9/11 attacks boosted it.
The [9-11] commission concluded that to stop the growth of Islamic terrorism, the United States must "stand as an example of moral leadership in the world. To Muslim parents, terrorists like bin Laden have nothing to offer their children but visions of violence and death. America and its friends have the advantage -- our vision can offer a better future."That is the greatest irony of the final report released yesterday. America had the advantage with its friends right after 9/11, to the degree that King Abdullah of Jordan said, standing beside President Bush on Sept. 28, 2001: "The majority of Arabs and Muslims will ban together with our colleagues all over the world to be able to put an end to this horrible scourge of international terrorism."
By invading Iraq, which had no tie to 9/11 and did not possess weapons of mass destruction, Bush threw away our moral leadership. It is easy to fear that by indiscriminately killing as many as four times more innocent civilians than who died on 9/11, we have already fueled future attacks against us.
We squandered the open, political support of many Arab leaders and even some of their citizens, and now face a decades' long conflict that neither side will "win". Millions will be killed, and the world will be a worse place for it. To use an old Texas phrase, "Nice shoot'n, Tex!" George W. Bush should have been impeached years ago ...
From Salon's War Room blog:
After Donald Rumsfeld testified on the Hill about Abu Ghraib in May, there was talk of more photos and video in the Pentagon's custody more horrific than anything made public so far. "If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse," Rumsfeld said. Since then, the Washington Post has disclosed some new details and images of abuse at the prison. But if Seymour Hersh is right, it all gets much worse.Hersh gave a speech last week to the ACLU making the charge that children were sodomized in front of women in the prison, and the Pentagon has tape of it. The speech was first reported in a New York Sun story last week, which was in turn posted on Jim Romenesko's media blog, and now EdCone.com and other blogs are linking to the video. We transcribed the critical section here (it starts at about 1:31:00 into the ACLU video.) At the start of the transcript here, you can see how Hersh was struggling over what he should say:
"Debating about it, ummm ... Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."
"It's impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there? When I did My Lai I was very troubled like anybody in his right mind would be about what happened. I ended up in something I wrote saying in the end I said that the people who did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed because of the scars they had, I can tell you some of the personal stories by some of the people who were in these units witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers and so we're dealing with a enormous massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher, and we have to get to it and we will. We will. You know there's enough out there, they can't (Applause). .... So it's going to be an interesting election year."
Notes from a similar speech Hersh gave in Chicago in June were posted on Brad DeLong's blog. Rick Pearlstein, who watched the speech, wrote: "[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened."
So, there are several questions here: Has Hersh actually seen the video he described to the ACLU, and why hasn't he written about it yet? Will he be forced to elaborate in more public venues now that these two speeches are getting so much attention, at least in the blogosphere? And who else has seen the video, if it exists -- will journalists see and report on it? did senators see these images when they had their closed-door sessions with the Abu Ghraib evidence? -- and what is being done about it?
Sensationalizing? Perhaps. But how would you have covered the Nazi death camps, or Pol Pot's killing fields before anyone suspected anything? We have to expose this if we are to be true to our values.
Memo to G. W. Bush: Get a Fucking Clue
Apparently, Tony Blair, sensing the end of his time as PM, has made the Earth-shatteringly obvious statement that the infamous WMD may never be found.
``We know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction but we know we haven't found them,'' Blair said. ``I have to accept we have not found them, that we may not find them.''
Would someone please tell Dick "Fuck Yourself" Cheney and Shrub this little factoid? The sad thing is that even though Blair is admitting the obvious, he cannot let go of the lie that Saddam had WMD in the first place. Pathetic.
E. J. Dionne on the military's stop-loss orders for the Iraq war:
The possibility of getting caught up in one of those stop-loss orders -- where tours of duty are extended -- is written into the fine print when volunteers enlist, so they are not illegal. But in the current circumstances, they are outrageous. Back home, those being held on duty have neighbors and friends who never thought to serve and could thus enjoy a lovely July Fourth weekend at the beach or in the mountains with their families. But God help those already serving.Volunteers are told suddenly that they are not free to go after their period of duty is up. They are in this position because our political leaders ignored the counsel of military leaders who knew the occupation of Iraq would require more troops than the politicians were willing to commit. When they were selling the war, those politicians did not want to admit how hard things might get. Nor were they willing to be candid about how their expansive foreign policy requires more troops than the administration is willing to pay for.
God forbid that Americans earning, say, more than $1 million a year be asked to pony up a little more in taxes to support a larger military at a time when, we are told over and over, the country is in the middle of a war on terrorism. Millionaires can't be asked to sacrifice even a little bit. No, they deserve to have their taxes cut while others fight and die. And anyone who speaks up in opposition to this injustice risks being called unpatriotic by those who give up absolutely nothing themselves. Patriotism is defined as a solicitude for tidy incomes, a belief in anything Rush Limbaugh says on the radio and a demand that those in charge of the country never be held accountable for their mistakes.
CNN is reporting that retired soldiers will be compelled to return to service in Iraq.
The Army is preparing to notify about 5,600 retired and discharged soldiers who are not members of the National Guard or Reserve that they will be involuntarily recalled to active duty for possible service in Iraq or Afghanistan, Army officials said Tuesday.It marks the first time the Army has called on the Individual Ready Reserve, as this category of reservists is known, in substantial numbers since the 1991 Gulf War.
The move reflects the continued shortage of troops available to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to fight the ongoing war on terrorism as well as Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Folks, if this isn't a kind of draft then tell me what is?
When I read George Takei's biography, written during the "kiss and tell" era of the Star Trek actor's middle aged lives, I expected a story about a young actor making it in Hollywood. Instead, I was introduced, at a shamefully late age, to the experiences of the Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned during WWII simply because they looked Japanese. Today Salon has an essay about one man who fought the process, and his life's story trying to get his name cleared as a result. I urge everyone to read it, because the same crap is going on today with the Bush Administration's efforts to legalize locking up any U.S. citizen they don't like. And don't think it can't be you ...
The Washington Post details the train wreck that has been our nation's foreign policy for the last few years:
The occupation of Iraq has increasingly undermined, and in some cases discredited, the core tenets of President Bush's foreign policy, according to a wide range of Republican and Democratic analysts and U.S. officials.When the war began 15 months ago, the president's Iraq policy rested on four broad principles: The United States should act preemptively to prevent strikes on U.S. targets. Washington should be willing to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk. Iraq was the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism. And Baghdad's transformation into a new democracy would spark regionwide change.
But these central planks of Bush doctrine have been tainted by spiraling violence, limited reconstruction, failure to find weapons of mass destruction or prove Iraq's ties to al Qaeda, and mounting Arab disillusionment with U.S. leadership.
