Obama

This was perhaps the best and most important political speech I've seen in my 51 years on this planet.

I don't agree with all of it, and the Obama-Biden ticket is not the second coming, but I've never seen a candidate I thought was so right for the country and the times. We need him now.

Biden's mixed record controversial among progressives

Stephen Zunes on Biden's pro-war record:

Rather than being a hapless victim of the Bush administration’s lies and manipulation, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq and making false statements regarding Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of “weapons of mass destruction” years before President George W. Bush even came to office.

As far back as 1998, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of that oil rich country. Even though UN inspectors and the UN-led disarmament process led to the elimination of Iraq’s WMD threat, Biden – in an effort to discredit the world body and make an excuse for war – insisted that UN inspectors could never be trusted to do the job.

...In the face of widespread skepticism over administration claims regarding Iraq’s military capabilities, Biden declared that President Bush was justified in being concerned about Iraq’s alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Even though Iraq had eliminated its chemical weapons arsenal by the mid-1990s, Biden insisted categorically in the weeks leading up to the Iraq war resolution that Saddam Hussein still had chemical weapons. Even though there is no evidence that Iraq had ever developed deployable biological weapons and its biological weapons program had been eliminated some years earlier, Biden insisted that Saddam had biological weapons, including anthrax and that “he may have a strain” of small pox. And, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1998 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted Saddam was “seeking nuclear weapons.”

Said Biden, “One thing is clear: These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.” He did not believe proof of the existence of any actual weapons to dislodge was necessary, however, insisting that “If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late.” He further defended President Bush by falsely claiming that “He did not snub the U.N. or our allies. He did not dismiss a new inspection regime. He did not ignore the Congress. At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation.”

...Biden even voted against an amendment sponsored by fellow Democratic senator Carl Levin that would have authorized U.S. military action against Iraq if the UN Security Council approved the use of force and instead voted for the Republican-backed resolution authorizing the United States to go to war unilaterally. In effect, Biden has embraced the neo-conservative view that the United States, as the world’s sole remaining superpower, somehow has the right to invade other countries at will, even if they currently pose no strategic threat.

Pretty depressing stuff. On the other hand,Andy Worthington defends Biden's record since the invasion, highlighting Biden's opposition to an open-ended War on Terror, his vote against the Military Comisssions Act of 2006, Biden's call for the closing of the Guantanamo gulag, and his categorical defense of Habeas Corpus. All of these are as admirable as Biden's earlier support for the war was abominable.

If Biden was a presidential candidate in a primary election, his early support for the war would prevent me from voting for him. As the vice-presidential candidate in a general election against McCain and his stable of neocon zombies, I'll hold my nose and vote for Obama-Biden without hesitation.

Victory and stability close in Iraq?

Leila Fadl, at McClatchy News, on the fragile political situation in Iraq:

A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in danger of collapsing because the Iraqi government is failing to absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who'd joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country's security forces.

American officials have credited the militias, known as the Sons of Iraq or Awakening councils, with undercutting support for the group al Qaida in Iraq and bringing peace to large swaths of the country, including Anbar province and parts of Baghdad. Under the program, the United States pays each militia member a stipend of about $300 a month and promised that they'd get jobs with the Iraqi government.

But the Iraqi government, which is led by Shiite Muslims, has brought only a relative handful of the more than 100,000 militia members into the security forces. Now officials are making it clear that they don't intend to include most of the rest.

"We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently," said one senior Iraqi commander in Baghdad, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue. "Many of them were part of al Qaida despite the fact that many of them are helping us to fight al Qaida."

He said the army was considering setting a Nov. 1 deadline for those militia members who hadn't been absorbed into the security forces or given civilian jobs to give up their weapons. After that, they'd be arrested, he said.

Some militia members say that such a move would force them into open warfare with the government again.

"If they disband us now, I will tell you that history will show we will go back to zero," said Mullah Shahab al Aafi, a former emir, or leader, of insurgents in Diyala province who's the acting commander of 24,000 Sons of Iraq there, 11,000 of whom are on the U.S. payroll. "I will not give up my weapons. I will never give them up, and I will carry my weapon again. If it is useless to talk to the government, I will be forced to carry my weapons and my pistol."

