As seen from Just Above Sunset

Sunday, 7 August 2005

Topic: Iraq

Letter from Baghdad

July 31 in Semantics: Thucydides got it right a long time ago… you would find a long discussion of how our government had decided to change how we discuss what we are doing around the world. The Global War on Terror (GWOT) was to become the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE) - a change in terms to better capture what we were doing. Yes, it was awkward, but not a bad idea. Precision is nice.

But GSAVE has gone the way of the great auk. We're back to GWOT. Disregard GSAVE. It’s dead. It's extinct. How that came about was covered Sunday, August 7, here. Folks got a bit ahead of themselves.

Major Cook in Baghdad has some thoughts:

Hey everyone, just hopping around the Net and had to dig in a little. For those who don't know, I am Alan's nephew.

As a soldier and an officer I prefer GWOT. Not because, as some of you may think, I am a warmonger and like the word "war" - but, because it defines what we are doing. Really Total Wars (like WWI and WWII) are Global Struggles - so why try to define it by its title? If people are too naive or uneducated to think that what we are doing is "global" and stretches from offensive military action, to election support, to eroding the terrorist's support base, to handing out toothbrushes and soccer balls in Mosul Iraq - then they are short-sighted and short-minded.

My personal opinion is that we need the commitment associated with a Total War - and that is not what the American Public nor much of the rest of the International communities want to give to the GWOT. Without that commitment, we might as well send invitations to Al Qaeda and Ansar Al Sunna (or/and while you have your pen out maybe Hezbollah) to come to America and attack us there.

So, anyway, I like that GWOT thing as long as it comes with all the bells and whistles.

v.r.
Major Brian Cook, US Army
Baghdad, Iraq
156 days to go.

My reply?

Thanks for the comment. Heck, they change the name and then change their minds. Geez. GWOT was fine with me, even if General Myers was uncomfortable with it. GSAVE just wasn't right, somehow.

As I used to teach general semantics the names folks choose for things always interest me. Yes, it's what you do, not so much what you call it. I guess we could call the whole business WWD - What We Do. But damn, that's just too vague.

I'll work on some alternatives.

Major Cook will be back here in Southern California on a fifteen-day leave starting around Labor Day. I'm not sure I'll have any ideas even by then.

As you recall, the idea is we're not fighting "terror" - as that's a tactic an enemy uses, and not the enemy itself. As General Myers himself pointed out, that's like saying WWII was "a war on submarines." No, we were fighting the fascist powers in Europe - Germany and Italy - and that Hitler fellow, and then fighting Japanese take-over-the-world imperialism. They used submarines, and so did we.

But whatever the name of the enemy is it has to be catchy, and sum everything up nicely. So drop this "terror" word? And use what?

We don't want to call it a war on Islam, and somehow a war on "Radical Islam" cuts too close too. Some have suggested a war on Islamacists (huh?) or a war Islamofascists (sounds too much like a carnival thing?) - but clearly "terror" and "terrorists" makes too vague an enemy - as some Irish fellows would fit here, and Basque folks, and folks in the new republics south of Russia, and the Tamil Tigers in Ceylon, and so on. We’re not fighting all of them. We need to be selective.

As is often said, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter - we ourselves didn't exactly play by the rules against the British in the 1770s after all. Dick Cheney himself, as a congressman way back when, famously held onto the position for years that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. Now Mandela is a grandfatherly hero. Some say when we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, then another on Nagasaki, and wiped out hundred of thousands of civilians, that was terrorism. Curtis LeMay, the man who ordered the firebombing of Tokyo, wiping out a third of the city, said if we had lost the war he would probably be tried as a war criminal. A war on "terror" presents problems.

So let's be selective and precise.

Is this a war on backward states that are troublesome, and happen to have a lot of oil? Is it a war on states at all? Is this a war on a stateless movement that wants us out of the Middle East, along with any number of the governments in power there now? Is this a war not against one thing in particular but for a finite resource, oil? No, that's too crude. (Bad pun.)