"Of the four principles, three have failed, and the fourth -- democracy promotion -- is hanging by a sliver," said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staff member in the Reagan administration and now director of regional strategic programs at the Nixon Center.
The president has "walked away from unilateralism. We're not going to do another preemptive strike anytime soon, certainly not in Iran or North Korea. And it looks like terrorism is getting worse, not better, especially in critical countries like Saudi Arabia," Kemp said.As a result, Bush doctrine could become the biggest casualty of U.S. intervention in Iraq, which is entering a new phase this week as the United States prepares to hand over power to the new Iraqi government.
Setbacks in Iraq have had a visible impact on policy, forcing shifts or reassessments. The United States has returned to the United Nations to solve its political problems in Iraq. It has appealed to NATO for help on security. It is also relying on diplomacy, with allies, to deal with every other hot spot.
"There's already been a retreat from the radicalism in Bush administration foreign policy," said Walter Russell Mead, a Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow. "You have a feeling that even Bush isn't saying, 'Hey, that was great. Let's do it again.' "
Some analysts, including Republicans, suggest that another casualty of Iraq is the neoconservative approach that inspired a zealous agenda to tackle security threats in the Middle East and transform the region politically.
"Neoconservatism has been replaced by neorealism, even within the Bush White House," Kemp said. "The best evidence is the administration's extraordinary recent reliance on [U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Annan and [U.N. envoy] Lakhdar Brahimi. The neoconservatives are clearly much less credible than they were a year ago."
Some of us were advocating a little realism before this thing even started, but it is nice that some folks are coming around ( now that the situation is completely fucked up ).
In the policy's early days, its supporters hinted that preemption could eventually justify forcible government change in Iran, Syria and North Korea as well as in Iraq. But that sentiment is evaporating, because Iraq showed the "pitfalls of the doctrine in graphic detail," said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.Preemption has been "damaged, if not totally discredited," and the outcome in Iraq may prove to be "an inoculation against rash action" by the United States in the future, Carpenter said.
I guess it should be comforting to know that this policy resulted from rash stupidity rather than complete insanity.
The administration is working overtime to reduce the sense of alarm that Washington is posed "on a hair trigger" to launch a new offensive against governments it does not like, said James F. Hoge Jr., editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. White House officials are relying on diplomacy to defuse confrontations over nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, the two other countries with Iraq that Bush labeled the "axis of evil."
Yeah, remember those other guys in the axis of evil? Those guys are busily developing nuclear weapons and, since we completely shot our wad in Iraq, there is pretty much nothing we can do about it. Nice strategy.
Could someone explain why this article is in the nearly worthless Useless Today and yet no mention is made of this story in The New York Times? Man, the "paper of record" is soft pedaling the Bush Administration's war crimes.
So, back to the smoking gun. Rummy (deftly and with lots of paper and oodles of words that he hoped would cover the obvious facts) authorized torture.
That's the whole enchilada. Oh, and that makes him a war criminal. That's the simple, uncomplicated consequence of his actions.
Just such a necessity arose months later when the first anniversary of Sept. 11 brought new fears of terror attack. Intelligence officers at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, told their superiors that Mohamed al-Kahtani, believed to be the would-be 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot, was withholding information about new attacks, Daniel Dell'Orto, the Pentagon's deputy general counsel told reporters at a White House briefing Tuesday.Gen. Miller of Gitmo claimed
in a letter to Rummy that he would
get better "actionable intelligence"
out of Abu Ghraib in 30 days if his
"techniques" were employed there.
from the USA Today
article posted today.The alert set in motion a review that culminated with a Nov. 27, 2002, "action memo" in which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved interrogation techniques that included "removal of clothing" and "inducing stress by use of detainee's fears (e.g. dogs)."
Rumsfeld also approved placing detainees in "stress positions," such as standing for up to 4 hours, though he apparently found this approach unimpressive. Rumsfeld, who works at a stand-up desk, scrawled on the memo, "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours? D.R."
Bush's lawyers also used clever language to strip people that the U.S. government holds in detention (in other words, kidnapped or virtually 'disappeared') of their rights under the Geneva Convention with a simple legalistic argument: they label them as "non-combatants" and claim the language of the Convetion doesn't apply.
That's the same legal argument as redefining the word "murder" to get O.J. off. Bush is responsible for Rummy's actions here and he set the tone of condoning torture. Rummy must resign and ought to be hauled before the World Court, followed by Bush.
From Salon's War Room '04 page:
The New York Times reports that the "Bush administration's policy of barring news photographs of the flag-covered coffins of service members killed in Iraq won the backing of the Republican-controlled Senate on Monday, when lawmakers defeated a Democratic measure to instruct the Pentagon to allow pictures.""The 54-to-39 vote came after little formal debate, with 7 Democrats joining 47 Republicans to defeat the provision. Two Republicans, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and John McCain of Arizona, voted in favor of permitting news photographers to have access to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where coffins containing the war dead from Iraq arrive."
"'These caskets that arrive at Dover are not named; we just see them,' said Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot who was a prisoner of war for five years in Vietnam. He added, 'I think we ought to know the casualties of war.'"
According to Brad de Long's blog, Seymour Hersh (the reporter who broke the Abu Ghraib story) had this to add at a talk given at the University of Chicago last week:
He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."
Remember, these are very probably random Iraqis who are being tortured this way. To use their kids is to amplify the cruel insanity and virtually guarantee a generation of anti-American hatred in Iraq. Also remember that U.S. Senators have probably seen these photos and none have come forward to denounce them..
Just fucking brilliant. Why are these people still in power in Washington?
You know what I'm talking about.
Bush. Cheney. Saddam and al-Qaeda.
They keep inisisting that there was a connection, even a strong one. But the 9-11 Commission has found no such thing.
Repeat: There is and was no link between Saddam Hussein (Iraq) and al-Qaeda (Saudi Arabia).
Don't believe it? Read this story in any of these respected news outlets:
Bottom f**king line: Bush and Cheney lied and continue to lie about this to justify their illegal, disastrous and ruinous war.
From the AP:
Angered by Bush administration policies they contend endanger national security, 26 retired U.S. diplomats and military officers are urging Americans to vote President Bush out of office in November...Among the group are 20 ambassadors, appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, other former State Department officials and military leaders whose careers span three decades.
Prominent members include retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East during the administration of Bush’s father; retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., ambassador to Britain under President Clinton and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan; and Jack F. Matlock Jr., a member of the National Security Council under Reagan and ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991.
“We agreed that we had just lost confidence in the ability of the Bush administration to advocate for American interests or to provide the kind of leadership that we think is essential,” said William C. Harrop, the first President Bush’s ambassador to Israel, and earlier to four African countries.
