Category Archives: Iraq War

SOS

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Today President Bush gave the first speech in new series of four speeches that will explain to the American people why we are in Iraq.

In his speech today, the President tossed out an SOS — for Same Old Shit.

If you really care about what he said, you can read a transcript here and a news story here. It’s essentially the same Iraq speech he’s been giving for the past several months — “As Iraqis stand up, America and our coalition will stand down” — with a couple of additions:

1. The bombing of the Golden Mosque of Samarra was bad. The people who bombed the mosque wanted to start a civil war, but you’ll be happy to know that the Iraqi people have already decided not to have one.

2. Iran is exporting IED devices into Iraq, which is very bad. Iran also supports terrorism and has a nuclear weapons program. We’re going to have to do something about Iran one of these days.

Other than that, it really was the SOS — Iraqi elections were good, Iraqi security forces doing a crackerjack job, everything’s just peachy.

Body and Soul

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Jeanne d’Arc has a couple of commendable posts up. This one is about the death of Tom Fox of Christian Peacemaker Teams. The CPT opposes the Iraq war and has criticized treatment of detainees in U.S. and Iraqi jails. Fox and three other CPT members were kidnapped in Iraq in November. Fox’s body was found in Baghdad Thursday morning.

Jeanne writes,

We hear so much about the horrible things Americans are doing in Iraq, and most of us respond with anger at what’s being done in our name. All of us, those who think everything can be solved with more killing, and those who know it can’t, but don’t know what else to do, desperately need to learn more about a man who didn’t just believe that violence was the wrong way, but that peacemaking was an active — and dangerous — pursuit.

As Jeanne says, most of the blog commentary on Fox’s death has come from the Right, and most of it that I saw dripped with hate and derision for Fox and everything he was trying to do. Truth be told, I started a post on Fox this morning but couldn’t finish it because the rightie commentary was too upsetting. No good can come of that much hatefulness.

The other commentary is about Ali Shalal Qaissi — the hooded man with wires attached to his body in the now iconic Abu Ghraib photo. Jeanne comments on the importance of seeing his face.

Talking the Talk

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Michael A. Fletcher writes in today’s Washington Post,

President Bush plans to begin a series of speeches next week again explaining the administration’s strategy for winning the war in Iraq, as the White House returns to a familiar tactic to allay growing public pessimism about the war that has helped keep the president’s approval rating near its historic low.

After previewing the upcoming speech in his radio address today, the president is scheduled to make remarks on the war at George Washington University on Monday. The appearance, which will be followed weekly by as many as four other speeches, marks the start of the White House’s latest effort to convince skeptical Americans that it has a coherent plan for victory as the war nears its third anniversary later this month.

Um, didn’t we do this before? Listen to Bush give a series of four speeches to explain the administration’s strategy for winning the war in Iraq? Like, less than four months ago? Yeah, let’s see — I live blogged the first one, and provided more commentary here, here, here, here, and probably some more places.

Does he have some new strategies, or can I just re-run the old posts? I guess we’ll find out. And why four more speeches?

President Bush claims to not be concerned about dismal poll numbers, but the White House is feeling intense concern.

The public relations offensive is being launched amid intense concern in the White House about polls showing that a growing majority of Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war and harbor growing doubts about the prospects for success. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that four in five Americans believe that the ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq will mushroom into civil war. Also, more than half of those surveyed believe the United States should begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, the poll found.

Meanwhile, the president’s approval rating remains at 41 percent, virtually unchanged since January and among the lowest in his presidency.

Seriously, what do the Bushies hope to accomplish by making speeches? For that matter, what do they hope to accomplish by running Dubya around New Orleans wearing a bleeping toolbelt?

Fact is, there is something that could make a difference; something that Bush could do that might turn the bad numbers around and send them going up again.

He has to bleeping accomplish something.

It doesn’t even have to be a finished accomplishment. It can be an accomplishment in progress, but it has to be something that is undeniably actually happening. Talk and trick photography ain’t cuttin’ it no more.

For example, nobody expects New Orleans to be rebuilt in only six months. But by now we should see a coherent plan of action underway, and we should have a sense that somebody is in charge who knows what he or she is doing.

Without that, it doesn’t much matter how many times the President gets his picture taken with his sleeves rolled up. Nobody’s buying it.

