Friday, July 01, 2005
The Mess that is Iraq
Iraq: A bloody mess
by Patrick Cockburn
30 June 2005
A year ago the supposed handover of power by the US occupation authority to an Iraqi interim government led by Iyad Allawi was billed as a turning point in the violent history of post-Saddam Iraq.
It has turned out to be no such thing. Most of Iraq is today a bloody no-man's land beset by ruthless insurgents, savage bandit gangs, trigger-happy US patrols and marauding government forces.
On 28 June 2004 Mr Allawi was all smiles. "In a few days, Iraq will radiate with stability and security," he promised at the handover ceremony. That mood of optimism did not last long.
On Sunday the American Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, told a US news program that the ongoing insurgency could last "five, six, eight, ten, twelve years".
Yesterday in London, after meeting Tony Blair, the new Iraqi Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, tried to be more upbeat, commenting: "I think two years will be enough and more than enough to establish security".
Tonight President George Bush will make his most important address since the invasion, speaking to troops at the US army base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He is expected to seek to assure increasingly sceptical Americans that he has a plan to prevail in Iraq, and that the US is not trapped in a conflict as unwinnable as the one in Vietnam, three decades ago.
The news now from Iraq is only depressing. All the roads leading out of the capital are cut. Iraqi security and US troops can only get through in heavily armed convoys. There is a wave of assassinations of senior Iraqi officers based on chillingly accurate intelligence. A deputy police chief of Baghdad was murdered on Sunday. A total of 52 senior Iraqi government or religious figures have been assassinated since the handover. In June 2004 insurgents killed 42 US soldiers; so far this month 75 have been killed.
The "handover of power" last June was always a misnomer. Much real power remained in the hands of the US. Its 140,000 troops kept the new government in business. Mr. Allawi's new cabinet members became notorious for the amount of time they spent out of the country. Safely abroad they often gave optimistic speeches predicting the imminent demise of the insurgency.
Despite this the number of Iraqi military and police being killed every month has risen from 160 at the handover to 219 today.
There were two further supposed turning points over the past year. The first was the capture by US Marines of the rebel stronghold of Fallujah last November after a bloody battle which left most of the city of 300,000 people in ruins. In January there was the general election in which the Shia and Kurds triumphed.
Both events were heavily covered by the international media. But such is the danger for television and newspaper correspondents in Iraq that their capacity to report is more and more limited. The fall of Fallujah did not break the back of the resistance. Their best fighters simply retreated to fight again elsewhere. Many took refuge in Baghdad. At the same time as the insurgents lost Fallujah they captured most of Mosul, a far larger city. Much of Sunni Iraq remained under their sway.
At the handover of power the number of foreign fighters in the insurgency was estimated in the "low hundreds". That figure has been revised up to at least 1,000 and the overall figure for the number of insurgents is put at 16,000.
The election may have been won by the Shia and Kurds but it was boycotted by the five million Sunnis and they are the core of the rebellion. It took three months to put together a new government as Sunni, Shia, Kurds and Americans competed for their share of the cake. For all their declarations about Iraqi security, the US wanted to retain as much power in its own hands as it could. When the Shia took over the interior ministry its intelligence files were hastily transferred to the US headquarters in the Green Zone.
To most ordinary Iraqis in Baghdad it is evident that life over the past year has been getting worse. The insurgents seem to have an endless supply of suicide bombers whose attacks ensure a permanent sense of threat. In addition the necessities of life are becoming more difficult to obtain. At one moment last winter there were queues of cars outside petrol stations several miles long.
The sense of fear in Baghdad is difficult to convey. Petrol is such a necessity because people need to pick up their children from school because they are terrified of them being kidnapped. Parents mob the doors of schools and swiftly become hysterical if they cannot find their children. Doctors are fleeing the country because so many have been held for ransom, some tortured and killed because their families could not raise the money.
Homes in Baghdad are currently getting between six and eight hours' electricity a day. Nothing has improved at the power stations since the hand-over of security a year ago. In a city where the temperature yesterday was 40C, people swelter without air conditioning because the omnipresent small generators do not produce enough current to keep them going. In recent weeks there has also been a chronic shortage of water.
Some Iraqis have benefited. Civil servants and teachers are better paid, though prices are higher. But Iraqis in general hoped that their standard of living would improve dramatically after the fall of Saddam Hussein and it has not.
Adding to the sense of fear in Baghdad is the growth of sectarianism, the widening gulf between Sunni and Shia. Shia mosques come under attack from bombers. Members of both communities are found murdered beside the road, in escalating rounds of tit-for-tat killings.
The talks between US officials and some resistance groups revealed in the past few days probably does not mean very much for the moment. The fanatical Islamic and militant former Baathists and nationalists who make up the cutting edge of insurgency are not in the mood to compromise. They are also very fragmented. But the talks may indicate a growing sense among US military and civilian officials that they cannot win this war.
Patrick Cockburn was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting in recognition of his writing on Iraq over the past year
by Patrick Cockburn
30 June 2005
A year ago the supposed handover of power by the US occupation authority to an Iraqi interim government led by Iyad Allawi was billed as a turning point in the violent history of post-Saddam Iraq.
It has turned out to be no such thing. Most of Iraq is today a bloody no-man's land beset by ruthless insurgents, savage bandit gangs, trigger-happy US patrols and marauding government forces.
On 28 June 2004 Mr Allawi was all smiles. "In a few days, Iraq will radiate with stability and security," he promised at the handover ceremony. That mood of optimism did not last long.