From journalist Christopher Allbritton's blog about his stay in Iraq:
The Iraqis overwhelmingly don’t want the Americans here anymore (I’m not counting Kurds in this sentence,) but Iraqis know they’ll need help. They’re not ready to run their own country yet, and the new leaders — Allawi, Yawer, et al. — know it. The way the announcement of the interim government was handled is prime example.
The part handled solely by the CPA — the initial accreditation — went sorta smoothly, despite some mortar fire and a car bomb, but after we arrived at the clocktower that was Saddam’s former Museum of Gifts Other World Leaders Gave Him, it turned into a disaster. The television reporters got their interviews, but after the ceremony, in a chaotic scramble, the Iraqis declared the day over, leaving print reporters with little to do except recap what the television cameras had captured. Ebrahim Jafari, the leader of the Dawa Party and now one of two vice presidents, came back out to wade into a journalistic mosh pit. Some officials screamed at him to get back into the other chamber with the rest of the government. He ignored them for as long as he could before someone — I’m not sure who — literally grabbed his arm and pulled him back into the other room.No one knew who was in charge. The Iraqis, inexperienced at managing the logistics of the day, were overwhelmed. The CPA people just wanted to get the hell out of there. There were attacks throughout the day. The Iraqi Civil Defense Corps troops were merely window dressing, with the real security provided by beefy South Africans private contractors. U.S. troops hung around getting in everyone’s way.
It was an almost perfect metaphor for the New Iraq.
I write this not as a plea for pity or understanding. I don’t understand this country myself, so that may be impossible. And I know I have written things that will anger people: I am ashamed of many of the emotions I feel these days. But I care about the truth as best as I can see and tell it. I once believed that telling the truth — or a small part of it — could help the world. It could help people understand things better and thus make the world better. But this war defies comprehension. It’s so stupid and there seems to be no point to anything that happens here. People die on a daily basis in random, terrifying attacks. And for what? Freedom? Stability? Peace? There is none of that here and it’s likely there won’t be after the Americans leave. Iraq has spiraled into a dark place, much worse than where it was a year ago during the war. There is no freedom from the fear that is stoked by mutual hatred, cynicism and an apprehension about the future. So what if one side has superior firepower? Every bullet fired helps kill souls on both sides of this war, whether it hits flesh or lands harmlessly.
We — Iraqis and the Americans here — are caged by fear, and we are all conquered people now.
President Bush keeps Saddam's side arm as a trophy in the Oval Office. The Iraq War was just a grudge match between Shrub and Saddam, and now that Georgie has Saddam's pistol, he won.
"He really liked showing it off," says a recent visitor to the White House who has seen the gun. "He was really proud of it."
I hope that sinks in with the military families who lost loved ones delivering this gun to Shrub when they go vote this November.
A coworker pointed out this story which states that the video of Nick Berg's execution was fake, and worse yet, was created by the U.S. to distract from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Many doctors have looked at the video and it is questionable. when you cut someone's head off blood can spray up to 10 feet.Now we learn that he was under investigation by the FBI right after 9/11 for having the same password as one of the al-CIAeda decoys.
On top of it all, we now learn that he had done work at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
Don't forget who stands to gain from all of this. Right when Bush's bacon needs to be pulled out of the fire this video magically pops up -- Al-CIAeda helping, as usual.
Now, I'd be the first to admit that the Staton Jones Report is biased, but this story is so incredible and inflamitory that I urge you, dear reader, to do your own investigating. But if there's any truth to it, it begs the question: did the U.S. kill Nick Berg and blame it on al Qaeda?
That's too much for me to handle right now. It goes lower than all the cynical thoughts I have about the U.S., yet still lies in the realm of possibility.
An old saying says that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. There seems to be a corollary: the depth of your ignorance is proportional to the similarity of the events that are repeated. If you are fairly aware of history, you may do something only vaguely like a previous event. If you are Bush-league ignorant, you'll do exactly the same damn thing.
Everything you need to know about what's happening in Iraq can be found in its history. For example, in the early 20's, Iraq was occupied by British troops who had recently "liberated" the Iraqis from a totalitarian regime, the Ottoman Empire. The Iraqis were quite grateful at first, but turned hostile quickly when the Brits wouldn't leave. The insurgency grew to the point where British troops ended up staging a brutal suppression, which included wanton "shock and awe" attacks on civilians and — you gotta love this — dropping nerve gas on the Kurds.
Only a group of complete imbeciles would make that mistake again, and only the kind of imbeciles that comprise the Bush adminsitration would have staged such a near-perfect recreation of those years.
After Iraq was "launched" and the Brits left, the next thing that pissed off the Iraqis was the government they left behind. Were they upset that it was a monarchy? Not entirely, that wasn't unusual for the region. Were they upset that it kowtowed to British interests? Well, obviously. The final straw, however, was that the newly appointed King wasn't even from Iraq. He was a member of the Jordanian royal family, the Hashemites.
Everyone, including the Bush Administration, expects that the U.N. will take an increasingly central role in Iraq as events progress. An interesting history-sorta-repeating itself event has created an image problem for Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy overseeing efforts in Iraq. His daughter, Rym, announced last month that she is marrying — wait for it — Jordanian King Abdullah II's half brother, Prince Ali.
The engagement was celebrated in an early April gala in Paris; although there is no reason to expect this union to have any effect whatsoever on events in Iraq, the Iraqi's are a little tweaked about it. Why can't they just calm down and trust the nice foreign governments to take care of them? Hmmmm?
It's the Locnar. It has to be the damn Locnar!
Conservative columnist David Brooks comments on Bush's speech last night in the NY Times:
It's a huge gamble to think that the solution to chaos is liberty. But it's fitting that during the gravest crisis of his presidency, President Bush reverted to his most fundamental political belief. He began this war in Iraq repeating the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence, that our creator has endowed all human beings with the right to liberty, and the ability to function as democratic citizens. He said last night with absolute confidence that the Iraqis are democrats at heart.Bush is betting his presidency, and the near-term future of this nation, on that central American creed.
It's an epic gamble...
It is a huge gamble. It's also a really stupid gamble. It's as if your spouse liquidated all of your assets and decided to risk them at the blackjack table.
If this gamble fails to come off, then that mission will seem, to many, false. Perhaps democracy and freedom are not really universal values, some will say. Perhaps they are just the outgrowths of a specific culture. People on the left and right will race to withdraw from the world. It will become difficult to take on the tyrants who will menace the world.On the other hand, if we muddle through in Iraq and some semidemocratic nation slowly emerges, it won't be because of American skill. It will be because the democratic creed is so strong it can withstand the highest incompetence...