The conflict over the militias underscores how little has changed in Iraq in the past year despite the drop in violence, which American politicians often attribute to the temporary increase of U.S. troops in Iraq that ended in July.

McCain is dead wrong on Iraq. As a moving force of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, he's been up to his neck in this since before the war began, so he has an overwhelming stake in telling us happy "victory" stories about Iraq, but that doesn't make it true.

Former career intelligence officer Ray McGovern lays out crucial aspects of Iraqscam

in the form of an open letter to Colin Powell:

...With the help of Allied intelligence services, the CIA recruited your Iraqi counterpart, Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, and Tahir Jalil Habbush, the chief of Iraqi intelligence. They were cajoled into remaining in place while giving us critical intelligence well before the war - actually, well before your speech laying the groundwork for war.

In other words, at a time when Saddam Hussein believed that Sabri and Habbush were working for him, we had “turned” them. They were working for us, and much of the information they provided had been evaluated and verified.

Most important, each independently affirmed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq...

...In case you [Powell] missed it, we now know from former CIA officials that his [Sabri's] information on the absence of WMD was concealed from Congress, from our senior military, and from intelligence analysts - including those working on the infamous National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002.

That NIE, titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for WMD,” was the one specifically designed to mislead Congress into authorizing the president to make war on Iraq.

...Tyler Drumheller, at the time a division chief in CIA’s clandestine service, was the first to tell the story of Naji Sabri, who is now living a comfortable retirement in Qatar. On CBS’s “60 Minutes” on April 23, 2006, Drumheller disclosed that the CIA had received documentary evidence from Sabri that Iraq had no WMD.

Drumheller added, “We continued to validate him the whole way through.”

Then two other former CIA officers confirmed this account to author Sidney Blumenthal, adding that George Tenet briefed this information to President George W. Bush on Sept. 18, 2002, and that Bush dismissed the information as worthless.

Wait. It gets worse. The two former CIA officers told Blumenthal that someone in the agency rewrote the report from Sabri to indicate that Saddam Hussein was “aggressively and covertly developing” nuclear weapons and already had chemical and biological weapons.

That altered report was shown to the likes of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was “duped,” according to one of the CIA officers.

...I hope you are sitting down, Colin, because Habbush also told us Iraq had no WMD. One of the helpful insights he passed along to us was that Saddam Hussein had decided that some ambiguity on the WMD issue would help prevent his main enemy, Iran, from thinking of Iraq as a toothless tiger.

Habbush, part of Saddam’s inner circle, had direct access to this kind of information. But when President Bush was first told of Habbush’s report that there were no WMD in Iraq, Suskind’s sources say the president reacted by saying, “Well, why don’t you tell him to give us something we can use to make our case?”

Apparently, Habbush was unable or unwilling to oblige by changing his story.

Nevertheless, later in 2003, when it became clear that he had been telling the unwelcome truth, Habbush was helped to resettle in Jordan and given $5 million to keep his mouth shut.

Suskind also reveals that in the fall of 2003, Habbush was asked to earn his keep by participating in a keystone-cops-type forgery aimed at “proving” that Saddam Hussein did, after all, have a direct hand in the tragedy of 9/11.

...In sum, the CIA had both the Iraqi foreign minister and the Iraqi intelligence chief “turned” and reporting to us in the months before the war (in Naji Sabri’s case) and the weeks before your U.N. speech (in the case of Tahir Jalil Habbush).

Both were part of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle; both reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

But this was not what the president wanted to hear, so Tenet put the kibosh on Habbush and put Sabri on a cutter to Qatar.

The article by Sidney Blumenthal to which McGovern refers above is here.

McWar

NYT:

Mr. McCain began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same. He drew on principles he learned growing up in a military family and on conclusions he formed as a prisoner in North Vietnam. He also returned to a conviction about “the common identity” of dangerous autocracies as far-flung as Serbia and North Korea that he had developed consulting with hawkish foreign policy thinkers to help sharpen the themes of his 2000 presidential campaign.