On Sunday the American Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, told a US news program that the ongoing insurgency could last "five, six, eight, ten, twelve years".
Yesterday in London, after meeting Tony Blair, the new Iraqi Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, tried to be more upbeat, commenting: "I think two years will be enough and more than enough to establish security".
Tonight President George Bush will make his most important address since the invasion, speaking to troops at the US army base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He is expected to seek to assure increasingly sceptical Americans that he has a plan to prevail in Iraq, and that the US is not trapped in a conflict as unwinnable as the one in Vietnam, three decades ago.
The news now from Iraq is only depressing. All the roads leading out of the capital are cut. Iraqi security and US troops can only get through in heavily armed convoys. There is a wave of assassinations of senior Iraqi officers based on chillingly accurate intelligence. A deputy police chief of Baghdad was murdered on Sunday. A total of 52 senior Iraqi government or religious figures have been assassinated since the handover. In June 2004 insurgents killed 42 US soldiers; so far this month 75 have been killed.
The "handover of power" last June was always a misnomer. Much real power remained in the hands of the US. Its 140,000 troops kept the new government in business. Mr. Allawi's new cabinet members became notorious for the amount of time they spent out of the country. Safely abroad they often gave optimistic speeches predicting the imminent demise of the insurgency.
Despite this the number of Iraqi military and police being killed every month has risen from 160 at the handover to 219 today.
There were two further supposed turning points over the past year. The first was the capture by US Marines of the rebel stronghold of Fallujah last November after a bloody battle which left most of the city of 300,000 people in ruins. In January there was the general election in which the Shia and Kurds triumphed.
Both events were heavily covered by the international media. But such is the danger for television and newspaper correspondents in Iraq that their capacity to report is more and more limited. The fall of Fallujah did not break the back of the resistance. Their best fighters simply retreated to fight again elsewhere. Many took refuge in Baghdad. At the same time as the insurgents lost Fallujah they captured most of Mosul, a far larger city. Much of Sunni Iraq remained under their sway.
At the handover of power the number of foreign fighters in the insurgency was estimated in the "low hundreds". That figure has been revised up to at least 1,000 and the overall figure for the number of insurgents is put at 16,000.
The election may have been won by the Shia and Kurds but it was boycotted by the five million Sunnis and they are the core of the rebellion. It took three months to put together a new government as Sunni, Shia, Kurds and Americans competed for their share of the cake. For all their declarations about Iraqi security, the US wanted to retain as much power in its own hands as it could. When the Shia took over the interior ministry its intelligence files were hastily transferred to the US headquarters in the Green Zone.
To most ordinary Iraqis in Baghdad it is evident that life over the past year has been getting worse. The insurgents seem to have an endless supply of suicide bombers whose attacks ensure a permanent sense of threat. In addition the necessities of life are becoming more difficult to obtain. At one moment last winter there were queues of cars outside petrol stations several miles long.
The sense of fear in Baghdad is difficult to convey. Petrol is such a necessity because people need to pick up their children from school because they are terrified of them being kidnapped. Parents mob the doors of schools and swiftly become hysterical if they cannot find their children. Doctors are fleeing the country because so many have been held for ransom, some tortured and killed because their families could not raise the money.
Homes in Baghdad are currently getting between six and eight hours' electricity a day. Nothing has improved at the power stations since the hand-over of security a year ago. In a city where the temperature yesterday was 40C, people swelter without air conditioning because the omnipresent small generators do not produce enough current to keep them going. In recent weeks there has also been a chronic shortage of water.
Some Iraqis have benefited. Civil servants and teachers are better paid, though prices are higher. But Iraqis in general hoped that their standard of living would improve dramatically after the fall of Saddam Hussein and it has not.
Adding to the sense of fear in Baghdad is the growth of sectarianism, the widening gulf between Sunni and Shia. Shia mosques come under attack from bombers. Members of both communities are found murdered beside the road, in escalating rounds of tit-for-tat killings.
The talks between US officials and some resistance groups revealed in the past few days probably does not mean very much for the moment. The fanatical Islamic and militant former Baathists and nationalists who make up the cutting edge of insurgency are not in the mood to compromise. They are also very fragmented. But the talks may indicate a growing sense among US military and civilian officials that they cannot win this war.
Patrick Cockburn was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting in recognition of his writing on Iraq over the past year
The Vietnam Solution
The Vietnam Solution
By Robert Dreyfuss
Tom Paine
30 June 2005
Comparisons between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are coming fast and furious now, so let's consider one more. There is an apt parallel between the way we got out of Vietnam and the way that we will get out of Iraq - sooner or later.
Public opinion is turning sharply against the war, even though mainstream Democrats and most Republicans are mostly sticking with the victory-in-Iraq strategy. The conditions in Iraq and here at home are strikingly similar to those we saw surrounding Vietnam at the end of the Johnson administration. Those looking for an exit strategy, take note.
In Vietnam, by the spring of 1968, it was clear to just about everyone - including our intelligence agencies - that the war was lost. The Tet Offensive made it obvious that the combined forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong weren't being defeated or decimated. The United States insisted that it would never talk directly or negotiate with the communist North and their allied partisans in South Vietnam, insisting that the quisling regime in Saigon was the lawful government. So the war dragged on for another five years, killing tens of thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese.
Finally, during 1972-1973, the United States did what it had previously said it wouldn't do: it essentially abandoned its puppet government in South Vietnam and began direct talks with the Vietnamese communists. The communists were magnanimous enough to give the United States a face-saving way out, rather than forcing Washington to admit that it was surrendering. And we left.
