More on US and Iran deal

The US Ambassador to Britain sobs a great gusher of crocodile tears about how Iran cares so little for the opinions of its people. "Iranian protesters were chanting that 'the nation is begging, while the master lives like God.'”  Not that the US has any sort of problem with income inequality or that the current presidential administration was any sort of shining example of that [/snark]. Newsweek: “The politically powerful rich get to pay low taxes, while the politically marginalized poor bear the burden but can do nothing about it.”

Iran "is sponsoring Hizbollah terrorists in Lebanon." Hizbollah is part of the Lebanese government with cabinet positions. They're hardly just "terrorists." 

Iran "is arming militants in Yemen." The Hindu says Yemen is "among the poorest in West Asia" and that the United Nations is calling the Yemen situation "the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis." Yemen has now suffered "three years of relentless bombing." The piece doesn't even mention Iran, meaning that Iran is not playing a meaningfully serious role there.

Yes, the US President decided to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement three months ago. "The decision was not taken lightly." Erm, actually, it was. The President did not present any real reasons for pulling out. There was no real debate on the issue and no non-supporters have been converted into supporters. The reasons given by the BBC are 1. Shredding the Obama legacy, 2. A pivot to Netanyahu and 3. New faces in the room. None of these count as weighty or serious reasons.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made extended remarks on why the US wanted to pull out of the nuclear agreement with Iran. I have to say, I wasn't the slightest bit impressed. The editorial by the US Ambassador to the UK, Robert Wood, isn't any more convincing.

Suggestion that we intervene in Syria against ISIS

So I saw this piece today: “The Pentagon could send conventional military forces into Syria”

My major problem with it is of course that it would be an utter quagmire as the US has no natural allies in Syria, except perhaps the Kurds and they’re only in the Northern part of that country. We’d get bogged down again even worse than we were in Iraq. But, an even worse problem is that the Daesh/ISIS problem is largely solved anyway.

Let’s put this in terms of World War II analogies. Everyone knows about the battles of Stalingrad (Nazi Wehrmacht vs the Soviet Union), Midway (Imperial Japanese Navy vs the US) and El Alamein (The Nazi Afrika Corps against the British), where the German/Japanese advances were stopped. Then there were three battles where the Axis powers might possibly have been able to stop the Allies and reversed the course of the war, but didn’t and victory for the Allies was never really in doubt afterwards. These were Kursk (In the Soviet Union), Guadalcanal (In the Pacific) and the Normandy Landings (France).

The situation with Daesh right now is comfortable after the Kursk/Guadalcanal/Normandy stage. Daesh has lost a great deal of land and people. They’re hanging onto a part of the city of Mosul, the Western part, but they’ve lost much else of their Iraqi territory. There’s even talk of their leaving Raqqa, their capitol in Syria.

Are there further battles the US may wish to fight in the region?

The main conflict in Syria’s civil war pits President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, Iran and Shi’ite militias, against an array of rebel groups aiming to oust him, including some that have been backed by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies.

This is a battle the the US really doesn’t want to get into, even though we’re obviously involved to some degree anyway. It’s really not clear that we wouldn’t be better off by simply abandoning the region. The main thing keeping us there is the oil supplied by the Gulf monarchies and global warming/climate change is a strong motivation to get ourselves off of fossil fuels anyway. The Saudi Arabians see the writing on the wall and have determined to get themselves out of the oil-supplying business during the 2020s.

No, we don’t need to send troops into the Mideast. We don’t need to throw US troops into a war against Daesh that Daesh has largely lost anyway and we really don’t want to “gin up” a conflict against Russian/Iranian forces.

Two wars wind down

Looks like the dirty effin' hippies were right all along and that the Bush dead-enders were wrong.

Very few Americans see either the Iraq or Afghanistan Wars as a success. In my view, a view shared by many of my buddies, the problem didn't lie at all with America's armed services. Our fighting men and women did all that they were asked to do and frequently went well beyond the call of duty.

Is the blame with the Iraqis of Afghans? No, there were plenty of both who welcomed their respective US invasions and who worked with the "occupiers" to try and make their countrymen think of Americans as "liberators."

The problem, we hippies saw, was that even before the invasion of Iraq, it was clear that the reconstruction of Afghanistan was being pursued in a very casual, lackadaisical manner. G.W. Bush called for people to go to Iraq after the fall of Baghdad to assist in the reconstruction there, but the right wing couldn't muster it's own Lincoln Brigade of people who were willing to undergo the lack of luxuries that working in Iraq would entail.

Iraqis and Afghans saw that their lives had been made more difficult, not less, after their respective dictators had been tossed out. So here we are, over a decade later, with pretty much nothing to show for it.

The CIA “Hollowed Out”

Bill Keller writes about the CIA and covert ops people versus intel people and the following passage jumped out at me:

"The C.I.A., having been hollowed out in the ’90s after the end of the cold war, failed to see the signs of what would be 9/11. Then the C.I.A. got the ostensible Iraqi weapons threat terribly wrong, drowning out more skeptical voices..."

There are three charges here: 1. That Bill Clinton permitted the CIA to be so underfunded and understaffed that it couldn't do its job while under George W. Bush, 2. that the CIA missed the signs that 9/11 was about to occur and 3. that the CIA thought there were WMD in Iraq when there weren't. The first charge is proven or disproven by the second and third charges. If those other two charges stand up, then we may presume that the first charge is true and vice-versa, if the two charges are not true, then the first is not true, either.

So how do the two charges stack up against the evidence? Not very well. Ron Suskind relates in his book “The One Percent Doctrine” that “Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: 'All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.'” And from The National Interest:

Kurt Eichenwald, former New York Times reporter and Vanity Fair contributing editor...”the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed.”

As to the third charge, that the CIA failed to see that there were no WMD in Iraq, the movie “Fair Game” tells the story of Joe and Valerie Plame Wilson, drawing heavily on the book by Valerie Wilson and shows that, yes indeed, the CIA did do its assigned job by presenting the President with all of the information that was available to them and that, in fact, there was significant doubt that Iraq had WMDs. The CIA and their buddies across the pond, MI6, were both informed that Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who was Iraq's head of intelligence, told them that Iraq had no WMD. Naji Sabri, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, is also said to have claimed this, although Sabri has denied saying so.

