More from Army of Dude

This post was inspired by Blue Girl.

Alex, among the first group of soldiers in Iraq to have their tours extended three months*, is nearing the end of his duty,

Going home is a beautiful, terrifying thought to have once it gets this close to happening.

I’ll look back on the hysterical laughter during fifteen hour Baghdad clears, the terror of being pinned down by machine gun fire, the sight of a Stryker on its side and the unfolding of a body bag under the flames of a nearby school, unzipped tenderly to fit the body of Chevy as RPGs screamed overhead. Soon this place will all be in the past.

The key to it all [the surge] would be 24/7 interaction with Iraqi Army and a constant presence among the Iraqi citizens, giving them confidence in the mission of coalition forces. The building we picked used to be a whiskey distillery, and we’ve been busy putting up concrete barriers and wire around it. A house was too close to where the wall was supposed to be, so engineers blew it to smithereens and sent the family packing. The father owned the plot for forty years and comes by every so often to collect the useful bricks left scattered a hundred yards in every direction. Before he entered once, I patted his seventy year old frame down like a common criminal.

Next month we’ll be the first unit home that completed a three month extension. We were one of few to see Iraq before and after the surge. If the media got anything right, it was that the surge failed.

* One way the Pentagon increased the number of US soldiers inside Iraq during the surge was to make some soldiers stay in Iraq longer.

Sources:

Full Blog Entry on Army of Dude "I Can Taste It"

Originally posted on GDAEman Blog

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The War, the Elections and Impeachment

Two months ago I attended the national assembly of United for Peace and Justice in Chicago. Whatever it’s shortcomings (think: too white and too old), participants shared a general sense that the anti-war movement was once again on the rise, and positioned to make real advances come the fall.

Today I would argue that the anti-war movement is actually somewhat weaker than it was then. Several dedicated activists I have spoken with recently share this concern, and tend to raise problems like activist burnout, a fall calendar chock full of scattershot and all-too-disunited demonstrations, decreased media coverage of the war, the confusion sewn by the administration’s spin doctors, and lack of leadership from the Congress that was elected to end the war.

True, every point true. But the real problem, I would argue, lies elsewhere. The momentum of the anti-war movement is being slowed and distorted by the pull of powerful gravitational fields from a pair of forces that have greatly increased in strength in the last two months. These are the Democratic Party’s 2008 campaign and the grassroots movement to impeach Bush and Cheney.

In the left liberal blogosphere, these two social currents tend to be seen as opposites, pitted against one another on an empty field, and their effect on other social movements is ignored. (The flareup around the occupation of Congressman John Conyers’ office and accompanying discussion of racism is a recent exception.)

Let me lay out as clearly as I can where I stand—I am an anti-war activist first and foremost these days. In part that’s because, as an American, if I fail to do as much as I can to stop the war, I own it. In part that’s because this unjust and unjustifiable occupation is the number one issue facing the American people. (The war is the central reality of American political life and people know it: Gallup Polls says it’s been on top of their “most important problem list since March 2004”).

The great majority are well and truly sick of this war and what it’s doing to the country. They want it over with, and they want it over with yesterday. That’s not going to change. Does anyone here believe that Bush’s poll numbers have plummeted so drastically because of Valerie Plame or White House emails on Republican Party accounts?

Those Darned Democrats

Here’s how I see the dynamics. First, the Congressional majority that was elected to end the war has done a piss-poor job of it, for a variety of unattractive reasons that have been hashed over here ad nauseam. Second, the major Democratic presidential candidates are all pushing ghastly “triangulated” positions on Iraq, proposals whose implementation would extend the occupation, in modified form, for years.

Even so, some folks are inclined to think that too much else is at stake in the coming elections--the survival of Constitutional democracy and the habitability of our planet, to cite two—to allow Democratic officeholders recalcitrant about ending the war to be the targets of protest and criticism. The liberal punditocracy and many important powers in and behind the Democratic Party have taken this stand.

It is presented seductively. Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), for instance, has been running a very well-funded (thanks to the Service Employees union and others) campaign targeting Republican Congresscritters exclusively, demanding that they stand up against the war. A worthy cause, no? Why not put a hurting on the weasels?

But, as I am hardly the first to note, this is mainly a part of Campaign 2008. Those behind it don’t expect to win many Republicans to the kind of gutsy stance Walter Jones (R-NC) has taken against the war, they just want to soften them up for challenges from Democratic candidates next year. And they sure don’t expect to shake those Congressional Democrats who continue to cast votes enabling Bush and the Pentagon, because they’re not even trying to.

“Well, maybe that’s a job somebody else should do,” I hear you mutter. Correct, and that somebody else is the anti-war movement, which has been hitting elected officials from both parties hard through efforts like the Occupation Project and letter-writing, phone-calling and lobbying campaigns. But the AAEI and similar efforts tend to pull angry, activist-minded folks away from gearing up for a battle royale next month over the next $100 plus billion in appropriations Bush is demanding to pour down the rathole of the war.

(In the meantime, election-related waffling has also helped muddy the hard-won clarity of virtually all sectors of the anti-war movement that our central demand must be “End The War Now! Bring The Troops Home Now!” Suddenly we are back in 2004-5, having to explain and debunk nonsense about “phased withdrawal” and “timelines and benchmarks” and “residual forces,” and “Iraqi political realignment” all over again.)

