It's not about your fucking convenience

On the way home this evening, I overheard several people talking about how inconvenienced they were by a few hundred dirty fucking hippies who had the temerity to briefly remind them about the clusterfuck that started five years ago today. They had been made late to work, late to a meeting, late to dinner by protesters blocking traffic, blocking entrances, and stridently refusing to block out the images of death occurring every day in the Middle East.

These people have no idea what inconvenience is.

Inconvenience is being displaced from your home by explosives or ethnic cleansing unleashed by this ill-conceived maelstrom.

Inconvenience is never seeing a loved one again because of an idiotic land grab to claim oil wealth and geopolitical advantage.

Inconvenience is losing your limbs, your eyesight, your hearings so that the dauphin king can overcome his daddy issues.

Inconvenience is losing your life for no fucking reason at all.

The thirty minutes you had to wait in traffic doesn't mean shit compared to the inconveniences visited upon millions of people because of this stupid fucking war. So stop your bitching.

The Surge, take two

Since it worked "so well" in Iraq, why not try a Surge in Afghanistan? Remember Afghanistan, where we're propping up yet another failed "democratic state"?

Why does a constantly see-sawing military deployment between two occupied nations - nations where insurgents are surely biding their time, waiting for their opportunities - seem like our foreign policy for the forseeable future?

The sweet smell of victory

Ah, yes. Corruption and cholera. Freedom is truly on the march.

Profiles in douchebaggery

I'm sure this is an encore appearance for DHo in the profiles, but his latest unhinged rant (which he, of course, is only relaying to us from a proxy as a courtesy) typifies the mindset of those who continue to mindlessly cheerlead the carnage in the Middle East. Here, Horowitz informs us that the only reason that blogger Andrew Sullivan has recanted his earlier enthusiasm for the misadventure in Iraq is because he's afraid that further support for the war will impede his ability to get laid.

And that's the whole narrative, isn't it? Anyone who opposes the war is giving in to their baser instincts - playing politics, being prone to an irrational bout of Bush Derangement Syndrome, wanting a piece of ass, anything but being concerned about the innocent lives being used as toy soldiers - while those who continue to march us into folly upon folly are pure of heart and firm in belief.

It's bullshit, but DHo has taken it to an entirely new level.

It's getting better all the time (it can't get much worse)

It's all the rage these days to point to the admittedly better numbers of civilian deaths in Iraq and claim that "we're winning." Unfortunately, the description of conditions in Baghdad don't really inspire confidence:

Days after she returned from Syria, 23-year-old Melal al-Zubaidi and a friend went to the market on a pleasant night to eat ice cream. It was a short walk, yet unthinkable only a month ago for a woman in the capital. Still, her parents were nervous, and Zubaidi wore a head scarf and an ankle-length skirt to avoid angering Islamic extremists.

The Zubaidis, a Shiite Muslim family, have yet to pass another boundary. When they fled Iraq five months ago, a Sunni family took over their large house in Dora, a sprawling neighborhood in southern Baghdad. When the Zubaidis returned this month, they were too scared to ask the new occupants to leave. So they rented a small apartment in Mashtal, a mostly Shiite district.

[...]

Hashimi no longer sees bodies in the street when he opens his front door. Sunni extremists no longer man checkpoints to search his vehicle for alcohol or signs of collaboration with the government or the Americans. Roads are being paved, and municipal workers are sprucing up parks and traffic circles. His patch of Dora is now a fortress, surrounded by tall blast walls that separate entire blocks.

"It's totally secured," said Hashimi, who was an intelligence officer during the government of Saddam Hussein. But a few days ago, he drove across the main highway to another section of Dora. He felt a familiar fear. "You're lost there. You don't know who controls the area, Sunni or Shia, American soldiers or Iraqi security forces. It's still chaotic."

He never drives on side streets, afraid of the unknown. On a recent day, he wanted to visit a Shiite friend in Amil, a district controlled by the Mahdi Army, whom he had not seen in a year. But his friend advised him not to come. Hashimi felt relief. "I'm afraid to go to Shiite areas," he said.