Well, he's right about the highest incompetence, but what does he mean by a semi-democratic nation? Perhaps something along the lines of Iran, where a few clerics have veto power over elected officials?
The Washington Monthly has published an essay by General Wesley Clark (Ret.) that paints a very different picture of the Middle East in comparison with the Soviet Union. The Neo-cons have argued that the techniques that were used by Reagan to "topple" the Soviets will work in the Middle East. Clark deconstructs the myth of Reagan, and then shows how the West really ran the clock out on the Soviets. Then, while showing the reasons for Eastern Europe's quick adoption of Western democracy, he shows that the Middle East isn't ready and why.
Joe Bob sez "check it out".
The Washington Post is running a damning story detailing the horrific shit we did to Iraqis in Saddam's old torture palace. When I read about what our troops did there, and then I think about the suffering we've caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, I can only feel one thing.
Shame.
Too bad the Bush Administration has never felt this emotion. This may turn out to be one of the most evil governments in our long history of saddistic purges.
Ahmad Chalabi isn't the only guy getting spanked today.
President Bush had to go meet with the GOP Congressional Leadership (you know these guys, they're the ones telling the other half of Congress -- who don't follow their lead -- to piss off while they rule the Nation instead of governing it) for his annual paddling for being a bad boy. Turns out that the GOP leaders are just a tad bit upset about their re-selection plans.
President "Chimpy" is widely quoted as saying that it's time to "take the training wheels off" the Iraqi quasi-government and let Iraqis rule themselves. I guess he didn't read about how "civilization, as we know it" started there over 5,000 years ago. Afterall, that's gotta be within minutes after Jesus created the world, right? Isn't it time the U.S. took the "training wheels" off of Chimpy (and by that, I do mean Crashcart himself)?
So, back to the important issue which is getting re-selected:
It was the second year in a row that Bush met privately with his fellow Republicans just ahead of the congressional break. The stakes were especially high this year: Bush and most lawmakers face re-election, and Iraq is still plagued by chaos and violence six weeks before the handover.Several GOP lawmakers who attended the meeting said Bush told his audience to brace for more violence after June 30 and he predicted insurgents would try to disrupt subsequent elections.
The lawmakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Bush sought to reassure them that despite his sagging poll numbers, he is eager for the re-election fight. They said the president defended his record on the economy, education and Medicare, all of which are targets for Democratic attacks.
Nice to know the emphasis is on saving their own bacon, rather than actually launching a new democracy in the Middle East (which, as the adverts have said, was our goal all along, right?). And by all means, Shrub, run on your record, instead of the lies your election team pumps out.
Several media outlets are reporting that Ahmad Chalabi is being ousted from the IRC, and that his offices in Baghdad and his home in an exclusive neighborhood were raided by U.S. forces today.
Most stories are reporting that his feuding with Paul Bremer has lead to this radical turn of events for Chalabi, but I have to wonder if his clandestine ties to Iran's rulers and the fact that Chalabi has been fingered as the source of the bad ("bad? Try utterly ridiculous", methinks) intel that Bush used to "justify" his war.
Payback's a bitch.
Oh, and there's a scandal brewing with regard to currency revaluation that sounds suspiciously like the banking fraud that got Chalabi prison time in Jordan (fear not, dear reader, his ass has never been in danger — yet). He's double-crossed the U.S. (and the neo-cons in particular), Israel (no pipeline deal — it was all lies), and of course, Iraqis (pretty much all of them). Get this man a Nobel Peace Prize application.
This just in ...
Salon has a follow on story claiming that Chalabi got the DEA treatment ("knock knock" ... "who's there?" ... Boot to Head) because he was plotting to create a splinter government to challenge the U.S. backed "hand off" government which no longer planned to feature ol' Ahmad in charge.
"Ahmed is gathering groups to bring this new government down even before July 1. He is in a very destructive phase, mobilizing forces to make sure the U.N. initiative -- due to be announced in 10 days -- fails." Chalabi has reportedly been inflaming his recruits with reports that veteran Algerian diplomat Brahimi is part of a Sunni conspiracy bent on undermining the rights of Iraqi Shiites to hold power in Iraq.
Remember, sports fans, this is our hand picked guy to lead Iraq up until last week.
Worst. Takeover. Ever.
Let's say you are a legitimate news service and former CIA storefront operation, like — what's a good example.... ah, yes — Reuters. So, then let's say that three people in one of your news teams in Iraq were imprisoned by U.S. authorities for three days and released without being charged with anything. Then let's say that the three employees claimed that they — and others — were sexually abused and tortured during their three day incarceration for (apparently) doing nothing. Wouldn't you tell everyone in the world?
Well, only if you could verify the story — after all, three pissed off guys might exaggerate. So, when the Army officials come back and say there was "no evidence that the Reuters staff had been tortured or abused," you'd probably just drop it.
You might, though, want to bring it up again after thousands of photos documenting sexual abuse and torture flooded into the media:
LONDON, May 18 (Xinhuanet) — The Reuters news agency said on Tuesday that three of its local staff in Iraq were allegedly subjected to sexually degrading treatment after being detained in January.Rumsfailed must resign.It was unveiling the ordeal of its employees after the US military had concluded there was no evidence that the Reuters staff had been tortured or abused, the news agency said.
The Reuters employees were allegedly abused at two US military bases, after being detained for covering the shooting down of a US helicopter near the flashpoint city of Falluja.
Earlier reports said Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Falluja-based freelance TV journalist Ahmad Mohammad Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani were held for three days before being released without charge.
The three detainees were quoted by the Reuters as saying that they were forced to make demeaning gestures as soldiers laughed, taunted them and took photographs.
Among other things, they were allegedly deprived of sleep, had bags placed over their heads, were kicked and hit and forced to remain in stress positions for long periods.
The Reuters report came in the wake of the scandal involving the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Graib prison near Baghdad.
Chimpymust be censured, if not impeached.
Three times, they could have gotten him, and three times they failed to act?
I'm talking about Clinton and Usama bin Laden, right? No, that's just Conservative propaganda. No, this time it's the latest scandal about the Bushista Regime letting a vicious terrorist walk away unharmed three times so that they could bolster their case for war in Iraq.
We've all heard the feeble cases about Abu Musab Zarqawi and his Al-Qaeda camp in Iraq. Apparently, this is the "connection" between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Of course, the Al-Qaeda outpost was in areas controlled by the Kurds, so Saddam Hussein couldn't have had anything to do with it.
Wait a minute — weren't the Kurds on our side? And didn't we have effective control over Northern Iraq? Yes, and yes. So why didn't we take out the camp, then? Simple: if the camp wasn't there anymore, that we would lose a major pillar of our invasion rationale.
