Category Archives: Iraq War

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This

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Sometimes, from diverse news stories, a shaggy dog emerges.

Item one: The recent drone attack that failed to kill al Qaeda’s “number two” guy had the unfortunate side effect of killing 17 other people, including six women and six children. According to Griff Witte and Kamran Khan in the Washington Post:

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis staged an angry anti-American protest near the remote village of Damadola, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, where Friday’s attack took place. According to witnesses, the demonstrators shouted, “Death to America!” and “Death to Musharraf!” — referring to Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf — and the offices of at least one U.S.-backed aid organization were ransacked and set ablaze.

Jason Burke and Imtiaz Gul of the Observer write that relations between the U.S. and our GWOT “ally,” Pakistan, have been stretched to the breaking point.

Tensions between Washington and Islamabad have grown in recent weeks as American troops have stepped up operations against militants. Pakistan has already lodged a protest with the US military six days ago after a reported US airstrike killed eight people in the North Waziristan tribal region, an almost deserted area of mountains 300 miles south of Damadola. In Damadola itself, locals said they had never sheltered any al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders, let alone al-Zawahiri, an instantly recognisable 54-year-old Egyptian-born ex-doctor.

Even if the raid had taken out Ayman Zawahiri, one might still argue that the price of the capture was far too high. “This is war, and unfortunately war results in collateral deaths by mistaken targeting,” say the warbloggers. But let’s take a step back and ask a fundamental question.

Why are we at war? Aren’t we supposed to be fighting to end (or, at least, significantly discourage) terrorism? If our focus on eliminating people on a shopping list of bad guys results in making more bad guys, is this not a tad self-defeating? Like curing someone’s headache by cutting off his head? Are we not missing the big picture here?

Jane Hamsher has more on what we might call the inconsistency of righties on this issue, but let’s move on to the next story …

An editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times says we’d better pay attention to Afghanistan.

MORE THAN FOUR YEARS AFTER the invasion that overthrew the Taliban, Afghanistan remains a dangerous place. A suicide attack 10 days ago — presumably targeting the U.S. ambassador, who was attending a nearby ceremony — killed 10 people. Days earlier, there was the beheading of a high school principal by suspected Taliban militants who broke into his home and forced his wife and eight children to watch.

The violence followed a year in which nearly 1,600 people were killed in insurgent attacks and suicide bombings. The latter are an especially troubling development because such attacks were previously rare in Afghanistan. Last year’s death toll included more than 80 American soldiers, making the year the bloodiest for U.S. forces there since the invasion.

Yet the U.S. plans to reduce the number of troops stationed in Afghaistan this spring. NATO will take up some of the slack, but one might ask why President Bush is so determined to “finish the job” in Iraq but not in Afghanistan.

But what’s this? Doug Smith and Borzou Daragahi write in the Los Angeles Times that Bush’s “Marshall Plan” for Iraq is fading.

After more than 2 1/2 years of sputtering reconstruction work, the United States’ “Marshall Plan” to rebuild this war-torn country is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding.

The $18.6 billion approved by Congress in 2003 will be spent by the end of this year, officials here say. Foreign governments have given only a fraction of the billions they pledged two years ago.

With the country still a shambles, U.S. officials are promoting a tough-love vision of reconstruction that puts the burden on the Iraqi people.

“The world is a competitive place,” Tom Delare, economics counselor at the U.S. Embassy, said this month during a news briefing. “You have to convince the investor that it is worth his while to put his money in your community.”

In other words, Halliburton et al. has decided there isn’t enough profit in Iraq reconstruction. The White House insists it remains committed to Iraqi reconstruction. They’re just not going to put any more money and effort into it.

Meanwhile, we’re on the way to a nuclear showdown in Iran.

Now, here’s the punch line: In response to their crumbling Middle East policy, some in the GOP have pulled out all the stops … to smear John Murtha.

Those that can, do. Those that can’t — smear.

