We are neither winning nor losing the war in Iraq

It seems to me that much of the recent debate in this Presidential campaign hinges on whether you believe we are winning or losing the war in Iraq. The problem is that none of the Presidential candidates are willing to clearly define (perhaps because they can't) what victory or defeat would look like.

It is fundamentally misleading to use the phrase "we are winning", as Bush and McCain so often do, because this is not a basketball game with a set amount of time on the clock. There's no scoreboard to look at and see where we are relative to the opposition. This is in part because there is no organized opposition, just a collection of small bands of people who hate us.

So what does it mean, we are winning? My understanding is simply that "we are winning" means "we haven't left yet". Such statements make a misguided assumption that there are only two possible outcomes in Iraq, one called victory and the other called defeat. Let me assure you, NEITHER of these outcomes are viable.

Real, unadulterated 'victory' would mean a democratic Iraq free from sectarian violence, free from regional influences (read: Iran), and capable of providing critical services to all of it's people. We are about as far from this goal as the day that we invaded Iraq, possibly farther.

However, 'defeat' is an equally meaningless term. If we 'lose' in Iraq, our way of life here at home won't be effected. We won't lose our land. We won't fall under the yoke of a foreign government. In fact, in a worst-case scenario in Iraq, America itself is not under direct threat, despite what the Hawks might try to say. (Remember, those talking about creating a haven for terrorists are the same ones who said that Sadaam was harboring and sponsoring terrorism before 9/11.)

So I call on the candidates to stop talking in absolutes about winning and losing in Iraq. There are an infinity of possible scenarios to resolve and end this war. They ALL involve us pulling out troops out at some point, and they ALL involve some unpleasant consequences and side effects. Let's decide what's best on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of the situation, rather than who can say the word 'winning' in just the right way.

One Crystallization of our basic problem in Iraq

A huge Shia march is planned for this week in Iraq, and there is significant (and justified) fear about a Sunni attack on the column of pilgrims. One of them had the following to say:

Sami Faraj, a 52-year-old government employee, said they would march nevertheless. "We do not care about the bombings and the terrorists. We are ready to sacrifice ourselves for the cause and for the sake of the prophet's descendants," Faraj said.

Here is a link to the article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070807/iraq/

By the way, this guy isn't a zealous preacher. He's the Iraqi equivalent of the fat guy with the lazy eye and hippie beard who takes the bus to work at the Department of Ecology. He's a nobody.

And yet he's talking in personal terms about the basic disagreement of a religious dispute that has been going on for nearly two thousand years. The furor over the succession of Mohammed was THE reason the Shias and Sunnis became the Shias and Sunnis, and this guy announced into a microphone that he was willing to die for it. And he MEANT it. There is a measurable percentage chance that some Sunni nutjob puts a bomb in the middle of that march. That's how personal this conflict is t the average Iraqi.

Ask yourself how many people you know in America would march for their religion. Not even march against abortion or something, just march for being right. Now ask yourself how many people in this country would bomb religous marchers. Finally, think of how many of those few (I assume it is few, unless you live in Utah) people-willing-to-march that you know would STILL MARCH if they knew there were people in the same CITY that were fully planning if possible to, in fact, kill them.

It is beyond folly to think that Sunnis and Shias are EVER going to live in the same physical space. They are fundamentally different than we are. They have not had a revolutionary event (In the Jeffersonian sense) to galvanize them into caring more about Iraq than about Mohammed. Until and IF they do, we have no shot, and it's irresponsible of politicians to pretend otherwise.

Petraeus blames bookkeeping for the missing weapons

Check this article on WashingtonPost.com:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/07/AR2007080701726.html?hpid=topnews

Petraeus blamed record-keeping errors for the loss of weapons in Iraq, then he said something that floored me. With regard to the lack of proper record-keeping procedures during the building of Iraqi forces, he said:

"We occasionally likened it to building the world's largest aircraft while in flight and while being shot at," the general said. "But we gradually started putting those procedures into place."

Really? When did you liken it to that? And who were you speaking to when you did it? I pay pretty close attention to the news, and I'm willing to bet you didn't say it to a reporter. All I seem to remember any administration spokesman saying was how great the Iraqi security forces were doing, and how much progress we were making over there.

