Thursday, May 31, 2007

 

WSJ: Historian Reflects On War and Valor And a Son's Death



Historian Reflects On War and Valor And a Son's Death

Andrew Bacevich Opposed
Iraq Conflict but, in Grief,
He Still Believes in Serving
By GREG JAFFE
May 26, 2007; Page A1

WALPOLE, Mass. -- In late 2004, with the Iraq war raging, Andrew Bacevich's son told him that he was joining the Army.

Mr. Bacevich's son didn't fit the profile of a typical soldier. First Lt. Andrew Bacevich spent his teenage years in affluent Boston and Washington, D.C., suburbs. His father was a professor at Boston University and a prominent conservative critic of the war, writing in some of the country's largest newspapers that the pre-emptive conflict was immoral, unnecessary and almost certain to lead to defeat.

[A B]

But the father was also a retired colonel and Vietnam veteran. He had argued that it was essential that the children of America's lawmakers, professors, journalists and lawyers serve in the defense of the nation. Too often, the affluent and well-educated treat national defense as a job they can contract out to the same people who bused their tables and mowed their lawns, he wrote in his 2005 book "The New American Militarism." That made it too easy for the president to take the nation to war in the first place, and left too few people willing to hold the commander in chief accountable when things went awry, he warned.

So the elder Mr. Bacevich didn't discourage his son from becoming an Army officer. Rather, he helped him.

On May 13, Lt. Bacevich, age 27, was killed by a suicide bomber near Balad, a small Sunni town north of Baghdad.

"Should I have said to my son, 'I don't want you to join the Army'?" the father, who is 59, asks himself quietly today. It is a question that he says likely will dog him for years to come.

Mr. Bacevich, who served in Vietnam from 1970-1971, and his son shared the same square jaw and confident smile. They also shared an "ironic kinship," he says. "In the long military history of the U.S., which has featured many victories and glorious moments, my son and I managed to pick the two wars that stand out for all the wrong reasons," he says.

Mr. Bacevich grew up in Illinois and attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His parents both served in World War II, but neither pushed him to go to West Point. "Military service seemed to be a worthy thing to do -- that was the milieu in which I grew up," he says.

He fought in Vietnam and stayed in the Army through the painful rebuilding stretch that followed, serving in tank units and earning a graduate degree from Princeton in history. He and his wife also have three daughters. After 23 years, he retired as a colonel. Mr. Bacevich, who says he registered as an independent, voted for George W. Bush in 2000 but not in 2004.

His son, Andy, who spent his early childhood on Army bases, signed up for the Army ROTC at Boston University. "I think he wanted to do what his dad had done," Mr. Bacevich says. After his second year of ROTC, Andy applied to go to Army jump school over the summer to learn to be a paratrooper. A routine Army medical screening found that he had had childhood asthma, which disqualified him from serving in the military. Mr. Bacevich took his son to Massachusetts General Hospital for a test that his son hoped would show that the effects of the disease had disappeared. Andy failed it.

He finished Boston University and went to work for his state senator, and then for Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. In 2004, the Army, which was having trouble finding soldiers to fight in Iraq, loosened its standards to allow recruits with mild asthma. Andy enlisted, went through basic training and was accepted into the Army's Officer Candidate School. Mr. Bacevich says he was "inordinately proud" of the fact that his son got his commission by rising through the enlisted ranks and Officer Candidate School. "It was the hard way," he says.

Andy was initially assigned to the field artillery branch, which fires big cannons. But he wanted to be a tank officer, as his dad had been. So Mr. Bacevich called a friend who was a serving general and asked whether it would be possible to move his son. "It happened," Mr. Bacevich says. "Andy drove off in his new black Mustang to the armor school in Fort Knox, Ky."

[Andrew Bacevich, Jr.]

In October 2006, Andy was sent to Iraq as a platoon leader responsible for the lives of 15 soldiers. Around that time, Mr. Bacevich pondered the value of life in Iraq. An Iraqi civilian killed mistakenly by U.S. forces merits a payment from the Pentagon of just $2,500 to his or her family, he wrote in the Washington Post. The family of a U.S. soldier killed in action typically receives about $400,000, he noted. "In launching a war advertised as a high-minded expression of U.S. idealism, we have wandered into a swamp of moral ambiguity," he wrote.

He never mentioned his son in his writings and asked reporters quoting him in stories not to write about his son, either. "I didn't want to burden him with my political baggage. My son had an enormous responsibility and a tremendously difficult job," he says. When his son called home from Iraq, he often sounded exhausted, Mr. Bacevich says. In February, he spent a two-week leave with his family. He seemed physically drained.

When his son was back in Iraq, Mr. Bacevich emailed him nearly every day with news about his family and Boston sports teams. "I wanted him to know that whatever the stresses he was enduring there was a normal life to which we hoped he would return," Mr. Bacevich says. At the same time, he railed in public even more loudly against the war. "The truth is that next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times on May 9. "We are spectators, witnesses, bystanders caught in a conflagration that we ourselves, in an act of monumental folly, touched off."

Then, on Mother's Day, Andy and his men stopped a suspicious van and ordered the men inside to get out. One of them fired a shot at Andy, who shot back, according to an email to Mr. Bacevich from Andy's company commander. A second man from the van began walking toward Andy and two of his soldiers. The man blew himself up, killing Andy and badly wounding a second U.S. soldier.

Today, Mr. Bacevich finds some solace in small things. His son was out in front sharing the risk with his soldiers when he died. "I would not want to make more of it than it deserves. But, yeah, my kid was doing the right thing, and it took bravery," Mr. Bacevich says.

One of Andy's soldiers recently emailed Mr. Bacevich a photo of Andy that he had taken a few hours before Andy was killed. Mr. Bacevich has studied it for clues about his son. In the picture, Andy is not smiling, but he doesn't look unhappy. "There's a confidence and a maturity that I think suggests that in a peculiar way he found satisfaction in the service he was performing," Mr. Bacevich says.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bacevich was sitting on his back porch when the Army casualty assistance officer assigned to help his family handed him a survivor's benefit check for $100,000. For a widow with children, such checks are a lifesaver. But Mr. Bacevich doesn't need the money. "I felt sick to my stomach," he says. "The inadequacy of it just strikes you."

As a historian and former soldier, he takes clear-cut lessons from the check, his son's death and the broader war. "When you use force, the unintended consequences that result are so large and the surprises so enormous that it really reaffirms the ancient wisdom to which we once adhered -- namely, to see force as something to be used only as a last resort." In the future, he says, historians will wonder how a country such as the U.S. ever came to see military force as "such a flexible, efficient, cost-effective and supposedly useful instrument."

For a father, the lessons are far less clear-cut. When he was writing against the war, which was often, he told himself he was doing the best he could to end the conflict.

Should he have told his son not to volunteer for such a war? "I believe in service to country. I believe soldiering is an honorable profession. There is no clear right and wrong here," he says. "What I tried to do was inadequate."

Write to Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@wsj.com1

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Tuesday, May 29, 2007

 

NYT: Iraqi Tribal Leader Is Killed, and Mourners Are Attacked ("killing at least 27 people and wounding dozens of others")





May 25, 2007

Iraqi Tribal Leader Is Killed, and Mourners Are Attacked

By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, May 24 — The growing confrontation between tribal leaders in Anbar Province and Al Qaeda took a violent turn on Thursday when a suicide bomber drove into a crowd gathering for a funeral procession in the volatile city of Falluja, killing at least 27 people and wounding dozens of others.