Well, Why Not Impeachment?

Okay, having pissed off many honest progressive Democratic Party stalwarts, let me see what I can do with the Impeachment activists. Their position is in one sense a mirror image of the election-centered forces. They too are desperate about the grievous harm that Bush and his co-conspirators are doing—to Iraq, the environment, democracy and civil liberties, etc. So intense are their concerns that they feel that waiting 17 months is courting disaster. And, after watching this Congress, many understandably suspect that even a substantial Democratic win might not do much to reverse the damage.

Friends have told me repeatedly in recent months, “We will never get this war ended until we’ve impeached Bush and Cheney.” What this amounts to is saying that the anti-war movement must refocus on the struggle to impeach.

I would argue that this is wrong. Unlike many who have challenged the impeachment enthusiasts, I don’t argue, “It’s not practical.” That argument is predicated on things staying just as they are. Suppose Bush orders an attack on Iran, to global condemnation and deep, visible resistance in the High Command. Suppose a scandal more readily comprehensible than the US Attorney firings erupts. Suppose a major stock market crash gets the Katrina treatment from administration incompetents. Suppose Bush moves toward postponing the elections. Might not impeachment become the order of the day in a real hurry (even if some Democratic strategists would still rather keep it off the table to improve the odds for a November blowout)?

Folks who have been pushing impeachment for years, like After Downing Street, have performed an invaluable service by raising the issue and building extensive popular sentiment for it at the grassroots level, and have done so with a tiny fraction of the resources going into various Democratic campaigns. They have created networks, conditions and consciousness that may yet bear fruit in impeachment and conviction.

But the pull on the anti-war movement to make “Impeachment Now” its central demand has, again, an unfortunate and distorting effect on the movement’s momentum. Folks who have been driving forces in building opposition to the war have set it to the side for the sake of this cause, or tried to shift the focus of organizations and coalitions they are in.

To be sure, many of the best organized and most effective anti-war forces have impeachment as part of their program, like United For Peace & Justice and Veterans For Peace, so I may seem to be splitting hairs here, but I think not.

Tackling the “Order of Magnitude Gap"

My point is a simple one, but one that bears repeating. It is Iraq that’s the main issue among the people of this country. Ending the war should be the main focus for progressives and activists. The way to do that is to face up to the “order of magnitude gap" we face: 60% of the people may want the war over, but perhaps 6% has ever done anything about it—worn a button, signed a petition, stood in a vigil, called a Senator’s office, voted in a referendum, anything. We aren’t going to get the whole 60%, but reaching solidly into the two digit range will make a huge difference.

That calls for concentrating on outreach, for organizing at a very local level, and for keeping the threshold of entry low so people who are against the war don’t sense barriers when we encourage them to act against the war. This is the idea behind, for instance, the Iraq Moratorium, scheduled to kick off September 21.

If the big issue is the war, that means keeping the demand to end it front and center in our agenda. The main strategic target of the movement is the Bush/Cheney gang who started the war and are glad to continue it indefinitely. But if other folks insist on gluing themselves to the target, and this includes elected Democrats, that’s no reason for us to hold our fire. And our tactics must be flexible, including ones that isolate and put maximum pressure on any Democrats who don’t dare to stand against the war when crucial votes come before Congress.

The efforts of the anti-war movement may lead to impeachment. Or they may not. They may well lead to a Democratic blowout in 2008. Or they may not.

But they will lead to a more rapid end to a criminal war which continues to be a catastrophe of almost unimaginable magnitude for the people of Iraq and has done incalculable and permanent damage to our own country.

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Your Pentagon Iraq War Room PR $$ at work

Those Sunni insurgents we’ve been giving a shitload of arms to be nice to us and shoot the guys we call Al Qaeda in Iraq? They’ve been rebranded as “concerned local nationals.”

“These are patriots who have come forward and have joined the security process. They are working with my soldiers and they are working with the Iraqi security forces,” Col. David Sutherland said.

Hell, why don’t we just call them the Sunni Department of the Iraqi national police force while we’re at it?

There's more: "Your Pentagon Iraq War Room PR $$ at work" >>

It’s All Good

“Sarah, if the people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched.” - Bush 41 to reporter Sarah McClendon, Dec. 1992

Hannah Arendt would’ve described this administration’s increasingly Byzantine dealings as “the inanity of evil.” There’s really no other phrase to describe it.

In describing the nondescript, guilt-free testimony of Adolph Eichmann to an Israeli court as “the banality of evil”, Arendt gave future generations a cautionary tale in miniature as to how easily we can coexist with evil even when it rears its innocuous-looking, balding head. However, she unintentionally left us unprepared for another kind of evil that’s comfortably nestled like a camouflaged snake in what passes for American culture: The inanity of evil.



By this, one can infer that the current administration runs like a crippled Ratso Rizzo in a universally-inhabited dream world of shifting sand, where traction, grace or a step is never lost and bad never happens or, at worst, is casually acknowledged and pre-emptively written off. Indeed, George W. Bush has become quite adept at neutralizing current and future criticism of the war in Iraq by coldly predicting that US casualties will be heavy in the month of August and that’s merely the cost of doing war.

