What tangled webs …

July 28th, 2007

Wes Clark was on Charlie Rose the other night [it was another of those episodes when Charlie appears to either be a ham--handed devils advocate or incredibly dense, they're rare but disturbing] and spoke to the problems with Bush’s war. He said Petraeus was a fine man and soldier, he knew him, but that solutions in Iraq were NOT military, and even Petraeus would agree. [He has not ruled out running again, by the way, and has a fine grasp of what is necessary to get us out and attempt conciliation in the region; I hope he's grabbed up by whichever Dem wins in '08 -- he's got the chops and the heart to make a stellar cabinet member.]

General Petraeus may be a military leader of the First Water, but … soldier still, and therein lies the limit of his effectiveness. He will be blamed [is already being blamed by the administration, which prefers to pretend they don't GIVE the marching orders] for the failure of the “surge,” as the Generals before him were pilloried and dismissed for their failures. Many of them have come forward to tell us that they were bullied, threatened and manipulated by the NeoCon arm of the Bush regime.

Still, you can BET that Maliki will be replaced before Petraeus is. And it still … always … begs the question: whose country is it?

The Iraqi’s, meanwhile, have taken a month off, strong-armed to give up their original plan for two — which really isn’t a problem, as I see it, because they’re reluctant to do much of anything, anyhow; Sadr’s in, Sadr’s out, the Kurds don’t want any part of it, and nobody likes the Bushie oil deal. The third article here is an example of their stonewall [and the complexity of our presence in a country happier with the 12th century than the 21st] and they’re better at stonewall, apparently, than anything else. That article should be passed around to the Happy Face conservatives that constantly howl that the press doesn’t show us all the “good things” that are happening in Iraq.

Ultimately, the Iraqi’s themselves will take the blame for all this … they already are in many minds. But I’m not falling for that one — this belongs squarely on Bush’s shoulders; this is what happens when you have a man of limited intelligence and vision in the White House … so un-curious about life that he bypassed the lessons of history in this region, so personally confused that he can’t separate his theocratic need to proselytize from his empirical desire to profit — and apparently didn’t even read [or see] Lawrence of Arabia, which should have, if nothing else, given him a heads up on the immense culture gap that has never been breached … and may never be until the Middle East solves its own internal problems.

First article is about the Maliki/Petraeus feud — second points us back to the actual “deciders” — third makes you wish all those billions spent in reconstruction had gone to New Orleans instead.

Jude

Iraqi leader tells Bush: Get Gen Petraeus out
Stormy relationship: Nouri al-Maliki and Gen David Petraeus
Damien McElroy, Telegraph UK
28/07/2007

Relations between the top United States general in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, the country’s prime minister, are so bad that the Iraqi leader made a direct appeal for his removal to President George W Bush.

Although the call was rejected, aides to both men admit that Mr Maliki and Gen David Petraeus engage in frequent stand-up shouting matches, differing particularly over the US general’s moves to arm Sunni tribesmen to fight al-Qa’eda.

One Iraqi source said Mr Maliki used a video conference with Mr Bush to call for the general’s signature strategy to be scrapped. “He told Bush that if Petraeus continues, he would arm Shia militias,” said the official. “Bush told Maliki to calm down.”

At another meeting with Gen Petraeus, Mr Maliki said: “I can’t deal with you any more. I will ask for someone else to replace you.”

Gen Petraeus admitted that the relationship was stormy, saying: “We have not pulled punches with each other.”

President Bush’s support for Mr Maliki is deeply controversial within the US government because of the Iraqi’s ties to Shia militias responsible for some of the worst sectarian violence.

The New York Times claimed yesterday that Saudi Arabia was refusing to work with Mr Maliki and has presented “evidence” that he was an Iranian intelligence agent to US officials. “Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia’s counterproductive role in the war,” it reported.

Alongside the firm support of Mr Bush, Mr Maliki also enjoys the backing of Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador and his predecessor, Zalmay Khalilzad, now America’s representative at the United Nations.

