Tag: iraq

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Baghdad Traffic and Weather on the 8s

Salon has a sort of interesting piece today on documents from the Coalition Provisional Authority (our original occupation government in Iraq, starring L. Paul “Jerry, here’s your Medal of Freedom” Bremer). A Case Western Reserve political scientist discovered some weekly reports from 2004 that still contain all the official edits and deletions. The Salon story cites one remarkable passage: in retrospect, an extended piece of wishful thinking about the insurgency cooling off in al Anbar Province. The CPA appears to have deleted the rosy speculation immediately after insurgents, mobs, or whoever it was killed four U.S. paramilitary contractors in Fallujah, an event that signaled the fact the province was entirely out of government control.

Reading about Iraq in the good old days made me curious about what the current voice of the United States in Baghdad — our embassy — has to say about the state of the nation. Its site includes a link for U.S. Citizen Services, which in turn contains a link labeled Iraq Travel Warning. There’s been a lot of talk coming out of the president’s bunker lately about how the media is exaggerating how bad things are in Iraq and that the good news stories aren’t adequately told. Interesting to read what his people on the ground, the people who actually have to wear flak jackets when they’re in the “Green Zone” and deal with fellow citizens who might wander into trouble, have to say about the situation:

“The Department of State continues to strongly warn U.S. citizens against travel to Iraq, which remains very dangerous. Remnants of the former Ba’ath regime, transnational terrorists, criminal elements and numerous insurgent groups remain active. Attacks against military and civilian targets throughout Iraq continue, including in the International (or “Green”) Zone. Targets include convoys en-route to venues, hotels, restaurants, police stations, checkpoints, foreign diplomatic missions, international organizations and other locations with expatriate personnel. These attacks have resulted in deaths and injuries of American citizens, including those doing humanitarian work. In addition, there have been planned and random killings, as well as extortions and kidnappings. U.S. citizens have been kidnapped and several were subsequently murdered by terrorists in Iraq. U.S. citizens and other foreigners continue to be targeted by insurgent groups and opportunistic criminals for kidnapping and murder. Military operations continue. There are daily attacks against Multinational Forces – Iraq (MNF-I), Iraqi Security Forces and Iraqi Police throughout the country.The Department of State continues to strongly warn U.S. citizens against travel to Iraq, which remains very dangerous. Remnants of the former Ba’ath regime, transnational terrorists, criminal elements and numerous insurgent groups remain active. Attacks against military and civilian targets throughout Iraq continue, including in the International (or “Green”) Zone. Targets include convoys en-route to venues, hotels, restaurants, police stations, checkpoints, foreign diplomatic missions, international organizations and other locations with expatriate personnel. These attacks have resulted in deaths and injuries of American citizens, including those doing humanitarian work. In addition, there have been planned and random killings, as well as extortions and kidnappings. U.S. citizens have been kidnapped and several were subsequently murdered by terrorists in Iraq. U.S. citizens and other foreigners continue to be targeted by insurgent groups and opportunistic criminals for kidnapping and murder. Military operations continue. There are daily attacks against Multinational Forces – Iraq (MNF-I), Iraqi Security Forces and Iraqi Police throughout the country.”

Of course, the embassy might be ignoring all the good news, too.

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‘Beyond Vietnam’ … and Beyond Iraq

Kevin Morrison, an old softball teammate of mine, just put together a four-minute montage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech at the Riverside Church in New York. He juxtaposes images of Iraq over King’s words to devastating effect. Kevin also did a Q and A on the historical context of King’s speech, available at a blog called Pop + Politics.

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Supporting the Troops: A True Story

The president is getting lots of air time today for his visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center; now that imperfections in the nation’s care for its wounded warriors have come to light, he vows, solemnly and sincerely, that the government will do better. And as long as someone’s keeping their eye on the problem–someone like the Washington Post, which brought the scandalously poor treatment to light–things will probably improve.

Meantime, he is escalating the war in Iraq, guaranteeing a steady flow of new clients for Walter Reed and the nation’s other military and veterans’ hospitals. The escalation also means that the services have to scrape together bodies to make sure that units headed for Iraq, or those held there on prolonged tours, are as close to full strength as possible. Where is the Pentagon finding the bodies? Here’s a story involving a friend of ours and her son.

The son was in the Marines, part of the first-wave invasion force sent into Iraq in March 2003. His unit’s combat assignment was over quickly, and he and his comrades were pressed into police duty in Baghdad and other locations in northern Iraq. Back then, when the mission was declared accomplished and administration’s victory lap was interrupted only by the need to mop up “non-compliant forces” and “destablizing influences” in the lexicon of the day, the son’s unit was quickly rotated back to the States, and he was discharged soon after.

