That was horribly depressing testimony yesterday. Crocker and Petraeus might have tried to put a sunny spin on the matter, but at the the end of the day the only thing you conclude was that the US is fighting in the wrong place and doesn’t have the first clue how to get itself out of this mess.
When Ambassador Crocker was asked which Al Qaeda group he would consider most important to eliminate, the real Al Qaeda or the splinter group Al Qaeda in Iraq, he choose the real Al Qaeda in Pakistan:
SEN. BIDEN: Mr. Ambassador, is Al Qaeda a greater threat to US interests in Iraq, or in the Afghan-Pakistan border region?
AMB. CROCKER: Mr. Chairman, Al Qaeda is a strategic threat to the United States wherever it is, in my view–
SEN. BIDEN: Where is most of it? If you could take it out? You had a choice: Lord almighty came down and sat in the middle of the table there and said ‘Mr. Ambassador you can eliminate every Al Qaeda source in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or every Al Qaeda personnel in Iraq,’ which would you pick?
AMB. CROCKER: Well given the progress that has been made again Al Qaeda in Iraq, the significant decrease in its capabilities, the fact that it is solidly on the defensive, and not in a position of–
SEN. BIDEN: Which would you pick, Mr. Ambassador?
AMB. CROCKER: I would therefore pick Al Qaeda in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.
SEN BIDEN: That would be a smart choice.
Crocker tried to make it seem as if we have struck a massive blow against Al Qaeda in Iraq and so we could now turn our attention to Pakistan/Afghanistan. Some war defenders may rush to use that hedging as support for the notion that even if Crocker admits that iraq is not the central front in the war against Al Qaeda that it once was. That, of course, is nonsense. Al Qaeda in Iraq did not exist until we invaded so it could not have been an important front in the fight against Al Qaeda until our own stupidity allowed Al Qaeda the opportunity to make it so. And if Crocker is right, if we have had significant enough success against Al Qaeda in Iraq that we are free to turn our attention to Pakistan, why, precisely, is there still so much violence in Iraq? It must be because of other factions, factions that have nothing to do with Al Qaeda in Iraq. But both Crocker and Patreaus said we cannot leave Iraq, so, by Crocker’s own words, Iraq is a colossal distraction from the real fight: Al Qaeda.
Crocker admitting that Iraq is preventing us form dealign with and defeating Al Qaeda is bad enough, but Petraeus and Crocker had even worse news In essence, they have no idea what victory would look like. When Asked by Senator Clinton what victory would look like, General Petraeus gave this rambling answer:
With respect to the conditions, Senator, what we have is a number of factors that we will consider by area as we look at where we can make recommendations for further reductions beyond the reduction of the surge forces that will be complete in July. These factors are fairly clear. There’s obviously an enemy situation factor, there’s a friendly situation factor with respect to Iraqi forces, local governance, even economic and political dynamics, all of which are considered as the factors in making recommendations on further reductions.
Having said that, I have to say that again it’s not a mathematical exercise. There’s not an equation in which you have co- efficients in front of each of these factors. It’s not as mechanical as that. At the end of the day, it really involves commanders sitting down, also with their Iraqi counterparts and leaders in a particular area, and assessing where it is that you can reduce your forces so you can, again, make a recommendation to make further reductions.
And that’s the process, again.
He cannot say what conditions would trigger a draw down of troops — apparently his field commanders would just one day magically know that everything was friendship and light and flowering ponies and they could all go home. Saying now what that magical land of happy-happy would look like is, apparently, impossible. Just trust in the Mighty Power of the Patraeus and He will come down from the mountain and present us with the Ten Dates For Withdrawal.
Crocker was just as bad. When asked by Senator Obama what constituted success, Crocker replied:
CROCKER: And that’s because, Senator, is a — I mean, I don’t like to sound like a broken record, but this is hard and this is complicated.
I think that when Iraq gets to the point that it can carry forward its further development without a major commitment of U.S. forces, with still a lot of problems out there but where they and we would have a fair certitude that, again, they can drive it forward themselves without significant danger of having the whole thing slip away from them again, then, clearly, our profile, our presence diminishes markedly.
But that’s not where we are now.
Again the double talk: we will leave when things are good but we cannot tell you right now how things will look when things look good. Success in Iraq is just like pornography: it is whatever Republicans are pointing to when they say “victory”.
But it gets even worse. When Senator Levin specifically asked Petraeus what the number of troops would be at the end of the year if everything goes according to his plan, Petraeus could not answer:
LEVIN: Now, next question, if all goes well — if all goes well, what would be the approximate number of our troops there at the end of the year?
Let’s assume conditions permitted things to move quickly. What, in your estimate, would be the approximate number of American troops there at the end of the year?
Can you give us a — just say if you can’t give us an estimate.
PETRAEUS: Sir, I can’t — I can’t give you an estimate on that.
LEVIN: All right. You’re not going to give us an estimate on that.
They don’t have a plan beyond hope. If they had areal plan, they would be trumpeting it and would take every opportunity to tell a disgusted and worried American public “here, here is what the end looks like and here is how we intend to get there.” Crocker and Petraeus bobbed and weaved like Ali in his prime every time someone tried to get them define success and victory. People who know where they are going aren’t afraid of questions about the destination. Clearly, all they have is the vague hope that if they hang around long enough, things will somehow sort themselves out.
By the end of the day Crocker and Petraeus had made it clear that the war in Iraq was not keeping the country safer, they don’t really have any idea what they are trying to accomplish in Iraq but we cannot leave no matter the cost until they have accomplished the accomplishment that they cnanot define.
April 9th, 2008
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General, Politics, Iraq, Terrorism, Iran |
10 comments
David Horowitz, the right-wing provocateur, along with Michelle Malkin and similar bottom-feeders, is promoting “Islamofascism Awareness Week” this month on college campuses, in conjunction with college conservative groups. It’s another exercise in putting a smugly self-righteous face on their own bigotry.
October 17th, 2007
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General, Politics, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, News & Current Events, Iran |
25 comments
Richard Cohen, alleged liberal, alleged expert:
The manifold blunders of America in Iraq have made it unfashionable to recall such truths.
Fashion is a poor compass. The next time a car bomb goes off, remember Saddon al-Saiedi, a 36-year-old Shiite army colonel, father of two, abducted by Saddam’s goons on May 2, 1993, and never seen again.
As he went, so went numberless others, without a bang. Totalitarian hell - malign stability - holds no hope. Violent instability is unacceptable but not hopeless. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than we have allowed.”
Thomas Friedman, alleged internationalist, alleged expert:
There were three great bubbles in the 1990s: the Nasdaq bubble, the Enron bubble…and the terrorism bubble.”
… “We need to go into the heart of their world and beat their brains out, in order to burst this bubble.”
What happens when you take the word of American experts:
He lies flat, unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling, tubes and machines feeding him, breathing for him, keeping him alive. He cannot walk or talk, but he can grimace and cry. And he is fully aware of what has happened to him.
Four years ago almost to this day, Joseph Briseno Jr. was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range in a Baghdad marketplace. His spinal cord was shattered, and cardiac arrests stole his vision and damaged his brain.
…
But he survived. From Germany, he went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, then to McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia. In December 2003, he went home, to Manassas Park, Virginia, where his parents, Joseph Sr. and Eva, quit their jobs to care for him.