Before Hashimi left Iraq, he used to pick up a friend every day from the mixed enclave of Bayaa and take him to the security firm where they both worked. But during his time in Syria, Shiite militias cleansed Bayaa of Sunnis. "It's impossible for me to go there now," he said.

So he spends most of his days in his once-mixed neighborhood, now a mostly Sunni area. A nearby tea shop is open until 10 p.m., but all other shops close by 7 p.m. Under Hussein, they used to be open past midnight. The walled-off streets have squeezed the pool of customers. Electricity, Hashimi said, is still scarce.

[...]

Hashimi is worried that the wall could easily crumble. He recently applied to join the Iraqi police. But he doesn't trust the Shiite-led government to integrate Sunnis into the political system, the police and army. And what if the American troops leave?

"Of course, if the political process is still the same, and the Americans withdraw from Dora, in a couple of days everything will collapse again."

So, "winning" is the dysfunctional political status quo with the population segregated into fortified enclaves, afraid to venture beyond their walled-off neighborhoods, even to meet family members.

This is the "peace" of a military occupation, premised on a terrified and demoralized population and armed factions biding their time for another opportunity. You'll have to excuse me if I'm not ready to dance a little jig for our pyrrhic "victory."

Just say no

Is there any reason for me to believe that the latest promised "fight" over supplemental war funding will end with anything other than Congress forking over $46 billion to continue the clusterfuck in Iraq?

Progress

Grim.

Fan-freakin'-tastic

Yet another plan where we remain mired in an intractable hellhole with close to no prospects for success. So what's different this time?

Where are the people?

Like many of my colleagues in the sociology department, I spent a good portion of graduate school quite smitten with Marx. Where many of my friends were drawn to the structuralism of Das Kapital ("When Marx became a Marxist," sneered the more snobby of the structuralists, completely eliding the question of whether Marx was ever a Marxist), I, on the other hand, was drawn to the humanism of his earlier works, being pretty fascinated by his answer to the question, "Why does work suck?" The quotidian is, after all, where structure is generated and replicated. Political economy is only as important as its effects the lives of real people, right? I thought so. So did one of my professors, whose standard complaint at certain job talks was, "Where are the people?"

I found myself thinking that when reading about the bureaucratic infighting surrounding economic development in Iraq:

Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense, has been called a Stalinist by U.S. diplomats in Iraq. One has accused him of helping insurgents build better bombs. The State Department has even taken the unusual step of enlisting the CIA to dispute the validity of Brinkley's work.

His transgression? To begin reopening dozens of government-owned factories in Iraq.

Brinkley and his colleagues at the Pentagon believe that rehabilitating shuttered, state-run enterprises could reduce violence by employing tens of thousands of Iraqis. Officials at State counter that the initiative is antithetical to free-market reforms the United States should promote in Iraq.

The fate of literally millions of people is obfuscated in a paragraph that pits the military objective of fighting a counterinsurgency against the political and ideological objective of building a "free market" economy (forgetting, for a moment, that a state-run economy financed by foreigners doesn't look substantially different than a privatized economy owned by foreigners). The construction of that third paragraph makes people accessories to larger political ends, "Basically, cannon fodder," as Eugene McDaniels would have it. In other words, a goal of providing a better life for Iraqis is incidental to whatever bureaucratic objectives are prioritized (although some will argue that that goal is assumed, the actual objective for both plans is "stability," another lovely reification).

You realize, of course, that the vision of economic development held by those working in Iraq is fucked up six ways to Sunday, right?

Brinkley, who was interviewed in Washington, said he expects several factories to reopen this summer. By year's end, he envisions Wal-Mart stores selling made-in-Baghdad leather jackets and other U.S. retailers stocking Iraqi loafers, hand-stitched carpets and pinstripe suits.

That's right, Iraq. Your economic future in the world trade system can be as bright as Bangladesh's, thanks to your comparative advantage of a supply of low-wage labor! My god.