Move Along

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Via Juan Cole, we read in today’s Guardian:

American troops in Baghdad yesterday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.

Ali Fadhil, who two months ago won the Foreign Press Association young journalist of the year award, was hooded and taken for questioning. He was released hours later.

Dr Fadhil is working with Guardian Films on an investigation for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme into claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated.

The troops told Dr Fadhil that they were looking for an Iraqi insurgent and seized video tapes he had shot for the programme. These have not yet been returned.

What can one say, but … Jebus.

Update: I believe Ali Fadhil is the same Ali Fadhil who bolted from Iraq the Model awhile back to start an independent blog, Free Iraqi. [Update: This is a guess, because the blogger and the writer are both physicians, but I don’t know for certain.] Dr. Fadhil also reported from Fallujah after the November 2004 assault; see “City of Ghosts” in The Guardian, January 11, 2005.

Not Serious

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According to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 26 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since the beginning of January. I’m not sure if this includes all of the 17 U.S. troops who died this weeked. Or was it 20 troops? Today, a suicide bombing killed at least 14 people in Iraq’s interior ministry. No, make that 21 people. [Update: Now the links are saying 28 people.]

Those last throes are a bitch, huh?

Recently we learned that 80 percent of the marines in Iraq who died of upper body wounds could have survived if they’d had extra body armor. The Pentagon could have obtained this armor; it just didn’t. No excuses.

Yesterday NBC News ran an interview of Paul Bremer by Brian Williams. From this, we learn that the Bush Administration hadn’t anticipated an insurgency, and that Bremer’s requests for more troops were ignored. And we learned that in November 2003 Bremer wrote to Cheney that there seemed to be no military strategy.

Williams: You wrote that you told Vice President Cheney there was no military strategy for Iraq, that the policy was driven more by troop rotation. What was the reaction?

Bremer: I said to the vice president, “You know i’m not sure that we really have a strategy for winning this war.” The vice president said to me, “Well, I have similar concerns.” He thought there was something to be said for the argument that we didn’t have a strategy for victory at that time.

This interview needs to be read together with some of James Fallows’s work for The Atlantic, such as “Blind Into Baghdad” and “Bush’s Lost Year.” There was, in fact, copious warning that an insurgency was likely. The Bush Administration simply chose to ignore it.

I keep thinking of some things George Packer said on The Daily Show recently (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 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.

Rumsfeld, Packer continued, had this “pre-enlightenment idea that you remove tyranny and people are free. No, you remove tyranny and people are crazy.” Once again, someone notices that the Bushies have very muddled notions about what constitutes freedom and democracy.

And once again we see that the Bushies don’t take anything very seriously until it poses a political threat. Just a couple of months ago the White House released the “Strategy for Victory” document, a document clearly thrown together post hoc by describing what has happened in Iraq and framing it as a strategy. The point of this, clearly, was to shore up Bush’s tanking approval numbers. As I wrote last month, even though the Bushies knew, or should have known, that the training of Iraqi security forces is critical to anything resembling success in Iraq, it wasn’t until early 2005 that they got around to putting more money and effort into that training.

Meanwhile, Vichycrat extraordinaire Joe Klein worries that liberal Democrats are “playing fast and loose with issues of war and peace.” Puh-leeze …

More good commentary at The Heritik.

Update: See Eric Alterman.

Because Jonah Goldberg Won’t Go

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A rightie at NRO supports the troops — from a distance — but only the male ones. NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez clucks with disapproval at this Washington Post piece by Anne Hull, “When Mom Is Over There.”

“[Y]ou really need to get yourself Women Who Make the World Worse to see how we got to the point where we’re deploying moms to Iraq,” sniffs Lopez, referring to a new book by celebrated right-wing airhead Kate O’Beirne. Lopez links to an interview with O’Beirne, who calls women serving in war zones “a disgrace.”