“All our savings, all our money, was just emptied … the 401(k)s, everything,” said Joseph Briseno, who took a new job a year and a half ago to make ends meet.
…
At the Tampa VA, a nurse taught Jay Briseno to swallow his saliva — a big step that allowed him to have some pureed foods instead of just tube-feeding. He has not been able to handle any solid food, though — his injuries are too profound.
More recently, the Tampa staff tried to wean him from the respirator. This involved painstaking therapy to strengthen his diaphragm by placing weights on his belly and gradually increasing the air pressure on the machine to try to create resistance and muscle strength. So far, it hasn’t worked.
He has had other trials: surgeries, procedures and medications for bladder problems, high blood pressure, the opening for his breathing tube, dead tissue on his tongue — even an ingrown toenail. The latest is the bone disease, osteoporosis.
He can respond to questions by grunting or grimacing, and occasionally can say “mom” or “go,” but not consistently. He often opens his mouth.
God damn them all. Wars aren’t games and soldiers and civilians aren’t game pieces to be sacrificed without a moments thought. Wars are horrible, horrible things that cut lives short and mark even the survivors for life. Wars break things: countries, people, minds. No sane person, no person with an ounce of hummanity actively tries to starts a war. Decent people fight the coming of war right until the first bullet flies and fight to end the war as soon as possible. Unfortunately, decency is not a requirement for punditry stardom.
We have a sick, sick political culture. Bush is a symptom of this reckless, soulless, militaristic, fetid political discourse, not its cause. After Bush leaves we will still be cursed with men who think there is no problem an armored division cannot solve and count the seriousness of a thinker by the number of children he or she is willing to condemn to bloody death.
June 26th, 2007
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Politics, Iraq, Iran |
5 comments
Dick Cheney and the neo-cons still think it is 1974:
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”
That attitude is one of the reasons our response to 9/11 has been so pathetically off target. Aside from their out0sized belligerence, their fatal flaw is that are apparently constitutionally incapable of understanding the modern world. They really and truly appear to believe that state sponsored terrorism is the primary driving force behind terrorism. Worse, they don’t seem to understand that the modern world has created a situation where small numbers of people can do large amounts of damage with just a little bit of money, some planning, and some luck.
This failure is apparently in the neo-con blood stream. As far as I can tell, the Project for a New American Century treated terrorism as a tertiary concern and thought that most of it would come in the form of state-sponsored groups. Laurie Mylroie wrote and article and a book making the ludicrously unsupported claim that Saddam was behind the first World trade Center bombing. That book was published by the American Enterprise Institute, which is what passes for the intellectual arm of the neo-conservative movement. Paul Wolfowitz was credited in the book for providing “… crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult.”
When th Administration took power, terrorism was a low priority. It wasn’t included in the top twelve priorities of the new Justice Department’s first budget, and the focus of the Bush Administration before 9/11 was on missile defense and China. They acted as if their primary problems were those created by rival nations, not those created by terrorist groups. Even after 9/11, Wolfowitz could not bring himself to believe that Al Qaeda was carrying carrying out their operations without the active help of a state:
Wolfowitz fidgeted and scowled … “Well, I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden.”
“We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States,” I answered. …
Wolfowitz turned to me. “You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1999 attack on New York, without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.” I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.
Even Bush thought that way:
“Go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way…”
I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. “But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this.”
“I know, I know, but … see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred …”
“Absolutely, we will look … again.” I was trying to be more respectful, more responsive. “But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of Al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.”
They just don’t understand. They formed their opinions of the way the world worked in the Cold War, when the conflict between the two super-powers dominated the world stage. During that time period, much terrorism was state sponsored and the largest threats to the United States did come from state actors. But the world has changed. Technology has made states unnecessary for terrorists. Technology allows small groups of people to communicate effectively, to raise money easily, and to devise means of killing a lot of people easily. They don’t realize that; worse, they seem incapable of realizing that.
Now they are apparently feeding money to Sunni terrorists and insurgents, many with connection to Al Qaeda, in the hopes of checking who they see to be the real threat in the region: the state of Iran. I would bet almost anything that these people think that once they have made the Saudis happy by weakening or demolishing Iranian power in the Middle East, the Saudis can call off these Sunni terrorist groups. But they cannot. These groups are not the puppets of the Saudis, at least not all of them and certianly not those working with Al Qaeda, are not controlled by anyone other than themselves. Assuming that the Saudis would even want to reign these groups in, there is little reason to think they could in any comprehensive fashion. Perhaps it’s their natural authoritarian nature, perhaps it’s their contempt for the little people, perhaps its their cold war experiences, perhaps it’s the bubbles they have built for themselves, but the neo-cons seem to be simply incapable of realizing that small groups can and are lethal. It is a failure of stunning proportions, made all the worse because it is still driving American policy.
New Yorker link Via Digby.
February 26th, 2007
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Iraq, Terrorism, Technology, Iran |
2 comments
War with Iran is being pushed:
Some senior administration officials still relish the notion of a direct confrontation. One ambassador in Washington said he was taken aback when John Hannah, Vice President Cheney’s national security adviser, said during a recent meeting that the administration considers 2007 “the year of Iran” and indicated that a U.S. attack was a real possibility. Hannah declined to be interviewed for this article.
Needless to say, the information is not exactly credible:
The allegations against Iran are similar in tone and credibility to those made four years ago by the US government about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion of 2003.
Senior US defence officials in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they believed the bombs were manufactured in Iran and smuggled across the border to Shia militants in Iraq. The weapons, identified as “explosively formed penetrators” (EFPs) are said to be capable of destroying an Abrams tank.
… The allegations by senior but unnamed US officials in Baghdad and Washington are bizarre. The US has been fighting a Sunni insurgency in Iraq since 2003 that is deeply hostile to Iran.
The insurgent groups have repeatedly denounced the democratically elected Iraqi government as pawns of Iran. It is unlikely that the Sunni guerrillas have received significant quantities of military equipment from Tehran. Some 1,190 US soldiers have been killed by so-called improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But most of them consist of heavy artillery shells (often 120mm or 155mm) taken from the arsenals of the former regime and detonated by blasting caps wired to a small battery. The current is switched on either by a command wire or a simple device such as the remote control used for children’s toys or to open garage doors.
… The statements from Washington give the impression that the US has been at war with Shia militias for the past three-and-a-half years while almost all the fighting has been with the Sunni insurgents. These are often led by highly trained former officers and men from Saddam Hussein’s elite military and intelligence units. During the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, the Iraqi leader, backed by the US and the Soviet Union, was able to obtain training in advanced weapons for his forces.
The US stance on the military capabilities of Iraqis today is the exact opposite of its position in four years ago. Then President Bush and Tony Blair claimed that Iraqis were technically advanced enough to produce long-range missiles and to be close to producing a nuclear device. Washington is now saying that Iraqis are too backward to produce an effective roadside bomb and must seek Iranian help.
They will go to war with Iran. The Navy and the Air Force have largely been untouched by the war in Iraq and are perfectly capable of doing damage to Iranian targets. To a group that fell in love with Rumsfeld’s vision of a high tech, low manpower fighting force, the exaggerated claims of air power proponents most sound like music. This is what they want. The neo-cons are old fashioned imperialists, people who believe that it is good and just and proper for the United States to use its might to dictate to the world what it can and cannot do. They disdain anything other than military power and still think in terms of state sponsored terrorism as the real terrorist threat, blinded to the new nature of non-state actors by their own limited intellectual abilities. They have wanted a war with Iran, really, with the entire Middle East, for some time. They probably realize that this will be their last chance in the foreseeable future.
