Boys in the Bubble

Regardless of how the war ends, Iraq is not Vietnam. This is true not just militarily and politically but also in the reporting about the two conflicts. For many journalists who covered Vietnam and subsequently wrote books about the war, the experience could be understood only as a hallucinogenic nightmare, and they described it in gonzo prose to match. The reality of Iraq is much more frightening than a bad acid trip, but the writing about this continuing fiasco has been cleareyed and sober, and all the more powerful for it. Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone” is a fine example.

This book tells the bureaucratic story of Iraq’s Year 1, the year after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, when the United States was the legal occupying power and responsible for the country’s administration. The primary mechanism for that work was the Coalition Provisional Authority, headquartered in the Green Zone, a blast-barrier-encased compound created around Hussein’s Baghdad palace, on the west bank of the Tigris. Chandrasekaran, The Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief during this period, catalogs a lethal combination of official arrogance and ineptitude behind those walls that doomed Iraq to its bloody present every bit as much as insufficient military manpower did.

To begin with, the C.P.A.’s recruitment policy would have shamed Tammany Hall. Loyalty to George W. Bush and the Republican Party was apparently the prime criterion for getting work at the C.P.A. To determine their suitability for positions in Iraq, some prospective employees were asked their views on Roe v. Wade. Others were asked whom they voted for in 2000. Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and party activists were all solicited by the White House’s liaison at the Pentagon, James O’Beirne, to suggest possible staffers.

Before the war began, Frederick M. Burkle Jr. was assigned to oversee Iraq’s health care system. He had a résumé to die for: a physician with a master’s degree in public health, and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Berkeley. He also had two bronze stars for military service in the Navy, as well as field experience with the Kurds in northern Iraq after the 1991 gulf war. A week after the liberation, he was told he was being replaced because, Chandrasekaran writes, “a senior official at USAID told him that the White House wanted a ‘loyalist’ in the job.”

That loyalist was James K. Haveman Jr., who had been recommended by the former Michigan governor John Engler. Haveman’s résumé included running a Christian adoption agency that counseled young women against abortions. He spent much of his time in Iraq preparing to privatize the state-owned drug supply firm — perhaps not the most important priority since almost every hospital in the country had been thoroughly looted in the days after Hussein was overthrown.

On page after page, Chandrasekaran details other projects of the C.P.A.’s bright young Republican ideologues — like modernizing the Baghdad stock exchange, or quickly privatizing every service that had previously been provided by the state. Some of these ideas would have been laudable if they were being planned for a country with functioning power and water supplies, and that wasn’t tottering on the brink of anarchy.

But how could these young Americans have known what life was like for ordinary Iraqis since they never left the Green Zone? Instead, they turned the place into something like a college campus. After a hard day of dreaming up increasingly improbable projects, the kids did what kids do — headed for the bar and looked for a hookup. As for the Iraqis, they were conspicuous by their absence.

Presiding over this unreal world was the American viceroy, L. Paul Bremer III, who comes across in this book as a man who has read one C.E.O. memoir too many, a man who knew his mind and would not have his decisions changed by the inconvenient reality of Iraqi life just outside the blast barriers. All of this would be funny in a Joseph Heller kind of way if tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers weren’t to die because of the decisions made by the C.P.A., the Pentagon and the White House.

In Chandrasekaran’s account, all the arrogance, stubbornness and desire for career advancement crystallized at the end of March 2004, when Bremer decided to shut down a newspaper published by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. With typical high-handedness, he made the decision without thinking through the possible consequences. He had no military backup plan if Sadr decided to fight and, predictably, Sadr’s Mahdi Army did fight back. Within a few days four American private security operatives were ambushed and killed in Falluja, their mutilated bodies hung from a bridge over the Euphrates. Suddenly, a year after overthrowing Hussein, the United States was fighting Shiite insurgents on one front and Sunni insurgents on another. This is the one and only time that the American military appears in Chandrasekaran’s otherwise civilian story, but his description of the skirmish between a platoon from the Army’s First Cavalry Division and Mahdi Army fighters is absolutely brilliant. It is eyewitness history of the first order.

If there is one thing missing from this account it is the author himself. Reading a 300-page book is a bit like driving across country with a stranger you’ve met through a message board. By the time you reach the Mississippi you hope to know your traveling companion reasonably well. That’s not the case here. Chandrasekaran’s personal views are absent until almost the very end of the book.

I think I understand why. He is adhering to the professional code of journalism: reporting facts with scrupulous neutrality and objectivity. However, I sometimes think that the relentless political attacks on the professionalism of reporters in Iraq have forced them to take a very narrow view of what that neutrality and objectivity mean. Those of us who have covered the invasion and its aftermath have an obligation not only as journalists but as citizens. We have had a privileged view of these epoch-defining events (and we didn’t get our jobs by taking litmus tests on abortion). We have a duty to bear passionate, accurate, personal witness — to be something more than mere compilers of facts.

