The Cakewalk War

[Anwaar]

By Paul Craig Roberts

09/20/05 "ICH" -- -- The "cakewalk war" is now two and one-half years old. US casualties (dead and wounded) number 20,000. As 20,000 is the number of Iraqi insurgents according to US military commanders, each insurgent is responsible for one US casualty.

US troops in Iraq number about 150,000. Obviously, US troops have not inflicted 150,000 casualties on the Iraqi insurgents. US troops have perhaps inflicted 150,000 casualties on the Iraqi civilian population, primarily women and children who are the "collateral damage" of the "righteous" and "virtuous" US invasion that is spreading civilian deaths all over Mesopotamia in the name of democracy.

What could the US have possibly done to give America a worse name than to invade Iraq and murder its citizens?

According to the September 1 Manufacturing & Technology News, the Government Accounting Office has reported that over the course of the cakewalk war, the US military’s use of small caliber ammunition has risen to 1.8 billion rounds. Think about that number. If there are 20,000 insurgents, it means US troops have fired 90,000 rounds at each insurgent.

Very few have been hit. We don’t know how many. To avoid the analogy with Vietnam, until last week the US military studiously avoided body counts. If 2,000 insurgents have been killed, each death required 900,000 rounds of ammunition.

The combination of US government owned ammo plants and those of US commercial producers together cannot make bullets as fast as US troops are firing them. The Bush administration has had to turn to foreign producers such as Israel Military Industries. Think about that. Hollowed out US industry cannot produce enough ammunition to defeat a 20,000 man insurgency.

US military analysts are beginning to wonder if the US has been defeated by the insurgency. Increasingly, Bush administration spokesmen sound like "Baghdad Bob." On September 19 the Washington Post reported that US military spinmeister Major General Rich Lynch declared "great success" against the insurgency that had just inflicted the worst casualties of the war, including a three-day mortar attack on the "safe" Green Zone.

Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, says: "We can’t secure the airport road, can’t stop the incoming (mortar rounds) into the Green Zone, can’t stop the killings and kidnappings." The insurgency controls most of Baghdad and the Sunni provinces.

With its judgement lost to frustration, the US military has 40,000 Iraqis in detention – twice the number of estimated insurgents. Who are these detainees? According to the Washington Post, "Many of the men detained in Tall Afar last week were rounded up on the advice of local teenagers who had stepped forward as informants, at times for what American soldiers said they suspected amounted to no more than settling local scores."

Obviously, the US, not knowing who or where the insurgents are, is just striking blindly, creating a larger insurgency.

The Iraq government, despite being backed by the US military, is unable to control movements across the Iraqi – Syrian border. So the Bush administration has passed the buck to Syria. Puny Syria is declared guilty of not doing what the US military cannot do.

Adam Ereli, the demented US State Department spokesperson, denounced the Syrian government for "permitting" insurgents to cross the border. The US government cannot prevent a steady stream of one million Mexicans from illegally crossing its border each year, but Syria is supposed to be able to stop a couple hundred foreign fighters from sneaking across its border.

Ereli misrepresents Syria’s inability to be "an unwillingness" which indicates that Syria is consorting with terrorists, not only in Iraq, but also in Lebanon and Palestine. Does this sound like Syria being set up for invasion?

According to news reports, at Ted Forstmann’s annual meeting of movers and shakers last weekend, US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, predicted that US troops will soon enter into Syria. Simultaneously, the Bush administration is desperately trying to orchestrate a case that it can use to attack Iran.

Stalemated in Iraq, the White House moron intends to attack two more countries.

At the Human Rights Conference on September 9, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, described Americans as "people with blood-soaked hands."

"Who are the terrorists," asked Mahathir, the Iraqis or the Americans?

The entire world is asking this question.

Source : www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10349.htm

[DT1]

Talk about the gang that could'nt shoot straight...
Are we to understand that we are to continue pouring BILLIONS of dollars into Iraq
(with no oversight)while the dollar plummets in value,the true benificiaries of our soldier's spilled blood(Isreal,Saudi Arabia)lift not a finger?
the National Guard is desperately needed HERE,NOW,and China laughs all the way to the bank,and Nasa is going forward withplans to send astranouts to mars?
SEND BUSH TO MARS!!!
Iraq:it's Vietnam-without the honesty.

[michelle]

[glow=red,2,300]NEXT WEEK WOMEN SAY NO TO WAR[/glow]

Peace is not just for women

Since before the Iraq War began, TrueMajority members have been raising their voices for peace. News stories, polls and editorials show that the majority of Americans are coming around, and we should be encouraged as we get our second wind to continue this struggle.

Our friends at CodePink have been leaders as well, with a constant flow of bold, creative actions spreading the message that Americans of all stripes do not want Iraqis killed in our name. They’ve offered TrueMajority members the chance to join in on their latest campaign – a Call for Peace in honor of International Women’s Day, which will be delivered by a huge crowd in Washington D.C. along with a delegation of Iraqi women. We think it’s a great idea, and hope you will, too. ANYONE can sign, whether you're a woman or just the child of one.

To have your name put on the Call for Peace, click the link below:

Or visit:

action.truemajority.org/campaign/womensayno/w3kwkg82y5bb83n?

You can also join the march in Washington on Wednesday, March 8th, or hold a support rally in your hometown; CodePink has more info on how at their website (below).


Matt Holland
TrueMajority Online Director


Here’s the message from our friends at CodePink:


This week we have seen escalating brutality in Iraq claiming the lives of 1,300 people, a poll exposing the desire of 72% of the U.S. soldiers to leave Iraq, and George Bush’s approval ratings plunging to the lowest levels of his presidency. We must act now. We must join together across the borders to end this madness.

Next week, in celebration of International Women's Day, a courageous group of Iraqi women will converge in Washington DC. They represent Shias, Sunnis and Kurds, religious and secular women. They are united in their horror at the killings, and their determination to stop the violence.

We owe it to them to stand with them in solidarity. You can do that by signing the Urgent Call for Peace, circulating it, and participating in an anti-war action on International Women's Day. Click here to find an event in your community. www.womensaynotowar.org/calendar.php NOTE: EVENTS ARE TO BE HELD INTERNATIONALLY, NOT JUST IN THE U.S.[/color]

One of our delegates told us that in Baghdad these days, there are dead bodies on the streets and pools of blood on the sidewalks, that parents are keeping their children locked inside their homes. Fear is everywhere.

As we say in our call, "This is not the world we want for ourselves or our children. With fire in our bellies and love in our hearts, we women are rising up - across borders - to unite and demand an end to the bloodshed and the destruction."

And if you don't see one, pull something together--fast. It can be as simple as downloading a copy of our Urgent Call for Peace, representing the signatures of tens of thousands of women worldwide, and taking it to your Embassy or congressperson. Click here to download.
www.womensaynotowar.org/article.php?id=698

Join us,

Dana, Farida, Gael, Jodie, Medea, Nancy, Rae & Tiffany

[michelle]

Does More War Require a Draft?

A couple of things here, including an article/message I found from some members of the Libertarian party on the draft resistance. Below that, THE REAL BODY COUNT, or: The National Young Men’s Meat Grinder....Michelle

Does More War Require a Draft?
By Brent Budowsky
August 24, 2006

Editor's Note: In this guest essay, political analyst Brent Budowsky says policymakers and pundits favoring a wider war in the Middle East must be asked about ominous signs that the Bush administration's proclivity for war means some form of military draft is in America's future:

The involuntary recall of 3,500 Marines to active duty, required by personnel shortages for the war in Iraq, on top of previous extensions of deployment schedules for active-duty troops and reserves, demands an answer to this question: Is America headed for a return to the draft, either by that traditional name or in some other form?

The problem is simple: the United States went to war in Iraq without sufficient numbers of troops leading to inevitable problems. My view has always been that it would have been better for the President to have finished the job of killing bin Laden in Afghanistan, rather than cutting and running on that job, and helping bin Laden escape, to charge into an unwise war in Iraq.

Once the decision to wage war in Iraq was made, the manner with which it was conducted created inevitable and catastrophic results that have caused major, long-term damage to American force structures, recruitment and restocking of equipment that will cost many billions of dollars to replace.

Many thoughtful Republicans, such as Sen. Chuck Hagel, have raised these issues from the beginning. Even Sen. John McCain, one of the strongest supporters of the war, has always understood the implications of troop strength and force structure, and now criticizes the President for not leveling with the American people on the consequences and cost of the war.

From the beginning, there have been unfair burdens imposed on our troops; there have been unfair deployment practices that have imposed major hardship on Reserves and their families; there have been inadequate supplies for our forces including insufficient armor, bandages and even helmets; there has been major erosion of equipment in the desert sands that will impose shocking new costs to replace; and there has been a major and dangerous disruption of American military force structures around the world, and major damage done to recruitment at home.

My view -- expressed here, elsewhere and privately to officials, once this war was unwisely begun -- has long been to seek a cease-fire with internal Iraqi insurgents, laying down their arms in return for a seat at the table of the governing of Iraq. This cease-fire would NOT include external terrorists, who are in much smaller numbers and would have been isolated and defeated with American casualties being dramatically decreased years ago.

Similarly, I have urged for several years, and urge again here, that America regain its traditional role of Middle East diplomacy deploying internationally known figures in both parties -- former President Clinton and former Sens. Sam Nunn and George Mitchell, working with former Secretaries of State Jim Baker, Colin Powell or others. The last six years represent the first time since 1948 that there has been no American diplomatic leadership at least attempting to address the fundamental issues that divide the Middle East. This re-engagement should have been initiated six years ago; it must be initiated now.

The President has been trapped in a narrow, provincial, war-obsessed mentality that has only increased instability, radically strained American force structures, given tactical advantages to our terrorist enemies and to Iran. This, too, must change immediately before the damage and dangers become even worse at a time of escalating chaos in the region, deteriorating conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and further destabilized American military force structures.

Warning Sign

The forced recall of 3,500 Marines is a clarion call warning to all Americans, and along with other distortions of deployment practices, is now, in effect, a form of reviving the draft.

Listening to the President, Vice President Cheney, the various neoconservative policy pushers, their vision appears to be a vision of endless and permanent world war, with expanding and ever more dangerous fields of combat, when we do not even have the troops strength to meet our commitments today.

Having been involved in intelligence and military matters for more than two decades, this much is clear: we cannot sustain our commitments today; with any additional wars to fight, we will be left with only two choices: either inadequate forces creating more Iraqs, or adequate forces that can only be maintained through a revival of the draft, no matter what it is called. That is the fact.

When these neoconservative voices rush to the airwaves to proclaim the wars they would like (others) to fight, Democrats, Republicans and all in the media should ask:

If you want war with Iran, where will you get the troops, and will you bring back the draft?

If you want war with Syria, where will you get the troops, and will you bring back the draft?

If you want war with North Korea, where will you get the troops, and will you bring back the draft?

It is high time and long overdue that the United States resumes its role of world diplomatic and political leadership and brings in people of world-wide credibility and stature to at least test the waters for game-changing diplomacy.

For those who prefer the course of war, we must all ask, on every occasion: for the wars you would like to fight, where will you get the troops, and are you prepared to bring back the draft?

Brent Budowsky was an aide to U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen on intelligence issues, and served as Legislative Director to Rep. Bill Alexander when he was Chief Deputy Whip of the House Democratic Leadership. Budowsky can be reached at [e-mail]..
SOURCE: www.consortiumnews.com/2006/082306a.html
****************************************************
No Compulsory Servitude
Donald C. Ernsberger

A new draft represents the clearest and most consistent application of several principles which are the root causes of the lack of liberty in America today.

