D'oh!

Tenet Says He Was Made a Scapegoat Over Iraq War

No shit sherlock. So you want us to believe that the head of US intelligence was the last person in the world to figure out that this medal was a reward for providing the White House with the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) Bush and Cheney wanted to justify the war they were already committed to, going with Powell to the UN so as to impress the world with the apparent solidity of the administration's intelligence, and then allowing the CIA to take the blame for "intelligence failures" which allegedly misled the administration? That's the story you're going to stick with?

I guess the alternative is to admit that you knowingly played along with this murderous charade until now.

Either way: Way to go, hero.

General Cockup

Thomas Ricks writing in the Washington Post:

An active-duty Army officer is publishing a blistering attack on U.S. generals, saying they have botched the war in Iraq and misled Congress about the situation there.

"America's generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq," charges Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran who is deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. "The intellectual and moral failures . . . constitute a crisis in American generals."

"After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public," he writes. "For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq."

Yingling said he decided to write the article after attending Purple Heart and deployment ceremonies for Army soldiers. "I find it hard to look them in the eye," he said in an interview. "Our generals are not worthy of their soldiers."

There are all different kinds of courage, but they don't give medals for the kind Col. Yingling shows here. He'll have the respect of his fellow officers but, for his sake and for ours, I hope he doesn't pay for it with his career.

PAF is still pissed off

Not long ago, a famous career DC think-tanker and pundit came to my University to give a big public lecture. Before his talk, he had dinner with a couple dozen of us in one of the school's fancier reception rooms. Rubber chicken, wine, pretty nice affair by our standards. When the subject of Iraq came up, he defaulted to the "bad intelligence" defense: We were all misled, he told us; Everybody had the same faulty intelligence and everybody was equally mistaken in believing that Saddam had WMD, was linked to al Qaeda, and represented some kind of real threat. Who knew???

In the interests of not disrupting a University function with an ugly tirade against an invited guest, I bit my tongue (and began formulating a somewhat pointed but hopefully still civil response for the public lecture afterward). But I was really pissed off, and still am, that this DC bigshot could come in here and feed us bullshit which he should have known to be false. He should have known it because others knew it, and said so, before the fucking war began. And you didn't have to have some kind of esoteric security clearance to know it, because (among others) Knight-Ridder reporters were all over it, as Bill Moyers has helpfully documented for us (once you get to Moyers' page, scroll down for a veritable catalog of links to sceptical Knight-Ridder stories).

For instance, here's one from September 6, 2002 , seven months before the war began (reported By Jonathan Landay):

Senior U.S. officials with access to top-secret intelligence on Iraq say they have detected no alarming increase in the threat that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein poses to American security and Middle East stability.

Another from October 8, 2002, six months before the war began (reported by Strobel, Landay, and Walcott):

While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq, a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war.

These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses - including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network - have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East.

They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.

"Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A dozen other officials echoed his views in interviews with Knight Ridder. No one who was interviewed disagreed. [emphasis added by PAF]

And there were many more stories like this for those willing to look beyond the big mainstream news outlets which had already capitulated to the administration's duplicitous militarism. The alternative news outlets listed near the top right of this blog carried many of these sceptical stories, which is why I recommend them to you now. For more on the (ahem) mature and symbiotic relationship between executive power and the mainstream press, watch the Moyers video.

So Mr. DC big-shot, PBS News Hour TV fixture, household name, trusted voice of reason and official bipartisan moderation, if you happen to be one of the three people (including me) who ever reads this, up yours.

No one suffers more than George and Laura

America blog reports on an interview with first lady Laura Bush, who asks for our sympathy:

Laura Bush wants you to know the President is suffering over Iraq. In fact, Laura told Anne Curry on the Today Show, that the American people need to know that "no one suffers more than their President and I do." No one? She's as delusional as her husband. Of course, her husband is the person who caused the suffering -- and is the one person who can end it. I would wager that there are 3,300 families in America that are suffering more than George Bush. And, there are tens of thousands of injured soldiers who are literally suffering.

Buck up pal, George and Laura are really suffering.