It would have been worthwhile if Chandrasekaran had given us a greater sense of what he thought about overthrowing Hussein and, more to the point, what he felt upon returning to Washington after having seen the bloody result of its policies. But that is a philosophical difference I have with the author. This is a clearly written, blessedly undidactic book. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand how things went so badly wrong in Iraq.

Michael Goldfarb is the author of “Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq.”

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They Told You So

Shortly after U.S. forces marched into Baghdad in 2003, The Weekly Standard published a jeering article titled, “The Cassandra Chronicles: The stupidity of the antiwar doomsayers.” Among those the article mocked was a “war novelist” named James Webb, who is now the senator-elect from Virginia.

The article’s title was more revealing than its authors knew. People forget the nature of Cassandra’s curse: although nobody would believe her, all her prophecies came true.

And so it was with those who warned against invading Iraq. At best, they were ignored. A recent article in The Washington Post ruefully conceded that the paper’s account of the debate in the House of Representatives over the resolution authorizing the Iraq war — a resolution opposed by a majority of the Democrats — gave no coverage at all to those antiwar arguments that now seem prescient.

At worst, those who were skeptical about the case for war had their patriotism and/or their sanity questioned. The New Republic now says that it “deeply regrets its early support for this war.” Does it also deeply regret accusing those who opposed rushing into war of “abject pacifism?”

Now, only a few neocon dead-enders still believe that this war was anything but a vast exercise in folly. And those who braved political pressure and ridicule to oppose what Al Gore has rightly called “the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States” deserve some credit.

Unlike The Weekly Standard, which singled out those it thought had been proved wrong, I’d like to offer some praise to those who got it right. Here’s a partial honor roll:

Former President George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, explaining in 1998 why they didn’t go on to Baghdad in 1991: “Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

Representative Ike Skelton, September 2002: “I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq’s forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it.”

Al Gore, September 2002: “I am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.”

Barack Obama, now a United States senator, September 2002: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

Representative John Spratt, October 2002: “The outcome after the conflict is actually going to be the hardest part, and it is far less certain.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker-elect, October 2002: “When we go in, the occupation, which is now being called the liberation, could be interminable and the amount of money it costs could be unlimited.”

Senator Russ Feingold, October 2002: “I am increasingly troubled by the seemingly shifting justifications for an invasion at this time. ... When the administration moves back and forth from one argument to another, I think it undercuts the credibility of the case and the belief in its urgency. I believe that this practice of shifting justifications has much to do with the troubling phenomenon of many Americans questioning the administration’s motives.”

Howard Dean, then a candidate for president and now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, February 2003: “I firmly believe that the president is focusing our diplomats, our military, our intelligence agencies, and even our people on the wrong war, at the wrong time. ... Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.”

We should honor these people for their wisdom and courage. We should also ask why anyone who didn’t raise questions about the war — or, at any rate, anyone who acted as a cheerleader for this march of folly — should be taken seriously when he or she talks about matters of national security.

To the Editor:

Re “They Told You So” (column, Dec. 8):

Paul Krugman provides an “honor roll” of famous people who warned against invading Iraq. He should also add the average, anonymous Americans like me who spoke out and marched by the hundreds of thousands to try to stave off the disastrous situation we now find ourselves in. Michael Accordino

Bogota, N.J., Dec. 8, 2006

•

To the Editor:

Paul Krugman is right to praise those leaders and thinkers who foretold the disaster in Iraq before the invasion.

The ultimate irony, though, is that today many of these same perspicacious people are the ones being most heavily criticized by pundits for “not having a plan for victory in Iraq,” even though they advised against the invasion in the first place!

There is certainly no easy solution now that we’re deeply involved in an entropic Iraq, so let’s hold accountable the people who put us there in the first place. Jeremy Paley

Washington, Dec. 8, 2006

•

To the Editor:

One group of early skeptics I find missing in Paul Krugman’s “honor roll” are the leaders of “old Europe,” notably President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany.

These leaders very early on forcefully expressed their doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq, only to have their countries slandered and maligned by the irresponsible hobby warriors who proceeded to cause so much senseless misery.

Johannes M. Heine

Miami, Dec. 8, 2006

Taliban Kills 2 Sisters for Crime of Teaching

New Taliban Rules Target Afghan Teachers

Filed at 2:26 p.m. ET

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The Taliban gunmen who murdered two teachers in eastern Afghanistan early Saturday were only following their rules: Teachers receive a warning, then a beating, and if they continue to teach must be killed.

The new list of 30 rules, decided on during a high Taliban meeting in September or October and since circulated over the Internet, span from the organizational -- no jihad equipment may be used for personal means -- to the health conscious -- militants are not supposed to smoke.

They also contain a grave warning for aid workers and educators.

Rule No. 24 forbids anyone to work as a teacher ''under the current puppet regime, because this strengthens the system of the infidels.'' One rule later, No. 25, says teachers who ignore Taliban warnings will be killed.

Taliban militants early Saturday broke into a house in the eastern province of Kunar, killing a family of five, including two sisters who were teachers.

The women had been warned in a letter to quit teaching, said Gulam Ullah Wekar, the provincial education director. Their mother, grandmother and a male relative were also slain in the attack.