And today?
Once again, it is obvious to all - again, including our intelligence agencies - that the war in Iraq is lost. Once again, like the Tet Offensive, the recent wave of bloody assaults across Iraq has made it clear that the resistance, far from being in its "last throes," is not being defeated. Once again, a Nixon-like American administration is refusing to sue for peace. Though Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld has admitted that US authorities in Iraq have been conducting an on-again, off-again dialogue with some elements of the insurgency, it is not nearly enough. The United States is talking, but not negotiating - instead, it is trying to find a few disparate elements of the resistance in order to get them to support the US-installed Iraqi interim government. Such take-it-or-leave-it dialogues are doomed to failure, since all they can produce are a few more Sunni quislings who will immediately become targets of the insurgency themselves. For the most part, the United States continues to insist that all potential olive branches from the resistance be delivered to the offices of the interim (and utterly illegitimate) ersatz government in the modern-day Saigon that is Baghdad.
It is perfectly clear what the United States has to do. It must abandon its deformed offspring in Baghdad, the hapless regime of Shiite fanatics and Kurdish warlords, and pray that it can establish direct talks with the people it is fighting.
There is no other exit strategy.
As in Vietnam, it's likely - given the bull-headedness of the administration - that the United States won't seek the sort of face-saving deal that it struck to end the war in Vietnam for years. My guess is that it won't dawn on them until deep into 2007, when the imminence of the 2008 elections concentrates their minds wonderfully. But by then, the United States will have spent another $100 billion or more, lost at least 1,000 more men and women killed, and forced the death of another 30,000 or more Iraqis. To avoid that, it's time for the foreign policy establishment - the greybeards, the think-tankers, and above all, Howard Dean and the Democratic Senate leaders - to catch up with public opinion on Iraq. Why wait another two years? Why not do now what we are going to do anyway then?
Over the past two weeks, I've had extended conversations with former diplomats and intelligence officers about Iraq. To a man (and woman), they were pessimistic, and blackly so. Over the past 18 months, one of them told me, the intelligence community put out two National Intelligence Estimates on Iraq and an additional major supplement, all of which told the White House the truth: that the war in Iraq is not going well, and is likely to get worse. So the administration knows the truth, at least if they choose to believe their spies and analysts. (Of course, the work product of the spies and analysts may get worse if the new bosses - John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and Porter Goss, the CIA director - have their way. Negroponte, the US ambassador in Baghdad, spent his days penning happy-talk propaganda about how well the war was going, which got back to Secretary of State Colin Powell last year and almost, almost persuaded him that the war was winnable.) But, just as "intelligence and facts" were being fixed around policy in 2002, it appears that in 2005, the Bush administration is once again ignoring its intelligence community and choosing to portray the war as progressing along nicely.
Can the United States make a deal with the resistance now? The way do it would be through Amman, Jordan, where the king has myriad ties to the Sunni resistance, to the former Baathists, to tribal leaders, to Sunni businessmen, to the Iraqi clergy. If asked, King Abdullah of Jordan could host a peace conference along the lines of the Paris peace talks, where the United States and the Iraqi resistance would be the main players, and the fictional Iraqi government could attend if they were told, politely, to be quiet and listen.
Doing this would, admittedly, have a high degree of difficulty. First, it is not at all clear that the mostly Sunni resistance is ready to coalesce into a party ready for talks with the United States. Unlike Vietnam, there is no Hanoi-style central committee to run the show. "It may be too early for the resistance to come together like that," said one former US intelligence official with wide-ranging experience in the Middle East. "But if they are, Amman would be the right place to try it." To make it work, the United States would have to induce a wide spectrum of the insurgent leadership to come into the peace-talks umbrella, from the Sunni tribal leaders to the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Association of Muslim Scholars to the former Baathist military men to the community-based street fighters in places like Mosul, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Tikrit and Fallujah (but, of course, not including the Zarqawi jihadists, who are irredeemable). So far, those few timid Sunnis who've agreed to join the Iraqi government or to take part in the constitution-writing exercise merely open themselves up to be branded as collaborators, so the coalition we end up talking with needs to include all but the most incorrigible Islamists or else it will shatter.
A second problem, even more serious, is that by announcing that we are ready to talk, we may convince the resistance that they have everything to gain. "If we say we are ready to talk, then the insurgents may conclude that it is in their best interest to keep fighting," says another former US intelligence official with years of experience with Iraq. That's true - but it is a chance we will have to take, since they will keep fighting anyway. This problem is the precise analogy to the problem of setting a fixed date for a US withdrawal, namely, that if we do so then the resistance will simply lie low until then and wait us out. That, too, does not seem to me to be a strong argument against our setting a date for a withdrawal. But, in terms of exit strategies, a political solution that is reached through an accommodation with the mostly Sunni resistance seems a better way to go than to imagine a precipitate withdrawal.
Still, if the talks can't be organized, we have no choice but to cut and run - that is, to declare victory and get out.
Abandoning the current Iraqi government is not as big a deal as it might seem. First of all, although few journalists treat it as such, it is a temporary, interim government anyway - expressly designed to disappear once a constitution is ratified and new elections held. Second, there is no one who believes that the Talabani-Jaafari regime in Baghdad would last a week without US forces there to prop it up. When I asked a former US official about comparisons between the Saigon and Baghdad regimes, he said without hesitation that the regime in Saigon in the 1960s and early 1970s was far better organized and more stable than the current Iraqi one. The South Vietnamese government commanded a massive army and police force, a national bureaucracy and provincial governments with a solid economic base; the current Iraqi one has none of that.
