Tag: iraq

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Now They Vote

You’d have to have a very hard heart not to be moved at least a little by the pictures of Iraqis going to the polls; going to the polls, moreover, with little idea what their votes will bring; just clear that whatever happens, it’s different from the past.

As to what the vote means, let’s wait a while and see. I’m amused/bemused to read Andrew Sullivan, who on Friday asked how we might judge the vote’s "success."

The amusement/bemusement is twofold. First, Sullivan throws out a set of blind metrics in his post: He suggests "over 50 percent turnout among the Shia and Kurds, and over 30 percent turnout for the Sunnis. No massive disruption of voting places; no theft of ballots. Fewer than 500 murdered." (I find that death figure appalling and outrageous on so many levels it’s hard to sit still and sort them out. Yes, that will be a great success if you’re not one of the 499 or one of their daughters, sons, wives, husbands, mothers or fathers. And: What’s 500 more lives on top of the tens of thousands spent already? And: The nerve of us Yanks, whether we support this war or not, to talk about these lives so casually).

But the thing that really kills me about Sullivan’s success metrics is the way they bounce around. Last week, Chris Matthew asked him to define success, and he said, "Success is 80 percent turnout in–in most of the regions, extremely enthusiastic voting among the Kurds and the Shias, and better than expected among the Sunnis." And today, after letting reality, or whatever it is, sink in a little, he offered this: "My revised criteria: 45 percent turnout for Kurds and Shia, 25 percent turnout for the Sunnis, under 200 murdered. No immediate call for U.S. withdrawal. Reasonable?"

No, not reasonable. But not because the numbers are off. Because they’re a sort of game we’ve all gotten used to watching the media and our leaders play. That game is both a cause and a symptom of the trouble we’re having understanding what’s happening in Iraq (and much of the rest of the world, including the United States, but that’s another post for another time). We’re so impatient for results that we have to know even before we’ve covered over the seed whether it’s growing yet.

When the media plays this way, it’s a game that’s nearly childish in its antsiness to be first to say what it all means. That’s a trait that leads to quick acceptance of announcements like "Iraq’s about to unleash weapons of mass destruction on the United States" or "the Iraqis will love us when we get there" to "major combat is over." Let’s just have a decent respect, for once, what we don’t know about all the dimensions of Iraqi reality and admit that some percentage figure won’t tell you a thing, by itself, about where this is all headed.

Of course, I do have my own opinion. I can’t imagine this working. I just don’t see how an alien power, especially one with as little credibility as we appear to have among Muslims in the Mideast, can both violently overthrow a government and impose a democratic replacement (much less one capable of creating the oasis of stability that Bush talks about).

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‘Exciting Times’ in Baghdad

As noted yesterday, Bush (countdown: 1,453 days) summed up the situation in Iraq going into the weekend of the vote this way: “It’s exciting times for the Iraqi people.”

The New York Times today carries a story from John Burns in Baghdad that captures the sense of excitement:

“… Daily life here has become a deadly lottery, a place so fraught with danger that one senior American military officer acknowledged at a briefing last month that nowhere in the area assigned to his troops could be considered safe.

‘I would definitely say it’s enemy territory,’ said Col. Stephen R. Lanza, the commander of the Fifth Brigade Combat Team, a unit of the First Cavalry Division that is responsible for patrolling a wide area of southern Baghdad with a population of 1.3 million people.

“In the week that ended Sunday, according to figures kept by Western security companies with access to data compiled by the American command, Baghdad was hit by 7 suicide car bombings, 37 roadside bombs and 52 insurgent attacks involving automatic rifles or rocket-propelled grenades. The suicide bombs alone killed at least 60 people and injured 150 others.”

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I Agree with Bush!

I agree with Bush! And on any subject other than the danger of swallowing pretzels whole, I think that statement demands an exclamation point. During his press conference today, he said Iraq’s insurgents (he called them terrorists “do not have the best interests of the Iraqi people in mind. They have no positive agenda. They have no clear view of a better future. They’re afraid of a free society.”

