Iraq

Mike responds to a post I wrote that questioned Speaker Pelosi's call to increase the military by 30,000 troops. I agree that given the way the force and its responsibilities (more about those below) are currently structured, the troop rotation schedule is near the breaking point. However, I still disagree with Mike for two reasons. First, I simply don't trust the current administration not to send the troops to Iraq. Nothing the Bush administration has done in the past six years has convinced me that they will do anything other than that, Congress be damned. The only way Bush will not…
Did you vote for that? I didn't. It's great that Pelosi said on national television that Bush won't be receiving a blank check. But it's another part of the interview that bothers me. From Crooks and Liars (italics mine): PELOSI: I'm saying two things. We will always support the troops who are there. If the president wants to expand the mission, that's a conversation he has to have with the Congress of the United States . But that's not a carte blanche, a blank check to him to do whatever he wishes there. And I want to make a distinction here. Democrats do support increasing the size of…
You might have read about (or are personally experiencing) the massive snowstorms hitting the Plains states. So what does that have to do with Iraq? From the NY Times: Colorado and Kansas were trying to find enough helicopters capable of hauling hay bales weighing up to 1,300 pounds, said Don Ament, Colorado's agriculture director. Many helicopters in the state's National Guard fleet are in the Middle East. That is supposed to be the primary role of the Guard: natural disaster, backup for enforcing civil order, and threats against the country itself (I refuse to use that Orwellian-sounding…
You might have heard about the U.S. contractor who volunteered to be an FBI informant. For his service, he received 90+ days of Gitmoization. As hideous as that is, there are some other disturbing points in the NY Times story. First, was he imprisoned because he had hard evidence about this: Mr. Vance went to Iraq in 2004, first to work for a Washington-based company. He later joined a small Baghdad-based security company where, he said, "things started looking weird to me." He said that the company, which was protecting American reconstruction organizations, had hired guards from a…
But you know you want to read it anyway. From Iraqslogger: A driver is stuck in a traffic jam on the highway. Suddenly a man knocks on his window. The driver rolls down his window and asks, "What's going on?" "Terrorists down the road have kidnapped George W. Bush and Dick Cheney," the man says, "They're asking $100 million ransom. Otherwise they're going to douse them with gasoline and set them on fire. We're going from car to car taking up a collection." The driver asks, "How much is everyone giving on average?" The man responds: "Most people are giving about a gallon."
Because said officials are even more ignorant than the Pundits of the Potomac. A few months ago, Jeff Stein published an op-ed about the many officials who are charged with anti-terrorism and who also know nothing about the Middle East--to the point where they don't know if Hezbollah is Sunni or Shiite. Stein has followed up with an interview with incoming House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes. As far as I can tell, Reyes is marginally more informed than his Republican predecessors, which is damning with faint praise. Shakes and Ezra Klein both pile on Reyes, so I won't do that here…
...an LBJ moment? President Johnson listening to tapes made by his son-in-law and Marine Cpt. Charles Robb during Robb's tour in Vietnam In light of what Bush has said publicly and what he has said to Jim Webb, combined with a complete absence of detectable empathy towards anyone (LBJ did, after all, push very hard for civil rights legislation because he thought it was the right thing to do), I think the casualties just don't bother him. Or rather, they bother him because it makes him look foolish and stupid, not because of the horrific human cost.