The attack followed a pattern of two-stage assaults that has been replicated often in the four-year war. At breakfast time, masked gunmen assassinated a prominent Sunni tribal leader, Allawi al-Issawi, who had joined others across Anbar in opposing terrorist groups linked to Al Qaeda. Less than three hours later, as mourners gathered for a funeral procession outside his home, the suicide bomber struck.

The tribal leaders' campaign has helped make Anbar one of the few bright spots in Iraq for the Americans. With many of the Sunni sheiks calling on their followers to join the Iraqi Army and the police, and declaring Al Qaeda a common enemy of Iraqi Sunnis, levels of violence across much of Anbar have dropped sharply, especially in the capital, Ramadi, and in towns along the Euphrates.

But the area around Falluja, 30 miles west of Baghdad, has seen a violent struggle between tribal leaders eager to follow the lead set in Ramadi and other tribal groups that continue to back Al Qaeda in what American commanders call the "Baghdad belts," predominantly Sunni areas like Falluja that straddle the approaches to the capital.

The Falluja attack occurred on another day of widespread violence, much of it apparently committed by Sunni insurgent groups.

Gunmen who set up a fake checkpoint at Hussainiya, on the northeastern outskirts of Baghdad, stopped a minibus and raked the Shiite passengers with gunfire, killing 11, including several women and children. The police said the attackers then left a bomb in the wreckage that exploded as rescuers arrived, killing two civilians.

Car bombings, suicide attacks, mortar volleys and ambushes killed at least 50 others. They included six Iraqi policemen who died in a roadside bombing in Suleiman Beg, about 60 miles south of Kirkuk in an area of mixed Sunni Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen population.

The police in Baghdad said they found 22 bodies on Wednesday, bringing the number of unidentified bodies in the capital, many bearing signs of torture, to more than 340 this month.

American commanders have cited lower levels of sectarian killings as a tentative early sign of success in President Bush's "surge" strategy, under which nearly 30,000 additional American troops have been committed, with the last of them now preparing to deploy in Baghdad and other hot spots, like Diyala. But the commanders have conceded that a lower rate of sectarian killing has been offset by an unabated tempo of suicide bombings, the attacks that claim the largest number of civilians.

The American military command said that two American soldiers were killed Wednesday during combat operations in Anbar Province, increasing an American military death toll that has risen above 80 this month, one of the deadliest in the war.

American commanders have said they expect American casualties to rise as the summer progresses and the troop increase reaches its peak. More than 150,000 troops are now deployed here, close to the highest level at any stage since the 2003 invasion.

At least five of the American combat deaths this month resulted from a May 12 ambush in which three soldiers were abducted. The American command confirmed Thursday that a body found in the Euphrates on Wednesday near Musayyib, in a Qaeda stronghold about 45 miles south of Baghdad, was that of Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, Calif. The search for the two other missing soldiers — Specialist Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass., and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich. — continued.

Among the thousands of United States troops involved in the hunt, the recovery of Private Anzack's body was greeted with a mixture of sadness and relief. "It's good to have the finality of it," said Lt. Michael Nunziato, 24, of Buffalo, a member of the Second Brigade Combat Team of the 210th Mountain Division, which lost a soldier in a bomb explosion on Saturday during the search for the missing men.

Lieutenant Nunziato added, referring to Private Anzack: "You never want it to be that he passed away, but you have to keep up hope for the remaining two. You have to keep up hope."

In Baghdad on Thursday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki named replacements for six cabinet ministers who quit last month on the orders of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. At the time, Mr. Sadr said he was taking the action to protest Mr. Maliki's refusal to back a timeline for the departure of American forces. But the cleric may also have wanted to distance himself from the increasingly unpopular Maliki administration, which completed its first year in office this week with scant progress in curbing violence or improving Iraq's devastated public services.

Officials in Mr. Maliki's office described his nominees as technocrats who would bring new levels of efficiency to the ministries, which included the politically delicate portfolios of agriculture, health and transport.

But Mr. Maliki also voiced some of his strongest opposition yet to pressure for his government to meet political "benchmarks" on bitterly contested issues like the division of oil revenues. "How can the head of an elected government accept another country imposing restrictions or conditions on its actions?" he said Wednesday in a television interview.

Reporting was contributed by Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi and Qais Mizher in Baghdad, Damien Cave in Mahmudiya and Iraqi employees of The New York Times in Baquba, Falluja and Kirkuk.



# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 10:51 PM 0 comments

Monday, May 28, 2007

 

AP: Nearly 1,000 soldiers killed in Iraq in past year


Nearly 1,000 soldiers killed in Iraq in past year

Deaths since last Memorial Day speak to shifting strategy, rising dangers

Image: "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit
Michael McConnell looks at one of more than 3,400 pairs of combat boots, one pair for every U.S. soldier killed in the Iraq war, displayed as part of the "Eyes Wide Open" anti-war exhibition in Chicago on Friday.


The Associated Press
Updated: 9:29 p.m. ET May 26, 2007

BAGHDAD - Americans have opened nearly 1,000 new graves to bury U.S. troops killed in Iraq since Memorial Day a year ago. The figure is telling — and expected to rise in coming months.

In the period from Memorial Day 2006 through Saturday, 980 soldiers and Marines died in Iraq, compared to 807 deaths in the previous year. And with the Baghdad security operation now 3½ months old, even President Bush has predicted a difficult summer for U.S. forces.

"It could be a bloody — it could be a very difficult August," he said last week.

U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus on Saturday acknowledged the increase in casualties as a result of the American surge in forces to regain control of Baghdad.

"We're doing heavy fighting. This is a fight. There's a war on out there," he told reporters at al-Asad Airbase in western Iraq.

Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution and a consultant to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, said the increased casualties were a result of the security operation.

Danger at every turn
Thousands more American soldiers are patrolling the streets and living in isolated outposts across Baghdad, leaving them more vulnerable to attack. He also said the increase in raids on extremist Shiite militiamen had brought a wave of retaliatory attacks.

"We're out there on the streets a lot more. There are more patrols going on every day, so we're more open to attacks," O'Hanlon said.

Stephen Biddle, a military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of a group that spent weeks in Iraq assessing the situation for Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, agreed that more American deaths were likely.

May among the deadliest of months
"The biggest change in their (insurgent and militia) tactics is that they've changed to exploit the vulnerabilities we've opened ourselves up to. They see a new, small American base in their neighborhood, three blocks away, and they're going to car bomb it," said Biddle.

"We're going to see a spike in the short term," said Biddle. "But the likelihood is that in six months we'll see a drop in casualties as these areas become more secure. The problem is, what about the rest of the country?"

By the end of Saturday at least 100 American troops had died in the first 26 days of May, an average of 3.85 deaths a day. At that pace, 119 troops will have died by the end of the month, the most since 137 soldiers were killed in November 2004, when U.S. troops were fighting insurgents in Fallujah.

As of Saturday, May 26, 2007, at least 3,451 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,817 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18885483/




# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 10:07 AM 0 comments

Saturday, May 26, 2007

 

San Francisco Chronicle: 1 in 8 Iraqis dies before fifth birthday


1 in 8 Iraqis dies before fifth birthday

In Baghdad's poorest area, hospital lacks basic supplies, staff

James Palmer, Chronicle Foreign Service

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Hassna Rhani watches over son Tahar Nahdi, who is sufferi...

(05-23) 04:00 PDT Baghdad -- Hanna Yousef Tamer watches hopelessly as her year-old daughter, Mahdi, writhes on pink sheets in a crowded ward of the Ibn Al-Baladi Pediatric Hospital in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City. The feeble child cries and looks around the bustling room through hollowed eyes.

Her body is wasted from malnutrition and dehydration. But with the hospital lacking basic medication and intravenous fluids, doctors and nurses can't do much to help Mahdi. And while precious drugs are available in pharmacies, the little girl's family can't afford them. Tamer, 27, lost another daughter, Roqia, in 2005 when the 2-year-old died of the same disorders.