I don’t know the letter of military regulations, but my understanding of the deal Marines have is that when they leave the corps, they don’t really leave the corps. For the first 48 months after discharge, they’re considered part of a ready reserve force and can be called back to service at any time. Only after that 48 months is up are you free and clear from an involuntary call-up; if you decide to join the reserves or go your own way at that point, that’s your business.

For our friend’s son, that four-year period for involuntary call-up will be over in a few months. He got married recently, and he’s going about his life pretty much the way any kid in his mid-20s would, with the significant exception that he’s been in combat and was assessed a disability rating of 40 percent because of post-traumatic stress syndrome when he left the corps. His mom, who’s not a Veteran’s Administration bureaucrat, a Navy medical officer, or a military lawyer, sort of figured that the 40 percent disability meant her son couldn’t or wouldn’t be called back despite the news that the armed services have begun to recall discharged members.

So she was puzzled the other day when her son asked her whether he had gotten anything from FedEx.

No, she told him—was he expecting a package?

No, he said–a letter from the Marines; they might be recalling him to service.

How could that be, she asked–you have a 40 percent disability.

The son told her that sure, that was right–but that a buddy of his, someone rated with a 60 percent disability (I don’t know the reason) had been summoned back to duty.

So this is the support the troops get from an administration whose leading members made damned sure they were never anywhere near the shooting when it was their turn: First, send the troops out on a tragically half-baked mission; second, when they start coming home with major physical and psychological trauma, make them fight an ill-prepared bureaucracy and medical system for care; third, when you find yourself in a pinch, call on the guys who have already given pieces of themselves and tell them they’ve got to go back in. Oh, and fourth, you question the patriotism and loyalty of anyone who questions your way of doing business.

All in all, it’s a heck of a recruiting campaign.

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Generals Bound, Unbound

Now that Congress has done the unexpected and voted to try to rein in the president’s open-ended war in Iraq, the president is blustering about how the troops must be “fully funded.” That’s a non-issue, as the Democrats who engineered the bills in both houses made sure that, even if there’s no tax revenue to pay for it, the military and the president get all the money they want over the next year or so to keep the blood flowing into the sand. That’s fine. Congress’s power to limit the president’s warmaking by cutting off the money sounds great in theory, but it’s such a political snare that no one wants to get close to it until they see everyone else headed in the same direction. We haven’t gotten to that point; and if we haven’t yet, you wonder what it would take.

The president and the Republicans who want to prolong the war indefinitely also decry a bunch of politicians trying to manage the war by imposing conditions and timetables on troop deployments. It is a little strange to see a branch of government that appeared content to let the president have his way in Iraq for four years suddenly sit up and take notice. But the bills that have passed and the deadlines they include are trivial limitations on military commanders when compared to the conditions the president and his crew have thrust upon the generals and their troops.

To begin with, the war had to be a streamlined, lightning-fast operation. The number of troops committed was to be kept to a minimum. Planning for postwar Iraq proceeded on the rosiest assumptions about Iraqi society, politics and physical infrastructure. Those who dissented from the plan, who questioned the basic assumptions, were openly chastised or shunted aside. When it turned out that not a single element of the president’s blueprint matched the reality on the ground, there was no Plan B; certainly, there was no option to seek wider involvement from allies since we had charged into battle in nearly complete isolation from those who might have played a part. So, a year after the invasion, when the lid really came off, the commanders were left to figure out how to proceed in a situation whose own architects swore didn’t even exist: those resisting us were just dead-enders, or the insurgency was in its last throes, or it would go away once one or two or three key bad guys were eliminated.

Meantime, the reality of what has happened in Iraq is too awful to honestly contemplate in terms of the destruction of life and the unraveling of a society. We’re privy to pallid secondhand accounts of the ongoing mass killings and car-bomb attacks and the exodus of everyone who has a chance of getting out of the country; but at the president’s urging, we go on with our lives except for offering knee-jerk praise to the members of the armed services. The president’s answer to the disaster he unleashed is essentially the same as it has always been: more of the same, but smarter this time. If the current escalation fails–and it will, if the definition of success is really pacifying Iraq–the president will go looking for another general with a bright idea about how to prevail. And he’ll keep the military handcuffed to a war he never had good reason to start and which long ago ceased making sense. It’s about time someone tried to tell him that this can’t go on forever.

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Your War in Numbers

Seventy-six U.S. soldiers have died so far this month in Iraq, according to Iraq Coalition Casualties. That makes March the seventh consecutive month in which the toll of U.S. soldiers killed has reached 70 or above, the longest such period since President Bush launched the war in March 2003.

Five hundred ninety-nine U.S. soldiers have died since September 1, 2006; that’s the highest toll for any seven-month span in the entire war, exceeding the 584 U.S. lives lost from August 1, 2004, through February 28, 2005, a period that included both the costly offensive against Fallujah and an insurgent onslaught leading up to the Iraqi national elections on January 30, 2005.

