Category Archives: Iraq War

A Time Capsule Opened

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I see that Bubble Boy was defending his war again today. He revealed that he expects troops to stay in Iraq as long as he is president. He also claimed he hadn’t wanted a war. Whereupon his nose grew several yards longer and sprouted branches.

Of course, the presidential schnoz was already formidable. Added to the recent “I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September 11th and Saddam Hussein” by now it’s twice the length of a football field.

There are several good Iraq War commentaries on the web today that I want to link to and comment on. For now I want to look at just one, which took me back to another article written in March 2003 before the invasion — Fred Kaplan writes in Slate —

A story by George Packer in the New York Times Magazine of March 2, 2003 (a couple of weeks before the war began), recounted a January meeting in the Oval Office between President Bush and three Iraqi exiles. The exiles spent much of the meeting explaining to Bush the difference between Sunnis and Shiites; they were stunned that he seemed unaware of the two groups’ existence.

This fascinated me. I found the article in the NYT archives; it’s called “Dreaming of Democracy.” In it, Packer explains the whole neocon “let’s invade Iraq and turn it into a democracy” fantasy. And he barely mentions weapons of mass destruction or homeland security or terrorism. Here’s the section from the Packer article that Kaplan talks about:

The longer you try to look at Iraq on the morning after Saddam, the more you see the truth of what many people told me: getting rid of him will be the easy part. After that, the United States will find itself caught in a series of conundrums that will require supreme finesse: to liberate without appearing to dominate, to ensure order without overstaying, to secure its interests without trampling on Iraq’s, to oversee democratization without picking winners, to push for reforms in the neighborhood without unleashing demons. It’s hard to know whether to be more worried by the State Department’s complacency or by the Pentagon civilians’ zealotry.

On the day that Saigon fell in 1975, the British writer James Fenton found a framed quotation on a wall of the looted American embassy: ”Better to let them do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their way, and your time is short.” The words are from T.E. Lawrence. Vietnam remains the shadow over every American war, but never more than the one we’re poised to fight, for no war since Vietnam has professed greater ambitions: to change the political culture of a country, maybe a whole region. Ever since Woodrow Wilson worked to put democracy and self-determination on the agenda at Versailles, this strain of high-mindedness in the American character has drawn the world’s admiration and its scorn. In Graham Greene’s novel ”The Quiet American,” which was recently released as a film, the title character is a young idealist sent to Vietnam in the early 1950’s to find a democratic ”Third Force” between the French and the Communists. The book’s narrator, a jaded British journalist, remarks, ”I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” Americans have never been very good at imperialism, or much interested in it; we’re too innocent, too impatient, too intoxicated with our own sense of selfless purpose. Several Iraqis expressed the wish that their occupiers could be the British again, who took the trouble to know them so much better, who wrote whole books on the Marsh Arabs and the flora and fauna of Kuwait. Afghanistan lost America’s attention as soon as Kandahar fell, and it remains unfinished business. As for Iraq, Jessica Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment, says, ”Our country is not remotely prepared for what this is going to take.”

If so, the fault mainly lies with President Bush. His articulation of political aims and postwar plans has been sketchy to the point of empty cliché. He has never discussed the human costs of war, nor its price. The Yale economist William D. Nordhaus estimates the military expenditure between $50 billion and $140 billion; far more daunting, his study finds, the postwar costs to the United States of occupying and rebuilding Iraq, along with the impact on oil markets and the economy, could run as high as $2 trillion. This is a calculation that no one in the administration has dared to make, at least publicly. Privately, some officials suggest that Iraqi oil will pay for it.

More than anything, the president hasn’t readied Americans psychologically to commit themselves to a project of such magnitude, nor has he made them understand why they should. He has maintained his spirit of hostility to nation-building while reversing his policy against it. Bush is a man who has never shown much curiosity about the world. When he met with Makiya and two other Iraqis in January, I was told by someone not present, the exiles spent a good portion of the time explaining to the president that there are two kinds of Arabs in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites. The very notion of an Iraqi opposition appeared to be new to him. War has turned Bush into a foreign-policy president, but democratizing an Arab country will require a subtlety and sophistication that have been less in evidence than the resolve to fight.

This was written before the invasion, mind you. Here’s another section:

The champions of Iraqi exceptionalism include the neoconservatives in the administration — Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon; John Bolton at the State Department; Lewis Libby in the vice president’s office; Richard Perle, who is chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a panel that advises the Pentagon — and numerous scholars, columnists and activists, most of them identified with the pro-Israel American right. In recent weeks, President Bush himself has appeared to embrace the idea as a geopolitical rationale for war. The story being told goes like this:

The Arab world is hopelessly sunk in corruption and popular discontent. Misrule and a culture of victimhood have left Arabs economically stagnant and prone to seeing their problems in delusional terms. The United States has contributed to the pathology by cynically shoring up dictatorships; Sept. 11 was one result. Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East’s center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region’s theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad.

The idea is sometimes referred to as a new domino theory, with tyrannies collapsing on top of one another. Among the harder heads at the State Department, I was told, it is also mocked as the Everybody Move Over One theory: Israel will take the West Bank, the Palestinians will get Jordan and the members of Jordan’s Hashemite ruling family will regain the Iraqi throne once held by their relative King Faisal I.

At times this story is told in the lofty moral language of Woodrow Wilson, the language that President Bush used religiously in his State of the Union address. Others — both advocates and detractors — tell the story in more naked terms of power and resources. David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who wrote the first two words in the phrase ”axis of evil,” argues in his new book, ”The Right Man,” ”An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein — and a replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States — would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe the Romans.”