While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.

...He has made the principle that the exercise of military power sets the bargaining table for international relations a consistent theme of his career ever since, and in his 2002 memoir he wrote that one of his lifelong convictions was “the imperative that American power never retreat in response to an inferior adversary’s provocation.”

Writing in The Nation Robert Dreyfuss offers a scary view of McCain's neoconservative foreign policy proclivities:

To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.

"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."

In that last sentence, Dreyfuss is quoting Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide.


So McCain combines a simple-minded good guy / bad guy view of the world + an instinctual militarism + neocon foreign policy advisors = a propensity for war and more war. Hey, but at least he tells us those exciting stories about "victory" being just around the corner.

Sometimes I think what Americans most want in political learership is someone who will tell them reaffirming stories about themselves. McCain wants to re-identify Americans as defenders of the free world. Been there, done that.

Either we stop the Rooskies in Georgia or...

According to Peter Hart and Jim Naureckas of the media watchdog FAIR, US mainstream media seem to accept this familiar, and overly simple, Cold War story line without much questioning:

U.S. corporate media frequently evoked the Cold War as a key to understanding the conflict between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia. This was certainly true of the media themselves, which generally placed black hats or white hats on the actors involved depending on whether they were allied with Moscow or Washington.

On August 11, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams referred to “what’s being called the Russian blitz of the nation of Georgia, former Soviet republic that split away and is now threatening to split apart from within.” NBC reporter Jim Maceda followed up: “The powerful Russian war machine is moving ever deeper into Georgia, and teaching all of us really a lesson about what makes Russia tick.”

Scary Russians. Let's all be scared.

PAF says: We've seen that movie, and it was really dumb the first time, and the second, and it's still dumb.

How US policy helped set the stage for the Russia-Georgia crisis

Stephen Zunes :

A number of misguided U.S. policies appear to have played an important role in encouraging Georgia to launch its August 6 assault on South Ossetia.

The first had to do with the U.S.-led militarization of Georgia, which likely emboldened Saakashvili to try to resolve the conflict over South Ossetia by military means. Just last month, the United States held a military exercise in Georgia with more than 1,000 American troops while the Bush administration, according to The New York Times, was “loudly proclaiming its support for Georgia’s territorial integrity in the battle with Russia over Georgia’s separatist enclaves.” As the situation was deteriorating last month, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a high-profile visit to Saakashvili in Tbilisi, where she reiterated the strong strategic relationship between the two countries.

Radio Liberty speculates that Saakashvili “may have felt that his military, after several years of U.S.-sponsored training and rearmament, was now capable of routing the Ossetian separatists (”bandits,” in the official parlance) and neutralizing the Russian peacekeepers.” Furthermore, Saakashvili apparently hoped that the anticipated Russian reaction would “immediately transform the conflict into a direct confrontation between a democratic David and an autocratic Goliath, making sure the sympathy of the Western world would be mobilized for Georgia.”

According to Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States may have caused Saakashvili to “miscalculate” and “overreach” by making him feel that “at the end of the day that the West would come to his assistance if he got into trouble.”

Another factor undoubtedly involved the U.S. push for Georgia to join NATO. The efforts by some prominent Kremlin lawmakers for formal recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia coincided with the escalated efforts for NATO’s inclusion of Georgia this spring, as well as an awareness that any potential Russian military move against Georgia would need to come sooner rather than later.

And, as a number of us predicted last March, Western support for the unilateral declaration of independence by the autonomous Serbian region of Kosovo emboldened nationalist leaders in the autonomous Georgian regions, along with their Russian supporters, to press for the independence of these nations as well. Despite the pro-American sympathies of many in that country, Georgians were notably alarmed by the quick and precedent-setting U.S. recognition of Kosovo.

Supporting the Troops means Rethinking US global strategy

Andrew Bacevich:

The four lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan boil down to this: Events have exposed as illusory American pretensions to having mastered war. Even today, war is hardly more subject to human control than the tides or the weather. Simply trying harder -- investing ever larger sums in even more advanced technology, devising novel techniques, or even improving the quality of American generalship -- will not enable the United States to evade that reality.