In moral terms, the power and use of power by government to compel individuals to serve two years in the armed forces is clearly slavery. Of a limited term variety to be sure, but slavery none the less. Some argue that this is a "necessary evil" and others that it is a moral good — a kind of dues — but none can deny that it is compulsive, forceful and anti-voluntary. There are three moral questions involved in the draft issue; the answers to which sum up the essential differences between libertarianism and statist collectivism.

The first issue is that of self-ownership. Should a society ever compel an individual to serve any master except oneself or pursue any goals but one's own. If one answers in the positive, then the path is open to a society where human beings are treated as national resources to be manipulated by groups or governments. The second is the question of the origin of rights. If rights are merely grants or gifts given to us by our government, then it can be argued that "dues" are owed and that our rights can temporarily suspended in times of national emergency. However if, in the American Revolutionary spirit, rights, are held to be natural and inherent we owe nothing in return for them and they can not be suspended. The third issue is the question of social needs vs. individual choice. Fundamentally, one must decide which is more important . . . the goals of the individual or the goals of the majority in society. For thousands of years, thinkers and leaders of the world have held that for the good of the group, the tribe, the society, or the state individual rights must be sacrificed. (Once this is accepted, their positions of power are secured!) Philosophically, the assumption destroys the basis of all society because it relegates the individual to the position of slave each time his views on a subject place him in the minority. Clearly here again the draft strikes at the heart of man's rights, as annunciated by out own Declaration of Independence.

In addition to the moral injustice of the Selective Service system, there are several social, political and psychological effects which eat away at a free society.

Socially, the draft tends to alienate the most intelligent and creative young thinkers from the proper uses of defensive action such as individual protection of rights and private protection agency concepts. Observe the current "anti-war" movement — many members of which would totally dismantle systems for protecting us from outside aggressors.

Politically, the history of the last thirty five years bears out the danger of conscription cited so frequently on every congressional debate on the subject. The power to draft gives the executive and the military establishment an unparalleled capability to rely on a militaristic foreign policy to the point of becoming involved in an undeclared war without congressional or popular approval. The power to draft stands as an essential pillar of foreign policy. Those concerned with Americanism would do well to ponder this attack on the checks and balances of our Constitution by those who support a new draft. Another political effect was seen in the past draft utilization where deferments were used to channel registrants into activities that the government deemed desirable. Some proposals for a new compulsory service for two years do the same. The late General Hershey described channeling as "the American way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted." Do we really want to emulate Castro and other dictators to get youth to take "worthwhile" jobs?

A clear psychological danger is that acceptance of the draft leads to a natural rejection of other free means of getting things accomplished. If the concepts of free trade are not applied to recruitment of men for the armed forces then voluntary association may take a back seat to force in other areas of American life.

America was not always run on the assumption that is could only be defended by conscript soldiers. The large bulk of the army that served under George Washington was volunteer. Only in a few colonies was the draft employed. During the War of 1812, the administration of President Madison pressed for a draft but Congress rejected it as inconsistent with a free America. It was called in Congress a "fabric of despotism ... a Magna Carta of slavery." During the Civil War, bloody riots in New York resulted from the use of the draft system for a short time in the North. At the outbreak of World War I the change from earlier ideals to the current popularity of conscription was almost complete. From the beginning of World War I our leaders were so mesmerized by the success of totalitarian Prussia's conscript army that we did not even allow volunteering. World War II also brought coercion through the draft as the means for recruiting an army. The draft allowed America to launch our unwise adventures in Korea and Vietnam . . . adventures which lost us world respect and alienated millions of young Americans.

To the believer in individual rights, there can be no compromise on the draft issue. The forced conscription of young men must not begin again. The volunteer army should be highly specialized and recruited along free market lines. This army must act only to protect the byes and property of individuals as any other use is illegitimate. The long range goal is, of course, for an end to all forms of coercion. The selective service system is the most dramatic and consistent application of statist mentality in America and it must not be brought back.

America has a proud tradition of individual resistance to the draft. The call for men to be drafted in 1812 was answered by threats of internal revolution. The response in New York and Pennsylvania to the draft in the Civil War was rioting and dodging. Immigrants flooded America in the late nineteenth century fleeing the draft in Poland, Germany and Russia. In World War I individuals went to jail rather than serve. During the Vietnam war, we saw thousands fleeing to Canada, refusing to register or report, faking physical aliments, or going underground to avoid compulsory servitude. While much of that resistance was not based on consistent acceptance of libertarian ideals, the resistance to coercion of this blatant type was widespread none-the less. There is a great need for those who do stand consistently for individual freedom to take the lead in the struggle against the draft. For if the draft is recognized for the abomination against human rights that it is it will be far easier to convince people that other forms of statism are just as alien to the American experience.

Advocates of individual rights must first oppose the enactment of compulsory registration laws, for the, required registration is the first step to the return of selective servitude. If these laws to require registration pass, libertarians will and must organize resistance to them. In the long run all of our lives and principles are on the line.

SIL DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLE
Adopted October 1969

As Advocates of Individual Liberty We Affirm:

That every person has an inalienable right to their own life, liberty and property;

That the only proper use of force is in retaliation against those who violate human rights;

That the basic violation of human rights consists of the initiation or the threat of the initiation of force against the individual;

That all proper social organization can only be a consequence of voluntary association between individuals;

That the only economic system consistent with human prosperity and happiness is laissez-faire capitalism;

That the ideologies and instrumentalities of coercive collectivism are the basic threat to human rights and the existence of moral human societies;

And that both moral individuals and moral societies have the obligation to act in their own rational self-interest to protect themselves from those who seek to coercively control, direct and enslave them.

With the apostles of coercion increasingly pre-dominant in the councils of man, it is the duty of all those who value their life, liberty and property to take appropriate action - intellectual and social - to preserve and extend their freedom.

We as libertarians resolve to resist of involuntary collectivism and all programs and activities of government which violate our rights and attempt to take from us the ability to set our own goals and to determine our own destiny.

We work for the day when all individuals are free, and we look forward to a society of peace, plenty and freedom where the individual's rights are truly politically inalienable. As advocates of reason and liberty we seek and will settle for no less than;
FREEDOM IN OUR TIME

SOURCE: www.draftresistance.org/nocompserv.php
****************************************************
Harring Report: The National Young Men’s Meat Grinder

There is excellent reason to believe that the Department of Defense is deliberately not reporting a significant number of the dead in Iraq. We have received copies of manifests from the MATS that show far more bodies shipped into Dover AFP than are reported officially.

The actual death toll is in excess of 10,000. (See the official records at the end of this piece.) Given the officially acknowledged number of over 15,000 seriously wounded (and a published total of 25,000 wounded overall,), this elevated death toll is far more realistic than the current 2,000+ now being officially published.

When our research is complete, and watertight, we will publish the results along with the sources In addition to the evident falsification of the death rolls, at least 5,500 American military personnel have deserted, most in Ireland but more have escaped to Canada and other European countries, none of whom are inclined to cooperate with vengeful American authorities. (See TBR News of 18 February for full coverage on the mass desertions)

This means that of the 158,000 U.S. military shipped to Iraq, 26,000 deserted, were killed or seriously wounded. The DoD lists currently being very quietly circulated indicate over 12,000 dead, over 25,000 seriously wounded and a large number of suicides, forced hospitalization for ongoing drug usage and sales, murder of Iraqi civilians and fellow soldiers, rapes, courts martial and so on -The government gets away with these huge lies because they claim, falsely, that only soldiers actually killed on the ground in Iraq are reported. The dying and critically wounded are listed as en route to military hospitals outside of the country and not reported on the daily postings. Anyone who dies just as the transport takes off from the Baghdad airport is not listed and neither are those who die in the US military hospitals. CLIP:

Source and read more: Ongoing body count here www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a2474.htm

[michelle]

Note: Thread below deleted and articles moved.....Michelle

Not enough money for Iraq war
« Thread Started on Sept 26, 2006, 12:48pm »
Army chief tells Bush: there's not enough money for Iraq war
[posted by Anwaar]
· 'Bungling' Rumsfeld must go, say retired officers
· British troops kill al-Qaida leader in Basra shootout

The Guardian, Tuesday September 26, 2006

George Bush suffered a serious rebuke of his wartime leadership yesterday when his army chief said he did not have enough money to fight the war in Iraq.

Six weeks before midterm elections in which the war is a crucial issue, the protest from the army head, General Peter Schoomaker, exposes concerns within the US military about the strain of the war on Iraq, and growing tensions between uniformed personnel and the Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld.

Three retired senior military officers yesterday accused Mr Rumsfeld of bungling the war on Iraq, and said the Pentagon was "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically". Major General Paul Eaton, a retired officer who was in charge of training Iraq troops, said: "Mr Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making."

The rare criticism from the three officers, all veterans of the Iraq war, is an embarrassment to Mr Bush at a time when his party had hoped to campaign on its strong leadership in the "war on terror".

The officers echoed the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate at the weekend, which said the Iraq war had fuelled Islamist extremism around the world. They also accused the Pentagon of putting soldiers' lives at risk by failing to provide the best equipment available. "Why are we asking our soldiers and marines to use the same armour we found was insufficient in 2003?" asked Thomas Hammes, a retired Marine Corps colonel.

The criticism comes amid an unprecedented show of defiance from the army chief, Gen Schoomaker. The general refused to submit a budget plan for 2008 to Mr Rumsfeld, arguing the military could not continue operations in Iraq and its other missions without additional funds, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday. The seriousness of the protest was underlined by Gen Schoomaker's reputation as an ally of the Pentagon chief. The general came out of retirement at Mr Rumsfeld's request to take up the post.

"It's quite a debacle," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute thinktank. "Virtually everyone in the army feels as though their needs have been shortchanged."

Gen Schoomaker's defiance gives a voice to growing concern within the military about the costs of America's wars, and the long-term strain of carrying out operations around the world.

For the past three years, the $400bn (£210bn) cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded by emergency spending bills passed by Congress. But Gen Schoomaker and others say the Iraq war has also put a severe strain on regular budgets. That puts the generals at odds with Mr Rumsfeld's strategic vision of a more nimble, hi-tech military. In addition, Congress and the White House have cut a number of army spending requests over the past months. "There is no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken budget," he told a Washington audience.

As the war in Iraq continues with no sign of a reduction in US forces, military officials have repeatedly complained about the strain on personnel, and say they fear they may be forced to rely more heavily on the National Guard and reservists to meet the demands of overseas deployments. General John Abizaid, America's senior commander in the Middle East, said last week there was little chance of any drawing down of the 140,000 forces in Iraq before next spring.

The burden of that commitment was underlined yesterday when the army extended the combat tours of about 4,000 soldiers serving in the Ramadi area.

In Basra yesterday, British troops killed a prominent al-Qaida figure who was hiding in Iraq after escaping from US custody in Afghanistan last year, the ministry of defence said. Omar Faruq was shot dead while resisting arrest during a pre-dawn raid by 250 soldiers after a long-planned intelligence-led operation. A British military spokesman described Faruq as a "very, very significant man".

Source :tinyurl.com/hfuyg

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Re: Not enough money for Iraq war
« Reply #1 on Oct 2, 2006, 9:13am »
The diminished dividends of war
[posted by michelle]
By Jim Lobe
Sep 27, 2006

WASHINGTON - With the US intelligence community agreed that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have made the United States less safe from terrorist threats, President George W Bush appears to be facing a growing revolt among top military commanders who say their ground forces are stretched close to breaking point.