Now these claims of Bill Keller's really bother me as Keller joined the NY Times in 1984 and was the Executive Editor from 2003 to 2011, so this is no amateur, wet-behind-the-ears, fresh-outta-J-school, eager beaver cub reporter. This guy's been around and knows full well what he's saying.

To be fair, there were indeed people in both MI6 and the CIA who credited claims of WMD “even after they were exposed as fabricated including claims, notably about alleged mobile biological warfare containers, made by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German source codenamed Curveball,” so it's incorrect to say that the CIA was united in casting doubt upon the Bush Administration's justifications for going to war, but there's certainly no justification for claiming that the CIA as an agency failed either before 9/11 or before the Iraq War.

By the way, neither former President George W. Bush nor former Vice President Dick Cheney have any regrets or second thoughts about having plunged the nation into an unnecessary war.

[Bush] reflected on the “realities of the situation 10 years ago”: that the Iraq invasion had bipartisan support and that seeking regime change in Iraq had also been the policy under Clinton.

“It’s easy to forget what life was like when the decision was made,” Bush said.

Yes, the invasion had bipartisan support, but that was because Bush was manipulating the intel. And as I pointed out here, Clinton did indeed send Madelaine Albright to get a read on how motivated Americans were to fight a war against Iraq, but found that there simply wasn't anywhere near enough enthusiasm to even attempt to launch such a war.

As to Cheney, his old company Halliburton made $39.5 billion from the war, so he obviously has no regrets.

As to Keller's larger thesis, that the “cowboys” of the CIA were an undue influence on the “eggheads” (i.e., that the covert ops people had too much influence on the gathering-of-intel people), I doubt that. I read a few books on the CIA during the 1980s and got the impression that, despite the CIA being a single agency with a single Director, that the intel and ops people perform different tasks in different places and don't interact much.

Ten years ago. The Iraq War in retrospect.

From WHYY Public Media.

One of Philadelphia's Gold Star Mothers, Celeste Zappala, was interviewed by WHYY on Tuesday, the 19^th of March and the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Zappala lost her son Sherwood Baker in 2004. He was the first National Guard member to lose his life in Iraq. During the Vietnam War, the National Guard was so safe a place to be that the future president George W. Bush signed up for a six-year tour (Notthat he even served the full six years), but in Iraq, the National Guard was a vital supplement to the regular armed forces. Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) charged in 2004 that by keeping National Guard troops in their billets longer than they had planned and by using them as regular forces, the Bush Administration didn't have to impose a draft or to increase the size of the regular armed forces, and thus that using the National Guard in that way amounted to a “back-door draft.” Recruitment for the military to keep enough troops fighting in Iraq was a problem. In 2007, the Army had to spend $1 billion in bonuses to recruit and retain the soldiers it had. The economic collapse at the end of 2007 made it a good deal easier to do keep the military fully staffed.

Why did the Bush Administration depend so heavily on the National Guard during the occupation of Iraq?

Much of the planning for the occupation of Iraq was improvised, last-minute and inadequate. The Bush Administration didn't appear to think that many forces or much money would be needed after Baghdad had fallen. The problem then was very ably sketched out by Colonel Harry G. Summers, who built upon the theories of Carl von Clausewitz concerning war and national determination. Colonel Summers' book was entitled “On Strategy: The Vietnam War in context” and it was written in response to the failure of the US to win over the Vietnamese people to the cause of America. The military in both Iraq and Vietnam did everything that was asked of it and it carried out its assigned task with enthusiasm and professionalism. In neither case can America assign any significant blame to the military for the inability of the US to win hearts and minds in the occupied country. The Iraqi insurgents certainly deserve a great deal of credit for making an American victory after the fall of Baghdad impossible. Had all gone according to the plans made by the Bush Administration and had Iraqis quietly accepted the American occupation, there would have been no need for Bush and his people to whip up American enthusiasm and support for the war.

As it was, the left wing was proven correct by the failure to find any WMDs and was thus completely uninterested in supporting the war and the right wing was perfectly happy to keep their activities in support of the war very sharply limited. The right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg was asked why he didn't join up and go to Iraq in uniform (Goldberg was at the very upper age limit for joining the military). He later apologized for this response, but it's worthwhile to remember what he said:

As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice.

The point here is that Goldberg's attitude was quite typical for right-wingers. People who supported the war didn't feel the need to actually go over to Iraq and spend years in a foreign land actually getting themselves involved in learning a foreign language and dealing with a very different culture. Patriotism only demanded so much.

According to Summers, yes, any military or any country's political leadership can carry out short, brief military actions without getting broad-based buy-in from the country's civilian population, but any war that costs significant time and resources must get the civilian population emotionally involved. People must be absolutely convinced that the war is of immense significance and that it's worth great sacrifice to win it. Bush failed to get civilians from the right wing to go to Iraq as civilian reconstruction personnel, which explains why $8 billion of the money allocated to Iraqi reconstruction was lost. Without on-the-ground personnel overseeing projects and with Americans attempting to supervise projects from desks inside the “Green Zone” in Baghdad or from the US, it wasn't at all surprising that the US reconstruction effort was a complete flop.

Getting Americans motivated

The first step to getting Americans enthusiastically involved in the conquest/occupation of Iraq wassupervised by Madeleine Albright in February 1998. Albright brought several fellow war hawks to a town meeting in Ohio. It was a PR disaster as citizens vigorously questioned why Iraq was considered to be a threat and why that threat had to be neutralized via a war. Albright and her people were unable to answer these objections and the Clinton Administration didn't make any further attempts to whip up the public to supporting a war against Saddam Hussein and his country.