But that’s but one of the many Protean rationales and objectives that one could not have predicted from an administration and army of flacks and drumbeaters who’d assured us in 2003 that US troop casualties would be kept to a bare minimum, that Iraqi civilians would be spared from senseless destruction ("the sheer humanity" gushed Rumsfeld) due to the quasi-divine level of technology of our laser-guided missiles and smart bombs.

Then, after being told to be patient while we await the good news from Gen. Petraeus this September, we were then told not to raise our expectations or expect too much from the man who'd said from the outset that the surge "had a one in four chance of suceeding." The turnaround time from lofty promises to lowered expectations is getting alarmingly more brief.

The most disturbing aspect of this war is not merely the constantly metamorphosing impetuses for invading and occupying Iraq but that the administration never makes it a point to remind us that these expectations have been lowered, that they’d once made pie-in-the-sky promises that Iraq’s war would cost one billion dollars and would be paid for by their own oil revenue, that we could mop up the place with 135,000 troops and be back home by the 4th of July 2003, that we’d be greeted as liberators, that democracy would take root and become the political gold standard for the Middle East.

This constant revisionist mindset, accompanied by the paternal invocation of, “Trust us, we know what we’re doing” fits like a velvet glove over an iron fist with a criminally deferential press and an American “culture”, for want of a better word, that embraces the catchphrase of, “It’s all good.”

But “it’s all good” is in itself a complacent Republican sentiment that was expressed nearly 300 years ago when Alexander Pope wrote in the “Essay on Man, Epistle I,”

All Nature is but Art unknown to thee;
All chance direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

And to bring that point home, the Bush administration and Fox News seem to be inappropriately humping that other delightful Pope axiom of a little learning being a dangerous thing.

The press gets that when they nervously gulp and ask Bush or any senior administration official in a quavering voice questions such as, “If major combat operations were over by May 2003, then why do we need a surge?” Or, “How can the American people continue to believe that you’re aware of what’s going on and aren’t living in a constant state of denial?” Such impertinent questions are almost invariably responded to as an impatient father would after having his values questioned by his increasingly self-aware 12 year-old.

And an administration that depends entirely on Orwellian revisionism, aided greatly by a White House press pool full of Winston Smiths all too eager to forget the failed objectives, discredited rationales and once-lofty expectations doesn’t like an electorate that can think for itself and has lengthening memories. It’s notable that the people who are most conspicuously the targets of partisan backlash are the ones who are finally getting organized and have the power to mobilize like-minded people: Liberal, progressive bloggers.

It is impossible to imagine a political landscape without political bloggers, upon whom an increasingly large percentage of online news consumers are depending for an explicated, factual version of current events, as well as upon Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It’s more than a sad and even alarming state of affairs for democracy when we have to depend upon part-time political pundits who, at most, daily attract 1-2% of the national population and comedians on the Comedy Channel for their news.

Yet it’s equally difficult for many distracted Americans to remember a day when we were told again and again that we were neutralizing a mushroom-clouded terrorist threat west of Iran and replacing it with milk and honey. And this is why the netroots is more relevant and necessary than ever.

Because not enough of the electorate has come to grips with the fact that we have failed in every one of our stated objectives (and even the ancillary ones, such as bringing democracy to Iraq, a nation deeply divided among three warring factions, not the most auspicious seedbed for Jeffersonian democracy) except in one notable instance:

Enriching the corporate sector, something forcefully promised by Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon briefing room on September 10th, 2001. It’s easy to view Iraq as a screaming success if you’re Eric Prince in the Great Dismal Swamp or the man who’s increasingly recognized by our Rip Van Winkle electorate as the sinister Phantom of Halliburton’s boardroom, Dick Cheney.

The same thing could be said of post-Katrina New Orleans. Blackwater USA wound up making a tidy $73,000,000 for their “work” in New Orleans while their mercenaries ambled around the French Quarter complaining to the press about making “only” $350 a day, a little over half what they made in Iraq, courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public. And New Orleans’ reconstruction has been bogged down in red tape at the municipal, state and especially the federal level, yet Halliburton still rakes in billions from the glacial cleanup and gets tax breaks from the SBA for qualifying as a small business (because Halliburton doesn’t ordinarily take on contracts such as post-disaster cleanup, which only beggars the question, “Why give it to them, in the first place?”).

If Hannah Arendt were alive today, she would surely characterize this cast of criminals who would call the sky green if Keith Olbermann or Michael Moore said it was blue, as the inanity of evil.

And we cannot say that we weren’t warned years ago when Karl Rove told Ron Suskind (and it would’ve surely been Bush’s Brain, since this quote is pure Rove),

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

The sad part is, when the observant among us see how more or less successful is the new smear campaign against Iran, it's becoming increasingly obvious that we’re not even studying.

There's more: "It’s All Good" >>

Cry me a river, Michael O’Hanlon

I won’t eat up too much space here on his , puerile response to critics of his and Ken Pollack’s original op-ed saying everything is hunky-dory in Iraq.

I will quote one comment, though:

Unfortunately, much of the blogosphere and other media outlets have emphasized the wrong question, challenging the integrity of anyone who dares to express politically incorrect views about Iraq. (My emphasis)

His views aren’t politically correct to the Bush Administration that he and Ken Pollack try to give intellectual props to, every chance they get.