See, you don't get to spend five years telling us how great everything is, and then when something goes horribly wrong, turn around and justify yourself by saying how difficult the situation was. I didn't believe you when you said how easy it was, but that doesn't mean you get points for coming clean. Three months ago, maybe, but now the only honesty involved is that which makes your terrible mistake seem more justifiable.

Weapons, journalistic priorities both missing

Here's a link to a disturbing little story:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/08/06/iraq.weapons.reut/index.html

This story is about how we have lost 190,000 weapons in Iraq, including 110,000 AK-47 Assault Rifles, and how many of those weapons are now being used to fight against American Troops. Awesome. Hope that gets in the progress report we get in September, somehow I would be willing to bet it slips through the cracks.

My question is, why isn't this a bigger story? cnn.com leads with a story of 6 miners getting trapped in a mineshaft. Tragic, but almost a quarter million deadly weapons getting lost in the most dangerous place on earth is a bigger story than 6 miners getting killed, or 60 miners getting killed. How many people will get killed with those weapons?

HuffPost leads with Rudy Giuliani's daughter's facebook page. Seriously. She joined the "1 Million Strong for Barack" facebook group, and now that's a national news story bigger than taxpayer dollars being used to arm out enemies.

Foxnews leads with the coal miners, followed by the facebook page and a twelve-year old "Messiah" getting arrested in France. Ummm...okay. What the hell is wrong with the media in this country?

I'm really hoping there's some language/translation problems between my ears and the Iraqi parlaiment

Check this article on the absenteeism of the Iraqi parliament in the days leading up to their month-long vacation in August:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-missing27jul27,0,4508518.story?coll=la-home-center

First of all, it's just shocking that they would take a month-long break right now. That's already been beaten to death in the media and on blogs for months. They had to cancel the first month of that vacation under heavy protests. But now I read, in this article, that a lot of the delegates don't show up for the sessions, at least in part because they are resistant to US pressure in setting them an agenda to talk about. That's fucking balls, right there.

The reason I reference a translation problem is because the quotes from these delegates makes them come off like Paris Hilton. It's absurd how they sound. Consider:

"The Americans don't understand," (Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker) said. "The more they insist, the more there will be opposition and we will never pass it."

Uhhh...what? Are you a five year old sitting on the at the dinner table refusing to eat something he likes just because his mother told him to eat it? The US isn't trying to ram some ridiculous proposal down their throats, it's trying to make them take steps that represent the only hope for their fledgling country.

Let me just say that I HATE US policy in Iraq. I hate it. And I acknowledge that it isn't Othman's (or any of the other delegates) fault that this situation was created. It is our fault, America's fault. We should have left Saddam Hussein in power, evil as he was, but we didn't. This is the situation now. And the simple fact that those delegates have accepted the positions they have (and the $65,000 a year, by the way. More than twice as much money as I make), makes them responsible, not for the situation, but for trying to find a way out of it. To shirk that responsibility by failing to work hard, as a response to perceived US influence, borders on the criminal.

Also, let's remember what is actually at stake here. It isn't the security of the US, at least not directly. The latest wargames estimates show that Al Qaeda won't take over in Iraq if we leave. We'll probably be better off, actually, because once we leave we can go to Pakistan and take care of the real enemy in short order. Now there's an invasion I could get behind.

All that will happen if we leave is that Iraq will burn itself to the ground. Tens of thousands of people will die, if not hundreds. Torture, religious, and ethnic cleansing will be the order of the day, and sometime far down the line, a rough, three-state scenario will emerge.

That's all we're trying to prevent. The Iraqi Parliament had better wake up and help us, because I can unequivocally say that the patience of this country is running out. We ARE leaving, and the amount of work they are able to get done before we do will directly influence the amount of Iraqi blood that is shed in the next ten years.

Michael Vick...worse than a child molester?

This is a sampling of one article on the Michael Vick dog-fighting case that I chose more or less at random:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/26/vick.dogfighting/index.html

The thing to notice here is that one of the lawyers involved said of the protests going on outside the courtroom that they were the most extreme he has ever seen. Really? The most extreme he's ever seen? I'm pretty sure that guy has been around some HUMAN murder trials, pedophilia trials, etc, in his time.

Now I'm not making the slightest excuse for Vick. Animal cruelty laws are on the books for a reason, and he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of them. But this is a striking trend that I've noticed happening in a number of animal-related cases.

