Iraq Problem Disappeared!

I know that Fox News' grasp of reality is fairly tenuous at best, but losing Iraq?

The Iraq Situation

Iraq appears to have disappeared off the radar for the moment with the Sarah Palin story dominating the news cycle. However, the situation there reminds me of that of Yugoslavia in the last days of president Tito.

There was a country basically at peace since the Second World War but in essence a simmering cauldron of ethnic tension held down by the military power of the Tito government. On Tito's death, the nationalistic Slobodan Milosovic rose to power and the lid came off. How similar is Iraq, with the US military providing the 'lid' in this case, but the underlying ethnic, or in this case, religious tensions still existing?

Yes, the 'Surge' was part of the success in reducing the level of violence in Iraq. Just as important though, I believe, were the decision by the Sunni tribes to join the fight against Al Qaeda - The Awakening, and the decision by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army to observe a ceasefire and the ethnic cleansing and subsequent walling off of various Baghdad districts.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, doesn't seem inclined to integrate the Sunni leaders into the country's government. Indeed, the opposite appears to be happening and he is making a grab for power and excluding them. The status of oil-rich Kirkuk is also a potential flashpoint between the Iraqi government and the Kurds, who to all intents and purposes are self-governing.

All in all then, the underlying tensions in Iraq are still there and until there are moves by the Iraqi government to include the Sunnis and Kurds in power, the Yugoslavia scenario is still a possible outcome.

Dividing Iraq

This needs no further comment...

Big Oil and Iraq

In the Boston Globe yesterday...

IT TOOK five years, the deaths of 4,100 US soldiers, and the wounding of 30,000 more to make Iraq safe for Exxon. It is the inescapable open question since the reasons given by President Bush for the invasion and occupation did not exist, neither the weapons of mass destruction nor Saddam Hussein's ties to Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Ouch!

Success In Iraq

At last, Bush and Cheney can (privately) toast the complete success of Operation Iraqi Liberation Freedom.

Where's Wally

Stephen Colbert reminds us that we never did find out where George W Bush went, after the swift-boating of Dan Rather.

What Does the Iraqi Oil Law Mean?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this AP article on Yahoo says that the Iraqi Oil Law defines distribution of the oil revenues. My understanding is that it decides how the oil is going to be exploited (mainly by US oil companies) and that a subsequent law will have to be passed to decide on the revenue-sharing.

It's pretty plain why the US governemnt has been pushing for this. It's what Operation Iraqi Liberation, oops sorry, Freedom, was all about.

Torture - Official Republican Policy?

With most of the Republican candidates enthusiastically endorsing torture, sorry - enhanced interrogation techniques, with the honourable exception of John McCain, It's worth reading this Op-Ed in the Washington Post in full.

These assertions that "torture works" may reassure a fearful public, but it is a false security. We don't know what's been gained through this fear-driven program. But we do know the consequences.

As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture -- only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works -- the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real "ticking time bomb" situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of "flexibility" about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone -- the rare exception fast becoming the rule.

The writers are an ex-Commandant of the Marines and an ex-CinC of Central Command so should be listened to.

The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

This is not just a lesson for history. Right now, White House lawyers are working up new rules that will govern what CIA interrogators can do to prisoners in secret. Those rules will set the standard not only for the CIA but also for what kind of treatment captured American soldiers can expect from their captors, now and in future wars. Before the president once again approves a policy of official cruelty, he should reflect on that.

How can it be acceptable for a civilised nation to condone this sort of treatment?

The Neocon Reply

Richard Perle, of of the leading neocon agitators for the invasion of Iraq, responds to Tenet's allegations about the lack of debate in the White House prior to the invasion.

It's a fascinating exercise in carefully parsed statements and half-truths.

He [Tenet] continues to assert falsely that the president's decision to remove Hussein was encouraged by lies about Iraq's responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Didn't every statement made made by the President, Vice-President and Defense Secretary between 9/11 and March 2003 link the 9/11 attack and Saddam Hussein?

Understandably anxious to counter the myth that we went into Iraq on the basis of his agency's faulty intelligence...

Does anyone believe that it was the CIA exclusively that got it wrong. From what I've read, there were all sorts of caveats on their intelligence. Not only that, most of the intelligence used as a basis for the need for invasion came out of the Office of Special Plans, created by Donald Rumsfeld and headed by Douglas Feith.

But the greatest intelligence failure of the past two decades was the CIA's failure to understand and sound an alarm at the rise of jihadist fundamentalism. It is Wahhabi extremism and the call to holy war against infidels that gave us the perpetrators of Sept. 11 and much of the terrorism that has followed. In his attempts to blame others for CIA shortcomings, Tenet cannot say, "I told the president that our Saudi allies were financing thousands of mosques and schools around the world where a hateful doctrine of holy war and violence was being inculcated in young potential terrorists." Fatefully, the CIA failed to make our leaders aware of the rise of Islamist extremism and the immense danger it posed to the United States.