According to Monday's Los Angeles Times, the US Army's top officer, General Peter Schoomaker, has called for a nearly 50% increase in spending, to nearly US$140 billion, in 2008 to cope
with the situation in Iraq and maintain minimal readiness for emergencies.

To convey his seriousness, Schoomaker reportedly withheld the army's scheduled budget request last month in what the Times called an "unprecedented ... protest" against previous rejections by the White House of funding increases.

And this week, several retired senior military leaders told Senate Democrats that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should go, arguing that he had mishandled the war in Iraq. The former soldiers claimed that Rumsfeld had ignored advice for more troops, failed to make a post-invasion plan or equip troops properly, and hid information from the public.

The news of Schoomaker's action, which is almost certain to intensify the debate over what to do in Iraq just seven weeks before the November 7 mid-term congressional elections, comes just days after the New York Times reported that the army was considering activating substantially more National Guard troops or reservists.

Such a decision, which would run counter to previous Bush administration pledges to limit overseas deployments for the Guard, would pose serious political risks for the Republicans if it were made before the elections.

Unlike career soldiers, the National Guard consists mainly of "citizen-soldiers" with families and jobs and deep roots in local communities. When the Pentagon last called up substantial numbers of Guard units for service in Iraq and Afghanistan in late 2003 and 2004, the move elicited a strong backlash in communities across the country.

With the Iraq war even less popular now than it was then, any major new call-up is likely to trigger renewed protests, particularly in light of the growing sense both among the national-security elites and the general population that the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq was a major mistake and that the war is unwinnable.

Recent opinion polls have shown that the US public has become increasingly pessimistic about the war's outcome and its impact on the larger "global war on terror".

This month, for example, a New York Times/CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) poll found that nearly two-thirds of respondents believed the war in Iraq was going either "somewhat" (28%) or "very" badly (33%).

For most of the past year, a majority of respondents in various polls have said they believed the decision to go to war in Iraq was a mistake and that it had made the US less, rather than more, safe from terrorism.

The fact that a similar conclusion was reportedly reached by the 16 agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), that make up the US intelligence community in April in a rare National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is likely to add to the public's pessimism.

The NIE, some of the contents of which were leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post over the weekend, found that the Iraq war had invigorated Islamic radicalism worldwide and aggravated the terrorist threat faced by the US and other countries.

While the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, insisted on Sunday that the newspaper accounts of the report's conclusions were partial and selective, they nonetheless backed up what a number of former senior intelligence analysts - most recently, the retired head of the CIA's Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program, Emile Nakhleh - have been saying individually for much of the past year.

While Democratic lawmakers called on Monday for the Bush administration immediately to declassify the NIE, "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States", so that the public could decide for itself, it is certain to intensify the debate about whether to begin withdrawing from Iraq or whether to "stay the course" there despite the growing sectarian violence and the wear and tear on US ground forces.

For most of the past year, the administration and senior military commanders have expressed hope that they could reduce US forces in Iraq from the approximately 140,000 troops who were there last December to help protect the parliamentary elections by as many as 30,000 by the end of this year.

But with the rise in sectarian violence, particularly in Baghdad, that followed the bombing of a major Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, Washington has been forced to abandon those hopes. Last week, the senior US Middle East commander, General John Abizaid, made it official when he told reporters in Washington that he needed at least 140,000 troops in Iraq through next spring.

Even this number of troops, however, has not proved sufficient to curb the violence in Baghdad, while a recent report from the senior Marine Corps intelligence officer in al-Anbar province, which comprises about one-third of Iraq's total territory, warned that the 30,000 US troops deployed there could not defeat the Sunni insurgency without the addition of at least 13,000 personnel and substantially more economic assistance.

Adding to the burden on the army and the marines, the resurgence of the Taliban has forced Washington to cancel plans to reduce forces in Afghanistan from 19,000 earlier this year to about 16,000 by autumn.

Instead, Washington currently has more than 20,000 troops deployed there amid signs that more may be needed if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization fails to provide more troops of its own or if, in light of the retreat of Pakistani forces from neighboring Waziristan, the Taliban mount an even bigger offensive from across the border next spring after the snows melt.

These commitments have taken a huge, unanticipated toll on US land forces, not just in manpower, but in equipment and money as well.

Before the war in Iraq, the Pentagon's political appointees confidently predicted that the Middle Eastern country's oil production would very quickly pay for the invasion's financial costs and that Washington could draw down US forces to as few as 30,000 by the end of 2003.

In fact, about $400 billion - almost all of it for military operations - has been appropriated for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since September 2001, and current operations there are running at about $9 billion a month.

The US Army, which has some 500,000 active-duty soldiers, has been allocated $98 billion this year, and the White House has cleared it to receive $114 billion for 2008. But Schoomaker has reportedly asked for $139 billion, including at least $13 billion to repair equipment. "There's no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken budget," he warned recently in a speech in Washington.

In addition to strains on both the land forces and their equipment, senior military leaders are also worried about attrition among mid-ranking officers, in particular, and the quality and cost of new recruits.

The military has greatly intensified its recruitment efforts, relaxed its age and education requirements for enlistment, and offered unprecedented bonuses and benefits packages - worth thousands of dollars - to enlistees and active-duty soldiers who re-enlist.

It has also increased enlistments by individuals with "serious criminal misconduct" in their records and eased requirements of non-citizens - of which there are currently about 40,000 in the US armed services - and made them eligible to citizenship after only one day of active-duty service.

Source:
atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HI27Aa01.html

[michelle]

America has finally taken on the grim reality of Iraq

The US is radically rethinking its exit strategy, while Britain waits zombie-like for new instructions

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday October 18, 2006
The Guardian

The Baker report on an exit strategy from Iraq, leaked this week in the US, is as sensible as it is sensational. It rejects "staying the course" as no longer plausible and purports to seek alternatives to just "cutting and running". Stripped of political sweetening, it concludes that there is none. America must leave Iraq without preconditions and hope that its neighbours, hated Syria and Iran, can clear up the mess. This advice comes not from some anti-war coalition but from the Iraq study group under the former Republican secretary of state, James Baker, set up by Congress with President George Bush's endorsement. Students of Iraq studies should at this point sit down and steady their nerves. Kissinger is in Paris. The Vietnam moment is at hand.

Earlier this week Bush telephoned the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, to reassure him about rumours swirling through Washington that the Pentagon was about to topple him for being useless. It was reported that Maliki had just two months to get both his army and the escalating violence - running at some 100 deaths a day - under control. Washington was allegedly searching for a new "strong man" to pull the militias into line and assert the power of central government over Iraq's catatonic insecurity.

Lending force to these rumours, Republican Senator John Warner has spoken of a deadline for withdrawal and some version of a "three-state" solution. The Kurds are already autonomous. Let the same apply to the Sunnis and Shia. In the west of the country a Sunni body, the Mujahedin Shura, has come out for a six province western region under Prince Abu Omar Baghdadi. In the south the Iranians are watching as the British cede control and a possible eight-province "confederacy" slides effortlessly under their de facto aegis. Every US thinktank is now busying itself (at last) with alternative futures for Iraq.

Since accurate reporting is near impossible, the scale of that country's collapse under three years of US and UK occupation is hard to measure. Civil war is normally indicated by death rates and population movements. Whether the figure of civilian deaths is 50,000 or ten times that number is immaterial; either is a horrific comment on the impotence of the occupation. The UNHCR estimates 365,000 internal refuges in Iraq this year alone. More are seeking asylum abroad than from any other nation.

A third of Iraq's professional class is reported to have fled to Jordan, a flight of skills worse than under Saddam. UN monitors now report 2,000 people a day are crossing the Syrian border. Over a hundred lecturers at Baghdad university alone have been murdered, mostly for teaching women. There are few places in Iraq where women can go about unattended or unveiled. Gunmen arrived earlier this month at a Baghdad television station and massacred a dozen of the staff, an incident barely thought worth reporting. The national museum is walled up. Electricity supply is down to four hours a day. No police uniform can be trusted. The arrival anywhere of an army unit can be prelude to a mass killing and makes a mockery of the American policy of "security transfer". All intelligence out of Iraq suggests this is no longer a functioning state.

For all the abuse which Europeans regularly heap on the American political process, it has one strength, its capacity for course-correction. A constitution heavy with checks and balances enables it to respond to new circumstances with brutal pluralism. Three years ago America went to war on a lie, a wing and a prayer. That war has clearly failed and consensus is disintegrating. Congress subjects serving and retired generals to searing cross-examination. Senior figures go to Baghdad and, when they break free of their minders, report independently. There is none of the executive deference of Britain's parliamentary committees and tongue-tied "loyal opposition". America's debate on Iraq is now a grim, grinding encounter with reality.

The debate must contemplate the painful but not unfamiliar experience of imperial retreat. As in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia the moment is delayed but the deed will be efficient. The Baker commission, appearing in full after November's congressional election, realises the senselessness of the present bloodbath. It reportedly accepts that the continued presence of foreign forces does not prevent but adds to the chaos. American troops are in occupation but not in control. Their departure can hardly undermine security, except possibly that of Baghdad's green zone, and that is largely privatised.

A measure of the collapse is the astonishing suggestion that America find a new regime in consultation with Iran and Syria. This can only mean accepting some degree of confederacy, looking to the shadowy militias, warlords and sheikhs for provincial and regional leadership. Last year's Iraq constitution negotiated by the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zelmay Khalilzad, remains the best template for this. It is significant that Maliki, in a recent interview with US Today, referred to the possibility of giving Sunnis and Shia muslims some of the autonomy enjoyed by the Kurds. Given the sheer scale of civil violence rife in and around Baghdad the price of such autonomy may be population migration, but that is happening on a massive scale already: Iraq is partitioning itself. It might at least presage a sort of political reconstruction, without which peace and prosperity are inconceivable.

What is humiliating for Britons is that not a whisper of such lateral thinking can be heard from the government. Downing Street is intellectually numb, like a forgotten outpost of a crumbling Roman empire. It can see the barbarians at the gates yet it dare not respond as it knows it should because no new instructions have arrived from Rome. As for parliament, the opposition, academics, thinktanks and most of the media, a zombie-like inertia is all. Last week's row over controversial remarks by the army chief, Sir Richard Dannatt, was concerned not with what he said but whether he should have said it. Every one is waiting for the US to move.

Blair's last comment on Iraq was that any withdrawal would be "craven surrender" and would endanger British security. This is mad. Even Bush can admit to be "open to new ideas on Iraq". Blair has clearly not heard of Baker's report. Perhaps he should hurry to Washington for new instructions from the boss.

[e-mail]
Source: www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1924736,00.html
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Also See:

General Concedes Failure in Baghdad
www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102006E.shtml
A day after George Bush conceded for the first time that America may have reached the equivalent of a Tet offensive in Iraq, the Pentagon yesterday admitted defeat in its strategy of securing Baghdad.

It's Time to Say Sorry for Iraq's Agony
www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101506A.shtml
Mary Riddell writes "History will forgive the war on Iraq. Or so Tony Blair told the US Congress in July 2003, as the first cold shadows fell on the invasion. The Prime Minister also warned of 'many further struggles ahead'. He cannot have imagined that these would include being gunned down by the head of the British army. By calling for a pull-out from Iraq, General Sir Richard Dannatt has reversed the view of the French wartime leader, Georges Clemenceau, that 'war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men'."

October On Pace to Be the Deadliest Month in Iraq War
www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101506B.shtml

[michelle]

Riverbend is back: Iraqi girl blog
riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

Baghdad Burning
... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...
Wednesday, October 18, 2006

The Lancet Study...