Mr Khalilzad took a swipe at Saudi Arabia in an editorial published earlier this month that was widely seen as an appeal for a larger UN role in stabilising Iraq.

Mr Crocker, who attends Mr Maliki’s stormy weekly meetings with Gen Petraeus, said the Iraqi leader was a strong partner of America.

“There is no leader in the world that is under more pressure than Nouri al-Maliki, without question,” he said. “Sometimes he reflects that frustration. I don’t blame him. I probably would too.”

The Neocon Armchair Generals
Scott Horton, Harpers
July 27

To hear President Bush tell it, all he does is sit back and patiently take the advice of his generals in the field and in the Pentagon. But every field commander to return from Iraq and put on his civvies has told a different tale: the White House hammers ridiculous strategies down their throats, doesn’t listen to a word they say, and instead takes direction from a group of juveniles in their fifties over at Neocon Central Command, the American Enterprise Institute.

This is another point on which White House lies are wearing thin and the truth is beginning to shine through. And Rowan Scarborough over at the D.C. Examiner has offered up an extremely revealing vignette. He looks at where the current strategy for the surge got cooked up. He notes that in the final analysis, there were three plans sent to the White House. One was prepared by General Petraeus and his team out in Baghdad. The second was crafted by the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon. And the third plan was put together by a bunch of overgrown teenagers who play with lead soldiers at the American Enterprise Institute.

And guess which one the White House picked? That’s right, the AEI plan.

And guess who put on his duck hunting fatigues to come over and run the show? That’s right, it’s Dead-Eye Dick himself, Vice President Cheney.

Even Vice President Dick Cheney came. “We took the results of our planning session immediately to people in the administration,” said AEI analyst Thomas Donnelly, a surge planner. “It became sort of a magnet for movers and shakers in the White House.”

Donnelly said the AEI approach won out over plans from the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command. The two Army generals then in charge of Iraq had opposed a troop increase . . .

The emergence of AEI as a power player on Iraq belies the notion that neo-conservatives are on the decline in Washington. AEI brags an impressive roster of neo-con thinkers.

Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an Iraq war architect, arrived at AIE this summer, joining such prominent conservatives as John Bolton, David Frum and Michael Ledeen.

With its plan in place, the AEI Iraq team is not sitting still. Keane is an adviser to Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. He has inspected war conditions on two visits. Kagan left for Iraq this week. “It was kind of the 11th hour, 59th minute,” Donnelly said of AEI’s surge plan. “It’s the function that think tanks are supposed to perform to provide independent advice and analysis.”

When all this fails–and now it looks very far from any sort of success–let’s please keep a sharp focus on who called the shots and who bears the blame. Not the generals in the field. Not the Pentagon. It’s the armchair generals from the Neocon Battalion. We’d all be a lot safer if they’d keep to playing paintball on the weekends. And even at that sort of game I wouldn’t want to be on their team.

As U.S. Rebuilds, Iraq Won’t Act on Finished Work
JAMES GLANZ, NYT
July 28, 2007

Iraq’s national government is refusing to take possession of thousands of American-financed reconstruction projects, forcing the United States either to hand them over to local Iraqis, who often lack the proper training and resources to keep the projects running, or commit new money to an effort that has already consumed billions of taxpayer dollars.

The conclusions, detailed in a report released Friday by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a federal oversight agency, include the finding that of 2,797 completed projects costing $5.8 billion, Iraq’s national government had, by the spring of this year, accepted only 435 projects valued at $501 million. Few transfers to Iraqi national government control have taken place since the current Iraqi government, which is frequently criticized for inaction on matters relating to the American intervention, took office in 2006.

The United States often promotes the number of rebuilding projects, like power plants and hospitals, that have been completed in Iraq, citing them as signs of progress in a nation otherwise fraught with violence and political stalemate. But closer examination by the inspector general’s office, headed by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., has found that a number of individual projects are crumbling, abandoned or otherwise inoperative only months after the United States declared that they had been successfully completed. The United States always intended to hand over projects to the Iraqi government when they were completed.