According to an MSNBC article published last night, the Bush Adminsition squashed three (count 'em!) DOD strike plans against Al-Zarqawi, allowing him to continue menacing peaceful citizens worldwide, and finally to vivisect poor Nick Berg (now playing on a web browser near you).
“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
The Washington Post is running a grim story on the lawlessness, terrorism and precision assassinations happening in Iraq, a scant six weeks before the "hand over" by the U.S. The "hand over" is looking more and more like a rich kid throwing a damaged toy back at the store vendor and telling him he doesn't want it any more.
With stunning brazenness, pinpoint timing and devastating force, the suicide car bomber who killed the head of Iraq's Governing Council on Monday gave shape to a feeling among Iraqi and U.S. officials and common citizens that the country is almost unmanageable.
The IRC President was blown to smithereens right in front of the U.S. "Green Zone" entrance. That sends a pretty stark message, if not to Shrub, at least to ordinary Iraqis: you are not safe. The next guy appointed President (a former "engineer", now soon to be a former "living person") should review his copy of The Empire Strikes Back and pay special attention to the Darth Vader School of Management (and particularly, the way to "move up" in the Empire's space navy).
If Bush can screw up Iraq this badly, I wonder what he'd do to the U.S. ?
Coming soon to midnight TV ads: Soldiers Gone Wild!™ (Disclaimer: Not Really).
Don't believe me? Take a look at the NY Post article about the sex video escapades at Abi Ghraib Prison.
 Photo of Pfc. England and her paramour and father of her illegitimate child, Spc. Charles Graner from the New York Post. | "There was a bed found in one of the abandoned buildings. There was a mattress on the ground. They had chairs all circled around it and candles all over the place," said Bischel, adding the chairs were "obviously for an audience." |
Need I say more?
I was going to answer a comment about the fact that Lynndie England, the world's most famous female war criminal, was knocked up by another soldier in the Abu Ghraib prison. Checking to see whether he was a superior officer — he is an enlisted rank ("Specialist") which may supervise other enlisted personnel by appointment — I came across a very nice blog entry at The London News Review pointing out some rather disturbing facts about England's pregnancy.
It took four months to come out, but Lynndie knew, back in January, that she was facing trouble over the torture photographs. Big trouble. So what did she do...? Did she panic? No. Did she give vent to her anxiety by forcing some naked Iraqis prisoners to masturbate each other? Probably. But that’s not all.He's quite a catch, that Graner. The LNR cites a USA Today story about Graner's previous marriage:Lynndie suspected she was going to face serious charges over her maltreatment of prisoners, so the clever little war criminal took drastic action: she got herself knocked up. By her war criminal fiancé, Charles Graner.
In 2001, Staci Graner filed a five-page, handwritten affidavit. She said that Charles Graner had come to her house and "yanked me out of bed by my hair, dragging me and all the covers into the hall and tried to throw me down the steps."More quotes and a link to another news story offering details about Graner are at LNR.
Good to know that when this Iraq mess is over, Graner may return to his job here in the United States; he's a prison guard. Ah... maybe Iraq is being turned into an America-style democracy.
There's been a lot of controversy about displaying images of our fallen soldiers. Some people — myself included — take the "Vietnam War Memorial" view that we showing the personal identity of each casualty is the least we can do in rememberence of their sacrafice in the line of duty.
The Rabid Right disagrees. The people we are supposed to be showing honor and deference to are the scumbags in the Whitehouse who got us into this Iraq debacle, not those bravely trying to survive it. Also, if we show all those picture of guys (and gals) who look like our friends, neighbors, and family, we might stop thinking in the video game terms — and I'm not taking "Splinter Cell," I'm talking "pong" — that the Bushista regime is using to promote their bumbling in Babylon.
The the left are just a few images in a montage. You can get the whole montage in two sizes:
Medium-sized
Full-sized
This commentary by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon talks about the depths of dissatisfaction in the professional military with the "leadership" of Rumsfeld. Rusmfeld is the last link in the chain of Neocons who started the whole Iraq boondoggle (itself probably a staggeringly successful con by Chablis).
Retired Gen. William E. Odom, a former staff member of the National Security Council and now at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, reflects the depth of dismay in the upper ranks of the military. "It was never in our interest to go into Iraq," he told me. He calls that war a "diversion" from the war on terrorism; the rationale for the war, finding WMD, "phony"; the U.S. Army overstretched, being driven "into the ground"; and the prospect of building a democracy in Iraq "zero." In Iraqi politics, he says, "legitimacy is going to be tied to expelling us. Wisdom in military affairs dictates withdrawal in this situation. 'We can't afford to fail' -- that's mindless. But the danger has been done. The issue is how we stop failing more. I'm arguing [for] a strategic decision."
Is Bush/Rove so stupid they'll hang on to Rummy even if it kills his Presidency?
I'm seeing a wave of stories that soft pedal the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. USA Today is running a story that tries to downplay the U.S. torture by comparing it to worse regimes. Like John Stewart said on The Daily Show last night, "So we're less evil than Saddam? Is that how we are presenting ourselves? (with the usual mock suprise and shock). That's the best the Bushinistas can do? "Less evil than Saddam" is our new slogan?
One thing that is clear is that the GIs being accused of perpetrating the torture are not that different from other soldiers ordered to do illegal and inhuman acts. They don't know they can refuse an illegal order, or they fear reprisals if they don't. In the case of Pfc. England, it looks like she was screwed either way, because it's clear the military will prosecute her to the full extent. But why wouldn't she reveal the names of the brass who ordered her to pose in the infamous photos? Is her lawyer saving that for the trial? Or does the Military Intelligence (or Halliburton) division scare her that much?
Editor's Note: Thanks to Winston's comment, we can confirm that Pfc. England was impregnated by her superior office at Abu Ghraib prison. I'm no expert on military law, but I'm pretty sure that will get her superior in deep shit too.
Nicholas Berg was a Bush supporter who believed Shrub's lies about bringing democracy to Iraq. He paid for his belief with his life.
His family back in the U.S. opposes the war. They have to live with the images of his beheading for the rest of their lives, the price they pay every day for Bush's Folly.
Comedy Central's The Daily Show neatly encapsulates the whole Iraqi mess with this episode titled "GIANT Mess O'Potamia" which features the Iraqi reaction to Abu Ghirabi prison and "Aw Shucks" Rumsfield. Don't miss it (requires Real Player to see -- works on Linux, Windows and Mac).
