Category Archives: Iraq War

The More Things Change …

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I just clicked on Memeorandum and had a sixties flashback. Righties are linking to an internet clip of a fellow who says he was an Army Ranger in Iraq and who saw atrocities committed. I haven’t taken the time to look at the clip yet and cannot comment on its contents.

Rightie bloggers have decided the guy is a poseur. And he may be; I wouldn’t know. “The pic on his wall shows the wrong t-shirt, wrong sleeves roll, wrong flash, this boy is so many flavors of wrong I can’t keep up,” says this guy.

But then I read this comment: “Someone really should look into the background of the other IVAW members.”

Wow, does that take me back. During the Vietnam War era antiwar veterans often were accused of being poseurs. I remember allegations that some participants in the Winter Soldier hearings were not real veterans, and the allegations severely damaged the effectiveness of the hearings. And I understand it’s possible some of the participants were poseurs, in spite of the efforts of VVAW to screen out impostors, although certainly most VVAW activists were real Vietnam veterans.

I remember that every time a news story about a “fake”veteran hit the news, always someone would say “Someone really should look into the background of the other VVAW members.” And “I bet they’re all fake.” The allegations, true or not, undermined the credibility of VVAW.

The new video is being linked on sites like True Blue Liberal and Information Clearing House and is, apparently, gut wrenching. But the video is not linked on the Iraq Veterans Against the War or the Veterans Against the Iraq War sites. Before more antiwar sites link to this video I urge that questions about the speaker’s service and credentials be resolved.

Jiltin’ Joe

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Once again, Paul Krugman nails it. Of the Connecticut Democratic Convention results that put Ned Lamont on the primary ballot against Joe Lieberman, he writes,

What happened to Mr. Lieberman? Some news reports may lead you to believe that he is in trouble solely because of his support for the Iraq war. But there’s much more to it than that. Mr. Lieberman has consistently supported Republican talking points. This has made him a lion of the Sunday talk shows, but has put him out of touch with his constituents — and with reality.

Mr. Lieberman isn’t the only nationally known Democrat who still supports the Iraq war. But he isn’t just an unrepentant hawk, he has joined the Bush administration by insisting on an upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq that is increasingly delusional.

Moreover, Mr. Lieberman has supported the attempt to label questions about why we invaded Iraq and criticism of the administration’s policies since the invasion as unpatriotic. How else is one to interpret his warning, late last year, that “it is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation’s peril”?

Other points made by Professor Krugman:

“A letter sent by Hillary Clinton to Connecticut Democrats credited Mr. Lieberman with defending Social Security ‘tooth and nail.’ … In fact, Mr. Lieberman repeatedly supported the administration’s scare tactics. … Mr. Lieberman was providing cover for an administration lie.”

“Mr. Lieberman supported Congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair.”

“Mr. Lieberman showed far more outrage over Bill Clinton’s personal life than he has ever shown over Mr. Bush’s catastrophic failures as commander in chief.”

The MSM keeps reporting that us lunatic raging lefties out here in Nowhereland are angry at Lieberman only because of his support for the Iraq War. Krugman gets it right.

Mr. Lieberman’s defenders would have you believe that his increasingly unpopular positions reflect his principles. But his Bushlike inability to face reality on Iraq looks less like a stand on principle than the behavior of a narcissist who can’t admit error. And the common theme in Mr. Lieberman’s positions seems to be this: In each case he has taken the stand that is most likely to get him on TV.

You see, the talking-head circuit loves centrists. But a centrist, as defined inside the Beltway, doesn’t mean someone whose views are actually in the center, as judged by public opinion.

Instead, a Democrat is considered centrist to the extent that he does what Mr. Lieberman does: lends his support to Republican talking points, even if those talking points don’t correspond at all to what most of the public wants or believes.

Truth. It’s a beautiful thing.

But this “center” cannot hold. And that’s the larger lesson of what happened Friday. Mr. Lieberman has been playing to a Washington echo chamber that is increasingly out of touch with the country’s real concerns. The nation, which rallied around Mr. Bush after 9/11 simply because he was there, has moved on — and it has left Mr. Lieberman behind.

See also Jane Hamsher.

Today the Wall Street Journal editorial staff is swooning in shock over the “ugliness” shown to senators McCain and Lieberman over the weekend. I addressed the “rude” New School students here; I’d have been disappointed if the students hadn’t heckled McCain. So many young people seem apathetic about politics; it’s good to see some who give a damn.

But WSJ wags it’s finger in warning at the antiwar Left. “It’s not an encouraging trend, especially if you’re a Democrat who wants to take back the White House,” it says.

Let’s see — the most recent ABC News/Washington Post Poll on Iraq says a solid two-thirds of adults polled disapprove of the way President Bush is handling the war in Iraq, and almost that many — 62 percent — say the war was not worth fighting. But if the Dems want to take back the White House, they’d better support the war? On what planet, WSJ?

Alec Russell of the Telegraph (UK) documents that the war is destroying the Bush Administration.