No, we seem to be up against an angry international movement, not tied to any formal government in any particular country, with a list of grievances all tied up with getting the west out of the Middle East entirely, with anger at everything that has happened or been done to the Palestinians since 1947, and with a demand for the freedom to practice a strict and repressive form of Islam all over the Middle East, where they say the folks want just that. They're saying, "Just go away and let us be." We say no. Oil and Israel seem curiously bound up with all this. We cannot abandon an ally we pretty much created, and we need the oil. There's a lot over there, so they have us over a barrel. (Another bad pun.) We cannot walk away from Israel. But they want to force the issues, with terror as the most effective tool they can find.

How do you sum up all that? We are fighting a loose, stateless confederation very angry people who feel they have been wronged, and may have been, and also may be quite crazy and know nothing of how the world really works. And they're pretty good at acts of terrorism. And they don't use submarines.

How do we name our enemy? And if we cannot name our enemy with some precision, then how do we win, or know when we have won?

Note this from Associated Press, Sunday, August 7 -

The mother of a fallen U.S. soldier who is holding a roadside peace vigil near President Bush's ranch shares the same grief as relatives mourning the deaths of Ohio Marines, yet their views about the war differ.

"I'm angry. I want the troops home," Cindy Sheehan, 48, of Vacaville, Calif., who staged a protest that she vowed on Sunday to continue until she can personally ask Bush: "Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for?"

Well, he died in the Iraq subset of the larger war against a loose, stateless confederation very angry people who feel they have been wronged, and may have been, and also may be quite crazy and know nothing of how the world really works, and are pretty good at acts of terrorism, and don't use submarines. How Iraq is involved in this? Let's see - no trace of WMD like we thought and no real connection to or support for the loose confederation, al Qaeda or whomever, like we thought - but now we have this general idea that a democracy there would help things, even if it turns out to be run by a group of fundamentalist Shiite guys who are all cozy with the fundamentalist Shiite Iraq bad guys....

I'm not sure she'd be happy with that.

But Major Cook is right about the W in GWOT - you don't have to worry about calling it a war, or a struggle, as long as you understand it's more than battles or sniping, and includes everything from criminal gumshoe work to PR, and from forensic accounting to trace the flow of funds to being the good guys and winning some trust. But it isn't easy, whatever it is.

I guess we could call the whole business WWD - What We Do.

Posted by Alan at 22:19 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Wednesday, 27 July 2005

Topic: Iraq

Tipping Point: Something Becomes News?

Over the last two weeks in these pages there has been a bit of discussion of how the government we established in Iraq, to replace the one dangerous one we removed, has been aligning itself with the government next door, Iran - cross-training troops, the new Iraqi PM laying the wreath at the grave of Ayatollah Khomeini on a visit to Tehran and all that. (See One Man's News Is Another Man's Tedium from July 17, 2005 and Non-Stories from last week.)

As you recall, the original Axis of Evil was Iraq, North Korea and Iran. The obvious question that came to mind was did we fight this war to install a government in Iraq that will join up with Iran in all sorts of military agreements? We created, possibly, a new client state of the worst-of-the worst, Iran? It seemed curious that that the government we brought into existence - to replace that of the former guy now in jail and awaiting trial - is aligning itself with Iran, who we have been told since the days just after 9/11 is just as bad (same axis) - and this was not all over the news.

Even more curious is the Sunni government of Saddam Hussein was quite secular, until some opportunistic Koran-thumping in the last weeks before the war. Iraq had one of the most progressive sets of laws protecting women's rights, they fought a long and costly war with the Shiite theocracy of Iran, and al Qaeda denounced Saddam as an enemy for his refusal to join the religious fanatics. They saw him as corrupt and worldly.

But now the Shiite fundamentalists have the power, the Sunni Baathist folks are out of luck, and the guys running this new fun house, like their Shiite counterparts next door in Iran, take their religion very seriously. Iran and the new Iraq have a lot in common.

But all this wasn't yet news, per se. It was quite startling, and made the whole war seem a tad pointless in a deeply ironic way - but to make it "news" there needed to be a tipping point.

