This is an interesting little story regarding the Tennessee Senate race. When Bob Corker was mayor of Chattanooga, his Administration ordered a change in an easement in such a fashion to allow Wal-Mart to build in an environmentally sensitive area. The kicker? Corker’s company sold land to Wal-Mart for the property for 4.7 million dollars:
A lawsuit by Kurtz that Corker’s lawyers had succeeded in getting dismissed has been reinstated, and, just last week, a judge issued an order that keeps private some records connected to the suit.
The controversy is spinning off new allegations.
A Nashville lawyer pursuing Kurtz’s suit says he’s bothered by records that show how a Corker real estate company collected $4.6 million by selling the Wal-Mart land just weeks after Corker’s public works administrator signed off on a construction easement.
Responding, Corker campaign manager Ben Mitchell said the Wal-Mart was approved in a transparent, open process involving several local, state and federal agencies, much of it occurring before Corker became mayor in April 2001.
“The public record clearly shows that the actions taken were completely ethical and consistent with the public good,'’ Mitchell said in a written statement.
… The easement grants certain rights to the city, including allowing public access and the construction of trails, while prohibiting construction, timbering or other development.
Although the appeals court found that the precise boundaries of the conservation easement are unclear, the environmental council’s suit alleges the developers ignored the easement and that the Wal-Mart construction extended into it.
Specifically, Prochaska said a new road built to the store obliterated a gravel parking lot once used by nature lovers to access the conservation area. Dig-and-fill operations also created a steep slope further limiting access while runoff has left the site in an overgrown, unusable condition, he said.
The suit, which names Bright Par 3, the City of Chattanooga, the Corker Group, Osborne and others as defendants, seeks restoration of the conservation easement and unspecified money damages.
Prochaska said he’s also concerned about the new road, Greenway View Drive, which started as a construction access easement granted by Corker’s administration.
Records show Corker’s public works administrator, William C. McDonald, signed the access easement, that ran through the conservation area. Prochaska said the road curved east to avoid an office parking lot owned then by Corker, and consequently ran though and destroyed the gravel parking lot used by nature lovers.
The change smells. Even if it was legal, look at what happened: employees of the mayor changed a legal agreement in such a manner as to allow their boss to personally profit in a substantial manner. I find it hard to find another word to describe that process other than “corrupt”.
August 21st, 2006
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Politics |
2 comments
Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks, is an important if unpleasant book. Its title captures its essence perfectly: this is the tale of the disaster that the American occupation of Iraq has become. In clear, precise and often powerful prose Ricks methodically builds the case that the American occupation has failed and the many reasons, causes, and poor decisions that lead to that failure. He has interviewed Americans at all levels of the occupation, in both civilian and military circles, and skillfully connects the decisions made in Washington and Baghdad to the daily failures and struggles of US troops and civilian administrators. Ricks spends some time on the failures of Congress and the press, but failures of the occupation of Iraq had two parents: the Bush Administration and the United States Army.
When the history of the Iraq occupation is written, it will largely be the story of the failures of the Bush Administration. And those failures were the direct result of the decisions made by George W. Bush. Put bluntly, the Iraqi occupation was doomed by decisions made in the White House. It was the White House and the neo-cons advisors in it that based their post war planning, such as it was, on ridiculously optimistic scenarios. There is nothing wrong with optimism, but the Administration did not admit for the possibility of pessimism. As a result, the roses and cheers of Paul Wolfowitz’s imagination dictated that the occupation be built around the assumption that the Iraqis would quickly fill the power vacuum left after the fall of Saddam and as a result, the occupation would require far fewer troops than the invasion. Of course, the opposite was predictable, predicted, and came to pass. For most of the occupation, the number of troops either equaled or surpassed the number used to topple the regime.
During this time, the Department of Defense and the State Department were in something very much like a war. The working relationship between members of the two departments was beyond awful, verging into adversarial. More than once Ricks described members of one department or the other rejecting out of hand valid information form the other side simply because it came from the other side. Towards the end, Rumsfeld and Powell appeared to openly despise on another. And Bush did nothing to bring the two camps together. As a result, the first CAP head was forced to leave behind talented and experienced State Department people when he went to Iraq. The Defense Department forced Garner to take to Iraq ideological hacks with no experience instead of accomplished diplomats. Iraq paid the price in terms of bugled reconstruction, corruption, and a loss of stability due to ideological correctness being placed far ahead of the needs of the Iraqis. The Heritage Foundation neophytes that ran the CAP invariably choose to attempt to transform Iraqi society along their notions of an ideal society over providing stability, security, and opportunity to the Iraqis.
As damaging as those failures were, however, much of the problems in the Iraqi occupation stemmed from the Administration’s original error: lying about WMDs and Iraqi-Al Qaeda connections.
Ricks doesn’t spend a lot of time in the build up to war, but he does clearly highlight when the Administration — generally in the form of Cheney or people who worked for Cheney — ether said things that it knew to be untrue or claimed intelligence support for contentions where such support was extremely tenuous or nonexistent. Colin Powell’s famous speech in front of the United Nations is the most prominent example of the way the Administration used half truths and deception to suggest a certainty that did not actually exist, but it was not the only one. And Ricks leaves no doubt that such deception happened on purpose. Those deceptive WMD claims and links to Al Qaeda hamstrung the US occupation form the moment they crossed the Iraqi border.