Many members of the Rabid Right hate the U.N. They spew slogans such as "Drop the U.N. &mdash on Paris!" Witty. Another Rabid Right feature is that they love guns. They love 'em a lot. Don't get me wrong, I own firearms myself, but I don't have back issues of Guns and Ammo with pages stuck together.
So, you got a bunch of people who hate the U.N. and love guns — and violence, can't forget that. As ardent supporters of Operation Screw Up The Planet, they have never seen a politcal problem that couldn't be solved with a high body count. Freepers — the Rabid Rightists who congregate on FreeRepublic.com — generate prolific posts like this:
Just kill them all. A dead Islamoterrorist will never hurt innocents anymore.
Well, now there is!
Usama bin Laden, spiritual leader of bloodthirsty morons worldwide is offering 10,000 grams of gold for the head of Kofi Annan, his Iraqui envoy, Ladkhar Brahimi, or Colonial Overlord, Paul Bremer.
OK, leave Bremer out of it — awww hell, why not leave Bremer in? — and lock and load, boys! 10,000 grams of gold — and thanks to crystal meth and oxycontin, rednecks now know what a gram is — is worth $137,000! You can buy a double wide!
Bottom line: the more this "war on terra" continues, the less difference I see between the two sides.
MoveOn.org is sponsoring a campaign to call our elected &mdash and "elected" — government overlords to fire Donald Rumsfeld. That would certainly go a long way toward making the Bush administration somewhat tolerable as the seat of American authority. Light from "acceptable" might reach Planet Bush years ahead of schedule. Of course, there's Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney... oh fuck it, we need to clean house.
But you can start by calling Dubya's office at (202) 456-1111 or (202) 456-1112. Call from work, it's free. This page on MoveOn.org's site has more links to some juicy editorials with stuff like this:
The abuses that have done so much harm to the U.S. mission in Iraq might have been prevented had Mr. Rumsfeld been responsive to earlier reports of violations. Instead, he publicly dismissed or minimized such accounts. He and his staff ignored detailed reports by respected human rights groups about criminal activity at U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, and they refused to provide access to facilities or respond to most questions. In December 2002, two Afghan detainees died in events that were ruled homicides by medical officials; only when the New York Times obtained the story did the Pentagon confirm that an investigation was underway, and no results have yet been announced. Not until other media obtained the photos from Abu Ghraib did Mr. Rumsfeld fully acknowledge what had happened, and not until Tuesday did his department disclose that 25 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. Accountability for those deaths has been virtually nonexistent: One soldier was punished with a dishonorable discharge.
Damn, I hate that guy.
Now that the occupation of Iraq is going so well, it seems like an opportune time to ask for more money to keep it going, right? Well, kinda — our troops could use some more real support, but the Bu__sh__ administration has been trying to hide the real cost, even when they were egregiously underestimating it.
Today, the Revisionican party asked for another $25 billion dollars. Stupid, stupid, stupid! They should ask for their largesse in Euros to keep the numbers down. Anyway, maybe when the American public will finally get sticker shock at the cost of this war and ask a very simple question: Hey, should we even be doing this?
And speaking of cost, let's not forget the lives of fallen soldiers. Can we get to 1004 in 2004? Easily. Whatever (valid) criticism you have of John Kerry, one thing is clear: of the two major-party candidates, only Kerry has the experience and the vision to get us the fuck out of Iraq.
From What We Now Know week of 5-3-2004
ARMY IN TROUBLERecently, we have heard increasing chatter in political circles about bringing back the draft. The latest comments came from Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that deteriorating conditions in Iraq might make the draft inevitable. On April 15, US Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) called for the draft in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.
Most pundits find it unlikely that the White House would take such a drastic step in an election year, inviting not only criticism from political adversaries but public outrage from voters. The Department of Defense has denied the possibility of a draft, but in late 2003 an ad on the DOD website asked for volunteers to serve on draft boards. After the media got wind of the ad, it was withdrawn without explanation.
All this seems to be an indicator that our military is overstretched. "The military's people, its equipment, its supplies and spare parts, its logistic systems, and all its other assets are under pressure they cannot sustain," reports the Atlantic Monthly in a March 2004 article. "Everything has been operating on an emergency basis for more than two years... The situation was serious before the invasion of Iraq; now it is acute."
The clearest indication of how acute the shortage is: thousands of soldiers whose time in the military would have been up by now are being kept in the military under "stop-loss" orders forbidding them to resign. To wit, their service is no longer voluntary. In January, the Marines put a stop-loss order on the entire service. Nicholas Confessore, editor of The Washington Monthly, stated, "large swathes of the U.S. military ... no longer meet the definition of a volunteer force."
After the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, demobilization was the name of the game. When Bush senior launched his operation "Desert Storm" in 1991, 2 million Americans were on active duty; by the time Bush junior started his conquest of Iraq, the Army had shrunk to 1.4 million, a 30% reduction.
Even after 9/11, the Pentagon resisted attempts to increase the size of the Army, mainly because of Donald Rumsfeld's vision of a downsized military in the corporate sense of "lean management"; from his first days in office, Rumsfeld has promoted a strategy of further mechanizing warfare which would save a lot of money now used for manpower maintenance. However, the new realities have now sunk in, and in January 2004 the DOD endorsed a bill before Congress that would allow for an additional 30,000 troops.
But if there are 135,000 soldiers on the ground in Iraq and we have 1.4 million altogether, where's the problem? The problem is that, as the world's self-appointed policemen, we're spreading ourselves thin. US troops are stationed in over a hundred countries: 75,000 US soldiers in Germany, 41,000 in Japan, 41,000 in Korea, 13,000 in Italy, 12,000 in the UK, etc. Some call it necessity, some call it imperialism. Officers on Army bases sarcastically refer to the recruiting slogan "An Army of One", stating, "that's how many soldiers are left for new assignments now." And new cases for the world police keep coming in.
Increasingly, the military has been trying to fill the gap with reservists and National Guard members who have previously been enticed into service with stylish TV commercials (remember the "Let's Roll" party missile?) which promise that "most serve two days a month and one month a year". Since 9/11, many Guards have been separated from their families and forced to serve up to one year in Iraq. In 2004, almost 40% of the troops in Iraq will be from the Reserves and National Guard... people who probably never expected having to fire a gun in their lifetime. The Denver Post reported that recruiting of reservists is dropping. While the desired retention rate is 85 percent, it dropped to as low as 71 percent in Colorado last year.
In October 2003, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes conducted an informal survey that showed that nearly 50% of the soldiers didn't plan to re-enlist; in comparison with re-enlistment rates in 1996 when 68% of all military personnel chose to sign up again. Retired general and former Army Secretary Thomas White told AM reporter James Fallows they were "in serious danger of breaking the human-capital equation of the Army" and "once you break it, it takes a long time to put it back together."