It's generally accepted among many former skeptics that no, President George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney didn't arrange for 9-11 to happen, but the belief was based on solid facts. Bush and Cheney both had oil industry roots, there was good reason to believe that the US oil industry would profit enormously via an American occupation of Iraq and 9-11 occurred just a few years after Albright's failed attempt to get American citizen buy-in for a war against Iraq. Al Jazeera points out that safeguarding civilians was certainly not on the agenda of the invading Americans:

The Iraq invasion cannot be reasonably described as a case of "humanitarian intervention" for three reasons. The means used in the war - a "shock and awe" bombing campaign, including the use of cluster munitions in populated areas - were clearly not designed with the objective of safeguarding Iraqi civilians. Secondly, there was no evidence of the triggering mechanism for a humanitarian intervention, such as mass slaughter or crimes that shock humanity. Saddam had a terrible track record but, during the run-up to war, no such crimes were ongoing or imminent. Third, humanitarian motives were clearly not dominant, as the war would probably not have occurred in the absence of the issues of WMD and/or the al-Qaeda connection. During his February 2003 presentation to the UN, even Colin Powell's slides related to Saddam's human rights violations were labelled, "Iraq: Failing to Disarm". 

Even if regular people didn't buy that Iraq had something to do with 9-11, the Washington DC press corps certainly did. What we do know for certain is that Bush & Cheney manipulated the information suppled by America's intelligence agencies to make it appear that Hussein had something to do with 9-11. 

The deleted paragraphs in the summary called "Key Judgements" read:

"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war.

Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge."

Many on the right wing have made their defense of the Bush Administration center around the allegation that Democratic Senators had access to the same intel that Bush had and that they reached the same conclusion. No, Democrats had access to the intel that Bush edited to make it look as though Iraq was a threat.

The consequences?  

As documented below, by the most scientifically respected measures available, Iraq lost 1.4 million lives as a result of OIL [Operation Iraqi Liberation], saw 4.2 million additional people injured, and 4.5 million people become refugees. The 1.4 million dead was 5% of the population. That compares to 2.5% lost in the U.S. Civil War, or 3 to 4% in Japan in World War II, 1% in France and Italy in

World War II, less than 1% in the U.K. and 0.3% in the United States in World War II. The 1.4 million dead is higher as an absolute number as well as a percentage of population than these other horrific losses.

The US absolutely must prevent anything like the Iraq War from ever occurring again. How are we doing on that? Unfortunately, not very well. The US leadership appears to greatly overestimate the effectiveness of sanctions, underestimates the usefulness of diplomacy and has far too much faith in our intelligence agencies. Also, people in Washington DC, both government officials and the press corps, appear to be talking about the deficit in much the same manner that they discussed Iraq in late 2002-early 2003. The good news is that US troops are very highly unlikely to go back into Iraq, no matter how badly the situation there deteriorates. The US couldn't do much there the first time and it seems our leadership knows that it couldn't do much on a return engagement. Could the US invade Iran? Certainly, elements want very badly to do so, but I think the public would be very highly likely to resist.

Comment on double standards

I'm scribbling out my response to Krauthammer's column in the Inky today, but I was most amused by the question posed by the  commenter who calls himself "The Monk": 

Bush was lambasted when he announced "Mission Accomplished" yet the media has not criticized President Obama one bit for his constant crowing that "Osama is dead, and GM is alive". Why the double standard?

Erm, well, let's see, the "mission" was NOT accomplished, if it had been, then US troops would have left Iraq. They didn't. they remained. Sure, if one defines the "mission" as merely overthrowing Saddam Hussein, then yes, that was accomplished, but Bush clearly meant much more than that. He wanted a "radical reconstruction of [Iraqs] entire economy." He meant that he had accomplished the first steps in bringing prosperity and stability to Iraq, that he would replace tyranny with democracy, or at least that he would give Iraqis a government that they would be content with. He did none of that. Heck, he couldn't even restore electric power to Iraq and because he couldn't follow up his initial military success against a nation that had been weakened by years of sanctions, Bush lost whatever success American arms had given him by May 2003.

How does the killing of Osama bin Laden compare with this? There's no indication that Obama ever wanted anything more than the destruction of al Qaeda and that project is proceeding quite smoothly, thank you very much. According to ABC News:

ABDUL BARI ATWAN: It seems Osama bin Laden had a long-term strategy. He told me personally that he can't go and fight the Americans and their country. But if he manages to provoke them and bring them to the Middle East and to their Muslim worlds, where he can find them or fight them on his own turf, he will actually teach them a lesson. It seems the invasion of Iraq fulfilled Osama bin Laden's wish. That's why the Americans are losing in Iraq, financially and on a human basis, and even their allies, including Australia, are really losing patience, losing money, losing personnel, losing reputation in that part of the world.

By ending the Iraq War on a schedule (As opposed to waiting for conditions to be fulfilled), Obama has stopped the bleeding and has frustrated one of bin Laden's objectives. General Motors is indeed alive and doing well.

In order for there to be a "double standard," Bush and Obama had to have made similar statements with similar intentions. They obviously didn't as Bush made grand and glorious plans for a brand new Middle East and Obama just wants to destroy al Qaeda and get America's economy back up to speed. There's simply no indication that Obama is pushing for more. Sorry "Monk," but your question is a FAIL!