And, this bullshit that somehow, after hunkering down in the Green Zone in Baghdad for a week, he and Pollack are somehow “daring,” is ludicrous.

I’ve said more than once that Brookings is NOT a liberal think tank. It could prove otherwise by canning people like O’Hanlon.

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"I don't want to be here any more."

The happy-talk coming out of aWol's mouth is not cutting it with those who are actually sacrificing and being sacrificed. In fact, they are downright disdainful. last month, in a dining hall at a base south of Baghdad, aWol was speechifyin' on a big-screen teevee and the soldiers didn't even look up from their chicken and mashed potatoes.

"I don't see any progress. Just us getting killed," said Spc. Yvenson Tertulien, one of those in the dining hall in Yousifiya, 10 miles south of Baghdad, as Bush's speech aired last month. "I don't want to be here anymore."

The frustration and sagging morale is palpable, and it is being expressed in overt statements and in ranting blog posts like this one: "This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasboard of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second," a soldier in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, wrote in an Aug. 7 post on his blog, Army of Dude.

The suicide rate in the Army is at the highest level in 23 years. The evidence is even in the latrines. Someone posted the Army's "help cards" listing nine warning signs for suicide in the stalls. One of the cards had seven of the boxes checked. Of the 99 suicides committed by Army personnel last year, 27 of them took place in Iraq. A mental health survey released in May revealed that 45% of the soldiers interviewed ranked morale as low or very low, and only seven percent ranked it as high or very high.

There are two faces to the occupation of Iraq. There is the reality, which the Soldiers and Marines are facing and dealing with daily, and then there is the face that is shown to the public. With support for continuing the occupation of Iraq at about 30% at home, they dare not show the reality, or that remaining support would crumble.

It is depressing and horrifying and I could rant for pages. In fact, I have, as you know full well if you have read this site...so to close, am going to let the soldier/blogger Alex, from Frisco Texas, have the last word:

"The only person I know who believed Iraq was improving was killed by a sniper in May."

There's more: ""I don't want to be here any more."" >>

Iraq Isn't Working Out So Well

And of course the fact that in invading Iraq Bush fulfilled Osama bin Laden's wishes might have something to do with that, so... it only makes sense to avoid facing reality and repeat the same kind of sheer idiocy on a much bigger scale and attack Iran as soon as possible:

In an effort to build congressional and Pentagon support for military options against Iran, the Bush administration has shifted from its earlier strategy of building a case based on an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program to one invoking improvised explosive devices (IEDs) purportedly manufactured in Iran that are killing US soldiers in Iraq.

According to officials - including two former Central Intelligence Agency case officers with experience in the Middle East - the administration believes that by focusing on the alleged ties between IEDs and Iran, they can link the Iranian government directly to attacks on US forces in Iraq.

One former CIA case officer

who served in the Middle East even suggested that politically framing the Iranians for its own failures in Iraq would allow the Bush administration to avoid accountability, as well as providing a casus belli for an attack.

The Bush Administration "can say it's [the Iranians'] fault we are losing the war in Iraq and that would be a convenient out for their failed policy," the officer said Monday.

The Iranians "have declared war against the US by sabotaging the war on terror is how they might sell it. I would not be surprised to next hear of Al Qaeda-Iranian connections because these people don't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi'a."

There were times,

huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that [Donald] Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.
...
He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers -- all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.
...
For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Of course, if word got out too far that Iraqis trying to take back their country were buying American made land mines and rocket-launchers, the Bush regime might have a more difficult time propagandizing about IEDs purportedly manufactured in Iran being used against American troops in Iraq.

There's more: "Iraq Isn't Working Out So Well" >>

Coming up next: the exciting new "Disaster!" spin-off!

Recently, Robert Baer, ex-CIA officer and now TIME.com's intelligence columnist, caused a stir by writing that

[r]eports that the Bush Administration will put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list can be read in one of two ways: it's either more bluster or, ominously, a wind-up for a strike on Iran. Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the IRGC, maybe within the next six months. And they think that as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's nuclear facilities. An awe and shock campaign, lite, if you will.

Baer notes the claim that only a nation-state is capable of producing the deadly explosive formed projectiles, or EFPs. That would seem to be belied by the fact that two years ago intelligence officials were pointing to the existence of training materials describing how to make improvised versions of the charges, but never mind; Baer doesn't endorse the claim, he just reports it, admittedly without rebuttal or comment.

The point here is that Baer quotes an administration official as saying

"IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this Administration. There will be an attack on Iran."

Interestingly, however, McClatchy newspapers also reported on the idea of declaring the Revolutionary Guard "a foreign terrorist organization." Doing so, it noted, would mark the first time that a military unit of a national government was declared a terrorist group. It would certainly be destructive: at best inflammatory and almost certainly putting an end to any hope for US-Iran negotiations. But that report also suggested that Condoleeza Rice was behind the move and that

State Department officials and foreign diplomats see Rice's push for the declaration against the Revolutionary Guards as an effort to blunt arguments by Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies for air strikes on Iran. By making the declaration, they feel, Rice can strike out at a key Iranian institution without resorting to military action while still pushing for sanctions in the United Nations.