Now we’re approaching the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. And it doesn’t matter how many five-star generals the Bushies trot in front of a camera to say that everything’s fine. Only those with a gallon-a-day Kool-Aid habit haven’t noticed the situation in Iraq is becoming more unstable every day.

If the reverse were true, and Iraq were becoming measurably more stable, and U.S. troops withdrawals were around the corner, Bush wouldn’t need to make speeches. But without visible improvement in the situation in Iraq, all the speeches in the world won’t make any difference.

The Bushies don’t get this. In this post from December 12 I quoted a Time magazine story by Karen Tumulty and Mike Allen — no longer free content —

The plan is to make January a critical month in what the President’s aides hope will be a turning-point year. The White House expects a quick victory on Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and the State of the Union speech will nod to big goals. But when it comes to fresh and concrete ideas, the list of what Bush will actually try to accomplish in 2006 is so modest that one bewildered Republican adviser calls it “an insult to incrementalism.”

Iraq is hemorrhaging, New Orleans is moldering, and the Bushies can’t think of anything in particular that needs to be accomplished. Excuse me while I go bang my head on the floor and howl.

On the bright side — considering that Bush’s approval numbers dropped after the last four speeches, another four should pretty much finish him off. Bring it on …

Striking a Balance?

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A couple of significant stories from Knight Ridder — Ron Hutcheson reports that the Bush Administration is sending mixed messages on Iraq.

Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday that conditions in Iraq were improving steadily, but the American ambassador in Baghdad has said the U.S. invasion opened a “Pandora’s box” of ethnic and religious violence that could inflame the entire Middle East.

Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Tuesday that the “potential is there” for a full-scale civil war in Iraq. Khalilzad, a highly regarded diplomat, warned that a victory by Islamic extremists “would make the Taliban in Afghanistan look like child’s play.”

The conflicting themes – Cheney emphasizing progress, Khalilzad stressing the difficulties and dangers – highlight the Bush administration’s struggle over how to deal with bad news from Iraq. Striking the right balance between optimism and realism could be crucial as Republicans head into the November elections with their control of Congress on the line.

Striking a balance, my ass. Cheney is delusional. Awhile back I stumbled on this paper about delusional thinking —

The DSM-IV defines delusions as “erroneous beliefs that usually involve a misinterpretation of perceptions or experiences.” Delusions may be bizarre, that is, “clearly implausible, not understandable, and not derived from ordinary life experiences” or nonbizarre, that is, involving “situations that can conceivably occur in real life.” …

… One common misconception about delusions–reflected in the DSM-IV definition–is that the thinking processes of delusional individuals are defective, or different from those of normal people. In fact, research suggests that delusional people use the same rules of reasoning as everyone else. Indeed, once a normal individual forms a belief, he or she is also reluctant to change it, and will actively seek out confirmatory evidence (“confirmation bias”) and ignore contradictory evidence.

Delusional people can appear to be completely normal and rational. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to diagnose delusion because the doctor doesn’t have any way to know that what the patient believes to be true isn’t true. The delusions may be obviously delusional or may seem entirely plausible. In general, delusional people don’t have visual or auditory hallucinations the way schizophrenics do. More commonly, they become fixated on some false belief and will look obsessively for evidence to confirm the belief. For example, a delusional vice president fixated on a belief that Saddam Hussein is plotting to destroy America might rattle cages all over Washington for evidence to back up the belief, ignoring whatever doesn’t back it up. Hypothetically.

Hutcheson continues,

In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Cheney said that as Iraqi security forces grow and the political process advances, “we’ll be able to decrease troop levels.”

U.S. intelligence officials, who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity because intelligence on Iraq is classified, said the broad consensus in the intelligence community was that while violence had subsided somewhat since the bombing of a major Shiite shrine last month in Samarra, a few more major incidents could plunge the country into full-scale civil war.

Cheney is nuttier than a pecan farm, I tell you.

The other story at Knight Ridder, by James Kuhnhenn, says that Senate Republicans today blocked an investigation into the NSA Spy program.

Senate Republicans blocked an investigation into President Bush’s secret domestic spying program on Tuesday, but agreed to expand congressional oversight of the surveillance system in the future.

At the same time, a group of four Senate Republicans began circulating legislation that would restrict the administration’s ability to eavesdrop on U.S. residents without court approval.