Fair Game

Finally got to see the DVD of Fair Game, the story of the Bush Administration's rush to war against Iraq in late 2002, early 2003. Very good and no, it doesn't leave the slightest doubt that Bush's people knew full well that in the two cases the film looks at, the aluminum tubes (centrifuges or missile launch tubes?) and whether of not Niger sold raw uranium to Iraq, that the Bush Administration very consciously, deliberately and with malice aforethought, lied to get Americans enthusiastic about going to war with Iraq.
I had never before heard the exact reasons the CIA gave for not believing that the aluminum cylinders were for missile launch tubes as opposed to being nuclear fuel enrichment centrifuges, but in the film, the agents laughingly answer a Bush Administration official that the tubes that Iraq possessed were three to four times thicker and twice as long as centrifuges would have been. Makes sense, as centrifuges wouldn't need to be very thick, but a launch tube would need to be able to withstand a rocket going off inside it.
I could tell when Joe's article came out in late 2003 that there were lots of problems with the idea that Iraq got uranium from Niger (Joe Wilson pronounced it Ni-zheer, precisely to distinguish it from Nigeria). There are no railroads in that part of the world and the film specifies that it would have taken 50 heavy trucks to have carried a sufficient quantity of raw yellowcake uranium to have made a few bombs. I looked at a map and saw that it was 400 miles from the Southeastern tip of Niger to the nearest ports in Benin or Nigeria. The author Tony Hillerman wrote about people living in isolated areas such as one finds in Niger and Northern Benin and Nigeria. Hillerman wrote about two Apache detectives who lived in the American West. When vehicles in those isolated areas move, they get noticed and commented on. People in the Hillerman novels get asked if they've seen, say, a blue car going West. They usually remember just such a car and approximately when it passed. Even if Niger could have gotten all 50 trucks the 400 miles in one day (That of course, presumes really well-maintained roads), it would still take quite a while to get all the yellowcake offloaded from the trucks and loaded onto a ship. There's simply no way that even the most minimal due diligence wouldn't uncover all kinds of testimony and other evidence about such a large shipment. Even if satellites didn't pick up such a large movement for that region, spies in the ports would definitely have gotten lots of pictures of the loading. Obviously, the ship would have been carefully tracked and intercepted long before it got to Iraq.
I was surprised to hear that Valerie Plame Wilson (Played by Naomi Watts) didn't tell her husband (Played by Sean Penn) that she had informed her supervisors in the CIA that Joe had previous experience being a General Services Officer in the late 1970s to Niger. And no, I never believed for a single moment that she "sent" him to there. Her explanation that she merely suggested that "Oh, if we need someone to go to Niger, my husband has relevant experience being in that area." Joe didn't work for the CIA, he went voluntarily and Valerie wouldn't have had the authority to send him anywhere as she simply didn't play any such role in the CIA.
What was always the most ludicrous charge thrown against the Wilsons was that Valerie had sent Joe on a "junket." When I served in the Navy (1991-2001), I spent two years in the Mediterranean (1996-1998) onboard the USS LaSalle (AGF-3), the command ship for the Sixth Fleet. I certainly got to the big party/tourist ports, Venice, Italy; Cannes, France; Mallorca, Spain, etc. But I also got to some not-so-wealthy, not-so-touristy places, Constanta, Romania;  Tunis, Tunisia and Poti, Georgia, among others. Now, if I were told by a US government official "Mr. Gardner, your country would appreciate it if you were to go to [one of these places to do whatever]", I'd salute, say "Aye-aye," get over there and make the best of it. But would I go to any of these places as though they were tourist destinations? Uh, hardly. There's a scene in the film where Joe turns on a tap and, instead of getting water, gets some sort of thick, black liquid. Clearly, Niger was not any sort of touristy kind of place that wealthy Americans or Europeans were visiting for the fun of it. So I never found it the slightest bit believable that Joe Wilson had set out to Niger for any reason other than what he said he was there to do, to see whether Niger had sent uranium to Iraq.
And yes, I agree with the films conclusion, that it's right for citizens to stand up when things are wrong and to publicly say so.I greatly appreciate both of the Wilsons for having done so.

Turkey vs Israel over Gaza

I was curious to read in a Trudy Rubin column that Turkey and the Palestinians of Gaza had been given a good offer by the UN and that they should have taken it up. The offer concerned the "US Ship to Gaza" or the "Freedom Flotilla" that had as its flagship the Mavi Marmara. I was especially struck by these passages: Israel had a "right to impose and enforce a naval blockade on Gaza" and "As the panel makes clear, Israel had a legal right to search the ship, but made a bloody mess of it."

In May 2010, the Mavi Marmara was about 80 miles from shore and Israel had a 12-mile limit, but there's no question that it was headed for Gaza. Israel's right to intercept and detain any ship attempting to break the siege or blockade of Gaza is hardly clear at all. Guests of the radio show Democracy Now, Huwaida Arrat and Norman Finklestein, strongly dispute that Israel had any such right.

Essentially, the proposed compromise is that Israel could check incoming shipments for weapons, but could not otherwise stop imports. That has the problem of defining a weapon. According to Israel, cement (Freedom Flotilla II had lots of cement onboard), which is widely used as a construction material for housing in the region, is also useful for constructing fortifications. The distinction between imports via land and via sea differ only in that imports via land can be checked more easily.

The UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories writes for Uruknet that, in the case of the report of the Palmer panel, that "the report failed to address the central international law issues in a credible and satisfactory manner."

But to be satisfactory, the report had to interpret the legal issues in a reasonable and responsible manner. This meant, above all else, that the underlying blockade imposed more than four years ago on the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza was unlawful, and should be immediately lifted. On this basis, the enforcement by way of the 31 May attacks were unlawful, an offense aggravated by being the gross interference with freedom of navigation on the high seas, and further aggravated by producing nine deaths among the humanitarian workers and peace activists on the Mavi Marmara and by Israeli harassing and abusive behavior toward the rest of the passengers. Such conclusions should have been 'no brainers' for the panel, so obvious were these determinations from the perspective of international law as to leave little room for reasonable doubt.

China's news service says that "Ankara announced a series of measures against Israel, which included downgrading Turkish-Israeli diplomatic ties to the second-secretary level, suspending bilateral military agreements, and demanding a review of the Israeli blockade of Gaza by the International Court of Justice."

Bush's speech on Iran

On Iran, Bush ratcheted up his so-far rhetorical battle with that country's government. Bush said the Iranian government has a choice: It "can live in peace with its neighbor, enjoy strong economic and cultural and religious ties, or it can continue to arm and train and fund illegal militant groups which are terrorizing the Iraqi people and turning them against Iran

"If Iran makes the right choice, America will encourage a peaceful relationship between Iran and Iraq. If Iran makes the wrong choice, America will act to protect our interests and our troops and our Iraqi partners."

Very tough and clear speech. If Iran continues to meddle in Iraq, watch out! Slight problem: there doesn't appear to be any evidence that Iran is doing any such thing.