That happened this week.

Wednesday, July 27, the Los Angeles Times, among others, reported on the draft of the new Iraqi constitution now in circulation (they're supposed to have it complete by August 15).

As the Times reports, it seems there are a few issues -

… the provisions on Islam and on the powers of the newly created federal regions are potentially divisive within Iraq. The powers of the regions are a concern for U.S. officials, as are the diminished rights of women.

The draft text states that "Islam is the official religion of the state. It is the basic source for legislation. It is forbidden to pass a law that contradicts its fixed rulings." That language is considerably stronger than the model set down by U.S. authorities before the hand-over of sovereignty last year, which stated that Islam would be "a source" for legislation.

Did Iran win this war? We won't get a unified county, women's rights will take a bit hit, and we get strict theocracy?

As for what it all means, Alex over at Martini Republic ("Lead, follow, or have a drink") sums it up this way:

The Chalabian fantasy of a pluralistic, Western-style democracy which the fools and dupes at PNAC who infest the Bush administration bought hook, line and sinker, continues to swirl down the toilet. The reality - a fundamentalist-Islamic regime in Iraq - continues to emerge as details of its new draft constitution comes to light.

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the gang of bumbling neocon assholes who Bush brought into office believed that Iraq was ripe for a pro-Western democracy, that American troops would be greeted as liberators, and that there would be virtually no resistance to US occupation once the regime's forces were destroyed or disarmed.

What's the line? "Rats! Foiled again!"

The Times also runs an item on all this upsetting folks. The guy Cheney and Rimfeld and that crew hand-picked to run the news Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi, did promise the new Iraq would be friendly to Israel. That didn't work out, and he didn't work out (or hasn't yet) - "Chalabi also promised his neoconservative patrons that as leader of Iraq he would make peace with Israel, an issue of vital importance to them. A year ago, Chalabi was riding high, after Saddam Hussein fell with even less trouble than expected."

As this Alec fellow had pointed out before, the Iraq draft permits Iraqi-born exiles to regain their citizenship - unless they are Jews. He notes draft Iraqi Charter also contains the following provision: "Any individual with another nationality (except for Israel) may obtain Iraqi nationality after a period of residency inside the borders of Iraq of not less than ten years for an Arab or twenty years for any other nationality..."

Oh well. And you might want to go read what he has to say about how the new plan takes away the rights of women.

His summary?

Bush has just about run the gamut of rationales for his rushed and forced decision to invade Iraq. First it was dismantling Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, which didn't exist; then it was disrupting the close ties and cooperation with Islamic fundamentalist terror groups which were similarly non-existent; finally, it was to put "Democracy on the March" in the Middle East, to show the way for Arabs to form a secular democratic government, which now looks like a march towards theocracy and Islamist rule. He's spent thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of cruelly maimed and wounded American soldiers, and hundreds of billions of American dollars, and the most favorable outcome we can hope to achieve is an Islamic republic, not terribly different from the neighboring Iranian regime Bush has labeled an axis of evil.

That's about right.

And for a full, careful analysis of the document, you might want to read what the University of Michigan professor, the Middle East expert Juan Cole, has to say in Draft Constitution Enshrines Islamic Law - but be prepared for a bit about the ambiguities particular Arabic phrases. It's rather academic. (No pun?)

Moving away from the academic, our columnist Bob Patterson listens to right-wing talk radio regularly, so we don't have to, and comments on Michael Savage.

I flipped on Michael Savage tonight and he is really ripping into Bush.

He says that the Iraq constitutional congress (or whatever they are calling it) says that the new constitution will found an Islamic Republic.

Savage says that's about the worst possible outcome there could be. He basically says all conservatives should punish the Bush Junta by voting for every Democrat in sight in 2006 and 2008.

Savage says that a Shiite Islamic Republic in Iraq would team up with the Shiite Islamic Republic in Iran.

If both countries voted for an Islamic Shiite leadership isn't that a triumph for the democratic way of life?

Gees, you'd think that Savage would be falling all over himself with praise for Bush's plan working out like that.