Bush himself is a child, a small man unfit for the job intellectually, emotionally, or in terms of maturity. He thinks in idiotically simple terms about the world and either does not understand the damage he has done or refuses to admit it. He is obsessed with proving his critics wrong and has decided that history will be his ultimate savior. He seems to think of himself, against all evidence to the contrary, as a visionary leader. Leaders lead and deciders decide and Bush has decided that Iran is evil and must be dealt with, with dealt with defined as attacked.
Cheney, of course, thinks that things have gone swimmingly Iraq. And Cheney always wants to go to war:
The vice president, silent through most of the meeting as was his wont, muttered something about “preserving all our options.”
There will be a war with Iran. The Administration is lead by a collection of delusional imperialists who haven’t the intellectual capacity to understand how much the world has changed in the last twenty years. Their nominal leader is a life-long failure, a child masquerading as a President who thinks in terms that even the writers of 24 would find naive and overly simplistic and who is convinced that history will regard him a new Churchill or a new Lincoln. Unless the Democrats do something now, and perhaps even if they do, Cheney will find a way to attack Iran.
February 12th, 2007
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Iran |
4 comments
Bush wants a war with Iran. It has been part of the neo-con plans from the beginning and Bush is desperate for something that will magically turn his disaster in Iraq into a glorious victory. That is the genesis of this comment:
Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.
The neo-cons really appear to believe that Iran really is the source of all evil in Iraq (never mind the ongoing sectarian strife, never mind that the anti-American insurgency is largely Sunni, never mind that the government of Iraq is made up of people formerly supported by or allied with Iran) and that they can make everything better by beating up on Iraq. Right from the start, neo-cons were saying things like “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad; real men want to go to Tehran”. Never mind Al-Qaeda, Iran is the real enemy.
And today, we have this report:
US forces have stormed an Iranian consulate in the northern Iraqi town of Irbil and seized six members of staff.
The troops raided the building at about 0300 (0001GMT), taking away computers and papers, according to Kurdish media and senior local officials.
The US military would only confirm the detention of six people around Irbil.
… One Iranian news agency with a correspondent in Irbil says five US helicopters were used to land troops on the roof of the Iranian consulate.
It reports that a number of vehicles cordoned off the streets around the building, while US soldiers warned the occupants in three different languages that they should surrender or be killed.
If a country did this to the US, it would probably be considered an act of war. It appears that the Bushies are going to escalate the rhetoric and the military provocations until either Iran over-reacts or the escalation process leads naturally to large scale action against Iran. If they do this, there will be no debates in Congress, there will be no authorizations. One day, we will wake up and find that we are in a shooting war of some kind (probably special forces and air power) with Iran.
Bush doesn;t consider escalating in Iraq going all in. Going all in, to he and his neo-con handlers, means Iran and Syria. And it looks like they are serious about pushing their chips to the center of the table.
January 11th, 2007
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Iraq, Iran |
7 comments
When did the Kurds become the big-eyed orphan children of the world? I’m sorry they get crapped on so much, but why is that our problem? And - at the risk of offending the puzzlingly large Kurd fan club - exactly what claim of mistreatment do they have, and to what does it entitle them?
As I understand it, the Kurds’ problems are two-fold: they don’t have a Kurd-only state of their own, and they got hammered by Saddam when they tried to claim one out of Iraqi territory in 1987 - specifically, that Saddam used chemical weapons in doing so. To the Kurds, certainly, these are overriding causes for complaint. And I am not offering a general defense of Saddam as other than a horrible, gratuitously and inhumanly violent person and a dictator of the worst sort. But I am not convinced that the Kurds’ complaints add up to a real case for support of their cause, or for the invasion of Iraq and (planned - now irrelevant) trial of Saddam. And I am concerned with the larger-scale implications of indulging the Kurds’ territorial ambitions, especially given the fragility of national identity in their region generally.
January 9th, 2007
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General, Politics, Religion, Iraq, Terrorism, News & Current Events, Iran |
7 comments
So the Wise men have come down form the mountain and they have handed us the One True Plan Forward on two stone tablets a 160 page booklet. If this is the best they can do, though, I think I will stick with the golden calf.
This thing is a sick joke. It says that the president’s plans have been complete failures — something that has been obvious for a long time — and yet it offers nothing in the ay of new thinking. I will get back to these in greater detail, but the basic recommendations boil down to “talk to Iran and Syria and train the Iraqi army better, using more troops to do so.” And then, once those particular ponies have been located, then maybe sometime in 2008 the level of troops in Iraq might be reduced a little bit. Halleluiah, we have been saved!
Or, you know, not. Because this wonderful plan from this Amazing Bipartisan Commission of Bipartisan-ness doesn’t talk seriously discuss Iraq’s place in the greater war on terrorism. And because it doesn’t, the consequences of the recommended actions on that war aren’t seriously discussed. Similarly, there is no serious discussion of the political players in Iraq itself, and thus no serious discussion of the fact that almost all of them represent constituencies that want the US gone right now. Consequently, there is no serious discussion of the ramifications of the approved upon plan for Iraqi politics and what those ramifications, in turn, will mean for the plan. The Iraqis, to be blunt, aren’t considered to have actually agency in this little document: they merely react to US actions. The thought that Iraqis might damn well have their own plans and desires and act on them is apparently foreign to the Great Bipartisan Wise Men.
The plan itself is just as sick a joke. Talking to Iran and Syria is probably a good idea at this point, but the plan mentions nothing about what the US should or should not be prepared to negotiate with (aside from a mention of the Golan Heights in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian mess). There is a lot of hand-waving and assurances that of course Syria and Iran want precisely the same thing that the United States. That, of course, is nonsense. But actually talking frankly about what dealing with Iran and Syria would entail would mean making hard choices and forcing Bush to confront them - -something that the ISG is loathe to do.
As mentioned already, there is no timetable, despite the fact that the report admits the current situation is a disaster and that American troops aren’t doing any good. There are also parts of the plan where they say they would support a temporary surge of troops to gain control of Baghdad. In other words, Bush can stay as long as he wants, and he can add as many troops as he wants for as long as he wants. Even the one other really concrete suggestion - -better training - -is just a continuation of current Administration policy. And it conveniently ignores the important question: train them to do what? Counter-insurgency? What can they possibly learn about counter-insurgency from the US Army, and institution that has avoided the subject like a prostitute at Christmas dinner since Vietnam? How to be a modern, effective field army? What good will that do, considering how much of the Iraqi Army holds allegiance to the various factions in the country and not the country itself? I hardly think a more efficiently deadly civil war in anyone’s best interest.
There is some good in this report. It is a clear read and contains quite a bit of unvarnished - -even surprising - -information about the reality in Iraq today. Its section on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and how it infects all other issues in the region is also worthwhile. But on the important matter, finding a way forward out of this disaster, the plan is a complete failure. It put bipartisanship over results and politics over reality. Having done so, the report is broad enough, bland enough, and vapid enough to support anything that Bush wants to do in Iraq.