That is, rather than being advanced within the internal White House struggle as a basis to attack Iran, it's being pushed as a way to head off an attack by upping the ante in a way that would allow for other sanctions besides war. However,

[p]artisans of military force argue that Rice's strategy has failed to change Tehran's behavior.

So the push for war, lead by the ghoulish, bloodthirsty Veep, continues. The real danger here, and something of which I'm sure "The Big" Dick is aware, is that

"[t]he coercion ... undermines diplomacy. And once diplomacy is undermined, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In other words, if McClatchy is right and it's an attempt by Rice to head off a direct strike, it may well do so in the short run only to make one more likely, even certain, in the longer run by creating a situation in which even those within the adminsitration who do not want to attack Iran come to feel that they must accede to it because the US couldn't not attack without losing that "credibility" in which they place so much stock. Yes, that is an astonishingly amoral position but still one likely to be adopted by "realistic" foreign policy advisers both in an out of the White House, people to who morality is a convenience, something nice to have as a frill, but not a guiding concern.

That situation of having to defend "credibility" is already being created by the Bushites:

The Bush administration has been engaging Iran in a increasingly strident war of words since the spring, when the Bush administration demanded tougher U.N. sanctions over Iran's nuclear energy program. ...

Recently, the administration has stepped up the rhetoric, accusing Iran of providing Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq with particularly deadly roadside bombs that have killed dozens of U.S. service members.

In fact, the military has now gotten very specific, according to another McClatchy report:

For the first time, the U.S. military said on Sunday that Iranian soldiers are in Iraq training insurgents to attack American forces.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a top U.S. commander who is in charge of a large swath of Iraq south of Baghdad, believes there are about 50 members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps in his battlefield area, military spokeswoman Maj. Alayne Conway said.

The report also said that US military officials specifically named Muqtada al Sadr's so-called Mahdi Army (which isn't really an army, more one of the numerous militias; about every political party in Iraq has one) as the recipient of Iranian weapons.

And what's more, Baer writes that

there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over.

They're aiding our enemies. They're supplying terrorists, in fact they are terrorists. They're gonna get The Bomb. We'll be seen as liberators. My god, they didn't even have to change the script. These are deeply warped people.

There's more: "Coming up next: the exciting new "Disaster!" spin-off!" >>

We now return you to your regularly scheduled "Disaster!"

So hey, guess what? Things are looking up in Iraq! Yes! The president has been vindicated and the naysayers vanquished! So much so that, the Washington Post said on Wednesday,

Democratic leaders in Congress [who] had planned to use August recess to raise the heat on Republicans to break with President Bush on the Iraq war ... have been forced to recalibrate their own message in the face of recent positive signs on the security front....

For example,

"We've begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Anbar province, it's working," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Monday.

"My assessment is that if we put an additional 30,000 of our troops into Baghdad, that's going to quell some of the violence in the short term," Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) echoed in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. "I don't think there's any doubt that as long as U.S. troops are present that they are going to be doing outstanding work."

So, yeah, it's going better and better! The "surge" is surging! Just look at Anbar Province! Of course, that had nothing to do with the "surge," but never mind! Violence is down! Of course, that's largely due to the fact that the military keeps changing how it reports it, so

[d]espite the military's assertion that violence has dropped significantly since the surge began in February, statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers show that while the number of bodies found in the streets has dropped, the overall level of violence is unchanged.

And of course there's the fact that, as laid out in today's New York Times,

[t]he number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves. ...

Statistics collected by one of the two humanitarian groups, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, indicate that the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000, since the buildup started in February. ...

The findings also indicate that the sectarian tension the troops were meant to defuse is still intense in many places in Iraq. Sixty-three percent of the Iraqis surveyed by the United Nations said they had fled their neighborhoods because of direct threats to their lives, and more than 25 percent because they had been forcibly removed from their homes.

Get that? A big part of the reason for any "decline" in sectarian violence is that it's succeeding. Neighborhoods are being ethnically cleansed and isolated.

But never mind! Who cares? Certainly not us! Because we know things are getting better! Why, just look at the new National Intelligence Estimate, released yesterday: It says security will improve over the next six to 12 months! Of course, it says the improvement will be "modest" and that violence will remain high, but just you never mind! Things will be great in just, um, how long, guys?

The U.S military will begin pulling out the additional troops it sent to Iraq as part of the so-called surge next spring and will have completed their withdrawal by next August, [Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno,] the No. 2 American commander in Iraq said Friday.

Oh, so a year from now troop levels will be back to where they were last December? Uh, well, okay, sure! And the rest of them?

[On Sunday, Rear Adm. Mark] Fox, [a U.S. military spokesman,] said he didn't know how large an Iraqi security presence is needed before U.S. troops can start pulling out of Iraq or how long that will take.

Determining an appropriate security force size is "a work in progress, quite frankly," Fox said.

Oh. Uh.... Hmmm. Well, do you have any idea how long this is going to take?

Gen. George Casey - the former top commander in Iraq and now the Army chief of staff — declared that Iraq will be a remarkable country “in a decade or so” if we maintain the U.S. occupation. ...

