"I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05
"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
Here are some recent article on the Iraq War that I found worthwhile.
A Higher Power: James Baker puts Bush's Iraq policy into rehab by Robert Dreyfuss Washington Monthly Sept 2006 (accessed 08/08/06). Dreyfuss discusses the "Iraq Study Group" headed by the Bush family fixer and former Secretary of State, James Baker:
Since March, Baker, backed by a team of experienced national-security hands, has been busily at work trying to devise a fresh set of policies to help the president chart a new course in--or, perhaps, to get the hell out of--Iraq. But as with all things involving James Baker, there's a deeper political agenda at work as well. "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home--that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008. "I guess there are people in the [Republican] party, on the Hill and in the White House, who see a political train wreck coming, and they've called in Baker to try to reroute the train." (my emphasis)
James Baker is a gutter political fighter. This part was weird and scary, and is a reflection of how addicted to secrecy the Bush dynastyis:
It's hard to know what the commission is really up to because its inner workings are nearly as secretive as those of the White House. Baker has imposed an ironclad gag order on all of its participants. The 60 people involved in the effort have been instructed, in the strongest of terms, not to comment to reporters on the task force's work. Every one of the participants I spoke to flatly refused to comment for the record, and several did not want to talk even off the record. Some were palpably nervous. "We're not allowed to talk about it," said one person involved. "We get about every month a warning: 'Do not discuss in any context the substance of what is happening in this group.' You know how bad it is? Initially they wanted us to end all of our contacts with the media, make no statements, write no op-eds--in other words, become monks. Then they realized, how can you take the entire community of Iraq experts in the United States and have them all stop talking?" (my emphasis)
Creepy.
Dreyfuss' article gives us an idea of what we should look for coming out of the Baker commission. Just be sure that it will be highly political, aimed at the good of the Republican Party in general and the Bush dynasty in particular:
But according to all accounts, the Iraq Study Group is Baker's show, with the assembled cast of characters there to give Baker the bipartisan, protective coloration he needs. "Jim Baker is the gatekeeper," one task-force participant told me, insisting on anonymity. "He's by far the most dynamic, and everyone else is intimidated by him." And Baker is keeping his cards very close to his chest. "He's very secretive, he keeps his distance, and he compartmentalizes everything, which is not a bad way to organize a political conspiracy," says another member of one of the working groups. ...
But the choice facing the task force--and, of course, the administration as well--is nonetheless bleak: Is there really a true middle ground between "staying the course" and "getting out"? By staying the course, the president means: battle the insurgency, build up Iraq's army and police, and strengthen the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki until Iraq is stable and secure. Perhaps Baker's task force will fiddle with that, supporting the basic notion of staying the course butadjusting this or that part of the strategy. But it's hard to see what those adjustments might be, since so far no one (including many experts in and outside the task force) has figured out a way of solving the Rubik's Cube that is Iraq. No team of experts, even those on the Iraq Study Group, is likely to come up with a silver bullet that can defeat the Sunni insurgents, get the religious Shiites to disarm the militia forces, block the Kurds from trying to seize Kirkuk and Iraq's northern oil fields, rebuild Iraq's shattered infrastructure, and prevent civil war. In the end, the choices are: Either we stay and fight, whatever the cost in lives and in money--or we set a date for withdrawal, start an orderly redeployment, and do what we can to encourage Iraq, its neighbors, the Arab League, and the United Nations to step in.
To some, it's unlikely that Baker will adopt anything resembling a plan that embodies a wholesale rejection of the Bush administration's policy, though it isn't impossible. Still, there is an outside chance, say observers of the task force, that Baker will come up with a report that uses diplomatic weasel-words, giving lip service to the idea of an American "victory" in Iraq but endorsing redeployment. "If Baker comes out with a report that basically says, if you read between the lines, we need to get out, that buys into the fundamental presumption of the redeployment crowd--the redeployment crowd is basically saying that staying there is worse than getting out--if he comes up in that consensus, that would be remarkable," says Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution. "It would be earth-shattering." (my emphasis)
Well, the Bush dynasty is sure doing a heckuva job on the Iraq War.
'Civil War’ Is Uttered, and White House’s Iraq Strategy Is Dealt a Blow by Jim Rutenberg New York Times 08/07/06:
Late last year, during a major address in Annapolis, President Bush introduced a new phrase for his Iraq policy: “Plan for Victory.” With those words emblazoned on a screen behind him, he laid out a possible exit path for American troops, who would gradually cede control to their Iraqi counterparts.
But that phrase has all but disappeared as scenes of horrific sectarian violence have streamed onto American television screens unabated. And when the United States commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, addressed the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, his testimony that “Iraq could move towards civil war” if the strife would not end overshadowed any talk of victory.
Those two words — civil war — further complicated what was already a daunting challenge for the administration: convincing battle-weary Americans that the war was winnable while acknowledging the grim reality of the bloodshed.