The Mom at War is Master Sgt. Angela Hull, Anne Hull’s sister-in-law. Anne Hull writes,

Angela is chief controller of the air-traffic control tower at Kirkuk Regional Air Base in northern Iraq. She did not graduate from the Air Force Academy or come from a long line of military heroes. Angela was 22 and working at the Stouffer’s frozen-food factory in her home town of Gaffney, S.C., in 1987 when she rebelled against the smallness of her life and joined the Air Force. She advanced the slow, hard way, from refueling aircraft at 30,000 feet to learning air-traffic control to commanding towers. In Kirkuk, she supervises 10 controllers in the base tower while serving as first sergeant to a squadron of 48.

But “women can’t and don’t meet the male physical standards,” says Kate O’Beirne.

I’d like to see O’Beirne explain physical standards to Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester of the 617th Military Police Company, who was awarded a Silver Star last June. According to the American Forces Press Service:

Hester’s squad was shadowing a supply convoy March 20 when anti-Iraqi fighters ambushed the convoy. The squad moved to the side of the road, flanking the insurgents and cutting off their escape route. Hester led her team through the “kill zone” and into a flanking position, where she assaulted a trench line with grenades and M203 grenade-launcher rounds. She and Nein, her squad leader, then cleared two trenches, at which time she killed three insurgents with her rifle.

When the fight was over, 27 insurgents were dead, six were wounded, and one was captured.

Kate O’Beirne finds Sgt. Hester disgraceful, even though her physical standards seemed perfectly adequate.

I realize we ladies are smaller and have a reduced capacity for upper body strength compared to men, and I have no doubt there are many war situations in which women generally would be at a disadvantage. I also realize that it’s hard on a family for Mom to be away. But isn’t it hard on a family for Dad to be away? Do O’Beirne and Lopez believe that husbands and fathers play a less critical role in family life than wives and mothers? I thought conservatives were into fatherhood these days.

I believe we should leave it to the military, not Kate O’Beirne or Kathryn Jean Lopez, to decide who is qualified to be a soldier and who isn’t. I’m told that our military activities in Iraq require smarts as much as brawn, if not more so. And in the past year the military often fell short of recruitment goals, causing the Army to lower its standards on aptitude tests. Are we supposed to replace smart, well-trained women for (possibly) less smart and less-well-trained men in order to satisfy Kate O’Beirne’s sense of propriety?

And if Ms. Lopez wants women serving in Iraq to be replaced by men, she could start by kicking her colleague Jonah Goldberg in his lazy butt and telling him to enlist.

Further — if we don’t want moms and dads going to war, maybe we should be a little more circumspect about starting wars, hm?

Freedom’s Just Another Word

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Last October Atlanta Journal-Constitution political cartoonist Mike Luckovich drew the word Why? made up of the names of 2,000 troops killed in Iraq. In response, a 17-year-old named Danielle Ansley used the names of the dead to render the word Freedom.

Naturally, righties find Danielle’s illustration inspirational and clever, while Lukovich is dismissed as a “moonbat.” So good with words, those righties.

I don’t want to be too hard on a 17-year-old, but I do hope eventually the child learns to think, and not just regurjitate. Not to sound like Tom Cruise, but freedom is too glib. The word has been just about stripped of all meaning and has become little more than a tribal totem, waved about by the likes of Michelle Malkin, an apologist for racially motivated imprisonment. Yeah, that’s freedom for you.

First off, the idea that any American should die deposing a dictator who was no threat to the U.S. is problematic of itself. There were no WMDs; there was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Our soldiers were sent to Iraq thinking they were defending America, and they were not. They were sent to fulfill some cockamamie political theory dreamed up by a pack of over-educated twits at the Project for a New American Century.

Second, whether the people of Iraq, right now, really are more free than they were before the invasion is debatable. Some Iraqis, certainly, are more free. There is more freedom to openly practice Shiia Islam, for example, which is fine. But this Christmas Iraqi Christians were afraid to go to church.