The legislation would require the administration to obtain warrants to eavesdrop on U.S. residents unless the attorney general certified to House and Senate intelligence subcommittees that seeking court approval would hurt intelligence gathering.
The legislation was sponsored by Sens. Mike DeWine of Ohio, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Olympia Snowe of Maine, all Republicans.

The legislation emerged as the Senate Intelligence Committee voted behind closed doors to block a Democratic demand for a full investigation into the program. The surveillance, which is carried out by the National Security Agency, tracks communications between al-Qaida suspects overseas and U.S. residents, according to the administration.

Right now I’m a little too tired to wrap my head around this, but it seems significant.

The Tar Baby

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The story thus far — a multinational diplomatic effort to resolve the Iran nuclear standoff, explained yesterday in this post, is still underway. Time is critical — the situation must be diffused before Tehran gets a bomb or Washington drops bombs.

As it’s unlikely Tehran has sufficient weapons-grade uranium to do much nuclear mischief right now, the latter outcome is the more immediate threat.

Simon Tisdall explains in today’s Guardian:

George Bush’s explanation of his volte-face over a proposed Iran-India gas pipeline project appeared slightly disingenuous. “Our beef with Iran is not the pipeline,” the US president said on Saturday after withdrawing previous objections and giving the go-ahead to Washington’s new friends in Delhi. “Our beef with Iran is the fact that they want to develop a nuclear weapon.”

But US fears about Iranian nukes, discussed in Vienna yesterday, are hardly the whole story. Washington is compiling a dossier of grievances against Tehran similar in scope and seriousness to the pre-war charge-sheet against Iraq. Other complaints include Iranian meddling in Iraq, support for Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon, and human rights abuses.

Our meddling in Iraq and human rights abuses are an entirely different matter, of course.

Mr Bush regularly urges Iranians to seize the “freedom they seek and deserve”. In Tehran’s ministries, that sounds like a call for regime change. He has ignored past Iranian offers of talks and tightened US economic sanctions.

Official Washington’s quickening drumbeat of hostility is beginning to recall political offensives against Libya’s Muammar Gadafy, Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, which all ended in violence. Rightwing American media are urging action, deeming Iran “an intolerable threat” that is the “central crisis of the Bush presidency”. [emphasis added]

Lord, how many central crises can one administration stand?

Yesterday’s ABC News report that Iran is making roadside bombs known as IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices, which begs the question — how are they “improvised” if they are being manufactured?) and shipping them to Iraq for use against Americans has the righties worked up into a nice lather. The old war, with Iraq, just wasn’t much fun any more. But here is the promise of a bright, shiny new war to play with!

It’s “a casus belli, if we want it,” says Captain Ed.

“Gee, how convenient is that?” asks John Aravosis. “Suddenly after 3 years we conveniently find ‘evidence’ of Iran arming the Iraqi insurgents, only a mere weeks after Bush starts laying the groundwork for attacking Iran.”

An odd part of this story is that for now it remains an ABC exclusive; I haven’t found independent corroboration. This suggests a plant. (Or, it also could suggest stupidity — see Newshog for evidence it’s an old story that ABC has confused for a new story.) On the other hand, ABC quotes Richard Clarke as finding the evidence credible. So let’s assume for a moment it’s true.

The ABC report doesn’t make clear exactly which Iraqis the bombs are going to. Righties assume the bombs are going to “terrorists” which is a possibility. Or they might be going to insurgents. Or Shia militias. Or all of the above. What the righties never stop to consider is that Iran’s importing of bombs into Iraq is a consequence of our invasion of Iraq. In other words, we created the conditions that brought this about.

The moral is, he who lets slip the dogs of war is likely to get bit.

I see the Bushies and their hard-right base continuing to fight the Middle East tar baby until they get the desired outcome (can anyone explain what that is?) or until the keys to the war machine are wrestled from their hands. One can only imagine the unintended consequences of a U.S. bombing of Iran. Unfortunately, Bushies are famously imagination-challenged. Will we have to listen to Condi say, “No one could have anticipated we would start World War III”?

An Uncivil War

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Jake Tapper reports for ABC News that Iraq is already in a civil war, and we’d all better accept this fact and adjust.

As Pentagon generals offered optimistic assessments that the sectarian violence in Iraq had dissipated this weekend, other military experts told ABC News that Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq already are engaged in a civil war, and that the Iraqi government and U.S. military had better accept that fact and adapt accordingly.