"Unfortunately, this is becoming common," said Saad Mehdi, 35, a pediatrician at Ibn Al-Baladi.

The mortality rate among Iraqi children younger than 5 rose 150 percent between 1990 and 2005, according to a report released this month by the U.S. humanitarian aid group Save the Children. In its most startling terms, the group estimates that 1 in 8 never makes it to his or her fifth birthday.

The report also said inadequate prenatal care has caused more birth defects and deaths, and that Iraq faced a grave humanitarian crisis even before the latest war. But most physicians here agree the 4-year-old conflict has had an unmistakable impact.

Iraq's child-mortality crisis is distressingly visible in Sadr City, a sprawling and embattled Shiite slum of 2 million residents in east Baghdad, home to many of the country's poorest people.

Pediatricians at Ibn Al-Baladi said leaking sewage and the lack of potable water has contributed to a startling increase in water-borne diseases, such as typhoid, which can place children at risk for circulatory failure, infections and possibly death if not properly treated.

Shortages of medicines, equipment and doctors have only made things worse, hospital officials said. The 34 pediatricians at Ibn Al-Baladi cope daily with hundreds of cases, often without antibiotics, intravenous drips, cardiopulmonary monitoring equipment, CT scans or MRI machines.

On a recent morning, the corridors of Ibn Al-Baladi were bustling with adults frantically shuttling children in their arms, while others lugged bags packed with blankets and clothes, and flagons filled with hot tea. In one hallway, a group of women clad in traditional black abayas sat on the floor feeding bottles to infants.

The hospital's wards were crammed with children like year-old Tahar Nahdi, who was suffering from a severe chest infection. The boy lay pale and unconscious on his back while his mother, Hassna Rhani, 35, swatted flies from her son's face. Ali Kareem, 25, a nurse attending Tahar, who has been ill for the past three months, said the hospital has no antibiotics to fight the little boy's infection and no intravenous fluids to alleviate his dehydration.

Rhani said that for the past five weeks, her family has been unable to afford the $5 necessary to buy Tahar four daily doses of antibiotics that are available in pharmacies outside the hospital.

"The majority of the families that come here can't afford the medications," Kareem said.

On the other side of the room, 4-month-old Doha Ahmed, anemic and malnourished, fidgeted in the arms of her grandmother, Sabira Ali. Doha has spent more than 13 days in the hospital during the past month, but her health continues to decline, Ali said. Doha's mother, who was home caring for her four other children, already lost a child two years ago under similar circumstances, Ali said.

In Sadr City, the lack of prenatal care has become more significant since Ibn Al-Baladi was forced to close its obstetrics wing more than a year ago after it was damaged in fighting. Reconstruction is moving slowly, according to the hospital's assistant director, Salam Mosan Bohan. For now, everything takes place in the main hospital.

Earlier this month, inside a wing of Ibn Al-Baladi's second floor, small incubators were filled with premature newborns, along with those suffering from birth defects. Some were clinging to life.

Taif Saif was one of the fortunate few.

The 7-day-old infant wrestled with a piece of gauze wrapped around his eyes as protection from the glow of a fluorescent light -- treatment for jaundice that he has had since birth due to anemia. Pediatrician Manam Husham says Taif's blood disorder was easily detectable through standard prenatal testing. And while his ailment is curable, he is still vulnerable to neurological disorders.

"We have many cases like this," Husham said. "It's become normal."

The frustrations, after a while, are easy to sense among the doctors at Ibn Al-Baladi.

"We have to deal with it," Husham said, referring to the harsh conditions in Sadr City and Ibn Al-Baladi. "We're trying to save as many lives as possible."

Health-care crisis for young Iraqis

According to a report by Save the Children, a U.S. humanitarian group, the rate of mortality among children younger than 5 in Iraq rose by 150 percent between 1990 and 2005. The report's key points:

-- In 2005, 122,000 Iraqi children died before age 5, or 125 per 1,000. In contrast, 36 per 1,000 died before age 5 in Iran; 15 per 1,000 in Syria; and 7 per 1,000 in the United States.

-- 46 percent of children younger than 5 suffering from diarrhea are not given oral rehydration treatment.

-- 24 percent of children younger than 5 with suspected pneumonia are not seen by a health care provider.

-- 12 percent of children younger than 5 are moderately or severely underweight.

-- 21 percent of Iraqi children suffer from severely or moderately stunted growth.

-- Only 35 percent of children are fully immunized.

-- 28 percent of births are not attended by a skilled health professional.

-- Iraq's infant mortality rate has increased by some 37 percent in the past four years.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/23/MNGJJPVKTK1.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 13 of the San Francisco Chronicle



# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 7:59 PM 0 comments

Friday, May 25, 2007

 

ABC News: Gore Blasts Bush in 'The Assault on Reason'


Gore Blasts Bush in 'The Assault on Reason'

Former Vice President's Book a Searing Assault on the Bush Administration

By JAKE TAPPER

May 21, 2007 —

When former Vice President Al Gore hosted "Saturday Night Live" in December 2002 he appeared in a skit that compared his vice presidential selection process from two years before to the dating reality TV show "The Bachelor." In one scene Gore appeared in a hot tub with a faux Joe Lieberman, both of them shirtless, drinking champagne, arms locked, romance in the air. Anyone then looking for clues to see if Gore would run for president in 2004 probably had no trouble discerning that an exploratory committee was not in the cards.

Almost five years later, Gore still says he has no plans to run for president, but his latest book, "The Assault On Reason," is so searingly critical of the Bush administration it's hard to discern what his plans may be.

On the one hand, Gore has written an un-nostalgic look back at the previous six years that lays out his case as to how the world might look today had the chads fallen another way -- a world where U.S. troops would not be fighting in Iraq, Abu Ghraib would just be a town's name and the nation would have been better prepared for Hurricane Katrina, global warming, and, yes, perhaps even Sept. 11.

But on the other hand, "The Assault On Reason" is an assault on President Bush, 308 pages of professorially rendered, liberal red meat that shuns the cautious language employed by any politician standing to the right of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and the left of Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.

Gore: 'I'm Not a Candidate'

"I'm not a candidate and this is not a political book, this is not a candidate book," Gore told Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America" Monday. "It's about that there are cracks in the foundation of American democracy that have to be fixed."

In the book, Gore is accusatory, passionate, and angry. He begins discussing the president by accusing him of sharing President Richard Nixon's unprincipled hunger for power -- and the book proceeds to get less complimentary from there. While Gore stops short of flatly calling for the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, he certainly gives the impression that in his view such a move would be well deserved. He calls the president a lawbreaker, a liar and a man with the blood of thousands of innocent lives on his hands.

Most of Gore's ire stems from, not surprisingly, the war in Iraq, a war that Gore opposed from the beginning. Bush, he writes, "has exposed Americans abroad and Americans in every U.S. town and city to a greater danger of attack because of his arrogance and willfulness."

"History will surely judge America's decision to invade and occupy (Iraq)&as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd," Gore writes.

The Democratic Conversation

"The Assault On Reason" begins as an academic discourse about the one-sided, corporate-controlled television medium with no interactivity.

Gore argues that television not only creates a dynamic that runs contrary to Thomas Jefferson's desire for a "well-informed citizenry" but lulls viewers in a partially immobilized state and allows unreasoned communicators to sell false bills of goods, such as, say, that there was a connection between the Sept. 11 hijackers and Saddam Hussein.