As this is being written he now is lamenting how much money it is costing and saying that an article in today's Wall Street Journal says it is all going to graft for the Iraqi politicians.

Gees! It is very disconcerting to listen to Savage and not have him blame everything on Clinton and heaping praise on Bush.

What's up with this?

Savage is hard to get. When he goes off like this he says later that he's just mocking the left - it's parody - and to others he says he really means it. He's needs his medication.

The larger issue is cognitive dissonance. How will the Bush side assimilate all this?

We shall see.

__

Unfamiliar with Michael Savage? You might want to checkout this from Paul Mulshine from the Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ).

Excerpts:

Al Franken and the other liberals are probably still wondering why they had such little luck in their efforts to start a talk-radio network to bash George Bush from the left. They didn't consider the obvious explanation. George Bush has his left flank nicely covered. It's on the right that he's weak.

That is the theory of Michael Savage. Savage is the most right- wing of the right-wing talkers on the national airwaves at the moment. He is based in San Francisco, but he can be heard in the New York area on WOR in the evenings. He is a welcome change from those Karl Rove clones Hush Bimbo and Sean Vanity.

"Hush Bimbo" and "Sean Vanity" are the names Savage has pinned on Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity of WABC. In doing so, he has sparked a war between the members of his "Savage Nation" (slogan: "Borders, language, culture") and the so-called "Bushbots," that sizable number of gullible Americans who can be convinced that whatever policy Bush adopts is a conservative policy.

"What makes Bush a conservative?" Savage asked when I got him on the phone the other day. "On the economy, Bush has got more governmental workers than anybody before him. He's ballooned the government."

As regards the so-called "war on terror," Savage points out that you can't win a war when you're afraid even to name the enemy.

"He's never mentioned Islamofascism," said Savage.

No, he hasn't. Even the French have been more willing to defend their borders, language and culture than Bush. He's a multiculturalist and a mushy one at that. Instead of reducing the reach of Islamic fundamentalism, Bush has managed in Iraq to get 1,700 Americans killed in a war that will create yet another Islamic republic. Just yesterday we learned that the new constitution in Iraq will incorporate sharia, Islamic law.

That's why we right-wing commentators believe the Iraq war has been the biggest blunder in America military history. As for Bimbo and Vanity, if I may employ Savage's labels, they are simply too uneducated to realize that the Iraq war represents a failed liberal exercise in nation-building.

"There is no college in Rush. There is no college in Hannity," said Savage. "He's a high school dropout. It's like listening to an uneducated, unthinking man on the radio."

Savage has a Ph.D. from Berkeley in epidemiology, an extremely challenging field. That makes him a bit overqualified for the verbal pro- wrestling matches that make up talk radio. But it also makes him interesting.

... Savage hears a lot from people who say that any criticism of Bush is a mark of disloyalty to conservatism.

Yeah, but PhD or not, he's a mean-spirited, nasty piece of work. MSNBC gave him a show a year or two ago, and that lasted only a few weeks. The final straw was when one caller raised the issue of rights for gays and Savage told him to just get AIDS and die, and hung up. So I'll let Bob listen all he wants and report back to me. I'd rather not listen to the guy.

Posted by Alan at 23:30 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 27 July 2005 23:34 PDT home

Monday, 9 May 2005

Topic: Iraq

Fretting: The Price of Failure in Iraq

Juan Cole, that professor of history at the University of Michigan, the middle-east expert on Iraq who travels down to Washington to testify before congress now and then is worried.

Why?

Because he reads Rolling Stone. And finds this in the latest issue.

The Quagmire
As the Iraq war drags on, it's beginning to look a lot like Vietnam
Robert Dreyfuss, May 05, 2005

The first paragraph opens with a simple contention: The news from Iraq is bad and getting worse with each passing day. And detail is provided.

The second paragraph opens with another: But to hear President Bush tell it, the war in Iraq is going very, very well. And detail is provided.

The third paragraph starts with thus: In private, however, senior military advisers and intelligence specialists on Iraq offer a starkly different picture. And detail is provided.