This has been the longest time I have been away from blogging. There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I'd be filled with a certain hopelessness that can't be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.


It's very difficult at this point to connect to the internet and try to read the articles written by so-called specialists and analysts and politicians. They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia- with a detachment and lack of sentiment that- I suppose- is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse. They fall between idiots like Bush- constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves.


The latest horror is the study published in the Lancet Journal concluding that over 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war. Reading about it left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it sounded like a reasonable figure. It wasn't at all surprising. On the other hand, I so wanted it to be wrong. But... who to believe? Who to believe....? American politicians... or highly reputable scientists using a reliable scientific survey technique?


The responses were typical- war supporters said the number was nonsense because, of course, who would want to admit that an action they so heartily supported led to the deaths of 600,000 people (even if they were just crazy Iraqis…)? Admitting a number like that would be the equivalent of admitting they had endorsed, say, a tsunami, or an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale, or the occupation of a developing country by a ruthless superpower… oh wait- that one actually happened. Is the number really that preposterous? Thousands of Iraqis are dying every month- that is undeniable. And yes, they are dying as a direct result of the war and occupation (very few of them are actually dying of bliss, as war-supporters and Puppets would have you believe).


For American politicians and military personnel, playing dumb and talking about numbers of bodies in morgues and official statistics, etc, seems to be the latest tactic. But as any Iraqi knows, not every death is being reported. As for getting reliable numbers from the Ministry of Health or any other official Iraqi institution, that's about as probable as getting a coherent, grammatically correct sentence from George Bush- especially after the ministry was banned from giving out correct mortality numbers. So far, the only Iraqis I know pretending this number is outrageous are either out-of-touch Iraqis abroad who supported the war, or Iraqis inside of the country who are directly benefiting from the occupation ($) and likely living in the Green Zone.


The chaos and lack of proper facilities is resulting in people being buried without a trip to the morgue or the hospital. During American military attacks on cities like Samarra and Fallujah, victims were buried in their gardens or in mass graves in football fields. Or has that been forgotten already?


We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?


There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.


Let's pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report published in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al.


Everyone knows the 'official numbers' about Iraqi deaths as a direct result of the war and occupation are far less than reality (yes- even you war hawks know this, in your minuscule heart of hearts). This latest report is probably closer to the truth than anything that's been published yet. And what about American military deaths? When will someone do a study on the actual number of those? If the Bush administration is lying so vehemently about the number of dead Iraqis, one can only imagine the extent of lying about dead Americans…

- posted by river @ 11:35 PM

[michelle]

Tomgram: Truths of a Lost War

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: This is part 2 of a dispatch on the Bush administration and Iraq. Part 1 was Losing the Home Front. One of the sections below is devoted to Riverbend, the pseudonymous "girl blogger" of Baghdad. For it, I read the collection of her blog entries that the Feminist Press at CUNY published in 2005, Baghdad Burning, Girl Blog from Iraq, and then the newest volume, Baghdad Burning II, More Girl Blog from Iraq, just now being published. These represent an unparalleled record of the American war on, and occupation of, Iraq (and Riverbend writes like an angel). The two volumes are simply the best contemporary account we are likely to have any time soon of the hell into which we've plunged that country. I can't recommend them too highly. Tom]

Fiasco Then, Fiasco Now
Why Baghdad Will Keep Burning
By Tom Engelhardt, Oct 26

Are we now officially out of our minds? On Tuesday, General George W. Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador to Iraq, gave a joint press conference in Baghdad that was all for home consumption. By home, I mean Washington DC. I mean Indiana. I mean Texas. Baghdad's Green Zone was essentially a stage set for a political defense of the Bush presidency.

If the news hadn't been quite so grim, this tandem's act might have qualified as an Abbott and Costello comedy routine, including the moment when the lights went out -- while "gunfire and bomb blasts echoed around the city" -- thanks to our inability to resuscitate Iraqi electricity production. In fact, the New York Times just reported that, on some projects, more than 50% of U.S. reconstruction dollars are being spent on "overhead" as, for months at a time, whole reconstruction teams sit idly with the meter going waiting to begin work.

Some Democratic critics had been calling on the Bush administration for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Well, a timetable they got (though Ambassador Khalilzad preferred to call it a "timeline"). The catch was: The hopeless, essentially powerless Iraqi "government" inside Baghdad's Green Zone was to deliver that timeline as a pre-election present to a disgruntled American public. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself would produce it with genuine "benchmarks" for upping oil production and splitting oil revenues, for disarming and dismantling Shiite militias and police death squads, and for negotiating with Sunni rebels.

Not only that, Maliki would have his "plan" in place (perhaps for the Iraqis to withdraw from their own country) "before the end of the year" -- and this was just one of a welter of mini-schedules offered by the ambassador and general that would shove Iraqi matters at least beyond November 7th, if not into the relatively distant future. The ambassador, for instance, assured Americans that all those benchmarks would be met and "significant progress" achieved "in the course of the next twelve months" -- the slight catch being: "assuming that the Iraqi leaders deliver on the commitments that they have made."

General Casey chimed in with his own timeline: "And it's going to take another 12 to 18 months or so until I believe the Iraqi security forces are completely capable of taking over responsibility for their own security." ("Still probably with some level of support from us.") Probably? These are the same forces some of whose battalions "demobilized" rather than accept transfer assignments to work with Americans in the dangerous streets of distant Baghdad. These are battalions that can have 30-50% of their troops either on leave, AWOL, or perhaps as ghost soldiers for whom commanders receive pay?

Ambassador Khalilzad finished off his Arabian Nights version of a press conference introduction with assurances that "victory" was possible and "success" achievable in the foreseeable future. The solution was simple: "Iraqi leaders must step up to achieve key political and security milestones on which they have agreed." (There's a new ad-jingle-style line to replace our President's "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down": "As the Iraqi leaders step up, we will…")

Like some genie from a bottle, Prime Minister Maliki, our recalcitrant "partner," who only the previous week had to check with George Bush to make sure he still held his job, promptly stood up at a rival news conference and "slammed" American officials for demanding a timeline. ("I affirm that this government represents the will of the people and no one has the right to impose a timetable on it.") Still, he seemed to grasp the essence of the message the ambassador and general were sending out: "Al-Maliki said he believed the U.S. talk of timelines was driven by the upcoming U.S. midterm election. ‘We are not much concerned with it.'" Once all those American purple fingers fade, look for a new spike in coup rumors in Baghdad.

The only evidence General Casey offered of Iraqi fortitude was the news that 300 members of their security forces had died over the Ramadan holiday "in defense of their country." (In a gesture of American cross-cultural sensitivity, he referred to them as "martyrs.") In the meantime, while waiting for that miracle moment when the Iraqi non-Army and militia-infiltrated police would truly "stand up" for Maliki's non-government, the general hinted at a familiar solution: Bring in more U.S. troops. Gen. Casey put it this way: "Now, do we need more troops to do that? Maybe. And as I've said all along, if we do, I will ask for the troops I need, both coalition and Iraqis." Expect that "maybe" to turn into various stop-loss orders and reservist call-ups soon after November 7th.

So think of Tuesday's dog-and-pony show as "the light at the end of the tunnel" news conference. And think of Prime Minister Maliki as a poor stand-in for the recalcitrant-to-American-wishes South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated in a U.S.-backed military coup in 1963, after which it was all downhill.

Meanwhile, our chameleon President was in Florida visiting a company that produces devices to detect roadside bombs. No longer was he the plodding, "stay the course" George Bush; now, he was the maestro of "change," a darting, dashing Wile E. Coyote of a president, zipping off a cliff while saying things like: "We're constantly changing. The enemy changes, and we change. The enemy adapts to our strategies and tactics, and we adapt to theirs. We're constantly changing to defeat this enemy."

Unlike the President, Ambassador Khalilzad and General Casey undoubtedly know that they are putting on an act for the TV screens back home, that this is a moment to say whatever a desperate administration considers necessary to bring voters back into the fold. This is policy as vaudeville, a farce for everyone except those "martyrs," the Americans dying in Iraq, and, of course, millions of Iraqi civilians who are unlikely to feel mollified by General Casey's lame reassurance "that 90 percent of the sectarian violence in Iraq takes place in about a 30-mile radius from the center of Baghdad."

The Vietnam Analogy

In the most hallucinatory moment of a news conference in which everyone must have been inhaling something, Gen. Casey offered this summary of the Iraqi War thus far:

"The American people already know what a magnificent job the men and women of their armed forces are doing here, and we continue to be grateful for their continuing support. But they should also know that the men and women of the armed forces here have never lost a battle in over three years of war. That is a fact unprecedented in military history."

READ MORE: www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=132603

[michelle]

ELECTIONS-US:
Antiwar Voters May Get Less Than They Bargained For
Aaron Glantz

SAN FRANCISCO, California, Nov 10 (IPS) - Democratic majorities in both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as defence secretary, will not necessarily mean major changes for the war in Iraq, analysts say.

That's primarily because it is the president, and not Congress, that supervises the armed forces and prosecutes war.

"The main control Congress has is financial," said Pratap Chatterjee, who directs the non-profit group Corpwatch. "Congress can refuse to pay for the war, which is what they did in Vietnam, but they can't really dictate how it's waged."

At this point, defunding the war does not seem likely. The presumed next speaker of the house, Democrat Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, told reporters after the election Tuesday that she wants to "work together in a bipartisan way to send a clear message to the Iraqi government and people that they must disarm the militias, they must amend their constitution, [and] they must engage in regional diplomacy to bring real stability and reconstruction to Iraq."

Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada, the likely majority leader of the new Senate to be seated in January, echoed Pelosi when he told reporters he wants to hold a "bipartisan summit on Iraq" rather than bring the war to a quick end.

Even Democrats swept into Congress on a tide of antiwar sentiment talk gingerly around the idea of defunding the war.

"It's very important to give our troops the things they need for their own security," Congressman-elect Jerry McNearny of California told IPS. "I don't know if defunding the war is the best way to go. I want to find a way to end that war that makes everyone more secure."

Since the Sep. 11 attacks five years ago, Congress has cast a series of votes authorising 448 billion dollars in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the House, each of those votes has been overwhelming with a majority of Democrats, including Pelosi, supporting funding for the war. Every Senate vote on funding the war has been unanimous.

Not that there haven't been complaints. In a speech against the administration's war appropriations last spring, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia complained that the George W. Bush administration was making deep cuts in domestic spending, roughly equivalent to the amount spent so far on the Iraq war. Those cuts, he said, included charging veterans for their medical care, underfunding the No Child Left Behind Act, and cutting dollars from the budget of the National Institutes of Health.

While casting his vote in favour of the plan, he noted: "By approving an emergency supplemental for the war," he said, "we are making a choice."

One area where Democrats may exercise their power is in oversight hearings over how U.S. tax dollars are spent in Iraq. The man who is poised to chair government oversight committees with subpoena power, Congressman Henry Waxman of California, and Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota have both indicated they plan to play hard-ball with the administration.

"They can say 'we want the head of military contractors like Bechtel or Halliburton to come and testify' and they'll have to do it because that's how the law works," Corpwatch's Chatterjee said. "Answers can be demanded from people at the top and they can be forced to turn over internal documentation."

"The problem is that it's not what people in Congress think that will stop the violence, it's what people in Iraq think," he added. "If you want to improve things, you have to actually talk to them and find out what they want and what they need. The Democrats are looking for ideas, but they don't have any yet."

Long-time antiwar activist and author Tom Hayden has a slightly different take. He sees the Democratic victory this November as the beginning of a long process that will eventually bring an end to the war, probably after Bush leaves office in 2008.