But, hey, it was Bi-partisan and clearly proves that the Washington Elite Consensus was not, in anyway whatsoever wrong in its assessment of the war, the President, its reporting, or anything at all up to and including what was for dinner. After all, the ISG report clearly says that Something Can Be Done to Achieve a Glorious Victory, and that proves that the Washington Elite Consensus, and not those dirty hippie sin the rest of the country, was right.
David Broder tells me so, it must be true.
UPDATE: Publius is not being cynical enough. He writes:
Maybe this is all too clever by half, but let me run this interpretation by you. The Report calls for scaling back combat troops, but leaving substantial numbers of support troops. But, the continuing support is contingent upon the Iraqis meeting a set of milestones that they can’t possibly reach. And when they don’t reach them (indeed, many dates are fast approaching), the US can say as early as 2007, “hey, the Iraqis didn’t make the milestones, so we’re leaving.”
To be truly cynical, the point of these recommendations may not be to “solve” Iraq, but to give elected officials political cover for withdrawing or redeploying most of the troops out of the country. At the least, it opens that door for those willing to take it.
And yes, there’s still reason to worry about the disclaimer above. But, that disclaimer is scary only because of how it’s been used in the past by the administration. If you looked at it from a blank slate, you would likely agree that of course withdrawals must be contingent upon something crazy not happening on the ground.
Given (1) that the Baker Report is very critical of the war and (2) there are other reasons to think it’s laying the groundwork for a quick withdrawal, I’m not sure this clause deserves the emphasis it’s getting. Yes, it gives Iraq supporters cover to stay in Iraq forever. But it also gives political cover to do just the opposite, for those so inclined.
He is wrong. the dynamic here is completely controlled by Bush. The Democrats aren’t inclined to cut off funding, at least right now. Even if they were, it’s extremely doubtful that they could do so with veto-proof majorities. Only when the US has become blood-sick over Iraq will those majorities materialize, and as long as there are politicians and their sycophants in the press running around talking about “one more push”, I find it hard to see those majorities crystallizing before 2008. That leaves Bush, and Bush has no intention of ever leaving. To him, leaving Iraq is the same as losing. No matter the consequences in the real war — the one with Al Qaeda, the one the stupid little git shows no signs of actually remembering — Bush Will Not Cut And Run. He is the Decider, dammit, not the Loser and the radicals around him whisper constantly in his ear that leaving Iraq before re-making in their image would be losing.
As I have mentioned before, the report is ambiguous enough to be read by people as supporting Bush’s stay the course “plan”. to adults, of course, the report is a warning that things are collapsing and something has to change. To the radicals and their petulant boy-President, it is cover for their existing plans. And since they are the one sin control, and since they are the only ones with any measure of control over this issue for the foreseeable future, it doesn’t matter what a responsible politician could do with the report. We don’t have a responsible politician — we have Bush.
And Bush will never, ever leave Iraq, not matter what the cost to US soldiers, to iraqi civilians, to peace in the region, to the war on Al Qaeda. he’s the Decider, dammit, not the Loser, and leaving means losing. Bush will never, ever leave Iraq.
UPDATE [tgirsch]: I also think Glenn Greenwald makes some excellent points about the absurdity of who was asked to write the report in the first place.
December 7th, 2006
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Iran |
9 comments
The neo-cons have always been wrong. They were wrong about the state of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, they were wrong about the nature and responses to the threat to terrorism, and they are wrong about the effectiveness of torture. In each case, they were wrong in a peculiar fashion: they have always thought that the United States was weak and that is it would just be tougher, the enemy of the day would collapse.
Torture is the most obvious example: torture is a tool of oppression and coercion, not of intelligence. Torture is sued to get people to do and say what you want, not to tell you the truth. It is being “tough” on terrorists, a method to scare the bad guys into stopping. We will get to the stupidity of that in a moment, but torture is just the latest of a long line of items fetishize-ing “getting tough” in the history of the group of radicals we now call neo-cons. This nonsense started almost the moment they gained some measure of power, with “Team B”.
Team B was a group of outside experts sent into to evaluate American intelligence on the Soviet Union. Needless to say, the neo-cons they used got pretty much everything wrong:
The outside experts on Team B were led by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes and included such well-known hawks as Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, and Paul Wolfowitz. Not surprisingly, Team B concluded that the intelligence specialists had badly underestimated the threat because they relied too heavily on hard data, instead of extrapolating the Soviets’ intentions from ideology.[1] According to some Team B members, “the principal threat to our nation, to world peace, and to the cause of human freedom was the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup.”[2]
Although the Team B report contained little factual data, it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger, whose members included Ronald Reagan, and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate. For example, it said that the Soviets would have 500 intercontinental Backfire bombers capable of striking the United States by 1984. In reality, only 235 were deployed. Team B also claimed that the Soviets were working on an anti-acoustic submarine, though they failed to find any evidence of one. The hawks explained away this lack of evidence by stating that “the submarine may have already been deployed because it appeared to have evaded detection.”[3]
Team B was right about one thing. The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. In 1989, the agency published an internal review of the threat assessments from 1974 to 1986. The report concluded that the Soviet threat had been “substantially overestimated” every year. In 1978, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the selection of Team B members yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases.[4] Consequently, the Team B analysis was deemed a gross exaggeration and completely inaccurate.
Team B’s assessment was incorrect to the point of garbage. But the errors always made the Soviet Union seem much more powerful and dangerous than it actually was. And when many of its members found their way into the Reagan Administration, the US wasted trillions of dollars trying to match a non-existent Soviet weapons juggernaut.
This wasn’t to be their last colossal failure. In the 1990s, the neo-cons formed something called the Project for a New American Century. One of its contentions was that Iraq was a serious threat to the United States and must be dealt with immediately. Saddam was such a threat that he had to be removed immediately:
We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.