For example, when I was in High School in Oregon, a kid in the area tied a cat to the roof of a shed and set it on fire. Now that's awful. The local papers and the kid's lawyer (full disclosure: the kid's lawyer was my dad) received hundreds of letters suggesting that the kid, a victim himself of systematic abuse, should be burned to death in turn. The outpouring of hatred and bile in the direction of this kid was incredible. That same week, my Dad took a case involving a five and a three year old kid. Those kids' parents were meth heads, who made extra money by inviting people over, and forcing the kids to run back and forth across the living room while paying customers shot at them with paintball and pellet guns. There were no letters sent in this case, no press coverage, no nothing. The parents got off on a technicality.

What does this have to do with Michael Vick's case? There is a war going on right now that claims innocent human lives every, single day. Atrocities are committed on people all over the world with shocking regularity. In our own country, children are abused EVERY SINGLE DAY. Where is the public outcry for this? I look out my window, or I turn on the news every night, and I don't see people protesting the War in Iraq (I have gone to a few protests myself). Why do we in this country seem to love animals and hate people so much?

I realize that Vick's high profile makes this a national case (shouldn't, but does), and I realize that dog-fighting is a bad thing. It's cruel, it's inhumane, and it's criminal. At issue here isn't whether Vick ought to be let off the hook or not. Nobody is suggesting he should. My point is that, with all the horrific things going on in the world, I think people with extra energy to burn on protests could find better outlets.

Palestine...Lost in the shadow of Iraq, but still with lessons for us.

I just saw this really interesting guy named Dennis Ross on Charlie Rose. He's an author and a think tank guy on the middle east. He made some interesting statements about the elections in 2005 (the ones in which Hammas took power, and directly after which the world cut off foreign aid to the region). This guy claimed that those elections should never have taken place, because Hammas refused to abide by the election criteria established during the previous elections in 1996. Apparently, the Bush administration pushed for these elections to take place anyways, and were the first to condemn them when Hammas won power.

There is an interesting parallel here between the kind of faith-based decision making that Ross describes, and the kind of faith-based decision making that has gotten us into such incredible trouble in Iraq. That is, Bush pushed for elections in Palestine because he had faith that free elections were a prescriptive wunderkind that would solve problems in any context. Now, from his own janky election victory, he should have known categorically this was not true. At least as importantly, he should have seen that with Fatah (the party opposed to Hammas in those elections) in shambles at the time, the better organization and message discipline of Hammas would allow them to triumph in spite of being in fact a minority party. After that happened, Bush (and much of the democratic world) was left in the awkward position of opposing a duly elected democratic regime, because of human rights violations and explicitly religious values.

Similarly, in Iraq, faith based decision making has gotten us in trouble across the board. We had faith that Iraqis cared more about freedom than they did about religion. To put it another way, we had faith that Iraqis cared more about being Iraqis than they did about being Sunni or Shia Muslims.

We also had too much faith in the superiority of US troops and firepower. My best friend is a US Marine, and I have as much respect for their capability as anyone, but they were tasked to use less than a quarter million troops to pacify a nation of more than twenty million. And to do so on that nation's home turf, more than a quarter world away from home. There simply aren't enough bodies to occupy that much space. US troops can achieve any specific tactical objective, but they cannot be present in the entire country at once. It's like trying to sop up twenty gallons of liquid with a single rag. There's no question the rag can absorb water, but at the same time, there's no question there is more liquid than a single rag can absorb.

At the core, the Bush administration is guilty of the same faith based error as the general in the Kubrick film "Full Metal Jacket". The general confronts Joker wearing ambivalent imagery on his uniform, and says that the US must prevail in Vietman because "Inside of every Gook there is a red-blooded American trying to get out." Replace "Gook" with "Iraqi" (or with "Towelhead", if the slur must stick), and you have a pretty accurate description of the Bush attitude towards the middle east. We are finding out, to our detriment, just like to the film's General, that this is simply not the case. Whether Palestine, Iraq, or anywhere else in the Middle East, Muslims are simply, categorically, and finally different than us. They care about different things, they live in different ways. The only way they are like us is that they are willing to fight and die for their families and their beliefs.

$282 Million sounds like a lot until you put it in perspective...

I saw a huge front page story today about how a bank in Baghdad got robbed to the tune of $282 million dollars. Sure seems like a huge heist, right? Sure seems like terrorists are gonna end up with that money, right? Let me just point out two things.