"It's very helpful that Democrats have found their voice in condemning the management of the war," he told IPS. "Where they aren't so good yet is what to do about it, and they don't have that obligation yet because they aren't going to take back the presidency -- if they ever do -- for two years."

"There will be an attempt by both parties to keep the war going and get rid of Iraq as a public issue, but that seems to me to be impossible," he said.

As a result, Hayden said activists may be best off putting the main thrust of their energies into convincing their friends and relatives not to join the U.S. military.

"Counter-recruitment at high schools, universities and community colleges is very important," he said "You have to have a well-rested military to fight a war and the anti-recruiting efforts are the most important. It's also important to keep popular sentiment against the war so there can't be another draft." [*see note at the end of this post]

Resistance to the war is already building within the rank-and-file of the military. Last month, more than 100 active duty soldiers petitioned Congress for protection under the Military Whistleblower Protection Act, and a variety of anti-war veterans groups have sprung up in recent months, including Iraq Veterans Against the War and Iraq Veterans for Progress. (END/2006)

Source: ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35442
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ALSO SEE:

A Glimpse of Iraqi Life Under Occupation
Aaron Glantz

SAN FRANCISCO - What sets apart the award-winning documentary "Iraq in Fragments", opening in U.S. theatres this month, is that it does not confront the issue of the war directly. U.S. soldiers are on the periphery of the film, as are Iraqi politicians, Ba'athist insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists. Instead, viewers are treated to a view inside Iraqi culture and daily life under occupation.

ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35486
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* Note from Michelle: Please see our Conscientious Objector thread; there you can find info on how to establish CO status:
tinyurl.com/yx995g

[michelle]

Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush
By Peter Baker
The Washington Post

Sunday 19 November 2006

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling- out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."

Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.

A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years. By this point in Bill Clinton's tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. But Bush's strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq venture.

"There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic situation... . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful."

The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N. Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the war.

Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the president.

"People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.

"If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee."

And so, in what some saw as a rebuke, Senate Republicans restored Trent Lott (Miss.) to their leadership four years after the White House helped orchestrate his ouster, with some saying they could no longer place their faith entirely in Bush.

Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this was a White House that held itself up as holy."

Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq - all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said, "so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction."

The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington, according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his administration.

The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W. Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L. Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government, culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.

On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.

Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle, Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that could be turned into an opportunity.

In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."

Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."

White House officials tend to brush off each criticism by claiming it was over-interpreted or misguided. "I just fundamentally disagree," Cheney said of the comments by Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives before the midterm elections. Others close to the White House said the neoconservatives are dealing with their own sense of guilt over how events have turned out and are eager to blame Bush to avoid their own culpability.

Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute, said he is distressed "to see neocons turning on Bush" but said he believes they should admit mistakes and openly discuss what went wrong. "All of us who supported the war have to share some of the blame for that," he said. "There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons should not get too angry at Bush about that."

It may also be, he said, that the mistake was the idea itself - that Iraq could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. "That part of our plan is down the drain," Muravchik said, "and we have to think about what we can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy."

Few of the original promoters of the war have grown as disenchanted as Adelman. The chief of Reagan's arms control agency, Adelman has been close to Cheney and Rumsfeld for decades and even worked for Rumsfeld at one point. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he wrote in The Washington Post before the Iraq war that it would be "a cakewalk."

But in interviews with Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and The Post, Adelman said he became unhappy about the conduct of the war soon after his ebullient night at Cheney's residence in 2003. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction disturbed him. He said he was disgusted by the failure to stop the looting that followed Hussein's fall and by Rumsfeld's casual dismissal of it with the phrase "stuff happens." The breaking point, he said, was Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to occupation chief L. Paul Bremer, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.

"The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the president can give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq," Adelman said. All told, he said, the Bush national security team has proved to be "the most incompetent" of the past half- century. But, he added, "Obviously, the president is ultimately responsible."

Adelman said he remained silent for so long out of loyalty. "I didn't want to bad-mouth the administration," he said. In private, though, he spoke out, resulting in a furious confrontation with Rumsfeld, who summoned him to the Pentagon in September and demanded his resignation from the defense board.

"It seemed like nobody was getting it," Adelman said. "It seemed like everything was locked in. It seemed like everything was stuck." He agrees he bears blame as well. "I think that's fair. When you advocate a policy that turns bad, you do have some responsibility."

Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals: "The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."

Source: www.truthout.org/docs_2006/0111906Y.shtml

[michelle]

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do ...a letter from Michael Moore

Friends,

Yesterday marked the day that we had been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II.

That's right. We were able to defeat all of Nazi Germany, Mussolini, and the entire Japanese empire in LESS time than it's taken the world's only superpower to secure the road from the airport to downtown Baghdad.

And we haven't even done THAT. After 1,347 days, in the same time it took us to took us to sweep across North Africa, storm the beaches of Italy, conquer the South Pacific, and liberate all of Western Europe, we cannot, after over 3 and 1/2 years, even take over a single highway and protect ourselves from a homemade device of two tin cans placed in a pothole. No wonder the cab fare from the airport into Baghdad is now running around $35,000 for the 25-minute ride. And that doesn't even include a friggin' helmet.

Is this utter failure the fault of our troops? Hardly. That's because no amount of troops or choppers or democracy shot out of the barrel of a gun is ever going to "win" the war in Iraq. It is a lost war, lost because it never had a right to be won, lost because it was started by men who have never been to war, men who hide behind others sent to fight and die.

Let's listen to what the Iraqi people are saying, according to a recent poll conducted by the University of Maryland:

** 71% of all Iraqis now want the U.S. out of Iraq.

** 61% of all Iraqis SUPPORT insurgent attacks on U.S. troops.

Yes, the vast majority of Iraqi citizens believe that our soldiers should be killed and maimed! So what the hell are we still doing there? Talk about not getting the hint.

There are many ways to liberate a country. Usually the residents of that country rise up and liberate themselves. That's how we did it. You can also do it through nonviolent, mass civil disobedience. That's how India did it. You can get the world to boycott a regime until they are so ostracized they capitulate. That's how South Africa did it. Or you can just wait them out and, sooner or later, the king's legions simply leave (sometimes just because they're too cold). That's how Canada did it.

The one way that DOESN'T work is to invade a country and tell the people, "We are here to liberate you!" -- when they have done NOTHING to liberate themselves. Where were all the suicide bombers when Saddam was oppressing them? Where were the insurgents planting bombs along the roadside as the evildoer Saddam's convoy passed them by? I guess ol' Saddam was a cruel despot -- but not cruel enough for thousands to risk their necks. "Oh no, Mike, they couldn't do that! Saddam would have had them killed!" Really? You don't think King George had any of the colonial insurgents killed? You don't think Patrick Henry or Tom Paine were afraid? That didn't stop them. When tens of thousands aren't willing to shed their own blood to remove a dictator, that should be the first clue that they aren't going to be willing participants when you decide you're going to do the liberating for them.

A country can HELP another people overthrow a tyrant (that's what the French did for us in our revolution), but after you help them, you leave. Immediately. The French didn't stay and tell us how to set up our government. They didn't say, "we're not leaving because we want your natural resources." They left us to our own devices and it took us six years before we had an election. And then we had a bloody civil war. That's what happens, and history is full of these examples. The French didn't say, "Oh, we better stay in America, otherwise they're going to kill each other over that slavery issue!"

The only way a war of liberation has a chance of succeeding is if the oppressed people being liberated have their own citizens behind them -- and a group of Washingtons, Jeffersons, Franklins, Gandhis and Mandellas leading them. Where are these beacons of liberty in Iraq? This is a joke and it's been a joke since the beginning. Yes, the joke's been on us, but with 655,000 Iraqis now dead as a result of our invasion (source: Johns Hopkins University), I guess the cruel joke is on them. At least they've been liberated, permanently.

So I don't want to hear another word about sending more troops (wake up, America, John McCain is bonkers), or "redeploying" them, or waiting four months to begin the "phase-out." There is only one solution and it is this: Leave. Now. Start tonight. Get out of there as fast as we can. As much as people of good heart and conscience don't want to believe this, as much as it kills us to accept defeat, there is nothing we can do to undo the damage we have done. What's happened has happened. If you were to drive drunk down the road and you killed a child, there would be nothing you could do to bring that child back to life. If you invade and destroy a country, plunging it into a civil war, there isn’t much you can do ‘til the smoke settles and blood is mopped up. Then maybe you can atone for the atrocity you have committed and help the living come back to a better life.

The Soviet Union got out of Afghanistan in 36 weeks. They did so and suffered hardly any losses as they left. They realized the mistake they had made and removed their troops. A civil war ensued. The bad guys won. Later, we overthrew the bad guys and everybody lived happily ever after. See! It all works out in the end!

The responsibility to end this war now falls upon the Democrats. Congress controls the purse strings and the Constitution says only Congress can declare war. Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi now hold the power to put an end to this madness. Failure to do so will bring the wrath of the voters. We aren't kidding around, Democrats, and if you don't believe us, just go ahead and continue this war another month. We will fight you harder than we did the Republicans. The opening page of my website has a photo of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, each made up by a collage of photos of the American soldiers who have died in Bush's War. But it is now about to become the Bush/Democratic Party War unless swift action is taken.

This is what we demand:

1. Bring the troops home now. Not six months from now. NOW. Quit looking for a way to win. We can't win. We've lost. Sometimes you lose. This is one of those times. Be brave and admit it.

2. Apologize to our soldiers and make amends. Tell them we are sorry they were used to fight a war that had NOTHING to do with our national security. We must commit to taking care of them so that they suffer as little as possible. The mentally and physically maimed must get the best care and significant financial compensation. The families of the deceased deserve the biggest apology and they must be taken care of for the rest of their lives.

3. We must atone for the atrocity we have perpetuated on the people of Iraq. There are few evils worse than waging a war based on a lie, invading another country because you want what they have buried under the ground. Now many more will die. Their blood is on our hands, regardless for whom we voted. If you pay taxes, you have contributed to the three billion dollars a week now being spent to drive Iraq into the hellhole it's become. When the civil war is over, we will have to help rebuild Iraq. We can receive no redemption until we have atoned.

In closing, there is one final thing I know. We Americans are better than what has been done in our name. A majority of us were upset and angry after 9/11 and we lost our minds. We didn't think straight and we never looked at a map. Because we are kept stupid through our pathetic education system and our lazy media, we knew nothing of history. We didn't know that WE were the ones funding and arming Saddam for many years, including those when he massacred the Kurds. He was our guy. We didn't know what a Sunni or a Shiite was, never even heard the words. Eighty percent of our young adults (according to National Geographic) were not able to find Iraq on the map. Our leaders played off our stupidity, manipulated us with lies, and scared us to death.

But at our core we are a good people. We may be slow learners, but that "Mission Accomplished" banner struck us as odd, and soon we began to ask some questions. Then we began to get smart. By this past November 7th, we got mad and tried to right our wrongs. The majority now know the truth. The majority now feel a deep sadness and guilt and a hope that somehow we can make make it all right again.

Unfortunately, we can't. So we will accept the consequences of our actions and do our best to be there should the Iraqi people ever dare to seek our help in the future. We ask for their forgiveness.

We demand the Democrats listen to us and get out of Iraq now.