It’s an audacious idea, and part of its appeal lies in the audacity. It shoves history out of a deep hole. To the idea’s strongest backers, status-quo caution toward the sick, dangerous Middle East is contemptible, almost unbearable. ”You have to start somewhere,” says Danielle Pletka, a vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. ”There are always a million excuses not to do something like this.” Who wouldn’t choose amputation over gangrene? If we have the will and imagination, the thinking goes, we can strike one great blow at terrorism, tyranny, underdevelopment and the region’s hardest, saddest problem.

”It’s called magical realism, Middle East-style,” says Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Exactly how, he wonders, would this chain reaction occur? Arab countries are stuck between autocratic governments and Islamist opposition, he says, and ”our invasion of Iraq isn’t going to remove those political forces. They’re going to be sitting there the next day.” The war, which is vastly unpopular in the Arab world, is far more likely to improve the fortunes of the Islamists, he says, and provoke governments to tighten their grip, than to ventilate the region with an Arab spring.

There were also Iraqi exiles — and not just Chalabi — promising the neocons that U.S. troops would be greeted with “sweets and flowers,” as well as “kites and boom boxes.” Weird. But plenty of people were making predictions about how the invasion would turn out that we can now see were spot on.

At Slate, Kaplan writes about whether the mess we’ve made of Iraq would have turned out better if other decisions had been made — if we’d sent more troops, if we hadn’t disbanded the Iraqi army — but seems to me that anyone with the knowledge and wisdom to have dealt successfully with the many postwar conundrums wouldn’t have ordered the bleeping invasion to begin with.

“Free Fraud Zone”

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We’ve known for some time that the Iraq “reconstruction” effort was doomed by incompetence and corruption, and that billions of dollars are unaccounted for. But there are some details in today’s Guardian that stunned even me.

Let’s start here:

At the start of the Iraq war, around $23bn-worth of Iraqi money was placed in the trusteeship of the US-led coalition by the UN. The money, known as the Development Fund for Iraq and consisting of the proceeds of oil sales, frozen Iraqi bank accounts and seized Iraqi assets, was to be used in a “transparent manner”, specified the UN, for “purposes benefiting the people of Iraq”.

I may have read that before, but I wasn’t aware of it. Anyway, we’ve got $23 billion in Iraqi money —

Because the Iraqi banking system was in tatters, the funds were placed in an account with the Federal Reserve in New York. From there, most of the money was flown in cash to Baghdad. Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in – $12bn, in cash. And that is where it all began to go wrong.

“Iraq was awash in cash – in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money,” says Frank Willis, a former senior official with the governing Coalition Provisional Authority. “We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced.”

Sorta gives “play money” a new meaning.

The environment created by the coalition positively encouraged corruption. “American law was suspended, Iraqi law was suspended, and Iraq basically became a free fraud zone,” says Alan Grayson, a Florida-based attorney who represents whistleblowers now trying to expose the corruption. “In a free fire zone you can shoot at anybody you want. In a free fraud zone you can steal anything you like. And that was what they did.“

The Guardian provides examples of fraud perpetrated by contractors like Custer Battles, a security company set up by Scott Custer and former Republican Congressional candidate Mike Battles.

Custer Battles also set up fake companies to produce inflated invoices, which were then passed on to the Americans. They might have got away with it, had they not left a copy of an internal spreadsheet behind after a meeting with coalition officials.

The spreadsheet showed the company’s actual costs in one column and their invoiced costs in another; it revealed, in one instance, that it had charged $176,000 to build a helipad that actually cost $96,000. In fact, there was no end to Custer Battles’ ingenuity. For example, when the firm found abandoned Iraqi Airways fork-lifts sitting in Baghdad airport, it resprayed them and rented them to the coalition for thousands of dollars. In total, in return for $3m of actual expenditure, Custer Battles invoiced for $10m.

Remarkably — well, no, not remarkably, as we’re talking about the Bushies here — the U.S. government has done nothing to recover any of this money. It has been left to private individuals to sue Custer Battles for damages. So far Custer Battles has been ordered to cough up more than $10 million in damages and penalties.

And Custer Battles was merely a drop in an ocean of corruption. Iraq became a cash free-for-all. “From one US controlled vault in a former Saddam palace, $750,000 was stolen. In another, a safe was left open. In one case, two American agents left Iraq without accounting for nearly $1.5m.”

Perhaps most puzzling of all is what happened as the day approached for the handover of power (and the remaining funds) to the incoming Iraqi interim government. Instead of carefully conserving the Iraqi money for the new government, the Coalition Provisional Authority went on an extraordinary spending spree. Some $5bn was committed or spent in the last month alone, very little of it adequately accounted for.

One CPA official was given nearly $7m and told to spend it in seven days. “He told our auditors that he felt that there was more emphasis on the speed of spending the money than on the accountability for that money,” says Ginger Cruz, the deputy inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction. Not all coalition officials were so honest. Last month Robert Stein Jr, employed as a CPA comptroller in south central Iraq, despite a previous conviction for fraud, pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal more than $2m and taking kickbacks in the form of cars, jewellery, cash and sexual favours. It seems certain he is only the tip of the iceberg. There are a further 50 criminal investigations under way.