Insightful analysis of regional politics and the Iraq War

I learned some things from reading the analysis of Oxford's Hussein Agha:

"Overt political debate in the Middle East is hostile to the American occupation of Iraq and dominated by calls for it to end sooner rather than later. No less a figure than King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, arguably the United States' closest Arab ally, has declared the occupation of Iraq 'illegal' and 'illegitimate'. Real intentions, however, are different. States and local political groups might not admit it - because of public opinion - but they do not want to see the back of the Americans. Not yet. "

"For this there is a simple reason: while the US can no longer successfully manipulate regional actors to carry out its plans, regional actors have learned to use the US presence to promote their own objectives. Quietly and against the deeply held wishes of their populations, they have managed to keep the Americans engaged with the hope of some elusive victory."

Of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Hussein says this:

"Al-Qaida and its affiliates arguably benefit most from the occupation. They established themselves, brought in recruits, sustained operations against the Americans and expanded. The last thing they want is for the Americans to leave and deny them targets and motivation for new members."

Thanks to Juan Cole's Informed Comment for pointing this out.

Survey Says!:

We are making lots of enemies in the Muslim world

Headlines from new public opinion poll of four predominantly Muslim countries:

• Majorities Want US Forces Out of Islamic Countries And Approve of Attacks on US Troops;
• Large Majorities Agree With Many Goals of Al Qaeda, But Oppose Attacks on Civilians;
• Most Support Enhancing Role of Islam in Their Society, But Also Favor Globalization and Democracy.

These people are not terrorist supporters, but clearly oppose US foreign policy which they believe specifically targets them:

"Large majorities across all four countries believe the United States seeks to weaken and divide the Islamic world.” On average 79 percent say they perceive this as a US goal, ranging from 73 percent in Indonesia and Pakistan to 92 percent in Egypt. Equally large numbers perceive that the United States is trying to maintain “control over the oil resources of the Middle East” (average 79%). "

Stabbed in the Back

Prompted by an angry and insightful post at Rising Hegemon, I dug out an article by Kevin Baker, published in the June 2006 issue of Harper's. In it, Baker discusses the venerable right wing myth of the "stab in the back," perhaps most famous as the hyper-nationalist rationalization for German defeat in World War I, and justification for pogroms against various alleged internal enemies during the Nazi period, prominently including leftists, Jews, and gays.

But as Baker points out, the stab in the back myth also has an enduring resonance among the American far right. It was deployed in order to recast the post-war settlement at Yalta as nefarious appeasement by an enfeebled FDR and his allegedly communist and homosexual-ridden administration. It was clearly implied by the "Who lost China" campaign waged by the right wing after the Maoist revolution. During the Korean war, MacArthur's folly in provoking Chinese intervention, and his breathtakingly reckless attempt to compensate by urging nuclear war against China, were recast in terms of the traitorous perfidy of lily-livered, limp-wristed Democrats who would not allow him to "win" the war by escalating it into World War III. And then Vietnam -- an unwinnable war in defense of a thoroughly corrupt and unpopular regime which existed only as the creature of US foreign policy and was expressly designed to frustrate the aspirations of Vietnamese nationalism, a war fought against a determined foe able to sustain literally millions of deaths in order to throw off foreign domination -- all of this reduced to the classic stab in the back narrative as exemplified in Rambo's supremely simple-minded slogan: "Do we get to win this time?" (as if 1-2 million Vietnamese killed by our war machine was somehow the result of us not really trying). Layered on top of this is the still resonant -- if factually unsupportable -- mythology of the wholesale abandonment of American Prisoners of War presumably now populating secret geriatric facilities hidden deep in the Vietnamese jungle (on the MIA myth see various works by H. Bruce Franklin).

These stories of American martial prowess betrayed by Democrats, progressives, Jews and gays, these legends of the dastardly stab in the back, are a common raw material of political myth-making on the American right. In light of this, it would be surprising if this story line wasn't trotted out yet again to account for the many failures of the war on terror otherwise inexplicable to the nationalists and jingos for whom America can do no wrong.

Based upon the relatively limited engagement of the American public with the GWOT, Baker believes the stab in the back story won't get a lot of popular traction this time around. After four years of being called a traitor for opposing this war, I'm not so sure. And as unpopular as the Iraq debacle is now, I ask myself whether the stab in the back myth won't make a strong comeback after the next terrorist attack.

