By PATRICK COCKBURN
The old war was primarily between the Sunni community -- which contested the American occupation -- and an Iraqi government dominated by the Shia in alliance with the Kurds. That conflict has not ended. But the most important battles likely to be waged in Iraq this year will be within the Shia community. They pit the US-backed Iraqi government against the supporters of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who represents the impoverished Shia masses of Iraq. ‘The Shia are the majority in Iraq and the Sadrists are a majority of this majority,’ a former Shia minister told me. ‘They make up 30 to 40 per cent of the total Iraqi population.’ The population of Iraq is 27 million: on this ex-minister’s calculation, up to ten million of them support Muqtada.
The result of underestimating the fighting power and popular support of the Sadrists was demonstrated at the end of March in the battle for Basra, which was unexpectedly launched by Nouri al-Maliki with his sudden announcement that he was going to end militia rule in the city, Iraq’s second largest. He left the Green Zone in Baghdad to take command, provoking derisive references among Iraqi politicians to ‘General Maliki’. He demanded that militiamen hand over their weapons in three days and promise to reject violence for good; he threatened to crush them if they did not. George Bush called it ‘a defining moment’ for the new Iraq.
For once Bush may be right; though, as when he stood beneath the triumphant slogan ‘Mission Accomplished’ in 2003, he may not understand the seriousness of the fight he is getting into. The Shia community is splitting apart after five years of solidarity. It is a split not just between the government and the militias but between rich and poor. Maliki’s main supporters -- his own Dawa party has a small base -- are the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and its Badr militia. ISCI draws its support primarily from the established Shia clergy, the merchants and the Shia middle class. But ever since ISCI was founded in Iran in 1982 at an early stage in the Iraq-Iran war the party has always lacked popular backing. It won an unsavory reputation for interrogating and torturing Iraqi prisoners: this did not stop it becoming a firm ally of the US occupation after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Muqtada has long tried to avoid an all-out military confrontation with his Shia rivals while they still have the support of the US. On April 7 he even said he would dissolve the Mehdi Army if asked to do so by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and other leading Shia clerics in Iran. There is less to this promise than meets the eye. It is easy enough for Iraqi militias to disband, take their weapons with them, and reassemble the following morning.
The new conflict has another aspect: it is also a proxy struggle between the US and Iran. This has been going on ever since the American invasion. But, for all Washington’s attempts to prove otherwise, the Sunni insurgency was primarily supported by the Sunni Arab states to the west of Iraq. The Sadrists have traditionally been highly suspicious of the Iranians. From the beginning, Muqtada was the only Shia leader who has always opposed the US occupation. His militiamen fought two furious battles with US Marines for the Shia holy city of Najaf in April and August 2004. They suffered heavy casualties, but survived; and Muqtada became politically stronger. In public he said he was shifting from military to political resistance. But, in confronting the US, he is forced to look to Iranian political and military support. ‘The Iranians cannot afford to see Muqtada eliminated or seriously weakened,’ says Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi political scientist. In Iran’s battle with the US for influence over the Iraqi Shia, Muqtada plays too important a role for Iran to see him crushed.
Confrontation, and even war, with Iran is politically easier to sell in the US than support for the continuing war inside Iraq. The Democratic Party may want to withdraw troops from Iraq but its leaders try to outdo each other in condemning Iran. General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, has been blaming Iran as the hidden hand behind the latest fighting in Baghdad and Basra. He dID the same when he appeared before Congress on April 8 to give evidence about why, over the last few months, Iraq has become more and not less violent. He had a lot of explaining to do. With US television showing armed men in the streets, burned-out vehicles and smoke rising over Baghdad and Basra, his claims about the success of the ‘surge’ looked much less convincing than they did at the end of last year.Petraeus says that the number of American soldiers in Iraq should not be reduced below the level they were at before the surge started -- which makes his claims of military success look dubious. The 3.2 million Iraqis, one in nine of the population, who fled to Syria, Jordan and elsewhere in Iraq, have not been coming home because they think it is too dangerous for them to do so; they are right.
I drove around central Baghdad just before the latest round of fighting between the Americans and the Iraqi army against the Mehdi Army. It was a little easier to travel than a year earlier. In the mixed Yarmouk district of the city on the west bank of the Tigris River, the hospital used to be run by the Mehdi Army; Sunni were terrified to go there. Now the militiaman have left and Sunni are going to the hospital again. At an intersection half a mile away there used to be a Sunni-controlled checkpoint: any Shia who was detected at it was killed on the spot and their bodies left lying beside the road. Now the checkpoint has gone. I visited al-Kindi Street, full of doctors’ offices and coffee shops: now, once more, there are people in the street.
But the revival of city life is never necessarily lasting: things, I thought, could change within hours. I remembered Beirut during the Lebanese civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s: there would be lulls in the fighting for weeks or months on end and Hamra Street in the centre of Ras Beirut would once again be filled with bustling shoppers and the beaches would be crowded. The Lebanese would say dolefully that nothing was solved and the fighting would begin sooner or later: they were always right. In the case of Baghdad this March the lull ended sooner than expected. I had taken a look at the luxury shops in the al-Mansur district -- many were open -- but a few days later a friend was walking there when several four-wheel drives with darkened windows appeared. He assumed they were carrying senior government officials -- but then the windows were rolled down and Mehdi Army militiamen opened fire, killing one policeman and wounding two others.
I spent a night in al-Khadamiyah, an ancient Shia district centred on a Shia shrine surrounded by shops selling gold jewellery and cheap restaurants for pilgrims. Some Shia friends suggested I come with them to the shrine; if anybody asked who I was, they advised me to say I was a Turk. This seemed a dangerous idea: we gave it up as we approached the shrine and saw the tight security. We went to see Ayatollah Hussein al-Sadr, a relative of Muqtada of moderate views, who was giving his blessings to Shia dignitaries, and we spent the night in a hotel which is, in effect, his guesthouse. There were plenty of soldiers and police in the streets but I would not have stayed if I had not been under the protection of the Ayatollah. Again the appearance of calm was deceptive. Two weeks later American helicopters were bombarding Mehdi Army positions in al-Khadamiyah.
Fighting between ISCI and the Sadrists has been increasing over the past year but local turf wars had never previously spilled over into all of Shia Iraq. As the Iraqi army started to advance in Basra at the end of March it became clear that Maliki’s offensive was targeted solely against the Mehdi Army. It did not touch the other two main militias in Basra, the Badr Organisation and Fadhila, a Sadrist splinter group powerful in the oilfields. Iraqis were not persuaded by Maliki’s argument that his aim was to eliminate criminal gangs in Basra. Banditry is obviously rife: a businessman friend told me that, to move a container from Umm Qasr port near Basra to Arbil in northern Iraq, he had recently paid $500 in transport fees and $3000 in bribes. Given that government officials in Baghdad seldom do anything without a bribe, Maliki’s claim that he would end criminality in Basra was never going to be convincing.
That air of fantasy surrounded all Maliki’s demands. The government had about 15,000 troops and the same number of policemen in Basra, but they were never going to penetrate the narrow alleyways in the sprawling slums in the north and west of the city. In most cases they did not even try. Muqtada’s forces responded, as they have in the past when facing a single attack, by spreading the battle to Baghdad and every other Shia city and town where their forces are strong. Local Sadrists were soon telling Iraqi police and soldiers at checkpoints in and around Sadr City -- often referred to as a district of Baghdad though in reality a twin city with a population of two million -- to get out and go home. Instead of militiamen handing over their weapons to the Iraqi security forces, Iraqis found they were watching television pictures of Iraqi police surrendering their weapons -- and receiving a sprig of olive and a Koran in return -- from clerics supporting Muqtada.
There were other humiliations for the government. For months the main Iraqi spokesman for the surge -- its official Iraqi name is the Baghdad Security Plan -- has been Tahsin al-Shaikhly. He regularly appeared on television to claim that security was improving, electricity supplies becoming more plentiful and life in Baghdad generally getting easier. Two days after Maliki’s offensive began, al-Shaikhly was kidnapped. According to eyewitnesses, the kidnappers -- al-Shaikhly himself tells a slightly different story -- were uniformed Iraqi police commandos driving a dozen Toyota Land Cruisers. They shot dead al-Shaikhly’s three bodyguards, set fire to his house and took him to a safe house from which he was allowed to telephone a television station in order to call on Maliki not to attack the Mehdi Army.
Why did the Iraqi army fail? Training a new army has been at the centre of British and American policy for the last four years. At checkpoints in Baghdad these days, Iraqi soldiers now look better armed; they use modern communications equipment and wear bullet-proof vests. A few years ago Iraqi soldiers were driving around Baghdad in ageing white pick-up trucks that were previously used to carry cabbages and cauliflowers to market; now they have second-hand American Humvees. Well-paid by Iraqi standards, and backed up by US air power, the army was expected to give a better account of itself. Yet, in gun battles in towns and cities across southern Iraq, the army either failed to fight or was driven back by the militiamen. Four days into Maliki’s offensive, the Mehdi Army controlled three-quarters of Basra and half of Baghdad. To prevent a complete rout, American helicopters and attack aircraft started to take an increasing part in the fighting. The isolated British soldiers at Basra airport -- 4,100 were stationed there -- fired their artillery in support of beleaguered Iraqi army units. A curfew in Baghdad caused resentment because people had been taken by surprise by the outbreak and had not, as they usually do when they see a crisis coming, stocked up on food and supplies.
As the Iraqi army began to fail the Americans moved quickly to prop it up. Air controllers to marshal air strikes were sent to Iraqi army units. A team of senior American advisers was sent to Basra. This may explain why Muqtada agreed to a ceasefire. The Mehdi Army had already shown it could fight off the Iraqi army and police, but the Americans might be a different matter. Even so, the short war between Muqtada and the government was revealing as to who really holds power in Iraq. A delegation of Shia leaders went to Iran. They talked to Muqtada in the holy city of Qom, and to General Qassem Sulaymani, the head of the Quds Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who oversees Iranian involvement in Iraq. He has long been an American bête noir and last year US special forces tried to kidnap him during an official visit to the Kurdish president. Maliki seems to have been told of the agreement only after it was reached, but its terms were that the Mehdi Army would not give up its arms, the government offensive would stop and militia members would no longer be arrested without warrants. The Americans, who normally react furiously to any sign of Iranian interference in Iraq, said nothing about the fact that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were negotiating peace terms between the government and its enemies.
The Americans said nothing because the abortive attack on Basra was, for them, a nightmare. The claim that the surge was the first step in restoring peace to |Iraq was exposed as a myth. American military casualties might be down -- but some two thousand Iraqis were killed in March. American politicians ran for cover. While I was in Baghdad in March, Senator John McCain visited, at the same time as Vice-President Dick Cheney. Both expressed confidence that security was improving. McCain happily told CNN that Muqtada’s ‘influence has been on the wane for a long time’. Three weeks later, McCain was denying he had ever said such a thing; what he had said, he insisted, was that ‘he was still a major player and his influence is going to have to be reduced and gradually eliminated.’ Given that Muqtada is the most powerful Shia leader, and that his militiamen had just shown they could defeat the Iraqi army, this would mean that McCain, if elected president, would fight a war with Iraq’s 17 million Shia.
By this time, American generals and politicians were saying that they had known nothing about Maliki’s disastrous offensive until the last minute -- conveniently forgetting that the Americans had been urging Iraqi prime ministers to attack the Mehdi Army since 2004. It was the failure of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the previous Iraqi prime minister, to initiate such an attack that turned the Americans against him. Four years ago, Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq, was demanding that Iraqi ministers refer to the Mehdi Army as ‘Muqtada’s militia’. Bremer called him an Iraqi Hitler in the making and made a disastrous attempt to eliminate him in April 2004, an attempt that was similar in many ways to Maliki’s offensive on Basra last month. Bremer too grossly underestimated Muqtada: his supporters took over most of southern Iraq in a few days.
The Iraqi government, ISCI, the Kurds and the Americans all felt threatened by Muqtada’s men. The Green Zone was coming under daily fire from Sadr City. ISCI in particular wants to defeat the Sadrists before the provincial elections in October, in which it is expected to do badly and the Sadrists well. The government dismissed soldiers who had refused to fight in the March campaign and is reported to have recruited 25,000 tribal levies. The Americans have long been hoping to repeat their triumph in Anbar province in 2007, when Sunni tribal leaders allied themselves with the US against al-Qaida in Iraq. Maliki’s advisers felt that if the Iranians had not interfered then the army might have given a better account of itself. But from the Sadrist point of view the humiliation of the government was almost too complete. The Sadrists admitted that they were becoming isolated. ‘A decision has been taken,’ Maliki said in early April. The Sadrists will ‘no longer have a right to participate in the political process, or take part in the upcoming election, unless they end the Mehdi Army’.
The statement was hypocritical: the Kurdish peshmerga and ISCI’s Badr Organisation are both militias that have been effectively incorporated into the Iraqi army and police. But the Sadrists were in a difficult position. Shia solidarity was breaking down. Muqtada has always been good tactician. He called a million person demonstration for 9 April, the fifth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein, to demand an end to the occupation. ‘He needs,’ an Iraqi observer said, ‘to show that his movement’s popularity is still as great as its military strength.’
Patrick Cockburn is the Ihe author of "Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq."
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Saturday, April 19, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
Bush’s Victory: Blame the Democrats
By Andrew Greeley
The argument in the Capitol last week was about victory. Legislators such as Sen. John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham believe, against all the evidence, that victory in Iraq is possible. They insist like puppets that “the surge has been a success” and see signs of victory. The president proclaims that we are winning the war. Gen. David Petraeus says that the progress is fragile and reversible, that there is not yet light at the end of the tunnel, victory is not right around the corner and the champagne is still at the back of the refrigerator.
We know that many in the Pentagon think victory in Iraq is impossible. Navy Adm. William Fallon was dumped because he agreed with them and disagreed with Petraeus. He argued that the military is traumatized by the duration of the war and the constant increase in tours of duty. Fallon was, some of the neocons say, guilty of insubordination. If you tell the civilian leaders that this war cannot be won and that military is stretched to its limit, you’re insubordinate. The president knows better.
There was a temporary decline in violence because Petraeus bought out the Sunni tribes, and Moqtada al-Sadr, for reasons of his own, called a truce — perhaps at the instigation of his Iraqi allies. But violence was in full swing again while the congressional testimony raged on. About 1,500 members of the Iraqi Army deserted in the middle of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s attack on the Shites in southern Iraq. Yet the neocon twins who thought this war up, Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol, smilingly proclaim that we’re on the road to victory.
Petraeus thinks victory will be an Iraq relatively free of violence. The president seems to think victory means that Iraq becomes a free and independent democratic state. The latter will certainly not happen, not in nine months. But his real goal is to keep the war going until his term is over. Then he can accuse the Democrats of “losing Iraq.” This recalls the Republican strategy of the early 1950s, when the Democrats were accused by the same kind of jingoistic hyper-patriots of losing China. No one seemed to ask whether China was ours to lose.
Could the war have been won? The question assumes that he went to war with clear goals — and clear means of winning it. Perhaps with the 300,000 troops that Gen. Eric Shinseki had requested, a sophisticated occupation policy and shrewd administrators to sustain the initial victory, the war could have ended four years ago. However, as is evident, most Iraqis don’t want to be occupied by Americans. Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thought that “shock and awe” would do the trick with less than half that number. The conceit that an extra couple of brigades would end violence and force the Iraqi government to get its act together was of the same order of fatuous folly.
Thus President Bush and those around him can go to their graves convinced that they were on the edge of victory, but the Democrats stole it away from them.
Some Democrats assure me that no matter who wins the primary, Democrats will win the election because of the war.
Don’t two-thirds of the American public think the war was a mistake in the first place? Can McCain win an election during a sharp recession and an ongoing war?
So the primary is really irrelevant.
Only if you believe Clinton’s fictionalized autobiography, in which she helped negotiate the peace in Northern Ireland, came under sniper fire in Bosnia and always opposed NAFTA — and thus can be trusted to tell the truth.
Andrew Greeley is a priest in good standing of the Archdiocese of Chicago for 52 years, a columnist for 40 years, a sociologist for 45 years, a novelist for 28 years, distinguished lecturer at the University of Arizona for 28, research associate at National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago for 46 years.
© Copyright 2008 Digital Chicago, Inc
The argument in the Capitol last week was about victory. Legislators such as Sen. John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham believe, against all the evidence, that victory in Iraq is possible. They insist like puppets that “the surge has been a success” and see signs of victory. The president proclaims that we are winning the war. Gen. David Petraeus says that the progress is fragile and reversible, that there is not yet light at the end of the tunnel, victory is not right around the corner and the champagne is still at the back of the refrigerator.
We know that many in the Pentagon think victory in Iraq is impossible. Navy Adm. William Fallon was dumped because he agreed with them and disagreed with Petraeus. He argued that the military is traumatized by the duration of the war and the constant increase in tours of duty. Fallon was, some of the neocons say, guilty of insubordination. If you tell the civilian leaders that this war cannot be won and that military is stretched to its limit, you’re insubordinate. The president knows better.