The two sisters brought to 20 the number of teachers killed in Taliban attacks this year, said Education Ministry spokesman Zuhur Afghan. He said 198 schools have been burned down this year, up from about 150 last year.

The 30 Taliban rules also spell out opposition to development projects from aid organizations, including clinics, roads and schools.

''If a school fails a warning to close, it must be burned. But all religious books must be secured beforehand,'' rule No. 26 says.

An addendum to the rules said they were distributed initially at a meeting of top Taliban leaders during Ramadan this year. The rules were signed by Mullah Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader and ''the highest leader of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan,'' according to the document.

A purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, confirmed the authenticity of the rules. He said aid organizations were not working for the Afghan people but for the policies of occupying countries. ''If they won't stop their work we will target them, like we've targeted them in the past,'' he said.

Mohammad Hashim Mayar, the deputy direct of ACBAR -- the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief -- an oversight body for almost 100 aid organizations in Afghanistan, said the rules are no surprise.

''They've been practicing this in the past,'' Mayar said. ''We already knew when they were burning schools, when they were killing people, we said that they were against education, and they are well aware of the importance of education.''

The rules confirm a Taliban policy of undermining all forms of development that benefit ordinary Afghans and seem to sanction the targeting of civilians, said Maj. Luke Knittig, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

''The rules likely represent an attempt at indirect leadership by the Taliban in the face of increasingly hindered ability to lead directly and visibly,'' said Knittig, who said officials had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the rules, which are being circulated on various Web sites.

Other edicts focus inward on the Taliban command structure:

-- No. 9: Taliban may not use jihad equipment or property for personal ends.

-- No. 10: Every Talib is accountable to his superiors in matters of money spending and equipment usage.

-- No. 12: A group of mujahedeen may not take in mujahedeen from another group to increase their own power.

Other rules appear focused on not having ordinary Afghans turn against the Taliban. Rule No. 16 says it is ''strictly forbidden'' to search houses or confiscate weapons without a commander's permission. No. 17 says militants have no right to confiscate money or possessions from civilians.

No. 18 says fighters ''should refrain from smoking cigarettes.''

Rule 19 says that mujahedeen may not take young boys without facial hair onto the battlefield -- or into their private quarters, an attempt to stamp out the sexual abuse of young boys, a problem that is widely known in southern Afghanistan but seldom discussed.

''The rule regarding behavior toward young boys shows this has been a problem,'' Knittig said.

------

Associated Press reporter Nimatullah Karyab in Ghwando, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.

Iraq Study Group's Fatal Flaw

Robert Dreyfuss

December 08, 2006

Robert Dreyfuss is an Alexandria, Va.-based writer specializing in politics and national security issues. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005), a contributing editor at The Nation and a writer for Mother Jones, The American Prospect and  Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website, www.robertdreyfuss.com. This article first appeared in The Nation .

There's good news and bad news in the long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group. Happily, it starts the United States down the path of withdrawal. Unhappily, its most basic premise—that the United States can somehow support the nonexistent Iraqi government and bolster its viciously sectarian armed forces—is fatally flawed.

Let's start with the good news. The ISG has delivered a stunning body blow to the White House. Stripped of its details, the ISG's message is that President Bush's Iraq policy is a complete failure that has brought Iraq and the Middle East to the brink of catastrophe. As a result, the United States must execute an about-face. Almost immediately, the United States must begin withdrawing virtually all of its combat forces from Iraq, a withdrawal that should be completed early in 2008. At the same time, it says, the United States will have to scramble to launch a diplomatic effort involving Iraq's neighbors—including Syria and Iran—the Arab League, the UN, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and other world powers to prevent Iraq from spiraling into chaos.

Further, says the ISG report—which was handed personally to Bush by Hamilton and his co-chairman, former Secretary of State Jim Baker, Wednesday—the United States must renounce any idea of permanent bases in Iraq, "reject the notion that the United States seeks to control Iraq's oil," and urgently seek national reconciliation in Iraq. To that latter end, the ISG proposes that the United States "must also try to talk directly to Muqtada al-Sadr, to militia leaders, and to insurgent leaders"—in other words, instead of seeking to crush the Iraqi resistance and smash Sadr's Mahdi Army, it's time to talk to them. And to top it all off, the ISG proposes a vigorous effort to restart the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

It's hard to imagine a more sweeping rebuke to the president's disastrously misguided Middle East policy. The report breathes not one word about "victory" in Iraq. Ever the master of understatement, Baker said that the idea of staying the course in Iraq "is no longer viable."

The Baker-Hamilton report instantly isolated President Bush against a snowballing consensus among the mainstream political establishment. In a collective I-told-you-so, Democrats mostly heaped praise on the ISG report. "If the president in serious about the need for change in Iraq, he will find Democrats ready to work with him in a bipartisan fashion to find a way to end the war as quickly as possible," said Nancy Pelosi, the incoming speaker of the House, who added that the ISG report echoed virtually all of the Democrats' main talking points on Iraq.