In spite of token rhetoric about women’s rights in the provisional constitution, women are less free than they were when Saddam Hussein was in power. They are less free to walk the streets without a veil. They are less free to marry as they choose. They are less free even to leave their homes. President Bush likes to brag that the invasion closed Saddam Hussein rape rooms; he doesn’t add that the lack of security leaves women more vulnerable to rape and kidnap than they were before. But I guess it doesn’t count if women aren’t raped in “rape rooms,” and the perpetrators are not agents of the state, but just thugs.

In any event, perhaps Danielle Ansley would like to explore the deeper meaning of the word freedom by living as a woman in Iraq (outside the Green Zone) for a while. If she survives, she might learn something about the gap between rhetoric and reality.

As Riverbend wrote,

We’re so free, we often find ourselves prisoners of our homes, with roads cut off indefinitely and complete areas made inaccessible. We are so free to assemble that people now fear having gatherings because a large number of friends or family members may attract too much attention and provoke a raid by American or Iraqi forces.

The bald, hard, bare-assed fact is that the deaths of 2,178 American soldiers (as of today) haven’t brought any measurable amount of freedom to anyone on the planet, except perhaps for the small cadre of men who are getting wealthy from wholesale corruption and war profiteering. In this country, the Bush Administration hides behind the “war on terror” to chip away at the civil liberties preserved in the Bill of Rights. In Iraq, it seems to me that one jackboot is replacing another. I don’t blame American soldiers for this, since most of the oppression right now seems to be Iraqi against Iraqi. One can, however, blame the flaming fools in Washington who sent U.S. soldiers to invade Iraq with next to no plans for post-invasion security.

But what about democracy? What about elections? The fact of the matter is that democracy and freedom are not the same thing. A country can be democratic and still oppress its people; the United States before the Civil War, when millions were enslaved, comes to mind. For that matter, the United States after the Civil War also comes to mind. A majoritarian republic allows the majority to oppress minorities any way it likes. The independent and sovereign Iraq now struggling to be born might technically be a “free” country, but if women must hide behind drapes and veils to avoid being murdered without compunction, then by no definition of the word are they free. Freedom takes more than democratic government; it takes a nation and society committed to the civil liberties of all.

It may be that in the fullness of time Iraq will become a truly free country. And it may have been that in the same fullness of time Iraq would have achieved that happy status without our “help.” We’ll never know what might have been.

But what we can see unfold before our eyes is the appropriation of the word freedom to mean “policies of the Bush Administration.” Perhaps the next word Danielle Ansley should learn is Orwellian.

Update: See also Kathy at Liberty Street.

Why They Snoop

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Jason Leopold of Raw Story reports that Condi Rice authorized a plan to use the NSA to spy on UN delegates in 2003.

President Bush and other top officials in his administration used the National Security Agency to secretly wiretap the home and office telephones and monitor private email accounts of members of the United Nations Security Council in early 2003 to determine how foreign delegates would vote on a U.N. resolution that paved the way for the U.S.-led war in Iraq, NSA documents show.

Two former NSA officials familiar with the agency’s campaign to spy on U.N. members say then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice authorized the plan at the request of President Bush, who wanted to know how delegates were going to vote. Rice did not immediately return a call for comment.

The former officials said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also participated in discussions about the plan, which involved “stepping up” efforts to eavesdrop on diplomats.

This is actually old news; the NSA angle was reported in the Observer in March 2003, before the Iraq invasion.

The United States is conducting a secret ‘dirty tricks’ campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq.

Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.

The disclosures were made in a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency – the US body which intercepts communications around the world – and circulated to both senior agents in his organisation and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency asking for its input.

See also Shakespeare’s Sister.

I recall that in 2004 the NSA was also used to wiretap Mohamed ElBaradei, of the International Atomic Energy Agency and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Bushies were pissed at ElBaradei for trying to warn them prior to the Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein was not a nuclear threat.