There was a temporary decline in violence because Petraeus bought out the Sunni tribes, and Moqtada al-Sadr, for reasons of his own, called a truce — perhaps at the instigation of his Iraqi allies. But violence was in full swing again while the congressional testimony raged on. About 1,500 members of the Iraqi Army deserted in the middle of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s attack on the Shites in southern Iraq. Yet the neocon twins who thought this war up, Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol, smilingly proclaim that we’re on the road to victory.
Petraeus thinks victory will be an Iraq relatively free of violence. The president seems to think victory means that Iraq becomes a free and independent democratic state. The latter will certainly not happen, not in nine months. But his real goal is to keep the war going until his term is over. Then he can accuse the Democrats of “losing Iraq.” This recalls the Republican strategy of the early 1950s, when the Democrats were accused by the same kind of jingoistic hyper-patriots of losing China. No one seemed to ask whether China was ours to lose.
Could the war have been won? The question assumes that he went to war with clear goals — and clear means of winning it. Perhaps with the 300,000 troops that Gen. Eric Shinseki had requested, a sophisticated occupation policy and shrewd administrators to sustain the initial victory, the war could have ended four years ago. However, as is evident, most Iraqis don’t want to be occupied by Americans. Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thought that “shock and awe” would do the trick with less than half that number. The conceit that an extra couple of brigades would end violence and force the Iraqi government to get its act together was of the same order of fatuous folly.
Thus President Bush and those around him can go to their graves convinced that they were on the edge of victory, but the Democrats stole it away from them.
Some Democrats assure me that no matter who wins the primary, Democrats will win the election because of the war.
Don’t two-thirds of the American public think the war was a mistake in the first place? Can McCain win an election during a sharp recession and an ongoing war?
So the primary is really irrelevant.
Only if you believe Clinton’s fictionalized autobiography, in which she helped negotiate the peace in Northern Ireland, came under sniper fire in Bosnia and always opposed NAFTA — and thus can be trusted to tell the truth.
Andrew Greeley is a priest in good standing of the Archdiocese of Chicago for 52 years, a columnist for 40 years, a sociologist for 45 years, a novelist for 28 years, distinguished lecturer at the University of Arizona for 28, research associate at National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago for 46 years.
© Copyright 2008 Digital Chicago, Inc
Pentagon institute calls Iraq war 'a major debacle' with outcome 'in doubt'
Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.
The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.
The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.
It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center.
"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.
At the time the report was written last fall, more than 4,000 U.S. and foreign troops, more than 7,500 Iraqi security forces and as many as 82,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and tens of thousands of others wounded, while the cost of the war since March 2003 was estimated at $450 billion.
"No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel," wrote Collins, who was involved in planning post-invasion humanitarian operations.
The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.
"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East," the report continued.
The addition of 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq last year to halt the country's descent into all-out civil war has improved security, but not enough to ensure that the country emerges as a stable democracy at peace with its neighbors, the report said.
"Despite impressive progress in security, the outcome of the war is in doubt," said the report. "Strong majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal. Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq with an American army may be an Iraq after a rapid withdrawal of that army."
"For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a 'must win,' but for many others, despite obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a 'can't win.'"
The report lays much of the blame for what went wrong in Iraq after the initial U.S. victory at the feet of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. It says that in November 2001, before the war in Afghanistan was over, President Bush asked Rumsfeld "to begin planning in secret for potential military operations against Iraq."
Rumsfeld, who was closely allied with Vice President Dick Cheney, bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the report says, and became "the direct supervisor of the combatant commanders."
" ... the aggressive, hands-on Rumsfeld," it continues, "cajoled and pushed his way toward a small force and a lightning fast operation." Later, he shut down the military's computerized deployment system, "questioning, delaying or deleting units on the numerous deployment orders that came across his desk."
In part because "long, costly, manpower-intensive post-combat operations were anathema to Rumsfeld," the report says, the U.S. was unprepared to fight what Collins calls "War B," the battle against insurgents and sectarian violence that began in mid-2003, shortly after "War A," the fight against Saddam Hussein's forces, ended.
Compounding the problem was a series of faulty assumptions made by Bush's top aides, among them an expectation fed by Iraqi exiles that Iraqis would be grateful to America for liberating them from Saddam's dictatorship. The administration also expected that "Iraq without Saddam could manage and fund its own reconstruction."
The report also singles out the Bush administration's national security apparatus and implicitly President Bush and both of his national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, saying that "senior national security officials exhibited in many instances an imperious attitude, exerting power and pressure where diplomacy and bargaining might have had a better effect."
Collins ends his report by quoting Winston Churchill, who said: "Let us learn our lessons. Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. ... Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think that he also had a chance."
WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.
The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.
The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.
It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center.
"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.
At the time the report was written last fall, more than 4,000 U.S. and foreign troops, more than 7,500 Iraqi security forces and as many as 82,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and tens of thousands of others wounded, while the cost of the war since March 2003 was estimated at $450 billion.
"No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel," wrote Collins, who was involved in planning post-invasion humanitarian operations.
The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.
"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East," the report continued.
The addition of 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq last year to halt the country's descent into all-out civil war has improved security, but not enough to ensure that the country emerges as a stable democracy at peace with its neighbors, the report said.
"Despite impressive progress in security, the outcome of the war is in doubt," said the report. "Strong majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal. Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq with an American army may be an Iraq after a rapid withdrawal of that army."
"For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a 'must win,' but for many others, despite obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a 'can't win.'"
The report lays much of the blame for what went wrong in Iraq after the initial U.S. victory at the feet of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. It says that in November 2001, before the war in Afghanistan was over, President Bush asked Rumsfeld "to begin planning in secret for potential military operations against Iraq."
Rumsfeld, who was closely allied with Vice President Dick Cheney, bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the report says, and became "the direct supervisor of the combatant commanders."
" ... the aggressive, hands-on Rumsfeld," it continues, "cajoled and pushed his way toward a small force and a lightning fast operation." Later, he shut down the military's computerized deployment system, "questioning, delaying or deleting units on the numerous deployment orders that came across his desk."
In part because "long, costly, manpower-intensive post-combat operations were anathema to Rumsfeld," the report says, the U.S. was unprepared to fight what Collins calls "War B," the battle against insurgents and sectarian violence that began in mid-2003, shortly after "War A," the fight against Saddam Hussein's forces, ended.
Compounding the problem was a series of faulty assumptions made by Bush's top aides, among them an expectation fed by Iraqi exiles that Iraqis would be grateful to America for liberating them from Saddam's dictatorship. The administration also expected that "Iraq without Saddam could manage and fund its own reconstruction."
The report also singles out the Bush administration's national security apparatus and implicitly President Bush and both of his national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, saying that "senior national security officials exhibited in many instances an imperious attitude, exerting power and pressure where diplomacy and bargaining might have had a better effect."
Collins ends his report by quoting Winston Churchill, who said: "Let us learn our lessons. Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. ... Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think that he also had a chance."
The long haul
Leaving Iraq will be a logistical nightmare
By Capt. Timothy Hsia
The recent push by the White House to negotiate a pact with the government of Iraq concerning the long-term presence of U.S. service members in the country surprised many Americans but served as coda for Army logisticians. The fact is, the military continues to build and stockpile thousands of containers full of equipment in Iraq, despite the unresolved political infighting in Washington concerning whether U.S. troops will leave.
The decision to depart Iraq today would require the military to withdraw vast amounts of equipment that have accumulated over the course of numerous deployments in and out of the country. The giant bases in Iraq are the nodes through which American soldiers are resourced and sustained. The vast majority of media representatives spend their time at Baghdad International Airport or with the generals and ambassadors in the International Zone. However, these two sites are simply the lungs and brains of the war effort. The heart of operations is Logistical Support Area Anaconda in Balad, Iraq. LSA Anaconda is the epicenter of all supply transactions in Iraq. Upon entering LSA Anaconda, you cannot be faulted for forgetting that you are in a war zone. Sidewalks line the base, roads are well-networked, traffic is continuous and American shops are plentiful.
U.S. equipment dominates the landscape of Iraq. The T-barriers that cut through Baghdad serve as the most obvious imprint of American presence. Parts from broken-down vehicles, used fuel cans and donated generators are all evidence of the American war effort. Today, deployed units in Iraq not only bring the equipment organic to them but also inherit Theater Property Equipment — equipment procured for a previously deployed unit and passed on to an incoming unit as the first unit returns home.
Often, the problem for logisticians in Iraq is not whether the equipment exists in country but, rather, finding where the equipment resides. In this resource-rich environment, many logisticians find it hard to believe that the military will be leaving Iraq in the near future because of the preponderance of American equipment interspersed around the country. Military analysts often quote Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” Nonetheless, it seems political decisions are reflecting the ground truth of the war, which is that American materiel at bases such as LSA Anaconda will be difficult to deconstruct, and it will require a Herculean effort to return this equipment stateside.
Military bases in Iraq are not being downsized but, rather, improved and developed. The roads within the U.S. base at the Baghdad International Airport are being paved and expanded. Tents are being replaced with trailers and buildings. In some cases, the bases in Iraq are more resource-rich than U.S. military bases in Germany or stateside. Units preparing to deploy often find it difficult to procure equipment during their preparations because of the emphasis on funding units already in Iraq. Similarly, units redeployed from Iraq find that little funding is available to refurbish, reset and service equipment that has survived a year or more of combat operations. The vast majority of the billions of dollars a month the military spends is devoted solely to units in Iraq, at the expense of units that are not deployed. As a result, training for these units suffers and maintenance after a deployment is reduced.
American commanders and policymakers have also framed the drawdown of American troops on the premise that the Iraqi military is postured to assume security within the region. This assumption is flawed because Iraqi units are poorly equipped and continue to rely heavily on the U.S. for their logistical needs. Presently, the Iraqi military is unable to organize, maintain and sustain its forces for a prolonged period without the assistance of the U.S. military. U.S. Military Transition Teams embedded with Iraqi units often request support from U.S. units operating in the same region because they need supplies for the Iraqi units.
The political debate in Washington will continue concerning the future of American forces in Iraq. Nonetheless, the ground truth is that the military is logistically postured and positioned for a long, sustained war in Iraq. Any debate concerning the possible withdrawal of American forces should be realistic and focus on the arduous task of coordinating and moving all the equipment in Iraq.
Although Clausewitz’s dictum remains true, policymakers should not forget that policy decisions reflect and are affected by reality. The reality is that the accumulation of American equipment in Iraq will take months, if not years, to undo.
By Capt. Timothy Hsia
The recent push by the White House to negotiate a pact with the government of Iraq concerning the long-term presence of U.S. service members in the country surprised many Americans but served as coda for Army logisticians. The fact is, the military continues to build and stockpile thousands of containers full of equipment in Iraq, despite the unresolved political infighting in Washington concerning whether U.S. troops will leave.
The decision to depart Iraq today would require the military to withdraw vast amounts of equipment that have accumulated over the course of numerous deployments in and out of the country. The giant bases in Iraq are the nodes through which American soldiers are resourced and sustained. The vast majority of media representatives spend their time at Baghdad International Airport or with the generals and ambassadors in the International Zone. However, these two sites are simply the lungs and brains of the war effort. The heart of operations is Logistical Support Area Anaconda in Balad, Iraq. LSA Anaconda is the epicenter of all supply transactions in Iraq. Upon entering LSA Anaconda, you cannot be faulted for forgetting that you are in a war zone. Sidewalks line the base, roads are well-networked, traffic is continuous and American shops are plentiful.
U.S. equipment dominates the landscape of Iraq. The T-barriers that cut through Baghdad serve as the most obvious imprint of American presence. Parts from broken-down vehicles, used fuel cans and donated generators are all evidence of the American war effort. Today, deployed units in Iraq not only bring the equipment organic to them but also inherit Theater Property Equipment — equipment procured for a previously deployed unit and passed on to an incoming unit as the first unit returns home.
Often, the problem for logisticians in Iraq is not whether the equipment exists in country but, rather, finding where the equipment resides. In this resource-rich environment, many logisticians find it hard to believe that the military will be leaving Iraq in the near future because of the preponderance of American equipment interspersed around the country. Military analysts often quote Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” Nonetheless, it seems political decisions are reflecting the ground truth of the war, which is that American materiel at bases such as LSA Anaconda will be difficult to deconstruct, and it will require a Herculean effort to return this equipment stateside.
Military bases in Iraq are not being downsized but, rather, improved and developed. The roads within the U.S. base at the Baghdad International Airport are being paved and expanded. Tents are being replaced with trailers and buildings. In some cases, the bases in Iraq are more resource-rich than U.S. military bases in Germany or stateside. Units preparing to deploy often find it difficult to procure equipment during their preparations because of the emphasis on funding units already in Iraq. Similarly, units redeployed from Iraq find that little funding is available to refurbish, reset and service equipment that has survived a year or more of combat operations. The vast majority of the billions of dollars a month the military spends is devoted solely to units in Iraq, at the expense of units that are not deployed. As a result, training for these units suffers and maintenance after a deployment is reduced.
American commanders and policymakers have also framed the drawdown of American troops on the premise that the Iraqi military is postured to assume security within the region. This assumption is flawed because Iraqi units are poorly equipped and continue to rely heavily on the U.S. for their logistical needs. Presently, the Iraqi military is unable to organize, maintain and sustain its forces for a prolonged period without the assistance of the U.S. military. U.S. Military Transition Teams embedded with Iraqi units often request support from U.S. units operating in the same region because they need supplies for the Iraqi units.
The political debate in Washington will continue concerning the future of American forces in Iraq. Nonetheless, the ground truth is that the military is logistically postured and positioned for a long, sustained war in Iraq. Any debate concerning the possible withdrawal of American forces should be realistic and focus on the arduous task of coordinating and moving all the equipment in Iraq.
Although Clausewitz’s dictum remains true, policymakers should not forget that policy decisions reflect and are affected by reality. The reality is that the accumulation of American equipment in Iraq will take months, if not years, to undo.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Teeth in the Jellyfish
A Confirming Moment in Basra
By WILLIAM S. LIND
When Iraqi Prime Minister al-Kerensky sent his "army" to fight the Mahdi Army in Basra, President Bush called it "a defining moment." It turned out instead to be a confirming moment. It confirmed that there is no state in Mesopotamia.
One of the most common signs that America's leadership is clueless about 4GW is the language they use. Fourth Generation war has few if any defining moments. Nor does it have "turning points," another common Bushism. In his testimony on Tuesday, General David Petraeus revealed the limits on his own grasp of 4GW when he said, "We've got to continue. We have our teeth into the jugular, and we need to keep it (sic) there." 4GW opponents have no jugular. 4GW is war of the capillaries. What we have our teeth into in Iraq is a jellyfish.
If we are to see Iraq and other Fourth Generation conflicts as they are and not through the looking glass, we need to use words more carefully. Because there is no state in Iraq, there is also no government. Orders given in Baghdad have no meaning, because there are no state institutions to carry them out. The governmental positions of Iraqi leaders have no substance. Their power is a function of their relationship to various militias, not of their offices. (Mr. al-Maliki has no militia, which means he is a figurehead.) The Iraqi "army" and "police" are groupings of Shiite militias, which exist to fight other militias and which take orders from militia leaders, not the government. Government revenues are slush funds militia leaders use to pay their militiamen. All of these phenomena, and many more, are products of the one basic reality: there is no state.
The failure of Mr. al-Maliki's "big push" into Basra put Iraq's statelessness on display. Ordered to do something it did not want to do, the Iraqi "army" fell apart, as militias usually fall apart when given unwelcome directives. Iraqi "soldiers" and "police" went over or went home, in considerable numbers. Those who did fight had little fight in them; the affair reportedly ended with the Mahdi Army controlling more of Basra than it did at the beginning. Mr. al-Maliki, desperate for a cease-fire, had to agree in advance to any conditions Muqtada al-Sadr cared to impose.
American policy proved even more reckless than that of Mr. al-Maliki. To win in Iraq, we must see a state re-emerge. That means we should stay out of the way of anyone with the potential to recreate a state. Muqtada al-Sadr is at or near the head of the list. The al-Maliki "government" isn't even on it.
So what did we do? Why, we went to war against al-Sadr on behalf of al-Maliki, of course. Our leadership cannot grasp one of the most basic facts about 4GW, namely that the splintering of factions makes it more difficult to generate a state. Should we have the bad luck to "win" this latest fight and destroy the Mahdi Army, we will move not toward but further away from that goal.
In the end, the Administration's (and the Pentagon's) insistence that the Iraqi state, government, army and police are real blinds only themselves. Iraqis know they are not. The American public knows they are not. The average Hottentot probably knows they are not. Do the members of the Senate Committees on Armed Services and Foreign Relations know less that the average Hottentot? So last week's hearings might suggest, and such is the power of empty words.
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.