As measured by results achieved, the performance of the military since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11 has been unimpressive. This indifferent record of success leads some observers to argue that we need a bigger army or a different army.

But the problem lies less with the army that we have -- a very fine one, which every citizen should wish to preserve -- than with the requirements that we have imposed on our soldiers. Rather than expanding or reconfiguring that army, we need to treat it with the respect that it deserves. That means protecting it from further abuse of the sort that it has endured since 2001.

America doesn't need a bigger army. It needs a smaller -- that is, more modest -- foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capabilities. Modesty implies giving up on the illusions of grandeur to which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise. It also means reining in the imperial presidents who expect the army to make good on those illusions. When it comes to supporting the troops, here lies the essence of a citizen's obligation.

On the geopolitics of Oil in the Russia-Georgia crisis

Michael Klare:

In commenting on the war in the Caucasus, most American analysts have tended to see it as a throwback to the past: as a continuation of a centuries-old blood feud between Russians and Georgians, or, at best, as part of the unfinished business of the Cold War. Many have spoken of Russia’s desire to erase the national “humiliation” it experienced with the collapse of the Soviet Union 16 years ago, or to restore its historic “sphere of influence” over the lands to its South. But the conflict is more about the future than the past. It stems from an intense geopolitical contest over the flow of Caspian Sea energy to markets in the West.

This struggle commenced during the Clinton administration when the former Soviet republics of the Caspian Sea basin became independent and began seeking Western customers for their oil and natural gas resources. Western oil companies eagerly sought production deals with the governments of the new republics, but faced a critical obstacle in exporting the resulting output. Because the Caspian itself is landlocked, any energy exiting the region has to travel by pipeline - and, at that time, Russia controlled all of the available pipeline capacity. To avoid exclusive reliance on Russian conduits, President Clinton sponsored the construction of an alternative pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Tbilisi in Georgia and then onward to Ceyhan on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast — the BTC pipeline, as it is known today.

The BTC pipeline, which began operation in 2006, passes some of the most unsettled areas of the world, including Chechnya and Georgia’s two breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. With this in mind, the Clinton and Bush administrations provided Georgia with hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, making it the leading recipient of U.S. arms and equipment in the former Soviet space. President Bush has also lobbied U.S. allies in Europe to “fast track” Georgia’s application for membership in NATO.

All of this, needless to say, was viewed in Moscow with immense resentment. Not only was the United States helping to create a new security risk on its southern borders, but, more importantly, was frustrating its drive to secure control over the transportation of Caspian energy to Europe. Ever since Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, Moscow has sought to use its pivotal role in the supply of oil and natural gas to Western Europe and the former Soviet republics as a source both of financial wealth and political advantage. It mainly relies on Russia’s own energy resources for this purpose, but also seeks to dominate the delivery of oil and gas from the Caspian states to the West.

Russia-Georgia crisis highlights moral bankruptcy of Uncle Sam's global militarism

Juan Cole:

The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted.

Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow's actions -- with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration's condemnations of Russia ring hollow.

Andrew Bacevich:

In the wake of 9/11, these puerile expectations -- that armed force wielded by a strong-willed chief executive could do just about anything -- reached an apotheosis of sorts. Having manifestly failed to anticipate or prevent a devastating attack on American soil, President Bush proceeded to use his ensuing global war on terror as a pretext for advancing grandiose new military ambitions married to claims of unbounded executive authority -- all under the guise of keeping Americans "safe."

With the president denying any connection between the events of Sept. 11 and past U.S. policies, his declaration of a global war nipped in the bud whatever inclination the public might have entertained to reconsider those policies. In essence, Bush counted on war both to concentrate greater power in his own hands and to divert attention from the political, economic and cultural bind in which the United States found itself as a result of its own past behavior.

So we have pissed away Uncle Sam's moral-diplomatic "soft power" at the same time as we have overcommitted and effectivly broken America's military "hard power," and seriously weakened the republic by allowing an enormous expansion of unaccountable executive power.