It's blame-blame-blame, blame-blame Iran. We've heard this song before. The Bush administration warbles it every time it needs to justify its failed Iraq policies and rally a skeptical public.

One of the main charges against Iran is:

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who will also testify, accused Iran of providing some of the rockets that have struck the Green Zone in Baghdad, causing a number of U.S. casualties. "We got the tailfins of what was dropping on us ... This was quite literally made in Iran," Crocker told reporters.

But Juan Cole points out that religious pilgrims travel from Iran to Iraq and back again in very large numbers, perhaps a million a year. Weapons may indeed be traveling across the border, but it's not like the weapons would necessarily come to Iraq via a deliberate Iranian policy:

Cole also questioned U.S. claims that Iran was intentionally supplying weapons to the Mahdi Army. "There's no proof for that, and whenever the U.S. Army is pressed for evidence, they always back off." The weapons are available on the black market, and the Mahdi Army, flush with funds, can easily buy them.

Back during the Vietnam War, whenever an advanced weapon appeared in the hands of Vietnamese who were fighting the Americans, it was so plainly imported from either the Chinese or the Russians that no attempt was made to hide where any of the weapons came from. That's not the case in the Middle East. With approximately 100 million AK-47s produced worldwide (They sell for $30 to $125) and with no gun control in Iraq, an AK-47 is part of pretty much every family's arsenal. IEDs and RPGs are also pretty generic and similarly hard to trace.
Vice-President Cheney had a talk with Sean Hannity wherein he warned darkly about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad having all sorts of crazy beliefs. Beliefs about Iran's need to destroy Israel (Juan Cole has argued that Cheney is quoting from a mistranslation) and that Ahmadinejad believes in "The 12th Imam," a rather mystical notion similar to the Christian Biblical "End Times." Mid-east scholar Bernard Lewis has already predicted an Iranian attempt to bring about an Islamic version of the "End Times," but nothing happened on the predicted day of Aug 8th, 2006.

In a rather alarming statement from Bill Kristol (Whose magazine, The Weekly Standard, pressed for war with Iraq from that famous September 11th until the invasion began), he said: "I think people are overdoing how much of a lame duck the president is." Shades of the 1989 "Wimp factor" that the elder George Bush exorcised by invading Panama!

And finally, the very latest news is that "Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. will be as aggressive as possible to counter the increase in Iranian support for militias." As the Iranian support for the militias appears to be more a matter of covering all their bets as opposed to trying to push Iraq in one direction or another, it's not really clear what countering Iranian support actually means. Gates was then quite vague about whether Iran was supplying more weapons to Iraq or not, echoing Bush's "gut instinct" of the period before the Iraq War. Gates went on to claim: "I think the Iraqi government now has a clearer view of the malign impact of Iran's activities inside Iraq."

I'd say if there was an Iran War equivalent of the nuclear "Doomsday Clock," I think we can move it a bit closer to midnight.

Douglas Feith coming out with book

Douglas Feith, the "stupidest fucking guy on the planet," is in the middle of putting out a 900-page book that praises Bush, Cheney and of course Doug Feith, and condemns Colin Powell, Paul Bremer, the whole State Department and various generals. Very notably, Feith notes that Bush made the declaration that "war [with Iraq] is inevitable" at an 18 Dec 2002 National Security Council meeting. The blogger Digby shows that Bush followed this momentous announcement with many public statements saying he hadn't made up his mind yet.

Personally, I've always thought of Bush's UN speech of 12 Sep 2002 as pretty much the raison d'etre (Latin: the reason for the existence of) speech of the Iraq War, the date when the Bush Administration's course was firmly set and Bush made it clear that he would have his war no matter what. And of course, the Bush biographer quoted in an archived Downing St Memo screenshot shows that Bush wanted to be seen as a "Commander-in-Chief" which of course could be accomplished by starting a war with Iraq.

The really amazing part of Feith's book-to-be is Feith's apparent faith in Ahmad Chalabi, the guy who was described by the young Iraqi woman blogger Riverbend as:
.

..not just a puppet- he's a mercenary. He encouraged the sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and maimed the country itself. He supported the war and occupation vehemently and fabricated lies about weapons and threats to further his cause. He's a criminal- and a lousy one at that.

Chalabi's return to Iraq was hardly a "Napoleon-returning-from-Elba" kind of return. The NY Times points out that:

When the [December 2005] election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament.

And yet, this is the guy that Feith apparently thinks was the savior of Iraq:

Others have criticized Feith's plan as relying too heavily on Iraqi exile politicians, including Ahmed Chalabi. Feith says that he considered Chalabi one of the most astute and democratically minded Iraqis but that he had no special brief for him. Instead, he charges that the State Department, the CIA and the military's Central Command were pathologically opposed to the exiles and to Chalabi in particular.

But what exactly was Feith's idea for running Iraq after the invasion?

The idea to which Feith appears most attached, and to which he repeatedly returns in the book, is the formation of an Iraqi Interim Authority. Feith's office drew up a plan for the body -- to be made up of U.S.-appointed Iraqis who would share some decision-making with U.S. occupation forces -- in the months before the invasion. [emphasis added]

Gee, I wonder which "U.S.-appointed Iraqis" Feith could have in mind? What's probably the most amusing statement in the review is: "...secret information was not necessary to understand the threat Hussein posed."

Erm, actually, it was. Saddam Hussein, no matter how evil, no matter how bloodthirsty, may be an awful fellow that people wish to dispose of, but to be considered a threat requires showing, through evidence, that his country could militarily threaten the US and/or it's close allies. That proof "had to" be manufactured because there was simply no proof to be had.

And oh, yes! It seems that "Saint John The Maverick" McCain was a strong supporter of...wait for it...Chalabi!

Iran and human rights

This post concerning Iran got me to thinking about how to handle Iran's problems with respecting human rights. The post ended with this statement:

The regime in Tehran unfortunately only understands a show of strength and nothing else. The mullahs in Iran know very well which presidential candidate will stand up to them if elected and which candidate will be a softy who literally let's them get away with murder.