What follows that is an analysis, filled with carefully chosen detail, of the prospects, real, for a major civil war – with the Shiite folks on one side supported by Iran, the Sunni folks on the other with the rest of the Arab nations piling on, and the Kurds. Do we back the Kurds, along with Israel?

And the paragraph in Rolling Stone that gets Professor Cole really worried?

If it comes to civil war, the disintegration of Iraq will be extremely bloody. "The breakup of Iraq would be nearly as bad as the breakup of India in 1947," says David Mack, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state with wide experience in the Arab world. "The Kurds can't count on us to come in and save their bacon. Do they think we are going to mount an air bridge on their behalf?" Israel might support the Kurds, but Iran would intervene heavily in support of the Shiites with men, arms and money, while Arab countries would back their fellow Sunnis. "You'd see Jordan, Saudi Arabia, even Egypt intervening with everything they've got -- tanks, heavy weapons, lots of money, even troops," says White, the former State Department official. "If they see the Sunnis getting beaten up by the Shiites, there will be extensive Arab support," agrees a U.S. Army officer. "There will be no holds barred."

Oh crap. Why did he have to quote this Mack guy – the former assistant secretary of state who knows that part of the world well? And this White fellow too?

Well, does one listen to the State Department, really? Over the last several years it has become clear that the Defense Department holds all the cards, and is where the president turns on international matters. Powell was ignored, and Rice seems to be redoing State as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Defense ? doing her Mistress of Pain dominatrix thing in those black boots and putting the tough back in tough love. This is the new face (or foot) of diplomacy.

But the traditionalists at State, in sensible shoes, are worried, it seems ? that a civil war, if it comes, would pull in all the players in the region, and force our hand with the Kurds. What WOULD Israel do?

But will this happen?

Dreyfuss ends with this ?

In fact, it may already be too late to prevent Iraq from exploding. Iraq's new government is stuck in a fatal Catch-22: To have any credibility among Iraqis it must break with the U.S. and oppose the occupation, but it couldn't last a week without the protection of American troops. The Bush administration is also stuck. Its failure to stabilize Iraq, and the continuing casualties there, have led to a steady slide in the president's popularity: Polls show that a majority of Americans no longer think that the war in Iraq was worth fighting in the first place. Yet withdrawing from Iraq would only lead to more chaos, and the rest of the world has exhibited little interest in cleaning up America's mess. Of the two dozen or so countries that sent troops to Iraq, fewer and fewer remain: Spain, Portugal, Hungary and New Zealand have already quit, and the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Italy have announced they are getting out. Even if the United Nations agreed to step in, there is little or no chance that the administration will internationalize control over Iraq. In the face of a full-scale civil war in Iraq, says a source close to the U.S. military, Bush intends to go it alone.

And that fellow says - "Our policy is to make Iraq a colony. We won't let go."

We say that isn?t our policy. In a private email from an Army officer in Mosul I received this ?

The elections started the constitutional process which could throw even the most democratic societies (which this one is not yet) into a tail-spin. I offer to all of you to watch this as we try to create or at least grow democracy in a cycle of less than five years. It will become a model of either true success or discouraging defeat often not because we don't want it to work -- but rather because it is not up to us but the Iraqis and people like the UN and the Independent Elections Committee - Iraq or IECI.

So it is up to the Iraqis ? and to the Shiites backed by Iran, the Sunnis backed by the other Arab states, and the Kurds hoping we?ll back them, and maybe pull in Israel. Who knows what the Turkish government would make of that?

This should be interesting.

But Professor Cole makes one more point. He comments that ?the full horror of it? has been ?expertly laid out? by Dreyfuss, with ?an acumen and imagination one doesn't see often? in the mainstream media. As a former English teacher I thought it was a fine composition. Cole wonders why he was reading it in Rolling Stone.

We live in a bizarro American were Jon Stewart's Daily Show and Rolling Stone are the venues for the real news, while the major cable news networks have confused themselves with the sort of thing the local television stations out in places like Peoria do at 5:17 pm for their human interest segments.