And while it's nice to see someone who doesn't think all nationalization plans are a bad thing (why hello there, inner socialist!), you can really see where their priorities are in this statement:

Brinkley, a balding 40-year-old who speaks in rapid-fire sentences, had joined the Defense Department as a political appointee in 2005 after serving as an executive at JDS Uniphase Corp. At the Silicon Valley manufacturer of fiber-optic equipment, he had helped the company acquire a factory in China that had been run by the government. The experience, Brinkley said, convinced him that "state-owned enterprises can provide jobs, and turn a profit and lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. [emphasis added]"

So, in order of importance: an abstract number of positions created in which to hire someone, profit, and the "well being" of the people.

I'm going to make the wild guess that a workers' rights movement would be relentlessly crushed under either model of development.

Scooby snacks

Shorter "L." Paul Bremer: And I would've gotten away with it if it weren't for those damn Iraqis!

You'll begin?

So sayeth John Boehner (R - Cracklyvania):

The leader of House Republicans said today that his members would begin to seek another strategy in Iraq in September, should President Bush's troop "surge" strategy clearly not be working by then.

Now call me crazy, but when undertaking something as massive as, say, a war, shouldn't a Plan B have been thought out well in advance? Along with, say, a Plan C, D, E, F...? You know, basic contingency planning that should have been done for something as unpredictable and fluid as a counter-insurgency campaign?

Well, I suppose I should be thankful that in September, the GOP has at least tentatively planned on joining the reality that the rest of the world acknowledges, right?

But he pledged that his caucus would stand firm against any Democratic timetable or benchmarks that mandate the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

[...]

[Boehner] emphasized: "We [will] want a clean bill. We don't want artificial deadlines. We don't want handcuffs on our generals. We don't want artificial measures in there to try to ensure failure. Iraq is very important. And we need to win in Iraq."

Oh shit.

Comeuppance

The way American journalism appears to work:

Start a catastrophic war on false pretenses, get a free pass to your next job at the World Bank.

Give an undeserved raise to the woman you're fucking, weather calls for your head on a platter.

Nice to know where our priorities are.

Cannon fodder

Dear god:

US commanders in Baghdad said today that they were investigating an incident in which two children appeared to be used as decoys to get past an American checkpoint in a car that was then blown up with the pair still inside.

This makes me ill. Can anyone argue that invading Iraq was worth the price in spilled blood after reading this?

Pardon my war for making your commute inconvenient

Want to know why the war in Iraq is still dragging on? From a combat veteran participating in a mock combat patrol of DC:

They called it Operation First Casualty -- citing the adage that truth is the first casualty of war. The premise of their guerrilla-theater incursion was that, for all the yellow ribbons and "support the troops" sloganeering, life goes on at home pretty much oblivious to what it's like for American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

"When I got home, the hardest thing for me was realizing the war does not exist here," said Aaron Hughes of Chicago, who was a sergeant in a transportation unit that convoyed troops and supplies in and out of Iraq from Kuwait.

The response of a witness to the patrol:

"I don't know what they're doing, but they're in everybody's way," said Janet Ruck, a career counselor in Washington. Upon hearing an explanation, she said, "So they were intentionally getting in people's way. I don't think that people have lost touch or forgotten [about the war]. I don't think this is the way to get people to connect."

And god forbid their need to make Muricans aware that people are fucking dying every day in Iraq preempt teh American Idol...

Remembering

I'm guessing that by the time I'm down writing this, it would be about ten times the length of the post to which it was attached, so I'll respond to ash's thoughtful question here.

There's not one specific memory, but rather a stream of images which come to my head from over several months. Watching events unfold and thinking, "They really can't think that they can pull this off, can they? I mean, this can be stopped, right?" It just seemed so clear that they were hell-bent on ginning up a war, lack of a legitimate casus belli be damned. And it all folded methodically, step-by-step, for everyone to see, and a lot of people - freaked out by 9/11 - just let it happen, were convinced it had to happen. It was slow motion, surreal.

