CIA hiding evidence on interrogations

The CIA allegedly oversaw interrogations of top-level detainees, and some investigators think the agency's tactics are at the heart of the question of whether the Bush administration has authorized torture.

The CIA is refusing to disclose any information about abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Juan Cole points out that a Gallup poll taken in August 2003 and then again in April 2004 and involving 3000 face-to-face interviews, showed a disastrously steep decline in Iraqi support for the American occupation.

On Balance, do you think of the Americans mostly as Occupiers or Liberators?

August 2003 Liberators 43%
April 2004 Liberators 19%

It's difficult to overstate the importance of this finding. The Bush Administration is counting on Iraqis to fill in the gaps caused by the shortage of American troops (Not enough sent in the first place and steep drops in recruitment) fighting in Iraq. As the number of Iraqi supporters of the occupation shrinks, so too does the pool of people available to recruit from. As it is, a blogger describes a guerrilla attack and mentions the resistance: "Oh yeah, they don't use masks. Only the people fighting for the Americans do." An Iraqi translator designated to be the native face at a US military checkpoint also hides himself. US programs to get all it's Humvees armored do not apply to Iraqis, who use old jeeps and AK-47s. There are no plans on the boards to re-equip Iraqis who work with the occupation.

UPDATE: The percentage of Iraqis who consider US soldiers as "occupiers": 92%

It's probably a waste of time to write either the CIA or the President, but it might be a good idea to write or call your Senators or Representative and to demand that the CIA turn over everything it has on detainee abuse yesterday!!!

Let us not forget...

I've commented a lot recently on how our military has messed up to the extreme detriment of American military people. I've never forgotten about the other side in this, but just to make it ultra-crystal clear:

In all of this, please remember that although for the American public, the deaths of their countrymen and countrywomen obviously hit close to home, it is the Iraqi public that is really suffering. The twin attacks in Karbala and Najaf two days killed more than 70. and literally hundreds of Iraqis die every week month in violence. The security situation is dire and it’s likely to get worse as the elections approach. There will be many more grieving families in America and Iraq before this is all over.

Baghdad-Green Zone road now impassable

The road between Baghdad Airport and the Green Zone, a 22
kilometer stretch, is probably as far as the American occupation
is concerned, the most important single road in all of Iraq. An
article on Z Magazine's website points out that the road is now
impassable by troops and they have to use helicopters to get from
one place to another. The Nation had previously reported that it
was costing up to $6000 to hire the people, weapons and vehicles
necessary to make it from one to the other safely.

This of course, is a much more expensive way to move supplies and
personnel, so expect the latest Iraq War money to get burned
through in a short period.

Thomas Friedman's latest

Interesting column by Thomas Friedman of the NY Times. Wildly misinformed of course and unbelievably arrogant in its presumptions, but interesting.

There has been so much violence in Iraq that it's become hard to distinguish one senseless act from another. But there was a picture that ran on the front page of this newspaper on Monday that really got to me. It showed several Iraqi gunmen, in broad daylight and without masks, murdering two Iraqi election workers. The murder scene was a busy street in the heart of Baghdad. The two election workers had been dragged from their car into the middle of the street. They looked young, the sort of young people you'd see doing election canvassing in America or Ukraine or El Salvador.

One was kneeling with his arms behind his back, waiting to be shot in the head. Another was lying on his side. The gunman had either just pumped a bullet into him or was about to. I first saw the picture on the Internet, and I did something I've never done before - I blew it up so it covered my whole screen. I wanted to look at it more closely. You don't often get to see the face of pure evil.

That's not what I saw. I saw a picture and read descriptions of a busy city street where nobody stopped to help the election workers. Where the young men with AK-47s didn't have the slightest concern that someone might see them and drop a dime on them to the Iraqi police or to the American Army. This was a killing that was supported by the population. This was a killing where the Iraqis around it thought to themselves “Ah, some collaborators with the occupation are receiving their proper punishments.” It probably made a lot of people's days to see that.

There is much to dislike about this war in Iraq, but there is no denying the stakes. And that picture really framed them: this is a war between some people in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world who - for the first time ever in their region - are trying to organize an election to choose their own leaders and write their own constitution versus all the forces arrayed against them.