Iraqis already believe they're living through a civil war by Nancy Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers 08/03/06:
The top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, told Congress on Thursday that the violence in Baghdad "is probably as bad as I've seen it," and went on to say that the country could be headed toward civil war.
Nearly all of the dozen Iraqis who work for McClatchy Newspapers' Baghdad bureau - evenly split between Shiite and Sunni Muslims - reached that conclusion long ago. ...
When I finally returned to Iraq on July 26, I could tell that the atmosphere had changed. The streets were empty, the staff looked drained and hopes for this government, the first permanent democratically elected body in nearly 100 years, were dimming.
One of our Shiite staff members, who'd been the most open champion of the government, suddenly said little. He'd proudly voted for the biggest Shiite slate, the United Iraqi Alliance, in the election Dec. 15. But his neighborhood had seen a surge in sectarian violence. He was leaving work often to help friends pull their relatives out of the rubble left by car bombs just blocks from his home.
The criminals are controlling the streets; the government isn't doing anything about it, he complained. Three months after the government finally was seated, he said he regretted his vote.
Iraqi civil war has already begun, U.S. troops say by Tom Lasseter, McClatchy Newspapers 08/04/06:
Army troops in and around the capital interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned bySunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.
"There's one street that's the dividing line. They shoot mortars across the line and abduct people back and forth," said 1st Lt. Brian Johnson, a 4th Infantry Division platoon leader from Houston. Johnson, 24, was describing the nightly violence that pits Sunni gunmen from Baghdad's Ghazaliyah neighborhood against Shiite gunmen from the nearby Shula district.
As he spoke, the sights and sounds of battle grew: first, the rat-a-tat-tat of fire from AK-47 assault rifles, then the heavier bursts of PKC machine guns, and finally the booms of mortar rounds crisscrossing the night sky and crashing down onto houses and roads.
The bodies of captured Sunni and Shiite fighters will turn up in the morning, dropped in canals and left on the side of the road. ...
A human rights report released last month by the United Nations mission in Baghdad said 2,669 civilians were killed across Iraq during May, and 3,149 were killed in June. In total, 14,338 civilians were killed from January to June of this year, and 150,000 civilians were forced out of their homes, the report said.
Pointing to a map, 1st Lt. Robert Murray, last week highlighted a small Shiite village of 25 homes that was abandoned after a flurry of death threats came to town on small pieces of paper.
"The letters tell them if they don't leave in 48 hours, they'll kill their entire families," said Murray, 29, of Franklin, Mass. "It's happening a lot right now. There have been a lot of murders recently; between that and the kidnappings, they're making good on their threats. ... They need to learn to live together. I'd like to see it happen, but I don't know if it's possible."
Shiite leaders distance themselves from Iraqi government by Nancy Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers 08/01/06. This article discusses the increasing intra-Shi'a disputes in Iraq. The Iraqi government is majority Shi'a. Ayatollah Al-Sistani and the other Shi'a religious leadership have so far backed the Shi'a-led government. The government of Iran has also backed the US-supported electoral process in Iraq because they knew it would very likely produce a Shi'a-dominated regime in Iraq. They were right. Youssef writes:
Many of the Shiite Muslim religious leaders who strongly backed the formation of the Iraqi government now are condemning it, warning that the country could descend into full revolt.
Their statements, observers said, reflect their effort to distance themselves from an increasingly unpopular government, one they once encouraged voters to risk their lives to support. In the process, they hope to win back support from the populace, the majority of which is Shiite.
The signs of defection are troublesome for U.S. and Iraqi officials, and another possible sign that the American strategy is threatened. The Shiite leaders have pushed for formation of the government more aggressively than any other Iraqi group, and their frustrations come just as American and Iraqi officials had encouraged Sunni Muslims to participate in the nascent political process.
"The government formed after the fall of the regime hasn't been able to do anything, just make many promises. And people are fed up with the promises," said Sheik Bashir al Najafi, one of the top four Shiite leaders and one of several who suggested there could be a revolt. "One day we will not be able to stop a popular revolution."
Commander: Insurgent attacks up in Iraq by Antonio Castenada AP/Yahoo! News 08/02/06:
Insurgent attacks have risen in western Iraq but Iraqi troops are beginning to take responsibility for a bigger area of Iraq's most troubled province, the top Marine commander in Iraq said Wednesday.
Maj. Gen. Richard C. Zilmer said most of the recent increase in attacks in Anbar province occurred around the provincial capital of Ramadi. Progress in pacifying the Sunni Arab-dominated province has lagged far behind most of the country.
"Right now, much like all of Iraq, the attack levels are up," Zilmer told The Associated Press. "While numbers of attacks are up, the effectiveness, the complexity (of the attacks) has not risen."
Zilmer seems to be trying hard to find the silver lining in this cloud:
"We are going to places, we are establishing a presence in parts of Ramadi where we didn't have it before. So things are going, generally speaking, well," Zilmer said. ...
With the slow development of the Iraqi military, Zilmer said there were no immediate plans to draw back U.S. troops from western Iraq. ...