And then there is good, old-fashioned Bushie cronyism. Jobs were awarded on the basis of loyalty to Bush rather than on the basis of experience. So those that weren’t stealing were wasting money out of sheer ignorance. One of the most mind-boggling examples of this (not mentioned in The Guardian article) was putting the $13 billion reconstruction budget in the hands of recent college graduates with no relevant experience. These people were hired because they’d posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation. (A Pentagon spokesman said there was “no organized effort to hire Republicans.” Snort.) Ariana Eunjung Cha wrote in the Washington Post (May 23, 2004),

Several had impressive paper credentials, but in the wrong fields. Greco was fluent in English, Italian and Spanish; Burns had been a policy analyst focused on family and health care; and Ledeen had co-founded a cooking school. But none had ever worked in the Middle East, none spoke Arabic, and few could tell a balance sheet from an accounts receivable statement.

“The group’s primary responsibility was to hand out money,” Eunjung Cha wrote.

The Guardian provides another example:

How is it possible that after three years of occupation and billions of dollars of spending, hospitals are still short of basic supplies? Part of the cause is ideological tunnel-vision. For months before the war the US state department had been drawing up plans for the postwar reconstruction, but those plans were junked when the Pentagon took over.

To supervise the reconstruction of the Iraqi health service, the Pentagon appointed James Haveman, a former health administrator from Michigan. He was also a loyal Bush supporter, who had campaigned for Jeb Bush, and a committed evangelical Christian. But he had virtually no experience in international health work.

Even now, three years later, the Iraqi health service is a shambles, and many hospitals lack basic medicine and equipment. But here’s the kicker:

The coalition’s health programme was by any standards a failure. Basic equipment and drugs should have been distributed within months – the coalition wouldn’t even have had to pay for it. But they missed that chance, not just in health, but in every other area of life in Iraq. As disgruntled Iraqis will often point out, despite far greater devastation and crushing sanctions, Saddam did more to rebuild Iraq in six months after the first Gulf war than the coalition has managed in three years.

See Riverbend for details. Back to The Guardian:

Kees Reitfield, a health professional with 20 years’ experience in post-conflict health care from Kosovo to Somalia, was in Iraq from the very beginning of the war and looked on in astonishment at the US management in its aftermath. “Everybody in Iraq was ready for three months’ chaos,” he says. “They had water for three months, they had food for three months, they were ready to wait for three months. I said, we’ve got until early August to show an improvement, some drugs in the health centres, some improvement of electricity in the grid, some fuel prices going down. Failure to deliver will mean civil unrest.” He was right.

Of course, no one can say that if the Americans had got the reconstruction right it would have been enough. There were too many other mistakes as well, such as a policy of crude “deBa’athification” that saw Iraqi expertise marginalised, the creation of a sectarian government and the Americans attempting to foster friendship with Iraqis who themselves had no friends among other Iraqis.

Another experienced health worker, Mary Patterson – who was eventually asked to leave Iraq by James Haveman – characterises the Coalition’s approach thus: “I believe it had a lot to do with showing that the US was in control,” she says. “I believe that it had to do with rewarding people that were politically loyal. So rather than being a technical agenda, I believe it was largely a politically motivated reward-and-punishment kind of agenda.”

Which sounds like the way Saddam used to run the country. “If you were to interview Iraqis today about what they see day to day,” she says, “I think they will tell you that they don’t see a lot of difference”.

In addition to the $23 billion in Iraqi money that was supposed to be used for reconstruction, Congress allocated more than $20 billion in American taxpayer money for Iraqi reconstruction. What has $43 billion dollars accomplished? It’s hard to know from here, because what the U.S. government says and what non-government observers say are, um, not in the same ball park. This recent Scripps Howard article, which blames the insurgency for the fact reconstruction has “stalled,” says the Iraq Project and Contracting Office in Baghdad started out with a list of 5,000 necessary infrastructure projects.

Of those, 2,750 have been started and more than 2,000 have been completed, said [Retired Rear Adm. David J.] Nash, now president of the government group of a major construction company, BE&K Inc.

“Rather than this constant din you hear that nothing has happened, that’s not true,” he said, pointing to the weekly reconstruction update that shows completion of 825 schools, 302 police facilities and 13 hospitals among other successes.

It may be that these facilities are now beautiful and functioning well, but I’m sure you’ve heard the anecdotes about school “reconstruction” that amounted to little more than a coat of paint. As I said, it’s really hard to get an accurate picture of what’s going on over there. The Scripp Howard article continues,

The shortfalls in infrastructure were detailed in a recent report by Stuart Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

Of 136 water sector projects, only 49 will be completed, and most of those involving sewerage, irrigation, drainage and dams have been canceled. Of 425 electricity projects, only 300 will be completed and only 2,200 megawatts of additional power will be delivered instead of the 3,400 megawatts that had been planned, Bowen told senators last month.

One interesting omission from the Scripps Howard article is mention of the $23 billion in Iraqi money. It only talks about the $20 billion in American money. It’s like the $23 billion never existed.

This is from a February 17 Reuters article by Sue Pleming, “Rice grilled over Iraq rebuilding pace, costs“:

With water, sewer and electricity services below prewar levels in Iraq, a leading Democrat told U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday that patience was waning over the pace and cost of rebuilding efforts.

Congress has given more than $20 billion for projects aimed at improving Iraq’s dilapidated infrastructure and winning over Iraqis with better utility services, and Rice told lawmakers that conditions were better.

But in three key areas — access to drinking water, electricity and sewer service — Iraqis are worse off than before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, according to statistics released last week by the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

I love Condi’s response:

Rice, who had told the committee more Iraqis had access to sewerage and water services than before, argued that what the United States had improved was “capacity” and the United States had made a difference.