Is Richard Perle seriously saying that the CIA didn't look closely enough at Saudi Arabia, the Neocons', and oil companies', biggest partner in the Middle East?

And the final paragraph tops it all.

George Tenet and, more important, our premier intelligence organization managed to find weapons of mass destruction that did not exist while failing to find links to terrorists that did -- all while missing completely the rise of Islamist fundamentalism. We have made only a down payment on the price of that failure.

What weapons of mass destruction did the CIA find? None, apart from a few chemical shells decades old and unusable. And they failed to find links to the terrorists because they didn't exist. Well, not in Iraq anyway.

Hanging On

Jay Bookman at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution makes the point that George Bush is just trying to hang on to pass the problem of Iraq on to his successor.

Any claim that President Bush is committed to victory in Iraq is contradicted by the facts. He is instead committing us to slow defeat, a defeat timed to come after he leaves office, on another president's watch so another president takes blame.

And if the current president has to purchase another 20 months in Iraq with the lives and limbs of our soldiers, and with the continued degradation of a military that we may need again in the not-so-distant future — well, he is apparently willing to make that deal.

All the evidence supports this view as he goes on to explain.

If Bush had been truly committed to victory, he would have paid the price for it. Sometime in the past five years, he would have found the hundreds of thousands of additional troops our generals have said from the beginning that they needed to succeed.

Being truly committed to winning also would have meant not just sending our military off to war, which was easy. It would have meant sending this nation to war as well, which was hard and something the president has never dared ask of the American people. For most of us, this is a war in which other people fight and die, and that other people will pay for. Under the president's leadership, we have become the only generation in U.S. history so selfish that we gave ourselves major tax cuts while our kids were fighting and dying, and for that we ought to be ashamed.

Most of all, a commitment to winning would have required taking the war effort seriously. It was not. It was not seriously planned, it was not seriously considered, it has not been seriously fought. And as a result, we find ourselves in a terrible dilemma.

H/T to Dan Froomkin's excellent White House Watch.

Cheney's Still At It!

According to a report in the Washington Post, Dick Cheney is even today still asserting that Iraq and Al Qaeda were cooperating before the invasion of Iraq.

This is on the day that a report has just been declassified which debunks this and details the misleading brief prepared by Douglas Feith, "Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case".

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

Meanwhile:

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."

And finally:

Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

If this man wasn't the Vice-President, wouldn't he be receiving some for of treatment for his delusional behaviour?

Is the Right Blinkered?

I've often thought that politicians and supporters on the right of the political spectrum see things in a much more polarised, black and white fashion than those on the left. I believe that I read a scientific survey a few years ago that indicated this.

Some of the pontificating by conservative commentators over the Libby verdict is just mind-blowing. "It's all a left wing plot" - "Guilty of forgetfulness" - "pardon him now!". Listen to Charles Krauthammer in the WaPo today:

There are lies and there are memory lapses. Bill Clinton denied under oath having sex with Monica Lewinsky. Unless you're Wilt Chamberlain, sex is not the kind of thing you forget easily. Sandy Berger denied stuffing classified documents in his pants, an act not quite as elaborate as sex, but still involving a lot of muscle memory and unlikely to have been honestly forgotten.

Scooter Libby has just been convicted of four felonies that could theoretically give him 25 years in jail for . . . what? Misstating when he first heard a certain piece of information, namely the identity of Joe Wilson's wife.

For lying to cover for his boss, Dick Cheney, that's for what. And it certainly isn't a left-wing witch-hunt. As a reader of Andrew Sullivan writes:

No. The right hand man of the most powerful Republican Vice President in history was done in by a lot of other Republicans. The John Ashcroft Justice Dept agreed with the CIA request to investigate the Valerie Plame leak. Ashcroft’s Republican assistant, James Comey, appointed one of his own, Patrick Fitzgerald, perhaps the only Republican in Chicago.

The only question now is will the whole deception that became the raison d'etre for the invasion of Iraq start to unravel? The yellowcake from Niger, the WMDs that the UN inspectors couldn't find even though Rumsfeld was proclaiming we knew where they were (why didn't he just tell them where to look?), the Al Qaeda-Iraq connection, the Curveball evidence. Where did it come from? Who validated it? Who pushed it?

Plan 'B'? There is no Plan 'B'.

The Cunning Realist highlights the fact.

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn't work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. "I'm a Marine," Pace told them, "and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory."

Wishful thinking hasn't worked before and it doesn't look like it will work now.