… as the American death toll has risen to more than 2,400 and nightly images on the news of death and destruction have failed to cede to the administration’s hoped-for scenes of prosperity and success, Mr Bush’s image has been in freefall.

In April 2003, 70 per cent of people surveyed in an ABC News/Washington Post poll said the war was worth the financial and human cost.

Three years later the figures were almost reversed with just 37 per cent saying the Iraq war had been worth it. Barely 30 per cent said they approved of Mr Bush’s handling of the war. …

… But now the American public appears finally to have had enough. In living memory, only Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and his father, briefly, in the year he lost his bid for re-election, have sunk as low as Mr Bush. “How low can he go?” asks this week’s US News & World Report.

Yet Beltway conventional wisdom still says that being against the war is politically risky? Weird.

Of course, the trick WSJ is trying to pull is to paint the Left as being soft on terrorism. The editorial continues,

Mr. Lieberman will still be favored to win the primary, but angry-left activists around the country will now descend on the state and the fight may well turn vicious.

The left’s larger goal is to turn the Democratic Party solidly against the war on terror, and especially against its Iraq and Iran fronts.

In fact, the left’s larger goal is to get somebody in Washington to notice that people out here in Reality Land ain’t buyin’ the same old snake oil.

At the Washington Post, Jackson Diehl writes about “reclaiming the Democratic agenda.” Does he mean rank-and-file Democrats are reclaiming the party from the weenies in charge? Of course not.

This is about a coalition of mostly younger foreign affairs professionals who held mid-level positions at the State Department and the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and who have spent the past several years formulating a distinctly Democratic response to the post-Sept. 11 era — as opposed to a one-dimensional critique of President Bush or Iraq. Now they are beginning to gravitate toward some of the centrist Democrats who — unlike Pelosi or Reid — might actually emerge as serious presidential candidates in 2008, such as former Virginia governor Mark Warner, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.

Remember Professor Krugman’s definition of “centrist Democrats” — “A Democrat is considered centrist to the extent that he does what Mr. Lieberman does: lends his support to Republican talking points, even if those talking points don’t correspond at all to what most of the public wants or believes.”

This month they published a fascinating book that lays out what the foreign policy of a winning campaign by one of those Democrats — or perhaps Hillary Clinton — could look like. Sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute, which is an outgrowth of the Clinton-friendly Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), it’s called “With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty.”

The DLC wants to take the terrorism issue away from Republicans by being more Bushie than the Bushies. Essentially they’re on the Bush bandwagon about promoting “democracy,” meaning … well, I’m not sure what “democracy” means to Bushies. It can’t mean, you know, democracy, because it’s obvious from their behavior here at home that they don’t like democracy very much. But they like the word, along with other words like liberty and freedom that sound just grand even if they’ve been stripped of all substantive meaning.

But the DLC is preparing the way for an “extended and robust security and reconstruction presence” in Iraq, which might have been a rational position to take in 2003. Now it makes me wonder what drugs they’re on.

Diehl continues,

[The DLC group] has ideas on how Democrats can build stronger ties to the Republican-dominated military, revitalize NATO and the United Nations, and reverse Bush’s tax cuts in order to modernize and expand the Army. Don’t be surprised if, after all the Internet noise fades away, such ideas are at the center of the next presidential campaign.

In point of fact, some of us making the Internet noise have already made those same suggestions on our blogs. Like most Washington “pundits,” Diehl has bought into the canard that we netroots types are only against the war and couldn’t possibly be promoting a much broader agenda to inject some real progressivism back into national politics.

The upcoming midterm elections are critical, folks. They are just as important as a presidential election. If the netroots demonstrate we can not only get candidates on the ballot but get them elected, we will have served notice on Democrats in Washington that we are not to be trifled with. On the other hand, if the Democrats don’t take back at least one house of Congress in November, the Bush Administration will assume they have a mandate to stumble along on the same dead-end course for two more years.

Open Letter to the 101st Fighting Keyboarders

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Dear Bloggers de Guerre,

Like most of you, I’ve been a civilian all my life. Most of what I know about war I learned from books and movies. If you’ve never served in the military or lived in an active war zone (New York City doesn’t count), all you know about war you learned from books and movies. You may not wish to admit this; some of you seem to think you have superior insight into martial matters bestowed upon you by ideological grace. But I doubt that’s true, even if you’ve seen a lot more war movies than I have.

Like most of you, I have enormous respect and appreciation for the U.S. military. I realize that most of you think liberals by definition hate the military, because you have encountered some liberals who hated the military, and since we’re all just alike we must all hate the military. But in fact it doesn’t work that way. I believe most of us, in fact, do not hate the military. I am personally acquainted with at least one sure-enough liberal who was a career army officer. Believe it, or not.

I want to talk to you about the allegations that U.S. Marines deliberately killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians last November 19. I take it most of you do not believe these allegations. Many of you are accusing Rep. John Murtha, who repeated the allegations on last night’s “Hardball” at MSNBC, of making wild accusations, of being anti-American, of engaging in a verdict first, trial later condemnation. Copious amounts of adjectives like “dishonorable,” “unconscionable” and “treasonous” are being heaped on Murtha’s name. Some of you concede there might be some truth in the allegations, but that Murtha should not have spoken out while investigations are ongoing.