Newsweek columnist Christopher Dickey writes this about our new Iraqi Phalangist friend, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq*, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (italics mine): As a Hakim supporter in the government told me privately the other day, "Moqtada should be behind bars, underground or across the border--those are the three options he has--and a fourth one is for him to behave. The U.S. doesn't need to tackle him. They don't need to do the dirty work. We will do the dirty work. They should stay over the horizon.". . . The essential point is that Iraqis on all…
For those of you just joining tonight's program, the Nazis are the bad guys Just when you think the Peter Pan Right can't possibly get any daffier, they just manage to do so. By way of Crooked Timber comes this synopsis of a Michael Novak article in the Standard: Josh Marshall links to a Michael Novak piece in the Standard - a piece that is surely the apotheosis of Green Lantern foreign policy (well, until next week); complete with vulnerability to the hideous yellow streak that is the MSM. It begins ... horribly: Today, the purpose of war is sharply political, not military; psychological,…
A while ago, I defined Compulsive Centrist Disorder: Complusive Centrist Disorder has always bothered me because a certain policy or view will mysteriously be labelled 'centrist' regardless of where it actually falls on the political spectrum, and suddenly it will be far more respectable than other policies. It's intellectual cowardice and laziness of a high order.... In this case, you might actually think my proposal is the best policy. However, the problem with Compulsive Centrist Disorder is that it short-circuits any discussion, since the compromise is automatically assumed to be a good…
Not predictable. Predicted. Over at DailyKos is a powerful diary by the wife of a Vietnam & Iraq I war veteran. During a discussion with a bunch of conservative college students, the following happened (italics mine): A little blonde got up enough nerve to say something. My husband wouldn't tell me exactly what she said, but I can picture it. My nieces, Thing 1 and Thing 2, are fairly typical college students. They back Bush 110% because he's the president and a Christian and God chose him to be president instead of that arrogant Al Gore or that CATHOLIC LIBERAL John Kerry ( cps…
So finally, a war supporter, albeit a former one, proposes something kind of like an exit strategy. George Packer argues that we should stay long enough to get exit visas those Iraqis who helped the U.S.: Those Iraqis who have had anything to do with the occupation and its promises of democracy will be among the first to be killed: the translators, the government officials, the embassy employees, the journalists, the organizers of women's and human rights groups.... If the United States leaves Iraq, our last shred of honor and decency will require us to save as many of these Iraqis as…
Sounds like a civil war to me. And as civil wars go, it's pretty awful. A year ago, I was comparing it to Northern Ireland. Actually, comparison is the wrong word, since Iraq is far more brutal than Northern Ireland ever was. This is not something 'that happened.' Those who supported the war, for whatever reason, are responsible for it. Many of us warned you this would happen, and instead of listening, we were derided as traitors and weaklings. We were not viewed as 'serious' people. Now, it's too late. I can see no way to fix this problem. So thank you for dragging our nation…
There are reports that the U.S. has cut a deal with Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, so he can negotiate with the Sunni insurgents: According to the Iraqi newspaper Al- Quds al-Arabi, James Baker, the Bush family's Mr. Fixit, recently met with one of Saddam Hussein's lawyers in Amman, Jordan, and told him that the former deputy prime minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, would be released from detention by December in order to negotiate with the US on behalf of factions of the Iraqi resistance movement still controlled by old Ba'ath Party leaders. Sources in Jordan tell me that the…
This week, Democratic Senator Carl Levin proposed that the U.S. begin withdrawing troops from Iraq in four to six months. Granted this is vastly superior to the Bush 'plan' which seems to be 'change absolutely nothing 'cuz it's worked damn well so far.' But I have a question: why wait four to six months? I'm leaving town for Thanksgiving, and as always, I'm running around, trying to finish things up, and do all those stupid little things you have to do before you go away for a while. It seems to me that's what that four to six months is for. Unfortunately, I haven't heard what exactly…
It's so hard to keep up with the Iraqi War and Occupation justifications. For those of us who opposed the Iraqi War and Occupation from the beginning, one reason was that our fellow citizens should not die to keep oil prices low. While it appears that the low oil prices never materialized, Bush and other Republicans are now arguing that we need to stay in Iraq to stabilize oil prices. It seems the GIs who unofficially named Iraqi base camps "Exxon" and "Mobil" knew what they were talking about. To paraphrase John Kerry from long ago--back when he was eloquent, what do you say to the last…
Buckling under to conservative pressure to find the non-existent evidence that Saddam Hussein had, in fact, been building weapons of mass destruction, about a year ago, the Bush Administration placed online documents from the Saddam Hussein era that provided technical information on building various nuclear devices. Quoth the Grey Lady: The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public…
I am taking off my scientist hat and putting on my citizen hat. (For explanations of these two hats, read my previous post.) The defining issue for me and most people in the coming election is the war on Iraq. I can tell you that at the beginning I was a supporter of US intervention in Iraq at least conditionally. I thought that our cause was relatively just and that the case for WMD was relatively strong. It turns out that case was not nearly as strong as I believed and the cause was significantly grayer. In this regard, I feel part of a peer group that has had a similar arc of changing…
Why couldn't Kerry have said this in 2004? Despite what the Washington Mandarins think, anger is the appropriate emotion. Sigh.
Recent estimates suggest that the dollar cost of the Iraq War and Occupation will be over two trillion dollars. The horrible irony is that, had Bush not fought this war--or very quickly declared democracy and 'cut and run'--the amount of money Bush would have added to the federal debt would have been substantially smaller (the debt would have increased, however). In other words, his stupid war/occupation undercut his stupid ecconomic policies. Maybe that's why conservatives are jumping ship...