Although Mr. Bowen’s latest report is primarily a financial overview, he said in an interview that it raised serious questions on whether the problems his inspectors had found were much more widespread in the reconstruction program.

The process of transferring projects to Iraq “worked for a while,” Mr. Bowen said. But then the new government took over and installed its finance minister, Bayan Jabr, who has been a continuing center of controversy in his various government posts and is formally in charge of the transfers.

“After Mr. Jabr took over, that process ceased to function,” Mr. Bowen said.

In fact, in the first two quarters of 2007, Mr. Bowen said, his inspectors found significant problems in all but 2 of the 12 projects they examined after the United States declared those projects completed.

In one of the most recent cases, a $90 million project to overhaul two giant turbines at the Dora power plant in Baghdad failed after completion because employees at the plant did not know how to operate the turbines properly and the wrong fuel was used. The additional power is critically needed in Baghdad, where residents often have only a few hours of electricity a day.

Because the Iraqi government will not formally accept projects like the refurbished turbines, the United States is “finding someone at the local level to handle the project, handing them the keys and saying, ‘Operate and maintain it,’ ” another official in the inspector general’s office said.

If the pace of the American rebuilding program is a guide, those problems could quickly accelerate: So far, the United States has declared that $5.8 billion in American taxpayer-financed projects have been completed, but most of the rest of the projects within a $21 billion rebuilding program that Mr. Bowen examined in the report are expected to be finished by the end of this year. Some of that money is also being used to train and equip Iraqi security forces rather than finance construction projects.

The report was released too late in the day to contact Mr. Jabr, who is part of a Shiite alliance in charge of the government. In his previous position as interior minister, he was accused of running Shiite death squads out of the ministry. In his current position he has developed a reputation as being slow to release budget money to Iraqi government entities, which would have to run the new projects at substantial expense.

He is sometimes suspected of seeking to use his position to undermine the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who is also a Shiite but answers to a different faction within the alliance. In interviews, Mr. Jabr has rejected those accusations and says he strongly supports the government.

American researchers who have followed the reconstruction said Mr. Bowen’s report raised serious new doubts about the program. Rick Barton, co-director of the postconflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institute in Washington, said the lack of interest on the part of the Iraqis was the latest demonstration that they were not involved enough in its planning stages. “It sort of confirms that you really need pre-agreement on the projects you are attempting,” Mr. Barton said, “or you end up with these kinds of problems at the tail end, where people don’t know much about the program and they haven’t bought into it.”

Mr. Barton said that the episode was probably inevitable given that the elected Iraqi government operated mainly within the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad and had little capability of managing thousands of new projects around the country. He said that this was the most likely explanation — rather than any ill will on Mr. Jabr’s part. But Mr. Barton said the findings indicated that the United States should put some of the remaining money in the program into “sustainment,” the term for running the projects, rather than continuing to build when there might be no one to run the projects.

“To build something and not have these issues resolved from top to bottom is unfathomable,” said William L. Nash, a retired general who is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on Middle East reconstruction. “The management of the reconstruction program for Iraq has been a near-total disaster from the beginning.”

The report says that of the 2,797 projects declared completed, besides the 435 projects formally accepted by Iraq’s central government, 1,141 have been transferred to local Iraqi authorities. American government entities in charge of those projects include the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the American-led multinational forces in Iraq, the United States Embassy and the United States Agency for International Development. In letters attached to Mr. Bowen’s report, several of those entities largely concurred with many of Mr. Bowen’s findings and said that new agreements were being hammered out with the Iraqi government to smooth the transfers.

A spokesman for the development agency, David Snider, said in a statement that work now being undertaken by the agency “helps address the concerns” raised in the report. Mr. Snider said that the agency was seeking to formalize an agreement with the Iraqi government that would protect the American investment there.

The agency “usually secures these commitments from recipient governments before the initiation of a project,” Mr. Snider said. But in the case of Iraq, he said, the American rebuilding effort “began before the current Iraqi government was established.”

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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