The fact that the United States has already tried a limited dialogue with the Iraqi resistance is not a great surprise. Such talks have been reported periodically since last year, and some elements in the CIA are undoubtedly pursuing tentative, olive branch-type talks with resistance leaders both directly and through intermediaries in Jordan, Syria, through former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and via Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, during Allawi's tenure, steps in this direction already took place. But without the imprimatur of the United States, none of these intermediaries can have any real credibility with the hard-core resistance, since Bush's recent statements ("We will settle for nothing less than victory!") don't allow any wiggle room for peace talks. Still, the Iraqi resistance knows (as does the US intelligence community) that eventually Washington is going to have to make a deal, or just get out.
Back to the Vietnam analogy: In the end, it was a combination of continuing military stalemate and heavy losses, along with ever-angrier public opinion, that made it impossible to continue the war any longer. Despite the turn in the polls, at this stage in the Iraq war things aren't there yet. However, the steady drumbeat of US casualties, hitting hard in small towns in red states like Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado and Texas, is fast souring public opinion. The dead are former high school track stars and Main Street businessmen from the US Army reserves and the National Guard, and their deaths are making painful headlines and causing sorrowful memorial services from coast to coast, and ordinary Americans are getting the message. Bush, however, is not getting the message. Like the phalanx of American foreign policy Wise Men - the Clark Cliffords and Averill Harrimans of the 1960s - who read the riot act to LBJ after Tet, today's establishment, including the Democrats, has to demand that Bush start to reality in Iraq, and not to the fantasies that the neoconservatives sold him on in 2001.
By Robert Dreyfuss
Tom Paine
30 June 2005
Comparisons between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are coming fast and furious now, so let's consider one more. There is an apt parallel between the way we got out of Vietnam and the way that we will get out of Iraq - sooner or later.
Public opinion is turning sharply against the war, even though mainstream Democrats and most Republicans are mostly sticking with the victory-in-Iraq strategy. The conditions in Iraq and here at home are strikingly similar to those we saw surrounding Vietnam at the end of the Johnson administration. Those looking for an exit strategy, take note.
In Vietnam, by the spring of 1968, it was clear to just about everyone - including our intelligence agencies - that the war was lost. The Tet Offensive made it obvious that the combined forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong weren't being defeated or decimated. The United States insisted that it would never talk directly or negotiate with the communist North and their allied partisans in South Vietnam, insisting that the quisling regime in Saigon was the lawful government. So the war dragged on for another five years, killing tens of thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese.
Finally, during 1972-1973, the United States did what it had previously said it wouldn't do: it essentially abandoned its puppet government in South Vietnam and began direct talks with the Vietnamese communists. The communists were magnanimous enough to give the United States a face-saving way out, rather than forcing Washington to admit that it was surrendering. And we left.
And today?
Once again, it is obvious to all - again, including our intelligence agencies - that the war in Iraq is lost. Once again, like the Tet Offensive, the recent wave of bloody assaults across Iraq has made it clear that the resistance, far from being in its "last throes," is not being defeated. Once again, a Nixon-like American administration is refusing to sue for peace. Though Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld has admitted that US authorities in Iraq have been conducting an on-again, off-again dialogue with some elements of the insurgency, it is not nearly enough. The United States is talking, but not negotiating - instead, it is trying to find a few disparate elements of the resistance in order to get them to support the US-installed Iraqi interim government. Such take-it-or-leave-it dialogues are doomed to failure, since all they can produce are a few more Sunni quislings who will immediately become targets of the insurgency themselves. For the most part, the United States continues to insist that all potential olive branches from the resistance be delivered to the offices of the interim (and utterly illegitimate) ersatz government in the modern-day Saigon that is Baghdad.
It is perfectly clear what the United States has to do. It must abandon its deformed offspring in Baghdad, the hapless regime of Shiite fanatics and Kurdish warlords, and pray that it can establish direct talks with the people it is fighting.
There is no other exit strategy.
As in Vietnam, it's likely - given the bull-headedness of the administration - that the United States won't seek the sort of face-saving deal that it struck to end the war in Vietnam for years. My guess is that it won't dawn on them until deep into 2007, when the imminence of the 2008 elections concentrates their minds wonderfully. But by then, the United States will have spent another $100 billion or more, lost at least 1,000 more men and women killed, and forced the death of another 30,000 or more Iraqis. To avoid that, it's time for the foreign policy establishment - the greybeards, the think-tankers, and above all, Howard Dean and the Democratic Senate leaders - to catch up with public opinion on Iraq. Why wait another two years? Why not do now what we are going to do anyway then?
Over the past two weeks, I've had extended conversations with former diplomats and intelligence officers about Iraq. To a man (and woman), they were pessimistic, and blackly so. Over the past 18 months, one of them told me, the intelligence community put out two National Intelligence Estimates on Iraq and an additional major supplement, all of which told the White House the truth: that the war in Iraq is not going well, and is likely to get worse. So the administration knows the truth, at least if they choose to believe their spies and analysts. (Of course, the work product of the spies and analysts may get worse if the new bosses - John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and Porter Goss, the CIA director - have their way. Negroponte, the US ambassador in Baghdad, spent his days penning happy-talk propaganda about how well the war was going, which got back to Secretary of State Colin Powell last year and almost, almost persuaded him that the war was winnable.) But, just as "intelligence and facts" were being fixed around policy in 2002, it appears that in 2005, the Bush administration is once again ignoring its intelligence community and choosing to portray the war as progressing along nicely.
