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Tonite: Frontline reveals and makes history

Tonight the investigative news program Frontline features the first of the two-part examination, "Bush's War." It draws on the more than 40 reports that Frontline has done on the "war on terror."

Frontline is also making history with online technology related to their programs. From the website:

Across the entire four-hour Bush's War series that will be streamed online, FRONTLINE will integrate and embed in its video player an array of related interviews, background material and video that can be viewed with just a click. In addition, more than 100 video clips of key moments and events in the Iraq war will be the centerpiece of an annotated master chronology which FRONTLINE will publish on the Bush's War site.

Frontline also continues to offer "Watch Online," a fantastic service providing past programs viewable online. I highly recommend "Secret History of the Credit Card," "The Dark Side," and "News Wars."

Appeal For Redress

A segment on 60 Minutes in February concerned the "Appeal For Redress" movement among US active duty and reserve soldiers.

I think it is important to stress that when a citizen signs on to be in the military, he or she is signing on to go where they are told, to do what they are told to do for as long as they are told they need to do it.

On the other hand, at many points throughout history, feedback from the rank and file has been ignored or misunderstood by general officers and politicians alike, to the detriment of everyone involved, even to the detriment of achieving stated military goals. To a point, complaint can be helpful. And soldiers demanding change can be far less demoralizing than having many soldiers being convinced that profound mistakes are being made by their superiors both civilian and military. It will be interesting to see if the movement reflects a widespread sentiment or is limited.

The 5th anniversary of murderously arrogant inanity in Babylon

Five years ago today the Bush Administration, a lazy US media titillated by the prospect of violence, and most of Congress took an ill-informed, myopic, and bellicose America into an unnecessary preemptive invasion of Iraq against all the commonsense of advisors of former Presidential administrations (including GHW Bu$h) and savvy diplomats among our allies.

The UN weapons inspectors were making clear progress during the run-up to the invasion, and the inspectors' expert leader, Hans Blix, had said completing the task of searching for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would take only months more. Such a search would have been:
1. conclusive,
2. extremely cheap (The war's cost us $3,000,000,000,000--that's $3 trillion),
3. supported by the international community,
4. able to allow the internationally-supported and US-led forces in Afghanistan to continue to hunt down Bin Laden.

If I go to Yearly Kos, it'll be to meet Bill In Portland Maine.

Days since the Mission Accomplished banner was hung from the bridge of the Aircraft carrier: 1,785
Expected monthly cost to fund the Iraq quagmire in 2008: $12 billion
Projected interest payments on money borrowed to fund the quagmire: $816 billion
(Source: The book The Three trillion Dollar War via AP)
Maine's contribution to the war so far: $1.35 billion
[U.S. Casualties since the Iraq War began: 40,229]
U.S. [fatalities] since the Iraq War began: 3,990
(Source: icasualties.org)
Average per year since the war began: 798
What that amounts to if we stay in Iraq, as John McCain insists, for 100 years: 79,800
Estimated Iraqi civilians killed: 150,000 to 1.2 million
(Source: Meteor Blades)

And from John McCain came these gems:

"I believe that the success will be fairly easy." (9/24/02)
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"We’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies." (9/29/02)
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"We will win this conflict. We will win it easily." (1/22/03)
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"[T]here’s no doubt in my mind, once these people are gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators." (3/24/03)

Zapatero for President!

The Socialists did even better than expected in Spain's elections yesterday. They won by a larger majority than last time, March 14, 2004.

Congratulations to President Zapatero!

From Wikipedia:

Actions of [Zapatero's] first government have included withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq, a controversial negotiation with the armed separatist group ETA, the creation of Spanish Courts for Violence against Women, legalizing same-sex marriages and a program of amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

Statement of UK commander in Iraq

The British Embassy in Washington D.C. has sent out by e-mail a Ministry of Defense release in which Maj. Gen. Barney White-Spunner (photo), who is the general officer commanding the Multi-National Division South East and commander of all British troops in southen Iraq, outlined his perspective and some developments.

From the release:

The British came to Iraq to help. We have never seen ourselves as an occupation. Some have disagreed. But I hope that now we have withdrawn from [Basra], handed over security and wish to devote ourselves to development and training, there can no doubts about our intentions. While the multi-national forces have the military technology and power to support your security forces, we will not be here forever. The recent reductions in UK forces here in Basra demonstrates this, but it also demonstrates our confidence in the Iraqi security forces.
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[T]he people of Basra....seek to make Basra the great regional city and commercial centre that its history demands it should be.
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The first meeting of the Basra Economic Forum last week was a major step. Next week the Basra Development Commission is holding 'Invest Basra 2008' in Kuwait to bring regional investors and Basra businesses together.