Indeed. Of course, one must know what?s up with the Michael Jackson trial, and did you know that runaway bride served jail time for shoplifting several years ago ? something about $1,700 worth of merchandise she lifted from a mall. And the prosecutor in that case is now serving as her attorney? MSNBC carried the Associated Press story and it has been talked about all over the news.

So by default sources like the Daily Show and Rolling Stone are where we traditionalists ? news hounds - now turn for our fix of things that matter to us.

Jonathan Klein can have his new and improved CNN. Michael Jackson can be convicted or not, and the runaway bride can be as strange as she likes. The likelihood of a major war of many nations across the whole of the Middle East, drawing us in, along with Israel, may be of little concern to the target demographic of the corporate news providers ? Time-Warner, ABC-Disney, Murdoch?s News Corp, Viacom and whomever ? but I?m sure they?ll send crews of earnest young ?reporters? when it starts.

Until then those of us outside the target demographic will hunt around for information. It?s a do-it-yourself kind of thing.

Posted by Alan at 22:34 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Monday, 9 May 2005 22:36 PDT home

Monday, 22 November 2004

Topic: Iraq

It's not OUR fault!

The Washington Post gives us this on Saturday, November 20 -

Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government. After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from `wasting,' a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

Eric Alterman says this the following Monday -

So the next time some one asks you if you're glad that we've removed Saddam Hussein from power, you might want to ask them if they're glad that, after we've spent 200 billion dollars and killed tens of thousands of people, 400,000 Iraqi children are now suffering from acute malnutrition. That and oh yeah, the world hates us and the pool of Al Qaeda recruits has been vastly increased. And oh yeah, I'm betting on a draft.

I say Eric has a bad attitude.

But he's not alone - Jeanne at Body and Soul adds this -

The main reason seems to be continuing lack of access to clean water, which can cause chronic diarrhea. Other things hurt as well: humanitarian organizations like CARE and Doctors Without Borders have had to leave as it became more and more dangerous to work there; Iraqi doctors are prime targets for criminals. But mostly children are malnourished because we've done a worse job than Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War in getting clean water to them.

News like this continues to stun me because even though I opposed the war, and even though I realized, after reading about the neglect of Afghanistan, that no one in the Bush administration knew or cared anything about humanitarian work, and even though I worried about the way they were undercutting NGOs before the war even began, I thought that repairing the infrastructure would be a high priority - one that we paid more than we should for, because there had to be a little sugar on top for the FOGs (otherwise known as the Friends of George), but nevertheless I was certain that even the FOGs realized that they had to do a better job than Saddam Hussein at filling basic human needs.

I was horribly na?ve. I thought they were con artists, not thugs.

The war fans will whine that there's nothing we can do while we're under attack, but that's getting everything backwards. If you're taking credit for "helping" Iraqis then the first priority - the only real priority - is getting food, water, and medicine to people who need it. Nothing else matters if you don't succeed at that. No excuses are acceptable.

... the only interest this story has generated is among conservatives condemning the Washington Post for blaming America for problems caused by insurgents.

So it's not OUR fault - if you believe the guys we reelected for their moral values.

Yep. Right.

And this?

It Hurts, but Don't Stop
Michael Kinsley, The Washington Post, Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page B07

Has there ever before been a war that so many people disapproved of but so few wanted to stop? Have the reasons for starting a war ever been so thoroughly discredited without turning into reasons for ending it?

[ ... fascinating body of text follows that argues there is no anti-war movement because after Vietnam we decided we had to "support the troops" and now we cannot oppose, or even criticize, any war we get into, however stupidly we get into it, no matter how badly it's run and no matter how much real damage it does, because we have to support the troops ... ]

... The lead headline in last Monday's Los Angeles Times was "Iraqi City Lies in Ruins." That would be Fallujah, a metro area of 300,000 people that many Americans had never heard of until we felt impelled to destroy it. And our reasons were neither trivial nor contemptible. They followed with confident logic from the premise that Saddam Hussein was an intolerable danger to the United States. If so, he had to be taken down. And if that destabilized the country, we had to occupy it for a while and calm it down. And you can't run a national occupation with rebels occupying a major city, so you have to besiege the city and kill a lot of people and leave the place "in ruins."