… The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons
That last paragraph was completely wrong, of course. Not only did Saddam have no WMDs, the inspectors on the ground before the invasion said as much:
Following press reports that the Bush administration has begun supplying inspectors with intelligence, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei tells reporters that the inspection teams need “more actionable information” and that the US is still refusing to provide “specific intelligence about where to go and where to inspect.” He adds that “the inspections process will intensify to allow the inspections to speedup” if the Bush administration cooperates with inspectors. He also suggests that he does not think Iraq has a nuclear weapons program. He says: “I think it’s difficult for Iraq to hide a complete nuclear-weapons program. They might be hiding some computer studies or R. and D. on one single centrifuge. These are not enough to make weapons.” [Time, 1/12/2003; Montreal Gazette, 1/11/2003; Sun-Herald (Sydney), 1/12/2003; Washington Post, 1/11/2003] Richard A. Boucher, a spokesperson for the State Department, contests ElBaradei’s contention that inspectors have been given little to go on, saying, “I can certainly say that they’re getting the best we’ve got, and that we are sharing information with the inspectors that they can use, and based on their ability to use it.” [Washington Post, 1/11/2003]
… UN Secretary General Kofi Annan orders all UN weapons inspectors, peacekeepers, and humanitarian aid workers to withdraw from Iraq. [Washington File, 3/17/2003] UN inspectors have been in Iraq since November 18 (see November 18, 2002). During their four months of work in Iraq, they inspected hundreds of sites (some of them more than once) and found no evidence of ongoing WMD programs. Their work was reportedly obstructed, not by the Iraqis, but by the US which refused to provide inspectors with the intelligence they needed to identify sites for inspection (see February 12, 2003) (see December 5, 2002) (see December 6, 2002) (see December 20, 2002) (see January 11, 2003). Of the 105 sites identified by US intelligence as likely housing illicit weapons, 21 were deliberately withheld from inspectors. [Bamford, 2004, pp. 344]
Once they got their way, they seemed determined to have a “tough” war. There is little argument that the Abu Gharib tortures were systematic and centered in policy. And those policies appear to have originated form the idiotic notion that Arabs are unusually susceptible to humiliation and only understand force. If that notion seems odd — as it does to anyone who actually pays attention to human beings — its oddness can be explained by the fact that the neo-cons appear to have gotten their strange notions from a thirty year old, deeply racist, deeply flawed book:
AMONG THE STARTLING revelations in Seymour Hersh’s recent articles about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was news of a peculiar scholarly revival. In the May 24 issue of The New Yorker, Hersh wrote that it was the late Raphael Patai, a Hungarian-born cultural anthropologist who taught at Columbia and Princeton, whose work provided the intellectual backdrop for the torture and sexual abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib. Patai’s 1973 book “The Arab Mind,” an unnamed academic told Hersh, had become “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In his discussion with conservative prowar intellectuals, the same academic told Hersh, two themes predominated: “One, that Arabs only understand force, and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
… Patai’s work is emblematic of a bygone era of scholarship focused on the notion of a “national character,” or personality archetype. (A longtime resident of Jerusalem, he also penned a book titled “The Jewish Mind.”) For such scholars, a set of sweeping generalizations about the personality of an entire people could be extrapolated from dubious anecdotal and literary references. In Patai’s case, his methodology was itself based on a fatally flawed set of assumptions — most importantly, that there is one entirely homogenous Arab culture, derived from nomadic Bedouin culture. This ignores both the diversity and history of a people and civilization that extends across dozens of countries, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and the deeply rooted Arab culture of cities and agricultural communities.
They wanted to get tough and they apparently latched onto a book that told them they had to get tough to get through to Arabs. It would be funny if it hadn’t resulted in the largest strategic disaster in modern, perhaps all of, American history:
A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
These people have always been wrong. And they have always erred on the side of being “tough”. They appear to think that they can swagger their way through history, that the world will tremble at the sound of their mighty tread. They have substituted the appearance of toughness for intelligence and actual strength. They have created a movie in their minds and think themselves to be playing the part of the steely-eyed missile man, bullying through the problems of the world. That may work for Rambo, but in the real world it is just another, peculiar form of idiocy. Unfortunately for this country, it appears to be an idiocy that no amount of fact or failure can
September 25th, 2006
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Politics, Iraq, Terrorism, Iran, Torture |
one comment
First, the Republican controlled Senate just released a report that said that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq and that Iraq had no WMDs. That information has been clear for a long time. What is more interesting is that the Bush white House apparently knew that their public statements were incorrect:
A declassified report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed that U.S. intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify invading Iraq.
Far from aligning himself with al-Qaeda and Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Hussein repeatedly rebuffed al-Qaeda’s overtures and tried to capture Zarqawi, the report said.
The Bush Administration, particularly Cheney several times presented as established fact several things that the intelligence services did not consider credible:
In a classified January 2003 report, for instance, the CIA concluded that Hussein “viewed Islamic extremists operating inside Iraq as a threat.” But one day after that conclusion was published, Levin noted, Vice President Cheney said the Iraqi government “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”
Intelligence reports in June, July and September 2002 all cast doubts on a reported meeting in Prague between Iraqi intelligence agents and Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. Yet, in a Sept. 8, 2002, appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Cheney said the CIA considered the reports on the meeting credible, Levin said.
In February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that “Iraq is unlikely to have provided bin Laden any useful [chemical and biological weapons] knowledge or assistance.” A year later, Bush said: “Iraq has also provided al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.”
Even more interesting is this conclusion:
The report also said exiles from the Iraqi National Congress (INC) tried to influence U.S. policy by providing, through defectors, false information on Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capabilities. After skeptical analysts warned that the group had been penetrated by hostile intelligence services, including Iran’s, a 2002 White House directive ordered that U.S. funding for the INC be continued.
My emphasis. The Bush Administration was warned that they were being fed disinformation by Iranian agents and then promptly turned around and fed that information to the American public:
But, as Snowe emphasized in her statement, the report concluded that information provided by an INC source was cited in that estimate and in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations as corroborating evidence about Iraq’s mobile biological weapons program. Those citations came despite two April 2002 CIA assessments, a May 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency fabrication notice and a July 2002 National Intelligence Council warning — all saying the INC source may have been coached by the exile group into fabricating the information.
They wanted their glorious little war that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda so badly that not only were they perfectly willing to deceive the American public, they were perfectly willing to deceive the American public with information fed to them by people who were almost certainly compromised by Iranian intelligence.
I think we can put to bed the notion that the Bush Administration was not deceiving the American public, at least about Iraq and Al Qaeda. They presented things as fact that their own intelligence agencies were telling them either had not been proven or were almost certainly false. I breathlessly await the condemnation from the right over Bush’s deliberate deceptions over a life and death matter.
While we wait for the crickets to quiet down, let me say that I am afraid that this report is just going to highlight how debased our democracy has become. In a sane world, this report would have Congress calling for the head of the President, with the members of his own party leading the way. The Senate has just concluded that the Administration deliberately mislead the American public on a matter of life and death. Such deception destroys the democratic process; how can the people be asked to decide an issue of the President is deliberately misleading them about the factual basis for his case? Unfortunately, I am sure we will see the GOP introduce a measure to attack Iran before they introduce a measure to hold Bush accountable for his betrayal of democratic principles.
September 11th, 2006
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Politics, Iraq, Iran |
one comment
Scientists in Australia may have found a way to use a type of photosynthesis to make solar cells more efficient:
Synthetic molecules that mimic chlorophyll in plants may one day form the basis of highly efficient solar cells, say Australian researchers.
Professor Max Crossley’s molecular electronics group at the University of Sydney recently presented its research at the International Conference on Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines in Rome.
“Nature has evolved this very efficient process, over millions of years, for harvesting light and then converting it into energy,” says Crossley.
“We’re trying to mimic aspects of natural photosynthesis.”
… Based on what nature delivers, they expect to eventually have much more efficient solar cells than exist at the moment.
A leaf is about 30-40% efficient at converting light to electricity and this compares with just a 12% efficiency for conventional silicon-based solar cells.
“We have the basis of a biomimetic organic photovoltaic device or solar cell,” says Crossley.
“In the long term what we’re trying to do is have something we can simply paint on a roof, like a thin layer.”
If this pans out, it will obviously be huge news. And it demonstrates the importance of funding basic scientific research. This is not a minor tweak; it is an entirely new way of looking at the problem. Things like this are one reason the Bush Administration has been such a disaster. Faced with the need to wean the country away from carbon based fuels for a variety of reasons and a public ready to listen to a pitch for more funding for basic scientific research in these areas, the Bush Administration did nothing of any significance. Their tax cuts at all costs economic policy has left no money and their energy policy has largely consisted of paying oil companies to dig out oil they were going to dig out anyway. Research has been less than an after thought.