This is a very pretty picture of hard-working and earnest folks who just want the best for their country. Unfortunately, it's also complete fantasy. The upcoming elections are not free by any stretch of the imagination. These are elections that will take place under foreign occupation. “people in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world” have nothing to do with these elections. The Americans, the guys who invaded Iraq under the pretense of looking for WMD that they knew full well didn't exist, are the ones who are trying to organize the election. Iraqi citizens are not fooled. Back in late August 2003, we read the following statement from the AP:

Iraqis will be free to form their own government as long as it is not an Iranian-style theocracy, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday.

In other words, sure, Iraqis can have freedom, as long as, of course, it's a type and variety of freedom that the US approves of. They have to clear it through their supervisors in Washington DC first. The condition may sound reasonable to Americans as the idea of a theocracy conjures up horrible images of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson running things, but Ayatollahs have run Iran for the past 20+ years in neighboring Iran and while the Taliban of Afghanistan has a great many detractors worldwide, they are still a significant political force in their country. The Administration is very anxious for Americans to believe that Iran is bubbling over with the desire to toss off the yoke of theocracy and to adopt capitalism/democracy, but they appear to be really stretching and making unwarranted assumptions to make that point. There doesn't appear to be much evidence that there's any revolutionary ferment in Iran.

Sorry, but no one on the face of the Earth defines that as “freedom”.

Note the identity of Friedman's sole source for how the Iraqis feel about anything and what the insurgents stand for:

As the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum so rightly pointed out to me, "These so-called insurgents in Iraq are the real fascists, the real colonialists, the real imperialists of our age."

Sounds like a knowledgable, objective source, eh? How seriously can we take the academic credentials of someone (Notice he's not called a professor, merely an expert.) from John Hopkins? From the BBC:

Just across the street is another academic institution, the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, which was headed by the leading Pentagon hawk, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Which means the expert Friedman cited works directly for the number two man at the Defense Department. Juan Cole, a noted professor of history (Note: an actual academic) at the University of Michigan and who writes frequently enough on Mideast affairs to have his own blog, never uses such overheated terminology. Cole quotes some polling data that gives us much better insight into how Iraqis see the US:

On Balance, do you think of the Americans mostly as Occupiers or liberators?

Occupiers: 71 %
Liberators 19%

(43% reported that in April 2003, they had thought of the Americans as liberators).

How have the US Forces Conducted themselves?

58% said "fairly badly" or "very badly."

Asked if the US was serious about establishing democracy in Iraq:

50% said "no."
12% said "don't know."

Asked if attacks on US troops could be justified,

52% said "sometimes," "somewhat," or "completely."


The United States had an unfavorability rating of

54%

(and there wasn't a significant difference between the Shiites and the Sunni Arabs).

Only 31% favored a separation of mosque and state! (But 66% of Kurds did).

Only 30% of the Arab population favored a multiparty parliamentary democracy!

So, when Friedman claims that:

Do not be fooled into thinking that the Iraqi gunmen in this picture are really defending their country and have no alternative. The Sunni-Baathist minority that ruled Iraq for so many years has been invited, indeed begged, to join in this election and to share in the design and wealth of post-Saddam Iraq.

If the gunmen think they are defending their country, isn't it supremely arrogant to say that they're not? Remember, they are the natives, the Coalition of the Willing contains very little besides invading foreigners. Where does some foreigner 6000 miles away who has dropped in on an every-now-and-then basis get the right to define who the true patriots are? If the “Sunni-Baathist minority” is suspicious of American motives and does not desire to take part in American-arranged elections, why does some American editorial writer get to declare that they aren't truly concerned about Iraq's future? As far as wealth is concerned, when Iraqis see oil trucks and pipelines carrying oil to the gulf to be shipped overseas, they view it as Americans stealing the natural resources that belong to them.

However this war started, however badly it has been managed, however much you wish we were not there, do not kid yourself that this is not what it is about: people who want to hold a free and fair election to determine their own future, opposed by a virulent nihilistic minority that wants to prevent that. That is all that the insurgents stand for.