Here’s what I say: As investigations are ongoing, we who were not there do not know what happened. OK, but that includes Murtha, you say. According to Drew Brown of Knight Ridder, however, Murtha said he learned what the investigation found from “military commanders and other sources.” He is known to be well connected to the career military guys in the Pentagon, so this is possible.

It can be argued that Murtha should not have spoken up until the investigation was complete. On the other hand, it’s possible that without some pressure on the Pentagon the results of the investigation will never be made public. Billmon:

I don’t know why Murtha went public (just as the right wingers don’t know) but I can make my own guess: He did it to try to prevent Rumsfeld’s toadies from classifying and then deep sixing the investigative report, as they tried to bury the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib. And if the past really is prologue, Murtha is probably speaking on behalf of some fairly senior Marine officers who either can’t abide a cover up, or who want to pin the blame on the people who created this mess, and left the jarheads in Haditha to deal with it, instead of on their beloved Corps.

Accounts of what happened on November 19 are heart-wrenching. This is from Nancy A. Youssef of Knight Ridder (April 8, 2006):

The Marines say they took heavy gunfire afterwards and thought it was coming from the area around Younes’ house. They went to investigate, and 23 people were killed.

Eight were from Younes’ family. The only survivor, Younes’ 13-year-old daughter, said her family wasn’t shooting at Marines or harboring extremists that morning. They were sleeping when the bomb exploded. And when the Marines entered their house, she said, they shot at everyone inside. …

… The events of last November have clearly taken their toll on Yaseen and his niece, Safa, who trembles visibly as she listens to Yaseen recount what she told him of the attack. She cannot bring herself to tell the tale herself.

Frightened, Safa fainted. She thought she had died. When she awoke, she remembered seeing her mother still lying in bed. Her head was blown open. She looked around and heard her 3-year-old brother, Mohammed, moan in pain. The blood was pouring out of his right arm.

“Come on, Mohammed. Get up so we can go to uncle’s house,” she told her brother. But he couldn’t.

In the same room where her mother, aunt and sisters lay dead, Safa grabbed the toddler, sat down and leaned his head against her shoulder. She put his arm against her chest and held it to try to stop the bleeding. She kept holding and talking to him until, like everyone else in the room, he too was silent. And then she ran next door.

Maybe Yaseen and Safa are lying. Maybe they’re confused. Maybe they aren’t.

I’m fond of reading about history, including military history. Incidents like those described by Yaseen and Safa happen in war. Exactly one century ago, in 1906, troops under the command of Gen. Leonard Wood massacred at least 900 (reported at the time as 600) Filipino Muslims on the island of Jolo. The dead included women and children, killed indiscriminately. Anti-imperlialists published pamphlets and distributed a photograph of the carnage.

The Filipinos of Jolo, fleeing gunfire, took shelter in the crater of a dormant volcano.

The Americans rigged a block and tackle to hoist their artillery up the last 300 feet, and, as the Moros fled over the lip, the Americans opened a barrage into the 50-foot-deep crater. With orders from Wood to “kill or capture the six hundred,” the American forces descended into the crater in an ever-shrinking circle. Wood wrote, “The action resulted in the extinction of a band of outlaws.” Fifteen Americans were killed in the fighting; all six hundred Moros died.

Mark Twain’s comments on the episode are here.

There have been other massacres by U.S. troops, such as Wounded Knee in 1890 and My Lai in 1968. In fact, the history of warfare around the world, through history, is riddled with accounts of atrocities. We who have not been at war might like to imagine that such acts are aberrations or only committed by our enemies, not us. But I suspect we are being naive.

Two centuries ago, the historians tell us, wars in western society were mostly fought in discrete battles by soldiers in pretty uniforms. Battles were horrific — mostly bayonet work, close up and bloody — but most of the time battles would last a day or two, and the soldiers had days or weeks or months of relative safety until the next battle. But since the dawn of trench warfare — by most accounts, Grant’s siege of Petersburg, Va., 1864-65 — soldiers in war face unrelenting stress for days, weeks, months on end. And in these days of “asymmetrical warfare,” when combatants blend in with civilians and death can come even at the hands of children, the stress must be a great deal more than the human nervous system was designed to bear.

Some soldiers are going to break down. This happens. We don’t know if it happened in Iraq on November 19, but it could have happened. The allegations may or may not be true, but they are not “outrageous.” They are serious.

If this massacre did occur as Yaseen and Safa described it, suppressing discussion of it out of some misguided notion of national pride isn’t doing the war effort a damn bit of good. Even if Americans never hear the details, Iraqis have heard the details. The rest of the Muslim world has heard the details. They heard the details months ago, long before Jack Murtha spoke of them on television. Denying what they know — or believe — to be true doesn’t make us more trustworthy in their eyes. If even those who might want peace and democracy believe they cannot trust the U.S. and our troops, there isn’t much point in our remaining in Iraq, is there?