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
[e-mail]

Source:
www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=202

[michelle]

Fiddling While Baghdad Burns
How to Stay in Iraq
The Iraq Study Group Rides to the Rescue
By Tom Engelhardt
posted December 4, 2006 at 9:11 am

Finally, the President and the New York Times agree. In a news conference with the Iraqi Prime Minister last week, George W. Bush insisted that there would be no "graceful exit" or withdrawal from Iraq; that this was not "realism." The next day the Times, in a front page piece (as well as "analysis" inside the paper) pointed out that, "despite a Democratic election victory this month that was strongly based on antiwar sentiment, the idea of a major and rapid withdrawal seems to be fading as a viable option."

In fact, in the media, as in the counsels of James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group, withdrawal without an adjective or qualifying descriptor never arrived as a "viable option." In fact, withdrawal, aka "cut and run," has never been more than a passing foil, one useful "extreme" guaranteed to make the consensus-to-come more comforting.

On Wednesday, at the end of a gestation period nearly long enough to produce a human baby, the Baker committee -- by now, according to the Washington Post's Robin Wright, practically "a parallel policy establishment" -- will hand over to the President its eagerly anticipated "consensus" report, its "compromise" plan that takes the "middle road," that occupies a piece of inside-the-Beltway "middle ground," and that will almost certainly be the policy equivalent of a still birth.

Whatever satisfaction it briefly offers, it might as well be sent directly to the Baghdad morgue. At a length of perhaps 100 pages, evidently calling for an "aggressive" diplomatic engagement with neighboring Iran and Syria -- even unofficial American officials advocating diplomacy just can't seem to avoid some form of "aggression" -- it will also, Washington Post reporters Wright and Thomas Ricks assure us, call for "a major withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq" (no timetables, naturally).

It will evidently suggest the following: Talk to those hostile neighbors; "embed" swarms of still-to-be-trained military advisors with Iraqi troops where, so far, they have had little luck except in generating scads of complaints; pull out (or back into our massive Iraqi bases) American "combat forces," except for those slated to be part of an in-country "rapid reaction force," not to speak of all those American trainers and logistics experts; and accomplish this by perhaps early 2008.

All of this will be termed a "short" period of time to change U.S. policy and the path to be headed down will be labeled "phased withdrawal" or the beginning of an "exit strategy." Oh, and while we're at it, make sure to suggest that we embed many of those "redeployed" troops just "over the horizon," probably in Kuwait and some set of small Gulf states, where they can theoretically strike at will in Iraq if the government and military we plan to "stabilize" there turns out to be endangered (as, of course, it will be).

Put in a nutshell, the Iraq Study Group plan -- should it ever be put into effect -- might accomplish the following: As a start, it would in no way affect our essential network of monumental permanent bases in Iraq (where, many billions of dollars later, concrete is still being poured); it would leave many less "combat" troops but many more "advisors" in-country to "stand up" the Iraqi Army (tactics already tried, at the cost of many billions of dollars, and just about sure to fail); many more American troops will find themselves either imprisoned on those vast bases of ours in Iraq or on similar installations in the "neighborhood" where they are likely to bring so many of our problems with them. And those aggressive chats with the neighbors, whose influence in Iraq is overestimated in any case, are unlikely to proceed terribly well because the Bush administration will arrive at the bargaining table, if at all, with so little to offer (except lectures).

All of this should ensure that, well into 2008, at least 70,000 American military personnel will still be in Iraq, after which, in the midst of a presidential election season, will actual withdrawal finally appear on some horizon? In other words, the Baker Commission plan guarantees us at least another 3-5 years in Iraq.

And, oh yes, here's something else no one is likely mention. Those Americans left behind after the phased withdrawers head for the horizon will surely be more vulnerable, which means, as in Vietnam during the Vietnamization years, the ratcheting up of American air power and far more sentences in news reports that read like this: "Two Apache helicopters firing anti-missile flares swooped over Fadhil neighborhood, a Sunni insurgent stronghold in one of the oldest parts of the capital, amid the slow thump of heavy machinegun fire, witnesses said."

And, oh yes, during this "short" period of perhaps 12-14 months when we are supposed to be phasing away, based on present casualty rates, perhaps another 40,000 to 60,000 Iraqi civilians will die horrific deaths as will at least modest numbers of young Americans, reminding us that the definitions of "short," "remarkable consensus," and "horizon" -- after all, your horizon may be someone else's home -- are in the eye of the beholder. And just one more thing: all this will be directed out of the largest embassy in the world, a vast, nearly complete, nearly billion dollar complex set in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone and armed with its own anti-missile system, which no "exit" strategy on any table in any foreseeable future is likely to mention.

Talk about a plan being DOA, when it comes to changing policy, even before an adamant president has the chance to consider how to reject some of its essential parts! After all those endless months, this, it seems, is the best the present generation of Washington "wise men" (and one woman) can actually deliver. I think I can guarantee that, with eight months and a giant staff of experts at your beck and call, you and a small group of your neighbors -- with no ties to Washington, a cursory knowledge of our 1,347-plus days already embedded in Iraq, and... no, let's say with just eight days, or maybe eight minutes -- could have come up with a plan at least this hopeless.

While the Iraqis were experiencing an actual civil war, combined with an actual insurgency, combined with actual American attacks from the air and the ground on actual city neighborhoods, combined with actual terrorist attacks, combined with actual widespread criminal activity, combined with the actual collapse of their economy, combined with the actual non-delivery of essential social services, combined with the actual flight of whole populations from ethnically cleansed or simply half-destroyed neighborhoods, combined with actual staggering death tolls, the American media and White House officialdom have passed through their own maelstrom over whether or not to apply the term "civil war" to the Iraqi situation. NBC and the Los Angeles Times have finally voted "yes"; others are waffling; the administration continues to deny that the "sectarian violence" in Iraq could possibly be a "civil war," which is evidently imagined inside the Oval Office as nothing short of Armageddon itself.

While the media, politicians, and administration spokesmen fight over how exactly to characterize the mountains of dead Iraqis, the urban killing fields where militias now deposit tortured and murdered former human beings, and the stuffed morgues of Iraq's cities, there are perhaps a few other words and phrases passing around Washington that might be reconsidered.

Let's start with "phased withdrawal." Withdrawal ("the act or process of withdrawing, a retreat or retirement") usually means sayonara, arrivederci, so long. And a "phase," of course, is a "stage." But put them together and, at least in the present collective Washingtonian imagination, we're still somehow embedded in Iraq the year after next with no actual plan for leaving in sight and none of our basic structures -- 5 or 6 bases the size of American towns and a goliath of an embassy -- in that country touched. Perhaps it's time to relabel this "option," something like "phased staying" or "phased permanency."

In turn, the Iraq Study Group's findings, which, as James Fallows recently noted, have been layered into our world these last weeks via "obviously authoritative leaks," might be relabeled "phased recommendations." They may not, however, faze George W. Bush, who has already responded (or perhaps presponded) by ordering two other sets of reviews to be conducted, ensuring that Washington will be flooded with recommendations. We face a veritable war of the recommendations. All of this is a classic case of Washington fiddling while Baghdad burns.

"Redeploy," according to my dictionary means to "move (military forces) from one combat zone to another." That may turn out to be all too correct, if redeployment, or "a responsible redeployment outside of Iraq," or even (gulp) "phased redeployment" turns out to be the order of the day. Redeploying to, say, various Gulf statelets and Kuwait, we may indeed take our combat zones with us, as we did in the early 1990s when, in the wake of Gulf War I, American troops were plunked down in sizeable numbers in Saudi Arabia. (Does the missing-in-action name Osama bin Laden come to anyone's mind?)

Don't confuse any of this, as often happens in the press, with an "exit strategy." An exit, my dictionary tells me, is "the act of going away or out; a passage or way out." Classically, critics have wondered whatever happened to Colin Powell's famed post-Vietnam dictum that no American war should be launched without its exit strategy in place. The answer was always that the Bush administration simply never imagined leaving Iraq. To a large extent, despite all the ado, this remains true even in Donald Rumsfeld's final, secret memo of options to the President.

So here's a small hint. You'll know something's in the air when some serious panel gets together to sort out our future strategy in Iraq, and you start regularly seeing "withdrawal" surface in the media without an adjective attached, or when you see any sober discussion of permanent bases, American air power, or oil.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt

Source: www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=145043

[michelle]

Are Troops Dying for Oil Profits?
Dennis Kucinich speaking from the Floor of the House

Note from Michelle: Please go to today's posting where you can read more on the new funding for the war and TAKE ACTION AGAINST THIS at:
Re: Current Legislation/Action
« Reply #56 on 12/08/06 at 2:30pm »
There is Only One Way to End The War in Iraq[/b]
tinyurl.com/ylrj4g

Dec 7, 2006

"On October 25th, President Bush cited oil as a reason for our continued presence in Iraq. The Iraq study group is recommending Iraq law be changed to facilitate privatization of Iraq's oil wealth.

"The Iraq Study Group report says as much as 500,000 barrels per day -- that is $11.3 billion per year -- in Iraqi oil wealth is now being stolen, which is interesting, since the Ministry of Oil is the first place our troops were sent after the invasion of Iraq and we now have 140,000 troops there.

"How can we expect the end of the Iraq war and national reconciliation in Iraq, while we advocate that Iraq's oil wealth by handled by private oil companies?

"It is ironic that this report comes at the exact time the Interior Department's Inspector General says that oil companies are cheating the US out of billions of dollars while the Administration looks the other way.

"Is it possible that Secretary Baker has a conflict of interest, which should have precluded him from co-chairing a study group whose final report promotes privatization of Iraq oil assets, given his ties to the oil industry?

"Is it possible that our troops are dying for the profits of private oil companies?"

Source: www.kucinich.us/floor_speeches/iq_troops_die4oil.php

[michelle]

Iraq: More Hellish Now Than Under Saddam
By Anthony Arnove, AlterNet. Posted December 20, 2006.

Each day the occupation continues, life gets worse for most Iraqis. Yet the U.S. still won't admit to failure.

The tragedy unleashed by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq defies description.

According to the most recent findings of the Lancet medical journal, the number of "excess deaths" in Iraq since the U.S. invasion is more than 650,000. "Iraq is the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world," according to Refugee International: nearly two million Iraqis have fled the country entirely, while at least another 500,000 are internally displaced.

Basic foods and necessities are beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis because of massive inflation. "A gallon of gasoline cost as little as 4 cents in November. Now, after the International Monetary Fund pushed the Oil Ministry to cut its subsidies, the official price is about 67 cents," the New York Times notes. "The spike has come as a shock to Iraqis, who make only about $150 a month on average -- if they have jobs," an important proviso, since unemployment is roughly 60-70 percent nationally.

October 2006 proved to be the bloodiest month of the entire occupation, with more than six thousand civilians killed in Iraq, most in Baghdad, where thousands of additional U.S. troops have been sent since August with the claim they would restore order and stability in the city, but instead only sparked more violence. United Nations special investigator Manfred Nowak notes that torture "is totally out of hand" in Iraq. "The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein." The number of U.S. soldiers dead is now more than 2,900, with more than 21,000 wounded, many severely.

The underlying trend is clear: Each day the occupation continues, life gets worse for most Iraqis. Rather than stemming civil war or sectarian conflict, the occupation is spurring it. Rather than being a source of stability, the occupation is the major source of instability and chaos.

All of the reasons being offered for why the United States cannot withdraw troops from Iraq are false. The reality is, the troops are staying in Iraq for much different reasons than the ones being touted by political elites and a still subservient establishment press. They are staying to save face for a U.S. political elite that cares nothing for the lives of Iraqis or U.S. soldiers; to pursue the futile goal of turning Iraq into a reliable client state strategically located near the major energy resources and shipping routes of the Middle East, home to two-thirds of world oil reserves, and Western and Central Asia; to serve as a base for the projection of U.S. military power in the region, particularly in the growing conflict between the United States and Iran; and to maintain the legitimacy of U.S. imperialism, which needs the pretext of a global war on terror to justify further military intervention, expanded military budgets, concentration of executive power, and restrictions on civil liberties.