First, what the hell is $282 US Dollars in cash doing in a bank in Iraq? That country is in the middle of a civil war. The only real surprise is that it took this long to get robbed. For that matter, along the same line, what the hell is a bank doing open for business in Baghdad? That city in under seige by multiple armies of desperate men. See above for the completion of this point.

Second, $282 million is a huge heist. Hell, that's bigger than the heist in "Ocean's 11", and that one was just cooked up by some screenwriter who could have said anything he wanted. He could have had Clooney say "Let's steal eleventy billion dollars from Terry Benedict", yet even at the limits of his imagination, that writer chose less than the REAL heist in Baghdad.

Yet let's think about the dollar amount the US spends in Iraq (not even counting the lives lost every day). The figure is ten billion a month. Break that down and you get...$333 million a day. So they stole less than one day's treasure in a war that has lasted more than five years. Ouch.

What the hell does "Mixed Bag" even mean?

It never ceases to amaze me how Bush will take language that seems meant to describe a round of golf and apply it to the war in Iraq. Today he issued a progress report on Iraq that said the government there had made satisfactory progress on about half their benchmarks, and called the results there a "mixed bag". You know, a mixed bag, like "I hit a few birdies, a few too many bogies, I was in the rough a lot off the tee, but I putted pretty well." That's a mixed bag. "We quelled the resistance in Al-Anbar at the cost of hundreds of dead Americans and thousands of dead Iraqis, but Baghdad is still hostile despite the mass death there." That's not a mixed bag. That's an unmitigated disaster.

This administration's willingness to use rhetoric, and this President's ability to use his supposedly "simple" grasp of language to minimize problems is truly incredible. But what is really shocking is the way the mainstream press just reports this bullshit. Every single paper who reported this White House update as if it were factual in any way should be ashamed. In fact, the administration should not be allowed to report on the state of the war at all. It's like a parent telling a five year old to clean her room, and then taking her word that it's done instead of opening up the door and looking for themselves. Gee, I wonder if she's going to say she's made more progress than she really has.

What it is really like, though, is the Enron case. It's like during the trial, Enron issued an internal report saying that there was reasonable doubt about the defendant's guilt. And then, in the middle of the trial, Enron's defense lawyers pulled out the report and said, "See, this report says there's doubt, so they can't be guilty." And then the jurors (played here by the media) said "Well, they must be right, look, it's right there in that report." People are such GD idiots.

Pay attention to Rhetorical shifts or you'll be in a diferent conversation without knowing it

I just found an EXCELLENT, GREAT, SUPERLATIVE article on Salon.com that I wanted to share:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/23/al_qaeda/index.html

This article describes the rhetorical shift among the bush administration and the military leaders from calling the people we are fighting "insurgents" or "Sunni/Shia fighters" to calling them "Al Qaeda". This is the kind of thing that changes conversations, and the fact is that (as the article states) the Bush administration only a few years ago freely admitted that only the smallest portion of the enemy was actually Al Qaeda affiliated.

This is the kind of reporting that is truly important, and keeps people honest, particularly if others take notice and start to call officials on it directly.

At least as important, the author points out that the NY Times has picked up the administration rhetoric and put it in dozens of stories. Papers that are infamously liberal (at least according to those on the right) like the NYT should not blindly accept terminology changes like this, especially ones that are obviously bullshit. That's how conversations get changed, and rhetorical battles get won.

I've just written a letter to both the times and salon.com, chiding the one and congratulating the other. I suggest you all do likewise. This is an absolutely CRITICAL issue.

The Medium is the Massage (That's a joke, not a typo)

Check out this article:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB219/index.htm

on George Washington University's excellent National Security Web Site. The article discusses the manipulation of media in Post-Saddam Iraq, and the transition from state-controlled media to an "Iraqi Free Media", whose message would, ironically, be controlled exclusively by the US, hence the white paper describing the apparatus and appropriate message to push.

The point here is not to notice that we wanted to manipulate the media in Iraq. I didn't need a Freedom of Information Act request to tell me that the USG wants to control the message in a time of war. They learned their lesson from Vietnam on that one.

The point IS that they did such a poor job of envisioning and planning how that might have been done. There is no mention in this document of any kind of alternative news sources, including low-budget, pirate TV news, nor does it give any thought to the internet (along the lines of Al Jazeera). This failure of imagination is staggering.

So even if we had won the military conflict, conducted a successful counter-insurgency operation, and executed our media-control strategy (we did none of these, except maybe the first), we would have been in the shit. If you can get a message out there, you can start a revolution.