The initial invading forces were reluctant to destroy arms caches and weapons bunkers that they came across for far that they contained chemical or nuclear weapons and would thus cause fallout related deaths among US troops and Iraqi civilians. Those undestroyed bunkers become the armory of the insurgency, once it became clear that the US did not have enough troops to effectively guard those bunkers. In addition to facilitating the arming of the insurgency, the search for WMDs took intelligence gathering resources away from the fight against the insurgency, leaving the Army severely disadvantaged.
The connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda provided a subtler kind of problem, one of attitude. Ricks talks to many soldiers, and details the actions of many more, than seemed to regard the Iraqis as the enemy from the moment they crossed the border. Instead of looking on Iraqis as victims of a totalitarian regime, many soldiers appeared to be suspicious of all Iraqi males under the assumption that some of them were involved with the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Obviously that worked against US forces attempts to win over Iraqis to their cause.
The Army, however, didn’t always seem to be interested in winning over Iraqis. The Army came out of Vietnam a broken institution, with poor morale and ever poorer discipline. In the sixteen years between the end of the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, the officers of the Army did a remarkable job re-creating the Army. They took a beaten organization and turned it into perhaps the finest strike force the world had ever seen. But in doing so, they made two mistakes that would haunt the Iraqi occupation: they threw away everything that they learned about counter-insurgency in Vietnam and they decoupled their operational planning from considerations of the operations political goals.
The Army that rose form the ashes of Vietnam was an Army built around overwhelming firepower and maneuverability. It was designed to destroy an opposing conventional army, and it was very good at it. But it seemed blind to the notion that it would be asked to fight counter-insurgency campaigns. The Army did not train its soldiers in how to deal with an insurgency in their day to day operations. Ricks paints a picture of an Army where counter-insurgency was, at best, an afterthought and at worst a never thought of at all. As a result, US forces were unprepared to deal with the reality of an insurgency. Some commanders - -such as the commander of the 101st Airborne — used their own instincts, intelligence, and common sense to great effect, leading to a relatively stable and supportive Iraqi population in their area of control. Others, such as the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, treated the Iraqis in the harshest, most punitive fashion possible and thus did the insurgency’s recruiting for it. Most commanders were somewhere in the middle, but somewhere in the middle generally meant that the wrong decisions were made far too often.
Classic counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a troops to live among the populace to gain a feel for the situation and the people and for force to be a last resort and used in a minimal fashion when required. In general, US forces concentrated on force protection over Iraqi protection, which lead to housing US units far form contact with ordinary Iraqis, the use of overwhelming firepower in response to any provocation, and rules of convey conduct — speeding, brushing aside civilian traffic, firing on civilian cars that got too close — that worked counter to the need to win over the Iraqi people. With almost every action most US commanders took, they made their job much more difficult.
But those decisions were generally in line with US doctrine. And that was largely the fault of the decision to treat wars as nothing more than the clash of arms. The US army lost the connection between military means and the larger war aims. Without that connection, it was too easy for US forces to fall into the trap of thinking only about the means to destroy the enemy without given proper consideration to second and third order effects of those action on the larger political goals of the conflict. Part of the reason that they post war planning on the part of the Army was so poor was that the culture of the Army just assumed that after the battle their troops would be drawn done and sent home. Their was little conception of what happened after the opposing force had been driven from control because that was the realm of politics and the modern US army spent very little time thinking about those issues. And that lead directly to things like Abu Gharib.
Absent the connection between tactics and the political strategy, US forces generally concentrated on the tactic that brought about the immediate victory as quickly as possible with the smallest risk to US personal. An army whose officers were accustomed to thinking in terms of how their tactics affected the broader political goals would have made very different decisions. Officers who knew that the goal was to convince the Iraqis to join the new Iraq would respond with much less force, far fewer mass roundups, and much more culturally sensitive searches and interactions with locals. The Army as a whole would have been prepared to quickly process prisoners and so the overpopulation that lead to the command breakdowns in Abu Gharib would not have happened. In those places where the commanders did think in larger, political terms, the US occupation went much, much smoother than in places were officers could not shake off the prevalent military culture.
The Iraqi Occupation stands a very good chance of being remembered as the greatest strategic disaster in American history. Ricks book is a wonderful history of the early years of the occupation. It is not perfect, but its flaws do not overwhelm the scholarship of the book. Ricks is a military reporter, so the majority of his interviews are with military personal. To a certain extent that is a justifiable decision. US soldiers were in much more direct and constant contact with Iraqis and thus were both the prime movers on the US side and the people best able to know what was happening in the country as a whole. However, the discussion of reconstruction could probably have benefited somewhat with a few more voices form inside CAP in Baghdad. And the book cannot be said to be a complete history of the time because it does not deal with the Iraqi side of the conflict, for obvious reasons. Ricks does make a good effort to get the opinions and thoughts of Iraqi citizens into the discussion, but Iraqi voices are still too few and they are often filtered through the recollections and biases of US officers and soldiers. And, of course, there is nothing from the Iraqi insurgency, meaning that how the insurgents reacted to US actions is missing.
These small problems aside, Fiasco is a marvelous book. It takes a complex subject with hundreds of players and dozens of conflicted motivations and teases out the story of why the Occupation has gone so poorly. It is written too soon to be the last word on the history of the occupation and invasion, obviously, but it is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand what has gone wrong and what problems in our political and military cultures need to be addressed in order to prevent a repeat of this fiasco. Thomas Ricks has written a book that all other serious histories of the Iraqi Occupation will be built upon.
August 21st, 2006
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Reviews, Writing, Iraq, Terrorism, Books, Fiasco |
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