“I think this may be an issue of whether we are talking about delivery or capacity. We have increased the capacity for clean water for several million Iraqis,” she said.

Awesome. The woman has a genius for bullshit.

Last week, the special inspector general for Iraq rebuilding, Stuart Bowen, told Congress that only 32 percent of Iraqis had access to potable water versus 50 percent before March 2003. The share of Iraqis with access to sewer service had dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent prewar.

Before the war, Iraq had the capacity to produce about 4,500 megawatts of power, while the capacity was now 3,995 megawatts, the inspector general said.

As I said, many are blaming the insurgency for the problems with reconstruction. But it’s my understanding that the slowness of reconstruction is a major cause of the insurgency. It’s not the only reason, but if Iraq had been reconstructed competently and efficiently it would have made an enormous difference.

More More Junk Intelligence

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This is an update to “Junk Intelligence” (and “More Junk Intelligence“), in which I revealed that the Right Blogosphere had mistaken an old document from the Federation of American Scientists for something generated by the Iraqi Intelligence Service: Juan Cole says I’m right. He also translates the mystery Arabic page.

What does the Arabic say?

    “The Institutions of the Apparatus of the Intelligence Service on the Internet:

    You will find enclosed information on the Apparatus that has been published on the internet. It has information on our organization, but it is clear that the information is relatively old. Otherwise, it does not do more than mention some correct and important matters . . .”

It then goes on to list the names of some agents. As an intelligence service, its main concern was with cover, apparently.

In other words, Iraqi intelligence notes the appearance of the document on the internet in 1997, and laments that it is very basic [‘does not do more than’] and then notes with some amusement how out of date it is (with the implication that Western intelligence on Iraq must be pretty bad). The “out of date” comment probably refers to the Western document’s preoccupation with WMD, which Iraqi Intelligence would have known was gone by then. It may also refer to personnel having been switched around. Note that the Iraqi comment does not endorse the internet document. It not only says it is “old” intelligence, which is very damning in intelligence work, but it also uses the word “some” when referring to what is accurate and important in it. “Some correct and important matters.” There will be those who read this as a blanket endorsement; it obviously is not.

Yeah, that’s a find, all right. Kind of makes the whole last three years worthwhile, all by itself.

Glenn Reynolds, who linked to the Investors Business Daily article that quoted the FAS document as proof of Saddam’s evil capabilities, has yet to print a retraction. He is, however, having a fine time making fun of a mistake made by the New York Times, for which the Times printed a correction.

As of this writing neither Lorie Byrd nor Cold Fury have issued corrections, either.

Being a rightie means never having to admit you’re wrong.

More Junk Intelligence

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Today another “revelation” from Saddam Hussein’s files is spreading like kudzu all over the Right Blogosphere. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard reports here that “Saddam Hussein’s regime provided financial support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s.”

Yes, it’s bogus. Judd at Think Progress explains why.

For anyone who came in late — the Mahablog Junk Intelligence Archives thus far:

March 16 — “Jeez, Righties Are So Gullible”

March 17 — “Blarney”

“Junk Intelligence”

March 18 — “Good Jokes”

“I Wish I’d Seen This Sooner”

Update: See Cernig.

I Wish I’d Seen This Sooner

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Juan Cole:

The Bush administration repeatedly made the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab Zarqawi a pretext for invading the country and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. They implied that he was a client of Saddam and that Saddam had arranged for hospital care for him.

Newly released documents from the captured Iraqi archives show that Saddam had put out an APB for Zarqawi and was trying to have him arrested as a danger to the Baath regime!

And, as I said, we already knew Zarqawi was in Iraq. But he was in a part of Iraq protected from Saddam Hussein’s control.

Good Jokes

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Question: How many avant garde artists does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: A fish.

I love that joke, which I heard from my daughter awhile back.

Sadly, No answers the next question: How are rightie bloggers like avant garde artists? Go read.

Junk Intelligence

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I want to revisit the last post, because I have realized a couple of things since I wrote it that change the emphasis, so to speak. There is something way screwy going on that is way screwy even by Bush Administration standards.

The story thus far: This week the Office of the Director of National Intelligence began to release documents it says were captured in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq. Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard writes about this here. He and Michael Barone have been hyping these documents for the past several weeks as the potential “proof” of an Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link.

Yesterday John Hinderacker of Power Line published a post called “In Saddam’s Archives” in which he links to and discusses one of these documents, posted on the Foreign Military Studies Office web site as “CMPC-2003-006430.” And here is that document as posted on the FMSO site [PDF].

Now here’s where it gets screwy. This document consists of a page of what looks like Arabic script (I don’t know Arabic from Parsi from whatever). This is followed by a seven-page document from the Federation of American Scientists about the Iraqi Intelligence Service, with information gleaned from various unclassified sources. This same document is still on the FAS web site, here, and was last updated in 1997, it says. Not exactly super-secret, in other words, and not from Iraq. What it contains is information floating around in the West as of 1997.

Note that Hinderacker doesn’t misrepresent this; he says plainly in his post that “The English portion of the document is a description of the Mukhabarat by the Federation of American Scientists. The Arabic portion apparently hasn’t been translated.” But then he goes on to quote the FAS document under the “In Saddam’s Archives” title, which would leave the uncareful reader with the impression that the FAS document is a translation. For all I know the Arabic portion is a laundry list.