Dateline: Washington

Having failed to find a real general to assume responsibility for the Global War on Terror, PAF has learned that the Bush-Cheney admininstration will nominate a fictional character to be the new Supreme Commander, Generalissmo, and Czar of the Global War on Terror (military acronym: SCGaCo'GWOT, but SCGaTo'GWOT is also acceptable). General Buck Turgidson, Air Force commander in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, could not be reached for comment on his nomination, but excitement is running high in the capital. The nomination was described as "daring," "innovative," and "downright neo-Reaganite" by Washington insiders at the American Enterprise Institute, who praised General Turgidson as a military strategist with a demonstrated ability to redefine catastrophe as victory, an ability sorely needed as the administration tries to get the GWOT out of its IED-strewn rut. Administration officials, who requested anonymity on the grounds that they do not want their names known, have told PAF that Turgidson's strategy of a devastating preemptive attack on a country unrelated to real terrorism was just the kind of thinking the country needs to "reunemasculate" its foreign policy. "It will send an unmistakable signal of American firmness and resolve to Badenov and the terrorists," said one White House advisor. "And, when it comes to plausible deniability for the White House, it's hard to beat assigning ultimate resposibility to a superbly acted fictional character."

In a related story, a videotape of Boris Badenov was broadcast worldwide in which the reputed terrorist mastermind issued the cryptic command, "Keel moose". While officials at the NSA's super-secret interception and decryption facility declined to comment on the meaning of Badenov's message, Homeland Security officially raised the national threat level to burnt umber. Administration spokespersons emphasized that this latest release only underscores the need for Congress to swiftly approve the Turgidson nomination.

Case Closed

BREAKING NEWS: A couple of guys named Curveball and Rocco have provided PAF with definitive proof that the Russians have acquired the bomb and Doug Feith insists they have "mature and symbiotic" links to global terrorism. Here reavealed for the first time in an exclusive virtual scoop, the proof: a mature and symbiotic Boris Badenov caught in the act.



But, you might say, that's not proof; it's a fucking cartoon. Three words: mobile bioweapons trailers. The precedent is set: For purposes of launching a preemptive war, cartoons count as proof.

PAF has it on good authority that tomorrow morning Vice President Cheney will appear on Meet the Press to say that it has been "pretty well confirmed" that Boris Badenov met Mohammed Atta in Prague, and Cheney will announce that the Turgidson Strategy is now the key to Victory in the War on Terror.

Start practicing those Duck and Covers.

A semblance of strategy

Since my earlier post, in which I realized that the US no longer has even the semblance of a strategy in Iraq, PAF has been scouring the internets for the semblance of a strategy. Now this is a strategy:



Of course, if you wanted to nitpick, you could belabor the point that this is a strategy for a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Russia, and is totally irrelevant to the Global War on Terror. But in defense of the Turgidson Strategy, I would point out that it is no less relevant to the GWOT than was our attack on Iraq. So it's no less likely to defeat the terrorists, and therefore worth a try.

PAF's new slogan for the GWOT:

Duck and cover, or the terrorists win.

Hey look!

Bill Bennett has an online store. Wow, lots of morally conservative swag. Or swagly conservative morals. Or something. As Slim Pickens once said: "Why shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all of this stuff."

War dehumanizes us all

Washington Post:

The Marine Corps chain of command in Iraq ignored "obvious" signs of "serious misconduct" in the 2005 slayings of two dozen civilians in Haditha, and commanders fostered a climate that devalued the life of innocent Iraqis to the point that their deaths were considered an insignificant part of the war, according to an Army general's investigation."All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics," Bargewell wrote. He condemned that approach because it could desensitize Marines to the welfare of noncombatants. "Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes."

We are some sick puppies

NPR reported this morning that Cho's parents are under FBI protection and being moved daily. This suggests that they have received death threats. If so, we are as sick as their son.

Grasshopper,

When is Congressional testimony like the sound of One Hand Slapping a Forehead?

What's the plan?

Last we heard, the plan was to Vietnamize the Iraq war. In an ironic sense, they're doing a great job of that.

"U.S. officials said they once believed that if they empowered their Iraqi counterparts, they'd take the lead and do a better job of curtailing the violence. But they concede that's no longer their operating principle."

Seems the ARVN can't fight, or Charlie don't surf, or some such; but it certainly sounds like Vietnamization. And that wasn't such a roaring sucess. House of cards, actually.

So: Ok, Plan A is not working out so well. They're not standing up and we're not standing down. But at least US officials recognize the old plan isn't working. That much is progress. So what's the new plan?