I responded to a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer in the following manner:

--------------
I completely agree with Trita Parsi that Iran is neither a complete democracy nor is it a full tyranny. It has instead a system which has elements of both. The US has not worn the mantle of human rights hero for many years. The Arab suspicion from the beginning was that the Iraq War was all about oil, a suspicion that has long since hardened over there into conventional wisdom. The recent retirement announcement of General Counsel of the Department of Defense William J. Haynes II confirms suspicion in many quarters that the US will not treat Guantanamo detainees fairly in their upcoming trials and that the US was simply eliminating an embarrassing symbol of its determination to conduct Soviet-style show trials that are certain to reach unanimously guilty verdicts.

Currently, the US posture of hostility to Iran's government looks to the Iranian people like the posture of a self-interested superpower that cares nothing for the human rights of Iranians. Pumping money into Iranian opposition groups has the effect of discrediting those groups as it allies them with a power that appears to be intent only upon getting ahold of Iran's oil. The US could probably rescue itself from that image by making a clear connection between Iran's respect for human rights and the resulting US posture towards Iran, but it must pursue that policy consistently and must reward good behavior on their part.

If Iranians select better politicians at their polls (Iran has some democratic elements, some pro-human rights politicians have gained office) and the US rewards that behavior by reducing its saber-rattling, then both sides will win and respect for human rights will end up being the winner.
----------------

Now, a reasonable person might ask: "The US demonstrated hostility towards the Apartheid regime of South Africa back in the 1980s. What's the difference? Why was saber-rattling hostility good for South Africa then and not good for Iran today?"

The difference, I think, is contained in the old Texas saying "I don't have a dog in that fight." With South Africa, the US didn't have an obvious economic self-interest in having either side prevail. The US could credibly present itself as a disinterested champion of human rights without people accusing it of pursuing policies that would benefit it economically. With Iran today unfortunately, the US simply cannot take the same posture. The US has a very strong economic self-interest in Iran's oil and no amount of speechifying about human rights in Iran will camouflage that.

The only credible policy for the US to take concerning Iran's human rights situation is what I've outlined above. I strongly recommend that the US immediately cease and desist from covertly financing Iranian opposition groups and to work wholly from the outside. Let's not work harder. Let's work smarter. Let's work in a more effective manner.

Dimwitted political strategy

I'm in complete agreement with GG here. This has got to be the most idiotic, dimwitted political strategy I've seen for at least, oh heck, in at least the past week:

MATTHEWS: "Let me ask you again about what you're facing now, John McCain -- he's even joked about bombing Iran. I know it was a joke -- let's not overplay it -- but he's certainly a very strong hawk. Is he too hawkish for the American people as our next president?"

MCAULIFFE: "Well, listen it's going to be quite a debate as we head into the fall. I think Sen. McCain's biggest problems are going to be dealing with the issues on the economy. That is not considered his strong suit. It is considered the strong suit for Hillary, as you know -- on the housing crisis, she's been the first one to get out in front on that, called for moratorium on home foreclosures, called for a freeze on interest rates for the next five years, she's been dealing with the credit crisis. So I think as it relates to Sen. McCain, he knows that he can't really deal with these economic issues -- he's been all over the map -- supporting the Bush tax cuts, against the Bush tax cuts. Hillary has been very consistent out there on these economic issues.

So he's going to try, I think, Chris, to continue to show that he's the most hawkish, he will be the toughest on national security -- that's going to be their fall campaign. As you know, they did it to us in 2004 with the Swift Boating of Sen. Kerry. They're going to do that same type of campaign again this time. They're not going to Swift Boat Hillary Clinton. They have no ability to do that. We're going to run a strong campaign because we know we're out there fighting for millions of Americans who want health care, want their homes to be preserved, and want to keep us safe. [emphases in original] 

This is not smart strategy. Trying to change the subject when talk turns to one's opponents main political appeal is just kinda dumb. I'm not sure what people are supposed to assume, but what they're going to assume is obvious, that Democrats are conceding that McCain has a better, more intelligent strategy than the Democrats do. Karl Rove has demonstrated that he knows better than that:

Very early on, Karl Rove did something that many other political operatives don't do, and it's really an element of why he's a unique figure in American political life: He understands that while other people look for the weakness in an opponent and exploit that, Rove has long looked at the strength of an opponent. In the case of Ann Richards running for governor, it was that she was tolerant and appealed to many constituents, so you attack her as an advocate for the homosexuals' agenda. In the case of John McCain, it was that he was a POW in Vietnam, and so you raise questions about his service in Vietnam through surrogate groups.

In 2004, the number one thing that John Kerry offered was his heroic service in Vietnam, and so what Rove did was attack the strength of Kerry, not his weakness. What you had to do was confront Kerry's strength in Vietnam by raising doubts about whether or not he was a hero and whether or not his service was really all that noble. And you do that in part with a surrogate group, raising questions about whether his medals were truly warranted, and beyond that, pressing the case of John Kerry, who came back from the war as an opponent of the war.

To try and sidestep or finesse McCain's insane warmongering (Q: "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years -- " (cut off by McCain) McCain: "Make it a hundred.") is an utter loser of a strategy that will do nothing but continue the pathetic losing streak established by the DLC (The DLC was caught flatfooted and "whacked upside the head" by Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution of 1994 and spent the next decade trying ever more futile and useless strategies until they were simply pushed aside by the netroots). Yes, there are serious questions about the 2004 vote, especially in Ohio, but the primary problem was that incompetent strategy on Kerry's part allowed Bush to get within lunging distance where cheating could then make the difference. Terry McAuliffe is a figure of the past and someone who needs to remain there. He obviously hasn't adapted to the Republican Party of Karl Rove and the new way of doing things.

The thing the Democratic Party has to remember is that when Republicans talk about a fear-based strategy, a strategy of saying "Ooh! Osama bin Laden's gonna gitcha! If we don't continue to wage war without end in the Mideast and continue dumping lives and money down into that endless hole, bin Laden will establish a caliphate and take over THE WORLD!!1@!!"