Can the United States make a deal with the resistance now? The way do it would be through Amman, Jordan, where the king has myriad ties to the Sunni resistance, to the former Baathists, to tribal leaders, to Sunni businessmen, to the Iraqi clergy. If asked, King Abdullah of Jordan could host a peace conference along the lines of the Paris peace talks, where the United States and the Iraqi resistance would be the main players, and the fictional Iraqi government could attend if they were told, politely, to be quiet and listen.
Doing this would, admittedly, have a high degree of difficulty. First, it is not at all clear that the mostly Sunni resistance is ready to coalesce into a party ready for talks with the United States. Unlike Vietnam, there is no Hanoi-style central committee to run the show. "It may be too early for the resistance to come together like that," said one former US intelligence official with wide-ranging experience in the Middle East. "But if they are, Amman would be the right place to try it." To make it work, the United States would have to induce a wide spectrum of the insurgent leadership to come into the peace-talks umbrella, from the Sunni tribal leaders to the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Association of Muslim Scholars to the former Baathist military men to the community-based street fighters in places like Mosul, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Tikrit and Fallujah (but, of course, not including the Zarqawi jihadists, who are irredeemable). So far, those few timid Sunnis who've agreed to join the Iraqi government or to take part in the constitution-writing exercise merely open themselves up to be branded as collaborators, so the coalition we end up talking with needs to include all but the most incorrigible Islamists or else it will shatter.
A second problem, even more serious, is that by announcing that we are ready to talk, we may convince the resistance that they have everything to gain. "If we say we are ready to talk, then the insurgents may conclude that it is in their best interest to keep fighting," says another former US intelligence official with years of experience with Iraq. That's true - but it is a chance we will have to take, since they will keep fighting anyway. This problem is the precise analogy to the problem of setting a fixed date for a US withdrawal, namely, that if we do so then the resistance will simply lie low until then and wait us out. That, too, does not seem to me to be a strong argument against our setting a date for a withdrawal. But, in terms of exit strategies, a political solution that is reached through an accommodation with the mostly Sunni resistance seems a better way to go than to imagine a precipitate withdrawal.
Still, if the talks can't be organized, we have no choice but to cut and run - that is, to declare victory and get out.
Abandoning the current Iraqi government is not as big a deal as it might seem. First of all, although few journalists treat it as such, it is a temporary, interim government anyway - expressly designed to disappear once a constitution is ratified and new elections held. Second, there is no one who believes that the Talabani-Jaafari regime in Baghdad would last a week without US forces there to prop it up. When I asked a former US official about comparisons between the Saigon and Baghdad regimes, he said without hesitation that the regime in Saigon in the 1960s and early 1970s was far better organized and more stable than the current Iraqi one. The South Vietnamese government commanded a massive army and police force, a national bureaucracy and provincial governments with a solid economic base; the current Iraqi one has none of that.
The fact that the United States has already tried a limited dialogue with the Iraqi resistance is not a great surprise. Such talks have been reported periodically since last year, and some elements in the CIA are undoubtedly pursuing tentative, olive branch-type talks with resistance leaders both directly and through intermediaries in Jordan, Syria, through former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and via Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, during Allawi's tenure, steps in this direction already took place. But without the imprimatur of the United States, none of these intermediaries can have any real credibility with the hard-core resistance, since Bush's recent statements ("We will settle for nothing less than victory!") don't allow any wiggle room for peace talks. Still, the Iraqi resistance knows (as does the US intelligence community) that eventually Washington is going to have to make a deal, or just get out.
Back to the Vietnam analogy: In the end, it was a combination of continuing military stalemate and heavy losses, along with ever-angrier public opinion, that made it impossible to continue the war any longer. Despite the turn in the polls, at this stage in the Iraq war things aren't there yet. However, the steady drumbeat of US casualties, hitting hard in small towns in red states like Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado and Texas, is fast souring public opinion. The dead are former high school track stars and Main Street businessmen from the US Army reserves and the National Guard, and their deaths are making painful headlines and causing sorrowful memorial services from coast to coast, and ordinary Americans are getting the message. Bush, however, is not getting the message. Like the phalanx of American foreign policy Wise Men - the Clark Cliffords and Averill Harrimans of the 1960s - who read the riot act to LBJ after Tet, today's establishment, including the Democrats, has to demand that Bush start to reality in Iraq, and not to the fantasies that the neoconservatives sold him on in 2001.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Torturers Win In Iraq
[In Australia, of course, none of these legalities matter. All that the average Aussie in the pub knows, and is told again and again by the gurus of talkback radio, is that "Iraqis are better off without Saddam"]
Torture and Accountability
by Elizabeth Holtzman
Published on Wednesday, June 28, 2005 by The Nation
from the July 18, 2005 issue of The Nation
Torture and Accountability
by Elizabeth Holtzman
Published on Wednesday, June 28, 2005 by The Nation
from the July 18, 2005 issue of The Nation
Although the terrible revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib hit the front pages in April 2004, no senior officials in the US military or the Bush Administration have yet been held accountable. The scandal has shamed and outraged many Americans, in addition to creating a greater threat of terrorism against the United States. But it has prompted no investigative commission (in the manner of the 9/11 commission) with a mandate to find the whole truth, or full-scale bipartisan Congressional hearings, as occurred during Watergate. Indeed, it is as though the Watergate investigations ended with the prosecution of only the burglars, which is what the cover-up was designed to insure, instead of reaching into the highest levels of government, which is what ultimately happened.