Casey’s comments echo those of the current top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) disclosed that on her recent visit to Iraq, Petraeus told her that the U.S. “will be in Iraq in some way for 9 or 10 years.”

:cough:

Yeah, things are going great.

Well, but certainly the Democrats will ultimately save us from this, won't they? Tell us, Bloomberg News!

Senator Hillary Clinton warned Democrats not to "oversell" plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, setting a cautious tone on the war that was echoed by the party's two other leading presidential candidates.

Clinton and her main competitors for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards, agreed in a debate [Sunday] morning that pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq can't be accomplished in just a few months and that any withdrawal must be balanced by security concerns. ...

Biden led the other Democrats in disagreeing [with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's six-month timetable]. "It's time to start to level with the American people," Biden said. "If we leave Iraq and we leave it in chaos, there'll be regional war. The regional war will engulf us for a generation."

Clinton said Biden is "absolutely right," cautioning that "this is going to be very dangerous and very difficult' and "a lot of people don't like to hear that." ...

Obama said Biden is right and that "this is not going to be a simple operation."

Damn.

(To be fair, Edwards did not oppose a deadline, he said rather than Richardson's was too optimistic, suggesting something more like 10 months, sort of splitting the political difference between a firm deadline and "when the security situation improves." But more importantly, none of the big three call for all troops to be withdrawn, just "most" troops or "combat" troops.)

Meanwhile, the WaPo says that advisers to Clinton and Obama said their statements in support of the reports of improvement on the ground were

political as well as substantive statements, part of a broader Democratic effort to frame Petraeus's report before it is released next month by preemptively acknowledging some military success in the region.

I suppose that looks like smart politics and perhaps it is if you're thinking of positioning for the 2008 election rather than ending the war, but that kind of cynical triangulation is part of what brought us to this turn in the first place. Why they think it's going to work any better now is beyond me - except, that is, they figure that the real antiwar electorate will decide it has nowhere else to go than whoever the Dummycrat candidate is so there's no risk from repeatedly slapping that electorate in the face.

Okay, but leave all that aside. Because at least now, with all that's happened of late, we finally know where to place the blame. Nope, not on the Shrub gang, panting for war with Iraq from the git-go. And not on the intelligence community that told the panting mouth-breathers what they wanted to hear. Nor on the Congress that kept - and keeps - going "uh-huh, yep, whatever you say." And certainly not on our illegal, immoral invasion and occupation of a foreign nation which has plunged it into sectarian violence, civil war, chaos, and death, a nation now awash with American-supplied weapons, including about 110,000 AK-47 rifles and 80,000 pistols the Government Accountability Office says cannot be accounted for. (That's on top of the literally hundreds of thousands of small arms that can't be traced to a particular owner and the weapons taken from unsecured Iraqi caches in the wake of the invasion.) Not on any of the stupidity, the inanity, or the cruelty. Nope, to the great relief of our politicians and pundits, they're all exonerated, every one. The real fault, we now know for sure, the real blame for the entire mess lies with the Iraqi government.

Declaring the government of Iraq "non-functional," the influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said yesterday that Iraq's parliament should oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his cabinet if they are unable to forge a political compromise with rival factions in a matter of days[, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday].

"I hope the parliament will vote the Maliki government out of office and will have the wisdom to replace it with a less sectarian and more unifying prime minister and government," Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said after a three-day trip to Iraq and Jordan. ...

Levin's comments to reporters followed the release of a joint statement with the second-ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, Sen. John W. Warner (Va.), which was pessimistic about Iraq's political future. The statement referred to a round of recent meetings between Maliki, who is backed by President Bush, and Iraqi political leaders as "the last chance for this government to solve the Iraqi political crisis."

And that in turn was followed up by the statement of

Hillary Rodham Clinton[, who] said Wednesday the Iraqi Parliament should replace embattled Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with a "less divisive and more unifying figure" to reconcile political and religious factions.

That according to MSNBC.

After all that, the NIE finding that

[t]he Iraqi government is strained by rampant violence, deep sectarian differences among its political parties and stymied leadership [and that] "To date, Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively,"

even its prediction that the government "will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months," seemed like an afterthought.

In fact, though, it must be said that things really are bad in the Maliki government. It's so bad that Juan Cole wrote yesterday that

[a] rumor is circulating among well-connected and formerly high-level Iraqi bureaucrats in exile in places like Damascus that a military coup is being prepared for Iraq. I received the following from a reliable, knowledgeable contact. There is no certitude that this plan can or will be implemented. That it is being discussed at high levels seems highly likely.

"There is serious talk of a military commission (majlis `askari) to take over the government. The parties would be banned from holding positions, and all the ministers would be technocrats, so to speak... [The writer indicates that attempts have been made to recruit cabinet members from the ranks of expatriate technocrats.]

"The six-member board or commission would be composed on non-political former military personnel who are presently not part of the government OR the military establishment, such as it is in Iraq at the moment. It is said that the Americans are supporting this behind the scenes.

"The plan includes a two-year period during which political parties would not be permitted to be part of the government, but instead would prepare and strengthen the parties for an election which would not have lists, but real people running for real seats. The two year period would be designed to take control of security and restore infrastructure.