Time to re-think? Or do we double down with the neocons?

Who is Randy Scheunemann?

McCain's top foreign policy advisor was a paid lobbyist of the government of Georgia even as he advised McCain on critical foreign policy issues involving the US, Russia and Georgia -- advocating policies which could drag the US into another Cold War.

Can you say "apparent conflict of interest layered on top of geopolitical clusterfuck"? I thought you could.

But Mr. Scheunemann is remarkably accomplished in a number of ways. As former head of the Project for a New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, he was a central player in the neoconservative faction which was one of the major driving forces behind the unneccessary, counterproductive and murderous US invasion of Iraq.

To all of which McCain apparently says: Heckuvajob Scheuney!

But, you know, in a mavericky, straight-talker sort of way.

Obama's challenge

Andrew Bacevich:

The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.

By showing that Bush has put the country on a path pointing to permanent war, ever increasing debt and dependency, and further abuses of executive authority, Obama can transform the election into a referendum on the current administration's entire national security legacy. By articulating a set of principles that will safeguard the country's vital interests, both today and in the long run, at a price we can afford while preserving rather than distorting the Constitution, Obama can persuade Americans to repudiate the Bush legacy and to choose another course.

This is a stiff test, not the work of a speech or two, but of an entire campaign. Whether or not Obama passes the test will determine his fitness for the presidency.

More

on Ron Susskind's allegations that the administration forged a WMD document as part of its campaign to mislead the country into Iraq: here, and here .

Uncomfortable coincidences

Robert Scheer on the McCain campaign's neoconservative, anti-Russian hard-line, and a close campaign advisor's connections to the Saakashvili regime in Georgia.

US policy toward Russia and Georgia helped to set the stage for this war, and McCain and his obnoxious pals are happy to exploit this tragedy for their own ends. Would a President McCain lead us unnecessarily into a new Cold War? Robert Scheer :

There is every indication that the candidate’s demonization of Russian leader Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Saddam to fuel American militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs.

McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy that McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, will be provided with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.

What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is turned into an enemy that expands its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Josef Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the old Soviet Union.

more on the limits of the Surge

from Steve Simon, writing in Foreign Affairs:

The Bush administration's new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

This thesis is also supported by the analysis of Lawrence Korb and his co-authors at the Center for American Progress, here. They argue that political reconciliation has not occurred, and is not ocurring, in Iraq and that the fundamental grounds for further conflict remain:

All major ethno-sectarian groups in Iraq still have their own (sometimes very different)vision of what Iraq is and should be. Kurds see a highly federalized Iraq, with a significant degree of autonomy for their own region that includes the capacity to sign oil exploration and production contracts. Shi’a Arabs generally agree on using their electoral supremacy to ensure security for their long-oppressed group, but the two main parties—the Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, or ISCI, led by al Sadr rival Abdul Aziz al Hakim—have strong disagreements over the meaning of federalism. ISCI is a strong proponent of highly autonomous super-regions, while the Sadrists favor a unified Iraqi state with a strong central government. Sunni Arabs are even more fractured. The local tribes in the Sunni regions of the country want to contest the forthcoming provincial elections, want money from the central government, and continue to receive support from the United States, while the Sunni insurgency seeks the return of a Sunni-dominated national
political system.

In short, promises of imminent "victory" and stability in Iraq are almost certainly illusory.

the limits of the "surge" and the case for withdrawal

are persuasively set forth by Charles Knight:

It is a very good thing that fewer are dying in Iraq, but that improvement alone is far from sufficient evidence from which to conclude that US policy is now on the right track.

And how did the reduction in violence come about? Not principally by the application of increased US military power or by adopting new counter-insurgency doctrine, but by accommodating and supporting the desire of Sunnis for local control and by “coming to terms” with Moqtada al-Sadr and by his decision, encouraged by Iran, to stand-down his armed contest with the Badr brigades.