Cost of Iraq for New Hampshire

From The National Priorities Project via a dKos diarist:

Taxpayers in New Hampshire will pay $1.9 billion for the cost of the Iraq War through 2007.

For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided (for the state of New Hampshire):

422,054 People with Health Care 

2,602,075 Homes with Renewable Electricity

42,468 Public Safety Officers

32,898 Music and Arts Teachers

190,723 Scholarships for University Students

140 New Elementary Schools

9,739 Affordable Housing Units

460,199 Children with Health Care

227,973 Head Start Places for Children

33,331 Elementary School Teachers

32,348 Port Container Inspectors

Juan Cole on "the surge" in Iraq

Juan Cole writes in Salon.com that the surge will not save Iraq, only diplomatic work will do that.

What the recent publicity about the "success" of the troop surge has ignored is this: The Bush administration has downplayed the collapsing political situation in Iraq by directing the public's attention to fluctuating numbers of civilians killed. While there have been some relative gains in security recently, even there the picture remains dubious.
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The current "good news" campaign from the Bush administration regarding the troop surge is only the latest in a long history of whitewashing the war since the 2003 invasion.
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The Bush administration has heralded any number of such "milestones" reached, but not whether they led to worthwhile results.
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[T]he relative reduction in violence is artificial and probably cannot endure. Blast walls enclose once posh Baghdad districts like Adhamiya, but although they keep out death squads they also keep out the customers that shopkeepers depend on.... Vehicle bans are effective, but not practical in the medium or long term. When they end, what will prevent the bombs from returning?
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The lack of virtually any good political news from around the country is what drives the war boosters to cite death statistics.
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[A]lthough there has been a relative lull in violence in the U.S.-reinforced Baghdad, the U.S. military acknowledges that the Iraqi capital is still a very dangerous place. One question is whether the violence will explode again when U.S. forces inevitably withdraw. But the far more important question is this: How much longer can Iraq limp along as a failing state before it really begins to collapse?

While it's true that the ultimate solution in Iraq must be diplomatic, not political, surely the relative success of the surge mustn't be ignored. Political solutions among the various factors in Iraq will be less likely, I assume, if the country is in chaos. And it is in chaos, but not as badly as in 2006 and some of 2007. I was extremely disappointed after reading in New York Magazine this observation by Kurt Andersen about anti-war Democrats' failure to note the decrease of violence in Iraq:

among the many dozens of posts on Daily Kos during the past two weeks there was only one citing this major and, for antiwar activists, inconvenient turn of events. No mention of or link to the Times piece, but simply an opportunity to rant once again about Joe Lieberman. Shouldn’t the online headquarters of the Democratic left be chewing over the issue like crazy, if not admitting they may have been mistaken about the surge then at least trying to figure out how to deal with the possible domestic political impact of the new facts on the ground? It seems like willful obliviousness, childish and slightly cowardly—not unlike hard-core Republicans’ four-year-long circle-the-wagons refusal to face the facts about the rest of the misbegotten war.

I've stressed elsewhere that the decrease in violence in Iraq has multiple causes; the surge is but one of several reasons for a lower civilian and military "body count."

It seems to me that the mess in Iraq is one America can't simply walk away from, but the Bush Administration is the ultimate cause of the mess. The invasion of Iraq was peddled to the American people with fear-mongering and falsehoods, it was done almost unilaterally and squandered rising global pro-US sentiment in the wake of 9/11, leaving us without enough allies and allied troops for the job of rebuilding Iraq, and ruining our reputation when we need international cooperation against terrorists. The debacle is bankrupting us, too. What to do? What to do?

Good news out of Iraq/Afgahnistan

"Violence in Iraq is at its lowest levels since the first year of the American invasion," according to a source in an AP story.

"British forces formally handed over responsibility Sunday for the last region in Iraq under their control," according to the Canadian Press. I believe, perhaps naively, that the British would not be doing this if they didn't honestly think that the region was basically secure.

"[A]ttacks along the Afghan-Pakistan border have dropped more than 40 percent since July and the U.S. and its allies are making progress in the fight against the Taliban," according to Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel in an AP story. That doesn't mean it won't be a long slog and horrifically expensive.

Queen of Quagmire ... more lessons from the Brits

From The New York Review of Books:

"When the British needed a senior political officer in Basra during World War I, they appointed a forty-six-year-old woman" Gertrude Bell. From 1916 to 1926 she served there, helping create Iraq "in 1920 from the three Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, which were conquered and occupied by the British during World War I...."