Over on the Republican side, moderates and mainstream conservatives such as Senators Chuck Hagel, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe also cheered its conclusions. "It gives impetus to both the Congress and hopefully the president," said Snowe. "The time has come to change our course and to support a plan… that ultimately leads to a withdrawal of troops from Iraq."

Against the emerging political consensus, Bush has no real option other than to come around. Jon Alterman, the director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of four think tanks that sponsored the ISG, noted that the ISG report frees Republicans to break with Bush:

With the issuance of this report, it has become far easier to claim that one is a loyal Republican and that one differs strongly with the Bush administration on Iraq. When some Congressional Republicans did that in September, it set off a tremor. This could provoke an earthquake and leave the President very isolated if he refuses to change course.

Of course, notoriously stubborn, frighteningly ignorant of foreign affairs, still susceptible to the whisperings of Vice President Cheney, and perhaps convinced that his Middle East policy is a holy Christian mission, there's no guarantee that Bush will go along. At the news conference releasing the report, Baker explicitly refused to psychoanalyze President Bush. Later, Larry Eagleburger, who served on the ISG and who was secretary of state under former President George Bush, could only speculate on how Bush was reacting to the ISG's 142-page insult. "I was impressed with the fact that number one, he didn't make any negative remarks at all, and secondly, he didn't have a sour look on his face," he said.

But the situation is so grave, according to Baker, Hamilton, et al., that even President Bush has to get it. The United States, said Hamilton in a television interview on with Anderson Cooper on CNN, has "not months, but weeks, even days" to act to prevent possible all-out civil war and regional conflict.

Although the ISG co-chairmen were willing to say—as did Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a former ISG member -- that the United States is not winning in Iraq, they were loathe to face the real truth: that the United States is losing; indeed, that the war is lost. Which brings us to the bad news.

Unfortunately, the Baker-Hamilton task force insists that with a precise combination of diplomacy, military action, micro-management of Iraqi politics, threats, and bribes, it is still possible to salvage, well, not victory, but "success" in Iraq, and to do so in a way that protects the "global standing of the United States." It notes that the United States must hang on to an imperial presence in the Persian Gulf, not only by maintaining several tens of thousands of troops in Iraq but substantial forces in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the region.

The troops remaining in Iraq would include up to 20,000 US forces to provide "training, … advice, combat assistance, and staff assistance" to Iraqi forces, plus "intelligence, transportation, air support, and logistics support," along with "rapid-reaction teams" and "special operations teams." And (on page 73 of its report) the ISG drops this a zinger, noting that it might not oppose a "surge" of U.S. forces:

We could, however, support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad, or to speed up the training and equipping mission, if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective.

The central premise of the ISG report is fatally flawed. It proposes to support an Iraqi government that doesn't exist, and to strengthen an Iraqi army that is not a national army but an array of sectarian and ethnic militias.

It proposes to withdraw perhaps 70,000 to 100,000 U.S. combat forces by early 2008, but to quadruple U.S. trainers and other experts to strengthen the Iraqi armed forces. Problem is, those Iraqi forces are nearly entirely made up of Shiites and Kurds, including tens of thousands of Shiite militiamen and Kurdish pesh merga forces. That means that strengthening the Iraqi army simply bolsters two sides in a three-sided civil war. Baker and Hamilton say: "The primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq should evolve to one of supporting the Iraqi army." But, they don't even try to explain how that might work, since the Iraqi army is utterly broken and filled with sectarian and ethnic loyalists.

And Iraq's government, led by the hapless Nouri al-Maliki, is a fiction. On one hand, the Baker-Hamilton task force proposes to enhance the power of the Maliki government and to give it increased control over its own armed forces. On the other hand, Baker-Hamilton warn darkly about threats and ultimatums that the United States must issue to Maliki. Yet neither incentives nor threats can work when the object of those incentives and threats is powerless. Maliki's status as a U.S. puppet, installed by an American occupation, kills any chance that he can emerge as a credible Iraqi leader.

Which brings us to the most basic flaw of the Baker-Hamilton report. In fact, the only Iraqi government that could have any credibility with large numbers of Iraqis is one that militantly opposes the U.S. occupation of Iraq, demands the withdrawal of U.S. forces on an orderly but speedy timetable, and supports the unity and integrity of the Iraqi state and nation. Between 60 percent and 80 percent of Iraqis want the United States to leave Iraq, quickly, and so do well over a hundred Iraqi members of parliament, if not an actual majority of that body. Perhaps a government that represents them could emerge on the ruins of the Maliki regime, if Maliki is forced from office or overthrown by Iraqis. There is—little reported by American media—a strong effort to create a movement across the Sunni-Shiite divide, one that could include Sadr's Mahdi Army, other Shiite parties, many Sunni leaders in the current parliament, and a large part of the Iraqi resistance.