I agree with part of this, anyway. Beyond wanting to thwart the will of Bush and the United States no matter what, beyond wanting to force the occupiers out, I don’t really get what the insurgents’ political program is. But that’s enough to keep them going. On the other hand — “having the best interests of the Iraqi people in mind” — that’s another breathtaking Bush conceit. As if he launched the war with the best interest of Iraqis (beyond Ahmad Chalabi) in mind. As if they were given a choice. And now that their country has been torn to pieces for their own good, what a choice we’ve given them. On one side, the insurgents. And on the other, a government that’s a sort of alien life form planted in the desert, one that owes its existence entirely to external life support (our cost, for 2005 alone, $105 billion).

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Our Torture Problem

Andrew Sullivan, of Andrew Sullivan fame, has a huge and absorbing piece in The New York Times Sunday Book Review on Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the Bush administration (along with the rest of us) and torture. He’s reviewing a couple of newly published books that document the administration’s policy on and practice of torture (“Torture and Truth,” by Mark Danner, and “The Abu Ghraib Investigations,” edited by Steven Strasser),

Sullivan’s take is thoughtful. He supported going to war in Iraq, still supports it, but has become a forceful critic of the Bush administration’s handling of it. His critique of the administration’s rationalization of torture and abusive tactics is pretty devastating. Although I’ll never agree with him on going to war in Iraq, I respect his willingness to look at his own, and other citizens’, complicity in what has taken place:

“Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naïve in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against ”evil” might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes. …

“I’m not saying that those who unwittingly made this torture possible are as guilty as those who inflicted it. I am saying that when the results are this horrifying, it’s worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and war methods. Perhaps the saddest evidence of our communal denial in this respect was the election campaign. The fact that American soldiers were guilty of torturing inmates to death barely came up. It went unmentioned in every one of the three presidential debates. John F. Kerry, the ”heroic” protester of Vietnam, ducked the issue out of what? Fear? Ignorance? Or a belief that the American public ultimately did not care, that the consequences of seeming to criticize the conduct of troops would be more of an electoral liability than holding a president accountable for enabling the torture of innocents? I fear it was the last of these. Worse, I fear he may have been right.”

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Friday Reading

Supporting the troops: Getting an education is one reason people enlist in the military, whether as active duty or in the National Guard. The Mountain Times of Boone, North Carolina, has an inspiring story about what happened when a young woman named Jordan Byrd finished her commitment to the Guard — her originally agreed-upon six years plus a full year in Afghanistan plus a full year in Iraq. Sounds like she did her part and then some. When she got out of the service with an honorable discharge, she went to her local college to sign up for classes. Long story short, the Army’s reneging on its commitment. The apparent reason: Byrd didn’t enroll in school soon enough to collect her educational benefits. The reason she didn’t was that the Army sent her to Afghanistan and Iraq. Thanks, soldier!

From the home of Björk: Sometimes a New York Times subscription pays for itself just in the issues ads that show up in the paper. Today, for instance, there’s a full-page ad bannered, “War Ends Today,” pushing a new book by Deepak Chopra, “Peace Is the Way.” There’s another full-pager from a San Francisco group called ForestEthics that blasts Victoria’s Secret for cutting down swaths of Canada’s boreal forests for paper for its catalogs (which have been declared “a world cultural resource” by the U.N. High Commission on Reading Matter for Men). On the next page (in my edition) Christians for Middle East Peace asks our president to do something meaningful about peace between Israel and the Palestinians (specifically: a solution with two viable states and Jerusalem as the shared capital).

But the ad that caught my eye was a statement from The Movement for Active Democracy in Iceland. It denounces the government’s support for the war in Iraq, noting in passing 1) that parliamentary approval for support was never sought, 2) that Iceland refused to declare war on Japan and Germany in 1945 as a condition of joining the United Nations as a charter member, 3) that even when it joined NATO in 1949, it was with the understanding that Iceland would never declare war on another nation, and 4) that the most recent polls show that 84 percent of Icelanders oppose the government’s support for the war.

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What Are We Fighting For?