As an example of the failed democratic conversation, Gore said Monday that prior to the war in Iraq, "if we had a full debate and a full airing of the pros and cons of the invasion that brought out the fact that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with attacking us on 9/11 then we would have been much less likely to have these troops trapped over there now in the midst of a civil war."

Sept. 11, Iraq and al Qaeda

But in the book Gore sheds his inner Marshall McLuhan for his inner Michael Moore, saying that if "Bush and Cheney actually believed in the linkage (between Iraq and al Qaeda) that they asserted -- in spite of all the evidence to the contrary presented to them contemporaneously -- that would by itself in light of the available evidence, make them genuinely unfit to lead our nation. On the other hand, if they knew the truth and lied, massively and repeatedly, isn't that worse? Are they too gullible or too dishonest?"

(Gore said Monday that the 2006 midterm successes of the Democrats were not an example of democracy's conversation failing, but "a belated response to some of the perceived mistakes of the current administration. But I think the threshold for change was way too high.")

Gore writes that since "Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack&then that means the president took us to war when he didn't have to and that over 3,000 American service members have been killed&unnecessarily."

When asked if that meant U.S. troops had died in vain, Gore said Monday that "those who serve our country are honored in memory" but that the issue is "there is hardly anybody left in America&who doesn't believe that it was a terrible mistake to invade a country that didn't attack us. But all of the evidence necessary to make that judgment before we invaded was available&We have been making a series of really important, really big mistakes, and the question is how can we reinvigorate the role of 'We the People' in American democracy so that we're part of the conversation and so that those (in power)&are listening to reason, are looking at the facts and not brushing past them."

It seems likely that even if Gore opts not to run for president in 2008, this book may serve to drive presidential candidates, including Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Barack Obama, D-Ill., and former Sen. John Edwards, even further to the left, both in rhetoric and substance. The former Tennessee congressman and senator accuses his former colleagues on Capitol Hill of complicity with what he sees as nefarious deeds committed by the Bush administration. The book opens with Gore wondering why Senate Democrats were so silent during the debate before going to war in Iraq and toward the end faults them for being so silent about the administration's warrantless surveillance program.

Naming Names

He doesn't assail any Democrats by name. Bush, however, he names. Over and over.

"President Bush has repeatedly violated the law for six years," Gore charges, regarding the warrantless surveillance program. He argues that the president does not need the enhanced domestic surveillance powers he has sought and received, often in secret, but that the competent use of the information already available would have been sufficient. Such as, for instance, the fact that Sept. 11 terrorists Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar were already on a State Department/INS watch list.

He does not flatly state that Sept. 11 would not have occurred during a Gore administration. But, he writes, "Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable, it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes."

Then, using a study from the Markle Foundation, Gore shows how better and quicker analysis -- not the increased data sought by the Bush administration -- would have led to other hijackers. Salem Alhazmi, then Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi. And so on.

But instead, Gore writes, incompetence rules the day and Bush has pushed for Orwellian powers a la "1984."

What might cause some to speculate that Gore isn't ruling out a third White House run (he also campaigned as a centrist "New Democrat" in 1988) is the cautious wording he uses about two claims against the administration, sensitive ones regarding Bush's religious views and whether or not the war in Iraq was a war for oil. Gore raises them, but even among his many incendiary charges, doesn't claim them as his own.

Gore's Charge to the Nation

As for what now? Gore says the nation, indeed the world, is at a fork in the road. Gore calls for the United States to rejoin the international community and lead the war on crises involving global warming, water, terrorism and pandemics such as HIV/AIDS. He calls for a repeal of the Patriot Act, and for the Bush administration to disclose all of its interrogation policies. He wants more transparency in political TV commercials and an expediting of the shift from television toward the Internet as a method of communication.

Gore told ABC News Monday he's focused not on running for president but on solving the climate crisis, but "in order to solve the climate crisis, I'm convinced that we're going to have to address these cracks in the foundation of democracy, these basic problems with the way we're approaching decision-making."

After Random House published 200,000 copies of "Putting People First: How We Can All Change America" -- the soporific campaign tome purportedly written by then-Gov. Bill Clinton and then-Sen. Al Gore -- the ill-fated re-election campaign of then-President George H.W. Bush filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. Republicans alleged that the book deal constituted an illegal corporate contribution to the Democratic ticket, which didn't directly profit financially from the book though the publicity certainly didn't hurt. How quaint that book must now seem to those Republicans.



# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 10:35 AM 0 comments

Thursday, May 24, 2007

 

New America Media: Iraq: A New Age Of Genocide?


Iraq: A New Age Of Genocide?

Bill Weinberg

May 15, 2007


Bill Weinberg, editor of the online journal WW4Report.com. This piece originally appeared in New America Media.

Amid daily media body counts and analyses of whether the "surge" is "working," there is an even more horrific reality in Iraq, almost universally overlooked. The latest annual report by the London-based Minority Rights Group International, released earlier this year, places Iraq second as the country where minorities are most under threat—after Somalia. Sudan is third. More people may be dying in Darfur than Iraq, but Iraq's multiple micro-ethnicities—Turcomans, Assyrians, Mandeans, Yazidis—place it at the top of the list.

While the mutual slaughter of Shi'ite and Sunni makes world headlines, Iraq is home to numerous smaller faiths and peoples—now faced with actual extinction. Turcomans are the Turkic people of northern Iraq, caught in the middle of the Arab-Kurdish struggle over Kirkuk and its critical oilfields. Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, now targeted for attack, trace their origins in Mesopotamia to before the arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century. So do the Mandeans, followers of the world's last surviving indigenous Gnostic faith—now also facing a campaign of threats, violence and kidnapping. The situation has recently escalated to outright massacre.

In late April, a grim story appeared on the wire services about another such small ethnic group in northern Iraq. Twenty-three textile factory workers from the Yazidi community were taken from a mini-bus in Mosul by unknown gunmen, placed against a wall and shot down execution-style. Three who survived were critically injured.

Yazidis, although linguistic Kurds, are followers of a pre-Islamic faith which holds that earth is ruled by a fallen angel. For this, they have been assailed by their Muslim neighbors as "devil-worshippers" and are often subject to persecution.

The wire accounts portrayed the attack as retaliation for the stoning death of a Yazidi woman who had eloped with a Muslim man and converted to Islam. After the killings, hundreds of Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika, their principal village in the Mosul area. Shops were shuttered and Muslim residents locked themselves in their homes, fearing reprisals.

Yazidis have often been the target of calumnies, and the stoning story may or may not be true. If it is, it says much about the condition of women in "liberated" Iraq, where "honor killings" witness a huge resurgence. In any case, it says much about the precarious situation of minorities in post-Saddam Iraq.

By eerie coincidence, April 24, the day the story of the massacre appeared on the wire agencies, also marked the 92nd anniversary of the start of the Armenian genocide, commemorated in solemn ceremony by Armenians worldwide. Following the mass arrests of that day in 1915, some 1.5 million met their deaths in massacres and forced deportations at the hands of Ottoman Turkish authorities. The Yazidis, whose territory straddles contemporary Turkey and Iraq, were targeted for extermination in the same campaign.

It is telling that the United States refuses to officially acknowledge the Armenian genocide, out of a need to appease NATO ally Turkey. More disturbingly, the United States is now presiding over the re-emergence of genocide in the same part of the planet.

The United States went into Iraq in 2003 to put an end to a regime that had committed genocide against the Kurds in 1988 (when, lest we forget, it was still being supported by Washington). Even if the aim was to control Iraq's oil under a stable, compliant regime, the result has been Yazidis massacred, Assyrian churches bombed, the majority of the Mandeans forced into exile in neighboring countries.