It's too much to expect the Iraq Study Group to support the creation of an anti-American Iraqi government. Indeed, many of its commissioners seem lost in a dream of somehow recapturing the lost U.S. position in the Middle East. But regardless of the ISG's seventy-nine options, things are moving fast in Iraq. Much of Iraq, of course, is moving toward a bloody civil war, pitting sect against sect and Arab against Kurd. But there is also an Iraqi movement for a nationalist republic, one free of the American occupation imposed on it by George W. Bush in 2003. Either way, it's likely that the pace of that movement will accelerate in the weeks and months ahead.

As a result, the real value of the ISG report is that it starts the United States down the road toward a withdrawal of a major portion of the occupation army, and toward a diplomatic effort in its place. That's all to the good—and for most Americans, who won't bother reading all 79 recommendations, the only thing they will get from the news of the ISG's work is that a bunch of smart people say it's time to get out of Iraq. The rest is details. And things in Iraq are moving so fast that few, if any, of those details will ever have any impact in the real world.

Copyright © 2006 The Nation

Dr. Jamal Al-Karbouli, vice president of the Iraqi Red Crescent, said some U.S. forces appeared not to realize that the society, which uses as its symbol the Muslim red crescent instead of the red cross, was part of the international humanitarian movement.

"The main problem we are facing is the American forces more than the other forces," Al-Karbouli told reporters in Geneva. "We are spending a lot of time to explain about the Red Crescent."

Al-Karbouli said insurgent groups in Iraq did not pose as great a problem for the organization.

"The insurgents, they are Iraqis, a lot of them are Iraqis, and they respect the Iraqis. And they respect our (the Red Crescent's) identity, which is neutrality."

He also complained that Red Crescent offices in Baghdad, Anbar and Najaf provinces had been repeatedly "attacked" by U.S.-led multi-national forces searching for insurgents.

"We have flags, we have everything, we have (the) logo, so they (U.S. forces) know everything, but unfortunately they come again and attack us many times," Al-Karbouli said. He complained that U.S. forces broke doors and windows at the Red Crescent headquarters "and they didn't find anything, and they left."

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the U.S.-led coalition forces "strive to ensure they are respectful when they conduct interaction with the local population."

"When we conduct searches, we do not 'attack' the place we are searching," he said.

Al-Karbouli said insurgent groups had tried to enlist support from the Red Crescent, but the organization had refused.

"We always say no. We want to keep our neutrality," he said.

Doctors and other medical workers have been targeted by militants in bombings and shootings in Iraq's relentless violence. Hospitals also have become safe havens for insurgents or Shiite militiamen, who have sometimes holed up in them in battles with U.S. forces.

The Red Crescent, which is part of the international Red Cross movement, has around 1,000 staff and some 200,000 volunteers in the country. It works closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross which visits detainees and tries to provide food, water and medicine to Iraqis.

Diplomat's suppressed document lays bare the lies behind Iraq war

By Colin Brown and Andy McSmith

Published: 15 December 2006

The Bloodbath We Created

Gareth Porter

December 14, 2006

Gareth Porter is a historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam was published in June 2005. During the Vietnam War, Porter was a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Vietnamese history and politics who debunked the Nixon administration's "bloodbath" argument in a series of articles and  monographs.

Of all the faults of the Iraq Study Group the most serious was its warning, highlighted by Co-Chairman Lee Hamilton, that a “precipitate withdrawal” would cause a “bloodbath” in Iraq as well as a region-wide war. The cry of “bloodbath”—now given bipartisan status—will certainly be used to crush any attempt in Congress to advance a plan for a timetable for withdrawal.

In offering this bloodbath argument, the ISG has unconsciously mimicked the argument used by President Richard Nixon to justify continuing the U.S. war in Vietnam for another four years. Nixon, too, warned of a postwar “bloodbath” if there was a “precipitate withdrawal” of U.S. troops. If the Vietnam era bloodbath argument sought to distract the public’s attention from the very real bloodbath that the U.S. war was causing, the new bloodbath argument distracts attention from the relationship between the U.S. occupation and the sectarian bloodbath that is continuing to worsen with every passing month.

You would think that the political elite might be wary of an argument suggesting that the U.S. military presence in Iraq somehow helps restrain the Shiites and Sunnis from civil war—in light of the escalating sectarian killings in Baghdad since thousands of U.S. troops poured into Baghdad ostensibly to curb the sectarian war. Yet that is exactly what we are asked to believe by the ISG.
 
The bloodbath argument evades the central fact that the U.S. occupation has never been aimed at avoiding or reducing sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. On the contrary, the U.S. has used sectarian conflict for its own purposes. The main purpose of the U.S. occupation has been to claim victory over those who resisted it, which has meant primarily suppressing the Sunni armed resistance throughout the Sunni zone. The Bush administration had to have Iraqi allies against the Sunni resistance, and after Sunni security units showed in 2004 that they would not fight other Sunnis on behalf of the occupation, the administration began relying primarily on Shiites to assist its war against the Sunnis.