“We’re in a civil war now; it’s just that not everybody’s joined in,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest.

“It’s our failure to understand reality that has caused us to be late throughout this experience of the last three years in Iraq,” added Nash, who is an ABC News consultant.

Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, “If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they’d say we’ve been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004.”

From here let’s skip over to today’s Dan Froomkin column:

… even as the public increasingly sees the situation in Iraq headed toward all-out civil war, Bush’s official position is denial.

Just last week, ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas tried repeatedly to get Bush to address the issue. “What is the policy if, in fact, a civil war should break out or the sectarian violence continues?” she asked. “Are you willing to sacrifice American lives to get the Sunnis and the Shiites to stop killing each other?

Bush’s reply: “I don’t buy your premise that there’s going to be a civil war.”

Good thing Bush wasn’t president in 1861, huh?

Froomkin provides more links to commentary about the essential Bushie world view, which is a mix of ignorance and denial. See especially this Fareed Zakaria column. The Bushies have made one blunder after another in Iraq, and most of these blunders came about because the Bush Administration viewed Iraq through a prism of fantasy. Even now, the Administration remains unable to understand what’s happening in Iraq from an Iraqi point of view. For that reason the Bushies do not understand how their policy decisions actually impact Iraqis, and for this reason they misjudge Iraqi actions and reactions.

But Bush cannot learn from mistakes, because he won’t even admit mistakes. Zakaria writes,

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush took a swipe at critics. “Hindsight alone is not wisdom,” he said. In fact, the tragedy of Iraq is that most of these critiques were made—by several people—at the time the policies were announced, often before. It’s the president who needs to look back and learn from his mistakes. Hindsight may not be the only wisdom, but it is a lot better than operating in the dark.

Intelligent people may disagree whether Iraq is engaged in civil war now or is just on the edge of one. But the White House position is that there is not now and never will be a civil war. Ronald Brownstein wrote in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times:

… the president gave no hint he’d considered how the widening gulf between Sunni and Shiite might alter America’s strategy. Instead, he summoned old sound bites, as if cueing them on tape. “The troops are chasing down terrorists,” he told Vargas. And: “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”

In other words, if there is a civil war in Iraq Bush will be the last to know. And for that reason our response is doomed to be a day late and a few billion dollars short.

I learned a long time ago never to say “it can’t get any worse.” Truly, there are no limits to how bad “it” can get. Hang on to your butts.

Sorta related: Interesting article by Niall Ferguson in today’s Los Angeles Times.

At Least Saddam Is in Jail

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Via Chris at AMERICAblog, Ed Johnson of the Associated Press reports,

Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein, as lawlessness and sectarian violence sweep the country, the former U.N. human rights chief in Iraq said Thursday.

John Pace, who last month left his post as director of the human rights office at the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, said the level of extra-judicial executions and torture is soaring, and morgue workers are being threatened by both government-backed militia and insurgents not to properly investigate deaths.

“Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK,” Pace said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But now, no. Here, you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can do anything they want to anyone.”

Sounds pretty grim.

Update: See also the BBC, “Gangs ‘Kill Freely’ in Iraq Chaos.”

Goin’ South

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The Ministry of Truth is working overtime to keep the True Believers in line. Victor Davis Hanson writes that we are winning the war in Iraq and will prevail as long as we believe.

“What seems to me most inexplicable is the war over the war–not the purported absence of a plan, but that the more we are winning in the field, the more we are losing it at home,” he says. What seems to me most inexplicable is that Victor Davis Hanson is, I assume, bright enough to dress himself. (Fortunately, Mr. Hanson does not require further snarking; Robert Farley has snarked for us all.)

At the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, Ralph Peters writes that the reporting from Baghdad is all wrong — no civil war here —

The reporting out of Baghdad continues to be hysterical and dishonest. There is no civil war in the streets. None. Period.

Terrorism, yes. Civil war, no. Clear enough?

Yesterday, I crisscrossed Baghdad, visiting communities on both banks of the Tigris and logging at least 25 miles on the streets. With the weekend curfew lifted, I saw traffic jams, booming business — and everyday life in abundance.