That's what is so ironic about this whole document. Trying to find a way to truly control the message in this day and age is like writing a paper about how to square a circle. It's impossible by definition.

People have said, "The medium is the message". I don't know if that's true, but I think we can say that some time in the last quarter century, the medium became more important than the message. We live in an age of such volume of message that any particular thing is lost in the shuffle (a trend of which this blog is a symptom). Trying to control a message in that morass of soapboxes is, as I just said, impossible.

This fundamental misunderstanding of the situation with regard to message is a microcosm of this entire war. We have a politics and an attention span in this country with no appreciation for subtlety or nuance, and a situation in Iraq that is nothing but nuance. Trying to sum it up in a white paper, to say nothing of a political speech or, god forbid, a sound byte, is not an option. These matters take years of experience and honed instinct, something which few of our current leaders possess. They are really good at getting elected, laughably bad at understanding or governing. At least, it would be laughable if not for the death screams of all those people.

Children and the Realities of the War on Terror

This is it. It's finally happened. The paradox of our War on Terror has finally crystallized today. For some reason it's not being reported on any of the major 'net new sites, but I just saw a report on Tucker Carlson's show on MSNBC that the US launched an air strike on a "high-value" Al Qaeda target in Pakistan and destroyed the compound he was living in, KNOWING that there were at least seven innocent children inside the building.

I say it's a paradox for the following reasons: My first thought is one that I've had before. At this point, what is the difference between us and the Terrorists? If we knowingly murder innocents in the pursuit of our military goals, how are we different than they? The answer is we are not.

My second thought is that the Terrorists knowingly put children in harm's way when they have them inside of a Terrorist compound. Because the fact is that the logical conclusion of my argument means that all Osama bin Laden has to do is strap a kid onto his back, and he is invulnerable. I mean, according to my own premise, if Osama constantly has a child within a twenty foot radius of his person, we can NEVER attack him without sinking to the Terrorists' level.

Now let me say that I am all in favor of finding and killing Osama bin Laden. If I had the chance I would pull the trigger on him myself. He is a truly evil, destructive man, and the world would unequivocally better without him.

So the real paradox is not with the Terrorists, but with us. America has set itself in an impossible position of needing to fight a war, but also needing to maintain the ethos that the death of innocents is totally unacceptable. This is a paradoxical position, because the prosecution of a war always involves the death of innocents, just as it always involves the kinds of abuses we saw on display at Abu Ghraib.

We have in this country the paradigm that the ultimate good is zero deaths. Our goal is that everyone should live forever, and nobody should suffer pain for which they do not recieve compensation. That paradigm is antithetical to the concept of warfare, which involves senseless death and the infliction of pain for which there can be no compensation. That's just the way it is. And the sooner we allow ourselves to percieve this paradox, the sooner we can start making sense of our situation, and start trying to find a way to extricate ourselves, either by deciding to get out, or by deciding to do what's necessary in the service of a greater goal. Just as they did in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and both World Wars, and just as we have failed to do in The Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and countless other, smaller conflicts in between.

The truth we've all known about Abu Ghraib...a few years too late.

Everyone should read the following article from the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/25/070625fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=1

My comments are my own. All quotations are from the above article.

This article describes the intricate procedures and chain of command by which events like Abu Ghraib are allowed to transpire, and the calculation with which deniability is manufactured by high ranking members of the military, as well as civilian leadership.

Now, it has been obvious for a while that these horrific events were not simply the work of a few low-level soldiers. My friends serving in Iraq have told me as much in confessional tones, that these behaviors are the exception rather than the rule, and that the only violation of procedure in this case was the photographic documentation of the acts.

The basic problem is that, given the strict control of the civilian press by the military, the only people in a position to expose these abuses are the ones with the most vested interest in keeping them a secret: The US Military. All that stands in the way of this cover-up is the integrity and honesty of common soldiers and officers. The same qualities that the armed forces deem secondary to loyalty and blind obedience.

The other mechanism in place to prevent these abuses is, of course, congressional oversight. The article says:

By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military—including the Pentagon’s covert task forces—for the purposes of “preparing the battlefield” could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress.

So there is problem number one. Congress (which is not nearly aggressive enough in oversight anyway) was kept in the dark by an administration driven mad by fear-induced power.