From an Army journalist/blogger who is returning from 11 months in Iraq:

“This war started out as a means to find weapons of mass destruction. Then, it was let’s give the Iraqi people freedom. Now, politicians say let’s fight the terrorists there and not on American soil. To be honest, soldiers don’t care about the cause. We’re not fighting for any of the above; we are fighting for the guy on our left and right. You form a bond so tight with fellow soldiers that you never want to let them down. I’ve seen it displayed every day for a year.”

Later in the same post, the blogger (whose observations are certainly worth reading, whether you agree or not) talks of his resentment that wire services and newspapers have seldom picked up on the personal stories of American troops killed in Iraq:

“We learned our lesson of spamming a memorial story to the larger outlets like AP. The editors deleted the story and used the photo of a crying soldier hugging the memorial display of an M-16 bayoneted into a box with the soldier’s helmet on the buttstock and dog tags on the hand grip. The photo cutline read: A soldier mourns the loss of a fellow comrade. Elsewhere in Iraq, 14 killed in a large explosion outside… you get the point. Just a single sentence. No name. No family. Just a sentence and then elsewhere in Iraq. That’s hardly justice for a soldier who gave that reporter the freedom of press.”

It’s the last sentence of that paragraph — especially in combination with the sentiment expressed in the first quote — that really gets to me. “We’re only fighting for our buddies and their survival … but we’re giving all you media ingrates (and those who express questions, doubts, criticism or outright rejection of the war) the freedoms you enjoy.” It’s as if, yes, the corruptness of the reasons given for going to war in Iraq — and for putting all the troops at risk there — is recognized. But at the same time, there’s a belief that the fight is preserving our rights.

I don’t get it. “Soldiers don’t care about the cause” (can’t help but think of the Country Joe lyric here: “One two three, What are we fighting for? Don’t tell me I don’t give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam. …”) Yet, as one person lectured me a couple months ago, they’re keeping me safe to sit here and blog my brains out.

You know, I don’t believe any of this is keeping us safe. And as for rights, I think the people who launched this war with their campaign of untruths are a bigger menace to our future as a democracy than Saddam ever was.

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10,000 Wounded

The newest casualty figures from the Department of Defense (it updates the number of killed daily or as needed and generally gives a revised total for wounded in action every Tuesday) shows the number of wounded in battle since we went into Iraq has now surpassed 10,000 (that’s in addition to 1,340 dead, 1.049 of those killed in action as of today).

Of the 10,252 wounded to date, 4,856 were “WIA RTD” — wounded in action and returned to duty within 72 hours. The report that said 5,396 of the wounded did not return to duty within 72 hours. The Pentagon’s stats also show that about 95 percent of the wounded have been injured since Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” event on May 1, 2003. The Defense Department describes action in the period from that date to the present as “post-combat ops.” Doesn’t “post” mean “after”?

All Pentagon and media bashing aside, I’d say that TV and print outlets have done a generally awful job reporting on the wounded. You rarely come across even a simple weekly summary of how many troops have been wounded. And getting into the reality of the kinds of injuries the troops are suffering, what kind of care they’re getting, and how the services treat those who are disabled. It’s part of the real face of the war that most people just don’t get to see (though we do get to see lots of images of happy troops watching sporting events; there was another example last night with troops in Baghdad rooting for Virginia Tech during ABC’s telecast of the Sugar Bowl. I’ll bet anything we get a repeat during the USC-Oklahoma game, complete with rah-rah commentary from the political dimwits in the broadcast booth).

Of course, you can’t talk about our 10,000 wounded without considering the carefully unreported details of Iraqi casualties since the war began. Ideologically driven efforts like Iraq Body Count aside — which at this point appears to attribute all Iraqi deaths, even Iraqi police officers and soldiers killed by insurgents, to the United States — there’s really no authoritative source for these numbers or for details that might show important trends in the actions (for instance, the bloodbath among Iraqis that has unfolded in Mosul over the past couple of months).