Again, it takes a staggeringly immense amount of chutzpah to say what the insurgents stand for. The “nihilistic” label is not backed up by any sort of evidence. It's simply slapped on as an insult. It matters a great deal “However this was started”, why wouldn't it? Say, for instance, Canada invaded and occupied Detroit and then insisted on holding elections after a brutal occupation in which somewhere up to 100,000 Americans had perished and after a former president had been put on trial. Of course the origins of the war would matter!

It might be entirely true that if the Iraqi resistance takes over, that there will not be free and fair elections. That's pure conjecture. It's an insult to say that there is a people anywhere on Earth that is opposed to determining its' own future. Democracy is certainly a treasured thing, but many, many nations throughout history have longed for a “man on horseback” who is willing to “get tough” to restore order. The columnist goes on to make further baseless conjectures without evidence.

We may actually lose in Iraq...We may lose because of the defiantly wrong way that Donald Rumsfeld has managed this war and the cynical manner in which Dick Cheney, George Bush and - with some honorable exceptions - the whole Republican right have tolerated it.

Yup.

We may lose because our Arab allies won't lift a finger to support an election in Iraq

Why on Earth would they? What could they possibly gain from having the world's only superpower having a hammerlock on the world's oil supplies? How would that benefit anyone other than the people who run the US?

There's just so much wishful thinking here it's ridiculous. Friedman considers the US as a party that's genuinely there to do good and to be fair to all parties. That may be true for the lower-ranking people, but it's ridiculous to apply such starry-eyed willful optimism to the Bush Administration.

Yet another false dawn in Iraq

First, the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled. Americans were given the impression that the Iraq War was largely over and that a bit of clean-up would be done and the troops would soon be on their way home. Guerrilla actions began on a modest scale at first, but by July, it was apparent that a full-scale resumption of violent conflict was brewing.

In July, Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay were surrounded and were killed along with a man and a boy. There was no evidence at the site that the two Hussein brothers were connected to the country-wide resistance. The two brothers appeared to be on the run and no one came to their rescue when they were surrounded. Nevertheless, it was thought that this marked a decisive defeat for the resistance.

In December, Hussein himself was captured. It was obvious he was not in charge of any of the resistance groups as he hadn't even been able to get a shave during his time on the run. No one was in the vicinity of his spider hole and there was no mention of having to fight through anybody to get to him. Nevertheless, it was widely thought that this marked the end of the war and that all that remained was to roll up the remaining resistance fighters.

The next year, the United States formally turned over limited sovereignty to hand-picked Iraqis who were, coincidentally enough, former members of the American-assembled Governing Council. By that time, the atrocities of Abu Ghraib had become public and the First Battle of Fallujah (Otherwise referred to as Fallujah I.) had occurred. It was not at all clear that Iraqis would settle for being governed by expatriates that they themselves played no role in choosing, but things seemed to get quieter for a while.

After the American presidential election, Bush commanded that the Second Battle of Fallujah (Or Fallujah II.) begin. There was every reason to suspect that the resistance was prepared to lose, but that they had made provisions to make the American victory as costly as possible. After a grueling and non-stop battle of many days, the offhand killing of a helpless Iraqi prisoer defined for the world just what the struggle there was all about. No strong foreign presence was found, no significant leaders were caught or killed and no happy, welcoming citizens were on hand to greet the Americans who had allegedly come to liberate them.

Many actions started in other cities just as the fighting in Fallujah was winding down. Fallujah never quite got to the point where it was safe enough to let people back into the city and after the United States announced plans to take detailed biometric scans of each male of military age before letting them back in, violence has resumed.

With several more attacks taking place across the country (Reaching an average of 100 a day) and an American military base attacked with heavy casualties, it's now clear that again, as was the case before, the Iraq War has not reached a turning point, that a decisive victory has not been won, that the end is nowhere in sight.

Will the elections, scheduled for 30 January next year, be the factor that makes the difference? Not even the Bush Administration is of one mind on that.