If it happens that the allegations are not true, and we can prove it, we need to get our proof in front of the world as soon as possible. If we learn that the allegations are not true, we should reprimand Rep. Murtha. But if they are true, we should thank him. You should thank him, if you are serious about accomplishing anything positive in Iraq.

But most of all, those of you who supported, and still support, the invasion of Iraq, should grow up and face the truth that atrocities will happen in war, even at the hands of U.S. troops, because we are asking troops to endure unbearable stress for prolonged periods of time. This is one of several reasons why war should be a solution of last resort. It’s easy for those of us who are safe and protected here at home to talk about what is “honorable” and what isn’t. But those who are bearing the burden you asked them to bear are human beings, not movie characters.

You helped send our troops into a war that didn’t have to be fought. If the allegations are true, you bear some of the blame. If the allegations are true, you owe both the Marines and little Safa an apology.

See also: ” Escalating the rhetoric.”

Bob Herbert Rocks

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More on why Hillary Clinton must not be nominated in 2008:

After more than three years of fighting and more than 2,400 American deaths, you still need a magnifying glass to locate the differences between Mrs. Clinton and the Bush administration on the war. It’s true, as the senator argues, that she has been a frequent and sometimes harsh critic of the way the war has been conducted. In a letter to constituents last fall she wrote, “I have continually raised doubts about the president’s claims, lack of planning and execution of the war, while standing firmly in support of our troops.”

But in terms of overall policy, she seems to be right there with Bush, Cheney, Condi et al. She does not regret her vote to authorize the invasion, and still believes the war can be won. Her view of the ultimate goal in Iraq, as her staffers reiterated last week, is the establishment of a viable government capable of handling its own security, thus enabling the U.S. to reduce its military presence and eventually leave.

That sounds pretty much the same as President Bush’s mantra: “Our strategy in Iraq is that as the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down.”

With disapproval of the way Bush is running the war at 64 percent, can somebody explain to me why sounding just like Bush is “smart politics”?

Democrats are still paranoid about being perceived as soft on national security.

With superhawk Republicans like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani making their way toward the starting gate for the 2008 White House run, the terminally timid Democrats continue to obsess about what they ought to be saying, neurotically analyzing every syllable they hesitantly utter, as opposed to simply saying what they really believe.

See also Brilliant at Breakfast.

Friends and Enemies

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Today righties are linking to this London Times story about the murder of Iraqi television journalist Atwar Bahjat. She was killed in an unspeakably cruel manner; you may wish not to read about it. [Update 5/8: It is reported the video is a hoax.]

Here’s a typical Right Blogosphere response to the story at RedState.org.

There are those who will respond with disgust to the details of Bahjat’s murder, but temper that disgust with a feeling that she somehow brought this on herself through her provocative journalism–and, by extension, conclude that the United States is ultimately culpable for her death for going into Iraq in the first place. This line of reasoning is utterly false. The people responsible for her death are the monsters who sawed at her neck and stomped on her stomach. Such people would not be peacefully sipping tea in Samarra had we not deposed Saddam Hussein. It is not their way. And if they could do this to Atwar Bahjat, what could they do to any of us if given the chance? Bahjat’s death is a tragic illustration of the fanatical and vicious violence that we fight and which, for her sake–for all our sakes–we must keep fighting.

The problem with this reaction (beside the straw man “There are those who will respond with disgust to the details of Bahjat’s murder, but temper that disgust with a feeling that she somehow brought this on herself through her provocative journalism….”) is that it’s not at all clear who the murderers are and which side they are on. The murderers appeared to be wearing Iraqi National Guard uniforms, but of course the uniforms could have been stolen. The Sunni insurgency supplied the video but claimed they found it on a cell phone captured by from the Shi’ite Badr Brigade.

But there is no evidence the Iranian-backed Badr militia was responsible. Indeed, there are conflicting indications. The drill is said to be a popular tool of torture with the Badr Brigade. But beheading is a hallmark of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by the Sunni Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

According to a report that was circulating after Bahjat’s murder, she had enraged the Shi’ite militias during her coverage of the bombing of the Samarra shrine by filming the interior minister, Bayan Jabr, ordering police to release two Iranians they had arrested.

There is no confirmation of this and the Badr Brigade, with which she maintained good relations, protected her family after her funeral came under attack in Baghdad from a bomber and then from a gunman. Three people died that day.

Bahjat’s reporting of terrorist attacks and denunciations of violence to a wide audience across the Middle East made her plenty of enemies among both Shi’ite and Sunni gunmen. Death threats from Sunnis drove her away to Qatar for a spell but she believed her place was in Iraq and she returned to frontline reporting despite the risks.

Anything is possible. They may have been Sunni insurgents or even al Qaeda. But they just as easily could have been from one of the Shi’ite militias — groups our little maladministration in Iraq unleashed. The Shi’ites and Kurds are the people our troops liberated from the Sunni Saddam-supporting Baathists, and the Shi’ites dominate the new government George W. Bush is so proud of.