However, Investor’s Business Daily isn’t so careful. Here is an article that quotes this same FAS document as if it were something captured in Iraq after the invasion. IBD trumpets the FAS document as “a manual for Saddam’s spy service” and proof of Saddam Hussein-terrorist connections. IBD says,

In the early stages of the war that began three years ago, the U.S. captured thousands of documents from Saddam and his spy agency, the Mukhabarat. It’s been widely thought the documents could shed light on why Saddam behaved as he did and how much of a threat his evil regime represented.

Yet, until this week, the documents lay molding in boxes in a government warehouse. Now the first batch is out, and though few in number, they’re loaded with information.

Among the enduring myths of those who oppose the war is that Saddam, though murderous when it came to his own people, had no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorist designs outside his own country. Both claims now lie in tatters.

As we’ve reported several times, a number of former top military officials in Saddam’s regime have come forward to admit that, yes, Saddam had WMD, hid them and shipped them out of the country so they couldn’t be detected. And he had plans to make more.

Now come more revelations that leave little doubt about Saddam’s terrorist intentions. Most intriguing from a document dump Wednesday night is a manual for Saddam’s spy service, innocuously listed as CMPC-2003-006430. It makes for interesting reading.

Yep, good ol’ CMPC-2003-006430.pdf. The problem is that the English language part of the document, which IBD goes on to quote, is not from Saddam’s archives. It is from the Federation of American Scientists.

As I predicted earlier, rightie bloggers are gleefully linking to the IBD article as “proof” that we liberals were wrong about Saddam Hussein. These bloggers include Glenn Reynolds, Lorie Byrd, and Cold Fury (upon which I commented and received a nice round of insults for my trouble), among others.

I’d like to point out, before I forget, that the FAS is an independent organization that compiles a lot of information on national security issues. The document being quoted probably is the best information available … in 1997. In the West. From nonclassified sources.

John Aravosis posted about the Negroponte document dump yesterday:

The new documents, released today by the Bush administration, are maybe, but maybe not, real Iraqi government documents that we found in Iraq. The Bush administration can’t vouch for the documents’ authenticity or the accuracy of the translations from Arabic, but they’re releasing them anyway in the hopes that – get this – right-wing blogs can help them prove their case that Saddam had WMD and ties to Al Qaeda.

Yes, it’s come to that. Bush is now relying on Michelle Malkin’s keen intelligence skills to prove the case for war in Iraq.

I think that’s exactly the plan. The documents released so far are mostly junk. But it’s carefully selected junk. And the righties are all too eager to “discover” the wondrous things in them that will justify their support of the war. Glenn Reynolds says “It’s funny that these documents are getting so little attention from the press.” Not funny at all; part of the plan. The last thing the Bushies want is for news reporters, who are sometimes slightly less gullible than your average rightie blogger, to start scrutinizing this stuff closely. (See also this AMERICAblog post for more.)

By dumping a truckload of phony “intelligence,” the Bushies figure they can keep what’s left of the “base” in line.

Yesterday I wrote about why another document actually “revealed” nothing at all that wasn’t already well known, but which a number of righties believed was new information proving that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (not). That’s pretty much the point of the AMERICAblog posts linked above. See also upyernoz.

And notice how well the document dump is timed to Bush’s reaffirmation of the “Bush Doctrine” and the escalation of saber-rattling over Iran. Hmmm.

Update: See also “White House White House caught fixing intelligence again?”

Update update: Sadly, No figured all this stuff out way before I did.

Blarney

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Quick follow-up to the last post, in which I expressed frustration (cough) at cognitively challenged righties who think newly released Iraqi documents contain evidence of an al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection —

John H. at Power Line hypes an undated document that describes the function and duties of the Iraqi intelligence service. The document lists such activities as developing and testing weapons, poisons, and explosives; providing training in “terrorist techniques”; and conducting operations of sabotage and assassination outside Iraq. [Update: I realized after I had posted that the previously “secret” document had been pulled off the web site of the Federation of American Scientists.]

It will not occur to the righties that without knowing how long these documents have been sitting around in a filing cabinet somewhere they don’t exactly prove anything. Righties have a weak grasp of linear time. You’ll remember, for example, how the gassing of the Kurds in 1988 (which the Right and the Reagan-Bush I administrations pretty much ignored in 1988) was repeatedly thrown in our faces as a reason to invade Iraq in 2003 — fifteen years later.

Another example: The 2003 State of the Union Address — Home of the Sixteen Words — also contained this little gem:

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb

Strictly speaking, the sentence is true. This IAEA fact sheet on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program shows that Iraq was working hard to enrich uranium to make a bomb — before the 1991 Gulf War.

However, if you’ll scroll down the fact sheet page you’ll learn that “As of 16 December 1998” the Iraqi nuclear weapons program was defunct and not going anywhere. You can read an IAEA report (PDF) dated 1999 that says (on page 7): “These verification activities have revealed no indication that Iraq possesses nuclear weapons or any meaningful amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material, or that Iraq has retained any practical capability (facilities or hardware) for the production of such material.”

And, of course, at the time Bush delivered the 2003 SOTU, IAEA inspectors had had a few weeks to visit the old Iraqi nuclear weapons sites, and they confirmed that the equipment and stores of yellowcake uranium were sitting unused, the IAEA inspection seals from 1998 still intact.

So, while the IAEA had confirmed that before the Gulf War Saddam had a nuclear weapons program, they also confirmed “All known indigenous facilities capable of producing uranium compounds useful to a nuclear programme were destroyed during the Gulf War.”