The second problem was related, and potentially as serious: Those in the Special Operations community suffering under the same delusion of power, who decided to operate (or were forced by circumstances to operate) outside of designated guidelines. Again, the NY Article:

J.S.O.C.’s special status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that “the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the global war on terrorism.

So either way what we have here is a breakdown in the checks and balances that are supposed to control the behavior of our armed forces. The fact is that we will never know which it was, such are the pitfalls of allowing people to classify their missions and prevent transparency from ever being achieved.

But what we can say is that the secrecy of our secret operations has gotten totally out of control. From the article:

A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned “to back off” on the investigation, because “it would spill over to more important things.” A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it—insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary’s great displeasure.

What the article fails to mention is who could possibly have put pressure on a high-ranking senator. Who could have the secrecy to avoid being named in the article, yet have the power to force a sitting senator to "stand up to" him, rather than simply tell him to shut the hell up?

The very existence of any such person is a huge problem for this country. It literally smacks of the SS, or the KGB under the worst auspices of Communist Russia. I am not merely using these analogies to make a point. We in the free world CANNOT allow people to wield this sort of power from the shadows, any more than we can allow the people high up in our military or civilian leadership to claim they were unaware of abuses as a defense of their inaction. In a lengthy quote from the article:

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

"There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.
And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.

Taguba (A full General, the primary investigating officer into the scandal, who has since taken a forced retirement), watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news.

There are two possibilities here. One is that Rumsfeld is lying, and he was aware of the abuses. In that case, he is a human rights violator not qualitatively different than Saddam Hussein. The other is that he is telling the truth, and he didn't know. What it's impotrant to understand is that having your underlings in a place where they fail to inform you of something this serious is not deniability, it is negligence. It is not WORSE is Rumsfeld's underlings knew of this and failed to tell him, and he failed to ask, but it isn't that much better. He has still failed this country miserably. And anyone else in the chain of command, up to and including the President, who was similarly ill-informed, is equally negligent.

Finally, we come to the cover up, always the easiest part to prove and, in this case, actually the easiest to condemn. I've seen the Abu Ghraib photos, and they are terrible, but I do not hate the soldiers in them. I've often said that these kinds of abuses have occured in every war that has ever been fought, and will occur in every war that is ever waged. The point is that you cannot dehumanize a population enough to kill them, yet maintain an understanding of their dignity as human beings, enough to prevent rape and torture from occurring.

So the question of real importance is whether this torture was the sad but natural consequence of war, or the calculated policy of those tasked to oversee and prosecute the strategy. The following quote from the article may shed some light:

The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”—in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’ ” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ”

Let me answer the question posed in that second to last sentence. The difference between shooting a guy in the street, as opposed to in his bed or in a prison, is that in the street, the guy has a chance to shoot back. That's the difference between a war and a massacre.

There are basically two sides in this conflict (That would be the conflict over the cover-up/information failure in Abu Ghraib. There are, unfortunately, many more sides than that in the Iraq War.). One side is the portion of the civilian and military leadership that claims no abuses are occuring, and no cover-up has occured, with reference to Abu Ghraib. They claim that aggressive investigation techniques are just that, and that the reported acts that are clearly torture did not occur. The other side is the other portion of the leadership, which says that there are unimaginable abuses happening at Abu Ghraib and other places around the world, and that the leadership, particularly the civilian leadership, right up to and including former Secretary Rumsfeld, did everything they could to obfuscate the acts.

Now, I want to point out two things. One is that one of the primary people on the second side is General Taguba, the guy who was specifically assigned to investigate this matter, who has spent more time than anyone looking at these issues, and who has since been (by his own account) ostracized by the military leadership and forced into early retirement in spite of his years of dedicated service. The second is that what we are really arguing about here is the semantics of torture, and whether or not the things that occured at Abu Ghraib are widespread or isolated instruments. What actually happened there is not at issue. As I said, I have personally SEEN PICTURES of people being tortured. That case is closed.

Normally I am all about shades of grey, but in this case, one or the other group is lying. Their accounts of what has happened are diametrically opposed. Either Rumsfeld had seen the pictures or he hadn't. Either he told people to cover it up or he did not. Either instructions came down to put the MP's in charge of softening prisoners up, or they did not. There doesn't seem to be a lot of middle ground here, as much as Rumsfeld, et al would like to create one.