"Many officials are vague about when the U.S. will know when troops can begin to return home. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. is trying to buy 'time for the Iraqi government to provide the good governance and the economic activity that's required.' One State Department official, who also asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, expressed the same sentiment in blunter terms. 'Our strategy now is to basically hold on and wait for the Iraqis to do something,' he said. "

[At this point, PAF takes a break for defibrilation - CLEAR: zot; cough, snort, hack; resume typing]

Keep doing what you're doing, even though it is demonstrably failing, and just hope for the best??

That's not a strategy; it's not even an acceptable fortune cookie slogan. (Be honest, you'd return that cookie, wouldn't you: "Could I have another fortune cookie please; this one is defective").

It's time to admit that military victory is not going to happen here. It's time to create the conditions for a political settlement. We need to set a timetable for withdrawal, bring the Sunni insurgents into talks with the Shiite dominated government, vigorously pursue regional negoitiations, and allow the people of the region to determine their own futures. The only thing standing between us and the end of the war is the unwillingness of our political leaders to admit their folly in launching this catastrophe.

Cheney's War

Impeach Cheney

Key to Political Solution in Iraq: Recognition that Sunni Insurgents are not the same thing as al Qaeda

Marc Lynch at the American Prospect:

"Far from vindicating the American escalation strategy in Iraq, recent tensions between insurgent factions and al-Qaeda bolster the case for withdrawal. "

"...The real story in Iraqi Sunni politics right now is the growing power struggle between al-Qaeda's Islamic State of Iraq and a tentative alliance of insurgency factions opposed to its methods and goals. This doesn't mean that these insurgents are "good guys" -- they are the most effective forces fighting the American presence in Iraq, with much American blood on their hands, and their goal is to keep the insurgency's focus on fighting the American occupation. But their goals are not the same as al-Qaeda's. "

"...Al-Qaeda presents a global vision of Iraq's role and future. In a document published by the London-based Arab newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, al-Qaeda laid out a strategic agenda that placed Iraq at the center of a global jihad. The Islamic State of Iraq would become a central base for exporting jihad against kafir Arab regimes, the West, and Iran (with a high priority placed on the last). What that means is that al-Qaeda is in no hurry to see the Americans leave, since this would deprive it of its main source of propaganda and direct access to Americans targets. Thus, al-Qaeda rejects any negotiations with the United States. Indeed, at least some of its global rhetoric is likely tailored to feed American fears of withdrawal."

"The Islamic Army of Iraq and other locally rooted insurgency factions explicitly reject this vision of global jihad, insisting instead on a strict focus on liberating Iraq from American occupation. These factions have certainly been radicalized by the spiraling civil war in Iraq, but they lack al-Qaeda's monomaniacal fixation on the Shia and have on occasion entertained proposals for a cross-sectarian alliance. In recent weeks, some of these factions have gone out of their way to reassure neighboring Arab states that they consider the jihad exclusively Iraqi, and would not tolerate Iraq becoming an exporter of jihad. These insurgent factions have said that they would talk to the United States on the condition that it commit to withdrawing. (In fact, they probably already did talk to U.S. officials earlier this year, and according to recent reports are currently talking with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.) And unlike al-Qaeda, these factions actually badly want an American withdrawal from Iraq."

"..The insurgency's turn against al-Qaeda -- if it comes to fruition -- actually strengthens the case for an American withdrawal, by putting to rest fears of Iraq becoming a new base for global jihad. The escalating confrontation we've witnessed between the insurgents and al-Qaeda suggests that they would not afterwards tolerate the kind of al-Qaeda presence that Americans fear. Meanwhile, the currently dominant trends in the insurgency have made it ever more clear that they are willing to talk to the Maliki government and the United States, if only they get a strong commitment to withdrawal. "

Lynch is a professor at Williams College and proprietor of the blog, Abu Aardvark.

More from Lynch on this topic here.

Stop It

Physicians for Social Resposibility has a web form here which will allow you to send a letter to your Congressional representative and Senators asking Congress to investigate the use of torture and other abusive practices at US run detention facilities.

That Light at the end of the Tunnel is an IED

Juan Cole:

"Bloody Wednesday: Guerrillas, Violence kill Nearly 300 Iraqis:

I guess those Baghdad markets aren't as safe as Senator John McCain thought."

Two Virginia Techs Every Day

Juan Cole:

"Iraq Has Two Virginia Techs Every Day."