In just the latest sign of the current Administration's nose-thumbing at accountability for higher-ups, Lieut. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq when the Abu Ghraib abuses occurred, is reportedly under consideration for promotion.
Nonetheless, higher-ups can be held to account. Difficult as it may be to achieve, our institutions of government can be pressured to do the right thing. If the public and the media insist on thorough investigations and appropriate punishments for those implicated--all the way up the chain of command--they can prevail...
© 2005 The Nation
Keep On Keeping On
Stay the Crooked Course
by Ray McGovern
Published on Wednesday, June 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
by Ray McGovern
Published on Wednesday, June 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
The editors of the New York Times this morning feign shock that in his speech at Fort Bragg yesterday evening President George W. Bush would “raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks.” Kudos for that insight! Better three years late than never, I suppose.
Forget the documentary evidence (the Downing Street minutes) that the war on Iraq was fraudulent from the outset. Forget that the U.S. and U.K. starting pulverizing Iraq with stepped-up bombing months before president or prime minister breathed a word to Congress or Parliament. Forget that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his merry men—his co-opted, castrated military brass—have no clue regarding what U.S. forces are up against in Iraq. The president insists that we must stay the course...
If they question why we died,Tell them because our fathers lied.--Rudyard Kipling...
The Religious Right in the US
America's Crusader
by James Carroll
by James Carroll
Published on Tuesday, June 28, 2005 by the Boston Globe
Billy Graham returned to New York this past weekend. Tens of thousands of people attended his revival gatherings at Flushing Meadows in Queens. Such response to the aged master of the public pulpit highlights the unpredicted resurgence of a certain kind of American religious enthusiasm. What gives?
Much is made of connections between right-wing politics and conservative Christian belief, with debate over such issues as life and death, homosexuality, textbooks, and even foreign policy being framed by fervently held dogma. President Bush and other Republicans are drawing powerful energy from this combination of politics and religion, a mix that also drives Graham's rejuvenated appeal. His long-time use of the word ''crusade" for his revival meetings has new resonance in the era of the global war on terror, but Graham has been tapping into the crusading spirit from the very start of his career. A look back suggests that swift currents of religion and politics have been flowing for a long time.
On Sept. 23, 1949, President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb. The American nuclear monopoly was over, and a formerly complacent United States reacted with shock. The administration, against the advice of top atomic scientists, took the most fateful step of the arms race, secretly ordering the development of the genocidal hydrogen bomb. But doomsday fears immediately seized the public mood, too.
It was then, as I learned from historian Stephen J. Whitfield, that Billy Graham made his great arrival on the American scene. He had already pitched a large tent for a revival meeting in Los Angeles, and it began, coincidentally, a few days after Truman's announcement about Moscow's bomb. Just then, on Oct. 1, the Communists officially took over China, news that hit Americans like a thudding second shoe of the apocalypse. People flocked to Graham's sermons as they never had before. Los Angeles attendance ultimately numbered well over 300,000. A star was born, and so was a crusade.
''God is giving us a desperate choice," Graham preached, ''a choice of either revival or judgment. There is no alternative. . . . The world is divided into two camps. On one side we see communism," which has ''declared war against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion. . . . Unless the Western World has an old-fashioned revival, we cannot last." Graham had his finger on the pulse of American fear, and in subsequent years, anticommunism occupied the nation's soul as an avowedly religious obsession. The Red scare at home, unabashed moves toward empire abroad, the phrase ''under God" inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, the scapegoating of homosexuals as ''security risks," an insane accumulation of nuclear weapons, suicidal wars against postcolonial insurgencies in Asia -- a set of desperate choices indeed. Through it all, Billy Graham was the high priest of the American crusade, which is why US presidents uniformly sought his blessing.
This national spirit of radical bipolarity, understood in overtly theological terms, went into hibernation at the end of the Cold War, but the earthquake of Truman's September 1949 announcement had its haunting aftershock in the September attacks of 2001. The old time political religion woke up, and Billy Graham was still there to preach it. Graham did not expressly name the new enemy, but his son and successor Franklin did, labeling Islam a ''very evil and wicked religion." The unleashed energy of an exclusivist doctrine of salvation led, as always, to the denigration of those who are not among the saved, and, in the context of political emergency, that denigration has again become violent. Bush's war is a religious war, whether he disavows ''crusade" or not.
The lesson of 1949 is that the American fear of Soviet nuclear aggression, coupled with fear of communist global dominance as represented by China, stimulated self-wounding reactions that proved far more damaging to the United States than anything Moscow or Beijing ever did.
Once again, American fear itself is today devastating the nation. Once again, nuclear accumulation is underway. Once again, an irrational military establishment has sent the US Army on a suicide mission. Once again, civil liberties and the rule of law are jettisoned in the name of ''security." Once again, homosexuals are being scapegoated. Once again, virtue is defined in narrowly partisan terms.
Billy Graham is a lion-hearted American, and one can only wish him well. But the implications of his transcending influence, old and new, should not be ignored. More than the man himself, the nation's response to him and his themes tells us who we are.
© 2005 Boston Globe
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Why Did "We" Invade Iraq?
The Thing We Don't Talk About
by William Rivers Pitt
T r u t h o u t Perspective
With the revelation of the secret Downing Street Minutes, which exposed the fact that George Bush and Tony Blair had decided to invade Iraq in April of 2002, a heated debate has blown through media, congressional and activist circles. The decision to go to war in Iraq was made before any public debate was initiated, before the United Nations was brought into the conversation, confirming that Bush's blather about wanting peace and leaving war as the last resort was just that: blather.