Why Rumsfeld's remarks were offensive

People are still discussing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's remarks on 8 December 2004. Army Spc. Thomas Wilson asked why he and his fellow National Guardsmen had to "...dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?" After the other 2300 National Guardsmen cheered, Rumsfeld hesitating and asked the soldier to repeat the question. His reply then was “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

This would have been a satisfactory answer had the US been forced to go to war before it was ready to do so. In March 2002, Bush came to three Senators & Condoleezza Rice and said "F--- Saddam. We're taking him out.", thereby indicating that a decision on the Iraq War had long since been made. The New York Times pointed out that serious, in-depth planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq began in April 2002. The project was reportedly of uneven quality, but successfully predicted many of the problems that would later befall the occupation.

And it's not like it took so long for things inside Iraq to start going sour. Has the situation in Iraq improved in the meantime? Apparently not. A Philadelphia soldier is accused of arranging for a relative to shoot him so that he wouldn't have to return to Iraq. Retired Col. David Hackworth had recieved numerous emails about poorly and under-equpped units by August 2003, only three months after Bush's infamous aircraft carrier landing.

It's been a long, long time since the Department of Defense needed to reexamine their strategy.

[This article, written by yours truly, is reproduced in it's entirety from http://phillyimc.org/ because I felt it was directly relevant to PRAWN, an organization that "went dark" or slumbered for about the past year or so.]

Personal note: Back when I was in the Navy, a Second-Class Petty Officer was in charge of two other sailors and occasionally, as all people do, made mistakes. Making mistakes is not a big thing all by itself. But the two other sailors were absolutely furious (In Navy language, they were expressing "hate and discontent") at her because she kept blaming them for her mistakes. As she outranked me, I decided to approach her indirectly, passing it on to a friend of hers, who passed it on to her, that this was seriously uncool and the problem was fixed. Naturally, there were lots and lots of times when I was "counseled" (Which can mean anything from a gentle reminder to a screaming, jumping-up-and-down, banging-one's-fist-on-the-table fit.) about dodging responsibility myself.

The point is, responsibiliy goes two ways. Subordinates are responsible to superiors, but superiors are also responsible to subordinates. A junior person has to do what they're told, but a senior person has to see to it that they don't demand anything of the junior person that they wouldn't do themselves. It is a flagrant violation of military protocol and manners for a senior person to deny that he's responsible for something and to try and pass the buck to someone else.

For the guy in charge of seeing to it that American troops have all that they need and to then not do that is called dereliction of duty

Now, if Rumsfeld wanted to claim that he just didn't understand how determined the Iraq resistance would be, that'd be fine. But what he would need to do next would be to tell us how he's going to fix it. As he's ruled out a draft (Remember his comment from early 2003: "Rumsfeld recalled that the draftees of years past had been thrown into battle with little training 'adding no value, no advantage really, to the United States Armed Services over any sustained period of time.' ") it's difficult to see how anything positive is going to happen.

Why do conservatives hate US troops?

Kathleen Parker, a columnist for TownHall.com, a website owned by the Heritage Foundation, made the following comment on the Chris Matthews Show while discussing the scandal over Rumsfeld's answer to soldiers who complained of being undersupplied:

They make the, well they, they bellyache if you ask them. If they haven't had a bath in two days and they're sleeping with a bunch of smelly guys and they're tired and they're hungry they're going to bellyache. Give them a little R&R and they come back and they have maybe a different story.

This sounds less like a fellow combat veteran and more like a member of the Screaming Chickenhawks of the 101st Keyboarders. Ms Parker is of course, an office worker sitting in a comfortable environment thousands of miles away from the fighting.
Next time anyone complains that you're not supporting the troops, you might remind them about people like this.