“Baghdad isn’t London during the Blitz, and certainly not New York on 9/11,” he continues. Possibly not, but those weren’t civil wars, either. And as someone who traveled nearly the length of Manhattan in a slow-moving car on 9/11 trying to get off the island, I can promise you that if you were anywhere north of about 14th Street there was no sign of anything amiss on that day, except for smoke in the sky. From midtown on north you couldn’t even see the smoke in the sky. One could see shoppers, people dining in sidewalk cafes, people walking dogs, all perfectly normal. Yet it was 9/11.

The moral is, sometimes one pair of eyes isn’t seeing the whole picture.

Ellen Knickmeyer reports for the Washington Post that in parts of Iraq Shiites are being told to leave their homes or be killed. That sounds rather … uncivil.

I don’t claim to know what’s going on in Iraq. It is possible that the current round of violence will settle down. But, truly, “reporting” like Mr. Peters’s sends a bigger chill down my spine than the stories of violence in Iraq. It makes me realize what dangers we are in here.

Brilliant quote du jour: “If the president actually believes that he has never wavered from his course, it makes you remember that all motion is relative.” Snort.

Update: Scott Ritter, “Iraq: A Solution to Nothing”

Staggering Ineptitude

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Via Josh Marshall — Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay write for Knight Ridder,

U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.

Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions – not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.

On the “Bush Policy Decision Process” flow chart, this is the familiar step of “Policy Decisions Made” inside a bubble. And no one with expertise or a diverse point of view is allowed inside the bubble.

The reports received a cool reception from Bush administration policymakers at the White House and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to the former officials, who discussed them publicly for the first time.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and others continued to describe the insurgency as a containable threat, posed mainly by former supporters of Saddam Hussein, criminals and non-Iraqi terrorists – even as the U.S. intelligence community was warning otherwise.

Most … incompetent … administration … in … U.S. … history …

Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, said the October 2003 study was part of a “steady stream” of dozens of intelligence reports warning Bush and his top lieutenants that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding.

“Frankly, senior officials simply weren’t ready to pay attention to analysis that didn’t conform to their own optimistic scenarios,” Hutchings said in a telephone interview.

Keep in mind Bush’s only response to any questions about his decisions: Trust me.

Old News

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The situation in Iraq is so volatile that conflicting spin and news cycles are bumping into each other. By way of illustration, here’s a screen capture taken from Memeorandum this afternoon.

Old News: The violence in Iraq is subsiding.

New News: Um, maybe not.

Old News (yesterday):

The US ambassador said the risk of civil war from last week’s crisis was over. …

… “That crisis is over,” US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad declared.

“I think the country came to the brink of a civil war, but the Iraqis decided that they didn’t want to go down that path, and came together,” the ambassador told CNN. “Clearly the terrorists who plotted that attack wanted to provoke a civil war. It looked quite dangerous in the initial 48 hours, but I believe that the Iraqis decided to come together.”

New News (today):

Attacks in Baghdad, including a car bomb near a Shi’ite mosque, killed at least 60 people on Tuesday and U.S. President George W. Bush told Iraqis who fear civil war that they faced a choice between “chaos or unity”.

As deposed leader Saddam Hussein returned to court after the worst week of sectarian violence since the U.S. invasion, three bombs in quick succession killed 32 people. After dark, a car bomb killed at least 23 near the Shi’ite mosque and a market.

New polls reveal that both the American public and the troops in Iraq are heartily sick of the mess Bush made and want out. This suggests to me that people outside the winger base are not listening to what Bush says any more.

As I mentioned in the last post, a whopping majority are skeptical of the UAE ports deal. Today on television I saw a clip of Bush, with his most condescending smirk, saying “If there was any doubt in my mind or people in my administration’s minds that our ports would be less secure or the American people in danger, this deal wouldn’t go forward.”

In other words … trust me.

Tonight on ABC’s World News Tonight Bush will speak to Elizabeth Vargas in an exclusive interview. Viewers will get to hear Bush flat-out deny there will be a civil war in Iraq. They’ll hear him deny that his low poll numbers concern him — “I’ve got ample capital and I’m using it to spread freedom and to protect the American people.” They’ll hear him say that the UAE port deal will be confirmed after review; the only reason Congress and the American people are concerned is that they don’t know the stuff that he knows.

Personally, I think the boy has completely slipped his tether. He could get away with that “trust me” stuff after 9/11. He’s not getting away with it now. Yet he doesn’t know any other way to relate to the American people.

Seems to me the American people ain’t relatin’ back.