Bush left that part out of the 2003 SOTU. It still amazes me this little oversight hasn’t gotten as much attention as the Sixteen Words, since it is a more bare-assed and easily refuted misrepresentation than the African uranium story. The IAEA posts their inspection reports and findings on their bleeping web site. In English. I bet even Douglas Feith could have found them.

(In July 2003, when people were starting to wonder where the WMDs were, it was pointed out to Condi Rice that a lot of their “intelligence” about WMDs was, um, old. And this is what she said:

Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, said Saturday that the question of new evidence vs. old was beside the point. “The question of what is new after 1998 is not an interesting question,” she said. [James Risen, David Sanger, and Thom Shanker, “In Sketchy Data, White House Sought Clues to Gauge Threat,” The New York Times, July 20, 2003]

Perhaps the Bushies should have been a little more … interested.)

I hadn’t meant to ramble on so about the old news. But to get back to the Iraq Intelligence Service documents that J.H. finds so interesting — a document that (for all we know) was drawn up before the Gulf War doesn’t tell us anything about what Saddam Hussein was up to in 2003. [Update: I see a note at the end of the document that says “Maintained by John Pike Updated Wednesday, November 26, 1997.” It was on the web site of the Federation of American Scientists. This is just weird.]

And a document that talks about what the IIS was supposed to be doing doesn’t tell us if they were doing it. Which takes us to another bit of news, reported by Shmuel Rosner of Haaretz.

Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein pretended to have chemical weapons because, among other reasons, he feared that Israel might attack if it discovered he did not. This is revealed in a recently declassified internal report by the American military.

The report was compiled from many dozens of interviews with senior Iraqi officials and hundreds of documents captured by the American forces during and after the war. …

… “According to Chemical Ali, Hussein was asked about the weapons during a meeting with members of the Revolutionary Command Council. He replied that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) but flatly rejected a suggestion that the regime remove all doubts to the contrary,” the report states. Ali explained that such a declaration could encourage Israel to attack, the report says.

The 100-page report has not been released yet, but some 9,000 words of it are to appear in the next edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine.

A lot of people have speculated that’s what Saddam Hussein was up to, but I don’t know that there’s been anything in the way of corroboration before now. But this I’ve heard before:

Senior Iraqi officials told their interrogators that Hussein had no idea what the true state of the country’s weapons was, because everyone lied to him and refrained from giving him bad news for fear of being executed.

Hussein’s deputy Tariq Aziz told interrogators, “The people in the military industrial commission were liars. They lied to you, and they lied to Hussein. They were always saying they were producing special weapons.”

“A captured military industrial commission annual report of investments from 2002 showed more than 170 research projects. When Hussein asked for updates on the nonexistent projects, they simply faked plans and designs to show progress,” the report says.

I don’t remember where I read that before and I’m not going to take time to hunt around for a link, but I’m sure at least one Iraqi weapons scientist pretty much said the same thing when he was interviewed after the invasion. Perhaps it was the same guy who had the remains of the Iraqi nuclear centrifuge buried in his flower garden.

Update to the Update: As I said in the first update, what might seem to be a translation of an Arabic document said to have been seized in post-invasion Iraq is actually an old report taken from the web site of the Federation of American Scientists. Information in the report appears to have been gleaned from various unclassified sources. It was last updated in 1997. John Hinkeracker of Power Line states in his post that the document was from the FAS, so I can’t accuse him of misrepresenting it — even though he published quotes from FAS under the heading “In Saddam’s Archives.”

However, Investor’s Business Daily is not so careful. In this articled titled “Declassified Truth” IBD quotes from the 1997 FAS document as if it were something discovered in Saddam’s archives. IBD says the FAS document refutes the claim that Saddam “had no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorist designs outside his own country.” I’m sure a big chunk of the Right Blogosphere will link to this article before the day is over.

These document were released per the direction of John Negroponte, note.

Jeez, Righties Are So Gullible

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Last night the Bush Administration began release of some Iraqi documents seized by U.S. intelligence after the invasion. John Solomon reports for the Associated Press:

The documents, the first of thousands expected to be declassified over the next several months, were released via a Pentagon Web site at the direction of National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

Many were in Arabic _ with no English translation _ including one the administration said showed that Iraqi intelligence officials suspected al-Qaida members were inside Iraq in 2002.

The Pentagon Web site described that document this way: “2002 Iraqi Intelligence Correspondence concerning the presence of al-Qaida Members in Iraq. Correspondence between IRS members on a suspicion, later confirmed, of the presence of an Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Moreover, it includes photos and names.”

Various rightie pundits like Michael Barone and Stephen Hayes have been hyping these documents in recent weeks. Barone, for example, wrote ten days ago,

Light on the Saddam regime’s collaboration with terrorists will almost certainly be shed by analysis of some 2 million documents captured in Iraq. But, as the intrepid Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, almost none of those documents has been translated or released either to the public or to the congressional intelligence committees. It appears that career professionals and, perhaps, political appointees have been blocking release of these documents.

Oooo, the dreaded career professionals.

Why do their superiors not order them released? Many Americans cling with religious intensity to the notion that somehow Saddam had no terrorist ties — a notion used to delegitimize our war effort. We should bring the truth, or as much of it as is available, out into the open.

I commented on this Barone screed here.

Looking back, the recent hyping of and now the release of these documents seems just a little too … coordinated. Especially since it seems timed to the beginning of an air war against North Viet Nam insurgent strongholds in Iraq.