The leadership insisting there is no torture and no coverup (Rumsfeld, et al) are protecting an organization which makes them among the most powerful people in the world. They are also protecting themselves from criminal prosecution from human rights violations. And they are doing it by sacrificing people with no power or voice to fight back.

The leadership claiming a coverup (Taguba, et al) are stirring up a hornet's nest within an organization they have dedicated their lives to. They are being widely criticized and ostracized by their peers, and in many cases they are ruining their careers.

The nice thing about a blog is that it is not a court of law. I don't have to prove anything, I don't even have to draw conclusions. So let me just pose this question. Given the two previous sets of circumstances, who does it seem would be more likely to lie?

Saddam Hussein and a Time Machine

As anyone who reads this blog obviously knows, I'm very much against the war in Iraq. It seems that most of the congresspeople in this country are against it also. I hear Republicans use the rhetorical device of asking "Well do you think we would be better off with Saddam Hussein still in power?" and forcing people to address that question on their terms. Why do Democrats, or any reasonable person, allow that to happen?

The answer to that question is simple. If it meant that we had never invaded Iraq, and this whole mess had never started, yes, I think we would be much better off with Saddam Hussein still in power. Not only would we be better off, but the Iraqi people would be better off. We are now killing a hundred Iraqi civilians a day, by the Pentagon's own estimates. Saddam wasn't doing that. Political repression through violent means? Yes. A hundred dead a day? No. So yes, everyone involved would be better off if Saddam were still in power.

By the way, guess what will happen once we leave: Someone like Saddam or worse will come into power. That's after a period of ethnic cleansing and civil war to rival anything happening in Africa. Thousands dead, and then we'll be, and the Iraqis will be, just as bad off as we all were before, if not worse. They will have less infrastructure, less ability to meet basic needs, and still no democracy or freedom. Nice.

Follow up to the arming of Sunni Insurgents

I just read an interesting although somewhat confusing article on slate.com regarding the arming of Sunni Insurgent groups that I posted on yesterday:

http://www.slate.com/id/2168400/fr/flyout

This article seems at times to make opposing points, and may simply be a symptom of how confused and hopeless our entire Iraq situation has become, but it suggested one interesting point to me that I thought worth making here.

The article says that "The main Bush argument for the surge has been that a withdrawl would embolden Al Qaeda in its actions in Iraq and around the world." I've heard Bush make versions of this argument many times, some version of the idea that "Iraq is the frontline of the war on terror and the fight against Al Qaeda."

Now, hardly anyone disputes that Al Qaeda had no significant presence in Iraq until we arrived there. Even the idea that Saddam supported and sponsored terrorism has been disproven, much less the idea that there was a terrorist presence actually inside the country. So we created the Al Qaeda presence there by going there and setting up shop.

Now if I, as a member of society, start a fight. If I throw a punch on someone, and they start to fight back, and they get the upper hand, and then I kill them, I get charged with murder. That is, the fact that the person was fighting me and might have killed me is not a mitigating circumstance, because I started the fight. The situation would never have existed had I not thrown the first punch. Yet it seems that in the case of nations, such behavior is justified, at least according to the logic of this administration.

Why is it that behavior not allowed within a country is nonetheless practiced by the country. Doesn't this seem hyperbolically hypocritical? We should not be able to use Al Qaeda as a justification for our continued presence in Iraq, because we brought them there and inflicted them on the Iraqi people.

Footsteps of the Apocalypse

I just learned about this story on "The Daily Show", and I had to google it to find it on any mainstream news website. Here is the NYTimes link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html?ref=todayspaper

This is a story about how the US Military is now arming the Sunni insurgeny that was killing our troops scant months ago, on the condition that those troops promise to fight only Al Qaeda from here on out. The US commanders supporting the plan admit that it is "fraught with risk."

Did I miss the part where we lifted the prohibition in the Army against hallucinogenic drugs? What are these guys fucking on? I mean look, I know the blogosphere is generally blowing up about this, and I know at least 99% of the comments are exactly the same as this one, but the reason for that is simple: People who take the time to write blogs also generally take the time to read at least a little bit of history. Read about ANY time in the history of this or any other country that we have provided weapons to an insurgent or revolutionary group. The result is ALWAYS that group using the weapons to our desire in the short-term, then turning them on us in the long term. There's one group that everyone knows that has followed this pattern: The Taliban.