I remember a few days before the war began having dinner at the home of one of the professors for whom I had worked, and the five of us that evening just being depressed to the point of not being able to converse over dinner when the subject was broached. The overwhelming inevitability of the coming days was suffocating, it seemed to hang over all our interactions. For some reason, I remember a lot of dark humor.

I believe it was only a day or two into "shock and awe" when ms. wobs and I went to New York for Spring Break (my first post-9/11 visit to the city). One of the first mornings there we awoke to the sounds of helicoptors buzzing around the East Village: someone had crawled into the structure of the Williamsburg bridge, causing a minor terror scare. Die-ins were snarling morning traffic in Midtown. Breathless correspondents reported on the inexorable progress being made towards Baghdad, the road home went through Baghdad.

Geraldo Rivera showed everyone exactly what the plan was on cable TV. Jessica Lynch was rescued in a very special made-for-television mini-series.

I remember watching the fall of Baghdad on airport television monitors with ash, dave, NL, and KT on our way to Atlanta, feeling uneasy about the congratulatory backslapping and weirdly scripted, ritualized "topple the dictator" coverage. I specifically remember the images of the toppled statue of Saddam, and remembering images I'd seen of the fall of the Berlin Wall or the protests leading up to the Tiananman Square, and how the images I was watching from Iraq seemed so contrived in comparison.

The overall feeling from that time, for me, is just sheer disbelief. I honestly could not believe what was unfolding in front of me, that any pretense of even lip service to the ideals of some mythical United States of America were jettisoned in a paroxysm of techno-fluffed bloodlust. Given the current wreck of an administration we're having to lurch around with for the next two years (barring a massive spine transplant for Congress), I still have a hard time believing that the funhouse that was four years ago really occured. But it did, and we'll pay for it for a long time.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic

According to the Guardian, advisors to the current military command in Baghdad are giving the United States one more Friedman to get it right in Iraq:

An elite team of officers advising US commander General David Petraeus in Baghdad has concluded the US has six months to win the war in Iraq - or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.

The obvious question that comes to my mind is, "What does 'win the war' actually mean?" Seeing as how are rationale for invading Iraq in the first place changes with the weather, I'm hard-pressed to visualize what "victory" might look like.

More damning, however:

Their biggest headache was insufficient numbers of troops on the ground despite the increase ordered by Mr Bush, the former official said. "We don't have the numbers for the counter-insurgency job even with the surge. The word 'surge' is a misnomer. Strategically, tactically, it's not a surge," an American officer said.

According to the US military's revised counter-insurgency field manual, FM 3-24, authored by Gen Petraeus, the optimum "troop-to-task" ratio for Baghdad requires 120,000 US and allied troops in the city alone. Current totals, even including often unreliable Iraqi units, fall short of that number. The deficit is even greater in conflict areas outside Baghdad.

"Additional troops are essential if we are to win," said Lt-Col John Nagel, another Petraeus confidant and co-author of the manual, in an address at the US Naval Institute in San Diego last month. One soldier for every 50 civilians in the most intense conflict areas was key to successful counter-insurgency work. Compounding the manpower problems is an apparently insurmountable shortage of civilian volunteers from the Pentagon, state department and treasury. They are needed to staff the additional provincial reconstruction teams and other aid projects promised by Mr Bush.

Let's remember: this is coming from the "commanders on the ground" on whose recommendations Bush is supposedly basing his strategy. I find it hard to believe that Bush was unaware that 20,000 additional troops would be an inadequate number before announcing the plan. In other words, more blood, more money, same result.

Criminal incompetence.

This isn't happening, is it?

Sy Hersh has been on top of Bushco's barbaric single-mindedness with regards to Iran for some time now. The Guardian pulls out this little tidbit in their summary:

Elements of the tough new approach towards Tehran outlined by Hersh include:

· Clandestine operations against Iran and Syria, as well as the Hizbullah movement in Lebanon - even to the extent of bolstering Sunni extremist groups that are sympathetic to al-Qaida...

