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.

Damn that's a lotta C-Span

I've been watching C-Span for a really long time. This is by far the most C-Span I have ever watched in one sitting. It's in first place and the race isn't even close. Here are a few thoughts:

First, I don't think John McCain or anyone else who supports the war should be able to refer to "the opinion of the generals" ever again. Let's just look at a little history lesson. Remember when there were other generals, before Petraeus, who said the surge was a shit idea? Then remember when you got rid of those generals and put in Petraeus, because he subscribed to the neocon strategy? Okay, at that point you stopped being able to refer to the opinion of the generals as a way to prove that we should do what you want to do. In fact, it's dishonest to refer to "the opinion of the generals" as if that opinion is one unified thing. There are a whole bunch of generals that agree with the democrats. They think we should end this war as soon as possible and get all our troops out or Iraq post haste. So don't sit here and try to say that we need to respect the opinion of the generals, because they don't really have any idea of what is going on either.

Second, the Democrats need to get off their ass and stop being such slaves to decorum. Some dipshit GOP senator got up and gave some bullshit, swiss cheese justification, and then Hillary got up there (she looked like warmed over death, by the way. Clearly these people are not used to being up until 5 am.) and started off her spiel with "I'd like to thank my friend and colleague from the great state of blah blah blah... Screw that. If you're going to stay up all night and keep my ass up all night, at least have a goddamn DEBATE. Get up there and point out the ten obvious flaws in his argument. It's not hard. I was sitting here in my living room doing it in real time. And you should be smarter than me.

Third, I'd just like to say that the procedures followed in the damn senate are at least 75% fluff. They have spent the last 20 minutes doing a "Quorum call" and some sort of procedural vote to GET ALL THE SENATORS IN THE CHAMBER. What?!?! We're taking up time with all this debate and the other senators are out of the chamber? Are they getting high? (Okay, obviously Ted Kennedy is getting high, and drinking a bottle of blue label, but still...) Get their asses in there and let's have us a real debate, or better yet, let's get a vote going. I can't take this shit anymore, I'm going to bed. I'm not getting any money out of this, I'm not going to be a live blogger for C-Span while nothing is happening...

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.

All the coverage in the world doesn't change policy

Washington Post has a profile of Bush today, and it crystallized something that had been nagging me for a while. There's no shortage of administration coverage out there. Quite the opposite, in fact. The problem is that every story I read diagnoses the same problem. It just diagnoses the same set of incorrect decisions and refusals the change, over and over and over. There is never a prescription for a set of concrete steps that would fix any of these problems.

Now by "these problems" I don't mean specific issues. There are plenty of articles and Op-Ed pieces on what to do about immigration, or the war in Iraq, Social Security, whatever. I mean what to do about the problem of the prospect of the next year and a half with a President that is an embarrassment and a danger to himself and others.

The article today on WaPost quotes some pundit as saying that Bush has "a knack for not looking in the rearview mirror". He reads some limited newspapers, but he doesn't really read about himself or his failings that much, and he considers the stubborn support of his positions a virtue.

The logical end of this line of thinking is that talking about how shitty Bush is will simply not have the desired effect. I want to see an article about what we, outside of the President's purview, can do to change policy. Basically, I want somebody to start talking about impeaching this guy. Why did Nancy Pelosi say that is off the table? What the fuck is her problem? I want this guy gone. Not in 18 months. Now.

Congress issues meaningless subpoena 5 years too late.

This article on HuffPost:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070627/eavesdropping-subpoenas/??

describes the subpoenas issued today by the congress for a whole slew of documents related to warrantless wiretapping, and other blatantly illegal programs employed by the administration during the war on terror.

First, I would point to the same insightful comment I posted a few days ago. Tying this up in the courts is, for the administration, just as good as killing the subpoenas. 2008 looms closer and closer, and all Bush et al has to do is get to the end of his term. It would take a fool to believe that these problems will follow him back to his ranch in Crawford, whence he will disappear in January '09, only to emerge for $250,000 speaking engagements in front of morons who worship him.

Goddamn I hate this guy.

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.