Last month Tom Lasseter reported for Knight-Ridder that, after ignoring the growth of the militias for two years, U.S. officials are finally admitting the Shi’ite militias are responsible for “more civilian deaths than the Sunni Muslim-based insurgency.”

Among U.S. officials’ missteps:

_White House and Pentagon officials ignored a stream of warnings from American intelligence agencies about the mounting danger posed by two Shiite militias, the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army. The Badr Organization is the armed wing of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the most powerful Shiite political faction in the country; the Mahdi Army is loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

_A group of high-ranking Iraqis appointed in 2004 to persuade militia leaders to disband their groups received no funding and was allowed to wither away.

_U.S. diplomats in Baghdad were slow to recognize that the majority Shiite population’s ascent to political power would expand rather than diminish militia activity. Many believed that the groups’ members would retire or would be integrated into the security forces without significant problems.

_Acting against the Shiite militias would have undercut the administration’s arguments that foreign terrorists and holdovers from Saddam Hussein’s regime were the problem in Iraq. It also would have raised doubts about the administration’s reliance on training largely Shiite security forces to replace U.S. troops in Iraq.

The American military’s inability to curb the Sunni insurgency, in part because U.S. troops are spread thin in Iraq, also played a role. As the insurgency continued to kill Shiite civilians, Shiites came to see the militias as their only reliable means of protection.

In the weeks since the February bombing of a Shiite shrine in the town of Samarra, the militias and their allies in the Interior Ministry are thought to have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis, who’ve been shot, hanged or tortured.

The London Times reported “The drill is said to be a popular tool of torture with the Badr Brigade.” Even if the murderers who used a drill to torment Atwar Bahjat were Sunni, the Shi’ite militias have perpetrated the same cruelty on others.

Last November, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior was also into drilling:

So far, it appears that the facts are these: that Iraq’s interior ministry, whose top officials, strike forces and police commando units (including the so-called Wolf Brigade) are controlled by paramilitary units from Shiite militias, maintained a medieval torture chamber; that inside that facility, hundreds of mostly Sunni Arab men were bestialized, with electric drills skewering their bones, with their skins flayed off, and more; that roving units of death-squad commandos are killing countless other Sunni Arab men in order to terrorize the Iraqi opposition. Even the Washington Post, that last-ditch defender of America’s illegal and unprovoked assault on Iraq, says:

    Scandal over the secret prison has forced the seven-month-old Shiite-led government to confront growing charges of mass illegal detentions, torture and killings of Sunni men. Members of the Sunni minority, locked in a struggle with the Shiite majority over the division of power in Iraq, say men dressed in Interior Ministry uniforms have repeatedly rounded up Sunni men from neighborhoods and towns. Bodies of scores of them have been found dumped by roadsides or in gullies.

By way of arguing his guys really aren’t so bad, the Iraqi interior minister noted that nobody was beheaded.

Righties want the Iraqi conflict to be divided up neatly between good guys versus bad guys. It doesn’t seem the conflict is cooperating.

Happy Anniversary!

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On this the solemn occasion of the third anniversary of Flight Suit Day, let us join together in remembrance.

It has been three years since that sunlit day in which our President stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, in front of a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” to tell us that the military phase of the Iraq operation was over. A CNN poll tells us that today 9 percent of Americans believe the U.S. mission in Iraq has been accomplished, which makes one yearn for whatever it is that 9 percent are smokin’.

Josh Marshall writes,

I think this will go down as the symbol of the Bush administration — like Carter’s malaise speech, Bush’s father with the carton of milk, LBJ falling on his metaphorical sword in a nationally televised address. It captures everything. The arrogance. The dingbat personality cult. The fleeting triumph of Potemkin stagecraft over tangible accomplishment. The happy willingness to let others take care of the president’s messes.

Could be, but he’s still got 1,000 or so days to pull off something even more absurd.

McJoan has posted a “then and now” commemoration of the great day at Daily Kos. See also Think Progress.

See other observances from The Left Coaster, Digby, Atrios, and Matt Yglesias.

President Bush celebrated the day by announcing that we’ve turned another corner. Unfortunately, we’ve turned so many corners that we have, in fact, been going in circles for some time.

Update: See Greg Mitchell in Editor & Publisher for a roundup of news coverage and commentary from three years ago.

Busted. Again.

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Via Kevin Drum, there is confirmation of the story that the Bush Administration chose not to eliminate a very nasty terrorist, apparently for political reasons. Chris Evans of The Age (Australia) reports,

The United States deliberately passed up repeated opportunities to kill the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, before the March 2003 US-led invasion of that country.

The claim, by former US spy Mike Scheuer, was made in an interview to be shown on ABC TV’s Four Corners tonight.

That’s the Australia ABC-TV, unfortunately. It would be great if a kind-hearted Aussie found a way to make a clip of the interview available on the net so that us Americans can find out what our own government is up to.