So the question isn't whether the Sunni's will break their word, but when they will do it. It's a simple issue of the moral scale: If you're willing to kill someone, it means nothing to lie to them, especially when needed supplies and weapons hang in the balance. It's the same principle that allows our soldiers to abuse and torture Iraqi prisoners with such apparent disregard. Torture is less than murder, so what's the problem?

The lack of understanding on the part of our generals is gross and disturbing. In fact, it is unbelievable. The only logical conclusion is that they aren't ignorant. They're desperate. This is a last resort, it has to be. If not it is the single stupidest, most unnecessary blunder in the history of organized warfare.

This is the last gasp of a dying fish lost in an endless desert. The come-down from a crack binge that started at the edge of memory. It's not hyperbole to say that this is the lowest point in American history since I was born.

Chris Matthews did an hour long show today without mention of this story. It's not leading on any of the news web sites right now. I follow news rabidly, and I didn't hear about this until just now. That's trouble for this country. Big trouble.

Shrine Attacks and the Definition of Insanity

Today's attack on one of the holiest shrines in Baghdad underscores a transition in my understanding of US policy in Iraq in general -- What was once merely misguided is now teetering on the brink of insanity.

The definition of insanity is repetition of the same action over and over with the expectation of different results. Today, after the shrine was bombed, General Petraeus said on ABC that he was optimistic, and that Iraq's leadership had done the right thing in universally condemning the attacks and calling for calm.

Is this some sort of new step? Was there a time at which Maliki's government was not condeming terrorism and not calling for calm? I hardly think so. So, Petraeus should not claim optimism in the face of renewed tactics that have proven ineffective in the past. Ineffective at least in the sense that today's attack was part of the result. Calling for calm and condemnation, sad to say, just doesn't mean anything to terrorists. And the regular people of Iraq have no reason to believe those calls will be effective, since we have shown no ability to enforce that calm.

Petraeus also claimed that the attacks today were the work of Al Qaeda. Maybe he's right, maybe not. But whether they were or not is immaterial, because either way it's bad news. I'm not even sure which would be worse: Either our forces are so ineffective against Al Qaeda that they were able to carry out a major attack against a known target in the center of the city which is the lynchpin of this entire conflict, or a homegrown terrorist cell is operating within the context of the greater civil war happening there. Wow, what a shitty set of options.

If we examine this in the context of our options going forward, we see that the result is the same in either case. Let's say it was Al Qaeda. They are doing this to stir up the ethnic hatreds that fuel the civil war, to make our situation there more untenable. The silver lining is that in doing so, Al Qaeda is itself stirring up the ire of the Iraqis, which means that when we leave, Al Qaeda is likely to find no firm purchase for recruiting or other operations.

If it wasn't Al Qaeda, then it is clear that the civil war is escalating, and it is equally clear that when we leave, things are going to get a lot worse, and in a hurry. What we must have the courage to face is that this is going to happen no matter when we leave, whether tomorrow of fifty years from now. This conflict has been going on for hundreds of years, so waiting even fifty years for us to leave means nothing to the Sunni or Shia.

Either way, this is yet another sign that it is time to get out -- Immediately. A failure to do so at this point, and insistence on the same optimism and impotent calls for a truce that have led us to this point, is a textbook case of insanity.

Talking Heads and The War

I'm watching Hardball with Chris Matthews (MSNBC) right now. It's my favorite of the bullshit talking head shows, a category into which I don't put excellent shows like Charlie Rose, et al. Anyways, Matthews does a nice job, but he is so limited by the format of his show that I can barely stand to watch it at times.

Today he had Bob Shrum on, a pundit who I actually like, and they spent 20 minutes talking about Krum's book, and Matthews was grilling him on comments he had made about the Presidential candidates. Things like Edwards saying gays made him uncomfortable at times, and a bunch of other meaningless crap. And I suddenly thought "Hey, did the Iraq war end during the last commercial break? Or is Chris Matthews just helping Shrum pimp his book at the expense of genuine content?"

I yelled at the TV for a minute, then my roomate told me to shutup and calm down. It's not that there's anything wrong with pimping books, and I understand that it's a hour-a-day show, and they can't have hard-hitting discussion every single second, but it's so damn frustrating to watch them talk about BS for twenty minutes, and then have to cut off discussion of an actual issue because they "ran out of time". Can we have two commercial breaks discussion about the most important issue in the world, and maybe chop 10 minutes out of the Bob Shrum advertisement? Is that too much to ask?