An American general in Vietnam famously said, "We had to destroy the village to save it." This has become the definitive expression of the macabre futility of war. Last week we destroyed an entire city to save it (progress!), but our capacity to find that sort of thing ironic seems to have become shriveled and harmless.

We've been here before. We're here again. But we have no antiwar movement. But we have messed up. Big time.

Time to start a revolution, and line them all up against the wall.

Posted by Alan at 20:55 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Thursday, 16 September 2004

Topic: Iraq

Trends: The rolling stone gathers speed...

Previously here the suggestion was that this week a new narrative started gathering momentum - a new meme, a newly accepted axiomatic sense of what is an actual fact.

That is the idea that we have lost the war in Iraq. You saw it one the blogs, and then more and more in the major media - and it got a major push from Newsweek and media interviews its editors. And this does not seem to be coming from the Democrats assailing Bush - but seem rather a simultaneous awakening by news folks and military folks. Things are bad.

Thursday we see a major leap. The White House has been sitting on an internal report since July - a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate - that says that there are only three possible scenarios now. The best? That would be "a tenuous stability" - but that's unlikely. The second? That would be where "increased extremism and fragmentation in Iraqi society impede efforts to build a central government and adversely affect efforts to democratize the country." The third is an all out civil war in Iraq by 2005, where the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds have it out and we have to deal with that. The document was first reported by the New York Times on its web site Wednesday night.

The Associated Press summary is here - and it is not pretty.

Much of this comes from, of course, a highly placed US official, who, late Wednesday, spoke on the condition of anonymity. I wonder who that was, and if he or she has good insurance? It does, after all, seem unwise to say this -

It "would be fair" to call the document "pessimistic," the official added. But "the contents shouldn't come as a particular surprise to anyone who is following developments in Iraq. It encapsulates trends that are clearly apparent."

The intelligence estimate, which was prepared for Bush, considered the window of time between July and the end of 2005. But the official noted that the document draws on intelligence community assessments from January 2003, before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deteriorating security situation there.

So. We shouldn't be surprised, even as day after day the president tells us we are making progress in Iraq.

Well, if you say it again and again, and really believe it to be so, and if you keep your resolve and never waver, then you can magically make it so. It's that Tinkerbell thing again - clap loud and long enough and Tinkerbell won't die, and a little fairy dust and you really can fly, if you believe strongly enough. No wonder Bush will easily win the election. We all want to fly off to Never-Never Land with that sexy little Tinkerbell. We want to believe. And we'll toss aside that Kerry guy who says we should be realistic. This is America, where, with hard work and never giving in to self-doubt, and with belief in yourself, you can be or do anything you want. Anyone can be president, even George Bush.

And who wants to stomp on these dreams? Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and the leaders of the other intelligence agencies who approved this fifty-page intelligence document. Losers, all of them.

Reactions?

In a conference call arranged by the John Kerry presidential campaign, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., called on the White House to release the new assessment. "The American people need to know the truth," he said Thursday.

Do we?

AP does note that State Department officials stressed areas of progress in Iraq since the United States turned over political control of Iraq to an interim government on June 28. They cited advances in generating electricity, producing oil and creating jobs.

Yep. They used the word "advances" as you see. But on the ground?

See We Are Losing The War In Iraq - quick summary from Oliver Willis.

Willis cites the Financial Times (UK) - hardly a lefty organization - saying we seem to have lost control of the one safe place for Americans in the capital, the Green Zone in Baghdad -

US military officers in Baghdad have warned they cannot guarantee the security of the perimeter around the Green Zone, the headquarters of the Iraqi government and home to the US and British embassies, according to security company employees.

At a briefing earlier this month, a high-ranking US officer in charge of the zone's perimeter said he had insufficient soldiers to prevent intruders penetrating the compound's defences.