In our view, when you get to the point that you are forcing soldiers to remain in the service against their will, it is time to review not only the current state of our military, but also the continued wisdom of trying to provide a global police force.
According to this article the U.S. coallition forces are handing over the control of Fallujda to one of Saddam's generals. Given the history of the town and the brutal oppression by Saddam, and the fact that the U.S. is now looking less and less like a benevolent dictator, this move seems utterly insane.
 | Guess what the Iraqi Ruling Council unveiled today? You guessed it! The Israelaq flag! Yes, bearing almost no resemblance to Israel's flag, the new symbol of Iraq (or maybe just a new market brand -- Shrub's Nations™) is going to cause a lot of excitement in the Muslim nation. Especially after they took the words "God is Great" off the flag. Mind you, these are the same people who want to keep God in our own Pledge of Allegiance. |
From What We Now Know:
As far as what's happening over here...first, in Fallujah, the Marines were doing well until they ran out of gas, literally. The real reason the Marines had to start their truce/cease-fire strategy is because the coalition forces are running extremely low on fuel right now. We first heard about it maybe 10 days ago or so from some Army 5th Group Special Forces guys who were complaining to us, saying how even THEY had been ordered to ration fuel.
Considering that Special Forces guys get the best of everything and get first dibs on everything, including fuel, we knew the shortage must be pretty bad. Sure enough, just a couple days later, the Army 1 star, who runs the base where our compound is located, implemented strict refueling policies, severely limiting how much gas we can take per day. They've gone so far as posting guards at the fuel points to measure how much gas is pumped per vehicle, per day, with everything getting logged on their clipboards. It's definitely a change. The 1 star didn't tell us where the fuel shortage came from, but it is probably a mix of poor planning and recent fuel truck convoys from Kuwait being either delayed or cancelled due to the increasing number of attacks. Anyway, that's the reason the marines had to slow down in Fallujah. Once the fuel problem gets taken care of, the Marines will probably pick up the pace again. Fallujah is going to take a couple months, not a couple weeks.In Baghdad, where we work, I've never seen the city this dangerous. It wasn't even this bad last spring, during the actual war. Though we've never had any of our executives injured, even after nearly a dozen attacks on our teams, the execs still decided to evacuate for two weeks just to lay low.
It's understandable, considering all the contractors getting kidnapped or killed (nearly all of whom were working without security, I must add) and so they decided to wait it out from some nice hotel in Dubai. As for us, the bodyguards, we're staying put to guard the compound.
We knew things would get worse before June 30th, and they have. Things will probably continue to get worse. It's already been established that both the new Iraqi military and Iraqi police are pretty much worthless and cannot be trusted. So much so, that the Army requested Kurdish soldiers to come to Baghdad to replace the Iraqi soldiers currently providing security for the army bases here. The Army knows the Kurdish soldiers can be trusted and are loyal to the U.S., unlike the Iraqi soldiers. It'll be interesting to see what happens when a few thousand Kurds show up in Baghdad armed with AK47s. But that'll only be one of many future problems.
The Army recently extended the tour lengths another 4 months for a lot of their guys who have already been in the Middle East a year now. Their morale and motivation was already non-existent before the extension; now these guys, tens of thousands of them, are just taking up space over here.
I know it's still early in the game, but you can pretty much write off the entire U.S. Army (with the exception of their special forces and maybe their aviation units) as being "operationally ineffective" in the future (i.e. completely worthless to the coalition from here on out, except to suck up food and fuel).
Generally speaking, the Army is incompetent in these types of environments: only Marines and Special Forces guys do well in a place like this. Special Forces because they're so precise, and Marines because they're so disciplined...and ferocious.
The Army is just making things worse for the coalition. The Army is intent on having its presence seen and felt in Iraq because they think that will make everyone think they are in charge. What they don’t seem to realize is that a large military presence is the one thing, pretty much the only thing, the Iraqis can't tolerate. Despite reports by the news media to the contrary, Iraqis don't resent the humanitarian projects, or the rebuilding effort, or even the U.S. being in control of the government until the transition. Sure the Iraqis want to be in charge, but the majority can tolerate the situation until a transition happens, even if it's months down the road. But what they can NOT tolerate is waking up every day and seeing army tanks and Bradleys rolling through their towns and villages. And they can't tolerate being stopped by endless Army checkpoints on the highways, which were set up by commanding officers who think terrorists and insurgents haven't figured out a way yet to avoid those checkpoints. That's what the Iraqis resent and can't tolerate, along with a thousand other ways the Army makes its presence felt (and I didn't even mention having your door kicked in at 2 am because of some "hot Army intel").
Until the Army realizes any of this--which it seems like they never will--things will only get worse. And in response, the Army will just increase its presence.
That's not to say all hope is lost. Slowly but surely, things are actually getting better for the Iraqi people. Everything except security and safety, of course. The water, the power, the food, business… pretty much everything is improving. It's too bad no one is able to notice. I guess that's just hard to do right now.
Well, that's pretty much how things are over here. Thanks again for the newsletters. I always look forward to them. As always, take care."
From The Globe and Mail.
Feminists — by which I mean people who support the concept that women have a right to run their own lives — have been unhappy with the Bush Administration, mainly due to John Ashroft climbing into the distaff citizenry's collective hoo-hahs and stamping "Property U.S. Govt." on their gonads. You'd think that people would be happy that he appointed the first female — and first African-American — National Security Advisor, but his true agenda on that has been outed. Bush appointed a black woman so that he could call his critics sexist racists when they accused her of lying (you'll notice that Bush likes to put minorities out in front to do his boldest lying for him).
Well, now there's been some real progress for women under Bush! Thanks to George W. Bush's policies, last Friday, Pvt. Michelle Witmer earned her place in the history books as the first female member of the Wisconsin militia to die in combat. Yea! Go Team Bush! Women around the world... c'mon! Celebrate!
There's an AP Newswire story.
On a serious note, there's a tragedy here. It's not that Michelle Witmer gave her life for a country that didn't think she was mature enough to drink legally. That's unfortunate, but dying is battle is a grim reality that every soldier faces. Calling it a tragedy implies that is was unexpected and unwarranted. No, the sad fact is that we knew Americans were going to die in Iraq — the tragedy is that the people who sent them to die can't give us a straight answer as to what, exactly we're buying with this sacrafice.
I think that American women should realize that we all need to lick Bush in 2004.
Charles Schmalzried pointed out this Frontline website for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Take a look at the content ... it's hard to look at but a harsh reminder that you don't need smart bombs or lasers to kill a lot of people. Just a warehouse full of machetes and some grim, twisted determination.