The armed insurgency and the forces collaborating with the occupation seem equally bent on exterminating perceived religious and ethnic enemies. In April 2004, the Badr Brigades of Shi'ite militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr burned down the Roma ("Gypsy") village of Qawliya, accused of "un-Islamic" behavior—like music and dance. Last year, the usually pacifistic Sufis, followers of Islam's esoteric tradition, announced formation of a militia to defend against the Shi'ite supremacists in both opposition and collaboration. "We will not wait for the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade to enter our houses," read the statement from the Qadiri Sufis. "We will fight the Americans and the Shi'ites who are against [the United States]." Suicide bombers have also struck Sufi tekiyas (gathering places).

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio recently stated without irony: "We can walk out of Iraq, just like we did in Lebanon, just like we did in Vietnam, just like we did in Somalia and we will leave chaos in our wake." He may be right. But the alternative may be staying—presiding over, and fueling chaos. Boehner ignores the inescapable reality that United States intervention created the current chaos, now approaching the genocidal threshold. It has only escalated throughout the occupation.

This reality raises tough questions for those calling for military intervention in Darfur: will this end the genocide there—or inflame it? And the United States failure to even impose sanctions on Sudan, despite four years of threats, again points to oil and realpolitik as imperial motives, rather than humanitarian concerns. Even the renewed warfare in Somalia, topping the Minority Rights Group list, was sparked by the U.S.-backed Ethiopian intervention late last year.

There are secular progressive forces in Iraq who oppose both the occupation and the ethno-exterminators in collaboration and insurgency alike. These groups, such as the Iraq Freedom Congress and the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, support a multi-ethnic Iraq, and constitute a civil resistance. Their voices have been lost to the world media amid the spectacular violence.

Such voices may have little chance in the escalating crisis. But looking to the United States occupation as the guarantor of stability is at least equally deluded. Above all, Iraq's minorities will likely be struggling for survival in the immediate future, whether the United States stays or goes. We owe them, at least, the solidarity of knowing about them.



# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 9:04 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

 

The Guardian: One building that's been built on time and on budget in Iraq: America's fortress embassy (It's the size of the Vatican)



One building that's been built on time and on budget in Iraq: America's fortress embassy

· Vatican-sized bomb-proof structure to cost £300m
· Builders in Green Zone already insurgent targets

Ed Pilkington in New York
Monday May 21, 2007
The Guardian

A portion of the new US embassy under construction is seen from across the Tigris river in Baghdad, Iraq
A portion of the new US embassy under construction is seen from across the Tigris river in Baghdad, Iraq. Photograph: AP
 

When the idea of building a new US embassy in Baghdad was first mooted by the American administration in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, there seemed to be a grandiose logic to it.

The compound, by the side of the Tigris, would be a statement of President Bush's intent to expand democracy through the Middle East. Yesterday, however, the entire project was under fresh scrutiny as new details emerged of its cost and scale.

Rising from the dust of the city's Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September.

It will cover 104 acres (42 hectares) of land, about the size of the Vatican. It will include 27 separate buildings and house about 615 people behind bomb-proof walls. Most of the embassy staff will live in simple, if not quite monastic, accommodation in one-bedroom apartments.

The US ambassador, however, will enjoy a little more elbow room in a high-security home on the compound reported to fill 16,000 square feet (1,500 sq metres). His deputy will have to make do with a more modest 9,500 sq ft.

They will have a pool, gym and communal living areas, and the embassy will have its own power and water supplies.

But commentators and Iraq experts believe the project was flawed from its inception, and have raised concerns it will become an enormous, heavily targeted white elephant that will be an even greater liability if and when the Americans scale back their presence in Iraq.

"What you have is a situation in which they are building an embassy without really thinking about what its functions are," Edward Peck, a former American diplomat in Iraq, told AP.

"What kind of embassy is it when everybody lives inside and it's blast-proof, and people are running around with helmets and crouching behind sandbags?"

Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 about 1,000 US diplomatic and military staff have been using one of his former palaces as a make-shift embassy, which several observers have criticised as giving the regrettable impression that the Americans merely replaced Saddam's authoritarian rule with their own.

Joost Hildermann, an Iraq analyst with the International Crisis Group, said of the new embassy: "This sends a really poor signal to Iraqis that the Americans are building such a huge compound in Baghdad. It does very little to assuage Iraqis who are angry that America is running the country, and not very well at that."

The need to make the compound secure is a top priority. The Green Zone - the fortified four square miles in which the Iraqi and American governments and other international officials operate - used to be relatively peaceful but in recent months has come under almost daily rocket and mortar fire. This month the US embassy ordered its people to wear flak jackets and helmets at all times when in the open after four foreign contractors were killed by a rocket landing beside the present embassy.

The multiple cranes surrounding the construction site of the new embassy have already attracted attacks from insurgents. Last week five contractors were wounded in a rocket assault.

Despite the peculiar pressures, the Bush administration says the embassy will open in September, and be fully staffed by the end of the year.

Already, however, there have been suggestions that the compound will not be large enough to house hundreds of diplomats and military personnel likely to remain in Iraq for some time. Scores of US officials are currently housed in trailers which are vulnerable to bombs landing on their roofs. According to a report by McClatchy News, staff members have complained about the dangers only to be told they must wait until the new embassy is ready to take them in.

Toby Dodge, an expert on Iraq at Queen Mary, University of London, has just come back from a month spent in Iraq, largely in the Green Zone. He thinks the Americans are unlikely to pull out of Iraq fully until the end of the next presidency at the earliest, and so the new embassy will serve its purpose for several years to come.

"A fortress-style embassy, with a huge staff, will remain in Baghdad until helicopters come to airlift the last man and woman from the roof," he said, adding his own advice to the architects of the building: "Include a large roof."

There is one added irony - the embassy is one of the few major projects the administration has undertaken in Iraq that is on schedule and within budget.



# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 11:48 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

 

NYT: Carter Criticizes Bush and Blair on War in Iraq


May 20, 2007

Carter Criticizes Bush and Blair on War in Iraq

By REUTERS

WASHINGTON, May 19 (Reuters) — Former President Jimmy Carter criticized George W. Bush's presidency in interviews released Saturday as "the worst in history" in international relations and faulted Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain for his loyal relationship with Mr. Bush.

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Mr. Carter, 82, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said in a telephone interview with The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from the Carter Center in Atlanta.

"The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me," Mr. Carter told the newspaper.

In an interview on BBC radio, he criticized Mr. Blair for his close relations with the president, particularly concerning the Iraq war.

"Abominable," he said when asked how he would characterize Mr. Blair's relationship with Mr. Bush. "Loyal, blind, apparently subservient."

Mr. Carter, who was president from 1977 to 1981 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his charitable work, was an outspoken opponent of the invasion of Iraq before it was begun in 2003.

"I think that the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world," he said.

In the newspaper interview, Mr. Carter said Mr. Bush has taken a "radical departure from all previous administration policies" with the Iraq war.

"We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered," he said.

The White House declined to comment on his statements.

Mr. Carter told the BBC that if Mr. Blair had opposed the invasion he could have reduced the ensuing harm by making it tougher for Washington to shrug off critics, even if the British prime minister had not been able to stop the war. "It would certainly have assuaged the problems" that have arisen, he said.

He characterized one of the defenses of the Bush administration in America and worldwide as "O.K., we must be more correct in our actions than the world thinks because Great Britain is backing us."

Mr. Carter also told the BBC that the combined support of Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair for the war "has prolonged the war and increased the tragedy that has resulted."

In the newspaper interview, Mr. Carter, who brokered the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel, also criticized Mr. Bush's Middle East policies. "For the first time since Israel was founded, we've had zero peace talks to try to bring a resolution of differences in the Middle East," he said. "That's a radical departure from the past."



# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 6:25 PM 0 comments

Monday, May 21, 2007

 

NYT: Iraq Attacks Stayed Steady Despite Troop Increase, Data Show

Please consider signing the Impeach Gonzales petition at: http://impeachgonzales.org/


This Modern World By Tom Tomorrow



Eros Hoagland for The New York Times

The daily attack figure for March was 157. Many recent attacks, like a firefight on March 28, have taken place in the province of Diyala.



Attacks in Iraq
The New York Times


May 16, 2007

Iraq Attacks Stayed Steady Despite Troop Increase, Data Show

By JAMES GLANZ

Newly declassified data show that as additional American troops began streaming into Iraq in March and April, the number of attacks on civilians and security forces there stayed relatively steady or at most declined slightly, in the clearest indication yet that the troop increase could take months to have a widespread impact on security.

Even the suggestion of a slight decline could be misleading, since the figures are purely a measure of how many attacks have taken place, not the death toll of each one. American commanders have conceded that since the start of the troop increase, which the United States calls a "surge," attacks in the form of car bombs with their high death tolls have risen.

The attack data are compiled by the Pentagon but were made public in a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office. It analyzed the effect of the attacks on the struggling American-financed reconstruction program in Iraq, especially the program's failings in the electricity and oil sectors.

A draft version of the report, obtained by The New York Times last week, indicated that every day during much of the past four years, somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels of oil, valued at anywhere from $5 million to $15 million, had been unaccounted for. But the draft report did not contain the attack statistics.

When asked about the new data, Barham Salih, an Iraqi deputy prime minister, said in an interview that the troop increase was having a positive impact in specific neighborhoods in Baghdad, particularly in the Shiite-dominated eastern half of the city. But he said Iraqi intelligence had concluded that Al Qaeda was in effect surging at the same time in Iraq to counteract the American program, damping any immediate gains.

Mr. Salih also said that insurgents had to some extent fled Baghdad, where the increase is concentrated, to outlying areas like the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, the Kurdish north and the ethnically mixed province of Diyala, north and west of Baghdad, where major attacks have taken place in recent weeks.

"Al Qaeda has adapted, first by pushing a surge of its own, and by escalation of its own attacks across Iraq," Mr. Salih said. "It is a deliberate attempt by Al Qaeda, an escalation, to get us to change our tactics."

Over all, the attack statistics, which the accountability office has been compiling since the early days of the conflict, paint a sobering picture of where the country is headed. The number of daily attacks remained low through 2003 and the early months of 2004, but then began a relentless climb even as the United States promoted what it saw as important political milestones in Iraq.

Those milestones included the transfer of the country to a sovereign Iraqi government, several elections and eventually the creation and ratification of a new Iraqi Constitution. Despite those developments, the statistics show, the number of attacks averaged 71 a day in January 2006, and rose to a record high of 176 a day in October 2006.

By February of this year the number had dipped to 164 a day. The troop increase, which is not expected to be fully in place until sometime this summer, began in earnest that month, with several American-led sweeps through Baghdad and plans for permanent new outposts in restive neighborhoods put into effect.

As troops continued to arrive, the statistics show, the early effect on countrywide attacks was at best marginal, although there does appear to have been a slight decrease. The daily attack figures for March and April, released yesterday for the first time, were 157 and 149, respectively.

"The improvement is too small to be meaningful, but it's too soon to declare defeat," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group that closely follows the conflict.

Aside from the considerable human toll of the attacks, the report says, their impact on the reconstruction program has been devastating.

"Insurgents have destroyed key oil and electricity infrastructure, threatened workers, compromised the transport of materials, and hindered project completion and repairs by preventing access to work sites," the report says.

In addition, it says, the looting and vandalism that American and Iraqi officials have vowed to stop has continued to destroy infrastructure that billions of dollars in American and Iraqi money have refurbished.

The report also contains the analysis of what appears to be billions of dollars of oil that is unaccounted for over the past four years. The report says smuggling, sabotage or colossal accounting errors could potentially account for the discrepancy.

A senior Iraqi official said yesterday that the Iraqi government believed the most likely explanation is a major smuggling effort by Shiite militias in the oil-rich south of Iraq.



Marwan Ibrahim/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On April 2, a suicide bomber blew up a truck near a school in Kirkuk, wounding dozens of children. The daily attack figure for April was 149.


# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 1:17 PM 0 comments

Sunday, May 20, 2007

 

AP: 7 U.S. soldiers die in Iraq attacks



Photo
Women mourn during funeral procession for Marwan Ja'afar, in Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, May 20, 2007. Marwan Ja'afar, a prominent soccer player, was killed in an mortar attack. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

7 U.S. soldiers die in Iraq attacks

By RAVI NESSMAN, Associated Press Writer 18 minutes ago

Seven American soldiers and a translator were killed in separate attacks in Baghdad and a city south of the capital, the U.S. military said Sunday.

Six of the Americans and the translator died Saturday in a bombing in western Baghdad, the military said. The soldiers were from the Multinational Division-Baghdad.

A soldier from the 13th Sustainment Command was killed and two were wounded when a blast struck their vehicle Saturday near Diwaniyah, a mostly Shiite city 80 miles south of Baghdad, the command said.

On Sunday, a suicide bomber exploded a tanker truck near an Iraqi police checkpoint outside a market west of Baghdad, killing at least two officers and injuring nine people, police said.

Police said they suspected chlorine gas was used in the attack in a town just outside the turbulent city of Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad. But the U.S. military said it had no reports chlorine was used.

Police grew suspicious of the truck as it approached the checkpoint and opened fire when it was still yards away. But the bomber still managed to detonate the explosives, police said.

Later Sunday, a bomb planted under a parked car exploded in the central Baghdad neighborhood of Bab al-Sharji, near the Zahraa Shiite mosque, police said. The blast killed two civilians, wounded 10 and damaged nearby houses and the mosque, police said.

Several hours later, a mortar shell landed in a commercial area in central Baghdad, killing one person and wounding three, police said.

Meanwhile, President Jalal Talabani left Iraq on Sunday for a trip to the United States that was expected to include a medical checkup. The trip came four months after Talabani was rushed to a Jordanian hospital where doctors said he was suffering from exhaustion and dehydration caused by lung and sinus infections.

"I will go to the U.S.A and stay nearly three weeks to lose weight and have some rest and relaxation ... away from meetings and work," Talabani, a 73-year-old Sunni Kurd, said before boarding a plane in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad.

A senior Kurdish politician close to the Iraqi leader said Talabani was going for a checkup at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., that had been scheduled for weeks. The politician spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the president's plans.

Azad Jindyani, spokesman of Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, denied the president had health problems.

"Talabani's health is very good, but he felt tired recently ... because of the work and meetings," he said.

Talabani was the second top Iraqi politician to fly to the United States for medical reasons in four days.

Senior Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim flew there aboard a U.S. military aircraft Wednesday for further tests to determine if he is suffering from lung cancer, according to members of his staff.

South of Baghdad, thousands of U.S. soldiers kept up their search for three missing comrades, more than a week after they were abducted.

At least one U.S. soldier was killed Saturday and four were wounded as insurgents attacked the searchers with guns, mortars and bombs. The military reported a dozen other U.S. troop deaths in Iraq since Thursday.

The search for the missing soldiers involves some 4,000 troops who "will not stop searching until we find our soldiers," said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. "We're using all available assets and continuing to assault the al-Qaida in Iraq network," he said.

An al-Qaida front group has claimed responsibility for the May 12 attack in Quarghuli, about 12 miles south of Baghdad, that resulted in the kidnapping and the deaths of four American soldiers and an Iraqi aide.