Wartime sacrifice and the upcoming Inaugural Ball

First, a letter-writer to the Philadelphia Inquirer makes the highly sensible suggestion that President Bush honor our soldiers in Iraq and remind Americans that wartime is a time of shared sacrifice. Then, the Inquirer runs an editorial endorsing said cancellation. Today, another letter-writer charges that anyone who wants to cancel the inaugural ball is simply trying to make President Bush look bad.
My own take on this is:
When's the last time anyone saw a picture of Presdident Bush at the funeral of a serviceperson, any serviceperson, whether Army, Marine, Navy or Air Force? Today's Iraq Coalition Casualty Count puts the number of US troops perished at a little over 1300, and the whole coalition as suffering a bit over 1450, so it's not like he hasn't had the opportunity to attend any.
When's the last time anyone saw a picture of Laura Bush attending any wounded soldiers? I think I remember running across a verbal description or two, but why isn't a picture of the president's wife tending to wounded soldiers a standard, routine front-page news photo?
When's the last time the American people were shown Bush's two college-graduate daughters in military uniform? No one says they have to join as enlisted personnel. Being college graduates, they're entitled to join as officers.
I'm sorry, but I don't see that the President has shown any sign that he takes the Iraq War seriously or that he's allowed it to inconvenience him in any way, shape or form.
I heartly endorse the idea of cancelling the Inaugural Ball.

Further thoughts on the New Republic essay

“I'm very confused.” says Jonah Goldberg, who then demonstrates his confusion by using incredibly simplistic arguments in which he clearly misunderstands the point of the author's original piece.

An example is in how he misrepresents Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11:

"Moore doubts that Osama was behind 9/11..."

Sigh!! No Jonah, no one on the Left doubts that bin Laden was the main author of 9/11. No one doubts that bin Laden was the guy who arranged the attacks of that day, who saw to it that 19 people were trained in American flight schools to fly planes into buildings and who rejoiced when 3000 Americans died as a result. What Moore and the Left also feel is that the negligence, irresponsibility and dereliction of duty by the Bush Administration is also responsible for 9/11. 9/11 was not a one-man show, it required that responsible US officials not do their jobs.

Is, as Goldberg maintains Moore is claiming, Bush a bigger threat to Americans than bin Laden is? Well, it depends on what exactly one means by that. Is Bush a threat to the life and limbs of Americans? Obviously not. Is Bush a far bigger threat to American liberties and the Constitution than bin Laden could ever hope to be? Of course he is. Bush is in a position to threaten the Constitution, bin Laden is not. Bin Laden's actions may provoke Bush to suspend the Constitution, but Bush has to be to be the one to do that.

Is the Left “confused” about the threat of “Islamo-fascism” and Islamic “totalitarianism”? The terms used demonstrate where the confusion lies. To equate Islamic fundamentalists and their desire to hurt Americans with the threats posed by Fascist Italy, let alone Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union is pathetic. The entire Islamic world, all one billion-plus of them, poses a fraction of the military threat that Nazi Germany did. When one considers that the Islamic world is split up into many nations, believes in several variants of the original message by Mohammed and that the US is really only concerned with violent, stateless Muslims, the argument is absolutely laughable.

Are violent Islamic fundamentalists a problem? Of course they are. Was the government of Afghanistan properly toppled for justifiable reasons? There were a few leftists* who thought that the invasion of Afghanistan was wrong, but their numbers were always small and their arguments never made much headway beyond far-left circles. The claim that MoveOn opposed the invasion is unsubstantiated and people agree with my memory that I don't recall any such opposition.

* I questioned at the time why the US could not accept the Afghan offer to turn over bin Laden in return for proof that bin Laden was behind 9/11. This was more of a quibble than a real argument and I wasn't inspired to attend any demonstrations against Bush's policies until he suggested that America should invade Iraq.

A major problem with the War On Terror (WOT) is that once Afghanistan fell, that was the last state sponsor of terrorism standing that had any desire to harbor or aid anyone who wished to attack the American mainland. Iran and Syria have been accused of supporting terrorists, but it's not clear that these terrorists pose any current threat to the US or that either nation wants to initiate an action that could be traced back to them. Largely, when we discuss the WOT, we're talking about Fourth Generation or Asymmetric warfare.

Goldberg writes:

"all the how-dare-yous and the Iraq's-a-distraction stuff"

His suggestion appears to be that the Iraq War is somehow, in some way, connected to the struggle against al Qaeda. This betrays enormous confusion and suggests that the man has either been hiding in a hole the last three years or that he's in thrall to Bush Administration propaganda. Under President Clinton, it was revealed that American intelligence agencies were collectively spending about $30 billion a year. Obviously, that figure has gone up since 9/11.