Thus the militant Shiite political parties and their military wing became the administration’s primary Iraqi allies. Unfortunately those were the very sectarian organizations that were motivated by revenge against Sunnis. As soon they had gained control of the state organs of violence through the January 2005 election, those organizations began to unleash retribution against the Sunni community in Baghdad—seizing Sunni mosques and killing Sunni political and religious leaders. The torture and killing of Sunni detainees by such Shiite paramilitary groups as the Badr brigade and the Wolf brigade were well documented by mid-2005.

The Bush administration was hardly unaware of the dangerous rise of the pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Baghdad who intended to carry out ethnic cleansing against Sunnis. Their closest Iraqi collaborator, the secular Shiite interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, was warning them in no uncertain terms. In July 2005 , Allawi warned publicly that Iraq was “practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak.”

For a period of months in late 2005 and early 2006, the administration fretted over the new threat of sectarian civil war. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad publicly resisted Shiite control over the interior and defense ministries and threatened to reconsider U.S. assistance if they were not put in non-sectarian hands. As reported by the Sunday Times of London December 10, Khalilzad even carried on secret negotiations with Sunni resistance leaders for two months on their offer to be integrated into the national army and to “clean up” the pro-Iranian militias in Baghdad with arms provided by the United States.

In the end, however, Bush pulled back from making a deal with the Sunnis. When a permanent government was finally negotiated under firm sectarian Shiite control in April 2006, the administration resumed its support for its Shiite allies in the official war against both the Sunni resistance and al-Qaida-related terrorists. The interests of the military command and the White House in claiming a success in “standing up” an Iraqi army and police force trumped any concern about sectarian civil war.

The ISG failed to consider the full implications of that policy. Contrary to the official administration line that involvement in sectarian violence is limited to a minority of “extremists” in the military and police, in fact virtually the entire structure of Shiite military and police units is either actively participating or complicit in terrorism against Sunnis. When the SCIRI and its allies took over the interior department in 2005, its Badr militia was given wide latitude to infiltrate thousands of its loyal militiamen into the national police.

Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militiamen dominate the police both in parts of Baghdad and the Shiite south. Both Badr and Mahdi army recruits have been implicated in sectarian killings. The Defense Department admitted in its August 2006 report to Congress that it has no system for screening police for membership in Shiite militias. Wayne White, who was Deputy Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Near Eastern Division and coordinated Iraqi Intelligence until his retirement in 2005, and an adviser to the ISG, says the Iraqi police force have such close ties with the Shiite militias that it is “probably beyond help.”

The U.S.-sponsored Iraqi army is scarcely less sectarian in nature. The ISG itself admits that there are “significant questions about the ethnic composition and loyalties of some Iraqi units—specifically whether they will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda.” Reporter Tom Lasseter, who was imbedded in the all-Shiite first brigade in October 2005, was told by one sergeant that they would do to the Sunnis what Saddam did to Shiites: “Start with five people from each neighborhood and kill them in the streets and go from there.”

Nevertheless, the United States has already transferred 287,000 AK-47 rifles, 17,000 machine guns, 7,600 grenade launchers, and 1,800 high mobility wheeled vehicles to these forces, according to official Central Command figures. The transfer of weapons to the police accelerated this past year, despite the well-known involvement of police units in death squad activities. And the Defense Department plans to send yet another 50,000 rifles to the police and another 86,000 to the army—along with 3,000 more vehicles.

We have every reason to fear that these weapons will become the basis for a higher level of warfare by Shiites against Sunnis in the future. Despite the administration’s complaints that Iran is supporting the Shiite militias who are causing sectarian violence, the United States itself is the quartermaster of the forces of sectarian civil war. And the recommendations of the ISG would continue this role for the indefinite future.

Why, then, should the occupation be considered as representing a restraint on the sectarian civil war already underway? It has no realistic plan or strategy for protecting the victims of “sectarian cleansing” except for “pressure” on the Shiite prime minister, which Shiite leaders rightly regard as serving domestic U.S. political purposes. And the idea that thousands of U.S. trainers swarming into Iraq will somehow transform the existing sectarian anti-Sunni army into one that will effectively oppose sectarian violence is, of course, laughable.

The notion that years more of U.S. military occupation will help stanch the bloodletting between Shiites and Sunnis is a self-deception of monumental proportions. If the objective were really to end the bloodletting, the United States would actively seek a peace agreement with the Sunni resistance based on a rapid, phased withdrawal and stop supporting the Shiite war against them. That would give international diplomatic efforts a more serious chance to succeed.

The bloodbath argument foisted on the public by the ISG is really about the refusal of a large segment of the political elite to accept the fact that the United States has broken Iraq in a way that can no longer be fixed by U.S. power—and has lost a war it entered into with such arrogance. It is a statement of ideological belief by an elite still deep in denial.

	Karim Kadim/Associated Press Iraqis grieved over some of the bodies of 70 people killed Tuesday by a truck bomb in central Baghdad.

December 13, 2006

Truck Bomb Kills 70 Iraqis as the Poor Gather for Jobs

BAGHDAD, Dec. 12 — A truck loaded with bags of wheat drove up to a crowd of poor Shiites early Tuesday, lured them close with a promise of work and exploded as they gathered around. Seventy people were killed and 236 were wounded, officials said.