In case you didn't follow that: the new Bush strategy involves us forming alliances with supporters of the people who attacked us on 9/11 so that we can destabilize not just one, but three other countries (in addition to Iraq) who had nothing to do with 9/11!

These sorts of contingencies demonstrate how dangerously unhinged Dick Cheney and his bloody-minded colleauges really are. Is he allowed to get away with growling out one side of his mouth about giving comfort to al Qaeda while handing cash out underneath the table to Bin Laden's allies in Iraq? Why do I have this weird sense of déjà vu?

Hersh claims that the former director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, resigned his post to take a parallel job as the deputy director of the state department because of his discomfort with an approach that so closely echoed the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s.

Oh... that would explain Elliott Abrams hanging around the White House again.

The gold standard

I've been starting to pay attention to the bizarre slate of third tier candidates being sported by a electorally fractured GOP, and I must say, the range of candidates claiming to be the true representative of "the base" (an appropriate descriptor in more ways than one) is an especially tasty smorgasbord of wingnuttia. We have a Catholic cultist (and they were worried about Kennedy taking orders from the Vatican?), an old school, SoCal Buchananite, and now, truly setting the gold standard for this crowd, a crazy-ass bigot.

How crazy? Well, how 'bout "Christian crusader, cultural nationalist, and Iran freedom fighter" crazy?

A cultural warrior on the international front, Tancredo is an enthusiastic supporter of the Bush administration's war on terror, including the war in Iraq. Tancredo, who is a consistent supporter of the Pentagon and U.S. defense industries, has become a leading spokesperson in the House for an Iran regime change strategy in which the People's Freedom Fighters (MEK) would be the vanguard organization supported by the United States.

What does it mean to be a "cultural warrior on the international front?" I can read that two ways. At first blush, it seems related to his "cultural nationalism," wanting to keep 'Murica 'Murican, and to make the rest of the world more 'Murican. And more Christian, judging by his (quite deliberate, I'm sure) use of the term "crusader." However, consider the term "cultural warrior" in the domestic context: I conjure up images of anti-woman, anti-sex, me-first xenophobes. Kinda like those Islamic fundamentalists who Dinesh D'Souza likes some much.

But for truly crazy, we've got to give a shout-out to his hare-brained scheme for regime change in Iran, promoting the agenda of an exile group with a bizarre, cultish ideology that the State Department considers a terrorist group. Obviously, Tancredo learned nothing the last time we relied on an exile group to accomplish regime change.

And speaking of that other war, how does Tancredo think it's going?

Tancredo continues to be an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. war in Iraq. In a section on his official website on Iraq, Tancredo says: “The United States did not invade Iraq to conquer it, but rather to set it free. The United States does not stand to gain territory, oil, or any other spoils of war. We all should be proud of that sacrifice.”

I suppose he has a point, if you ignore the building of permanent bases in Iraq, President Bush warning the Iraqi Army to "not destroy oil wells," securing the Oil Ministry while letting the rest of Baghdad fall into chaos in April 2003, and Halliburton.

And there you have it. While the GOP has an impressive array of wingnuts to choose from, Tom Tancredo is heads and shoulders above the rest of the Fringe for out-and-out craziness. My hat's off to you, freak!

Stopping the war

So now both John Edwards and Barack Obama have comprehensive plans for withdrawing from Iraq. Good on 'em. How do they stack up?

Timeframes: If both proposals became law today, their timeframes would be very similar. Obama has firm dates (out by the end of March 2008, with provisions for extending that time frame and for keeping "a limited number of U.S. troops to remain as basic force protection, to engage in counter-terrorism, and to continue the training of Iraqi security forces.") Edwards, on the other hand, has proposed more vague 12-18 months ("from when?" being the obvious question).