As we assess the so-called “surge strategy,” it is important to note its limits:

* The surge has reduced violence by leveraging and reinforcing the inter-communal and intra-communal divisions that plague Iraq — think of the walls American soldiers have built to separate Sunni and Shia enclaves in Baghdad; And,

* The fact remains that none of the powerful Iraqi groups or leaders with whom the US is currently allied share the American vision or purpose — not even the Kurds. US alliances inside Iraq are marriages of convenience — and shaky ones at that.

Indeed, the surge marks the limit of what the United States might accomplish in Iraq by military means. Now the task is to bring into the political process most of the remaining rejectionists and to catalyze the type of international support that will facilitate this inclusion and a national accord. And this requires US military withdrawal.

Some proponents of staying warn us about backsliding if the US leaves, including the specter of a failed state wherein al Qaeda will thrive. This warning displays a basic misunderstanding of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia which was founded as a reaction to the US invasion. When the US leaves Iraq it looses its primary motivation for its adherents and rather than thrive, it is very likely to fade.

In addition, political instability does not equal a failed state — there are many ways of avoiding that outcome that do not involve keeping US troops there indefinitely. Iraq is a traumatized society and that condition is a major contributing factor to why Iraq will be politically volatile for a long time to come. But seeking to shape or control Iraqi politics with Army brigades is to perpetuate the use of a blunt and inappropriate tool that does at least as much harm as it does good. Staying means staying for a very long time! US presence is one cause of the violence — its troops will always be seen as a foreign invader to be resisted.

Knight is co-author of a report by the Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq, available here.

Knight references a Pentagon study of Iraqi opinion conducted in November 2007, and reported in the Washington Post:

Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military...Outside of the military, some of the most widespread polling in Iraq has been done by D3 Systems, a Virginia-based company that maintains offices in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. Its most recent publicly released surveys, conducted in September for several news media organizations, showed the same widespread Iraqi belief voiced by the military's focus groups: that a U.S. departure will make things better. A State Department poll in September 2006 reported a similar finding.

more on Tenet's role in Iraqscam

from Gareth Porter:

The disappearance of all that credible evidence reflected a deliberate decision by Tenet. The White House Iraq Group had just rolled out its new campaign to create a political climate supporting war in early September, and Tenet knew what was expected of him. As an analyst who worked on the NIE told Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, ‘The going-in assumption was that we were going to war, so this NIE was to be written with that in mind.’ That means Tenet’s account of the CIA’s role in the WMD issue in his 2007 memoirs completely ignored the credible evidence from Habbush, Sabri and the former Iraqi specialists that there was no active program, as well as his own role in suppressing it.

Tenet even brazenly claimed that a ‘very sensitive, highly placed source in Iraq’ about whom ‘little has been publicly said’ had ‘reported that production of chemical and biological weapons was taking place’. The reporting from the source, continuing through the NIE and beyond, ‘gave those of us at the most senior level further confidence that our information about Saddam’s WMD programmes was correct.’

Tenet was clearly referring to the reporting coming from the Sabri debriefings, but his description of them was a prevarication. As Blumenthal reported, they had written a report on Sabri’s intelligence spelling out his view that there was no active WMD programme, but they later discovered that it had been rewritten and given an entirely new preamble asserting that Saddam already possessed chemical and biological weapons and was ‘aggressively and covertly developing’ nuclear weapons.

Tenet — who was a political operator rather than an intelligence professional — had betrayed the CIA’s mission of providing objective analysis, instead choosing to serve the interests of the Bush administration in preparing the way for war. It is not difficult to imagine how he would have meekly carried out whatever was asked of him by the White House — even forging a document and leaking it to the media, to buttress the administration’s case for war.

some of what the Pentagon doesn't want you to see, or think too much about

in this NYT photo essay.

Be warned: these are hard images.

The accompanying NYT article is here.

Locked into a downward spiral?

political scientist Paul Rogers writing at Open Democracy:

US army and air-force plans for operations in Iraq each imply that Washington intends to establish a near-permanent presence that will remain almost independent of the wishes of any future administration; most analysts believe that even if the violence does continue to decline, the Pentagon envisages a total US military presence of around 50,000 for many years to come, backed up by many thousands more across the border in Kuwait as well as other forces in Qatar and Oman (see "The Iraq project", 30 January 2008).