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Tsunami Aid: Quick Calculation

The United States made an initial pledge of $15 million in post-tsunami disaster relief. Incredibly generous compared to, say, France, which is offering 100,000 euros; but less open-handed compared to Japan, which is sending $30 million and other forms of help; aid from Australia and the Netherland (something like $7.5 million and $2 million, respectively) is far greater per capita than what we’re offering. But it’s really the thought that counts.

Here’s how our $15 million stacks up against the pile of money we’re ploughing into Iraq. The cost of our ongoing "bust a dictator, start a democracy" project is about $150 billion to date. That’s 10,000 times as much as we’re contemplating putting into the tsunami recovery effort. Wait, though: It’s taken us 21 months to spend all that Iraq money. In round figures, let’s say we’ve spent $7 billion a month on average on dictator busting. In round figures again, that breaks down to $230 million a day. We spend $15 million in Iraq every one hour and 40 minutes. So the conclusion is obvious: We’re shelling out about 15.33 times as much for one day of building our future Mesopotamian democracy as we’re willing to spend to help deal with a calamity that some are calling the costliest disaster in history.

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‘Let’s Stay in Iraq … for a Month’

A remarkable human-in-the-street story in The New York Times on Wednesday about how the American public feels about the war. The story cites another poll that illustrates doubts about what the whole thing is about: This time, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that shows 47 percent of respondents feel the war is going worse than it was a year ago, 32 percent think it’s about the same, and 20 percent think it’s going better than it was then. Those 20 percent must be on antidepressants.

The article is full of quotes from people who mostly sound resigned to the thing just dragging on the way it is now. One guy, identified as a cotton farmer in Texas, opines that opinion polls and public debate about the war are aiding and abetting the enemy. Not a single person comes out and says that they thought the war was a good idea to begin with. Most striking to me was one woman, a U.S. Army civilian employee in Virginia, who is quoted as saying she supports the troops’ presence in Iraq now and backs Bush’s plan. But look at the way she qualifies her support:

” ‘I think we should stay through the elections. I support the president’s plan up to there. But if we’re going to focus on Iraq without support of other nations, I see the violence increasing. I can’t see a democratic Iraq. So what are we doing there?’ ”

This is another way of saying, “I can stand for this for another five weeks.” How many people like this are out there, both conflicted and just about at the end of their rope?

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Those Crazy Americans

You’ve got to love those crazy Americans. Wait, that’s me, too. Change that to “us crazy Americans.” Just seven weeks ago, we had a chance to fire the guy who decided that the single most important thing to do in the whole wide world, just couldn’t wait to get it done, was to bust world-class bad guy and former U.S. ally (those crazy Americans!) Saddam Hussein.

But no. For reasons still inadequately explained (and no, I’m not buying fraud as the answer, or the “morality” thing, either) and perhaps irretrievably buried in the minds of tens of millions of voters, the guy was re-elected.

Now, the Washington Post and ABC News are out with a new poll: A majority of us crazy Americans now think the war’s, like, a mistake:

“Most Americans now believe the war with Iraq was not worth fighting and more than half want to fire embattled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the chief architect of that conflict, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

“The survey found that 56 percent of the country now believes that the cost of the conflict in Iraq outweighs the benefits, while 42 percent disagreed. It marked the first time since the war began that a clear majority of Americans have judged the war to have been a mistake.

“Barely a third of the country approves of the job that Rumsfeld is doing as defense secretary, and 52 percent said President Bush should sack Rumsfeld, a view shared by a big majority of Democrats and political independents.”

But then comes the number that probably partly explains the way we crazy Americans voted last month: “… Nearly six in 10 — 58 percent — said the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq rather than withdraw them, a proportion that has not changed in seven months.”

OK — that’s honorable. Let’s not cut and run and leave those nice Iraqis in the lurch. The thing you have to question about that sort of thinking, though, is the assumption that our indefinite presence is a stabilizing, positive influence. I mean, we sure can’t imagine anyplace in the world that doesn’t benefit from our warm attention, but at some point you have to consider the possibility that Iraq could be better off with some different kind of foreign oversight, or regime, than what we’re trying to impose.