Metrics for progress: Seems like an odd thing to need to discuss when both candidates are calling for withdrawal, but Obama's provisions for extensions beyond the March 31, 2008 deadline are dependent upon the Iraqi government meeting thirteen criteria put forth by the Bush administration. Edwards' approach seems to assume that either a) the political cleavages in Iraq are so sharp that rapprochement in the near-term is highly unlikely and worth the cost in American lives and treasure, or b) that the U.S. presence in Iraq is an actual impediment to any sort of political solution. My hunch is on the former. At any rate, the Edwards plan makes no provisions for "progress" in Iraq.

I actually think this point illuminates some of the stylistic differences between the candidates. Edwards here seems to be playing for the majority of the population who think the situation is hopeless and want withdrawal in the very near future (by the end of year). Obama, on the other hand, appeals to an idealized (if somewhat diminished) notion of American optimism by offering the hope that maybe, just maybe, things might be turned around in Iraq. Populist versus optimist, as it were. Just sayin'...

Diplomacy: I'm shocked, shocked! to discover that both candidates favor intensive regional diplomacy, including talks with Syria and Iran.

Redeploy to where?: Again, both candidates seem to be in agreement. U.S. forces will remain in the region; Edwards is explicit about the military's role in containing the Iraqi civil war within its borders, and both allow for humanitarian interventions and retain the right to intervene to prevent terrorism. I don't know how significant a point this is, but Edwards seems pretty unequivocal in calling for a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces, while Obama's legislation seems to imply that U.S. military personnel would remain to continue to train Iraqi security forces, as well as conduct anti-terrorist operations.

Funding: Here's where the real difference lies. Edwards is calling upon Congress to place funding caps on how many troops it will support (immediately capping it at 100,000 troops). Unfunded troops must be redeployed. Further, Edwards is proposing that military units who do not meet "real readiness standards" cannot be deployed to Iraq. I read the entire text of Obama's bill, but found no mention of funding one way or the other in the bill. As Congress's constitutional power in this matter derives from its power over the appropriations process, it would seem to me that Edwards' proposal has more teeth. I don't know what Senator Obama's actual position on capping funds for the occupation is, but as far as proposals on the table go, Edwards is the one proposing that Congress use its institutional leverage to halt the war.

Edwards obviously has the luxury of not actually holding office with the possibility to vote on his proposal. Obama has the burden of trying to convince 59 of his colleagues to agree with him (or at least agree enough to prevent a filibuster). Differences in proposals aside, there's a potential win for the public here. The Edwards campaign is asking folks to contact their Congresscritters to push for the details in his proposal. Let's just crawl into our happy fantasyland bubble here and pretend that the calls generated by Edwards' call to action moves Congress past the tipping point to a more "immediate withdrawal" frame of mind - Obama's S. 433 would be the natural proposal to build consensus around, no? And after the bill passes, both candidates are magnanimous in victory, right?

But then, of course, Bush vetoes the bill, enough Republicans remain loyal to sustain an override attempt, and we're back to square one... Wow, even the fantasyland bubble can't squash that little nugget of truth. How much more of his crap do we have to take?

I could start in with my standard leftist carping that neither of these candidates are addressing the question of Iraq in the broader context of the U.S. role in the Middle East (working on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? examining our petro-dependency? supporting repressive regimes?), but honestly, I'm excited to see two concrete plans to get us the hell out of Iraq. Again, good on 'em.

The winds we've sown

From a harrowing tale, a cautionary note:

Some may suggest there is no reason to revive the story of abuse in Iraq. Rehashing such mistakes will only harm our country, they will say. But history suggests we should examine such missteps carefully. Oppressive prison environments have created some of the most determined opponents. The British learned that lesson from Napoleon, the French from Ho Chi Minh, Europe from Hitler. The world is learning that lesson again from Ayman al-Zawahiri. What will be the legacy of abusive prisons in Iraq?

Mr. Fair is already paying for the injustices he inflicted upon his fellow human beings. What will we owe for our collective refusal to hold those who ordered these crimes accountable?