Recently, I challenged someone who wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer to substantiate his claim that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. The letter-writer suggested I was an idiot for not recognizing such an obvious “fact” and proceeded to ramble on about the unsubstantiated charge that Hussein attempted to have the elder George Bush assassinated (Clinton obviously needed to rack up public opinion points at the time and the news media reacted with enthusiasm.), that Hussein paid off the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (Palestinians complain Hussen never came through on that) and that well..Hussein was an evil and rotten and terrible and immoral kind of guy.

If there was a connection between Hussein and 9/11, our vaunted and well-funded intelligence agencies have not been able to find any trace of any such connection in the last three-plus years.

The Iraq War was and remains a distraction from the WOT. The Iraq War is a nationalist struggle to drive American occupation forces out of that country. There have been fighters and jihadists from other countries fighting in Iiraq from the day Baghdad fell and probably before. The brother of a soldier who died in Iraq has claimed that Iranian weapons have been found among the Iraqi resistance. But foreigners have never numbered more than two to five percent of the forces killed in action and/or taken prisoner and the story of the missing weapons of al Qaqaa means that an outside weapons supply isn't really necessary.

So, do us liberals, leftists, etc., have a deep problem with the way the WOT is currently being fought? Yes we do! As terrorism, three-plus years after 9/11, has still not been really defined, America is slated to fight what is an endless struggle. There is simply no end-point that the Bush Administration has defined for us, no way to tell when victory has been achieved. If Americans are being asked to put aside Constitutional protections and put up with the abominations of the Patriot Act and tolerate atrocities like those of Abu Ghraib, then we'll be doing so on a permanent basis. If Americans are to preserve anything resembling democracy, if we are ever going to have freedom and liberty, we must carve out space within the WOT to do so. The Bush Administration has done absolutely nothing whatsoever to reconcile the WOT with democracy in America. A revived and aggressive Democratic Party is one of our very few hopes for ever doing this.

The argument with pro-war Democrats

The New Republic's Peter Beinart writes an article (Original requires a subscription, but the blog Orcinus has a good summary) wherein he states that

The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grassroots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge. That means abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn.

I agree with Orcinus and other bloggers that this notion, previously endorsed by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is completely insane. First of all, you've got to work with what you've got. It's the very height of stupidity to say that the party must abandon a major component of it's constituency for any reason. If the constituency is that unbearable, for heaven's sake, change parties!!
To anyone who considers Beinart's insane ramblings to be any more than the mutterings of drunks in the alleyway, go join the Republicans! Don't waste any more time with the Democrats! Leave the party to us and we'll do our thing without you!
To say that MoveOn and the Howard Dean people are problems that stand in the way of getting a Democrat elected president in 2008 is to say that the party must cut off its' own balls and emasculate itself. The Democrats are being asked to toss over the side everything that made them formidable competitors to the Republican Party in the first place.

Orcinus talks about the very shaky and questionable case for the Iraq War and points out that the Democratic Party bigwigs (John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Tom Daschle, Richard Gephardt, et al) miserably failed Americans who questioned Bush's case for war. Personally, I went to a number of demonstrations sponsored by ANSWER (And a few sponsored by the more moderate and middle-class group United for Peace & Justice) and later signed up with MoveOn to push for Kerry for president. I absolutely refuse to offer any apologies for doing so as hey, we had to make do with what we had.

Beinart also talks about the War On Terror and how liberals have to get with the program and jump on board the bandwagon. That's an awful idea. I have pointed out in many forums that the Bush Administration has done an absolutely awful job of conducting this war, not least by getting the war against al Qaeda confused with the Iraq War. In order to effectively fight a campaign against those who use the tactic called "terrorism", Americans must take a cold, clear-eyed, comprehensive and sober view of just what terrorism is and how to beat those who use it. I can't see that there's anybody at the top of either the Democratic or Republican parties who have the foggiest notions.
Orcinus:

Kevin Drum put the hypocrisy inherent in this position on display the other day responding to Atrios:

And evading the issue by constantly implying that no one who supported the Iraq war is morally qualified to criticize those who opposed it doesn't really help matters.