So why did we go?
It had been suspected, and has now been confirmed by the Minutes, that Bush took us to war on false pretences and by way of a whole constellation of lies and exaggerations. First it was the weapons of mass destruction that were not there. Then it was connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that did not exist. Finally, it became about bringing freedom and democracy to the region, which has emphatically not happened.
Threaded through the discussion was the belief that Bush and his petroleum-company allies lusted after Iraq's oil. There was also the idea that Bush wanted Saddam's head because of the "unfinished business" left by his father in 1991. Some whispered that Iraq had intended to change the monetary basis of its petroleum dealings from the dollar to the Euro, an action that would have spelled financial disaster for the boys in Houston. Finally, many believed Bush ramped up a war push in order to give Republicans a flag-waving platform to run on in the 2002 midterms.
All of these were on the table as reasons for an invasion, though most of them were not included in public debate. Yet the real reasons behind this war, the real reasons for many of our military actions over the years, were never discussed. As with almost everything we deal with today in the foreign policy realm, the real reasons we invaded Iraq hark back to World War II and the Cold War.
When the United States jumped into World War II, President Roosevelt ordered the American economy be put on a wartime footing. This was a sound decision: the country had to speed its industrial capabilities up to a sprint in order to manufacture a huge fighting army out of whole cloth. The action was successful beyond measure. The economy was invigorated, the war was won, and in the process the military/industrial complex, so named by President Eisenhower, was established as a power player in the American economy.
In 1947, President Harry Truman put forth the Truman Doctrine, a broad policy of foreign intervention to combat the feared spread of Communism around the world. The Doctrine was essentially created by a small band of men like Paul Nitze, who were the precursors of what we now call neo-conservatives. Nitze, it should be noted, was the mentor of Paul Wolfowitz, who went on to be the mentor of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
The establishment of the Truman Doctrine, the establishment of the "permanent crisis" that was the Cold War, required that the American economy remain on a wartime footing. There it has remained to this day, despite the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the threat of a global communist takeover. Ten thousand books have been written on this subject, on the impact of our wartime economic footing upon domestic policy, the environment, global affairs and politics. In the end, however, the fact that our economy is set on a wartime footing means one simple thing.
We need wars.
Without wars, the economy flakes and falls apart. Without wars, the trillions of dollars spent on weapons systems, military preparedness and a planetary army would dry up, dealing a death blow to the economy as currently constituted. Without wars or the threat of wars, the populace is not so easily controlled and manipulated.
Let us be clear, however. When I say "we," I do not refer to your average working man and woman on the street. The man running the shoe store or the woman managing the bar does not need war to remain economically viable. The "we" I speak of is that overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful few who have wired their fortunes into the manufacture of weapons, the plumbing of oil, and the collection of spoils through political largesse.
These are the people who need war. They need it to pile up the contracts from the Pentagon, to enrich the banking institutions that protect them, to pay the lawyers who defend them, to pay the lobbyists who sustain them, to purchase the politicians who champion them, and to buy up the media that hides them from sight.
Yet though this group is small in number, they are "we," for they are our leaders and our myth-makers. They have convinced the majority of this population that war is a necessity. They create the premises for combat and invasion, they convince and cajole and, when necessary, frighten us into line. All too often, almost every time, we buy into the fictions they manufacture, thus sustaining the "permanent crisis" mentality and the need for war after war after war.
The economic need for war creates the required excuses for war. The "permanent crisis" of the Cold War motivated the United States to support the Shah in Iran, a decision that led to the Islamic Revolution and the establishment of Iran as a permanent enemy. The Cold War motivated us to support Saddam Hussein financially and militarily as a bulwark against Iran. The Cold War motivated us to establish the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia to ensure a steady supply of oil. The Cold War motivated us to support Osama bin Laden and the so-called "Jihadists" in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet invaders.
Now, we prepare to invade Iran. We have invaded Iraq for the second time in 15 years. We will never invade Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that this nation's vast wealth and Wahabbist extremists make it the birthing bed of international terrorism. We lost two towers in New York City at the hands of a group that we created in the 1980s to fight the Soviets. Put plainly, the "permanent crisis" of the Cold War created a cycle of military self-justification. We build enemies with arms and money, and then we destroy them with arms and money, thus keeping our wartime economy afloat.
The Cold War ended more than ten years ago, but we still need war, and we need that "permanent crisis" to continue the cycle of military self-justification. If a legitimate war is not available, we will create one because we have to. We have our new "permanent crisis," which we call the War on Terror, another turn of the cycle created by an attack that our foreign policy and war-justifications of the last 50 years made almost inevitable.
We need wars. That's why we are in Iraq. This invasion and occupation of that nation has given our economy the war it needs, and has also created the justification for future wars by creating legions of enemies in the Middle East and around the world. Our wartime economy will tolerate no less.
Talking about Bush's lies regarding weapons of mass destruction, or about bringing democracy to the region, or about the dollar-to-Euro transfer, or about the midterm elections, is window-dressing. We invaded Iraq because we had to. This is the elephant in the room, the foreign policy reality nobody talks about.