The U.S. command is tentatively planning to hold provincial elections in the province in the spring of 2007. But many prominent Sunni Arab leaders in western Iraq have fled the country to escape the violence or U.S. forces. (my emphasis)
We may already be seeing fallout from the Israel-Lebanon War in Iraq: Iraq Resistance Gains Steam IslamOnline.net 08/02/06.
Iraqi resistance fighters have stepped up attacks against US occupation forces over the past weeks, with some security sources linking the momentum to the US-backed Israeli onslaught on Lebanon.
"Attacks against US forces have increased, particularly since the Israeli military offensive on Lebanon began," Anbar police officer Yusuf al-Dailemi told the London-based Al-Quds Press news agency.
"Dozens of attacks are being carried out every day against US troops in the Al-Anbar province, western Iraq."
Dailemi further said in recent days attacks on the Americans forces hit a record high of 50.
Judith Coburn draws on her experience in reporting the Vietnam War to talk about How Not to Vietnamize Iraq TomDispatch.com 08/03/06. She writes:
It seems, however, that there is no way of keeping failed Washington policies in their graves, once the dead of night strikes. I was amazed, when, in 2005, in Foreign Affairs magazine, Melvin Laird resurrected a claim that his "Vietnamization" policy had actually worked and plugged for "Iraqification" of the war there. Soon after, journalist Seymour Hersh, famed for his reportage on the Vietnam-era My Lai massacre (and the Iraq-era Abu Ghraib abuses), reported in the New Yorker that the Vietnamization policy of the Nixon era was indeed being reclothed and returned to us -- with similarly planned American drawdowns of ground troops and a ramping up of American air power -- and I wondered if we could be suffering a moment of mass post-traumatic stress syndrome. ...
However it feels to anyone else, it's distinctly been flashback city for me ever since. One of the great, failed, unspeakably cynical, blood-drenched policies of the Vietnam era, whose carnage I witnessed as a reporter in Cambodia and Vietnam, was being dusted off for our latest disaster of an imperial war. Some kind of brutal regression was upon us. It was the return of the repressed or reverse evolution. It was enough to drive a war-worn journalist to new heights of despair.
Her comments about the air war are important:
The Air Force called it "precision" bombing back then -- and still does. In guerrilla war, where fighters live among civilians, no bombing missions, no matter how carefully targeted, can avoid killing civilians. The Pentagon reports that, right now, on average on any given day, 45 American and British war planes are in the air over Iraq, plus Army, Marine and Special Forces helicopters. Most of the bombing is being done by American F-15s and F-16s from bases outside Iraq and F-14s and F/A-18s from carriers in the Persian Gulf. They mostly drop 500 pound bombs, though Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones and other unmanned aircraft do their share of damage, and in Afghanistan both B-52s, those old Vietnam warhorses, and B-1s have been called in. In addition, as one would expect in a "Vietnamization" program, the number of air strikes has risen sharply in recent months. Last summer, air missions in Iraq averaged 25 a month; by last November, they had jumped to 120 a month and have remained at that level ever since.
Occasionally, American military commanders remark that civilian casualties, sanitized with the euphemism "collateral damage," are regrettable; but, in areas where local residents are believed to support the guerrillas, civilian casualties may actually be the goal rather than so many mistakes. In Vietnam, the Pentagon created "free fire zones" in the countryside where any living thing was fair game. The theory was simple, if bloody-minded: If the guerrillas swam in the sea of the peasants, as Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong had so famously argued, then, as American counterinsurgency experts were fond of explaining, it was necessary to "drain the sea."
With last week's announcement that more American troops were being rushed to Baghdad to put a brake on the fast-developing civil war in the capital, we may be seeing a new twist on the old theme of Vietnamization - Americans may up the use of air power in al-Anbar Province and elsewhere inthe heartland of the Sunni insurgency as a substitute for troops "drawn-down" to Baghdad. As I saw in Indochina, however, air operations rarely succeed anywhere as a substitute for crack ground troops. They can kill enormous numbers of people without significantly tipping the military balance. (my emphasis)
But those air operations get the OxyContin crowd off. "Bombs make big boom. Bombs kill lots of foreigners. Killing foreigners is what makes America great."
But in the real world, that approach is far more problematic. Coburn continues:
Recently, the Pentagon claimed that it was changing course in its counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq, each zig and zag like this one seemingly intent on replicating the worst of that long-gone era. In an eerie echo of Vietnamization, the old, failed military policy of "clear and hold" -- the idea of clearing designated limited areas of guerrillas and supportive civilians, securing those areas, and then, in "ink blot" fashion, spreading out from there -- is being resuscitated. It is meant to replace the modern equivalent of General William Westmoreland's discredited big-unit "search and destroy" operations. In Iraq, however, in a deft, cynical PR twist, the phrase has been recoined as "clear, hold, and rebuild." (No matter that Iraqi "reconstruction," long ago bankrupted by corruption, cronyism, and pure administration incompetence, has already wound down without a "mission accomplished" banner in sight.)