Prof. Juan Cole provides some analysis on the situation in Iraq:
The United States has managed to create a failed state, similar to Somalia and Haiti, in Iraq.
From What We Now Know week of 4-5-2004:
If anyone needed proof that war is hell, it was provided last week in Iraq.
Our Baghdad correspondent, "Mr. X" - a former U.S. military NCO now working for a private security company (see Calling Iraq, WWNK Week of 2/23/04) - contacted us following last week's gruesome killing of four U.S. civilian security workers in Fallujah. His comments are excerpted here.
"Blackwater [the firm that employed the four slain men] is actually the premiere private security company in the world. They hire almost exclusively ex-Navy Seals. It just goes to show you, if a company like Blackwater, literally "the best of the best," can get hit... anyone can get hit over here.
"We were expecting the attacks to escalate between now and the end of June. This is pretty much the insurgents' last chance to try to derail the transition. It'll get worse.
"But there is one development that I haven't seen anyone report, or at least not report in the right perspective. The Army's 82nd Airborne left (read: got fired) from Fallujah and the Sunni Triangle. The Marines are in charge now, and Marines don't care about getting their hands dirty and looking bad on CNN.
"They've only been in Fallujah and in the Sunni Triangle about 2 weeks, but I've already seen some of their operations. They're going to kill a lot of people (it'd be nice if only bad guys, but innocents always die too, that's just the reality, unfortunately). Give the Marines 3-4 months, and it'll be a whole different picture."
To which we add, watch the news. We suspect the Iraqi body count is about to go much higher in Fallujah... but this time it won't be American lives being lost.
And hell burns a little brighter.
Update: Over the weekend, coalition soldiers opened fire on a crowd of supporters of the Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, killing 20 and wounding scores. As explained in our previous article Shiites vs. Sunnis in Iraq, al-Sadr is an anti-American firebrand and a major candidate for the leadership of the Shiite majority in Iraq. Some of his followers consider him to be the Mahdi, the Arab messiah. Hitting that particular hornet's nest may have very serious consequences.
Update no. 2: As we go to press, events in Iraq are unfolding with the force of an avalanche. In next week's edition, you'll read more about Muqtada al-Sadr and the Iraqi debacle.
Is it just my imagination, or is Iraq starting to look less like a beacon for democracy and more like a failed state? Here's the latest from the Washington Post:
The day's events constituted the most serious challenge yet to the U.S.-led occupation by an element of the country's majority Shiite population, which for most of a year has observed a broad tolerance of the United States and its allies.
And from Anthony Shadid in another piece:
Fighting with U.S. troops raged into the night in a Baghdad slum, and hospitals reportedly took in dozens of casualties. But even before sunset, there was a sense across the capital that a yearlong test of wills between the American occupation and supporters of Moqtada Sadr had turned decisive, and its implications reverberated through Iraq.
The unrest signaled that the U.S. military faces armed opposition on two fronts: in scarred Sunni towns such as Fallujah and, as of Sunday, in a Shiite-dominated region of the country that had remained largely acquiescent, if uneasy about the U.S. role. If put down forcefully, a Shiite uprising -- infused with religious imagery, and symbols drawn from Iraq's colonial past and the current Palestinian conflict -- could achieve a momentum of its own.
My personal "History of Iraq" seems to be unfolding in real-time; I finally updated it tonight. I added Iraq 1960-1965: Oil, Kuwait and Saddam (Episode I). Visit the Never Fight a Land War in Asia site to learn about Iraq's hilarious history (as well, as reading my brilliant comparison of George Bush and Adolph Hitler — Hitler comes out ahead).
Here are some excerpts of the new chapter:
…
The year 1963 was chock full of political assassinations. The murder of Vietnam's Ngô Ðình Diệm, helped ignite the Vietnam war. The subsequent death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy made sure it would last a good long time. Finally, the shooting of Abdel Qassim promoted Saddam Hussein from a mere murderer to a state-sponsored murderer.
The coup in Iraq had no effect on the Vietnam War, although it initiated a sequence of events resulting in a war that the people born during the Vietnam War could compare to it.
In 1958, the Iraqi people — well, the Iraqi military elite, really — ousted the monarchy that Britain had thoughtfully installed years earlier. Since an angry mob had shredded the Royal family and scattered their body parts throughout the streets of Baghdad, it wasn't looking good for a replacement monarchy. Thus, Iraq became the Republic of Iraq and drafted a new constitution making it a Parliamentary Democracy.
That constitution was pretty much ignored by Saddam Hussein, and now it's being ignored by George W. Bush. Iraq's new constitution identifies Iraq as an Islamic Republic, thereby draining the only oasis of religious tolerance in the Arabian desert. If "exporting" American democracy results in theocracies, maybe we should be doing a little quality-control back here in the Freedom Factory™.
On a more recent note — just yesterday, in fact — American GI's demonstrated the blessings of liberty by shutting down a newspaper for being critical of the Bush Administration. Officially, the paper is being accused of printing wild rumor and speculation which Colonial Overlord Bremer fears will incite violence in Iraq. Naturally, Iraqis are outraged at American hypocrisy (why aren't more Americans outraged by American hypocrisy?).
Me, I applaud the shutdown of the paper. And to deflect accusations of hypocrisy, I think that we should shut down other news outlets that publish lies and rumors which might lead to violence in Iraq. Let's start with Fox News.
Other than undermining the credibility of U.S. efforts to bring "freedom" to the Iraqi people, the closure of the newspaper has acheived nothing. The violence continues, unabated.
I missed the interview with Richard Clarke last night on 60 minutes, but word is that it was pretty devestating:
"We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.
"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.
[...]
Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department.
For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.
Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'
"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."
Idiots.
Is the Bush administration looking for a scapegoat? According to the neo-con's favorite Iraqi exile-turned-politician, convicted embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, the answer appears to be "yes," as discussed by the Inter Press Service News Agency...
" The Telegraph reported that Chalabi merely shrugged off
accusations his group had deliberately misled the administration. 'We
are heroes in error,' he said.
'As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful,' he told
the newspaper. '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. We're ready to fall on our
swords if he wants.'"
Or, what about Tenet? Is he offering to take the fall for Neo-con intelligence hijinx? According to a recent article from IPS, it would appear possibly so. Or, not?
Or, we could just continue with the focus shift. Who cares why we went to war. Look at how much better things are now that Saddam's gone! Or, as Jay Garner says, ...
"'Look back on the Philippines around the turn of the 20th century: they were a coaling station for the navy, and that allowed us to keep a great presence in the Pacific. That's what Iraq is for the next few decades: our coaling station that gives us great presence in the Middle East,' Garner added."