The U.S. military did not invade and occupy Iraq to spread democracy, check the spread of weapons of mass destruction, rebuild the country, or stop civil war. In fact, the troops remain in Iraq today to deny self-determination and genuine democracy to the Iraqi people, who have made it abundantly clear, whether they are Shiite or Sunni, that they want U.S. troops to leave Iraq immediately; feel less safe as a result of the occupation; think the occupation is spurring not suppressing sectarian strife; and support armed attacks on occupying troops and Iraqi security forces, who are seen not as independent but as collaborating with the occupation.

It is not only the Iraqi people who oppose the occupation of their country and want to see the troops leave. A clear majority of people in the United States have expressed the same sentiment in major opinion polls and in the mid-term Congressional elections, which swing both houses of Congress and the majority of state governorships to the Democrats, in a clear vote against the imperial arrogance of Bush's "stay the course" approach to the disaster in Iraq. The public did not vote for more money for the Pentagon (as incoming Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada immediately promised, announcing a plan to give $75 billion more to the Pentagon), for more "oversight" of the war (the main Democratic Party buzzword these days), or for more troops (as Texas Democrat Representative Silvestre Reyes, the incoming chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has demanded), but to begin bringing the troops home. A clear majority of active-duty U.S. troops want the same thing, as a much-ignored Zogby International poll found in early 2005, with 72 percent saying they wanted to be out of Iraq by the end of 2006.

But Bush's response to the groundswell of opposition to the war, which has led not only to his setbacks in the midterm elections but to even further erosion in his already abysmal approval ratings (with approval of his handling of the war reaching a new low of 27 percent), is to insist that the sun still revolves around the earth. "Absolutely, we're winning," Bush told reporters. "I know there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit from Iraq," Bush said. "This business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it whatsoever," he added. "We're going to stay in Iraq to get the job done."

In a similar vein, Vice President Cheney said, "I know what the President thinks. I know what I think. And we're not looking for an exist strategy. We're looking for victory." After the midterm elections Bush was forced to jettison his deeply unpopular defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, but nominated in his place someone who is unlikely to oversee any fundamental shift in U.S. strategy. Robert Gates, an old CIA hand, is a dedicated Cold Warrior who advocated, among other enlightened policies, the bombing of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua for daring to challenge the corrupt order of death squad dictatorships in Latin America. Bush also dropped UN ambassador John Bolton, a man who embodies everything that the world hates about U.S. foreign policy today.

Perhaps most significantly, though, in the face of the failures in Iraq, Congress resorted to the old strategy of bringing in the "wise men" to repackage a failing war, convening the Iraq Study Group (ISG), with Bush family fixer James Baker III, former Indiana representative Lee Hamilton, and other foreign policy establishment figures with little or no knowledge of Iraq. The commission was never going to advocate any radical reversal of U.S. policy in Iraq, but even so, Bush has hedged his bets from the outset, setting up two different internal military review committees to make suggestions to the White House about the next steps in Iraq (much as he had overseen a separate intelligence operation to create the evidence that would be used to sell the invasion in the first place).

Indeed, when the report's findings were made public on December 6, Bush immediately distanced himself from its highly limited recommendations. As the New York Sun noted, "Barely 24 hours old, the bipartisan report has been placed on a high shelf to gather dust, its principle function having been to take the heat off the president for a time while allowing him to gather his resolve to press on" with the same course as before. Bush immediately rejected the report's call to negotiate with Iran and Syria, the Wall Street Journal reported: "A senior administration official said the White House doesn't feel bound by the report and is unlikely to implement many of its recommendations, especially regarding calls for diplomatic outreach to U.S. foes Syria and Iran." In addition, "The White House has rejected mounting calls for a course correction in Iraq, insisting it would maintain the current number of U.S. military personnel in Iraq indefinitely."

But even if the Bush administration sought to immediately implement every recommendation of the Iraq Study Group report, it would only be a recipe for more death, displacement, and despair. The ISG report explicitly rejects setting any deadline or timetable for withdrawal, asserts the need for a "considerable military presence in the region, with our still significant force in Iraq and with our powerful air, ground, and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, as well as an increased presence in Afghanistan" for years to come, and basically repackages the Bush Doctrine of "as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," that is "Iraqization" of the conflict, much as "Vietnamization" was presented as the solution in Vietnam.

It is worth briefly reviewing the various options now being considered by the Bush administration, none of which offers any real alternative:

Sending in more troops in the short term

The idea that sending in more troops would provide stability and improve the situation in Iraq ignores the fact that the U.S. is the main source of violence and instability. More troops breed both more opposition and more sectarian violence. Observes Michael Schwartz, "Instead of entering a violent city and restoring order, [U.S. forces] enter a relatively peaceful city and create violence. The accurate portrait of this situation ... is that the most hostile anti-American cities like Tal Afar and Ramadi have generally been reasonably peaceful when U.S. troops are not there." Even the ISG notes that Operation Together Forward II, which redeployed thousands of U.S. troops to Baghdad in August 2006, achieved the opposite of its stated goal: "Violence in Baghdad -- already at high levels -- jumped more than 43 percent between the summer and October 2006." Schwartz also explains the way in which the higher presence of U.S. combat troops exacerbates sectarian violence:

American patrols in Shia neighborhoods immobilize the local defenses and make the community vulnerable to jihadist attack; while American invasions of Sunni communities are even more damaging. They not only immobilize the local defense forces, but almost always involve the introduction of Iraqi Army units, made up mainly of Shia soldiers (since the army being stood up by the Americans is largely a Shia one). What results is violence in the form of battles between a Shia military (as well as militia-infiltrated Shia police forces) and Sunni resistance fighters defending their communities. These attacks generate immense bitterness among Sunni, who see them as part of a Shia attempt to use the American military to conquer and pacify Sunni cities. The result is a wealth of new jihadists anxious to retaliate by sacrificing their lives in terrorist or death-squad-style attacks on Shia communities -- which, in their turn, energize the Shia death squads in an escalating cycle of brutalizing violence.

The U.S., in addition, cannot add more troops without straining an already badly overtaxed military and relying on greater use of backdoor draft measures that are provoking more opposition at home and within the military to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, another failing occupation.

We'll stand down as they stand up

The idea that training Iraqi troops can be improved, a major recommendation of the ISG report, suggests that there's a technical solution that the U.S. faces in Iraq. But the root of resistance to U.S occupation is political. As long as the U.S. remains an occupying power, the police and military will continue to be seen as collaborators and illegitimate. Resistance groups in Iraq, meanwhile, face no such training problems, and are carrying out increasingly sophisticated operations, including direct military battles with U.S. troops, because their fighters are politically motivated and have a defined goal that has widespread support.

Engage Iran and Syria

The idea behind this strategy, another major thrust of the ISG report, is that the root of resistance to U.S. occupation in Iraq is foreign, rather than indigenous -- much as we were told that the popular resistance of the Vietnamese to U.S. state terrorism was directed by Moscow and Beijing. In this delusional worldview, Iran and Syria, and groups such as al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, are the sources of violence in Iraq. This baseless theory then leads to the equally baseless idea that the U.S. will somehow stabilize Iraq through talks with two governments it is committed to overthrowing.

As the Financial Times observes, there is little reason to think Bush "would be willing to follow advice that contradicts his deeply held belief that the U.S. should not talk to ... Iran and Syria" because doing so would "reward bad behavior." Bush has repeatedly said that a precondition for talking to Iran is a suspension of the country's legal nuclear enrichment program, something that Iran has no reason to agree to in advance of negotiations. At any rate, even if talks do take place, Iran and Syria are not the masters of events in Iraq, which are driven by the internal politics and the dynamics of the U.S. occupation.

Gradual withdrawal

Proposals for gradual withdrawal with no timetable are a recipe for pursuing an infinitely receding horizon. The idea behind gradual withdrawal was put accurately, if cynically, by Donald Rumsfeld in a secret leaked memo, written November 6, just a few days before his resignation: "Recast the U.S. military mission and U.S. goals (how we talk about them) -- go minimalist." In other words, change the rhetoric while lowering expectations, but pursue the same goals. "Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not 'lose.'"

Redeployment

A frequent buzzword in discussions of the occupation of Iraq today, especially among Democrats, is redeployment. On November 14, 2006, Senator Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat considered to be at the extreme left end of the party's elected officials, introduced a bill "requiring U.S. forces to redeploy from Iraq by July 1, 2007." But the plan itself calls for keeping troops in Iraq. "My legislation would allow for a minimal level of U.S. forces to remain in Iraq for targeted counterterrorism activities, training of Iraqi security forces, and the protection of U.S. infrastructure and personnel." In other words, redeployment envisions U.S. bases, U.S. troops, and U.S. occupation, while merely shifting some personnel to other military bases in the region -- where they can be quickly mobilized to strike when necessary -- and most likely shifting to greater reliance on air power in Iraq and in the region to pursue U.S. imperial objectives.

Partition

One plan that the ISG did not recommend, and which Bush has also criticized, but which remains a real possibility as the crisis in Iraq unfolds, is partition. The deteriorating situation on the ground has encouraged some analysts and politicians -- including incoming Democrat Joseph Biden, the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair -- to call for the breakup of Iraq into three independent countries or three relatively autonomous territories within a loosely federated state. Such a division of Iraq, however, could only be accomplished by massive ethnic cleansing. The largest urban concentration of Kurds in Iraq is not in the northern zone that would likely make up a future Kurdish enclave or state, but in Baghdad. Most cities described by reporters as "Sunni strongholds" or "Shiite townships" have mixed populations with significant minorities of Sunni, Shiite, Turkmen, Kurds, or Assyrians.

In addition, any predominantly Sunni state in central and western Iraq that emerged from a tripartite division of the country would be significantly impoverished compared to its oil-rich southern and northern neighbors.

The iron fist

Another option -- one with a long history in Iraq and the Middle East -- remains support for a new "iron fist." Eliot A. Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, suggests that "A junta of military modernizers might be the only hope of a country whose democratic culture is weak, whose politicians are either corrupt or incapable," a narrative that is gaining much more popularity in the establishment press and among pundits and politicians seeking an explanation for the disaster in Iraq that avoids looking at its real roots. This is a refurbishing of an old idea -- a Saddam-style regime without Saddam -- that became impossible as soon as the Bremer administration in Iraq dismantled the army and the Baath party, the only political and administrative basis on which such a dictatorship could have been established.

Expansion

Despite the ISG's recommendations of direct talks with Iran and Syria, and the caution of Robert Gates and others about the pitfalls of pursuing Iran militarily, the threat of the U.S. expanding the war in Iraq remains very real. In summer 2006, Washington sponsored the disastrous and bloody Israeli invasion of Lebanon, hoping to gain some tactical advantage in the region and hence in Iraq.

The gamble failed miserably, but some feel another such gamble is necessary. As Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker, "many in the White House and the Pentagon insist that getting tough with Iran is the only way to salvage Iraq. 'It's a case of "failure forward,"' a Pentagon consultant said. 'They believe that by tipping over Iran they would recover their losses in Iraq -- like doubling your bet.'"