Iraqi deaths in the same span: Conservatively, about 1,300 and counting for March. More than 13,000 since September 1.

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McCain

John McCain was on Letterman Wednesday night and announced (or pre-announced) that he’s running for president. There was a moment a few years back when I felt pretty good about McCain. You know: stand-up guy, moderate, rational, independent thinker, as demonstrated by his willingness to go against Bush, Cheney and company on the issue of the United States employing torture against detainees enemy combatants. McCain managed to rally veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress for his anti-torture bill and got Bush to publicly acquiesce and sign the thing. Here’s what’s strange about that story, though, and a hint about what’s wrong with McCain’s quest for the presidency: He uttered not a whisper of public protest when news reports disclosed that Bush had appended a signing statement to the new law that said, essentially, the executive branch would enforce it as it saw fit.

Why would McCain not raise a fuss about that? It’s as if, having made his principled stand, having won his public relations victory, he couldn’t be bothered with confronting Bush’s designs to thwart his work. It’s as if the only way he can imagine becoming president is to be part of the team that’s running things now.

And then, of course, there’s Iraq. McCain not only supports the “surge,” a piece of window dressing designed to buy time, but he has long called for the United States to send a far larger force into Iraq. That’s his answer to the Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney “mismanagement” of the war–an American army big enough to bang heads together and “create the conditions” for peace. I’ll give Letterman credit: He left off fawning long enough to ask McCain a hypothetical question that was at least as probing as what he’d get from the likes of Tim Russert or Katie Couric:

“The country of Iraq is stabilized, the government is now, as you described, stabilized, the violence is now significantly reduced; the net benefit to the United States, beyond Americans have stopped losing their lives there, is what?”

To which McCain responded:

“Probably that we have a functioning democracy or a government that will become a democracy, that there will be oil revenues which will then be used by the Iraqis to build up there own country. And maybe it will spread in the region. You know, there are really only two democracies in the region, Israel and the other is Turkey, in the whole region, and obviously we would like to see that.

“I think I know what you’re getting at, and that is should we have gone in in the first place. There was massive intelligence failures and books have been written about the mismanagement of the war, and I would recommend ‘Fiasco’ and ‘Cobra Two’ or one of these other books. But we are where we are now–we are where we are now–and rather than reviewing all the problems we have, if we withdraw early, every expert I know says it will descend into chaos, sectarian violence and even genocide, so that’s why when I say this may be our last chance to succeed, because Americans are very frustrated and they have every right to be. We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives, over there.”

So, part one of the answer is the same old fairy tale: If we try hard enough, we’ll turn Iraq into a functioning democracy or start the evolutionary process toward democracy in motion (hey, a Republican who believes in evolution!). And maybe it will spread to the other benighted corners of the Middle East, like those governed by our closest Arab allies.

Part two is also getting to be an old saw: If we withdraw, there will be unimaginable violence (senator, check your morning paper). In short, this is the same answer we’d get from Bush, complete with occasional signs of the same fractured syntax (though I note that McCain slipped and said American lives have been wasted in Iraq, which is a heresy among the true believers; if some Democrat had said that, Fox News and the whole right-wing opinion mob would be flaying them alive, the mainstream media would be picking up on it, and a mealy-mouthed clarification/apology would be in the works).

The bottom line is nuts: We’re gonna fight our way out of this, only smarter this time. Don’t ask what it costs, because we can’t afford to fail.

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‘Nemesis’

NPR’s "Talk of the Nation" had Chalmers Johnson on Wednesday talking about his new book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic." Johnson is a harsh critic of the way our military has come to dominate at least the foreign policy agenda of our government, and he offers no comfort for those (like me most of the time, to be honest) who believe we’ll just find a way to muddle through:

"One of the oddest features of political life in the United States in
the years since the terrorist attacks is how few people have thought or
acted like Barbara Lee. The public expresses itself in opinion polls,
which some students of politics scrutinize intently, but there is
little passion in the society, certainly none proportionate to the
threats facing our democratic republic. The United States today is like
a cruise ship on the Niagara River upstream of the most spectacular
falls in North America. A few people on board have begun to pick up a
slight hiss in the background, to observe a faint haze of mist in the
air or on their glasses, to note that the river current seems to be
running slightly faster. But no one yet seems to have realized that it
is almost too late to head for shore.

"Like
the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, imperial German, Nazi, imperial
Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Soviet empires in the
last century, we are approaching the edge of a huge waterfall and are
about to plunge over it."

                        

And he also points out what’s obvious now that we’ve gotten to watch Congress’s first impotent response to Bush’s Iraq policy:

"I believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have led the country into
a perilous cul-de-sac, but they did not do it alone and removing them
from office will not necessarily solve the problem. The crisis of
government in the United States has been building at least since World
War II. The emergence of the imperial presidency and the atrophying of
the legislative and judicial branches have deep roots in the postwar
military-industrial complex, in the way broad sectors of the public
have accepted the military as our most effective public institution,
and in aberrations in our electoral system. The interesting issue is
not the damage done by Bush, Cheney, and their followers but how they
were able to get away with it, given the barriers that exist in the
Constitution to prevent just the sorts of misuses of power for which
they have become notorious."