I’ve written about this story several times before, most recently here. For more background see Fred Kaplan in Slate, April 14, 2004:

Apparently, Bush had three opportunities, long before the war, to destroy a terrorist camp in northern Iraq run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaida associate who recently cut off the head of Nicholas Berg. But the White House decided not to carry out the attack because, as the [NBC News] story puts it:

    [T]he administration feared [that] destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

The implications of this are more shocking, in their way, than the news from Abu Ghraib. Bush promoted the invasion of Iraq as a vital battle in the war on terrorism, a continuation of our response to 9/11. Here was a chance to wipe out a high-ranking terrorist. And Bush didn’t take advantage of it because doing so might also wipe out a rationale for invasion.

See also Daniel Benjamin, Slate, October 2004.

What’s significant about today’s news story is that it provides a credible, confirmed source. The earlier story, broken by Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News on March 2, 2004, was attributed to anonymous sources.

Back to today’s story by Chris Evans:

Mr Scheuer was a CIA agent for 22 years – six of them as head of the agency’s Osama bin Laden unit – until he resigned in 2004.

He told Four Corners that during 2002, the Bush Administration received detailed intelligence about Zarqawi’s training camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. …

… “Almost every day we sent a package to the White House that had overhead imagery of the house he was staying in. It was a terrorist training camp . . . experimenting with ricin and anthrax . . . any collateral damage there would have been terrorists.”

Zarqawi is a very nasty guy whose followers decapitated Daniel Berg, among others. But as I explained in earlier posts, before the invasion he was operating in Iraqi Kurdistan, which had been protected from Saddam Hussein by U.S. air power and was not under Saddam Hussein’s control. In fact, one of the documents that John Negroponte dumped on the righties to keep them occupied (and ignorant) revealed that Saddam Hussein’s agents were on the “lookout” for Zarqawi and another man. (Righties believed this to be proof Saddam and Zarqawi were working together; Juan Cole says it meant Saddam thought Zarqawi was a threat an wanted him arrested.)

But before the invasion, Zarqawi was the only terrorist believed to be connected to al Qaeda operating within the borders of Iraq. As such, he was invaluable to the Bushies.

Scheuer says that he was told the White House wouldn’t act because President Bush didn’t want to piss off the French.

“Mr Bush had Zarqawi in his sights almost every day for a year before the invasion of Iraq and he didn’t shoot because they were wining and dining the French in an effort to get them to assist us in the invasion of Iraq,” he told Four Corners.

C’est, as they say, fou. As in nuts. The Bushies needed Zarqawi to argue that Saddam Hussein was harboring terrorists. They and the VRWC goons could fan out across talk radio and TV news and expound on this dangerous man affiliated with Osama bin Laden (possibly; there are conflicting stories on that) operating terrorist training camps inside Iraq; therefore, we must get Saddam Hussein before he gets us.

The fact that this Zarqawi guy was not an ally of Saddam and could have been taken out without invading Iraq were, um, small technicalities left unmentioned.

Righties today are linking to this story from, um, someplace (it’s unclear to me who the writer, Harold C. Hutchison, is or what he bases his assumptions on) claiming that “al Qaeda has been defeated in Iraq, and is now retreating to lick its wounds where it can.”

Mission Accomplished II?

This story doesn’t mention Zarqawi, but rightie James Joyner explains that this claim was “apparently prompted by yesterday’s news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was running out of suicide bombers and thus redirecting his efforts along more conventional lines.”

Harold C. Hutchison attributes this glorious victory to the glorious Bush Administration, which stayed the course in spite of the pressure from insidious liberal media to stand down. ‘Course, if the Bushies had elminated Zarqawi in 2002 when they could have, WE COULD HAVE DEFEATED al QAEDA IN IRAQ QUITE NICELY WITHOUT THE BLEEPING INVASION.

Not that any rightie will ever admit that, of course.

In spite of the glorious victory over al Qaeda in Iraq, as of last count 72 U.S. troops lost their lives in Iraq in April 2006. This number is a sharp increase from the 31 deaths in March. This seems to me to be proof that Jack Murtha is right — it’s the insurgency that’s killing us in Iraq more than terrorists, who all along were only a very small fraction of the opposition to the “coalition.” Not that any rightie will ever admit that, of course.

See also Georgia10. Sorta kinda related: Frank Rich, Bob Herbert.

Udpate: From 2004 — “Zarqawi – Bush’s man for all seasons.”

Serious About Rummy

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Via True Blue Liberal — the Army Times conducted one of those online, not-scientifically-valid polls asking readers this question:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has come under fire in recent weeks from a variety of retired generals, who say he should resign for his performance in managing the war in Iraq. Do you think the U.S. war effort is grounds for Secretary Rumsfeld to resign?

That’s a carefully worded question; note it doesn’t say that Rummy’s performance was bad or hint that the war effort is not going well. Anyway, the results as of this writing (4,339 total votes) are yes, 63.47 %; no, 32.96 %; and no opinion, 3.57 %.

These results don’t prove anything. I have no doubt a scientifically conducted poll would have different results. Still, it suggests some Army Times readers, not known to be loony leftie peaceniks, are really pissed off at Rummy.

Some mid-level officers interviewed last week by New York Times reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt sounded pissed at both Rummy and the generals who didn’t speak out about him until after they retired.