And it was also timed to the release today of a Bush foreign policy document that restates the “Bush Doctrine” — the right to pre-empt threats, e.g. invade anybody we damn well like — and which also states “We face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran.”

We know where this is going, don’t we?

But the real knee-slapper is this … the usual tools are hyping the Saddam-al Qaeda connection with a vengeance. Al Qaeda was in Iraq before the invasion! This guy writes (under the headline “Saddam Tied to al Qaeda”) “Consider this the final nail in the coffin of the liberal fantasy about Al Qaeda ties to Iraq.” Another found a photo of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the documents!

Do these people have fewer than three functioning brain cells apiece? Or were they not paying attention?

OF COURSE Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was in Iraq before the invasion. And he was running terrorist training camps in Iraq before the invasion. This is not a secret. Everybody knows this. I’ve even written about it myself several times.

But here is the part the bleepheads of the Right never get through their impenetrable skulls: Zarqawi was operating in Iraqi KURDISTAN, an area of northern Iraq that had become a safe haven for Kurds. He was in a part of Iraq over which Saddam Hussein had no control. He was, in fact, in part of Iraq controlled by our buddies, the Kurds. Kurdish autonomy had been shielded by U.S. air power since the end of the 1991 war.

Now, here is the juicy part. Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate, April 14, 2004 (righties, this is for you, so pay attention):

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.

I’ll pause to let that sink in. Kaplan continued,

As far back as June 2002, U.S. intelligence reported that Zarqawi had set up a weapons lab at Kirma in northern Iraq that was capable of producing ricin and cyanide. The Pentagon drew up an attack plan involving cruise missiles and smart bombs. The White House turned it down. In October 2002, intelligence reported that Zarqawi was preparing to use his bio-weapons in Europe. The Pentagon drew up another attack plan. The White House again demurred. In January 2003, police in London arrested terrorist suspects connected to the camp. The Pentagon devised another attack plan. Again, the White House killed the plan, not Zarqawi.

When the war finally started in March, the camp was attacked early on. But by that time, Zarqawi and his followers had departed.

This camp was in the Kurdish enclave of Iraq. The U.S. military had been mounting airstrikes against various targets throughout Iraq—mainly air-defense sites—for the previous few years. It would not have been a major escalation to destroy this camp, especially after the war against al-Qaida in Afghanistan. The Kurds, whose autonomy had been shielded by U.S. air power since the end of the 1991 war, wouldn’t have minded and could even have helped.

But the problem, from Bush’s perspective, was that this was the only tangible evidence of terrorists in Iraq. Colin Powell even showed the location of the camp on a map during his famous Feb. 5 briefing at the U.N. Security Council. The camp was in an area of Iraq that Saddam didn’t control. But never mind, it was something. To wipe it out ahead of time might lead some people—in Congress, the United Nations, and the American public—to conclude that Saddam’s links to terrorists were finished, that maybe the war wasn’t necessary. So Bush let it be.

Also in Slate, Daniel Benjamin wrote (October, 2004):

Why didn’t the Bush administration kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi when it had the chance?

That it had opportunities to take out the Jordanian-born jihadist has been clear since Secretary of State Colin Powell devoted a long section of his February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council. In those remarks, which were given to underscore the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, Powell dwelt at length on the terrorist camp in Khurmal, in the pre-invasion Kurdish enclave. It was at that camp that Zarqawi, other jihadists who had fled Afghanistan, and Kurdish radicals were training and producing the poison ricin and cyanide.

Neither the Khurmal camp nor the surrounding area were under Saddam’s control, but Powell provided much detail purporting to show Zarqawi’s ties to the Baghdad regime. His arguments have since been largely discredited by the intelligence community. Many of us who have worked in counterterrorism wondered at the time about Powell’s claims. If we knew where the camp of a leading jihadist was and knew that his followers were working on unconventional weapons, why weren’t we bombing it or sending in special operations forces—especially since this was a relatively “permissive” environment?

Benjamin’s answer boils down to “because Bushies are idiots,” as opposed to Kaplan’s theory that the Bushies left Zarqawi alone deliberately because his presence in Iraq was one of their excuses for invading it.

But today, once again, Zarqawi is dangled in front of the mouth-breathers and throwbacks of the Right to show them that, see, Saddam Hussein did too have ties to terrorism. And they, dumb beasts that they are, take the bait.

‘Scuse me while I pound my head on the floor and scream.

Iraq Shellac

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We learned yesterday from Insight, a Moonie Times publication, that for some time President Bush has cleared his plate of all issues except Iraq and the 2006 midterm elections. Everything else is entirely delegated. This is why, Insight reports, that Bush didn’t know anything about the Dubai ports deal until it hit the news.

Considering that his involvement with Iraq consists mostly of denying reality, and that most of his party thinks he is dragging down their midterm election chances, this pretty much means he’s not doing anything substantive at all. We don’t have a functioning president in the White House. ‘Course, we haven’t had one since January 2001; what else is new?

Speaking of presidential voids and Iraq — behind the NY Times subscription firewall today is a powerhouse of an article by David C. Unger. So far I haven’t found an alternative source for this article so that non-subscribers can read it, but I’ll keep looking. In the meantime, I’ll quote from it substantially —

If America had taken the trouble to learn more about Iraq before invading it in 2003, a lot of the problems we face there today could have been avoided. In fact, had the right questions been asked and answered accurately, the invasion might have been canceled before it began. For example, if the Bush administration had spent more time poring over the actual findings of American intelligence agencies, they might have realized then what almost everyone acknowledges today — that Iraq’s most dangerous weapons programs had been effectively shut down by sanctions and inspections, and that Baghdad was not helping Al Qaeda and had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks.