First of all, no one is "morally qualified to criticize those who opposed" the war PERIOD. For the Bush Administration and their supporters to suggest that those who opposed the invasion of Iraq are somehow skeptical of the ability of Iraqis to handle democracy was always a stupid objection. The idea that Iraqis would be better off living under Saddam Hussein's brutal tyranny than under American control is 1. Accepted by a great many Iraqis today and 2. With over 100,000 Iraqis dead from American actions it's actually quite hard to argue with that. No one has made the case, no one needs to make the case that Hussein's regime was anything to celebrate in order to say that Iraqis were better off in January 2003 than they were in January 2004 or will be in January 2005.

What conservative, pro-war Democrats have to deal with is the fact that the anti-war people were right. The invasion of Iraq was illegal, immoral and unnecessary. The United States has accomplished nothing useful and has not pre-emptively protected itself from anything.

Defense Science Board weighs in on WOT

Report (PDF) from the Pentagon's Defense Science Board
Article from DailyKos, also featured in Malaysia, The BBC, Australia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. Naturally, nothing except a few alternative media sources in the US.

Muslims do not "hate our freedom," but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.

Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover, saying that "freedom is the future of the Middle East" is seen as patronizing, suggesting that Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World -- but Muslims do not feel this way: they feel oppressed, but not enslaved.

Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim selfdetermination.

Followed by much more. Basically, the US has majorly hosed up and as with employment figures, is way behind where the US was on January 2001.
The Kos article talks about how everything is the State Department's fault. Does that mean Colin Powell is to blame? I doubt it. It doesn't seem likely to me that the State Department was given the resources it needed to do the job. I also suspect Bush has managed things there by remote control and with an extremely heavy and clumsy hand.

Rumsfeld's tenure as SecDef

Donald Rumsfeld to remain in Bush's second term as Secretary of Defense. So how's he done? Well, these are the kinds of things you can only say when you're aware that you have a friendly interviewer (italics mine):

BILL O'REILLY: What do you think is the biggest mistake the USA has made in Iraq?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, I suppose you could, one looking at it today with 20/20 hindsight, would say it's not anticipating, first of all, not finding WMD's, uh, un, until, apparently it was wrong, or else they're buried or else we'll find out something later. But at the moment it looks like they weren't there. Um, and I suppose the second thing would be uh, more current, would be the fact of, was it possible to better estimate the insurgency? Uh,

BILL O'REILLY: Did somebody say to you, look, once we depose Saddam, these guys are going to go and fight a guerrilla campaign, did any general or human being that advises you tell you that?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, my goodness, I ...

BILL O'REILLY: Because [inaudible] was saying that, [inaudible] he was saying that.

DONALD RUMSFELD: 'Course you, we've heard everything. We heard they were going to burn the bridges, light up the oil wells,

BILL O'REILLY: Right.

DONALD RUMSFELD: There would be a humanitarian crisis, there would be a nasty refugee problem, uh, that they were going to use weapons of mass destruction, so our people strapped on chemical suits every day, we, you can find intelligence that says almost anything. If you're asking, was there any kind of understanding or agreement that there would likely be a long insurgency afterwards, I don't believe that anyone would say if you dropped a thumbline through all that intelligence ...

BILL O'REILLY: Yeah.

DONALD RUMSFELD: That anyone would say that.

Actually, The State Department did a yearlong study from April 2002 until the fall of Baghdad that anticipated precisely such an insurgency. Considering that Iraq had gone through just such an insurgency in the years following World War I and that Algeria had driven out the French in the 1950s after a long struggle, a long insurgency was quite predictable and indeed, predicted by the Future of Iraq Project. Granted, reading over 2000 pages split up into 13 volumes was quite a task. Sigh! If only the State Department had published it's findings in comic-book form to avoid this kind of problem! We of course have absolutely zero evidence that President Bush ever read any of it. If he's ever referred knowledgeably to any part of it, I'm not aware of it.