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A Reminder: What We Know

Q. What assurances can you give the American people that the intelligence this time [on Iran supplying IEDs to Iraqi insurgents] will be accurate?

THE PRESIDENT: Ed, we know they’re there, we know they’re provided by the Quds force. We know the Quds force is a part of the Iranian government. I don’t think we know who picked up the phone and said to the Quds force, go do this, but we know it’s a vital part of the Iranian government.

What does President Bush know, and when does he know it? It matters because, despite his insistence that he’s not spoiling for a war with Iran, the things he knows tend to take on a life of their own and consequences for everyone else. So: A look back at what the administration presented as fact during its campaign to launch the war in Iraq. The speaker unless otherwise noted is Bush; the source is whitehouse.gov.

August 26, 2002 (Vice President Cheney): Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.

September 26, 2002: We know that the Iraqi regime is led by a dangerous and brutal man. We know he’s actively seeking the destructive technologies to match is hatred. We know he must be stopped. The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. And when they have fully materialized it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies. By then the Iraqi dictator would have the means to terrorize and dominate the region. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX — nerve gas — or some day a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally.”

November 7, 2002: Well, I think most people around the world realize that Saddam Hussein is a threat. And they — no one likes war, but they also don’t like the idea of Saddam Hussein having a nuclear weapon. Imagine what would happen. And by the way, we don’t know how close he is to a nuclear weapon right now. We know he wants one. But we don’t know. We know he was close to one at one point in time; we have no idea today.

January 28, 2003: From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving. From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves.

March 6, 2003: We care about the suffering of the Iraqi people. I mentioned in my opening comments that there’s a lot of food ready to go in. There’s something like 55,000 oil-for-food distribution points in Iraq. We know where they are. We fully intend to make sure that they’re — got ample food. We know where their hospitals are; we want to make sure they’ve got ample medical supplies. The life of the Iraqi citizen is going to dramatically improve.

March 15, 2003: We know from prior weapons inspections that Saddam has failed to account for vast quantities of biological and chemical agents, including mustard agent, botulinum toxin and sarin, capable of killing millions of people. We know the Iraqi regime finances and sponsors terror.

April 12, 2003: As people throughout Iraq celebrate the arrival of freedom, America celebrates with them. We know that freedom is the gift of God to all mankind, and we rejoice when others can share it.

April 22, 2003 (Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary): Q But the primary motivation behind going into Iraq, at least as expressed by the administration at the time, was the danger presented by Saddam holding these WMDs. Even if they did not exist, does the administration think that going into Iraq was the right thing to do?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, I can’t share the premise. We know they exist and we’re confident they will be found.

Continue reading “A Reminder: What We Know”

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Payback

Saddam Hussein is gone. He got his, the just deserts for 30 years of brutality and tyranny, violence and oppression unleashed against his own people and anyone else within reach. By this point, everyone knows the big irony: The tyrant brought low by us, the nation that once upon a time saw fit to encourage his designs–as long as those designs injured a common enemy and didn’t rebound against us.

Ancient history. And now, the morbid fascination of Saddam’s departure. The New York Times says that part of the pre-hanging procedure involved preparing a “red card” to inform the condemned man he was about to be executed. The red card is part of the vengeance exacted on Saddam, as his regime reportedly invented the practice of presenting the notices to the thousands it condemned to death.

So Saddam hangs. Surely, there’s some kind of justice in that–even if only the score-settling kind that Iraqi Shiites and others Saddam suppressed will savor. But after Saddam? It’s difficult to believe his execution matters much in a large sense; that it will end extinguish a dire threat to the world or bring peace or freedom to Iraq or do much to assuage the victims of his crimes.

And his crimes: Beyond ruling by fear and murder, he launched wars that visited untold suffering on people inside and outside Iraq. He aspired to the part of regional power broker, and player on the world stage, and in a sense got his wish. He became our president’s Public Enemy No. 1, and Bush is said to have the pistol Saddam was carrying when he was captured, mounted and on display in his private White House office. And look at the headlines now: Not just any two-bit gangster gets this kind of attention when he takes a fall.

The one thing you can say for Saddam at the end, though: He was held to account for his crimes and paid the price. Not to equate the actions of Bush & Co. to Saddam’s; I can express my opinion and go to sleep without fearing much what the next day may bring. But I wonder whether Bush and the people around him–those who led us into a war that has little to show for it beyond hanging Saddam Hussein–will ever be held to account for their deceit, for their violation of trust, for the lives and treasure they’ve thrown away,

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