In itself this forward planning is hardly a surprise, given the long-term strategic significance of the region - and especially its oil reserves - to the United States. The country's need and vulnerability in this regard are highlighted by the steep oil-price rises and the intense competition for resources at a time of breakneck economic development. But a determined focus by Washington on the pursuit of its own perceived interests in Iraq - especially in the context of its close relationship with Israel - will also create further antagonism to the American presence in Iraq and the wider region.

More on preparations for long-term US bases in Iraq here.

Elsewhere, Rogers is clear and explicit about the likely political consequences of prolonged US military presence in the Middle East:

...the United States authorities responsible seem to lack any idea of the impact even of these potential deployments. They appear to be trapped in a remarkable conviction that the US can maintain an extensive arsenal of military power - up to 50,000 troops in Iraq, many thousands elsewhere in the Gulf region, aircraft-carriers in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, and bombers and strike-aircraft at bases across the region - in a way that can find acceptability in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

There is a real lack of understanding and imagination here, of just how valuable this scenario is to the radical, jihadi movement. For Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaida leaders and strategists, the prospect of a US presence heavily entrenched for at least a decade in the heart of "their" world is a gift. Moreover, in the process of attempting to establish this position, the US will offer numerous (and perhaps expanding) opportunities for militant target-practice.

The key point is that the very best outcome from a US military perspective - a declining insurgency but a long-term military presence in Iraq - is still very good news indeed for al-Qaida. That alone is a predicament for the United States, one far beyond its current official mindset. This is indeed shaping up to be a long war.

This is not a strategy to keep us safe.

General Patraeus himself admitted in Congressional testimony that he could not make a case that this policy in Iraq will make America safer:

Senator John Warner (R-VA), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former Navy Secretary, asked Gen. Petraeus during testimony in Sep tember, “If we continue what you have laid before the Congress ... Does this make America safer?” General Petraeus responded, “Well sir, I don’t know.”

Patraeus quote from here.

PAF concludes: America's Iraq policy is not driven by concern for safety or security; it's about long-term bases, geo-strategic dominance, and oil.

McCain's tax policy

Continue to spoon-feed the richest of the rich who (ahem) haven't been doing so badly compared to the rest of us.

More evidence of administration deceit

Salon reviews Ron Susskind's new book on administration fraud regarding Iraq.

In September 2003, according to Suskind, CIA officials -- at the direct command of then-CIA director George Tenet and at the behest of the White House -- deliberately forged a backdated letter from Iraqi security chief Tahir Jalil Habbush to Saddam Hussein. The phony letter claimed that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had trained for his mission in Iraq and that al-Qaida had facilitated mysterious shipments from Niger to Iraq. The letter was the "slam dunk" the Bush administration had been seeking so desperately: evidence of a direct operational link between al-Qaida and Saddam's regime.

...Since then, that narrative has unraveled thread by thread -- as has the Habbush letter. That it was a forgery can no longer be doubted; that it originated with the White House may be harder to prove. Two former CIA officials -- Rob Richer and John Maguire -- have gone on record as saying they were personally charged with carrying out the forgery, but their marching orders, if they existed, came directly from Tenet (who has fiercely denied the story).

...The irony is that if White House honchos had listened to what Habbush was really saying instead of putting (or wishing) words in his mouth, they might have avoided the war that destroyed their political fortunes. As early as January 2003, writes Suskind, Habbush told a British intelligence officer that Saddam, 12 years earlier, had both ended his nuclear program and destroyed his chemical weapon stockpile and was in no hurry to build them up again. "They're not going to like this downtown," said Tenet, referring to his Pennsylvania Avenue bosses. They didn't. The Habbush report was buried, the war was set in motion, and Habbush himself was spirited to Amman, Jordan, where he was placated with $5 million in CIA hush money (even as his picture showed up as the jack of diamonds in Bush's playing deck of Iraqi war criminals).

More here.


I'm still angry about this whole murderous charade. I'll probably stay angry until they pour me into the urn.