Rumsfeld tries a number of diversionary tacks here. First, he tried to divert the viewers attention to Afghanistan:

BILL O'REILLY: Okay. Um, so you wouldn't say that it was a mistake that the United States made, not um, putting more soldiers there to fight the insurgency in the beginning?

DONALD RUMSFELD: No, I, I think not. I mean, there's been a lot of people who thought there should be more troops in Afghanistan,

BILL O'REILLY: Right.

Then, he tries to blame the “battlefield commanders” who of course, are not legally permitted to give interviews defending themselves.

DONALD RUMSFELD: Not a question in Iraq. But in, in, in Iraq, uh, we had the number of troops that the battlefield commanders asked for.

BILL O'REILLY: [OVERLAPPING VOICES] Then what could we have done differently?

DONALD RUMSFELD: And, and, and one has to believe that they know something about the subject ...

BILL O'REILLY: [OVERLAPPING VOICES] Yeah but,

DONALD RUMSFELD: More than maybe some armchair people speculating from the side.

BILL O'REILLY: True. But Marine General Zinnie for example, said, you need more people in there. Um, Senator McCain said, you need more people in there. So there were voices. But,

DONALD RUMSFELD: But who are you going to go with?

Readers will remember that the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki estimated that the US would need "several hundred thousand troops.", an estimate that prompted Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz to call Shinseki's estimate "wildly off the mark." Former Army secretary Thomas White came down on Shinseki's side. “Rumsfeld was furious with White when the Army secretary agreed with Shinseki.” No, Rumsfeld did not just go along with what the “battlefield commanders” were asking for. He took the very strong view that the US didn't need very many troops.

This is an absolutely classic non-answer answer:

BILL O'REILLY: What, could we have done anything differently to fight this insurgency before it got out of hand?

DONALD RUMSFELD: We have been doing things differently ever since we got in there. In other words, what you have is a plan. And then you have a whole, a flexibility to, to deal with a whole set of excursions that might occur. You're dealing not with a static situation, you're dealing with an enemy with a brain. They get up every morning, go to school on what we're doing, and change what they're doing to advantage themselves. We get up every morning, see what they're doing, and change what we're doing to advantage ourselves against what they're doing.

Uh, okay. We're paying attention and adjusting as we go. That's very nice, but it was obvious to me, a citizen in a suburb of Philadelphia as early as July 2003 that US forces were seriously understrength and the Secretary of Defense still hasn't adjusted yet, so I seriously doubt that there's any day-by-day adjustments going on either.

BILL O'REILLY: How do we beat them?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, well, it's a test of wills. I mean, they haven't won a single battle the entire time since the end of, of major combat operations.

I would dispute this assertion. Back on April 29^th, blogger Steve Gilliard discusses the First Battle of Fallujah. That and this quoted passage again suggests that this battle was far from an American victory:

US Marines withdraw from Fallujah. “Led by a former Saddam Hussein general, Iraqi troops replaced U.S. Marines on Friday and raised the Iraqi flag at the entrance to Fallujah under a plan to end the monthlong siege of the city. A suicide car bomb on the outskirts that killed two Americans and wounded six failed to disrupt the pullout of Marines from bitterly contested parts of the city.”

And is a guerrilla war really just a “test of wills”?

Opinion: “Take the confident manner in which President Bush keeps asserting that ‘he says what he means and means what he says,’ as if consistency is the highest virtue and the inability to re-consider one's actions is a strength. He has the benighted notion that saying a thing makes it so. We have only to watch the faces of Iraqi women and children when their homes are invaded and torn apart by soldiers in search of terrorists. That is enough to make us know that life is not now better for families despite our president's insistent protestations that the people of Iraq are better off because we have liberated them.”

Sounds to me like there's a lot more to it than that. In fact, watching the movie The Battle of Algiers, I'd say that winning a guerrilla war was very considerably more complicated than just a battle of wills. It may be all very fine and well to proclaim that you're showing toughness and resolve when you never face the casualties coming back home via Dover Air Force Base, but I don't think that even really counts as courage, let alone toughness.

So how does Rumsfeld stack up as Secretary of Defense? We need to fire this guy yesterday!!