The US major said it was possible weapons or explosives had already been stashed in the zone, and warned people to move in pairs for their own safety. The Green Zone, in Baghdad's centre, is one of the most fortified US installations in Iraq. Until now, militants have not been able to penetrate it.

Oh well. How did Rumsfeld put it? Stuff happens? This seems to be an indication, with the "no go" zones mentioned previously, that things are getting far worse. Perhaps we should take care of Iraq remotely, from Qatar or Bahrain, using remote drones and calling in air strikes. We could relocate our Iraq embassy to, say, Portugal, where no one pays attention to anything. Nothing much ever happens there.

Willis also cites the Bush-supporting Wall Street Journal as they report those fighting us are merging now into a unified force -

Iraqi government officials are especially concerned that the violence in Baghdad in the past week may be fueled in part by growing support for the insurgents in the capital and growing contact with rebel groups active in the countryside to Baghdad's north.

Many U.S. military and Iraqi government officials are focusing on the stronghold of Fallujah, which they suspect the rebels are using as an operational center to launch attacks west of Baghdad and within the city.

"The insurgents are no longer operating in isolated pockets of their own. They are well-connected and cooperating," said Sabah Kadhim, a senior adviser to Iraq's Interior Ministry, which oversees the police and security around the country.

Well, that is progress, but not the sort Bush is envisioning. The folks who oppose us are getting quite organized.

And Willis points out an AP report that the attacks on our guys are getting far more sophisticated -

The spike in bloodshed - more than 200 dead in four days - has stifled American hopes that the transfer of sovereignty and the prospect of a democratic vote in four months could take the steam out of the uprising and pave the way for a reduction in U.S. troops.

Instead, there are signs the Americans and their Iraqi allies are facing an enemy more determined than ever. Insurgents have learned from past mistakes and shifted strategy, cooperating more closely with each other and devising new ways to put their relatively simple arsenal to treacherous use.

Yep, fewer random car bombs and more trained snipers, and carefully targeted car bombs. Great.

Willis himself says this -

This is the story. Not the memos. Not the medals. Not even the vote to go to war or not (though who got us into this in the first place bears remembering). We are losing the war in Iraq. We can't secure the green zone - which is where all our people are - and the rest of the country is ripe with anti-American sentiment. This nonsense about handing over control to the Iraqis and having elections within the year is a sham. At best we would be handing the keys to a puppet regime with no mandate, at worst there will be a civil war. Either way, because we have never set a real exit strategy for Iraq, any move on our part gives the appearance of capitulation. It's not that the people of Iraq aren't smart enough to have a western-style democracy... it's pretty obvious that they don't want one. Even the moderates seem to have a preference for an Iranian style theocracy (the most powerful person in Iraq is Ayatollah Sistani).

At this point, with all the international commitments we have on our plate and the priority of destroying Al Qaeda and its support network, it may be time to limit the scope of Operation: Iraqi Freedom (elimination of chemical/biological/nuclear raw materials - what ever little bit there may be, and the destruction of the terrorist networks that have taken root in Iraq since we invaded) and set the timetable for our troops to be redeployed against Al Qaeda operating elsewhere, or in the case of reservists, to come home.

Iran and North Korea are fast developing nuclear weapons. The Israeli-Palestinian standoff will explode again and again - and Sharon will bluster, with our help, and Arafat be as foolish as usual. The world is running short on oil, and Putin is doing his Mussolini thing and stopping popular elections in the name of fighting terror. We are carrying an enormous federal deficit that will impoverish us for decades, or end most government social programs. Forty-four million of our people are without any health coverage, and millions more out of work. And of course Al Qaeda is doing just fine and that Osama fellow is nowhere to be found, if he's still alive, which may not matter now as his franchisees are thriving.

So what are we doing in Iraq? We lost, or are well on our way to losing. Of course the odious Saddam is gone, and his two thug sons. But now what?

A line that always gets people from "The Man from La Mancha" is this - The only battles worth fighting are losing battles. So noble, and so romantic. And so stupid.

But we love it. Kerry doesn't stand a chance.

Posted by Alan at 17:28 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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