The discussions often flare with anger, particularly among many midlevel officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and face the prospect of additional tours of duty.

“This is about the moral bankruptcy of general officers who lived through the Vietnam era yet refused to advise our civilian leadership properly,” said one Army major in the Special Forces who has served two combat tours. “I can only hope that my generation does better someday.”

An Army major who is an intelligence specialist said: “The history I will take away from this is that the current crop of generals failed to stand up and say, ‘We cannot do this mission.’ They confused the cultural can-do attitude with their responsibilities as leaders to delay the start of the war until we had an adequate force. I think the backlash against the general officers will be seen in the resignation of officers” who might otherwise have stayed in uniform for more years.

In defense of the generals, some of them said they did try to explain reality to the Pentagon, but the exercise proved as fruitful as explaining verb conjugation to a tree stump.

Mo Dowd (via True Blue Liberal) writes of Rummy’s and Condi’s little visit to Baghdad this week:

The former “Matinee Idol,” as W. liked to call him, is now a figure of absurdity, clinging to his job only because some retired generals turned him into a new front on the war on terror. On his rare, brief visit to Baghdad, he was afraid to go outside Fortress Green Zone, even though he yammers on conservative talk shows about how progress is being made, and how the press never reports good news out of Iraq.

If the news is so good, why wasn’t Rummy gallivanting at the local mall, walking around rather than hiding out in the U.S. base known as Camp Victory? (What are they going to call it, one reporter joked, Camp Defeat?)

Very often when us loony leftie peaceniks criticize the war, the righties spin it as a slam on our troops. It’s as if they absolutely cannot fathom that fault may lie with leadership and planning rather than execution. And, of course, the ultimate responsibility for the debacle in Iraq lies with the bleepheads who made the decision to invade for no good bleeping reason.

But let’s brush that aside for the moment.

According to a Virginia businessman named Joseph Robert, Jr., who has been in Iraq, the troops are still dedicated to the mission; it’s everyone else who has screwed the pooch. Robert writes in today’s Washington Post:

First, U.S. forces in Iraq remain focused on their mission. Talking with soldiers and Marines over dinner in their mess halls, it’s easy to see why reenlistment rates among U.S. troops in Iraq are the highest in the military. These men and women understand their mission and believe they are making a difference. Like my son, Joe III, after he returned from a tough mission in Fallujah, the Marines I met said they would be happy to return to Iraq because they believe what they’re doing is important.

However,

… dangerous failures in Iraq’s economic reconstruction are undermining progress on the security and political fronts. …

… This strategic failure is a direct result of something else I observed: Only one element of the U.S. government — the military — seems to be treating Iraq as “the vital national interest” that President Bush declares it to be. Across Iraq, military personnel are heroically managing local reconstruction and development projects for which they lack the proper training or tools. Meanwhile, back in the Green Zone, hundreds of civilian positions — from the departments of State, Justice, Commerce and Agriculture — go unfilled.

U.S. commanders expressed frustration that dozens of Justice Department billets sit empty despite Iraq’s urgent need for help in developing a functioning judicial system. American troops like my son describe risking their lives to arrest suspected insurgents, testifying in Iraqi courts and then watching in frustration as the offenders are tossed back on the streets. In government, as in business, refusing to devote the resources and personnel to a strategic priority is a recipe for disaster.

This reminds me of something George Packer said on The Daily Show awhile back (link to video on this page). Parker spoke of many individuals in Iraq, both Iraqi and American,

Packer: … really pouring their hearts into this project, and meanwhile back in Washington decisions being made on the fly, or not being made at all, being made against all expert advice as if it almost didn’t matter. …

… there was a whole tide of young Republican operatives coming over to staff the occupation, people who had never lived abroad, certainly had no experience in the Middle East, there were maybe three Arabic speakers in the whole coalition provisional authority in the first few few months …

Stewart: You say the more you know about Iraq the more you’d be punished, it seems.

Packer: Yes. It’s a law of the occupation that the more you know the less influence you have, and as you go higher and higher in the Administration, knowledge decreases until at the very top …

… they were unbelievably reckless, and I think it’s going to take time for historians to explain how they could have rolled the dice in such a risky way and not taken it more seriously. Over and over again that’s the thing that I come back to. They didn’t take it very seriously.

As I wrote here, the Bushies seem congenitally incapable of taking anything seriously. Unless it’s a political threat, of course.

Philip Gold writes in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer that “Too few are carrying the burden of war.” He discusses a book written by Dr. Ron Glasser titled Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq. Dr. Glasser had been an Army doctor stationed in Japan during the Vietnam war.

When the Iraq war started to sour, Glasser, now a prominent Minneapolis pediatric nephrologist, noticed that new kinds of wounded were coming back. Thanks to improved body armor and lack of enemy artillery and mortars, there were fewer traditional gunshot and fragmentation wounds. But because of the wide use of improvised explosive devices such as suicide bombs, there were far more serious wounds to limbs and closed head injuries. Gone was the “Million Dollar Wound” that got you honorably home but still reasonably intact. Now the military was doing amputations at a rate unknown since the Civil War and dealing with head injuries that could only be described as “polytrauma.” …

… “Wounded” tells it to the American people like it is and warns that these new wounded are going to require expensive lifetime care from a Department of Veterans Affairs that will be struggling with Vietnam vets for the next three decades.