The attack, in a square in central Baghdad, together with bodies found by Iraqi authorities, pushed the day’s deaths across Iraq to at least 131, the highest total since a bombing killed more than 200 here last month. Shiite political leaders often point to such attacks, arguing that they, not the American military, should control security here.

The attack comes at a delicate time for the Bush administration. The White House is weighing proposals for major changes in its policy on the war. Months of escalating violence have drained support in the United States for the occupation, and left officials here and in Washington searching for a way out of an increasingly complicated war.

The Iraqi government, meanwhile, is pushing the American military to cede control of security in the capital, arguing that Iraqis know best how to protect themselves. American commanders, however, fear the Shiite-dominated government will use the predominantly Shiite army as a weapon against Iraq’s embattled Sunni minority.

The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, immediately denounced the bombing, calling it the work of supporters of the former dictator, Saddam Hussein. Shiite workers, still scraping rubble out of blood-stained puddles at noon, angrily accused the United States of failing to protect them.

“The security portfolio is still being held by the Americans,” said Waleed Hussein, a hardware store owner, whose two brothers and son were wounded. “We put all this on their shoulders.”

The deepening war again drew the attention of Iraq’s Sunni Arab neighbors. On Monday more than 30 prominent Islamic clerics from Saudi Arabia called on Sunni Muslims around the Middle East to support Sunnis in Iraq against Shiites, The Associated Press reported. The clerics, most of them from Saudi Arabia’s top Islamic universities, centers of hard-line Islam, posted their statement on a Saudi news Internet site.

“After almost four years of occupation, it is clear that the aim behind this occupation is for the Crusaders and Shiites to take control of Iraq, paving the way to complete their control over the region,” the statement read, the news agency said.

The bombing in Baghdad followed a grimly familiar pattern. Day laborers, whose wages average about $11 a day, gathered in the early morning chill to wait for offers of work. Shortly before 7 a.m., a small Kia truck drove up, loaded with bags of wheat.

“The owner got down and shouted, ‘I need laborers to unload!’ ” said a worker who had been standing in the area when the blast occurred.

Just as the workers gathered, the truck exploded, scattering grain in all directions, scarring the facade of a three-story building, wounding scores of workers and gouging out a crater nearly 10 feet wide. But two hours after the blast, workers had already cleared away most of the debris.

The hardware store owner, Mr. Hussein, who was standing in front of his crumpled shop shortly before noon, piling debris into hardhats and buckets, said he thought there had been a second bomb, delivered moments later on a motorcycle, though the police did not confirm it.

The immediate aftermath was also familiar. Brothers, fathers and sons sought each other. One man, slightly wounded, repeated the name of a Shiite saint. He was grabbing at bodies in a tangled heap, looking for his brother, Maitham Ali, a 41-year-old worker who was there when the bomb went off. He found him still alive and lifted him into a car.

The wounded were taken to Kindi Hospital, which has one of the city’s primary emergency rooms, but which declined badly in recent months, said the director, Flayeh Hassan. The hospital has lost large numbers of doctors and nurses, as many middle-class Iraqis have fled the country. There is not enough money to buy basic supplies, he said.

Kadhim Thijil, a 40-year-old construction worker from the southern city of Nasiriya, said he needed stitches that were costing more money than he had. He saved his small daily earnings and sent about $30 to his family each week, he said.

The American military described the startling rescue of 23 hostages from a neighborhood in west Baghdad by Iraqi Army soldiers. Some of the captives were found in car trunks.

The military also announced the deaths of five service members, while gunmen in Mosul shot and killed a cameraman for Associated Press Television News, the news agency reported.

Also on Tuesday, the military announced it had detained the head of the Kut office of Moktada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric, on Dec. 9. The Iraqi, whom they did not identify, was suspected of smuggling weapons and attacking American and Iraqi forces, the military said.

Qais Mizher and Wisam A. Habeeb contributed reporting.

GOP senator says war may be 'criminal'

By Douglas Brinkley
Sunday, December 3, 2006; B01

Shortly after Thanksgiving I had dinner in California with Ronald Reagan's best biographer, Lou Cannon. Like many historians these days, we discussed whether George W. Bush is, conceivably, the worst U.S. president ever. Cannon bristled at the idea.

Bush has two more years to leave his mark, he argued. What if there is a news flash that U.S. Special Forces have killed Osama bin Laden or that North Korea has renounced its nuclear program? What if a decade from now Iraq is a democracy and a statue of Bush is erected on Firdaus Square where that famously toppled one of Saddam Hussein once stood?

There is wisdom in Cannon's prudence. Clearly it's dangerous for historians to wield the "worst president" label like a scalp-hungry tomahawk simply because they object to Bush's record. But we live in speedy times and, the truth is, after six years in power and barring a couple of miracles, it's safe to bet that Bush will be forever handcuffed to the bottom rungs of the presidential ladder. The reason: Iraq.