Remember!!! They already tried this for the 2006 midterm elections! It didn't work then. It won't work in the future, but it will only remain futile if the Democrats respond forthrightly and answer their arguments directly. I had a conversation with conservatives in the comments section of a newspaper article recently. He commented on how terrible things were under the evil dictator Saddam Hussein. I replied "Yes, he was an evil dictator, but..." and proceeded to detail how bad things became after the US invasion. The other guy continued the argument, but we moved onto different aspects.

Gauging seriousness

Various bloggers are suggesting that perhaps Bush & Cheney aren't panting and lusting and whining and scratching at the door to start a war with Iran. Patrick Poivre d'Arvor of French TF1 Television interviews Bush:

Poivre: "So to a certain extent, you did contribute to giving greater power to Iran, because it no longer is facing its hated enemy on the other side. So now is there a true threat in Iran, and are you ready now to invade Iran as you did with Afghanistan and Iraq? So it is indeed true that Vice President -- is it true that Vice President Cheney has a plan for that?"

Bush: "I don't know where you're getting all these rumors -- there must be some weird things going on in Europe these days -- because I have made it abundantly clear, now is the time to deal with a true threat to world peace -- that's Iran -- and to do it diplomatically and peacefully. And that's what I'm going to spend a lot of time on with President Sarkozy. But of course we want to solve these problems peacefully. . . ."

You see, when the President is unable to answer serious questions seriously, or even to acknowledge plain and obvious facts, I just can't help but be suspicious as to what he's up to. Of course the US has, by removing a "hated enemy" of Iran from their Western border, made Iran more of an expansionist threat (Iran is still a "regional power" as compared to the US being a "hyper power," several levels more powerful. "More of a expansionist threat" does not mean a "serious expansionist threat.") The idea that the US has, whether accidentally or not, aided and abetted the growth of Iranian power is not a "rumor," it's a fact.

Reporters from the RTL and N-TV German television networks then had an interview with Bush.

Question "Do you think that the nuclear threat that Iran poses right now is larger than the threat Iraq posed about five or six years ago?"

Bush: "I think they were both dangerous. I think both of them could have been solved diplomatically. Saddam Hussein chose to ignore the demands of the free world and Security Council 1441 -- which, by the way, Germany voted for initially. And I think they're both dangerous. And I think therefore the lesson of Iraq is that we can work together and solve questions peacefully now. . . ."

But Saddam Hussein did NOT "ignore the demands of the free world and Security Council 1441." Saddam Hussein, in December 2002, turned in a 12,000 page document detailing all of the weapons that Iraq possessed at the time. It was met with considerable scorn, skepticism and derision, but there was never any proof that anything in that document was even questionable, let alone that it was in any way inaccurate. And in response to another question:

"I've committed our troops into harm's way twice, and it's not a pleasant experience because I understand the consequences firsthand. And so I owe it to the American people to say that I've tried to solve this problem diplomatically. And that's exactly what I intend to do."

Actually, I got the impression that Bush enormously enjoyed sending soldiers off to war.

Minutes before President Bush's solemn announcement that the US military were in action against Iraq he vigorously pumped his fist and declared: "I feel good". [Mirror]

"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."

And "firsthand"? In November 2003 "Mr Bush spent two hours having dinner with about 600 stunned US troops at Baghdad airport before leaving Iraq." Bush snuck in, remained at the Baghdad airport and snuck out. All of his following visits have been equally surreptitious.

Granted, his wife Laura thinks that she's endured a harsh lot in life, apparently right alongside the troops:

ANN CURRY: Do you know the American people are suffering… watching [Iraq]?

LAURA BUSH: Oh, I know that very much, and, believe me, no suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this. And certainly the commander-in-chief who has asked our military to go into harm’s way.

Nah, the idea that Bush & Cheney won't attack Iran is a bet that I won't put any money on. It seems entirely plausible they will and no, I can't believe for one minute that Bush takes war with anywhere even close to the seriousness that it requires.

Limbaugh insults anti-war soldiers

So the question on Rush Limbaugh and his "phony soldiers" crack is "Will we see anywhere near the fuss and bother over Limbaugh's remark that we just witnessed over the MoveOn 'Petraeus/Betray US' ad?"

Yeah, me neither. I don't trust the Democrats to raise anywhere near the stink that the Republicans recently raised over MoveOn.

Here's the quote, but keep in mind that Limbaugh has frequently complained that people don't read the whole context of his remarks, so if one wishes to write him to complain:

[Here's the essential context for the actual quote]
CALLER 1: Good. Why is it that you always just accuse the Democrats of being against the war and suggest that there are absolutely no Republicans that could possibly be against the war?
LIMBAUGH: Well, who are these Republicans? I can think of Chuck Hagel, and I can think of Gordon Smith, two Republican senators, but they don't want to lose the war like the Democrats do. I can't think of -- who are the Republicans in the anti-war movement?
CALLER 1: I'm just -- I'm not talking about the senators. I'm talking about the general public -- like you accuse the public of all the Democrats of being, you know, wanting to lose, but --
LIMBAUGH: Oh, come on! Here we go again. I uttered a truth, and you can't handle it, so you gotta call here and change the subject. How come I'm not also hitting Republicans? I don't know a single Republican or conservative, Mike, who wants to pull out of Iraq in defeat. The Democrats have made the last four years about that specifically.
CALLER 1: Well, I am a Republican, and I've listened to you for a long time, and you're right on a lot of things, but I do believe that we should pull out of Iraq. I don't think it's winnable. And I'm not a Democrat, but I just -- sometimes you've got to cut the losses.
-----------------
[And The Quote]
LIMBAUGH: "Save the -- keep the troops safe" or whatever. I -- it's not possible, intellectually, to follow these people.
CALLER 2: No, it's not, and what's really funny is, they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.
LIMBAUGH: The phony soldiers.
CALLER 2: The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they're willing to sacrifice for their country. [emphasis from Media Matters]
------------------
BTW, Representative Patrick Murphy (D-PA) is both a combat veteran AND against the Iraq War, so is the entire membership of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. On their site, the IVAW claims that "Over 2000 soldiers have signed the Appeal For Redress." Out of 168,000 soldiers currently serving in Iraq, that's obviously a small minority, but it's far from legitimate to say that all "real" soldiers, by definition, support the Iraq War. They don't.
CNN says: "Anti-war sentiment among Republican poll respondents has suddenly increased with 38 percent of Republicans now saying they oppose the war." Again, a minority, but it's simply inaccurate to say that being a Republican means one automatically supports the Iraq War.
Limbaugh's assertion that any soldier who opposes the Iraq War is a "phony soldier" is simply false just as it's false to say that all Republicans, by definition, support the Iraq War.