Toward the end, “Wounded” shifts from medicine to note who’s not coming home shattered in body and spirit: America’s more privileged sons and daughters.

Glasser also wrote about the sounded of Iraq in a July 2005 Harper’s Magazine article. Glasser writes that the Bushies aren’t taking the Iraq wounded seriously, either.

“Based on what we should be doing, the VA is simply underfunded,” former Georgia senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee from the war in Vietnam and head of the Veterans Administration under President Carter, told me. “The budgetary constraints put into place by this administration’s tax cuts have proved a disaster for the whole system. The VA can’t handle what they have to do now; how are they going to handle the flood of physical and emotional casualties, many of whom will be the responsibility of the VA for the rest of their lives?”

Ultimately, if the Bush Administration continues its refusal to accept the realities of this conflict, the most enduring images of the Iraq war will be the sight of legless and addled beggars on our street corners holding cardboard signs that read: IRAQ VET. HUNGRY AND HOMELESS. PLEASE HELP.

See also “Coming Home from War on the Cheap” by Judith Coburn.

In other news, Drew Brown reports for Knight Ridder that the cost of the war is skyrocketing. Ewen MacAskill reports for the Guardian that the “US admits Iraq could become haven for terror.”

And the righties complain the press isn’t reporting the good news in Iraq. Such a shame.

But about Rummy? You know we’re living in strange times when something written by William S. Lind, Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation, shows up in the hyper-leftie online mag Counterpunch.

Rumsfeld’s defenders argue that some of his critics are dinosaurs who resent “Transformation” because it disrupts business as usual, they have a point. As anyone who has dealt with the higher ranks of the U.S. military knows, they put the La Brea tar pits in the shade as a dinosaur graveyard. …

But here too the story is not so simple. While Rumsfeldian “Transformation” represents change, it represents change in the wrong direction. Instead of attempting to move from the Second Generation to the Third (much less the Fourth), Transformation retains the Second Generation’s conception of war as putting firepower on targets while trying to replace people with technology. Its summa is the Death Star, where men and women in spiffy uniforms sit in air-conditioned comfort zapping enemies like bugs. It is a vision of future war that appeals to technocrats and lines industry pockets, but has no connection to reality. The combination of this vision of war with an equally unrealistic vision of strategic objectives has given us the defeat in Iraq. Again, Rumsfeld lies at the heart of both.

Lind believes that Rummy’s is the only head that should roll. But seems to me that if the President were serious about the war in Iraq, Rummy’s head would have rolled a long time ago.

Liz Sidoti reports for the Associated Press that many Senate Republicans would like Rummy to be gone, but are resigned to the fact the the President wants him to stay.

And why does the President want Rummy to stay? Because the President can’t admit he made a mistake, that’s why. It’s all about Dear Leader and his glorious ego.

As of this morning, 2398 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.

Update: Flaming idiot rightie Mark Noonan of Blogs for Bush linked to the Joseph Robert, Jr., article I link to and quote above, and wrote, “Warning: No Liberal Should Read This! It is positive news about Iraq, and we wouldn’t want to spoil the nice, little anti-Bush fantasy land the liberals live in…”

How stupid are these people?

Thanks for Nothing

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Bonnie Erbe writes in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women’s-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government.

It’s sacrilege to say that anything was better under Saddam than it is now. Erbe better be careful the rightie Thought Police don’t catch her.

This is doubly troubling. It’s troubling first because the Bush administration used the issue of women to justify its now widely criticized invasion of Iraq in part by promising to improve the situation of women.

It’s troubling second because the administration has issued news releases, held public meetings and tried to gain media attention (as well as U.S. public support) for all the “good” it’s supposedly doing the women of Iraq via this invasion.

Even though their rights are supposed to be protected by the Iraqi constitution, women are finding that the constitution doesn’t mean squat. Sharia law rules. Women are being forced to veil themselves, and “fewer women are working in professional jobs than when Saddam was in power,” writes Erbe.

Last week Reuters reported on this same poll

According to the findings of a recent survey by local rights NGOs, women were treated better during the Saddam Hussein era – and their rights were more respected – than they are now.

“We interviewed women in the country and met with local NGOs dealing with gender issues to develop this survey, which asked questions about the quality of women’s life and respect for their rights,” said Senar Muhammad, president of Baghdad-based NGO Woman Freedom Organisation. “The results show that women are less respected now than they were under the previous regime, while their freedom has been curtailed.”

There have been numerous reports that say Iraqi women generally are more subject to rape and assault now than they were before the invasion; for example, this, this, and this.

And in that other nation we “liberated,” Afghanistan, the New York Times reported in March 2004 that increasing numbers of Afghan women were setting themselves on fire to escape the horror of their lives. Way to go, neocons.