She wrote almost as soon as she arrived in Basra in 1916: '...We rushed into the business with our usual disregard for a comprehensive political scheme.' [And]

The wild drive of discontented nationalism...and of discontented Islam...might have proved too much for us however far-seeing we had been; but that doesn't excuse us for having been blind.

Bell is...both the model of a policymaker and an example of the inescapable frailty and ineptitude on the part of Western powers in the face of all that is chaotic and uncertain in the fashion for "nation-building."

T.E. Lawrence ["Lawrence of Arabia"] was right to demand the withdrawal of every British soldier [from Iraq] and no stronger link between Britain and Iraq than existed between Britain and Canada. For the same reason, more language training and contact with the tribes, more troops and better counterinsurgency tactics—in short a more considered imperial approach—are equally unlikely to allow the US today to build a state in Iraq, in southern Afghanistan, or Iran. If Bell is a heroine, it is not as a visionary but as a witness to the absurdity and horror of building nations for peoples with other loyalties, models, and priorities.

(Photo: Gertrude Bell's grave at the Anglican Cemetery in Baghdad.)

Iraq: we broke it; we'll have to try to fix it.

The security situation in Iraq has improved for now, and decidedly so. Some refugees are returning. The number of civilian deaths are down...70% since June; the number of US military deaths are down significantly, too. Three reasons for the improvement are identified in "Inside The Surge" a great article by Jon Lee Anderson in the November 19 issue of The New Yorker. The reasons are:

1) The surge itself—which is, in part, an increase in US troop numbers in select areas in Iraq and a repositioning of troops "out of large bases and into Joint Security Stations—small outposts in [some of] Baghdad’s most dangerous districts," but not (yet?) in "Baghdad’s Shiite slums...which are controlled by Shiite militiamen."

2) The Mahdi freeze—Moqtada al-Sadr's decision in August "to order the Mahdi Army, which is believed to have been responsible for much of the Shiite-on-Sunni sectarian killing in and around Baghdad, to 'freeze' its activities for six months."

3) The Sunni Awakening—the decision by some Sunni tribesmen in the Anbar province "to ally themselves with the Americans and to fight against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia." In other words, the US acceptance of help from insurgents who used to attack them. (As one official told Anderson, "Some of these armed groups were, until yesterday...considered terrorists."

Thus, for a mix of reasons the US military (with some help from Coalition forces of other nations) are policing a civil war more successfully. (Meanwhile, things in Afghanistan have been worsening for months.)Many military analysts now say that we may well have to stay in Iraq with 100,000 to 150,000 men for another 5 to 10 years. This is a daunting prospect considering that the US government spends $15,000,000 per hour in Iraq as it is, and considering that if a conflict breaks out elsewhere in the world, the US may not be able to respond adequately with so many soldiers committed in Iraq.

Our Iraq adventure was an unwarranted invasion undertaken without proper post-invasion plans or an exit strategy. It was justified to the American people with false evidence and heated rhetoric parroted by an unquestioning corporate media establishment that serves the republic poorly. It was also a turning away from the fight against the original Al-Qaeda. (The man responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks is still at large, remember.) What is more, it remains today a cause celebre for terrorist recruiters and Muslim fundamentalist extremists worldwide. And it has left us more isolated from the rest of the world than we have ever been, more in debt, and militarily weaker.

Yet, there we are: in Iraq, like it or not. We broke Iraq, and we need to try to fix it. The sooner we can leave the better; the sooner we can turn security, anti-terrorism, economic development, and aid-related operations over to non-US institutions the better.

Some observers argue that there is a military solution in Iraq, and I agree only insofar as security on the ground is a prerequisite for the political dealings, compromises, and reconciliation work that will bring about the real, lasting solution. So, security is needed, therefore we should keep US troops there, right? Maybe, maybe not. When the British forces left Basra recently, violence in the area dropped 90%. So it's possible that removing our troops will actually bring stability, at least insofar as the troops themselves cease being targets (attacks decrease) and cease being one reason for young Iraqi men to arm themselves. However, I have a hard time believing that if the US withdrew quickly a new wave of Shiite-Sunni violence would not follow. But setting no schedules or benchmarks at all for a pullout is too far too far towards the extreme option of staying for an undefined period of time. What is more, remaining in Iraq does not seem to be motivating Iraqi political leaders to begin the necessary reconciliation and unity tasks before them, which they are pursuing only half-heartedly.

Do we stay or do we go? The answer is both and neither. We need to draw down the numbers and try to get others nations and multinational organizations involved, if that's possible. It's a complicated situation. It could have been avoided all along. And we're paying dearly for it. But, both the knee-jerk "out of Iraq now!" sentiment and the ill-defined "stay the course!" Bush administration motto are recklessly simplistic.