Army Gen. David Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq, told the Army Times newspaper in an interview Friday night that U.S. forces were focusing on an insurgent who is "sort of an affiliate of al-Qaida."

He said an informant provided U.S. forces with names of those who took part in the raid and kidnapping but they were still at large.

"We've had all kinds of tips down there. We just tragically haven't found the individuals," he said.

Petraeus said he did not know whether the three missing soldiers from the Army's 10th Mountain Division were alive. But "as of this morning, we thought there were at least two that were probably still alive," he said.

"At one point in time there was a sense that one of them might have died, but again, we just don't know."

An Iraqi army intelligence officer, who said he helped interrogate two suspects detained in recent days in Mahmoudiya, said they confessed to participating in the raid. Mahmoudiya is the largest town in the search area.

They said 13 insurgents conducted the surprise attack and then escaped in two groups. The leader of the group, along with some gunmen, took the kidnapped soldiers to an unknown destination, he said.

He added that the two detainees gave interrogators the hiding place for weapons used in the ambush and U.S. troops confiscated them.




# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 12:55 PM 0 comments

Saturday, May 19, 2007

 

Daily Star: 'Largely irrelevant:' Study says Iraqi government near 'collapse'


'Largely irrelevant:' Study says Iraqi government near 'collapse'

Compiled by Daily Star staff
Friday, May 18, 2007

'Largely irrelevant:' Study says Iraqi government near 'collapse'

Iraq's government has lost control of vast areas to powerful local factions and the country is on the verge of collapse and fragmentation, a leading British think tank said on Thursday.

Chatham House also said there was not one civil war in Iraq, but "several civil wars" between rival communities, and accused Iraq's main neighbors - Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey - of having reasons "for seeing the instability there continue."

The report was starkly at odds with an assessment delivered by Washington's top official in Iraq on Thursday saying that the country had stepped back from "the edge of the abyss." US Ambassador Ryan Crocker said that sectarian violence in the country was not as widespread as it was a year ago but conceded that patience with continued violence was not "limitless."

"If I had to evaluate today, and looking purely at the security situation, as devastating as the Al-Qaeda-led chain of suicide vehicle attacks is, that does not in my mind suggest the failing of the state or of society," Crocker told reporters.

Crocker seemed to be responding directly to language in the Chatham House report, which saw potential for the "collapse" of Iraq.

"It can be argued that Iraq is on the verge of being a failed state which faces the distinct possibility of collapse and fragmentation," the group's report said. "The Iraqi government is not able to exert authority evenly or effectively over the country. Across huge swathes of territory, it is largely irrelevant in terms of ordering social, economic and political life."

The report also said that a US-backed security crackdown in Baghdad launched in February has failed to reduce overall violence across the country, as insurgent groups have just shifted the focus of their activities outside the capital.

While cautioning that Iraq might not ultimately exist as a united entity, the 12-page report said a draft law to distribute Iraq's oil wealth equitably among Sunni Arabs, Shiites and ethnic Kurds was "the key to ensuring Iraq's survival."

"It will be oil revenue that keeps the state together rather than any attempt to build a coherent national project in the short term," the influential think tank said.

The author of the report, Gareth Stansfield, said instability in Iraq was "not necessarily contrary to the interests" of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

"[Iraq] is now a theater in which Iran can 'fight' the US without doing so openly," Stansfield said.

Crocker said that progress was being made on the three key milestones Washington has set Baghdad's leaders: the revenue-sharing oil law, legislation to allow former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party to take up public posts and constitutional reform.

"If this were September I think it would be a terrible mistake to conclude that, because they've been able to mount these attacks, that therefore it isn't working, it isn't going to work and we just all need to pull stakes," Crocker said.

"Sometimes it can be the case that you've got to look over the edge to see how deep the abyss really is," he added.

Mortar rounds hit a US Air Force base north of Baghdad on Thursday, destroying one helicopter and damaging nine others, police said. The attack at Taji, a major base on the northern outskirts of Baghdad, occurred about 2 a.m., the police said. An explosion also rocked the Green Zone on Thursday in the third attack in three days on the heavily fortified area in the capital.

A massive search for three US soldiers feared captured by Al-Qaeda entered its sixth day Thursday. About 4,000 US troops and 2,000 Iraqis are searching for the three US soldiers feared captured by Al-Qaeda during the ambush, which also killed one Iraqi soldier.

Major General Rick Lynch, commander of US troops south of Baghdad, said Wednesday that the US was offering rewards of up to 250 million dinars ($200,000) for information on the missing soldiers' whereabouts. - Reuters, AP

 

Tags: Al-Qaeda, Baghdad, Baghdad, Civil War, Iran, Iraq, North, Police, Saudi Arabia, Soldier, Turkey, War, Washington
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=82331


# posted by I Dislike GWB @ 9:57 AM 0 comments

Friday, May 18, 2007

 

The New Yorker: No Blame, No Shame



Comment

No Blame, No Shame

by George Packer May 14, 2007



Why has it become impossible to admit a mistake in Washington and accept the consequences? The last time a senior government official quit over his own job failure was more than twenty years ago, when Robert McFarlane, President Reagan's national-security adviser, resigned during the Iran-Contra scandal and, taking accountability to a Roman level, swallowed an overdose of Valium, out of "a sense of having failed the country." (He survived.) Today, this mostly forgotten act of personal responsibility seems rather heroic. Recent years have seen such a steep decline in shame that a book like George Tenet's "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA," for which the author was paid four million dollars, has become an expected destination at the end of a well-trodden path that leads from disaster through obfuscation and defiance to a well-rewarded self-justification.

The Bush Administration has come close to perfecting the art of unaccountability. Tenet's memoir shows just one of several styles of evasion lately on display: last month, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's admission that mistakes were made in the firing of eight United States attorneys had the air of a schoolboy hoping that bogus contrition would get him off the hook. "I accept full responsibility," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, meaning only that he was sorry he had allowed the matter to become such a nuisance. He spent the next five hours explaining—through repeated memory failure and a steady refusal to acknowledge the contradictions and lies in which he kept entangling himself—why he bore no responsibility for anything else. Afterward, the President praised Gonzales for his "very candid assessment" and said that it "increased my confidence in his ability to do the job." This is unaccountability as pure chutzpah, and so far it seems to be working.

Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank president and former Deputy Secretary of Defense, in answering charges that he favored his girlfriend by giving her a promotion and a hefty pay raise at the bank while holding impoverished countries to a high standard of good government, has taken a different approach. Wolfowitz, in his most recent statement, prepared for an investigatory panel, conceded nothing, and denounced a "smear campaign" waged by his enemies inside the bank. "I acted transparently, sought and received guidance from the bank's ethics committee, and conducted myself in good faith in accordance with that guidance," he asserted. Assertion is the neoconservative style of avoiding accountability: don't give an inch or they'll tear you to pieces. Wolfowitz's ally Richard Perle once said that to express public doubts about the Iraq war "would be fatal." And, of course, the World Bank scandal is all about Iraq.

Wolfowitz is as responsible as anyone for that catastrophe, having been nearly perfect in getting every aspect of it wrong. When he left the Pentagon for the World Bank, in 2005, many saw an analogy to the move made by Robert McNamara in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. But McNamara was seeking atonement, while Wolfowitz wanted vindication—further evidence of the diminishing power of disgrace in American politics. Wolfowitz, who continues to enjoy the President's full support, has never uttered any serious self-criticism about the war. Like Al Capone, who was nailed on tax evasion, and Alberto Gonzales, who as the White House counsel opened the door to torture, Wolfowitz is being hounded for the blunder because he couldn't be got for the crime. The press is more comfortable with—in fact, is better at—catching important people in fibs and flip-flops than in making independent judgments about something like a war.