Some presidents, such as Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, are political sailors -- they tack with the wind, reaching difficult policy objectives through bipartisan maneuvering and pulse-taking. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, was deemed a "chameleon on plaid," changing colors regularly to control the zeitgeist of the moment. Other presidents are submariners, refusing to zigzag in rough waters, preferring to go from Point A to Point B with directional certitude. Harry S. Truman and Reagan are exemplars of this modus operandi, and they are the two presidents Bush has tried to emulate.

The problem for Bush is that certitude is only a virtue if the policy enacted is proven correct. Most Americans applaud Truman's dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they achieved the desired effect: Japan surrendered. Reagan's anti-communist zeal -- including increased defense budgets and Star Wars -- is only now perceived as positive because the Soviet Union started to unravel on his watch.

Nobody has accused Bush of flinching. After 9/11, he decided to circumvent the United Nations and declare war on Iraq. The principal pretext was that Baghdad supposedly was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. From the get-go, the Iraq war was a matter of choice. Call it Mr. Bush's War. Like a high-stakes poker player pushing in all his chips on one hand, he bet the credibility of the United States on the notion that Sunnis and Shiites wanted democracy, just like the Poles and the Czechs during the Cold War.

Bush wasn't operating in a historical bubble. Other presidents had gambled on wars of choice and won. James K. Polk, for example, begged Gen. Zachary Taylor to start a border war with Mexico along the Rio Grande. An ardent expansionist, he wanted to annex land in what are now Arizona, California and New Mexico. Nearly half of the American population in 1846 screamed foul, including Henry David Thoreau, who refused to pay taxes for an unjust war. Yet in short order, Polk achieved his land-grab objective with a string of stunning military successes. Mr. Polk's War was a success, even if the pretext was immoral. On virtually every presidential rating poll, Polk is deemed a "near great" president.

Half a century later, William McKinley also launched a war of choice based on the bogus notion that the USS Maine, anchored in Cuba, had been sabotaged by Spain. The Maine, in truth, was crippled by a boiler explosion. An imperialist, McKinley used the Maine as a pretext to fight Spain in the Caribbean and in the Philippines. A group of anti-imperialists led by Mark Twain and William James, among others, vehemently objected, rightfully accusing McKinley of warmongering. But McKinley had the last word in what his secretary of state, John Hay, deemed "a splendid little war." In just six months, McKinley had achieved his objectives. History chalks up Mr. McKinley's War as a U.S. win, and he also polls favorably as a "near great" president.

Mr. Bush's War, by contrast, has not gone well. When you don't achieve a stealth-like victory in a war of choice, then you're seen as being stuck in a quagmire. Already the United States has fought longer in the Iraq war than in World War II. As the death toll continues to rise, more and more Americans are objecting. The pending Democratic takeover of Congress is only one manifestation of the spiraling disapproval of Bush.

At first, you'd want to compare Bush's Iraq predicament to that of Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam War. But LBJ had major domestic accomplishments to boast about when leaving the White House, such as the Civil Rights Act and Medicare/Medicaid. Bush has virtually none. Look at how he dealt with the biggest post-9/11 domestic crisis of his tenure. He didn't rush to help the Gulf region after Hurricane Katrina because the country was overextended in Iraq and had a massive budget deficit. Texas conservatives always say that LBJ's biggest mistake was thinking that he could fund both the Great Society and Vietnam. They believe he had to choose one or the other. They call Johnson fiscally irresponsible. Bush learned this lesson: He chose Iraq over New Orleans.

So Bush's legacy hinges on Iraq, which is an unmitigated disaster. Instead of being forgiven, like Polk and McKinley, for his phony pretext for war (WMD and al-Qaeda operatives in Baghdad), he stands to be lambasted by future scholars. What once were his two best sound bites -- "Wanted dead or alive" and "Mission accomplished" -- will be used like billy clubs to shatter his legacy every time it gets a revisionist lift. The left will keep battering him for warmongering while the right will remember its outrage that he didn't send enough battalions to Iraq.

There isn't much that Bush can do now to salvage his reputation. His presidential library will someday be built around two accomplishments: that after 9/11, the U.S. homeland wasn't again attacked by terrorists (knock on wood) and that he won two presidential elections, allowing him to appoint conservatives to key judicial posts. I also believe that he is an honest man and that his administration has been largely void of widespread corruption. This will help him from being portrayed as a true villain.

This last point is crucial. Though Bush may be viewed as a laughingstock, he won't have the zero-integrity factors that have kept Nixon and Harding at the bottom in the presidential sweepstakes. Oddly, the president whom Bush most reminds me of is Herbert Hoover, whose name is synonymous with failure to respond to the Great Depression. When the stock market collapsed, Hoover, for ideological reasons, did too little. When 9/11 happened, Bush did too much, attacking the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be president.

dbrinkl@tulane.edu

Douglas Brinkley is director of the Roosevelt Center at Tulane University.

Co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (L) and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) hold a news conference on recommendations on the Iraq war on Capitol Hill in Washington, December 6, 2006. (Jim Young/Reuters)

Iraq report sees "grave and deteriorating" crisis