Sunday 24th of November 2024
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staying on the wrong course .....

from the Centre for American Progress

‘Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified about Iraq before the Senate Armed Services Committee, his first public testimony about the war in six months. One thing became abundantly clear: conditions in Iraq have gone from bad to worse.

Four months ago, Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, told a Senate committee, "Iraq remains a long way from civil war." Yesterday, Abizaid, who testified with Rumsfeld, said that the "the sectarian violence is probably is as bad as I’ve seen it" and, unless rampant violence in Baghdad is "stopped," a civil war could be imminent.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who also accompanied Rumsfeld, added, "I believe we do have the possibility of that devolving to a civil war." Rumsfeld, for his part, pretended he had always allowed for the possibility that -- more than three years after the initial invasion -- there would be rampant sectarian violence and more than 130,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq. Rumsfeld told Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), "I have never painted a rosy picture. I have been very measured in my words, and you’d have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I have been excessively optimistic."

Actually, prior to the invasion, Rumsfeld publicly said he "doubt[ed]" the conflict would last "six months." More than 40 months later, we still bogged down in Iraq and still "staying the course" with a failed strategy.

"It is now obvious that we are not mid-wifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war," writes New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. "'[S]taying the course' is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B — how we might disengage with the least damage possible." Friedman, who has been a supporter of Bush's Iraq effort, said it is time for the administration to hold a peace conference and announce its intention to leave. "[W]e can’t throw more good lives after good lives," he argued.

Friedman's analysis comes on the heels of a leaked British memo, drafted by William Patey, Britain's ambassador to Baghdad, that warned of an emerging civil war. In the memo, Patey wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair, "The prospect of a low-intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy." Acknowledging the civil war in Iraq would force Bush's hand in changing the course of the war. The administration has indicated that it will not take sides if Iraq enters into a civil war.

Another complication for Bush is that Sen. John Warner (R-VA), chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, indicated yesterday that Congress may need to vote on a new Iraq resolution if the civil war grows.

Last weekend, Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria warned that Rumsfeld "seems literally in a parallel universe and slightly deranged. If you listen to what he said last week about Iraq, he's living in a different world, not a different country." Yesterday's hearing provided fresh examples of Rumsfeld's delusions. “If we left Iraq prematurely,” he said, “the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines.”

Echoing the faulty domino theory applied to the Vietnam war, Rumsfeld said America would ultimately be forced “to make a stand nearer home.” The New York Times writes Americans want "some assurance that the administration has a firm grasp on reality and has sensible, achievable goals that could lead to an end to the American involvement in Iraq with as little long-term damage as possible. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld offered the same old exhortation to stay the course, without the slightest hint of what the course is, other than the rather obvious point that the Iraqis have to learn to run their own country."

USA Today also charred the defense secretary, saying: "Americans deserve a strategy based on the reality of a changing situation, not political rhetoric that costs lives and prolongs an illusion." Sen. Clinton yesterday called on Rumsfeld to resign, echoing a call previously made by a host of military generals. "The secretary has lost credibility with the Congress and with the people," she said. "It's time for him to step down and be replaced by someone who can develop an effective strategy and communicate it effectively to the American people and to the world."

Providing fresh images of the anarchic civil war that is playing out in Iraq, "insurgent fighters have killed at least 23 Iraqis, most of them police officers, in a wave of bombings across the country" today. In a one incident, "a suicide car bomber ploughed into a police post protecting a football match in northern Iraq, killing three officers and seven civilians." Yesterday, "a motorcycle bomb in Baghdad killed 12 people. At least 18 other people were killed or found dead across the country. The dead included nine bodies discovered floating in the Tigris River."

The intensifying Lebanon-Israel conflict appears to providing a political impetus for the Iraqi civil war. "More than 100,000 white-clad Shiites marched through Baghdad in a noisy rally in support of Lebanon's Hezbollah militia." Moqtada al-Sadr, who commands the powerful Mehdi Army militia that has engaged heavily in the sectarian strife, appears to be gaining greater popular support. And the U.S. seems to have few options to contain him. One senior coalition official said, "We have to careful that we don't demonize Jaish al-Mehdi [the Mehdi Army], because look at the polls -Moqtada Sadr himself is an enormously popular figure. Why? Because he is thumbing his nose at the coalition."’

first of many....

 

When 100,000 citizens of a country march through the centre of the capital city ordering you out of their country, it is time to go.

That march is the first of many more to come all over the world where the American Military perched on occupied territory have been getting away with acts of rape and abuse and worse on the local citizens for decades. America will be driven back behind it's own borders, behind it's own "iron curtain" before the world even considers forgiveness. They will join Germany and Japan in infamy, and they and their children's children will have to listen to the world demanding to know "how could you have let this happen!?"

How many more innocents will die in this process? How many more countries will be pounded into rubble? How many nukes will be used before they are done with it?

The question is, can Australia keep from being dragged behind a curtain of its own by virtue of having been willing?

 

You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation. ~~ Marian Wright Edelman

Inevitable?

 

 "....do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a century?"


 The room shook. Not since the 1983 earthquake has my apartment rocked from side to side. That was the force of the Israeli explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut - three miles from my home - and the air pressure changed in the house yesterday morning and outside in the street the palm trees moved.

Is it to be like this every day? How many civilians can you make homeless before you start a revolution? And what is next? Are the Israelis to bomb the centre of Beirut? The Corniche? Is this why all the foreign warships came and took their citizens away, to make Beirut safe to destroy?

 Robert Fisk: A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11

 

You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation. ~~ Marian Wright Edelman

hard labour .....