By WILLIAM S. LIND
When Iraqi Prime Minister al-Kerensky sent his "army" to fight the Mahdi Army in Basra, President Bush called it "a defining moment." It turned out instead to be a confirming moment. It confirmed that there is no state in Mesopotamia.
One of the most common signs that America's leadership is clueless about 4GW is the language they use. Fourth Generation war has few if any defining moments. Nor does it have "turning points," another common Bushism. In his testimony on Tuesday, General David Petraeus revealed the limits on his own grasp of 4GW when he said, "We've got to continue. We have our teeth into the jugular, and we need to keep it (sic) there." 4GW opponents have no jugular. 4GW is war of the capillaries. What we have our teeth into in Iraq is a jellyfish.
If we are to see Iraq and other Fourth Generation conflicts as they are and not through the looking glass, we need to use words more carefully. Because there is no state in Iraq, there is also no government. Orders given in Baghdad have no meaning, because there are no state institutions to carry them out. The governmental positions of Iraqi leaders have no substance. Their power is a function of their relationship to various militias, not of their offices. (Mr. al-Maliki has no militia, which means he is a figurehead.) The Iraqi "army" and "police" are groupings of Shiite militias, which exist to fight other militias and which take orders from militia leaders, not the government. Government revenues are slush funds militia leaders use to pay their militiamen. All of these phenomena, and many more, are products of the one basic reality: there is no state.
The failure of Mr. al-Maliki's "big push" into Basra put Iraq's statelessness on display. Ordered to do something it did not want to do, the Iraqi "army" fell apart, as militias usually fall apart when given unwelcome directives. Iraqi "soldiers" and "police" went over or went home, in considerable numbers. Those who did fight had little fight in them; the affair reportedly ended with the Mahdi Army controlling more of Basra than it did at the beginning. Mr. al-Maliki, desperate for a cease-fire, had to agree in advance to any conditions Muqtada al-Sadr cared to impose.
American policy proved even more reckless than that of Mr. al-Maliki. To win in Iraq, we must see a state re-emerge. That means we should stay out of the way of anyone with the potential to recreate a state. Muqtada al-Sadr is at or near the head of the list. The al-Maliki "government" isn't even on it.
So what did we do? Why, we went to war against al-Sadr on behalf of al-Maliki, of course. Our leadership cannot grasp one of the most basic facts about 4GW, namely that the splintering of factions makes it more difficult to generate a state. Should we have the bad luck to "win" this latest fight and destroy the Mahdi Army, we will move not toward but further away from that goal.
In the end, the Administration's (and the Pentagon's) insistence that the Iraqi state, government, army and police are real blinds only themselves. Iraqis know they are not. The American public knows they are not. The average Hottentot probably knows they are not. Do the members of the Senate Committees on Armed Services and Foreign Relations know less that the average Hottentot? So last week's hearings might suggest, and such is the power of empty words.
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.
Torturers in the White House: Why Is This Story Being Ignored?
By Ruth Conniff, The Progressive
Posted on April 17, 2008, Printed on April 17, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/82483/
The biggest news of the last week went virtually uncovered by the mainstream, print media. ABC News first reported last Wednesday that top Bush Administration officials, including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, and George Tenet, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld met to discuss which particular torture techniques should be used against Al Qaeda suspects in U.S. custody.
The group signed off on specific techniques, including sleep deprivation, slapping, pushing, and waterboarding, and gave instruction "so detailed … some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed, down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic."
If John McCain is seriously considering Condoleezza Rice as a running mate, the former POW should keep in mind that Rice not only condoned torture, but chaired the National Security Council's "Principals Committee" meetings to plan the details of torture of prisoners in U.S. custody.
Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was so troubled by the meetings, he was moved to object: "Why are we discussing this in the White House?" he asked, according to ABC. "History will not judge this kindly."
On Friday, ABC added this blockbuster: Bush himself was aware of the meetings. Unlike Ashcroft, he had no compunctions. There was nothing "startling" about the revelations that his top advisers were directing the waterboarding of individual prisoners, Bush told ABC's Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue and I approved," Bush said.
Why is this not bigger news?
Remember when the nation was brought to a virtual standstill over Bill Clinton's affair with a White House intern?
We now have confirmation that the President of the United States gave the OK for his national security team to violate international law and plot the sordid details of torture. The Democrats in Congress should be raising the roof.
House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers, to his credit, has suggested subpoenaing the members of the Principals Committee, calling their actions "a stain on our democracy."
Conyers also threatened last week to subpoena John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer whose recently declassified 2003 torture memos attempted to give legal cover to practices such as waterboarding.
Such techniques, as long as their sole purpose wasn't sadism, were acceptable, Yoo wrote. Being a sadist was presumably necessary but not sufficient qualification for employment in the Bush White House.
In his new book The Terror Presidency, Yoo's colleague Jack Goldsmith writes about his evolution from friend and supporter of the officials who brought us to this pass to a conscientious objector to their illegal and morally corrupt practices.
Back when he worked for Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, Goldsmith wrote a memo warning that Bush Administration officials could be indicted by the International Criminal Court for their actions in the war on terror.
After he went to work for Justice, Goldsmith began standing up to the torture cabal at the White House -- to his enduring discomfort. In one incident, recounted in his book and in a September profile by Jeffrey Rosen of the New York Times Magazine, he knocked heads with Dick Cheney's advisor (now his chief of staff) David Addington. Goldsmith delivered the bad news that terror suspects were, in fact, covered by the Fourth Geneva Convention against torture of civilians: "'The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,'" Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. 'You cannot question his decision.'"
Goldsmith also criticized the torture memos for their "extremely broad and unnecessary analysis of the President's Commander-in-Chief power" and for their extremely loose definition of torture as limited to causing a level of pain akin to organ failure.
Pointing out that the Administration was violating the War Crimes Act of 1996, the Geneva Conventions, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Goldmith withdrew Yoo's torture memos -- and promptly resigned his post.
Even after losing that flimsy legal cover, Bush and the other members of the Principals Committee appear unrepentant and undeterred.
Goldsmith, who now teaches law at Harvard, is no civil libertarian, but like John Ashcroft and John McCain, he has spoken out against executive lawlessness. No doubt he would have plenty to tell the House Judiciary Committee.
And perhaps the International Criminal Court as well.
© 2008 The Progressive All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/82483/
Posted on April 17, 2008, Printed on April 17, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/82483/
The biggest news of the last week went virtually uncovered by the mainstream, print media. ABC News first reported last Wednesday that top Bush Administration officials, including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, and George Tenet, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld met to discuss which particular torture techniques should be used against Al Qaeda suspects in U.S. custody.
The group signed off on specific techniques, including sleep deprivation, slapping, pushing, and waterboarding, and gave instruction "so detailed … some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed, down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic."
If John McCain is seriously considering Condoleezza Rice as a running mate, the former POW should keep in mind that Rice not only condoned torture, but chaired the National Security Council's "Principals Committee" meetings to plan the details of torture of prisoners in U.S. custody.
Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was so troubled by the meetings, he was moved to object: "Why are we discussing this in the White House?" he asked, according to ABC. "History will not judge this kindly."
On Friday, ABC added this blockbuster: Bush himself was aware of the meetings. Unlike Ashcroft, he had no compunctions. There was nothing "startling" about the revelations that his top advisers were directing the waterboarding of individual prisoners, Bush told ABC's Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue and I approved," Bush said.
Why is this not bigger news?
Remember when the nation was brought to a virtual standstill over Bill Clinton's affair with a White House intern?
We now have confirmation that the President of the United States gave the OK for his national security team to violate international law and plot the sordid details of torture. The Democrats in Congress should be raising the roof.
House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers, to his credit, has suggested subpoenaing the members of the Principals Committee, calling their actions "a stain on our democracy."
Conyers also threatened last week to subpoena John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer whose recently declassified 2003 torture memos attempted to give legal cover to practices such as waterboarding.
Such techniques, as long as their sole purpose wasn't sadism, were acceptable, Yoo wrote. Being a sadist was presumably necessary but not sufficient qualification for employment in the Bush White House.
In his new book The Terror Presidency, Yoo's colleague Jack Goldsmith writes about his evolution from friend and supporter of the officials who brought us to this pass to a conscientious objector to their illegal and morally corrupt practices.
Back when he worked for Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, Goldsmith wrote a memo warning that Bush Administration officials could be indicted by the International Criminal Court for their actions in the war on terror.
After he went to work for Justice, Goldsmith began standing up to the torture cabal at the White House -- to his enduring discomfort. In one incident, recounted in his book and in a September profile by Jeffrey Rosen of the New York Times Magazine, he knocked heads with Dick Cheney's advisor (now his chief of staff) David Addington. Goldsmith delivered the bad news that terror suspects were, in fact, covered by the Fourth Geneva Convention against torture of civilians: "'The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,'" Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. 'You cannot question his decision.'"
Goldsmith also criticized the torture memos for their "extremely broad and unnecessary analysis of the President's Commander-in-Chief power" and for their extremely loose definition of torture as limited to causing a level of pain akin to organ failure.
Pointing out that the Administration was violating the War Crimes Act of 1996, the Geneva Conventions, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Goldmith withdrew Yoo's torture memos -- and promptly resigned his post.
Even after losing that flimsy legal cover, Bush and the other members of the Principals Committee appear unrepentant and undeterred.
Goldsmith, who now teaches law at Harvard, is no civil libertarian, but like John Ashcroft and John McCain, he has spoken out against executive lawlessness. No doubt he would have plenty to tell the House Judiciary Committee.
And perhaps the International Criminal Court as well.
© 2008 The Progressive All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/82483/
Weary of War?
Don't Collaborate
By KATHY KELLY
U.S. Senators and Representatives are finding common ground in asking that Iraqis begin picking up the tab for the cost of war, so an April 14 AP article by Anne Flaherty reported. The lawmakers are troubled that Iraqis might experience windfall surpluses of revenue generated by rising oil prices, while U.S. people bear the burden of paying for war in Iraq. "In hearings last week," Flaherty writes, "Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates whether Baghdad should start paying some U.S. combat costs, and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., raised the possibility that an anticipated Iraqi budget surplus this year could be used to help Afghanistan, whose $700 million in annual revenue represents a small fraction of Iraq's $46.8 billion budget."
In light of reports that rising oil prices will endow Iraqis with a large surplus of funds, it's helpful to consult commentary by seasoned analysts regarding energy issues. On April 11, UPI's Energy Editor Ben Lando clarified that "Iraq would not make $100 billion in oil sales this year ... unless the price of oil went substantially higher, like nearing $200 per barrel. And the 'surplus' would be anything beyond the $50 billion 2008 budget, which at current oil prices will give it just about a $10 billion surplus."
In February, Iraq produced 2.4 million barrels per day of oil, of which about 1.6 million barrels per day are exported from the south (the rest being for domestic consumption). Assume a price of $100 per barrel of oil; multiply it by 1.6 million barrels; and multiply again by 365 days and you get $58.4 billion in annual revenue from oil. Iraq's budget for 2008 is about $54.3 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund. Any decline in oil prices, damage to Iraq's oil infrastructure, or other shock to production and Iraq's "surplus" vanishes into thin air.
Before U.S. lawmakers imagine ways to spend Iraq's possible "surplus", they should be asked about the "rights" of an aggressor nation that illegally invades another country. The U.S. waged an unprovoked war of choice against Iraq, a country which posed no threat whatsoever to U.S. people. Did Iraq have any "rights" after it invaded Kuwait? An aggressor nation has no rights. Period. Indeed, the international community, via the U.N. Security Council, continues to punish the Iraqi people for the crimes of Saddam Hussein's regime by requiring Iraq to pay five percent of its oil revenues as "war reparations" for the prior regime's invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91 (with virtually all of the remaining payments going to the governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia or those country's state owned oil enterprises).
Commenting on suggestions that the U.S. impose financial obligations on Iraq, Lando writes:
"This begs the question as to whether a country can invade another country--which inherently destroys the capital, political and societal infrastructure--poorly spend both occupying and occupied funds, unilaterally create conditions of chaos requiring ongoing security and reconstruction funds, and then bind the occupied country to make reparations and take out loans from the occupying country?"
What are some of the "conditions of chaos requiring ongoing security and reconstruction funds" in Iraq? In 1991, the United States deliberately targeted, bombed and destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, in particular its water treatment plants, its electrical plants, and its electrical power grid. This damage was exacerbated over the next thirteen years as the U.S. and UK insisted that the UN maintain brutally punitive economic sanctions that prevented Iraq from substantively rebuilding and caused further decay and debilitation in every sector of Iraq's infrastructure. The sanctions also caused widespread disease, starvation and impoverishment, directly contributing toward the deaths of over one half million children under age five.
Today, available statistics about the consequences of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq speak of misery and chaos nearly unimaginable to most U.S. people. One out of six Iraqis has been displaced from their homes. A March 2007 report from Save the Children, a US based NGO, stated that 122,000 Iraqi children didn't reach their fifth birthdays in the year 2005 alone. UNAMI, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq, in its most recently issued report on humanitarian conditions in Iraq, stated that 54 per cent of Iraqis live on less than $1 per day, including 15 per cent who are forced to live on less than fifty cents per day. 70 per cent of Iraq's people lack access to potable water. 43 per cent of Iraqi children under age five suffer a form of malnourishment, with 23 per cent suffering from chronic malnourishment and 8 per cent suffering acute malnourishment. 40 per cent of Iraq's population are children under 15 years of age. Should these children be deprived of food and clean water so that their country is instead forced to pay U.S. forces to drop bombs on them, shoot at them, and exacerbate any or all of the three civil wars which the analyst Juan Cole says are now well underway in Iraq?
In the past year, U.S. aerial bombardments of Iraqi neighborhoods increased five fold while the number of Iraqis incarcerated in U.S. prisons in Iraq has doubled. (Some 24,000 Iraqis are now imprisoned by U.S. forces, approximately 650 of whom are juveniles). If a foreign country were bombing U.S. cities and imprisoning U.S. civilians, would we ever agree to pay the invaders' military expenses? Would we agree that the aggressor nation had no fiscal responsibilities to pay for reparations?
Perhaps news of U.S. lawmakers' weariness over Iraq's "free ride" will prompt some Iraqis currently aligned with U.S. forces to stop aiming their weapons against other Iraqis and to instead find common cause, using all means of nonviolent resistance, to defy the U.S. occupation.
But what of our own culpability?
What about our options for nonviolent resistance?
We do have options. We each can, at the very least, pressure our elected representative, through legal or extralegal lobbying, to vote against President Bush's $102 billion supplemental funding request which the U.S. House of Representatives will likely vote on the last week of April and with the Senate following suit shortly thereafter.
Another option was pursued, this year, by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Campaign's "War Tax Boycott." This project helped people eliminate at least a portion of war making from their personal budget. They did so by collectively redirecting $100 of their federal income tax to assist Iraqis who've been forced to flee their country as well as victims of Hurricane Katrina whose needs remain unmet.
Yes, it's outrageous to think that U.S. lawmakers could propose that Iraq's people should be asked to pay for any aspect of U.S. occupation. But it's also an outrage for U.S. people to foot the bill for the continued military occupation. We owe the Iraqi people reparations for the damage our country has caused over these past 18 years of economic and military warfare-not an ever-lasting occupation. If you're among those who are wearied and exasperated by the wrongfulness of this ongoing war, allow yourself some relief: don't collaborate.
Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She has refused to pay all forms of federal income tax since 1980. She is the author of Other Lands Have Dreams, published by AK / CounterPunch Press. She can be reached at kathy@vcnv.org
By KATHY KELLY
U.S. Senators and Representatives are finding common ground in asking that Iraqis begin picking up the tab for the cost of war, so an April 14 AP article by Anne Flaherty reported. The lawmakers are troubled that Iraqis might experience windfall surpluses of revenue generated by rising oil prices, while U.S. people bear the burden of paying for war in Iraq. "In hearings last week," Flaherty writes, "Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates whether Baghdad should start paying some U.S. combat costs, and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., raised the possibility that an anticipated Iraqi budget surplus this year could be used to help Afghanistan, whose $700 million in annual revenue represents a small fraction of Iraq's $46.8 billion budget."
In light of reports that rising oil prices will endow Iraqis with a large surplus of funds, it's helpful to consult commentary by seasoned analysts regarding energy issues. On April 11, UPI's Energy Editor Ben Lando clarified that "Iraq would not make $100 billion in oil sales this year ... unless the price of oil went substantially higher, like nearing $200 per barrel. And the 'surplus' would be anything beyond the $50 billion 2008 budget, which at current oil prices will give it just about a $10 billion surplus."
In February, Iraq produced 2.4 million barrels per day of oil, of which about 1.6 million barrels per day are exported from the south (the rest being for domestic consumption). Assume a price of $100 per barrel of oil; multiply it by 1.6 million barrels; and multiply again by 365 days and you get $58.4 billion in annual revenue from oil. Iraq's budget for 2008 is about $54.3 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund. Any decline in oil prices, damage to Iraq's oil infrastructure, or other shock to production and Iraq's "surplus" vanishes into thin air.