But … but … but … (the righties blubber), everybody thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. So if Bush was wrong, he can’t be blamed because everybody else was wrong too.

Matthew Barganier (hat tip to Avedon) argues that “The whole WMD construct was a fraud” and that anyone who argued that Saddam Hussein might not have had WMD was in the position of having to prove a negative. On the other hand, before the invasion the Bushies (under the direction of Dick the Dick) were working on the assumption that there were WMDs, so any evidence to the contrary was self-evidently wrong. In fact, by the time of the invasion it was pretty much universally accepted (except by American righties) that Saddam had no nuclear program, and most of the world (except for American righties) was far from certain he had anything else.

[Update: See also Murray Waas, “What Bush Was Told About Iraq.”)

If the United States had not invaded, Saddam Hussein would still be a headache for American policymakers and a nightmare for the Iraqi people. But in many ways, things would be much better. The United States would not have the bulk of its ground forces tied down in a stalemated counter-insurgency war. Iraq would not be teetering on the brink of a civil war that could ignite much of the Middle East. And Iran, which has emerged as the most worrisome threat in the region, would not have the benefit of client Shiite fundamentalist parties tightening their grip over Iraq oilfields and providing Tehran with the added security insurance of a friendly western frontier.

Lots of other people knowledgeable about terrorism have made this same argument. Michael Scheuer, for example, went so far as to say that “Without a doubt, in the war against al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein was one of our best allies.” Saddam had no intention of helping the U.S. in any way, but the fact is that al Qaeda could not operate freely in area Saddam controlled, because Saddam didn’t trust them. In furthering his own interests he furthered ours. That is, until we deposed him and left a nice power vacuum for al Qaeda to help fill.

Unger goes on to “10 Questions That Should Have Been Asked Before the Invasion,” which he lists and discusses. I’m going to list the questions but skip the discussions–

1. What would Iraq look like without Saddam Hussein?
2. Regime change or nation-building?
3. How many American troops would be needed, and for how long?
4. What about safeguarding Iraqi weapons arsenals?
5. And what about sealing the borders?
6. Would Iraq hold together as a unified state?
7. What could the British experience teach us?
8. How do we get and keep the Iraqi people on our side?
9. Once a post-Baathist Iraq took shape, how would it fit into the map of the Middle East?
10. More specifically, would invading Iraq make Iran more or less of a regional threat?

As I said, Unger provides three or four paragraphs answering each question, but if you’ve been paying much attention at all to Iraq you already know what most of the answers are.

Then he goes on to “10 Questions That Should Have Been Asked Since the Invasion.”

1. Where were the flowers?
2. Where were the Chalabi voters?
3. What can stop the looting (and the erosion of American credibility that accompanied it)?
4. Once the original game plan for political transition collapsed amid the looting and growing Iraqi ill-will , what might have been a more realistic Plan B?
5. What’s more important, on-time elections or inclusive elections?
6. Who are America’s natural allies in Iraq?
7. What would it take to get more international support?
8. What could be done to minimize the damage from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal?
9. What kind of Iraqi security forces should we be building?
10. Again — how many United States troops will be needed, and for how long?

Again, Unger provides discussion with each question; I am just listing the questions. The overall point here is that the Bush Administration either never honestly confronted these question or did so months too late to do anything constructive about them.

Finally Unger gets to “5 Questions That Should Be Asked Now.” This time he doesn’t give answers, but throws these questions at readers. Sometime in the future the NY Times will publish a selection of the answers.

1. Where should the United States draw the line on giving full military support to an Iraqi government that insists on being sectarian, vengeful and non-inclusive?

2. What can Washington to do to mitigate the advantages it is handing Iran by aligning itself with Iraq’s most pro-Iranian parties?

3. Should Washington give up on the idea of holding Iraq together as a single nation and accept an equitable partition of territory and resources as the best remaining hope for avoiding civil war?

4. If civil war cannot be avoided, should American troops stay in Iraq and risk getting caught in the crossfire in the hope of limiting the carnage, the regional repercussions and the effects on world oil markets?

5. In the long run, would the United States be better off holding out for something it can call “peace with honor” or would it be better to cut our losses by announcing an exit strategy and brokering the best deal we can?

These are hard questions, and you know that the President is not considering these questions at all. You can see that if you read the transcript of his most recent Iraq speech. He’s not even close to forming these questions, never mind answering them.

In other Iraq news, Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder reports that “American forces have dramatically increased airstrikes in Iraq during the past five months.” This is something Seymour Hersh predicted would happen awhile back. Tim Grieve at Salon looks at poll numbers that show Americans no longer believe what Bush says about Iraq.

And do not miss this Dan Froomkin column —

Yesterday brought two strong signs that even as Bush is trying — and failing — to placate the public about Iraq, he’s increasingly keen to focus attention on a new villain: Iran. …

… But if Bush’s ability to govern, in either Iraq or his own country, has been overestimated at times, the same cannot be said for his ability to campaign and stoke a nation to war.

A Bush who appears embattled, defensive and quite possibly overwhelmed inevitably leads to lower and lower public approval ratings.

But White House aides are abundantly aware that there’s something about the image of a fearless American president boldly kicking butt that seems to fill the public with an enthusiasm that transcends even the issue of whose butt it may be.