For Limbaugh, a lifelong civilian (The phrase during World War II was "never heard a shot fired in anger."), to accuse soldiers who don't agree with his views on the Iraq War is a flat-out insult and deserves our hearty, full-throated condemnation.

Update:

A Media Matters piece on Limbaugh's (false) assertion that he was actually referring to one specific fake soldier (Could the White House bailing out over Rush's comments be motivating this climbdown?) contains what journalists refer to as a "nut paragraph," a paragraph that summarizes what the whole controversy is all about.

'LIMBAUGH: -- the weapons of mass destruction. We gotta get beyond that. We're, we're there. What -- who cares if, if -- we all know they were there and, and"

I'm not really sure how Limbaugh wants to "get beyond" the WMD issue. The point of that is that the war was initiated on lies, upon untruthful statements and misrepresented facts and overlooked/ignored aspects. Opponents of going to war in the six months before it started were not honestly debated. We were instead shouted down. There was no honest discussion of whether of not Iraq really and truly posed a threat to the US or indeed, to its' immediate neighborhood. Instead, American citizens received a lot of hysterical, overheated, screaming propaganda. Allegedly earnest "liberals" in the press want US citizens to base their decisions on the personal qualities of the men making the accusations against purported national foes, not upon the evidence that they present in these accusations.

Susan Estrich, one of the Fox News liberals, wrote: "The Democrats, especially the Democrats running for president, have a problem, and his name is Petraeus." She asked: "But attacking the General who oozes courage, fortitude and decency?" (emphasis added) demonstrates that many alleged liberals still don't want to honestly debate the actual issues involved.

Yeah "We're, we're there" but I don't see that Americans should "get beyond" the fact that the US is in Iraq for reasons that have never been honestly and forthrightly discussed.

"Mahmoud [Ahmadinejad, Iranian president] even admitted it in one of his speeches here about -- talkin' about Saddam using the poison mustard gas or whatever it is on his own people"

True, Saddam Hussein used poison mustard gas on his own people in 1987. That demonstrated that Saddam Hussein was a monster and not to be trusted, but not that Iraq posed any immediate threat to anyone in 2003.

"-- but that, that's moot, right? What, what's more important is all this is taking place now in the midst of the surge working."

There's actually no such evidence. The "surge" has utterly and miserably failed to achieve any of its objectives. 70% of Iraqis believed in September that it had failed. Only 50% of Shiite Muslims in Iraq saw attacks on US troops as justified, but 93% of Sunni Muslims in Iraq thought so. One might keep in mind the fact that, in the event of a US withdrawal from Iraq, Shiites are 60% of Iraq's population and that their co-religionists in Iran would have gained a greatly expanded influence. Shiites might not actively hate the US presence in their country, but it's highly unlikely they'd fight to keep US troops there. Any "Hearts & Minds" campaign has long since been lost and an academic study shows that the US's highly mechanized military has little or no chance of prevailing in any sort of guerrilla struggle in any event (Due to what the author refers to as "information starvation").

"And all of these anti-war Democrats are getting even more hell-bent on pulling out of there, which means that success on the part of you and, and your colleagues over there is, is a great threat to them. It's just, it's frustrating and maddening, and it is why they must be kept in the minority." 

Limbaugh's problem is that Democrats are merely reacting to the situation in Iraq. He'd like to believe that Democrats are actively creating the situation, but that's simply not the case. The essential difference between the way that Limbaugh sees the struggle in Iraq and the way progressives see it is that he blames insufficiently dedicated Americans for not having enough faith, for the occurrence of war's failures. Progressives believe the war was a really terrible and immoral idea to begin with and that if a long, drawn-out guerrilla struggle was not a certainty to start with, then it had certainly become apparent to us that the guerrilla war had begun in earnest by the time the President went on a month-long vacation in August of 2003.

Allegations on China & Iran

*Sigh!* Well, it seems our old pal Jeff Gerth has been a busy boy. Now, he's claiming that China is supplying arms to Iraqi insurgents via Iran

Yee-hah! It's a two-fer! Now our media is blaming not just one, but two evil empires!

Frankly, I thought the following:

"...Beijing, which insisted it knew nothing about the shipments and asked for additional intelligence on the transfers..."

and

"Apologists for China within the government said the intelligence reports were not concrete proof of Chinese and Iranian government complicity."

First off, China's request that the US supply proof that they're sending covert arms shipments to Iraqi insurgents is an entirely reasonable one, one that would be honored immediately by an honorable administration. It's of course quite possible that there could be a rogue element in China's government that they would be more than happy to stop if only they were apprised of details concerning how the transfers are being made. If the US had 10 discrete
pieces of evidence, they could reveal perhaps three and see if action is taken that affects the other seven.

Second, the observation that the word of intelligence agencies do not constitute "concrete proof" is again an entirely reasonable one. Intelligence agencies "hoover up" all the information they can get ahold of because one is better safe than sorry. If one is making a diplomatic protest, it's not unreasonable to get other agencies to certify that the information they're working off of is solid. It was shown after the Vietnam War that military services did a very good job of critiquing the plans of other military services. The Navy critiqued the plans of the Air Force and pointed out quite a few things that later became common wisdom.

It's hardly called for to refer to those skeptical of the reports on China "Apologists for China."