Before U.S. lawmakers imagine ways to spend Iraq's possible "surplus", they should be asked about the "rights" of an aggressor nation that illegally invades another country. The U.S. waged an unprovoked war of choice against Iraq, a country which posed no threat whatsoever to U.S. people. Did Iraq have any "rights" after it invaded Kuwait? An aggressor nation has no rights. Period. Indeed, the international community, via the U.N. Security Council, continues to punish the Iraqi people for the crimes of Saddam Hussein's regime by requiring Iraq to pay five percent of its oil revenues as "war reparations" for the prior regime's invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91 (with virtually all of the remaining payments going to the governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia or those country's state owned oil enterprises).
Commenting on suggestions that the U.S. impose financial obligations on Iraq, Lando writes:
"This begs the question as to whether a country can invade another country--which inherently destroys the capital, political and societal infrastructure--poorly spend both occupying and occupied funds, unilaterally create conditions of chaos requiring ongoing security and reconstruction funds, and then bind the occupied country to make reparations and take out loans from the occupying country?"
What are some of the "conditions of chaos requiring ongoing security and reconstruction funds" in Iraq? In 1991, the United States deliberately targeted, bombed and destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, in particular its water treatment plants, its electrical plants, and its electrical power grid. This damage was exacerbated over the next thirteen years as the U.S. and UK insisted that the UN maintain brutally punitive economic sanctions that prevented Iraq from substantively rebuilding and caused further decay and debilitation in every sector of Iraq's infrastructure. The sanctions also caused widespread disease, starvation and impoverishment, directly contributing toward the deaths of over one half million children under age five.
Today, available statistics about the consequences of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq speak of misery and chaos nearly unimaginable to most U.S. people. One out of six Iraqis has been displaced from their homes. A March 2007 report from Save the Children, a US based NGO, stated that 122,000 Iraqi children didn't reach their fifth birthdays in the year 2005 alone. UNAMI, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq, in its most recently issued report on humanitarian conditions in Iraq, stated that 54 per cent of Iraqis live on less than $1 per day, including 15 per cent who are forced to live on less than fifty cents per day. 70 per cent of Iraq's people lack access to potable water. 43 per cent of Iraqi children under age five suffer a form of malnourishment, with 23 per cent suffering from chronic malnourishment and 8 per cent suffering acute malnourishment. 40 per cent of Iraq's population are children under 15 years of age. Should these children be deprived of food and clean water so that their country is instead forced to pay U.S. forces to drop bombs on them, shoot at them, and exacerbate any or all of the three civil wars which the analyst Juan Cole says are now well underway in Iraq?
In the past year, U.S. aerial bombardments of Iraqi neighborhoods increased five fold while the number of Iraqis incarcerated in U.S. prisons in Iraq has doubled. (Some 24,000 Iraqis are now imprisoned by U.S. forces, approximately 650 of whom are juveniles). If a foreign country were bombing U.S. cities and imprisoning U.S. civilians, would we ever agree to pay the invaders' military expenses? Would we agree that the aggressor nation had no fiscal responsibilities to pay for reparations?
Perhaps news of U.S. lawmakers' weariness over Iraq's "free ride" will prompt some Iraqis currently aligned with U.S. forces to stop aiming their weapons against other Iraqis and to instead find common cause, using all means of nonviolent resistance, to defy the U.S. occupation.
But what of our own culpability?
What about our options for nonviolent resistance?
We do have options. We each can, at the very least, pressure our elected representative, through legal or extralegal lobbying, to vote against President Bush's $102 billion supplemental funding request which the U.S. House of Representatives will likely vote on the last week of April and with the Senate following suit shortly thereafter.
Another option was pursued, this year, by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Campaign's "War Tax Boycott." This project helped people eliminate at least a portion of war making from their personal budget. They did so by collectively redirecting $100 of their federal income tax to assist Iraqis who've been forced to flee their country as well as victims of Hurricane Katrina whose needs remain unmet.
Yes, it's outrageous to think that U.S. lawmakers could propose that Iraq's people should be asked to pay for any aspect of U.S. occupation. But it's also an outrage for U.S. people to foot the bill for the continued military occupation. We owe the Iraqi people reparations for the damage our country has caused over these past 18 years of economic and military warfare-not an ever-lasting occupation. If you're among those who are wearied and exasperated by the wrongfulness of this ongoing war, allow yourself some relief: don't collaborate.
Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She has refused to pay all forms of federal income tax since 1980. She is the author of Other Lands Have Dreams, published by AK / CounterPunch Press. She can be reached at kathy@vcnv.org
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The Man Who Would Be Bush
by Robert Scheer
Are Americans unusually stupid or is it something our president put in the water? ? As millions surrender their homes and sacrifice other standards of our nation’s economic and political reputation to the caprice of the Bush-Cheney imperium, a majority of voters tell pollsters that they might vote for a candidate who promises more of the same.
Assuming that likely voters are not now thinking of yet another Republican president simply because John McCain is the only white guy left standing — an excuse as pathetic in its logic as the decision four years ago to return two Texas oil hustlers to the White House because they were not Massachusetts liberals — must mean that tens of millions of Americans have taken leave of their senses.
If not the white-guy syndrome, why would even a shocking minority of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters say they prefer McCain to the other Democrat? How otherwise to explain the nation’s widespread bipartisan rejection of the Bush presidency and yet a willingness to let McCain continue in that vein?
To be sure, as a senator, McCain has exhibited flashes of independence on behalf of taxpayers, as in his support of campaign-finance reform in which he partnered with Democrat Russ Feingold. McCain’s investigations of the military-industrial complex’s shameless exploitation of terrorism fears set a high standard, as in exposing the air-tanker scandal that dispatched a Boeing exec and a former Pentagon employee to prison. But his political ambition is showing. Although he previously harshly criticized the enormous waste in the Iraq occupation, today, as a presidential candidate, he opens the door to a hundred years of taxpayer dollars tossed down the drain in Iraq. The man who was tortured now hugs a leader who authorized the same.
By so unabashedly embracing the most glaringly failed U.S. president ever, McCain has surrendered the right to be considered an independent candidate, judged on his own merits and personal history. A vote for McCain is a vote for that rancid recipe mixing religious bigotry, imperial arrogance and corporate greed that he had stood against in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election when he challenged George W. Bush, but to which he now has capitulated.
Too harsh? Then consider just how tight the space is between the rocks of our failed Mideast policy and the hard place of our impending financial disaster. The sudden out-of-control spike in the cost of oil — the key short-term market variable, the specter that stokes inflation fear and limits moves to avoid recession — is not a natural disaster or in any realistic way the result of inefficiency in the use of energy. What more than doubled the price of petroleum in the short run was not that too many of us bought Hummers, but rather that the political stability of the region that contains the bulk of that oil was deliberately and recklessly roiled.
In the name of fighting the 9/11 terrorists, the Bush administration overthrew the one Arab government most adamantly opposed to the Saudi financiers of that son of their system, Osama bin Laden. Instead of confronting the royal leaders of a kingdom that supplied 15 of the 19 hijackers, we invaded a nation that supplied not a single one. While Bush overthrew Saddam Hussein, who had no ties to the hijackers, he embraced the leaders of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the only three nations in the world that had diplomatically recognized and supported the Taliban sponsors of al-Qaida.
Consider that historical marker at a time when the UAE and Saudi Arabia bankers are buying major positions in distressed U.S. financial and other key corporate institutions. I know, it all sounds too conspiratorial, like imagining that we might wake up from this national nightmare and discover that the CEO of Halliburton, who replaced Dick Cheney when the latter selected himself to be Bush’s vice president, now has his headquarters in Dubai, tucked safely into the obscenely oil-revenue-rich UAE that our troops were sent to Iraq to protect.
There is no national outrage, or even seriously sustained media interest, over the fact that Cheney’s old company profited enormously from ripping off U.S. tax dollars going into the Iraq occupation. Nor is there even much curiosity about the shenanigans of Halliburton, which is doing business with Arab oil sheiks at a time when the U.S. banks these Middle Eastern oil interests bought into are moving to foreclose on American homeowners.
It’s just the sort of egregious betrayal of the trust of the taxpayers that Sen. McCain would have gone after, before he sought to don the soiled robes of the Bush presidency.
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.
Are Americans unusually stupid or is it something our president put in the water? ? As millions surrender their homes and sacrifice other standards of our nation’s economic and political reputation to the caprice of the Bush-Cheney imperium, a majority of voters tell pollsters that they might vote for a candidate who promises more of the same.
Assuming that likely voters are not now thinking of yet another Republican president simply because John McCain is the only white guy left standing — an excuse as pathetic in its logic as the decision four years ago to return two Texas oil hustlers to the White House because they were not Massachusetts liberals — must mean that tens of millions of Americans have taken leave of their senses.
If not the white-guy syndrome, why would even a shocking minority of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters say they prefer McCain to the other Democrat? How otherwise to explain the nation’s widespread bipartisan rejection of the Bush presidency and yet a willingness to let McCain continue in that vein?
To be sure, as a senator, McCain has exhibited flashes of independence on behalf of taxpayers, as in his support of campaign-finance reform in which he partnered with Democrat Russ Feingold. McCain’s investigations of the military-industrial complex’s shameless exploitation of terrorism fears set a high standard, as in exposing the air-tanker scandal that dispatched a Boeing exec and a former Pentagon employee to prison. But his political ambition is showing. Although he previously harshly criticized the enormous waste in the Iraq occupation, today, as a presidential candidate, he opens the door to a hundred years of taxpayer dollars tossed down the drain in Iraq. The man who was tortured now hugs a leader who authorized the same.
By so unabashedly embracing the most glaringly failed U.S. president ever, McCain has surrendered the right to be considered an independent candidate, judged on his own merits and personal history. A vote for McCain is a vote for that rancid recipe mixing religious bigotry, imperial arrogance and corporate greed that he had stood against in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election when he challenged George W. Bush, but to which he now has capitulated.
Too harsh? Then consider just how tight the space is between the rocks of our failed Mideast policy and the hard place of our impending financial disaster. The sudden out-of-control spike in the cost of oil — the key short-term market variable, the specter that stokes inflation fear and limits moves to avoid recession — is not a natural disaster or in any realistic way the result of inefficiency in the use of energy. What more than doubled the price of petroleum in the short run was not that too many of us bought Hummers, but rather that the political stability of the region that contains the bulk of that oil was deliberately and recklessly roiled.
In the name of fighting the 9/11 terrorists, the Bush administration overthrew the one Arab government most adamantly opposed to the Saudi financiers of that son of their system, Osama bin Laden. Instead of confronting the royal leaders of a kingdom that supplied 15 of the 19 hijackers, we invaded a nation that supplied not a single one. While Bush overthrew Saddam Hussein, who had no ties to the hijackers, he embraced the leaders of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the only three nations in the world that had diplomatically recognized and supported the Taliban sponsors of al-Qaida.
Consider that historical marker at a time when the UAE and Saudi Arabia bankers are buying major positions in distressed U.S. financial and other key corporate institutions. I know, it all sounds too conspiratorial, like imagining that we might wake up from this national nightmare and discover that the CEO of Halliburton, who replaced Dick Cheney when the latter selected himself to be Bush’s vice president, now has his headquarters in Dubai, tucked safely into the obscenely oil-revenue-rich UAE that our troops were sent to Iraq to protect.
There is no national outrage, or even seriously sustained media interest, over the fact that Cheney’s old company profited enormously from ripping off U.S. tax dollars going into the Iraq occupation. Nor is there even much curiosity about the shenanigans of Halliburton, which is doing business with Arab oil sheiks at a time when the U.S. banks these Middle Eastern oil interests bought into are moving to foreclose on American homeowners.
It’s just the sort of egregious betrayal of the trust of the taxpayers that Sen. McCain would have gone after, before he sought to don the soiled robes of the Bush presidency.
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.
Only A Miracle Can Save America Now
by Chuck Baldwin
April 15, 2008
Every four years, conservative "pragmatists" trot out the "We Can't Let So-And-So Win" mantra. Of course, the so-and-so in question is always the Democratic Presidential candidate. For all of my adult life, I have been listening to so-called "conservative" Republicans warn us of the impending doom that would befall our country if the Democratic candidate were elected. And this year is no different.
This year's Republican primary did provide a wonderful aberration, however, to the usual choices between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Republicans had an opportunity to nominate a real American constitutionalist, a statesman in the similitude of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. That man was Texas Congressman, Ron Paul. Unfortunately, the Republican faithful seem to be incapable of discerning the marks of true greatness, not to mention fidelity to constitutional government. It is doubtful that most of them even understand what constitutional government is. And as for Christian conservatives, they can barely see any issues beyond abortion and "gay rights." To try and convince them to support a constitutionalist candidate is like talking to a brick wall.
So, what choice does the Republican Party offer the American people this year? The worst of all possible choices: good old John "McSame" McCain.
Let's be clear: a John McCain Presidency will be no better than a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama Presidency. In fact, in many ways, a McCain White House will be WORSE than a Democratic one.
On many issues, there is virtually no distinction between John McCain and any potential Democratic candidate. John McCain is no friend to gun owners. He is no friend to pro-lifers. He is no friend to fiscal conservatives. He is no friend to property owners. He is no friend to "family values" voters. He is no friend to America's blue-collar workers. He is no friend to small business owners. He is no friend to opponents of illegal immigration.
On the other hand, John McCain is a great friend to Big Business. Similarly, he is a friend to Big Government and Big Brother. He is also a friend to open borders, supranational government, regionalism, and American imperialism.
But this is where the Boogeyman comes in.
At this point, Republican Party lackeys will break in and say, "We can't let Hillary Clinton win. We can't let Barack Obama win." Even the favored son of the Religious Right, Mike Huckabee, has endorsed John McCain, not to mention Mitt Romney and virtually every other Republican "bigwig." (Thank God, Ron Paul has maintained his integrity by NOT endorsing McCain.)
I, for one, am fed up with this baloney, because what we are actually faced with is not the "lesser of two evils" but "the evil of two lessers." (To quote a good friend of mine.) And the reason John McCain would actually be a worse President than either Obama or Clinton is because of the manner in which conservatives go to sleep whenever a Republican occupies the Oval Office. Furthermore, the next couple of years are "crunch time" for this burgeoning North American Union and related issues.
America is currently facing the most serious threat to its national independence and sovereignty since the War of 1812. The forces of globalism have declared an all-out war against our country's independence. Illegal immigration, the NAFTA superhighway, the North American Community, a regional currency called the Amero, and "free trade" deals are just a few of the weapons in their arsenal. And John McCain will use every bit of his power as President to facilitate all of this chicanery. And, because McCain is a Republican, conservatives and Christians will sit back and let it happen without even the slightest whimper of resistance. If Obama or Clinton were sitting in the Oval Office, however, massive numbers of conservatives and Christians would rise in protest over every inch of ground ceded to these nefarious nabobs. So, tell me, who is the greater evil? I say it is John McCain.
I realize that there are many readers shouting to themselves right now and saying, "So what do we do, Chuck? We have to vote for one or the other." To which I say, No you don't. You can think outside the box. You don't have to throw your vote away on either of these wretched candidates. You can cast a vote for principle and vote for a third party candidate.
I can hear readers screaming at me now, saying that voting for a third party candidate is a wasted vote. I strongly disagree! Casting a vote for a person who you know is unfaithful to your principles is a wasted vote! Voting for someone who you know will keep our borders and ports open to illegals, continue George Bush's preemptive war doctrine, and facilitate a burgeoning hemispheric government--not to mention someone who will increase and augment a burgeoning Orwellian police state--is a wasted vote!
At some point, we Americans must decide whether we will tolerate the continued sellout of our freedoms and principles or not. Will we swallow the shallow squeals of the establishment elite who think we are a bunch of sheep to be herded into their New World Order? Or will we stand our ground? Will we vote our principles and our conscience?
It does not matter that the pundits and experts say we can't win. That is not our business. As John Quincy Adams said, "Duty is ours; results are God's." When will Christians, especially, quit trying to play politics and start standing for principle? They talk a lot about principle, but when it comes down to where the rubber meets the road, most don't act like people of principle.
If God intends to give America another chance, if He intends to return these United States to constitutional government, and if He intends to preserve America's independence, it will only come in the form of a miracle. And miracles do not happen by the machinations of pragmatic planners. Miracles are just that.
America was born a miracle, and it could now be given a new birth by miracle. If so, it would demand that people of principle start acting like it. That we cast aside the pragmatic, the reasonable, the sophisticated, and the expected. That we--as did the priests of old--would be willing to step out into the raging current of the Jordan River, knowing that either God would part the water or we would drown. That we would be willing to sign our names to a document--as did our Founding Fathers--that would make us either the enemies of the state or the inventors of a new nation. It means taking risks; it means doing the impractical; it means rejecting accepted wisdom and standing for principle.