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has vehemently denounced a raid conducted by American military personnel and Iraqi troops into the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, home to influential radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Arguing that the operation "used weapons that are unreasonable to detain someone - like using planes," Maliki said he was "very angered and pained" at the events.

The raid, which killed three and wounded at least 18, including an American soldier, was conducted to counter the growing influence of Sadr's Mahdi Army, which "has been accused of carrying out frequent assassinations and kidnappings of Sunni Arabs." Sadr is a "major figure in the majority Shiite community and a pillar of support for al-Maliki," and has "re-emerged as a key force" since his battles with U.S. troops in 2004, making his militia one of the "principal targets of the American forces" as it brings an additional 5,000 troops into Baghdad. Sadr recently staged a large demonstration to support Shiite Hezbollah, but with a "secondary motive...to show his power to mobilize large crowds of his supporters, mostly angry young men, on very short notice."

In addition, Sadr's party "won 30 seats in parliament in this year's elections, and so he can apply political pressure as well as military pressure."

For his part, Maliki has refused to crack down on Shiite militias like Sadr's, even going so far as to consider "a limited amnesty that would likely include guerrillas who had attacked U.S. troops."

Following Tuesday's raid, Maliki "apologized to the Iraqi people for the operation, saying, 'This won't happen again.'"

failed schemes & grand plans .....

‘On the evening of March 19, 2003, Marine Lieutenant Therral "Shane" Childers was part of the first American contingent to cross the Iraq-Kuwait border. His battalion's mission was to secure the key oil installations in the south and it went smoothly. Iraqi army defenses were weaker than expected and the oil wells had not been sabotaged. Childers's platoon easily seized its objective, a pumping station, after which Childers ordered his men into their AAVs (amphibious assault vehicles) in preparation for clearing enemy fighters from the nearby bunkers. In their minutely chronicled account, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, Michael R. Gordon, the chief military correspondent for The New York Times, and Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, describe what happened next:

   ... a tan Toyota pickup truck began to approach Childers's platoon. The Marines were not sure how to respond. They had been primed to take on Iraqi T-72s, T-55s, and Soviet-designed armored personnel carriers called BMPs - not a lone civilian vehicle. The truck picked up speed until it was bouncing across the desert at seventy miles per hour. As it flew by the platoon, civilian-clad Iraqis in the cab and bed of the truck raised AK-47s and sprayed the Marines with automatic weapons fire. Most of the bullets ricocheted off an AAV, but one bullet struck Childers just below his flak jacket.... When the day's toll was tallied, the Marines determined that Childers had been the first allied soldier killed as a result of enemy action in the war.

Childers's death was a signal that the Iraq war was not going as planned. The CIA had prepared the troops to expect the most formidable opposition to come from Saddam Hussein's Republican Guards and Special Republican Guards, predominantly Sunni Arab soldiers whose officers at the highest level were members of Saddam's own Tikriti clan. The American troops were told that the demoralized regular army, filled mostly with Shiite conscripts, would not put up much of a fight and that civilians - at least in the Shiite south - would welcome the Americans as liberators. But as they headed northward, the US troops faced the problem of figuring out which civilians were harmless and which were potential killers or suicide bombers.

Before long, the civilian fighters became America's most formidable adversary and the tactics used to protect troops - shooting at vehicles approaching checkpoints too rapidly or convoys too closely - killed thousands of Iraqis and made enemies of hundreds of thousands.’

Mindless In Iraq

meanwhile, back at the ranch …..

‘Amid the highly charged political infighting in Washington over what to do in Iraq, you might be excused for not noticing that a bipartisan commission quietly started work last spring with a mandate to help the Bush administration rethink its policy toward the war. Of course, anything labeled "bipartisan commission" seems almost guaranteed to be ignored by a highly partisan White House that is notoriously hostile to outside advice and famously devoted to "staying the course." But what makes this particular commission hard to dismiss is that it is led by perhaps the one man who might be able to break through the tight phalanx of senior officials who advise the president and filter his information. That person is the former secretary of state, Republican insider, and consigliere of the Bush family, James A. Baker III.

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."’

"A Higher Power "

other body counts .....

‘Figures compiled by the Baghdad city morgue indicated Wednesday that the number of killings in the Iraqi capital reached a new high last month, and the U.S. military said a new effort to bring security to Baghdad will succeed only if Iraqis "want it to work."

The Baghdad morgue took in 1,815 bodies during July, news services quoted the facility's assistant manager, Abdul Razzaq al-Obeidi, as saying. The previous month's tally was 1,595. Obeidi estimated that as many as 90 percent of the total died violent deaths.

Since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in the northern town of Samarra in late February, Baghdad has been ravaged by sectarian violence. Shiite militiamen conduct almost nightly raids on Sunni neighborhoods, and Sunni insurgents frequently bomb Shiite mosques and other gathering places. A report from the United Nations combining morgue and hospital body counts for June showed that, on average, more than 100 people were being killed every day.

On Tuesday, the U.S. military announced the start of the second phase of a U.S.-Iraqi crackdown aimed at securing Baghdad known as Operation Forward Together. A key element of the new phase is the transfer of thousands of U.S. troops to Baghdad from elsewhere in Iraq, but the military's top spokesman told reporters Wednesday that force of arms alone cannot bring peace to the capital.’

Baghdad Morgue

the usual suspects .....

‘In their glossy annual reports, military contractors are typically modest about how much loot they've gotten from a bloody and increasingly unpopular "War on Terror." But read the transcript of virtually any Q&A session with Wall Street and the truth comes out. While millions are suffering from the human and economic costs of the Iraq war, the violence has been very good for the bottom lines of military contractors and their top executives.’

Blatantly Boasting War Profiteers