That attitude slows down the rate of progress. Basic research is a lot like fertilizer. At first, it looks like you’ve just spread crap all over the place. But eventually flowers grow. The Bush Administration is refusing to fertilize a critical area of research, slowing the pace of advancement at a time when we as a nation need to make as much progress as possible in the shortest amount of time.
September 7th, 2006
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Politics, Economics, Environment, Science, Iraq, Terrorism, Technology, Iran |
3 comments
Apparently there’s a British film coming out soon that takes a fictional look back, from an imaginary future, at the consequences of an assassination of George W. Bush late this year, and the subsequent (imagined) course of events.
It’s an interesting premise, one that I’ve wondered about occasionally. “President Dick Cheney” is a truly terrifying phrase, but at least he’s an adult and he’s not a religious nutter. I had casually imagined that his ascension into office would result in a return of economics-based Republicanism, back-burnering the whackos, and open season for Haliburton from then on. All in all, that’s not as bad as it could be (like, now, for instance).
This new film sees things rather differently, however. It’s provocative (though perhaps, from what I can tell, a bit over-the-top, and I say this as a proud and unrepentant GOP-hater), and I think worth giving some thought to whether or not, in the end, their predictions are realistic.
The Daily Mail has an article about the film. (I have to confess, the intro is so vague that I can’t quite tell whether they’re summarizing the film or simply asking someone to speculate on their own about its basic premise. Either way, it’s an interesting article.) They give an historian’s summary of events under the scenario in question - Bush is killed by an assassin with Arabic heritage in late 2006, and Cheney takes over. Whether or not any of this is plausible, it offers an interesting vision of how some Brits see things, at least.
September 1st, 2006
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Iraq, Terrorism, Media, News & Current Events, Iran |
one comment
So yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to this OpinionJournal blurb about Reid’s response to the Rumsfeld ALNC speech. My response focused on the section where he says “we need to face the following questions.” After re-reading it, I decided to also post my response here, because it’s a good breakdown of the rhetorical tactics used so often by this administration.
My response, slightly edited for this audience, is below the fold.
August 31st, 2006
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Politics, Iraq, Terrorism, Iran |
6 comments
Oh my:
“Hezbollah attacked Israel without any knowledge of the (Lebanese) government. Hezbollah attacked Israel. Hezbollah started the crisis, and Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis,” the president said.
I hope he is just stupid enough to think that if he says it, people will believe it. Because the thought that Bush actually believes the war in Southern Lebanon was anything other than a victory for Hezbollah is truly terrifying.
August 14th, 2006
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Politics, Iran |
6 comments
Some analysts are saying the Bush administration has already made the decision to go to war on Iran, and may do so as early as next month. In an eerie repeat of the Iraq fiasco, the Bushies are prodding the UN for a sanctions resolution based on the belief that Iran is researching nuclear weapons - not that it has them or is even within years of having them - while having already determined that it will act unilaterally in any case. Military assets are being positioned for the attack. Worse, the administration is backing terrorist mercenaries in a campaign of murder and intimidation against civilian targets
Concern is building among the military and the intelligence community that the US may be preparing for a military strike on Iran, as military assets in key positions are approaching readiness, RAW STORY has learned.
According to military and intelligence sources, an air strike on Iran could be doable in June of this year, with military assets in key positions ready to go and a possible plan already on the table.
Speculation has been growing on a possible air strike against Iran. But with the failure of the Bush administration to present a convincing case to the UN Security Council and to secure political backing domestically, some experts say the march toward war with Iran is on pause barring an “immediate need.”
“In March/April of this year [the US] was pushing for quick closure, a thirty day window,” says a source close to the UN Security Council, describing efforts by the Administration to “shore up enough support” to get a UN Chapter 7 resolution.
A UN Chapter 7 resolution makes it possible for sanctions to be imposed against an uncooperative nation and leaves the door open to military action.
The UN source also says that a military analysis suggests that no military action should be undertaken in Iran until spring of 2007, but that things remain volatile given this administration’s penchant for having “their own way.”
Strike could come earlier than thought
Other military and intelligence sources are expressing concern both privately and publicly that air strikes on Iran could come earlier than believed.
Retired Air Force Colonel and former faculty member at the National War College Sam Gardiner has heard some military suggestions of a possible air campaign in the near future, and although he has no intimate knowledge of such plans, he says recent aircraft carrier activity and current operations on the ground in Iran have raised red flags.
Gardiner says his concerns have kept him busy attempting to create the most likely scenario should such an attack occur.
“I would expect two or three aircraft carriers would be moved into the area,” Gardner said, describing what he thinks is the best way air strikes could be carried out without disengaging assets from US fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Two air-craft carriers are already en route to the region, RAW STORY has found. The USS Abraham Lincoln, which recently made a port call in Singapore, and the USS Enterprise which left Norfolk, Virginia earlier this month, are headed for the Western Pacific and Middle East. The USS Ronald Reagan is already operating in the Gulf. . . .
Intelligence sources confirm hearing the allegations of a June attack, but have been unable to fully confirm that such an attack is in the works. Both the New Yorker and the Washington Post have previously reported that the Pentagon is studying military options on Iran.
All sources, however, agree that given the administration’s interest in regime change, an attack on Iran is likely, regardless of international support or UN backing. Furthermore, all sources agree that Gardiner’s scenario is the most probable, including an estimated duration and “pause” assessment.
Gardiner believes that the entire initial operation could run quickly, roughly 24-72 hours. “Most of the strikes would be at night,” he said. “The Iranian nuclear facilities will be targeted; more important however, a major effort would focus on Iran’s capability to retaliate. The US will target missile facilities, air bases and naval assets.”
“After the initial effort, there will be a pause during which time the Iranians will be told that if they retaliate, the air strikes would continue,” he added.
I’m not happier than anyone about the idea of Iran’s having nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration is the only one in the world that believes that problem requires an unprovoked military assault, or that it is required now, without any effort to mediate the problem. On the ever-relevant hypocrisy front, it’s also hard to see a difference between a nuclear-armed Iran and a nuclear-armed Pakistan, with which Bush is repulsively chummy. We’ve already got the “Islamic bomb”, in the hands of a viciously repressive terrorist dictator with territorial ambitions (versus a similarly nuclear-armed, equally religiously fanatical neighbor), and Bush doesn’t care; why do we need a war in Iran, then? When the nation that gave the world these hideous weapons, and remains the only one ever to use them in war (against a non-nuclear-armed enemy, yet), continues to pursue a policy of global nuclear favoritism (Pakistan OK, Iran Not OK; Israel OK, Iraq Not OK . . .), backed by unilateral military violence, and systematically abrogates or degrades efforts to moderate the nuclear arms race, it would be hard for other nations not to regard us as one of the sources of the nuclear danger. Bush has destroyed not only America’s history as a nation of laws and a force for peace; he has squandered the goodwill earned by oceans of American blood through a dangerous century, and set us back among the nations other nations - including former friends - fear as unlawful, uncontrollable, and violent.
But just as worrisome as the big-stick sabre-rattling is Bush’s forays into the familiar territory of Republican-sponsored right-wing terrorist squads:
As previously reported by Raw Story, a terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) is being used on the ground in Iran by the Pentegon, bypassing US intelligence channels. The report was subsequently covered by the Asia Times (Article).