I am convinced that only a miracle can save America now. And I am expecting God to grant such a miracle. Beyond that, I am willing to do my part to place myself in a position to let God use my voice and my vote to accomplish this miracle. And if that means voting for someone who "has no chance of winning" in order to let God take the glory for whatever victory results, it is the least I can do. So, who will join me?
*If you enjoyed this column and want to help me distribute these editorial opinions to an ever-growing audience, donations may now be made by credit card, check, or Money Order. Use this link:
http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/donate.php
© Chuck Baldwin
April 15, 2008
Every four years, conservative "pragmatists" trot out the "We Can't Let So-And-So Win" mantra. Of course, the so-and-so in question is always the Democratic Presidential candidate. For all of my adult life, I have been listening to so-called "conservative" Republicans warn us of the impending doom that would befall our country if the Democratic candidate were elected. And this year is no different.
This year's Republican primary did provide a wonderful aberration, however, to the usual choices between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Republicans had an opportunity to nominate a real American constitutionalist, a statesman in the similitude of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. That man was Texas Congressman, Ron Paul. Unfortunately, the Republican faithful seem to be incapable of discerning the marks of true greatness, not to mention fidelity to constitutional government. It is doubtful that most of them even understand what constitutional government is. And as for Christian conservatives, they can barely see any issues beyond abortion and "gay rights." To try and convince them to support a constitutionalist candidate is like talking to a brick wall.
So, what choice does the Republican Party offer the American people this year? The worst of all possible choices: good old John "McSame" McCain.
Let's be clear: a John McCain Presidency will be no better than a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama Presidency. In fact, in many ways, a McCain White House will be WORSE than a Democratic one.
On many issues, there is virtually no distinction between John McCain and any potential Democratic candidate. John McCain is no friend to gun owners. He is no friend to pro-lifers. He is no friend to fiscal conservatives. He is no friend to property owners. He is no friend to "family values" voters. He is no friend to America's blue-collar workers. He is no friend to small business owners. He is no friend to opponents of illegal immigration.
On the other hand, John McCain is a great friend to Big Business. Similarly, he is a friend to Big Government and Big Brother. He is also a friend to open borders, supranational government, regionalism, and American imperialism.
But this is where the Boogeyman comes in.
At this point, Republican Party lackeys will break in and say, "We can't let Hillary Clinton win. We can't let Barack Obama win." Even the favored son of the Religious Right, Mike Huckabee, has endorsed John McCain, not to mention Mitt Romney and virtually every other Republican "bigwig." (Thank God, Ron Paul has maintained his integrity by NOT endorsing McCain.)
I, for one, am fed up with this baloney, because what we are actually faced with is not the "lesser of two evils" but "the evil of two lessers." (To quote a good friend of mine.) And the reason John McCain would actually be a worse President than either Obama or Clinton is because of the manner in which conservatives go to sleep whenever a Republican occupies the Oval Office. Furthermore, the next couple of years are "crunch time" for this burgeoning North American Union and related issues.
America is currently facing the most serious threat to its national independence and sovereignty since the War of 1812. The forces of globalism have declared an all-out war against our country's independence. Illegal immigration, the NAFTA superhighway, the North American Community, a regional currency called the Amero, and "free trade" deals are just a few of the weapons in their arsenal. And John McCain will use every bit of his power as President to facilitate all of this chicanery. And, because McCain is a Republican, conservatives and Christians will sit back and let it happen without even the slightest whimper of resistance. If Obama or Clinton were sitting in the Oval Office, however, massive numbers of conservatives and Christians would rise in protest over every inch of ground ceded to these nefarious nabobs. So, tell me, who is the greater evil? I say it is John McCain.
I realize that there are many readers shouting to themselves right now and saying, "So what do we do, Chuck? We have to vote for one or the other." To which I say, No you don't. You can think outside the box. You don't have to throw your vote away on either of these wretched candidates. You can cast a vote for principle and vote for a third party candidate.
I can hear readers screaming at me now, saying that voting for a third party candidate is a wasted vote. I strongly disagree! Casting a vote for a person who you know is unfaithful to your principles is a wasted vote! Voting for someone who you know will keep our borders and ports open to illegals, continue George Bush's preemptive war doctrine, and facilitate a burgeoning hemispheric government--not to mention someone who will increase and augment a burgeoning Orwellian police state--is a wasted vote!
At some point, we Americans must decide whether we will tolerate the continued sellout of our freedoms and principles or not. Will we swallow the shallow squeals of the establishment elite who think we are a bunch of sheep to be herded into their New World Order? Or will we stand our ground? Will we vote our principles and our conscience?
It does not matter that the pundits and experts say we can't win. That is not our business. As John Quincy Adams said, "Duty is ours; results are God's." When will Christians, especially, quit trying to play politics and start standing for principle? They talk a lot about principle, but when it comes down to where the rubber meets the road, most don't act like people of principle.
If God intends to give America another chance, if He intends to return these United States to constitutional government, and if He intends to preserve America's independence, it will only come in the form of a miracle. And miracles do not happen by the machinations of pragmatic planners. Miracles are just that.
America was born a miracle, and it could now be given a new birth by miracle. If so, it would demand that people of principle start acting like it. That we cast aside the pragmatic, the reasonable, the sophisticated, and the expected. That we--as did the priests of old--would be willing to step out into the raging current of the Jordan River, knowing that either God would part the water or we would drown. That we would be willing to sign our names to a document--as did our Founding Fathers--that would make us either the enemies of the state or the inventors of a new nation. It means taking risks; it means doing the impractical; it means rejecting accepted wisdom and standing for principle.
I am convinced that only a miracle can save America now. And I am expecting God to grant such a miracle. Beyond that, I am willing to do my part to place myself in a position to let God use my voice and my vote to accomplish this miracle. And if that means voting for someone who "has no chance of winning" in order to let God take the glory for whatever victory results, it is the least I can do. So, who will join me?
*If you enjoyed this column and want to help me distribute these editorial opinions to an ever-growing audience, donations may now be made by credit card, check, or Money Order. Use this link:
http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/donate.php
© Chuck Baldwin
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The Bush Admin's How-to Guide for Using Religious Warfare to Destroy Iraq
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on April 15, 2008, Printed on April 15, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/82212/
Here's a thought exercise.
Imagine if the greatest minds this country has to offer were assembled in a conference room and tasked with drawing up a post-invasion plan that would lead to sectarian bloodshed in a country like Iraq -- where different groups had long lived side-by-side, intermarried and thought of themselves first and foremost as Iraqis, rather than as Shiites and Sunnis.
Their first recommendation would probably be to create an environment in which conflict would be likely to flourish. It would be a good idea to go into the country with enough heavy weaponry and air power to defeat the national army, but too few troops to provide security on the ground after the fact. When anarchy reigns, people look inward -- to their family, neighborhood and, yes, their religious community -- and develop a distrust of members of other communities.
If some military experts -- say the Army Chief of Staff -- said that the planned force would be insufficient for providing day-to-day security, one would probably want to humiliate and undermine him publicly. Maybe announce his successor 14 months before the end of his term so that he appeared before the world as some batty lame duck without any support from his superiors.
Then, dismantle the entire government, instead of just the senior leadership, and fire all of the country's bureaucrats, police and security personnel -- even if there were a half-million of them. But don't disarm them -- those weapons will come in handy later.
It would be good to destroy the country's infrastructure, too -- people get pissed off when they lack reliable electricity, working sanitation facilities, clean running water and the like. Make sure not to get those things up and running within five years of the invasion, either. That's a challenge, especially if one wants shovel tens of billions of dollars of American tax-payers' cash into the reconstruction effort.
The best way to achieve that trick would be to create enormous umbrella contracts with dozens of projects within their scope -- far too many for any firm to complete without farming out projects to dozens of subcontractors -- and hand those out to well-connected firms -- firms with terrible track records if possible. Make those contracts "cost-plus" - guaranteeing a profit regardless of the quality of the work -- add in minimal oversight and you've created excellent incentives for graft, corruption and incompetence (this solution would likely come from an economist sitting on that prestigious panel).
While you're at it, it would probably be best to rapidly privatize the large state-run companies that guaranteed employment for a large portion of the population. Make sure to ship in tens of thousands of foreign guest workers from places like India and the Philippines, and, if possible, pass a binding law that prevented any new government from giving preference to domestic firms or firms that employ large numbers of locals in its contracting. Otherwise, with a huge influx of foreign investment coming in, it's unlikely that there'd still be an unemployment rate of between 25-50 percent five years after the invasion.
If a working group within the government -- say at the State Department -- recommended that a job program be created for the newly-unemployed -- including those heavily armed members of the former regime's security forces -- ignore it at all costs. Idle hands are, after all, the Devil's tools.
When chaos first breaks out, as it inevitably will, dismiss it with a sound-byte -- maybe just say, "democracy is messy."
Make sure to leave dozens of large weapons caches unguarded for easy looting -- they'll come in handy later.
With the stage set, now comes the tricky part. How would that group of August thinkers replace a strong national identity -- one of the strongest in the region -- with a fractured sectarianism?
It would require some sophistication -- the key task is taking a population that has had all the "ancient blood-hatreds" that one finds among American Lutherans and Methodists, and deepen that sense of sectarian identity to a very large degree.
That group of experts might come up with something like this: encourage the formation of political parties on sectarian rather than ideological lines. Discourage the formation of any nationalist parties that might draw support from all of the country's ethnic and sectarian groups. Then hold an election before establishing any neutral democratic institutions -- no credible electoral commission, no functioning judiciary. Do it while there's still chaos on the ground -- that way, it will be far too dangerous for the candidates to be listed by name and people will only be able to vote for sectarian-based "lists." What will be achieved is not an exercise in democracy, but an ethno-sectarian census. If done right, this will effectively replace the population's concrete political and economic interests with a sense that their futures are explicitly tied to their sectarian or ethnic group.
Before holding elections, it would be wise to pass a law effectively banning thousands of leading members of a powerful minority from the political process.
Then prop up a ruling coalition dominated by one sect. But not dominated by just anyone from that sect; make sure it's a government with a deeply unpopular agenda that includes partitioning the country into small regional quasi-states, privatizing its energy sector and accepting the long-term presence of foreign troops.
With a little luck, and the smart appointments of a few highly-sectarian individuals to key ministries -- hopefully individuals with a lot of blood on their hands -- the new government's security services will quickly be infused with sectarian militiamen loyal to the dominant group. If this is handled right, sectarian militias will also no doubt rise from within the minority's ranks to defend the community from the government which, by this time, will be seen as highly sectarian and not at all democratic.
When that nice, hot mix of fighting factions has been established, make sure to arm and fund all sides.
All of these efforts should keep things boiling nicely. But it needs to be accompanied by a media strategy; it would be best to repeat, over and over and over again, that everything going wrong in the target country is a result of sectarian strife, and sectarian strife alone.
Ideally, one would try to get the media to avoid reporting -- or even mentioning -- the significant political divides that one has helped establish, in the hope of creating a conventional wisdom that is so universal that it spreads to the far reaches of the global media.
With the American press hard at work on the story, that shouldn't be too difficult.
The final task is to keep a powerful nationalist movement from rising, especially one with a popular agenda. That's fairly simple - one would need to ignore indigenous reconciliation efforts, launch attacks and detain nationalists whenever possible and marginalize them when it's not. Try to exclude them from the political process as much as is practical. If a charismatic nationalist should emerge, always refer to him as a "radical," even if he consistently shows restraint (don't worry, reporters won't ask exactly what it is that makes him so radical).
If all this is done correctly, it will result in a great prize of propaganda. First, one can shift some blame. Even if, as the final authority, everything one touches turns to crap, one can simply blame it on the wild-eyed, primitive Muslims, with their inability to accept the gift of freedom.
Even better, one can then claim that an indefinite occupation is necessary because if one withdraws, genocide is likely to ensue. This'll work even if none of the conditions that experts say lead up to genocide are present in the country. It'll even work on many of the people who opposed the war in the first place and who now want to do the right thing for a country that their government decimated in the first place.
Now, here's the interesting thing about all of this. It turns out that this plan -- one that might have been cooked up by that hypothetical panel of brilliant thinkers -- is exactly what the United States has in fact done in Iraq since its unprovoked invasion of the country in 2003.
It might have been part of a strategy to "divide and conquer," but it also could have been achieved through a potent combination of cultural ignorance, ideological rigidity, rank incompetence and a touch of cronyism.
According to a "briefing for Western readers" found on the Iraqi newsblog, Gorilla's Guides, The U.S., seeking to create a compliant government in Baghdad ...
...searched for Iraqi political actors [who] would act as an adjunct to the occupation. Local secular political forces were marginalized by the American occupiers who did not want people who it deemed to be too nationalist in the Iraqi government ... Instead it sought out religious parties, groupings, and politicians who it believed would be less experienced and more compliant.
...Intensifying Iraqi resistance to the American occupation of Iraq strengthened the occupying forces' opposition to Iraqi nationalism in all its forms. The US occupiers aggressively promoted a view of Iraqi politics that focused entirely upon ethnic/religious questions and completely ignored the long tradition of secular nationalism.
Iraqis appear to grasp this dynamic quite well, even if consumers of the Western media don't. As the Washington Post reported in late 2006, "a strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers" (emphasis mine).
The U.S. is not the first to encourage sectarianism in Iraq - the Ottoman Empire, the British and even Saddam Hussein worked to "divide and rule," but with very limited success in each case. As the Gorilla's Guides briefing notes:
The British colonial policy of "divide et impera" by fostering sectarian and or ethnic bitterness was notably less successful in Iraq than elsewhere. Iraqis had then and have now, a strong sense of being specifically Iraqi, and referred to themselves as "Iraqis" and the country in which they lived as "Iraq."
Despite our best attempts, we don't appear to be doing much better than the Brits did in the last century. The Iraqi government that began with power divided along ethnic and sectarian lines has substantially realigned itself. What began as a largely Shiite ruling coalition has seen a number of nationalist Shiite parties defect, and has replaced them with compliant Sunni and Kurdish parties (the governing coalition now rests on two Shia, two Kurdish and one Sunni party, all of which support the United States' agenda for Iraq). At the same time, a bloc of nationalists -- also representing all of Iraq's major ethnic and sectarian groups -- has formed to oppose that agenda in the parliament. That nationalist bloc now has a majority of lawmakers in that body (this dynamic, which the New York Times and Washington Post will get around to reporting any day now, is what American politicians don't discuss when complaining about Iraq's "dysfunctional government").
And that divided identity also hasn't caught on with the Iraqi people as a whole. Sociologist Mansoor Moaddel, with the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR), was part of a team that conducted a series of surveys of Iraqi attitudes between 2004 and 2007, and concluded: "Iraqis have a strong sense of national identity that transcends religious and political lines." The survey found that Iraqi nationalism is on the rise, with twice as many Iraqis identifying themselves as such than the number who see themselves as Muslims first and foremost. "This is a much higher proportion than we found in other Middle Eastern capitals," said Moaddel. He concluded that it's a mistake to believe that the sectarian street-fighting of recent years "represents widespread sentiment among Iraqis as a whole... the Iraqi public is increasingly drawn toward a vision of a democratic, non-sectarian government for the country."
Now we have to set a timetable for an orderly withdrawal and leave the Iraqis free to create that "democratic, non-sectarian state" on their own terms.
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/82212/
Posted on April 15, 2008, Printed on April 15, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/82212/
Here's a thought exercise.
Imagine if the greatest minds this country has to offer were assembled in a conference room and tasked with drawing up a post-invasion plan that would lead to sectarian bloodshed in a country like Iraq -- where different groups had long lived side-by-side, intermarried and thought of themselves first and foremost as Iraqis, rather than as Shiites and Sunnis.
Their first recommendation would probably be to create an environment in which conflict would be likely to flourish. It would be a good idea to go into the country with enough heavy weaponry and air power to defeat the national army, but too few troops to provide security on the ground after the fact. When anarchy reigns, people look inward -- to their family, neighborhood and, yes, their religious community -- and develop a distrust of members of other communities.
If some military experts -- say the Army Chief of Staff -- said that the planned force would be insufficient for providing day-to-day security, one would probably want to humiliate and undermine him publicly. Maybe announce his successor 14 months before the end of his term so that he appeared before the world as some batty lame duck without any support from his superiors.
Then, dismantle the entire government, instead of just the senior leadership, and fire all of the country's bureaucrats, police and security personnel -- even if there were a half-million of them. But don't disarm them -- those weapons will come in handy later.
It would be good to destroy the country's infrastructure, too -- people get pissed off when they lack reliable electricity, working sanitation facilities, clean running water and the like. Make sure not to get those things up and running within five years of the invasion, either. That's a challenge, especially if one wants shovel tens of billions of dollars of American tax-payers' cash into the reconstruction effort.
The best way to achieve that trick would be to create enormous umbrella contracts with dozens of projects within their scope -- far too many for any firm to complete without farming out projects to dozens of subcontractors -- and hand those out to well-connected firms -- firms with terrible track records if possible. Make those contracts "cost-plus" - guaranteeing a profit regardless of the quality of the work -- add in minimal oversight and you've created excellent incentives for graft, corruption and incompetence (this solution would likely come from an economist sitting on that prestigious panel).