"...[I]t is another [desperate plan], but one which many many Iraqis will support, since they are sick of their country being pulled apart by the 'imports' - Maliki, Allawi, Jaafari et al. The military group is composed of internals, people who have the goal of securing the country even at the risk of no democracy, so they say."

(Brackets as per Cole's post.)

The bit about "the Americans are supporting this behind the scenes" gets some indirect support from former Democratic congressional staffer Brent Budowsky, who claimed recently that

a growing faction close to President Bush privately favors a new “Iraqi strongman” to establish some form of authoritarian rule.

If this is true, perhaps it's just an example of things coming back into fashion: In May 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, at a time when at least some folks knew booting out Saddam Hussein would result in "a quagmire," a staff report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee quoted an NSC aide as saying “Our policy is to get rid of Saddam Hussein, not his regime.” The goal, that is, was to provoke a military coup that would replace one dictator who had become unreliable with another who would be more friendly.

Since Bush just dipped into history to cite both World Wars, Korea, and even Vietnam to urge "stay the course," why shouldn't he look to the first attack on Iraq for advice on what to do now after the second?

But, you ask, how can it be a quagmire when things are improving - yes indeedy, improving, I say! - on the security front? Well, how about the fact that in talking about removing the troops involved in the escalation - excuuuse me, "surge" - General Odierno

didn't comment on what might happen after the additional U.S. forces leave. U.S. officials have claimed that the surge plan has cut violence, but they've also expressed concern that the violence could resume once U.S. troops are reduced because there's been no move at reconciliation between rival Sunni and Shiite groups.

And the NIE

warns against scaling back the mission of U.S. forces. Analysts found that changing the U.S. military's mission from its current focus - countering insurgents and stabilizing the country - in favor of supporting Iraqi forces and stopping terrorists would hurt the security gains of the last six months.

In other words, they're saying that the very "successes" and "gains" they're bragging about have actually tied us down even more to what we're already doing - tied us down for, if others are to be believed, another decade. If that's not a quagmire, what the hell would be?

This concludes this episode of Disaster! Coming up soon, new episodes arising from these developments:

- August 20: Members of the Mehdi Army confirm to The Independent (UK) that they received training in Lebanon from Hizbollah,

[A] Mehdi Army fighter, a 26-year-old who asked to be identified as Abu Nasser, said he and 100 other group members travelled to Lebanon in December 2005. "They didn't teach us anything about suicide bombings, they showed us real tactics and taught our snipers," he said. Speaking in Tufa in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, the head of the Mehdi Army, admitted to "formal links" with Hizbollah.

- August 20: An upsurge in violence in northeast Iraq, on the Iranian border, has Iraqi Kurdish officials expressing "deepening concern," according to The Guardian (UK).

Jabar Yawar, a deputy minister in the Kurdistan regional government, said four days of intermittent shelling by Iranian forces had hit mountain villages high up on the Iraqi side of the border, wounding two women, destroying livestock and property, and displacing about 1,000 people from their homes. Mr Yawer said there had also been intense fighting on the Iraqi border between Iranian forces and guerrillas of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), an armed Iranian Kurdish group that is stepping up its campaign for Kurdish rights against the theocratic regime in Tehran.

Iran, which has recently sent tens of thousands of Revolutionary Guard troops to the area, calls PJAK terrorists and charges it is

sponsored and armed by the US to increase pressure on Iran.

On a recent visit to PJAK camps in the Qandil mountains the Guardian saw no evidence of American weaponry.

- August 22: The heat is rising in more than one way in Iraq. AFP says that

[f]or war-weary residents of Baghdad fighting sweltering heat in near-blackout conditions, the message on Wednesday from Electricity Minister Karim Wahid was grim - there won't be any relief this summer. Nor next summer. Nor even the one after.

"It will take another three to four years to fully rehabilitate the grid," Wahid told reporters in an air-conditioned room in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, while temperatures outside soared above 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit).

Much of the national power grid was destroyed during the US-led invasion in 2003, while insurgents, militias and thugs continue to vandalise infrastructure even as the government races to rehabilitate facilities, he said. ...

"We are reaching only 20 to 40 percent of Baghdad's needs," Wahid said, adding however that hospitals and essential services are receiving power 24 hours a day.

Baghdad residents complain that conditions are far worse than they can remember, with electricity reaching them just two or three hours a day - and sometimes not at all.

Not at all. Seems like an apt summation:

"I'll take 'Iraq' for $1000, Alex."

"The answer is, 'Not at all.'"

"What is how much has the US invasion really helped ordinary Iraqis?"

"Correct!"

There's more: "We now return you to your regularly scheduled "Disaster!"" >>

The Washington Consensus Of Iraq Reality Is Delusion

Recognition of the realities of the situation that has been created in Iraq is all well and good and important, but... and it's a big but.

This from Jay Ackroyd's post at TPMCafe really bothers me:

If you saw Taylor Marsh at YKos, you heard a clear delineation of this DC consensus. This isn't a matter of reflexive use of force as the only solution by crazy neocons. This is a recognition that Iraq is a failed state without a sovereign government and without the capacity to defend itself. The US Congress passes resolutions declaring what laws Iraq must pass, while the Pentagon makes all military decisions. Iraq's government plays no role other than certifying US policy. And, these days, we're hearing talk of changing the government. That talk is taking place in Washington. And there can be no freely elected, sovereign government in Iraq, because, in the Washington consensus, those bases are more important than a reprentative government--and no represesentative government would permit military bases defending Israel and threatening Iran.