Military and intelligence sources now say no Presidential finding exists on MEK ops. Without a presidential finding, the operation circumvents the oversight of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.
Congressional aides for the relevant oversight committees would not confirm or deny allegations that no Presidential finding had been done. One Democratic aide, however, wishing to remain anonymous for this article, did say that any use of the MEK would be illegal.
In addition, sources say that a March attack that killed 22 Iranian officials in the province of Sistan va Baluchistan was carried out by the MEK.
According to a report by Iran Focus filed Mar. 23, the twenty-two people killed in the ambush included high ranking officials, including the governor of Zahedan.
“Hours after the attack took place, Ahmadi-Moqaddam announced there was evidence the assailants had held meetings with British intelligence officers,” the Iranian news service reported.
“Radical Shiite cleric Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi also claimed the people behind the attack were the same as those behind a spate of bombings in Iran’s south-western province of Khuzestan earlier this year and in 2005,” it added.
Military and intelligence sources say that MEK assets were responsible for this attack, but did not know if the US military was involved or if US military assets were part of the ambush.
One former high ranking US intelligence official described the use of MEK as more of a “Cambone” operation than a “Department of Defense operation.”
Undersecretary of Defense Intelligence Stephen Cambone, a stalwart neo-conservative, is considered by many to be Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s right-hand man.
The too-familiar story begins again. Will we have the wisdom, the courage, or even the sheer bone-deep disgust and weariness to say “No” to another war of choice, another attack on an Islamic nation on overhyped premises, another imperialistic cesspool bubbling with the blood of the sons of the “Not Our Kind, Dear” classes who don’t get the Halliburton payoffs and the oil-field contracts?
The increase in violence on the southern border of Iran, the movement of aircraft carriers into the region, the insistence of Iran’s leadership that they intend to be a player on the nuclear stage and the Bush Administration’s focus on regime change make military and intelligence sources nervous.
“[President] Bush thinks that history will judge him as a great leader, not unlike Winston Churchill,” one former high-ranking military intelligence official remarked.
Three unprovoked, failed wars, the almost-overnight squandering of the support and compassion of the entire world in a fit of childish rage and calculatingly pscyhotic self-indulgence, the conversion of isolated terrorism into the worldwide hostility of large percentages of the planet’s second-largest religion, and the economic crippling of his own country make him Winston Churchill? I think he’ll go down as the younger, dumber Andrew Jackson: stupid, genocidal, and incompetent, with a self-delusional cowboy/soldier dressup fetish. (The difference is that Jackson fought his own battles and could actually ride a horse.)
George Bush is evidence that there is no god. Whatever our sins, no one would wish this on us again. Yet here he goes.
May 12th, 2006
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General, Politics, Religion, Iraq, Terrorism, News & Current Events, Iran |
26 comments
One from Iran:
Iran’s women will be barred from attending soccer games, a reversal by the president that comes a month before the national team plays in the World Cup.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had ruled in April that he would allow women to go to soccer games and sit in a separate section of the stands. He wanted to “improve soccer-watching manners and promote a healthy atmosphere.”
But Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who under the Islamic Republic’s constitution has the final say — opposed the move.
“The president has decided to revise his decision based on the supreme leader’s opinion,” Iranian government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said Monday.
One from Augusta:
Billy Payne, the first chairman born in Georgia and the first with no tangible link to club founders Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts, said Monday his goal was to preserve the traditions of Augusta National and that he had no time for Martha Burk.
“Our membership matters are all decided by club members, and we have no specific timetable to address that issue.”
Billy Payne, Augusta National Golf Club
“I’m very much aware of her position on all issues as they relate to Augusta National, and I don’t really see at this time that any dialogue would be meaningful or helpful,'’ Payne said in a conference call, his first comments since he was selected Friday to replace Hootie Johnson as chairman of perhaps the most powerful club in golf.
There are no similarities between these two stories. None at all.
May 9th, 2006
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Politics, Sports, Culture, Iran |
5 comments
Atrios points us to this rather nice demolishing of Peter Beinart’s straw man by David Sirota. But I wanted to point something out that is getting a little bit lost in the debate over Iran and the “serious liberals” like Beinart. Liberal interventionism is a horrible idea.
Sirota quotes the Atlantic Monthly describing Beinart’s position on the Iraq thus:
“Like many Democrats of his ilk, Beinart initially supported the intervention in Iraq, believing that bringing down a WMD-wielding, genocidal dictator was in the tradition of liberal interventionism. He has since changed his mind, however.”
I think that is a fair assessment of Beinart’s position, and I don’t think it would be out of line to say that it is representative of the liberal hawk position in general. But that is a terrible indictment of the liberal hawks. They have based their entire foreign policy outlook on the notion that we can make people love us by pointing guns at them. That has never worked. I can think of no example of a successful liberal intervention. That is to be expected; violence radicalizes.
Military intervention, by definition, involves violence, either in the initial invasion or in keeping order afterwards. Violence most obviously means that people die. Those deaths just as obviously anger and sadden the people who are connected to the dead. Every death creates a set of angry people susceptible to arguments that the intervention is wrong or has outstayed its usefulness. Violence also destroys property and infrastructure. The man who has seen his life’s work may not be as enraged as the man who has held his dying child in his arms, but he is still angry. And a country unable to provide basic services for its citizens is not a country that can long be stable.
But even a bloodless intervention brings with it radical changes. A new government, a new order, a new set of social conventions comes with the intervention. The old order has been ripped away, creating new winners and potentially embittering the new losers. In any case, there is a period where the new order has not been established and confusion reigns. Confusion brings with fear and uncertainty, which encourage all sorts of bad behavior. Finally, there is the stigma of foreigners imposing their will upon the country. Any government installed by force will have a hard time establishing its legitimacy. Illegitimate governments, or governments whose legitimacy is in question, invite disorder and rebellion.
Violence breaks things, and those things have to be put back together again. Military interventions break countries, and putting a country back together again is not a matter of super glue and duct tape. Once broken, pride, nationalism, fear, anger and desperation all tend to work against reconciliation and peace. Human beings have no easy solutions for dealing with any of those emotions. In theory, if everything went perfectly, it might be possible. But things never go perfectly in the presence of violence. A broken country is an unpredictable country, and the plans that need to work to perfection are confronted with situations that they did not, could not foresee.
Beinart’s inability to see that Bush was undeserving of trust on the matter of Iraq is a symptom of the real problem. Beinart and liberal hawks have allowed themselves to be seduced by the fantasy of a clean break. They believe that they can smash the tyrannical Humpty Dumpties of the world and have the President’s men put them back together in a democratic form. As tempting as that fantasy is, it does not account for human nature or for the complex dynamics of societies. But as long as people give into the temptation, you will find Peter Beinart’s cheering on wars in the mistaken, if noble, belief that they can remake the world with a few bold strokes of the military pen.