While you're at it, it would probably be best to rapidly privatize the large state-run companies that guaranteed employment for a large portion of the population. Make sure to ship in tens of thousands of foreign guest workers from places like India and the Philippines, and, if possible, pass a binding law that prevented any new government from giving preference to domestic firms or firms that employ large numbers of locals in its contracting. Otherwise, with a huge influx of foreign investment coming in, it's unlikely that there'd still be an unemployment rate of between 25-50 percent five years after the invasion.
If a working group within the government -- say at the State Department -- recommended that a job program be created for the newly-unemployed -- including those heavily armed members of the former regime's security forces -- ignore it at all costs. Idle hands are, after all, the Devil's tools.
When chaos first breaks out, as it inevitably will, dismiss it with a sound-byte -- maybe just say, "democracy is messy."
Make sure to leave dozens of large weapons caches unguarded for easy looting -- they'll come in handy later.
With the stage set, now comes the tricky part. How would that group of August thinkers replace a strong national identity -- one of the strongest in the region -- with a fractured sectarianism?
It would require some sophistication -- the key task is taking a population that has had all the "ancient blood-hatreds" that one finds among American Lutherans and Methodists, and deepen that sense of sectarian identity to a very large degree.
That group of experts might come up with something like this: encourage the formation of political parties on sectarian rather than ideological lines. Discourage the formation of any nationalist parties that might draw support from all of the country's ethnic and sectarian groups. Then hold an election before establishing any neutral democratic institutions -- no credible electoral commission, no functioning judiciary. Do it while there's still chaos on the ground -- that way, it will be far too dangerous for the candidates to be listed by name and people will only be able to vote for sectarian-based "lists." What will be achieved is not an exercise in democracy, but an ethno-sectarian census. If done right, this will effectively replace the population's concrete political and economic interests with a sense that their futures are explicitly tied to their sectarian or ethnic group.
Before holding elections, it would be wise to pass a law effectively banning thousands of leading members of a powerful minority from the political process.
Then prop up a ruling coalition dominated by one sect. But not dominated by just anyone from that sect; make sure it's a government with a deeply unpopular agenda that includes partitioning the country into small regional quasi-states, privatizing its energy sector and accepting the long-term presence of foreign troops.
With a little luck, and the smart appointments of a few highly-sectarian individuals to key ministries -- hopefully individuals with a lot of blood on their hands -- the new government's security services will quickly be infused with sectarian militiamen loyal to the dominant group. If this is handled right, sectarian militias will also no doubt rise from within the minority's ranks to defend the community from the government which, by this time, will be seen as highly sectarian and not at all democratic.
When that nice, hot mix of fighting factions has been established, make sure to arm and fund all sides.
All of these efforts should keep things boiling nicely. But it needs to be accompanied by a media strategy; it would be best to repeat, over and over and over again, that everything going wrong in the target country is a result of sectarian strife, and sectarian strife alone.
Ideally, one would try to get the media to avoid reporting -- or even mentioning -- the significant political divides that one has helped establish, in the hope of creating a conventional wisdom that is so universal that it spreads to the far reaches of the global media.
With the American press hard at work on the story, that shouldn't be too difficult.
The final task is to keep a powerful nationalist movement from rising, especially one with a popular agenda. That's fairly simple - one would need to ignore indigenous reconciliation efforts, launch attacks and detain nationalists whenever possible and marginalize them when it's not. Try to exclude them from the political process as much as is practical. If a charismatic nationalist should emerge, always refer to him as a "radical," even if he consistently shows restraint (don't worry, reporters won't ask exactly what it is that makes him so radical).
If all this is done correctly, it will result in a great prize of propaganda. First, one can shift some blame. Even if, as the final authority, everything one touches turns to crap, one can simply blame it on the wild-eyed, primitive Muslims, with their inability to accept the gift of freedom.
Even better, one can then claim that an indefinite occupation is necessary because if one withdraws, genocide is likely to ensue. This'll work even if none of the conditions that experts say lead up to genocide are present in the country. It'll even work on many of the people who opposed the war in the first place and who now want to do the right thing for a country that their government decimated in the first place.
Now, here's the interesting thing about all of this. It turns out that this plan -- one that might have been cooked up by that hypothetical panel of brilliant thinkers -- is exactly what the United States has in fact done in Iraq since its unprovoked invasion of the country in 2003.
It might have been part of a strategy to "divide and conquer," but it also could have been achieved through a potent combination of cultural ignorance, ideological rigidity, rank incompetence and a touch of cronyism.
According to a "briefing for Western readers" found on the Iraqi newsblog, Gorilla's Guides, The U.S., seeking to create a compliant government in Baghdad ...
...searched for Iraqi political actors [who] would act as an adjunct to the occupation. Local secular political forces were marginalized by the American occupiers who did not want people who it deemed to be too nationalist in the Iraqi government ... Instead it sought out religious parties, groupings, and politicians who it believed would be less experienced and more compliant.
...Intensifying Iraqi resistance to the American occupation of Iraq strengthened the occupying forces' opposition to Iraqi nationalism in all its forms. The US occupiers aggressively promoted a view of Iraqi politics that focused entirely upon ethnic/religious questions and completely ignored the long tradition of secular nationalism.
Iraqis appear to grasp this dynamic quite well, even if consumers of the Western media don't. As the Washington Post reported in late 2006, "a strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers" (emphasis mine).
The U.S. is not the first to encourage sectarianism in Iraq - the Ottoman Empire, the British and even Saddam Hussein worked to "divide and rule," but with very limited success in each case. As the Gorilla's Guides briefing notes:
The British colonial policy of "divide et impera" by fostering sectarian and or ethnic bitterness was notably less successful in Iraq than elsewhere. Iraqis had then and have now, a strong sense of being specifically Iraqi, and referred to themselves as "Iraqis" and the country in which they lived as "Iraq."
Despite our best attempts, we don't appear to be doing much better than the Brits did in the last century. The Iraqi government that began with power divided along ethnic and sectarian lines has substantially realigned itself. What began as a largely Shiite ruling coalition has seen a number of nationalist Shiite parties defect, and has replaced them with compliant Sunni and Kurdish parties (the governing coalition now rests on two Shia, two Kurdish and one Sunni party, all of which support the United States' agenda for Iraq). At the same time, a bloc of nationalists -- also representing all of Iraq's major ethnic and sectarian groups -- has formed to oppose that agenda in the parliament. That nationalist bloc now has a majority of lawmakers in that body (this dynamic, which the New York Times and Washington Post will get around to reporting any day now, is what American politicians don't discuss when complaining about Iraq's "dysfunctional government").
And that divided identity also hasn't caught on with the Iraqi people as a whole. Sociologist Mansoor Moaddel, with the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR), was part of a team that conducted a series of surveys of Iraqi attitudes between 2004 and 2007, and concluded: "Iraqis have a strong sense of national identity that transcends religious and political lines." The survey found that Iraqi nationalism is on the rise, with twice as many Iraqis identifying themselves as such than the number who see themselves as Muslims first and foremost. "This is a much higher proportion than we found in other Middle Eastern capitals," said Moaddel. He concluded that it's a mistake to believe that the sectarian street-fighting of recent years "represents widespread sentiment among Iraqis as a whole... the Iraqi public is increasingly drawn toward a vision of a democratic, non-sectarian government for the country."
Now we have to set a timetable for an orderly withdrawal and leave the Iraqis free to create that "democratic, non-sectarian state" on their own terms.
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/82212/
Questions for Petraeus
by Ron Paul
Before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Report on Iraq to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, April 9, 2008
Opening Statement
Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you for calling this hearing on the current state of affairs in Iraq with General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Reviewing the presentations by our panel, I have noted with some concern that they seem more focused on justifying a future attack on Iran than reporting on progress in Iraq. Much of the assertions about Iran in Iraq seem illogical, others seem intended to inflame the situation with little justification.
Particularly, I am concerned about claims that a new enemy in Iraq has emerged with ties to Iran. First we were told that the enemy was Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party. Then we were told the enemy was the "dead-enders" from Saddam’s former government. Then the prime enemy became "al-Qaeda in Iraq," a prime focus of the presentation by Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus last September. Now we are told that the new enemies are mysterious "Special Groups" that are said to have spun off from al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
If this phenomenon of constantly emerging enemies bent on destabilizing Iraq is accurate and our presence in Iraq keeps generating new enemies, perhaps the problem is the occupation itself. If this is the case, doesn’t it make sense that our departure from Iraq may actually have a stabilizing effect?
I suspect these allegations that Iranian-supported "Special Groups" are now the prime enemy are in reality designed to provide an excuse for a planned US attack on Iran or are meant as justification for a permanent US military presence in Iraq.
It makes little sense to assert that Iran is funding militias to undermine the Iraqi government. The current Iraqi government may have been approved by the United States, but essentially it was made in Iran. The leading political parties of Iraq, the DAWA and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council have close ties to Iran. Leaders of these parties were in exile in Iran until the US invasion of Iraq. Iranian president Ahmadinejad is warmly welcomed in Baghdad by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. Why would Iran set up militias in the south to destabilize a government with such strong Iranian ties? I find the allegation that Iran just cannot tolerate an elected government next door to be unsatisfying, particularly considering that Iran itself regularly holds elections where a wide variety of political parties compete for power.
It is alleged that the rockets fired into the Green Zone during the recent clashes in Baghdad and Basra were made in 2007 in Iran. Is it not true, however, that if the Iranian government were to actually arm the Iraqi militias, these groups would have more modern weapons to counter U.S. helicopter gunships and heavy tanks? Is there any hard proof that the Iranian government is arming groups in Iraq? There are reports that thousands of US weapons have gone missing in Iraq. If some of these turn up in the hands of insurgents, would it make sense to suggest that the US government is intentionally arming them?
In fact, there is plenty of evidence that Iran is trying to prevent the further destabilization of Iraq, which makes sense considering that Iran is next door and would keenly feel the effects of an Iraq fallen into civil war. The Associated Press reported yesterday that the Iranian government has condemned attacks on the "Green Zone" in Iraq. According to other press reports, the government of Iran brokered a ceasefire after recent Iraqi government moves against elements of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to conclude by again stating my concern that the real purpose of today’s testimony is to further set the stage for an attack on Iran. Congress should make it very clear that there is no authority under current law for an attack on Iran. It is in our best interest to talk with Iran and to work with Iran to help stabilize the situation in Iraq. It is also in our immediate interest to remove US forces from Iraq as quickly as it is safe to do so.
Questions at Hearing
Questions for the Witnesses, General David H. Petraeus, USA and The Honorable Ryan C. Crocker
Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit several questions to the panel. I know there will not be enough time to answer these, but I want to get them into the record.
Why should the American people continue to support a war that was justified by false information, since Saddam Hussein never aggressed against the United States, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction?
It is said that we must continue the war because we have already sacrificed so much. But what is moral about demanding even more needless sacrifice of human lives merely to save face for the mistakes of invading and occupying Iraq?
Doesn’t it seem awfully strange that the Iraqi government we support is an ally of the Iranians who are our declared enemies? Are we not now supporting the Iranians by propping up their allies in Iraq? If (Iraqi Prime Minister) Maliki is our ally and he has "diplomatic relations" with (Iranian President) Ahmadinejad why can’t we? Why must we continue to provoke Iran, just looking for an excuse to bomb that country? Does our policy in Iraq not guarantee chaos for years to come?
It is estimated that up to 2,000 Iraqi soldiers refused to fight against al-Sadr’s militia. Why should we not expect many of the 80,000 Sunnis we have recently armed to someday turn their weapons against us, since they as well as the Mahdi Army detest any and all foreign occupation?
Is it not true that our ally Malaki broke the ceasefire declared by al-Sadr by initiating the recent violence? Is it not true that the current ceasefire was brokered by the Iranians, who also condemned the attacks on the "Green Zone"? How can we blame all the violence on the Iranians?
Is it not true that with the recent surge in violence in March, attacks are now back at the same levels as they were in 2005?
Does Iran not have a greater justification to be involved in neighboring Iraq than we do, since it is 6,000 miles from our shores? If China and Russia were occupying Mexico how would we react?
Since no one can define "winning the war," just who do we expect to surrender? Does this not mean that this war will be endless since the political leaders will not end it – until we go broke, and maybe that’s not so far off?
Before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Report on Iraq to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, April 9, 2008
Opening Statement
Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you for calling this hearing on the current state of affairs in Iraq with General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Reviewing the presentations by our panel, I have noted with some concern that they seem more focused on justifying a future attack on Iran than reporting on progress in Iraq. Much of the assertions about Iran in Iraq seem illogical, others seem intended to inflame the situation with little justification.
Particularly, I am concerned about claims that a new enemy in Iraq has emerged with ties to Iran. First we were told that the enemy was Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party. Then we were told the enemy was the "dead-enders" from Saddam’s former government. Then the prime enemy became "al-Qaeda in Iraq," a prime focus of the presentation by Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus last September. Now we are told that the new enemies are mysterious "Special Groups" that are said to have spun off from al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
If this phenomenon of constantly emerging enemies bent on destabilizing Iraq is accurate and our presence in Iraq keeps generating new enemies, perhaps the problem is the occupation itself. If this is the case, doesn’t it make sense that our departure from Iraq may actually have a stabilizing effect?
I suspect these allegations that Iranian-supported "Special Groups" are now the prime enemy are in reality designed to provide an excuse for a planned US attack on Iran or are meant as justification for a permanent US military presence in Iraq.
It makes little sense to assert that Iran is funding militias to undermine the Iraqi government. The current Iraqi government may have been approved by the United States, but essentially it was made in Iran. The leading political parties of Iraq, the DAWA and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council have close ties to Iran. Leaders of these parties were in exile in Iran until the US invasion of Iraq. Iranian president Ahmadinejad is warmly welcomed in Baghdad by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. Why would Iran set up militias in the south to destabilize a government with such strong Iranian ties? I find the allegation that Iran just cannot tolerate an elected government next door to be unsatisfying, particularly considering that Iran itself regularly holds elections where a wide variety of political parties compete for power.
It is alleged that the rockets fired into the Green Zone during the recent clashes in Baghdad and Basra were made in 2007 in Iran. Is it not true, however, that if the Iranian government were to actually arm the Iraqi militias, these groups would have more modern weapons to counter U.S. helicopter gunships and heavy tanks? Is there any hard proof that the Iranian government is arming groups in Iraq? There are reports that thousands of US weapons have gone missing in Iraq. If some of these turn up in the hands of insurgents, would it make sense to suggest that the US government is intentionally arming them?
In fact, there is plenty of evidence that Iran is trying to prevent the further destabilization of Iraq, which makes sense considering that Iran is next door and would keenly feel the effects of an Iraq fallen into civil war. The Associated Press reported yesterday that the Iranian government has condemned attacks on the "Green Zone" in Iraq. According to other press reports, the government of Iran brokered a ceasefire after recent Iraqi government moves against elements of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to conclude by again stating my concern that the real purpose of today’s testimony is to further set the stage for an attack on Iran. Congress should make it very clear that there is no authority under current law for an attack on Iran. It is in our best interest to talk with Iran and to work with Iran to help stabilize the situation in Iraq. It is also in our immediate interest to remove US forces from Iraq as quickly as it is safe to do so.
Questions at Hearing
Questions for the Witnesses, General David H. Petraeus, USA and The Honorable Ryan C. Crocker
Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit several questions to the panel. I know there will not be enough time to answer these, but I want to get them into the record.
Why should the American people continue to support a war that was justified by false information, since Saddam Hussein never aggressed against the United States, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction?
It is said that we must continue the war because we have already sacrificed so much. But what is moral about demanding even more needless sacrifice of human lives merely to save face for the mistakes of invading and occupying Iraq?
Doesn’t it seem awfully strange that the Iraqi government we support is an ally of the Iranians who are our declared enemies? Are we not now supporting the Iranians by propping up their allies in Iraq? If (Iraqi Prime Minister) Maliki is our ally and he has "diplomatic relations" with (Iranian President) Ahmadinejad why can’t we? Why must we continue to provoke Iran, just looking for an excuse to bomb that country? Does our policy in Iraq not guarantee chaos for years to come?
It is estimated that up to 2,000 Iraqi soldiers refused to fight against al-Sadr’s militia. Why should we not expect many of the 80,000 Sunnis we have recently armed to someday turn their weapons against us, since they as well as the Mahdi Army detest any and all foreign occupation?
Is it not true that our ally Malaki broke the ceasefire declared by al-Sadr by initiating the recent violence? Is it not true that the current ceasefire was brokered by the Iranians, who also condemned the attacks on the "Green Zone"? How can we blame all the violence on the Iranians?
Is it not true that with the recent surge in violence in March, attacks are now back at the same levels as they were in 2005?
Does Iran not have a greater justification to be involved in neighboring Iraq than we do, since it is 6,000 miles from our shores? If China and Russia were occupying Mexico how would we react?