This leaves the Democratic candidates in a very difficult position. They are part of this Washington consensus.

Iraq is a mess. That's undeniable reality. It's not going to be fixed easily. I think that's also undeniable reality.

Taylor Marsh is describing another, separate reality, however. The Washington Consensus. Which appears to distill down to the attitude that Washington must make the decisions for Iraq, almost as if Iraqis are incompetent children who cannot manage their own affairs. And I see nearly no recognition, if any at all, even grudging recognition, that is is Iraqis who are going to make the decisions. As they are doing now, successfully or not from their point of view.

The whole of the "recognition of reality" by the Washington consensus described in Ackroyd's post seems to me to be excuses and justifications for imperialism/colonialism/control of Iraq and the countrys resources, regardless of and without concern for what Iraqis want.

One of the things we know Iraqis want is to NOT be occupied by American military.

Every time Iraqis kill another American soldier, it is, in my view, a "request" to Washington to withdraw all the troops. Some of the puppet government of Iraq would deny that I think. But they are a puppet government, and a large percentage of the social groups in Iraq are rejecting that puppet government and doing their damnedest to force it to collapse.

Iraqis don't want US troops in their country, and they don't want a US puppet government running their country for the benefit of America. I think that's also undeniable reality.

The "Washington consensus" is focused only on what the "Washington consensus" wants.

I don't think Iraqis, in the main, care in the least what the "Washington consensus" wants, and I think that's also undeniable reality.

I think that if there are any "benchmarks" to be set or to be met, or "decisions" made by anyone about what is or is not "progress" for Iraq, rightfully those benchmarks and those decisions should be being set and made by Iraqis. Required benchmarks to be met by Washington for the "right" and the "privilege" of being allowed to stay and "help". And I believe now that in actual fact that is exactly what is now happening in Iraq.

Both the rate, with upwards of 10,000 Iraqi deaths from foreign terrorism each month now, and the total number of Iraqi deaths from foreign terrorism, are huge problems, that are probably creating hundreds of thousands of people who absolutely hate America and would like to kill as many Americans as possible.

Saba Ali Ihsaan, Baghdad, Irak

The American "surge" as with everything else they have done is a failure...

All I care about is that your country has its troops in my land raping its people, raping its resources, slaughtering our children, and defiling our Holy Places...

The Americans in Irak are reflecting their culture. Racist, callow, shallow, and seemingly unable read a map, it's just that they are a little more honest, a little bit more openly barbaric about it.

There is only one measure of progress that matters in Irak and that is the progress in chewing the invader forces into pieces and then spitting them out. Progress on that is excellent.

They came here as predators and now they are prey. The only thing an American understands is force, we sand nig*ers know a thing or two about that.

I think that, for good or for ill for the people of Iraq, it is not up to anyone in the US to decide for Iraqis what is or is not "progress".

To metaphorize a bit, since we destroyed the infrastructure of the house before we started the fire and made no effort to rebuild it, once we stop throwing fuel in and get out of the way before we are thrown out of the way, someone else will rebuild it.

It probably won't look anything like what we'd like it to when they're done, but too bad.

It's their business, in other words. Not America's. Regardless of how often the "national security interests" line is uttered.

The U.S. presence in Iraq, and the U.S. refusal to leave, is the problem.

It is in Americas interest obviously, to NOT have a failed state of anarchy in Iraq, and to not have Iraq aligned with Iran.

But that can't be forced on Iraq. Iraqis have the right to, and will, decide for themselves.

And they are.

All that Washingtons "help" has ever done for Iraq is make the situation worse. Continually. Never better. Only worse.

Iraq will get fixed. Eventually.

But I think it will not be republicans or democrats, or even the U.S. that fixes it. If Iraq can be fixed it will be Iraqis that fix it. They will, and do, set the benchmarks. I think not recognizing that is delusion.

When Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah opened the Arab Summit in Riyadh [...] speaking about Iraq as a land where "blood flows between brothers in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation and hateful sectarianism," he offended many policymakers in Washington. But the statement was only one signal among many that, in the face of explosive conflicts that the Bush administration has caused or failed to contain, the king is out to assert Saudi Arabia's role as an independent leader in the region. The goals--to stabilize Iraq, build an Arab-Israeli peace and contain the growing influence of Iran--are the same as Washington's. But the means to those ends are very different. In an exclusive interview, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal sat down with NEWSWEEK's Christopher Dickey to trace the dramatic changes in his country's policy over the last year.

What will fix Iraq is not staying there and fantasizing that continuing to do the same things that are causing the problems there will somehow magically begin to solve the problems.

What will fix Iraq is not "doing" something.

What will fix Iraq is "not doing" something.

Not that I expect it will ever happen, but not funding the occupation any longer and complete and total withdrawal of all U.S. military from the country is what will begin fixing Iraq.

Along with massive reparations paid to the Iraqi people, perhaps equal to the trillion dollars spent to destroy their country.

There's more: "The Washington Consensus Of Iraq Reality Is Delusion" >>