George Tenet's style is more subtle and complex. In his book, not admitting a mistake begins with admitting a mistake, then creating an impression of anguished self-scrutiny, which almost immediately dissolves in a shower of equally anguished claims of mitigating circumstances. Addressing the C.I.A.'s failure to adequately alert the F.B.I. that a known terrorist, soon to be a 9/11 hijacker, had a visa to the United States, Tenet writes, "No excuses. However," he adds, "overworked men and women who, by their actions, were saving lives around the world all believed the information had been shared with the F.B.I." It is the same with the slam-dunk quote, with Colin Powell's C.I.A.-approved speech to the United Nations, with the Medal of Freedom the President gave Tenet: the author agonizes just long enough to absolve himself of real blame. Tenet's self-defense is that he's a good-hearted, hardworking guy. And we can only assume from the book's gentle treatment of Bush that he still has the confidence of the President.

These styles of unaccountability would be private moral failings if the stakes were lower. But under the Bush Administration no senior civilian official or military officer has been held responsible for what will probably turn out to be the greatest foreign-policy disaster in American history. (Donald Rumsfeld was thrown overboard only after he became too much trouble politically.) Those in highest authority have been kept in office (Dick Cheney), promoted (Gonzales, Condoleezza Rice), honored with medals (Tenet, General Tommy Franks, Paul Bremer), or sent off with encomiums (Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld). Generals who held command over chaos and looming defeat have received additional stars and more powerful posts, such as George Casey, Jr., who was promoted earlier this year to Army chief of staff. Recently, an Army lieutenant colonel and Iraq veteran named Paul Yingling published an essay in the Armed Forces Journal, entitled "A Failure in Generalship." Yingling's open indictment of a military leadership composed of yes-men was the first by an active-duty officer during the Iraq war, and it expressed in analytical terms a simmering rage among lower-ranking soldiers. "A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war," he wrote.

Eventually, war enforces its own accountability—though heads might not roll, bodies will render a final judgment—but the point in punishing failure is to correct mistakes before a war is lost. Bush's refusal to do so has come at an unimaginably high cost, which will include his own legacy. The most common explanation for this stance is his loyalty to people loyal to him, but folly on this scale is never entirely personal. Bush represents the apotheosis, and perhaps the demise, of politics as war by other means. Bring overwhelming force to the political battlefield without apology, this deluded ideology holds, and reality—even a real war—will take care of itself. ♦

Illustration: Tom Bachtell


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Thursday, May 17, 2007

 

The Guardian: This perfect storm will finally destroy the neocon project



This perfect storm will finally destroy the neocon project



Americans are sick of the unrepentant arrogance of this elite. But the realisation has come at a very heavy cost

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Friday May 11, 2007
The Guardian

Now and again people have found themselves in places where the course of history was dramatically changed: Paris in 1789, Petrograd in 1917, Berlin in 1989. Sometimes the feeling of momentous change is illusory. When Tony Blair won his first election 10 years ago, perfectly sane people proclaimed that "these are revolutionary times". As most of us realised long before his ignominious departure, that was just what they weren't.

And yet to visit the US at present, as I have done, is to experience an overwhelming sensation of drastic impending change. It's not merely that President Bush, to whom Blair so disastrously tethered himself, is "in office but not in power". Most Americans can't wait for him to go, Congress is beyond his control, and the Senate majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, has told him that the war in Iraq is lost - for which statement of the obvious Reid was accused of "defeatism" by the vice-president, Dick Cheney.

Besides that the portents range from Paul Wolfowitz's travails at the World Bank to the Senate interrogation of Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, and the trial of Conrad Black. This might sound like the "succession of small disasters, oh trifling in themselves", in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On ("a Foreign Secretary's sudden attack of dysentery at the funeral of George V, an American ambassador found strangled in his own gym-slip...") And yet there really is an observable pattern.

Along with the collapse of Bush's authority, all these episodes are connected to the great disaster in Iraq. And all illustrate the hubristic, impenitent arrogance of the people who have been guiding America's destiny - as well as ours, alas - for the past six years. What one senses so acutely are the conditions building for a political perfect storm, which will engulf and destroy the whole neoconservative project.

In Washington I took part in a debate with Christopher Hitchens, my old sparring partner and drinking companion (mots justes, all of them), who supports Bush with a defiance worthy of a better cause. He surpassed himself by insisting that his friend Wolfowitz is a wronged man. A World Bank committee reportedly disagrees, and has found that Wolfowitz did violate the bank's rules in the matter of his lady friend's salary.

But in any case everyone else in Washington says the same thing: Wolfowitz cannot survive. His appointment was widely resented in the first place - the German, French, Dutch and Scandinavian governments have warned that they might withhold funds if he stays in office; and severe damage is being done to the organisation he claims to have at heart by his refusal to accept reality.

Then again, detachment from reality is perhaps to be expected from one of the architects of the war, a man who thought that the Iraqis would rise up to greet the American army as liberators. As the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said, Wolfowitz and his cabal "do not seem to understand that being president of the World Bank is a privilege, not an entitlement".

Gonzales was just a Texan hack lawyer who acted as Bush's consigliere, but he made his contribution to the great enterprise when he ruled that torture could be justified in the "war on terror". His Senate hearing provided a little comic relief, what with his acute amnesia followed by the deathless admission that "I now understand there was a conversation with myself and the president". One day Blair may understand that there was a conversation between himself and the president about the invasion of Iraq, and that his commitment to the war took place much earlier than he has ever admitted.

While Lord Black has never worked for the Bush administration, he was aligned with the neocon elite through the National Interest, the journal he used to publish, and he brought some of its members, such as Richard Perle, on to the board of his companies. Perle seems to have taken his fiduciary duties as lightly as he and his colleagues took the problems that would arise in Iraq as a result of the invasion. What has struck me about Black's trial was that we were hearing another version of the arrogance and denial we have heard from Wolfowitz and many others. It will give me no particular pleasure if my former employer is banged up, but his downfall is another grave blow for the neocons.

All of which has vital implications for British politics. Nicolas Sarkozy has been called "an American neoconservative with a French passport", which he is not. But Blair really is an American neoconservative with a British passport. He revealingly and accurately said that "there isn't a world of difference" between himself and the neocons politically, and his party must now, as it shakes off the burden of these past years, ask itself what, in that case, he was doing as Labour leader.

The Tories have questions of their own. Even the stupidest have grasped that the war and the American alliance are unpopular with the electorate, but they should now ask if sceptical, pragmatic Conservatism ever had anything in common with neoconservatism and its vast revolutionary scheme. One who did understand is Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP. Before the 2004 presidential election he said he wanted Bush re-elected: his presidency was halfway through an "experiment whose importance is almost literally earth-shattering" and should be played out to its inevitable failure.

But that failure must be demonstrated beyond contradiction. "The theory that liberal values and a capitalist system can be spread across the world by force of arms... should be tested to destruction ... The president and his neoconservative court should be offered all the rope they need to hang themselves."

His wish has come true; neocons are dangling all around us. In a flicker of self-knowledge, Wolfowitz told a recent World Bank meeting: "I understand that I've lost a lot of trust, and I want to build that trust back up." But it's too late, for him and all the other courtiers. They never really enjoyed the trust of most Europeans, let alone Africans and Asians, and they have now lost the trust of the American people.

All the readings on the barometer and the wind gauge say the same thing. The perfect storm is gathering. Unfortunately the collapse of the neocon project comes at a very heavy cost, not only to the people of Iraq but to all of us.

· Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of Yo, Blair!
wheaty@compuserve.com



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