Since no one can define "winning the war," just who do we expect to surrender? Does this not mean that this war will be endless since the political leaders will not end it – until we go broke, and maybe that’s not so far off?
Financial Collapse will End the Occupation
And it won't be "A time of our choosing"
By Mike Whitney
14/04/08 "ICH " -- - The US Military has won every battle it has fought in Iraq, but it has lost the war. Wars are won politically, not militarily. Bush doesn't understand this. He still clings to the belief that a political settlement can be imposed through force. But he is mistaken. The use of overwhelming force has only spread the violence and added to the political instability. Now Iraq is ungovernable. Was that the objective? Miles of concrete blast-walls snake through Baghdad to separate the warring parties; the country is fragmented into a hundred smaller pieces each ruled by local militia commanders. These are the signs of failure not success. That's why the American people no longer support the occupation. They're just being practical; they know Bush's plan won't work. As Nir Rosen says, “Iraq has become Somalia”.
The administration still supports Iraqi President Nouri al Maliki, but al-Maliki is a meaningless figurehead who will have no effect on the country's future. He has no popular base of support and controls nothing beyond the walls of the Green Zone. The al-Maliki government is merely an Arab facade designed to convince the American people that political progress is being made, but there is no progress. Its a sham. The future is in the hands of the men with guns; they're the ones who have divided Iraq into locally-controlled fiefdoms and they are the one's who will ultimately decide who will rule the state. At present, the fighting between the factions is being described as “sectarian warfare”, but the term is intentionally misleading. The fighting is political in nature; the various militias are competing with each other to see who will fill the vacuum left by the removal of Saddam. It's a power struggle. The media likes to portray the conflict as a clash between half-crazed Arabs--"dead-enders and terrorists"---who relish the idea killing their countrymen, but that's just a way of demonizing the enemy. In truth, the violence is entirely rational; it is the inevitable reaction to the dissolution of the state and the occupation by foreign troops. Many military experts predicted that there would be outbreaks of fighting after the initial invasion, but their warnings were shrugged off by clueless politicians and the cheerleading media. Now the violence has flared up again in Basra and Baghdad, and there is no end in sight. Only one thing seems certain, Iraq's future will not be decided at the ballot box. Bush has made sure of that.
The US military does not rule Iraq nor does it have the power to control events on the ground. It's just one of many militias vieing for power in a state that is ruled by warlords. After the army conducts combat operations, it is forced to retreat to its camps and bases. This point needs to be emphasized in order to understand that there is no real future for the occupation. The US simply does not have the manpower to hold territory or to establish security. In fact, the presence of American troops incites violence because they are seen as forces of occupation, not liberators. Survey's show that the vast majority of the Iraqi people want US troops to leave. The military has destroyed too much of the country and slaughtered too many people to expect that these attitudes will change anytime soon. Iraqi poet and blogger Layla Anwar sums up the feelings of many of the war's victims in a recent post on her web site "An Arab Women's Blues":
"At the gates of Babylon the Great, you are still struggling, fighting away, chasing this or the other, detaining, bombing from above, filling up morgues, hospitals, graveyards and embassies and borders with quesesfor exit-visas.
Not one Iraqi wishes your presence. Not one Iraqi accepts your occupation.
Got news for you Motherfuckers, you will never control Iraq, not in six years, not in ten years, not in 20 years....You have brought upon yourself the hate and the curse of all Iraqis, Arabs and the rest of the world...now face your agony." (Layla Anwar; "An Arab Women's Blues: Reflections in a sealed bottle"
Is Bush hoping to change the mind of Layla or the millions of other Iraqis who have lost loved ones or been forced into exile or seen their country and culture crushed beneath the bootheel of foreign occupation? The hearts and minds campaign is lost. The US will never be welcome in Iraq.
According to a survey in the British Medical Journal "Lancet" more than a million Iraqis have been killed in the war. Another four million have been either internally-displaced or have fled the country. But the figures tell us nothing about the magnitude of the disaster that Bush has caused by attacking Iraq. The invasion is the greatest human catastrophe in the Middle East since the Nakba in 1948. Living standards have declined precipitously in every area---infant mortality, clean water, food-security, medical supplies, education, electrical power, employment etc. Even oil production is still below pre-war levels. The invasion is the most comprehensive policy failure since Vietnam; everything has gone wrong. The heart of the Arab world has descended into chaos. The suffering is incalculable.
The main problem is the occupation; it is the primary catalyst for violence and an obstacle to political settlement. As long as the occupation persists, so will the fighting. The claims that the so-called surge has changed the political landscape are greatly exaggerated. Retired Lt. General William Odom commented on this point in an interview on the Jim Lerher News Hour:
"The surge has sustained military instability and achieved nothing in political consolidation....Things are much worse now. And I don't see them getting any better. This was foreseeable a year and a half ago. And to continue to put the cozy veneer of comfortable half-truths on this is to deceive the American public and to make them think it is not the charade it is.....When you say that the Lebanization of Iraq is taking place, yes, but not because of Iran, but because the U.S. went in and made this kind of fragmentation possible. And it has occurred over the last five years....The al-Maliki government is worse off now...The notion that there;'s some kind of progress is absurd. The al-Maliki government uses its Ministry of Interior like a death squad militia. So to call Sadr an extremist and Maliki a good guy just overlooks the reality that there are no good guys." (Jim Lerher News Hour)
The war in Iraq was lost before the first shot was fired. The conflict never had the support of the American people and Iraq never posed a threat to US national security. The whole pretext for the war was based on lies; it was a coup orchestrated by elites and the media to carry out a far-right agenda. Now the mission has failed, but no one wants to admit their mistakes by withdrawing; so the butchery continues without pause.
How Will It End?
The Bush administration has decided to pursue a strategy that is unprecedented in US history. It has decided to continue to prosecute a war that has already been lost morally, strategically, and militarily. But fighting a losing war has its costs. America is much weaker now than it was when Bush first took office in 2000; politically, economically and militarily. US power and prestige around the world will continue to deteriorate until the troops are withdrawn from Iraq. But that's unlikely to happen until all other options have been exhausted. Deteriorating economic conditions in the financial markets are putting enormous downward pressure on the dollar. The corporate bond and equities markets are in disarray; the banking system is collapsing, consumer spending is down, tax revenues are falling, and the country is headed into a painful and protracted recession. The US will leave Iraq sooner than many pundits believe, but it will not be at a time of our choosing. Rather, the conflict will end when the United States no longer has the capacity to wage war. That time is not far off.
The Iraq War signals the end of US interventionism for at least a generation; maybe longer. The ideological foundation for the war (preemption/regime change) has been exposed as a baseless justification for unprovoked aggression. Someone will have to be held accountable. There will have to be international tribunals to determine who is responsible in the deaths of over one million Iraqis.
By Mike Whitney
14/04/08 "ICH " -- - The US Military has won every battle it has fought in Iraq, but it has lost the war. Wars are won politically, not militarily. Bush doesn't understand this. He still clings to the belief that a political settlement can be imposed through force. But he is mistaken. The use of overwhelming force has only spread the violence and added to the political instability. Now Iraq is ungovernable. Was that the objective? Miles of concrete blast-walls snake through Baghdad to separate the warring parties; the country is fragmented into a hundred smaller pieces each ruled by local militia commanders. These are the signs of failure not success. That's why the American people no longer support the occupation. They're just being practical; they know Bush's plan won't work. As Nir Rosen says, “Iraq has become Somalia”.
The administration still supports Iraqi President Nouri al Maliki, but al-Maliki is a meaningless figurehead who will have no effect on the country's future. He has no popular base of support and controls nothing beyond the walls of the Green Zone. The al-Maliki government is merely an Arab facade designed to convince the American people that political progress is being made, but there is no progress. Its a sham. The future is in the hands of the men with guns; they're the ones who have divided Iraq into locally-controlled fiefdoms and they are the one's who will ultimately decide who will rule the state. At present, the fighting between the factions is being described as “sectarian warfare”, but the term is intentionally misleading. The fighting is political in nature; the various militias are competing with each other to see who will fill the vacuum left by the removal of Saddam. It's a power struggle. The media likes to portray the conflict as a clash between half-crazed Arabs--"dead-enders and terrorists"---who relish the idea killing their countrymen, but that's just a way of demonizing the enemy. In truth, the violence is entirely rational; it is the inevitable reaction to the dissolution of the state and the occupation by foreign troops. Many military experts predicted that there would be outbreaks of fighting after the initial invasion, but their warnings were shrugged off by clueless politicians and the cheerleading media. Now the violence has flared up again in Basra and Baghdad, and there is no end in sight. Only one thing seems certain, Iraq's future will not be decided at the ballot box. Bush has made sure of that.
The US military does not rule Iraq nor does it have the power to control events on the ground. It's just one of many militias vieing for power in a state that is ruled by warlords. After the army conducts combat operations, it is forced to retreat to its camps and bases. This point needs to be emphasized in order to understand that there is no real future for the occupation. The US simply does not have the manpower to hold territory or to establish security. In fact, the presence of American troops incites violence because they are seen as forces of occupation, not liberators. Survey's show that the vast majority of the Iraqi people want US troops to leave. The military has destroyed too much of the country and slaughtered too many people to expect that these attitudes will change anytime soon. Iraqi poet and blogger Layla Anwar sums up the feelings of many of the war's victims in a recent post on her web site "An Arab Women's Blues":
"At the gates of Babylon the Great, you are still struggling, fighting away, chasing this or the other, detaining, bombing from above, filling up morgues, hospitals, graveyards and embassies and borders with quesesfor exit-visas.
Not one Iraqi wishes your presence. Not one Iraqi accepts your occupation.
Got news for you Motherfuckers, you will never control Iraq, not in six years, not in ten years, not in 20 years....You have brought upon yourself the hate and the curse of all Iraqis, Arabs and the rest of the world...now face your agony." (Layla Anwar; "An Arab Women's Blues: Reflections in a sealed bottle"
Is Bush hoping to change the mind of Layla or the millions of other Iraqis who have lost loved ones or been forced into exile or seen their country and culture crushed beneath the bootheel of foreign occupation? The hearts and minds campaign is lost. The US will never be welcome in Iraq.
According to a survey in the British Medical Journal "Lancet" more than a million Iraqis have been killed in the war. Another four million have been either internally-displaced or have fled the country. But the figures tell us nothing about the magnitude of the disaster that Bush has caused by attacking Iraq. The invasion is the greatest human catastrophe in the Middle East since the Nakba in 1948. Living standards have declined precipitously in every area---infant mortality, clean water, food-security, medical supplies, education, electrical power, employment etc. Even oil production is still below pre-war levels. The invasion is the most comprehensive policy failure since Vietnam; everything has gone wrong. The heart of the Arab world has descended into chaos. The suffering is incalculable.
The main problem is the occupation; it is the primary catalyst for violence and an obstacle to political settlement. As long as the occupation persists, so will the fighting. The claims that the so-called surge has changed the political landscape are greatly exaggerated. Retired Lt. General William Odom commented on this point in an interview on the Jim Lerher News Hour:
"The surge has sustained military instability and achieved nothing in political consolidation....Things are much worse now. And I don't see them getting any better. This was foreseeable a year and a half ago. And to continue to put the cozy veneer of comfortable half-truths on this is to deceive the American public and to make them think it is not the charade it is.....When you say that the Lebanization of Iraq is taking place, yes, but not because of Iran, but because the U.S. went in and made this kind of fragmentation possible. And it has occurred over the last five years....The al-Maliki government is worse off now...The notion that there;'s some kind of progress is absurd. The al-Maliki government uses its Ministry of Interior like a death squad militia. So to call Sadr an extremist and Maliki a good guy just overlooks the reality that there are no good guys." (Jim Lerher News Hour)
The war in Iraq was lost before the first shot was fired. The conflict never had the support of the American people and Iraq never posed a threat to US national security. The whole pretext for the war was based on lies; it was a coup orchestrated by elites and the media to carry out a far-right agenda. Now the mission has failed, but no one wants to admit their mistakes by withdrawing; so the butchery continues without pause.
How Will It End?
The Bush administration has decided to pursue a strategy that is unprecedented in US history. It has decided to continue to prosecute a war that has already been lost morally, strategically, and militarily. But fighting a losing war has its costs. America is much weaker now than it was when Bush first took office in 2000; politically, economically and militarily. US power and prestige around the world will continue to deteriorate until the troops are withdrawn from Iraq. But that's unlikely to happen until all other options have been exhausted. Deteriorating economic conditions in the financial markets are putting enormous downward pressure on the dollar. The corporate bond and equities markets are in disarray; the banking system is collapsing, consumer spending is down, tax revenues are falling, and the country is headed into a painful and protracted recession. The US will leave Iraq sooner than many pundits believe, but it will not be at a time of our choosing. Rather, the conflict will end when the United States no longer has the capacity to wage war. That time is not far off.
The Iraq War signals the end of US interventionism for at least a generation; maybe longer. The ideological foundation for the war (preemption/regime change) has been exposed as a baseless justification for unprovoked aggression. Someone will have to be held accountable. There will have to be international tribunals to determine who is responsible in the deaths of over one million Iraqis.
Monday, April 14, 2008
American Hegemony Is Not Guaranteed
by Paul Craig Roberts
Exactly as the British press predicted, last week's congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Green Zone administrator Ryan Crocker set the propaganda stage for a Bush regime attack on Iran. On April 10 Robert H. Reid of AP News reported: "The top U.S. commander has shifted the focus from al-Qaeda to Iranian-backed 'special groups' as the main threat. … The shift was articulated by Gen. Petraeus who told Congress that 'unchecked, the special groups pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq.'"
According to the neocon propaganda, the "special groups" (have you ever heard of them before?) are breakaway elements of Sadr's militia.
Nonsensical on its face, the Petraeus/Crocker testimony is just another mask in the macabre theater of lies that the Bush regime has told in order to justify its wars of naked aggression against Muslims.
Fact #1: Sadr is not allied with Iran. He speaks with an Iraqi voice and has his militia under orders to stand down from conflict. The Badr militia is the Shi'ite militia that is allied with Iran. Why did the U.S. and its Iraqi puppet Maliki attack Sadr's militia and not the Badr militia or the breakaway elements of Sadr's militia that allegedly now operate as gangs?
Fact #2: The Shi'ite militias and the Sunni insurgents are armed with weapons available from the unsecured weapon stockpiles of Saddam Hussein's army. If Iran were arming Iraqis, the Iraqi insurgents and militias would have armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades and surface-to-air missiles. These two weapons would neutralize the U.S. advantage by enabling Iraqis to destroy U.S. helicopter gunships, aircraft, and tanks. The Iraqis cannot mass their forces as they have no weapons against U.S. air power. To destroy U.S. tanks, Iraqis have to guess the roads U.S. vehicles will travel and bury bombs constructed from artillery shells. The inability to directly attack armor and to defend against air attack denies offensive capability to Iraqis.
If the Iranians desired to arm Iraqis, they obviously would provide these two weapons that would change the course of the war.
Just as the Bush regime lied to Americans and the UN about why Iraq was attacked, hiding the real agenda behind false claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaeda, the Bush regime is now lying about why it needs to attack Iran. Could anyone possibly believe that Iran is so desirous of having its beautiful country bombed and its nuclear energy program destroyed that Iran would invite an attack by fighting a "proxy war" against the U.S. in Iraq?
That the Bush regime would tell such a blatant lie shows that the regime has no respect for the intelligence of the American public and no respect for the integrity of the U.S. media.
And why should it? The public and media have fallen for every lie the Bush regime has told.
The moral hypocrisy of U.S. politicians is unrivaled. McCain says that if he were president he would not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics because China has killed and injured 100 Tibetans who protested Tibet's occupation by China. Meanwhile the Iraqi toll of the American occupation is one million dead and four million displaced. That comes to 20 percent of the Iraqi population. At what point does the U.S. occupation of Iraq graduate from a war crime to genocide?
Not to be outdone by McCain's hypocrisy, Bush declared: "The message to the Iranians is: we will bring you to justice if you continue to try to infiltrate, send your agents or send surrogates to bring harm to our troops and/or the Iraqi citizens."
Consider our "Christian" president's position: It is perfectly appropriate for the U.S. to bomb and to invade countries and to send its agents and surrogates to harm Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, Serbians, and whomever, but resistance to American aggression is the mark of terrorism, and any country that aids America's victims is at war with America.
The three-week "cakewalk" war that would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues is now into its sixth year. According to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, the cost of the war to Americans is between three and five trillion dollars. Five trillion dollars equals the entire U.S. personal and corporate income tax revenues for two years.
Of what benefit is this enormous expenditure to America? The price of oil and gasoline in U.S. dollars has tripled, the price of gold has quadrupled, and the dollar has declined sharply against other currencies. The national debt has rapidly mounted. America's reputation is in tatters.
The Bush regime's coming attack on Iran will widen the war dramatically and escalate the costs.
Not content with war with Iran, Republican presidential candidate John McCain in a speech written for him by neocon warmonger Robert Kagan promises to confront both Russia and China.