Now, I don’t know offhand if these wiretaps would have required warrants. But it does show us that the Bushies have no qualms about snooping for purely political purposes.

Indigestion 2005

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I did a Technorati search, and it seems Jazz is right — as of now the Right Blogosphere is ignoring the unfortunate post-election turmoil in Iraq. After whining at us that we ignored the glorious election, now they’re ignoring the inglorious side-effects of an apparent religious Shiite victory.

Reuters reports renewed violence in Iraq, along with Sunni demands for a do-over election and a boycott of parliament.

On the other hand, some Sunnis are still negotiating for more seats in the new parliament. Not successfully, but they haven’t given up.

I remain skeptical that Iraq or any other non-democratic nation can be forcibly retrofitted with a workable democratic government by outside forces. The argument is that the U.S. turned Japan into a democratic country after World War II; therefore, it should work with Iraq as well. This argument ignores the fact that there are ENORMOUS cultural, sociological, historical, and political differences between post-WWII Japan and current day-Iraq. And (warning: I’m no expert) I understand that the government that emerged in Japan was not as wildly different from what the Japanese were accustomed to as Americans might believe. For centuries under the Shogunate the country was ruled through rigid hierarchy and bureaucratic control, and the emperor was little more than a figurehead. Some argue that’s sorta kinda the way General MacArthur left it in 1949. And Japan had been moving toward democracy on its own in the 1920s before economic and social upheaval shoved it toward militarism. For a time after World War I the nation had a two-party political system and was governed mostly by a prime minister, not the Emperor. Americans have a hazy notion that Japan’s pre-war government was something like a European monarchy and that elections were utterly alien to the Japanese, but this is not so.

So if we eliminate Japan as an example of a new Little Democracy That Could, are there other examples? I can’t think of any.

Also: More on why the “tough on terror” Right is really a pack of weeniebabies. It’s us liberals, not the lefties, who demonstrate real resolve against terrorists.

Ready for Democracy?

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Although I’d rather be playing with the Meme of Fours, there’s serious stuff going on out there.

Nancy A. Youssef and Huda Ahmed report for Knight Ridder that “An Iraqi court has ruled that some of the most prominent Sunni Muslims who were elected to parliament last week won’t be allowed to serve because officials suspect that they were high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.”

Following a week in which several hundred thousand Sunni Iraqis demonstrated against the election results, this move seems somewhat less than conciliatory. Shoving former Baathists out of the government will not, I think, placate former Baathists into accepting the new government.

If I had more time I could probably work up a comparison with the United States after the Civil War. Former Confederates were disenfranchised for a short time but regained power and influence fairly quickly, partly through violent means — race riots and the Klan, for example — and partly through political corruption — e.g., the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, which was settled by an agreement that Reconstruction would end — leading to the Jim Crow era. So those who were eventually “punished” for the rebellion were the former slaves, not their masters. Funny how that worked out.

I understand Iraq less well than I understand the postbellum U.S. South, but I assume that the former Baathists retain wealth and property out of proportion to their numbers in the population. The world being the way it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually gain political power out of proportion to their numbers in the population, as well. We’ll see. They’ll be competing with the influence of Iran, which is formidible. But in the short run, unfortunately, we may see increasing violence in Iraq just as the U.S. plans a troop “drawdown.”

For more learned and detailed analysis, see Juan Cole, who points out “The Bush administration’s fear of Iran and of its reigning Iraqi allies in Baghdad may be destabilizing Iraq by giving ammunition to disgruntled Sunni Arabs. How many feet does the Bush administration have left to shoot itself in??”

Update: Speaking of the Civil War, don’t miss “What Bush Could Learn from Lincoln” by Robert Kuttner in today’s Boston Globe. Then read “Bush’s False Choices” by Ellen Goodman from yesterday’s Boston Globe.