May 2nd, 2006
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Politics, Iraq, Iran |
8 comments
Time has an article outlining what the new White House Chief of Staff intends to do to right the Bush Administration. Changes in policy are, of course, not contemplated. The list seems to boil down to pr functionality and this:
4 RECLAIM SECURITY CREDIBILITY. This is the riskiest, and potentially most consequential, element of the plan, keyed to the vow by Iran to continue its nuclear program despite the opposition of several major world powers. Presidential advisers believe that by putting pressure on Iran, Bush may be able to rehabilitate himself on national security, a core strength that has been compromised by a discouraging outlook in Iraq. “In the face of the Iranian menace, the Democrats will lose,” said a Republican frequently consulted by the White House. However, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll this April 8-11, found that 54% of respondents did not trust Bush to “make the right decision about whether we should go to war with Iran.”
They think that ratcheting up the conflict with Iran is good for them politically. They believe that to save their presidency, to prevent the Democrats from getting the power of subpoena in the mid terms, and to have a legacy other than the disasters in New Orleans and Iraq. I suspect that this is a sign that the Bush Administration has already decided to attack Iran, in much the same way they decided to attack Iraq months before they announced their intentions. Our problem is that they cannot actually force regime change. All they can do is bomb (at best, a slight delay in the progress of the Iranian nuclear program) or bomb with nuclear weapons (perhaps more effective at retarding the nuclear program). Either option puts the US in a much worse situation without really doing any lasting damage to Iran or the mullahs.
We have an administration stuffed with phony men, men who have played at being tough or successful without actually having real toughness or honestly earned success. They think that chest thumping is a sign of strength instead of weakness and thy have never had to fight for success so they think that they can bully people who have actually had to earn their positions. I have little doubt that they are seriously considering nukes. Nuclear weapons would make such a satisfying thump.
April 24th, 2006
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Politics, Iran |
4 comments
Dan Simmons has ether gone nuts or pulled off one of the greatest April Fool’s Jokes of all time. Simmons is a science fiction writer and he wrote a bad story in which a time traveler from one hundred years in the future returns to tell him of the Century War against Islam and how Islam is winning the way, including conquering Europe and pushing the United States to the brink of disaster. You can read it here, if you want, but I would not recommend it. It has a very first draft quality about it; definitely not one of Simmons’ (whose work I actually quite enjoy) better pieces. And, more to the point, it is insane.
First, the time traveler tells the protagonist that the lesson of Thucydides was that Athens lost the war with Syracuse and her allies not because it abandoned its principles for the sake of empire, but because it was not barbaric enough. That interpretation, to stretch the word to the breaking point, was enough to convince me that Simmons had to be playing some sort of grand practical joke. Because no one what has actually read Thucydides could honestly come to the conclusion that Simmons claims to have come to: that Athens failed because it wasn’t ready to commit barbarous atrocities.
The other clue is the Century War itself. We are supposed to believe that Islam, with all its fractions, which is split between dozens of countries who don’t all like each other and share nothing but a religion, and tends to be in materially poor nations conquers Europe and fights a prolonged war and apparently very successful war against the most militarily powerful nation the world has ever seen. Of course, he could be claiming that Europe is over taken by that historical bugaboo of racist everywhere: the Great Brown Peril that is going to outbreed all the white folk and take over. You know, just like the Irish swamped the good Protestants of the United States with their heathen Gaelic offspring and turned the country into a Vatican City toady.
Oh, wait. That never happened. Why? Aside from the fact that demographic trends never continue to infinity, liberal democracy has proven itself quite the attractive suitor over time. Every culture that has had the opportunity to try it out has eventually bought it. It goes against all reason, history, and human nature to think that Muslims would be different than every other group of people throughout history and, as a groups, massively reject liberal democracy.
I find it hard to believe that either scenario — conquest from without or within — would make it past the slush pile. The fact that it is a thinly disguised apologia for pre-emptive genocide would just be icing on the cake. But, as Belle points out, it certainly seems to have been swallowed whole by a good segment of the right wing blogosphere. Why? I suspect it might have something to do with why they all seem to think they are living in 1937: the BJ Armstrong problem.
BJ Armstrong was the starting point guard for the Chicago Bulls during their last three championships in the late 90s. On the court, next to other players, the 6′ 3″, baby-faced Armstrong looked like he was twelve years old. On the street, however, Armstrong was 6′3″ and his face didn’t look so babyish from its perch above you. Hitler, obviously, was a very real threat with the very real capacity to do enormous harm to the entire world. In metaphysical terms, he was actually of giant stature. The Iranians and the Muslim world in general pose nothing like that threat. Even if they were completely unified, they do not posses a first class military machine that could threaten the Western powers. But from the right perspective, say the perspective of small men who wish they were giants, the Iranians might seem larger than they are, like a pre-schooler playing a pick-up game against BJ Armstrong.
We do not live in a time where outside forces can destroy liberal democracy. There is nothing like the Nazi war machine to invade us and nothing like the Soviet Nuclear Missile Forces threatening to melt our cities. But instead of appreciating their good fortune, some seem bound and determined to pretend that whatever threat we do face is the equivalent of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or even worse. I suspect that is because they are incapable of seeing that greatness can be had in making the world better and feel only that violent conflict can give their lives meaning. And these people get the best of both worlds, in their minds. Since their contribution to the “war effort” is hurtling bad interpretations of the books of dead Greeks and typing out pages of barely concealed calls for extermination, they can feel part of a grand struggle without actually having to put their flabby asses in harms way. They need to bleed to feel alive - - no, wait, they need to have other people bleed to make themselves feel alive. They are small men looking at other small men — like Bin Laden and the Iranian mullahs — as if they were colossus bestriding the earth.
It would be funny if it were not so pathetic.
April 18th, 2006
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Politics, Writing, Iraq, Terrorism, Iran |
5 comments
I am beginning to think that William Kristol is fundamentally a stupid man. Obviously he can tie words together and obviously he has some measure of intellectual curiosity, but I am becoming more and more convinced that he is not capable of actually learning from history. In this column, he makes the argument that the Iran of today is just like the Germany of 1936 and that anything other than Bush’s planned bombing attacks would be the equivalent of appeasement of Hitler. There is no other word for that argument than stupid.
In 1936, Germany was a proven expansionist power that had already violated at least one treaty and had demonstrated the industrial capacity to rebuild a modern war machine and had, in fact, gotten quite far down the road to military superiority over its regional rivals. Germany was not a potential threat in 1936 but an actual problem that had already broken the peace of the continent. Iran is none of those things today.
Iran is not an expansionist power; they have fought no wars of aggression since the revolution of 1979 and they do not have the military capacity to conquer any of their neighbors. They do not have the industrial capacity to change that equation in the near future, and their nuclear ”threat” is a good ten years if not more in the future. Aside from a hatred of Jews, Iran and Germany of 1936 could not be more dissimilar. They are not equivalent in any fashion, and pretending that they are can only lead people to doubt your intelligence.
Kristol hasn’t learned anything at all from the interwar period in Europe. Normally when we speak of learning the lessons of history we mean a process by which the general rules of history are abstracted form a given set of events and those general principles are applied to an existing situation as an aid to understanding what could happen next. Kristol hasn’t done anything like that. All he has done is take the map of Europe in 1936 and assigned the parts to nations in the Middle East and expecting the drama to play out exactly the same, no matter the changes to the past. That is lazy, intellectually sloppy, and just plain stupid.
Iran is not Germany of 1936. It is not nearly the threat and will not be nearly the threat for some time to come. Listening to the intellectually lazy and the overly panicky is not a recipe for success.
April 17th, 2006
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Politics, Iran |
no comments
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