If you want peace, work to change the underpinnings of our economy. Until that change is made, there will always be wars, invasions, and lies to bring such things about. It is what it is.
by William Rivers Pitt
T r u t h o u t Perspective
With the revelation of the secret Downing Street Minutes, which exposed the fact that George Bush and Tony Blair had decided to invade Iraq in April of 2002, a heated debate has blown through media, congressional and activist circles. The decision to go to war in Iraq was made before any public debate was initiated, before the United Nations was brought into the conversation, confirming that Bush's blather about wanting peace and leaving war as the last resort was just that: blather.
So why did we go?
It had been suspected, and has now been confirmed by the Minutes, that Bush took us to war on false pretences and by way of a whole constellation of lies and exaggerations. First it was the weapons of mass destruction that were not there. Then it was connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that did not exist. Finally, it became about bringing freedom and democracy to the region, which has emphatically not happened.
Threaded through the discussion was the belief that Bush and his petroleum-company allies lusted after Iraq's oil. There was also the idea that Bush wanted Saddam's head because of the "unfinished business" left by his father in 1991. Some whispered that Iraq had intended to change the monetary basis of its petroleum dealings from the dollar to the Euro, an action that would have spelled financial disaster for the boys in Houston. Finally, many believed Bush ramped up a war push in order to give Republicans a flag-waving platform to run on in the 2002 midterms.
All of these were on the table as reasons for an invasion, though most of them were not included in public debate. Yet the real reasons behind this war, the real reasons for many of our military actions over the years, were never discussed. As with almost everything we deal with today in the foreign policy realm, the real reasons we invaded Iraq hark back to World War II and the Cold War.
When the United States jumped into World War II, President Roosevelt ordered the American economy be put on a wartime footing. This was a sound decision: the country had to speed its industrial capabilities up to a sprint in order to manufacture a huge fighting army out of whole cloth. The action was successful beyond measure. The economy was invigorated, the war was won, and in the process the military/industrial complex, so named by President Eisenhower, was established as a power player in the American economy.
In 1947, President Harry Truman put forth the Truman Doctrine, a broad policy of foreign intervention to combat the feared spread of Communism around the world. The Doctrine was essentially created by a small band of men like Paul Nitze, who were the precursors of what we now call neo-conservatives. Nitze, it should be noted, was the mentor of Paul Wolfowitz, who went on to be the mentor of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
The establishment of the Truman Doctrine, the establishment of the "permanent crisis" that was the Cold War, required that the American economy remain on a wartime footing. There it has remained to this day, despite the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the threat of a global communist takeover. Ten thousand books have been written on this subject, on the impact of our wartime economic footing upon domestic policy, the environment, global affairs and politics. In the end, however, the fact that our economy is set on a wartime footing means one simple thing.
We need wars.
Without wars, the economy flakes and falls apart. Without wars, the trillions of dollars spent on weapons systems, military preparedness and a planetary army would dry up, dealing a death blow to the economy as currently constituted. Without wars or the threat of wars, the populace is not so easily controlled and manipulated.
Let us be clear, however. When I say "we," I do not refer to your average working man and woman on the street. The man running the shoe store or the woman managing the bar does not need war to remain economically viable. The "we" I speak of is that overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful few who have wired their fortunes into the manufacture of weapons, the plumbing of oil, and the collection of spoils through political largesse.
These are the people who need war. They need it to pile up the contracts from the Pentagon, to enrich the banking institutions that protect them, to pay the lawyers who defend them, to pay the lobbyists who sustain them, to purchase the politicians who champion them, and to buy up the media that hides them from sight.
Yet though this group is small in number, they are "we," for they are our leaders and our myth-makers. They have convinced the majority of this population that war is a necessity. They create the premises for combat and invasion, they convince and cajole and, when necessary, frighten us into line. All too often, almost every time, we buy into the fictions they manufacture, thus sustaining the "permanent crisis" mentality and the need for war after war after war.
The economic need for war creates the required excuses for war. The "permanent crisis" of the Cold War motivated the United States to support the Shah in Iran, a decision that led to the Islamic Revolution and the establishment of Iran as a permanent enemy. The Cold War motivated us to support Saddam Hussein financially and militarily as a bulwark against Iran. The Cold War motivated us to establish the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia to ensure a steady supply of oil. The Cold War motivated us to support Osama bin Laden and the so-called "Jihadists" in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet invaders.
Now, we prepare to invade Iran. We have invaded Iraq for the second time in 15 years. We will never invade Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that this nation's vast wealth and Wahabbist extremists make it the birthing bed of international terrorism. We lost two towers in New York City at the hands of a group that we created in the 1980s to fight the Soviets. Put plainly, the "permanent crisis" of the Cold War created a cycle of military self-justification. We build enemies with arms and money, and then we destroy them with arms and money, thus keeping our wartime economy afloat.
The Cold War ended more than ten years ago, but we still need war, and we need that "permanent crisis" to continue the cycle of military self-justification. If a legitimate war is not available, we will create one because we have to. We have our new "permanent crisis," which we call the War on Terror, another turn of the cycle created by an attack that our foreign policy and war-justifications of the last 50 years made almost inevitable.
We need wars. That's why we are in Iraq. This invasion and occupation of that nation has given our economy the war it needs, and has also created the justification for future wars by creating legions of enemies in the Middle East and around the world. Our wartime economy will tolerate no less.
Talking about Bush's lies regarding weapons of mass destruction, or about bringing democracy to the region, or about the dollar-to-Euro transfer, or about the midterm elections, is window-dressing. We invaded Iraq because we had to. This is the elephant in the room, the foreign policy reality nobody talks about.
If you want peace, work to change the underpinnings of our economy. Until that change is made, there will always be wars, invasions, and lies to bring such things about. It is what it is.