Whatever Bush's new plan for Iraq may be, a major clash of expectations is likely to come about as the Democrats fail to pose any real challenge to the war. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stressed "bipartisanship" the moment the results were announced, adding that impeachment of Bush was "off the table." Pelosi and the new Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also said they would take off the table the greatest power the Democrats have in Congress, the ability to cut off funds for prolonging the occupation. As Alexander Cockburn wrote in the Nation: "It's ... the role of elections in properly run western democracies to remind people that things won't really change at all. Certainly not for the better. You can set your watch by the speed with which the new crowd lowers expectations and announces What is Not To Be Done."

Out now

Indeed, the one option that remains truly off the table in Iraq is the only sensible one: complete and unconditional immediate withdrawal, followed by reparations to the Iraqi people for the massive harm the occupation -- and before that the sanctions, the Gulf and Iran-Iran Wars, and years of supporting the dictatorship -- have caused. According to the New York Times, "In the cacophony of competing plans about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: despite the Democrats' victory ... in an election viewed as a referendum on the war, the idea of rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option."

The debate today in Washington remains one largely over tactics, not strategy or principles. In fact, the one debate over principles that is taking place is a racist one: more and more "experts" now question whether Bush's folly was in thinking he could bring democracy to Arab or Muslim people, who, we are told, "have no tradition of democracy," are from a "sick society," a "broken society."

In a much-lauded speech, Barack Obama, the great hope of the Democrats, couched his criticism of the Bush administration's policy by saying there should be "No more coddling" of the Iraqi government: the United States "is not going to hold together this country indefinitely," he explained, adding that "we should be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy." Richard Perle, former chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, one of the main neoconservative enthusiasts of the invasion of Iraq, in explaining why things had gone so contrary to his glorious predictions, now says he "underestimated the depravity" of the Iraqis.

And the ISG report chides that "the Iraqi people and their leaders have been slow to demonstrate their capacity or will to act," and therefore the U.S. "must not make an open-ended commitment" to them. In other words, blame the victim. As Sharon Smith wrote on Counterpunch, "Within a few short weeks, the Washington 'consensus' has rewritten the history of the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- as if Iraqis invited the U.S. to invade their sovereign nation in 2003 and now have failed to live up to their end of the bargain."

As the crisis in Iraq unfolds, we can expect these arguments to gain even wider traction, providing more cover for the real U.S. objectives in the Middle East.

The tragedy unfolding in Iraq is still far from over. In Act I of the tragedy, we were told that Washington would invade Iraq, quickly topple the dictatorship, install a stable client government, and then -- having radically changed the balance of power in the Middle East -- march on from Baghdad to confront the regimes of Iran and Syria. With that dream in tatters, the United States commenced Act II: the manipulation of sectarian divisions in Iraq to form a Shiite and Kurdish coalition government that would isolate the Sunnis (though it would seek to co-opt as much of their political leadership as possible) and serve the intended client role, if less effectively than Washington had hoped, allowing the U.S. to gain at least some foothold in Iraq and claim victory.

By mid-2006, the failures of this strategy could no longer be ignored, however. Having invaded Iraq intending to weaken Iran and Syria, to strengthen its position and that of Israel and its Arab allies in the region, the United States instead achieved the opposite. (Of course, all of this ignores the many stages of the tragedy authored by the United States before the March 2003 invasion, through its support of the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein, its nefarious role in the Iran-Iraq War and then the 1991 Gulf War, and the more than twelve years of sanctions and bombing that followed.)

Acts I and II in the tragedy of the Iraq occupation have now come to a close. But Act III has only just begun. All the signs suggest that the endgame in Iraq is likely to be long and very bloody. Iraq and the Middle East are so strategically important to the United States that neither party is willing to withdraw and admit defeat; such an outcome would be more disastrous for the United States than its defeat in Vietnam.

But there is one factor in the Iraq tragedy that we should not discount. The question of how long this war lasts, whether it will expand to Iran and Syria, whether more troops will be sent to needlessly kill and be killed for profit and power, does not only depend on the decisions and internal conflicts of the ruling class. It also depends on the level of public opposition in Iraq, at home, and within the military itself. Groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War are already playing a leading role in the struggle to end the occupation. But we are still only at the beginning of organizing the kind of opposition we need to affect the course of the war decisively.

The U.S. war against Vietnam was lost by 1968, if not sooner, but continued for years after, with millions of lives lost as a consequence. We cannot allow a repeat of that tragic history. The Vietnam War, though, also has another lesson to teach us: that when people speak out and organize, they can deter even the most powerful and reckless government. The war against the people of Indochina would certainly have lasted even longer -- and might have spread even farther -- had concerted opposition at home and internationally not forced the United States to retreat. That is a lesson we badly need to relearn -- and put into practice -- today.

For a footnoted version of this article, see the January-February issue of the ISR.

Anthony Arnove is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal. An updated paperback edition is coming out Jan. 9, with a foreword by Howard Zinn, in the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt).
Source: www.alternet.org/waroniraq/45699/

[DT1]

The Battle Of The Surge
By Simon Jenkins
Huffingtonpost.com
This is to be the week, we are told, when George Bush announces positively the last military assault on insurgency in Baghdad before losing patience and quitting. The so-called surge will supposedly correct the error of last year's similar Operation Together Forward II. Without order in the capital the physical and political reconstruction of Iraq is impossible.

But since that order cannot, after all, be assigned to local Iraqi forces, the Americans must throw another 20-30,000 troops into the job instead.

I have not heard one remotely plausible game plan for this Battle of the Surge. Leaks have indicated that generals on the ground are opposed to offering the enemy yet more targets. Pentagon chiefs of staff are opposed to such a cost in men and money for a transient boost in control on the ground. Public opinion and congress are overwhelmingly against the plan, which Republican Senator Chuck Hagel calls "Alice in Wonderland". America's puppets in Baghdad's green zone will do as they are told but the only real enthusiasts are neo-con die-hards. They were well-represented on this page two weeks ago by Frederick Kagan, in a fantasy advocacy of the 2003 "clear and hold" strategy, which amounts to telling American soldiers to commit suicide.

Leaders contemplating defeat far from the front line are always tempted to order "one last push". Thus did Hitler ordered the Battle of the Bulge, Nixon the bombing of Cambodia and Reagan the blasting of the Shouf villages to cover his retreat from Lebanon. Leaders must pretend to victory even in the jaws of defeat, or their soldiers will not fight. America has a million men under arms. Surely they are not to be beaten by a few hundred guerrillas in the suburbs of Baghdad. So bush will tell them to make one last heave, however pointless.

To such callousness to the lives of others, reason has no response. War is so awful that most people can understand it only through metaphor, as a football game or a business take-over or a pub brawl or, at best, some other war retrieved from history. The conflict in Iraq is beyond metaphor. It is the most dangerous, heart-breaking and hopeless that those who have witnessed war can recall. The risks taken by soldiers on the ground and the terrifying existence endured by ordinary Iraqis are worse than in anything I have witnessed. Independent reporting is near impossible. Military intelligence is non-existent. Bombers do not know where to bomb, soldiers whom to kill, generals when to negotiate.

Such government as exists under prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is unable to enforce any law or control any army. For Washington and London to tell him to "bring his militias to heel" is like telling a junior cop to arrest Al Capone. Large areas of Iraq are under the rough and ready control of local militias, either clerical fundamentalists or gangsters rich on stolen American aid. But the city of Baghdad (and half the non-Kurd population) is given over to armed gangsters, roadblocks, ghettos, nocturnal disappearances, mass killings and refugee flight. Three thousand flee to Jordan and Syria each day. A million Iraqis have fled the country since the American arrived, including an estimated 40 per cent of the professional class. Only the green zone operates as a working entity and its isolation is medieval, its inhabitants barely able to venture beyond its walls.

The idea that such a hell-hole can be policed back to normality with an extra 20,000 American troops is absurd. Such a force (which means barely 5,000 on patrol at any one time) would simply disappear into the fog. The anti-occupation insurgency is now entangled with the conflict between Shia and Sunni in and round Baghdad, claiming hundreds of lives each week and fought by paramilitaries mostly armed and supplied by America in what is a shambles of unaudited theft and fraud.

The only way in which more American troops might assert any control is "denying ground to the enemy" by laying waste to it. In Basra Britain's contribution to law and order has been to flatten the chief police station. In Anbar province American counter-insurgency takes the form of wrecking villages from the air, as with Fallujah twice since 2003. According to a Times correspondent who reached Fallujah last week, the wrecked city is cut off from Baghdad and back in the hands of Sunni militias who intend to rename the hospital after Saddam Hussein. All Iraqis most crave is a local policeman they can trust not to kill them. America and Britain have failed to give them that and are unlikely to succeed at this late stage.

A shrewd analysis of the present state of play was given in last Friday's Independent by the former Iraqi finance and defence minister, Ali Allawi. He concluded that "whatever project [the US] had for Iraq has vanished, a victim of inappropriate or incoherent policies". The country is now moving inexorably away from Baathist secularism into control by Shia islamists in unstable coalition with Kurdish separatists. Formal partition is avoidable only with an acceptance of a ruthless regional autonomy so that Shia and Sunni alike can retreat to their tents and lick their wounds.

What should happen in Iraq has long played second fiddle to what is happening. Indeed they are barely on the same planet. To most observers on the ground there is no point in dreaming up regional conferences or international treaties to monitor a "future Iraq" as long as the present one is so unstable and blood-spattered. That will come only when the focus of personal security rises above the level of the family, the clan and the barricaded street at least to the tier of a city or province. That requires the province to have a coherent and disciplined police force to which local people give assent.

As Allawi points out, Iraq has passed way beyond such a force emanating from central government. Progress depends entirely on the split between Kurdish, Sunni and Shia zones being somehow replicated in constitutional devolution. As already recognised by the 2005 draft constitution, this must embrace not just fiscal and administrative separatism but military, judicial, religious autonomy. Without that autonomy, the Sunni minority will never trust a Shia-dominated federal government in Baghdad. It will remain in thrall to such fanatical imports as al-Qaeda, much as Catholic Ulster was in thrall to the Provisional IRA after the British occupation.

The likely fate of more American troops in Baghdad is to defend the surviving Sunni enclaves from Shia ethnic cleansing as it pushes westwards across Baghdad, supported by semi-official death squads. Of all ironies none would be more savage than that American soldiers leave Iraq after protecting Baathist Sunnis from a murderous onslaught by Shia irregulars in league with the police and army. Yet this is the most plausible outcome of the Battle of the Surge. Even now Sunnis pray that the nocturnal knock on the door is from an American marine rather than an Iraqi police uniform. The first may mean "rendition" but the second means mutilation and death.

It is conceivable that the surge strategy might eventually stabilise a "green line" of ethnic partition somewhere through western Baghdad, as in 1980s Beirut. Behind it each group could begin to find some security and normality, sufficient for their local commanders to meet and parley some division of the spoils of aid and oil revenue under provincial and then national authority.

If it comes to that no outsiders, regional or global, should be anywhere near them. Iraq's next chapter must surely be left to Iraqis alone. Outsiders have made this country a byword for arrogant and incompetent interventionism unparalleled in half a century. The 2003 assault on Iraq was unprovoked and justified by no overriding threat to western interests. It was one gigantic whim, a whim to which the leadership of the British Labour government fully subscribed.

When Blair was asked at a private lunch before Christmas what he had done to restrain American policy in Iraq he looked baffled. "It's worse than you imply," he said with a smile. Restraint was not an issue because he fully agreed with the policy. We assume he also agrees with the surge strategy, about which he spoke to Bush on the phone on December 29. So it is no good the Blairites or Gordon Brown or Labour voters or the British people generally objecting to the impending bloodbath on the streets of Baghdad. It is being done in their name. They can hope only that it is the beginning of the end.