Three questions present themselves:
(1) Will our foreign creditors – principally China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia – finance a third monstrous Bush regime war crime?
(2) Will Iran sit on its hands and wait on the American bombs to fall?
(3) Will Russia and China passively wait to be confronted by the warmonger McCain?
Should a country that is overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan be preparing to attack yet a third country, while threatening to interfere in the affairs of two large nuclear powers? What sort of political leadership seeks to initiate conflict in so many unpromising directions?
With Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea threatened by American hegemonic belligerence, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario that would terminate all pretense of American power: For example, instead of waiting to be attacked, Iran uses its Chinese and Russian anti-ship missiles, against which the U.S. reportedly has poor means of defense, and sinks every ship in the American carrier strike forces that have been foolishly massed in the Persian Gulf, simultaneously taking out the Saudi oil fields and the Green Zone in Baghdad, the headquarters of the U.S. occupation. Shi'ite militias break the U.S. supply lines from Kuwait, and Iranian troops destroy the dispersed U.S. forces in Iraq before they can be concentrated to battle strength.
Simultaneously, North Korea crosses the demilitarized zone and takes South Korea, China seizes Taiwan and dumps a trillion dollars of U.S. Treasury bonds on the market. Russia goes on full nuclear alert and cuts off all natural gas to Europe.
What would the Bush regime do? Wet its pants? Push the button and end the world?
If America really had dangerous enemies, surely the enemies would collude to take advantage of a dramatically overextended delusional regime that, blinded by its own arrogance and hubris, issues gratuitous threats and lives by Mao's doctrine that power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
There are other less dramatic scenarios. Why does the U.S. assume that only it can initiate aggression, boycotts, freezes on financial assets of other countries, and bans on foreign banks from participation in the international banking system? If the rest of the world were to tire of American aggression or to develop a moral conscience, it would be easy to organize a boycott of America and to ban U.S. banks from participating in the international banking system. Such a boycott would be especially effective at the present time with the balance sheets of U.S. banks impaired by subprime derivatives and the U.S. government dependent on foreign loans in order to finance its day-to-day activities.
Sooner or later it will occur to other countries that putting up with America is a habit that they don't need to continue.
Does America really need more political leadership that leads in such unpromising directions?
Exactly as the British press predicted, last week's congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Green Zone administrator Ryan Crocker set the propaganda stage for a Bush regime attack on Iran. On April 10 Robert H. Reid of AP News reported: "The top U.S. commander has shifted the focus from al-Qaeda to Iranian-backed 'special groups' as the main threat. … The shift was articulated by Gen. Petraeus who told Congress that 'unchecked, the special groups pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq.'"
According to the neocon propaganda, the "special groups" (have you ever heard of them before?) are breakaway elements of Sadr's militia.
Nonsensical on its face, the Petraeus/Crocker testimony is just another mask in the macabre theater of lies that the Bush regime has told in order to justify its wars of naked aggression against Muslims.
Fact #1: Sadr is not allied with Iran. He speaks with an Iraqi voice and has his militia under orders to stand down from conflict. The Badr militia is the Shi'ite militia that is allied with Iran. Why did the U.S. and its Iraqi puppet Maliki attack Sadr's militia and not the Badr militia or the breakaway elements of Sadr's militia that allegedly now operate as gangs?
Fact #2: The Shi'ite militias and the Sunni insurgents are armed with weapons available from the unsecured weapon stockpiles of Saddam Hussein's army. If Iran were arming Iraqis, the Iraqi insurgents and militias would have armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades and surface-to-air missiles. These two weapons would neutralize the U.S. advantage by enabling Iraqis to destroy U.S. helicopter gunships, aircraft, and tanks. The Iraqis cannot mass their forces as they have no weapons against U.S. air power. To destroy U.S. tanks, Iraqis have to guess the roads U.S. vehicles will travel and bury bombs constructed from artillery shells. The inability to directly attack armor and to defend against air attack denies offensive capability to Iraqis.
If the Iranians desired to arm Iraqis, they obviously would provide these two weapons that would change the course of the war.
Just as the Bush regime lied to Americans and the UN about why Iraq was attacked, hiding the real agenda behind false claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaeda, the Bush regime is now lying about why it needs to attack Iran. Could anyone possibly believe that Iran is so desirous of having its beautiful country bombed and its nuclear energy program destroyed that Iran would invite an attack by fighting a "proxy war" against the U.S. in Iraq?
That the Bush regime would tell such a blatant lie shows that the regime has no respect for the intelligence of the American public and no respect for the integrity of the U.S. media.
And why should it? The public and media have fallen for every lie the Bush regime has told.
The moral hypocrisy of U.S. politicians is unrivaled. McCain says that if he were president he would not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics because China has killed and injured 100 Tibetans who protested Tibet's occupation by China. Meanwhile the Iraqi toll of the American occupation is one million dead and four million displaced. That comes to 20 percent of the Iraqi population. At what point does the U.S. occupation of Iraq graduate from a war crime to genocide?
Not to be outdone by McCain's hypocrisy, Bush declared: "The message to the Iranians is: we will bring you to justice if you continue to try to infiltrate, send your agents or send surrogates to bring harm to our troops and/or the Iraqi citizens."
Consider our "Christian" president's position: It is perfectly appropriate for the U.S. to bomb and to invade countries and to send its agents and surrogates to harm Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, Serbians, and whomever, but resistance to American aggression is the mark of terrorism, and any country that aids America's victims is at war with America.
The three-week "cakewalk" war that would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues is now into its sixth year. According to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, the cost of the war to Americans is between three and five trillion dollars. Five trillion dollars equals the entire U.S. personal and corporate income tax revenues for two years.
Of what benefit is this enormous expenditure to America? The price of oil and gasoline in U.S. dollars has tripled, the price of gold has quadrupled, and the dollar has declined sharply against other currencies. The national debt has rapidly mounted. America's reputation is in tatters.
The Bush regime's coming attack on Iran will widen the war dramatically and escalate the costs.
Not content with war with Iran, Republican presidential candidate John McCain in a speech written for him by neocon warmonger Robert Kagan promises to confront both Russia and China.
Three questions present themselves:
(1) Will our foreign creditors – principally China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia – finance a third monstrous Bush regime war crime?
(2) Will Iran sit on its hands and wait on the American bombs to fall?
(3) Will Russia and China passively wait to be confronted by the warmonger McCain?
Should a country that is overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan be preparing to attack yet a third country, while threatening to interfere in the affairs of two large nuclear powers? What sort of political leadership seeks to initiate conflict in so many unpromising directions?
With Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea threatened by American hegemonic belligerence, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario that would terminate all pretense of American power: For example, instead of waiting to be attacked, Iran uses its Chinese and Russian anti-ship missiles, against which the U.S. reportedly has poor means of defense, and sinks every ship in the American carrier strike forces that have been foolishly massed in the Persian Gulf, simultaneously taking out the Saudi oil fields and the Green Zone in Baghdad, the headquarters of the U.S. occupation. Shi'ite militias break the U.S. supply lines from Kuwait, and Iranian troops destroy the dispersed U.S. forces in Iraq before they can be concentrated to battle strength.
Simultaneously, North Korea crosses the demilitarized zone and takes South Korea, China seizes Taiwan and dumps a trillion dollars of U.S. Treasury bonds on the market. Russia goes on full nuclear alert and cuts off all natural gas to Europe.
What would the Bush regime do? Wet its pants? Push the button and end the world?
If America really had dangerous enemies, surely the enemies would collude to take advantage of a dramatically overextended delusional regime that, blinded by its own arrogance and hubris, issues gratuitous threats and lives by Mao's doctrine that power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
There are other less dramatic scenarios. Why does the U.S. assume that only it can initiate aggression, boycotts, freezes on financial assets of other countries, and bans on foreign banks from participation in the international banking system? If the rest of the world were to tire of American aggression or to develop a moral conscience, it would be easy to organize a boycott of America and to ban U.S. banks from participating in the international banking system. Such a boycott would be especially effective at the present time with the balance sheets of U.S. banks impaired by subprime derivatives and the U.S. government dependent on foreign loans in order to finance its day-to-day activities.
Sooner or later it will occur to other countries that putting up with America is a habit that they don't need to continue.
Does America really need more political leadership that leads in such unpromising directions?
Why the Surge Doesn’t Matter
By Blake Hounshell
Posted April 2008
General Petraeus has scored some victories. But the United States is still far closer to having created another failed state than a functioning democracy.
When Gen. David Petraeus testifies on Capitol Hill this week, he will have much to brag about. Since the surge was first announced in January 2007, attacks on coalition forces in Iraq have decreased by at least 60 percent. Iraqi civilian casualties are down by a comparable amount.
These impressive gains have stalled in recent months, as the war’s critics have been quick to point out. Violence is ticking back up, they note, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s recent attempt to regain a footing in Basra suggests that the Iraqi military is not ready for prime time. Truces by Sunni and Shiite militias, not more U.S. troops or new tactics, largely explain the decline in attacks, they say. The few claims of political progress are strained at best.
Such critiques miss the larger point. Surge or no surge, it’s extremely doubtful the U.S. occupation can ultimately produce a successful Iraq—a stable, unitary, democratizing state at peace with its neighbors. The surge is merely the most preliminary precursor to this intended outcome, and even Petraeus admits that it could all come undone overnight. For that matter, Iraq is just one part of a larger strategic picture, as former CENTCOM commander Adm. William J. Fallon tried to impress upon the Bush administration before he resigned. A myopic, irrational focus on Iraq has impaired the United States from making progress on the Arab-Israeli conflict, managing the rise of China, and everything in between. In short, the Iraq war is long past being worth the $120 billion a year being spent to wage it—an amount that exceeds Iraq’s entire annual economic output.
This is hardly the fault of Petraeus, a brilliant general tasked with a nearly impossible mission. Building a decent political order in Iraq has always been something of a fantasy. Even if Petraeus somehow succeeds in bringing violence down to a manageable level, it may be generations before Iraq becomes the “dramatic and inspiring example of freedom” in the Middle East that President Bush has repeatedly invoked. Instead, it will most likely evolve into a country plagued by instability, ethnosectarian violence, weak institutions, and unreliable oil production—if we’re lucky. Few Americans would support spending $12 billion a month in Iraq if they understood that they were buying, at best, another Nigeria, and at worst, Somalia with oil.
Supporters of the Iraq war, however, should know better. Many of them seem to have forgotten the work of scholars like NYU political scientist Adam Przeworski, who has written extensively about the relationship between wealth and democracy. Above a per capita income of $6,055, Przeworski finds, “democracies last forever.” But below that threshold, democracies are more fragile. Iraq’s GDP per capita today is a paltry $3,600, but even that low figure is misleading. When a country depends so heavily on oil revenues, its GDP per capita says little about its real level of development (Equatorial Guinea, technically speaking, is the 12th-richest country in the world). Przeworski’s research therefore excludes major oil-producers, which have their own set of problems.
In fact, oil tells us nearly everything we need to know about Iraq’s grim future. The United States is betting billions that Iraq—which has traditionally depended on oil exports for 95 percent of its foreign-exchange earnings—will escape the curse of what a Venezuelan oil minister once called “the devil’s excrement.” Academic studies have shown repeatedly that poor countries with oil tend to be poorer, more repressive, and more prone to internal conflict than those without it. In an influential 1995 paper, economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner found that resource extraction is deadly for economic development. Others, notably UCLA political scientist Michael Ross, have added insights about how oil impedes democratization and increases the likelihood of civil war. Oil has helped make Iraq the world’s third-most corrupt state, just above Somalia and Burma. Such findings are no guarantee that Iraq is destined to fail. But the United States has made a tremendous sacrifice in blood and treasure because President Bush is trying to prove, against all odds, that it won’t.
The arguments for staying in Iraq are drearily familiar. There will be a “blood bath” if the United States leaves. Withdrawing will only “embolden” al Qaeda. Iraq’s oil will be taken off the market. Iran will seize control of the country. These risks are not only overblown, they are also deeply uncertain. They must be weighed against the well-known costs of sticking around—a U.S. military stretched to the breaking point, a Middle East becoming more radicalized and anti-American, continued distraction from the real fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the real diplomatic action in Asia, to name but a few. Most importantly, we must not forget that even a perfect surge would still have left the United States chasing an expected strategic payoff—a stable, democratic Iraq—that is extremely unlikely to be realized for decades, if at all.
It’s one thing to ask American soldiers to lay their lives on the line for freedom and democracy, or to safeguard their country from weapons of mass destruction. But who wants to be the last man to die for Nuri al-Maliki?
Blake Hounshell is web editor of ForeignPolicy.com.
Posted April 2008
General Petraeus has scored some victories. But the United States is still far closer to having created another failed state than a functioning democracy.
When Gen. David Petraeus testifies on Capitol Hill this week, he will have much to brag about. Since the surge was first announced in January 2007, attacks on coalition forces in Iraq have decreased by at least 60 percent. Iraqi civilian casualties are down by a comparable amount.
These impressive gains have stalled in recent months, as the war’s critics have been quick to point out. Violence is ticking back up, they note, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s recent attempt to regain a footing in Basra suggests that the Iraqi military is not ready for prime time. Truces by Sunni and Shiite militias, not more U.S. troops or new tactics, largely explain the decline in attacks, they say. The few claims of political progress are strained at best.
Such critiques miss the larger point. Surge or no surge, it’s extremely doubtful the U.S. occupation can ultimately produce a successful Iraq—a stable, unitary, democratizing state at peace with its neighbors. The surge is merely the most preliminary precursor to this intended outcome, and even Petraeus admits that it could all come undone overnight. For that matter, Iraq is just one part of a larger strategic picture, as former CENTCOM commander Adm. William J. Fallon tried to impress upon the Bush administration before he resigned. A myopic, irrational focus on Iraq has impaired the United States from making progress on the Arab-Israeli conflict, managing the rise of China, and everything in between. In short, the Iraq war is long past being worth the $120 billion a year being spent to wage it—an amount that exceeds Iraq’s entire annual economic output.
This is hardly the fault of Petraeus, a brilliant general tasked with a nearly impossible mission. Building a decent political order in Iraq has always been something of a fantasy. Even if Petraeus somehow succeeds in bringing violence down to a manageable level, it may be generations before Iraq becomes the “dramatic and inspiring example of freedom” in the Middle East that President Bush has repeatedly invoked. Instead, it will most likely evolve into a country plagued by instability, ethnosectarian violence, weak institutions, and unreliable oil production—if we’re lucky. Few Americans would support spending $12 billion a month in Iraq if they understood that they were buying, at best, another Nigeria, and at worst, Somalia with oil.
Supporters of the Iraq war, however, should know better. Many of them seem to have forgotten the work of scholars like NYU political scientist Adam Przeworski, who has written extensively about the relationship between wealth and democracy. Above a per capita income of $6,055, Przeworski finds, “democracies last forever.” But below that threshold, democracies are more fragile. Iraq’s GDP per capita today is a paltry $3,600, but even that low figure is misleading. When a country depends so heavily on oil revenues, its GDP per capita says little about its real level of development (Equatorial Guinea, technically speaking, is the 12th-richest country in the world). Przeworski’s research therefore excludes major oil-producers, which have their own set of problems.
In fact, oil tells us nearly everything we need to know about Iraq’s grim future. The United States is betting billions that Iraq—which has traditionally depended on oil exports for 95 percent of its foreign-exchange earnings—will escape the curse of what a Venezuelan oil minister once called “the devil’s excrement.” Academic studies have shown repeatedly that poor countries with oil tend to be poorer, more repressive, and more prone to internal conflict than those without it. In an influential 1995 paper, economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner found that resource extraction is deadly for economic development. Others, notably UCLA political scientist Michael Ross, have added insights about how oil impedes democratization and increases the likelihood of civil war. Oil has helped make Iraq the world’s third-most corrupt state, just above Somalia and Burma. Such findings are no guarantee that Iraq is destined to fail. But the United States has made a tremendous sacrifice in blood and treasure because President Bush is trying to prove, against all odds, that it won’t.
The arguments for staying in Iraq are drearily familiar. There will be a “blood bath” if the United States leaves. Withdrawing will only “embolden” al Qaeda. Iraq’s oil will be taken off the market. Iran will seize control of the country. These risks are not only overblown, they are also deeply uncertain. They must be weighed against the well-known costs of sticking around—a U.S. military stretched to the breaking point, a Middle East becoming more radicalized and anti-American, continued distraction from the real fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the real diplomatic action in Asia, to name but a few. Most importantly, we must not forget that even a perfect surge would still have left the United States chasing an expected strategic payoff—a stable, democratic Iraq—that is extremely unlikely to be realized for decades, if at all.
It’s one thing to ask American soldiers to lay their lives on the line for freedom and democracy, or to safeguard their country from weapons of mass destruction. But who wants to be the last man to die for Nuri al-Maliki?
Blake Hounshell is web editor of ForeignPolicy.com.
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