The Reality — "…the Americans will never leave Iraq"

Our Uranus placement is doing a splendid job of creating the counterpoint to Dubby’s anticipated speech [which is to highlight “constructive results” of his surge; I expect the speech writers are rewriting madly, this very moment] … all Hell’s breaking loose in Iraq today. [Earthquakes with tsunami warnings as well, tribute to the Grand Cross, and the southern Texas coast getting trounced by Hurricane Humberto.]

Here are reports about the actual conditions and what the Iraqi’s think about all this, reflected by the quote in the ledeline — the last two articles here are excellent think pieces, both highly recommended.

And this completes my obligation to cover the long-anticipated Petraeus Report — you have more info now than you can comfortably read; tonight the nation will hear the buzzing whine of Dubby’s BS. And I’ll bet the ratings are pitiful … we’ve all heard it before. In a season of reruns, this one can easily be skipped for something more interesting.

Jude

The General Lies
Robert Scheer, Truthdig
September 12, 2007

Once again, we have a general repeatedly promising to save Western civilization by turning the corner in yet another intractable and unnecessary foreign war.

Of course, Gen. David Petraeus predicts success in the Iraq war. What wonders couldn’t generals achieve with more troops and more time? The battle is always going well until it is lost, and then they blame defeat on the politicians and the public.

There’s no shortage of retired generals who will tell you we could have won in Vietnam if only we had sent more troops, or bombed the dikes in the North, or been willing to kill more than the 3.4 million Vietnamese who died along with 59,000 American soldiers.

Instead, the politicians and public, led by that bleeding heart President Richard Nixon, lost the will to win. Thus, the dominoes fell to communism, and Red China and Red Vietnam now rule the world by dint of military force. Have you been to Wal-Mart lately? The triumph of communism is total.

Once again, we have a general repeatedly promising to save Western civilization by turning the corner in yet another intractable and unnecessary foreign war. Back on Sept. 26, 2004, in the weeks before the midterm congressional elections, Petraeus took to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post to make sure the voters didn’t vote wrong.

Despite appearances, he claimed the war in Iraq was going very well: “I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up,” Petraeus wrote. “The institutions that oversee them are being re-established from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously. … There has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security, something they are keen to do.”

So keen, it makes one’s heart swell. So keen that three years later, after the expenditure of $450 billion more in taxpayer funds, and more U.S. troops in proportion to the Iraqi population than we had in Vietnam at the height of that war, the good general now insists it would be disastrous to even think about bringing any American troops home before next summer.

That’s at least another $150 billion and many more Iraqi and U.S. lives wasted. But wait–Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, also testified before Congress this week with Petraeus, and he has more good news about what he still celebrates as the “liberation of Iraq.”

Remember that Bush administration promise that the oil-rich Iraqis would pick up the check for the cost of their liberation? Well, Crocker is bullish on that front: the Iraqi economy is on schedule to grow by 6 percent, according to his testimony. Perhaps he is referring to the additional money dumped into Iraq’s economy by American taxpayers chipping in for the “surge.”

He certainly wasn’t basing his estimate on any improvement in Iraqi oil production or any other economic component. As the International Monetary Fund reported last month in its annual review of Iraq’s economy, “Economic growth has been slower than expected at the time of the last (review) mainly because the expected expansion of oil production has failed to materialize.”

In case you haven’t noticed, oil is the Iraqi economy, yet a recent GAO report stated an additional $57 billion in U.S. tax dollars will be needed to bring oil and electricity production to the level where it can satisfy Iraq’s domestic demand by the year 2015.

Ambassador Crocker actually had the nerve to compare the bloody religious fratricide in Iraq, which our inane invasion unleashed, to the American battle over state’s rights, once again reducing the complexities of world history to an easily understood but totally irrelevant example from the American experience.

In this case, a better analogy might have been made to the American Indian wars, given that the only thing the United States has been able to do effectively in Iraq is unleash superior firepower. At the current rate, Iraq will be liberated when there are no Iraqis.

Perhaps that is why this week’s ABC/BBC poll shows that 70 percent of Iraqis believe security has deteriorated since the surge began and that 60 percent believe attacks on U.S. forces are justified. And 93 percent of Sunnis, whom the general and ambassador claim are joining our side, want to see us dead.

As for optimism, only 29 percent of Iraqis now think the situation will get better, as opposed to 64 percent who shared that optimism before the surge — which almost 70 percent of Iraqis believe has “hampered conditions for political dialogue, reconstruction and economic development.”

So, ambassadors and generals lie. Get used to it.

What Crocker and Petraeus didn’t say
Nancy A. Youssef and Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers
Monday, September 10, 2007

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration’s top two officials in Iraq answered questions from Congress for more than six hours on Monday, but their testimony may have been as important for what they didn’t say as for what they did.

A chart displayed by Army Gen. David Petraeus that purported to show the decline in sectarian violence in Baghdad between December and August made no effort to show that the ethnic character of many of the neighborhoods had changed in that same period from majority Sunni Muslim or mixed to majority Shiite Muslim.

Neither Petraeus nor U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker talked about the fact that since the troop surge began the pace by which Iraqis were abandoning their homes in search of safety had increased. They didn’t mention that 86 percent of Iraqis who’ve fled their homes said they’d been targeted because of their sect, according to the International Organization for Migration.

While Petraeus stressed that civilian casualties were down over the last five weeks, he drew no connection between that statement and a chart he displayed that showed that the number of attacks rose during at least one of those weeks.

Petraeus also didn’t highlight the fact that his charts showed that “ethno-sectarian” deaths in August, down from July, were still higher than in June, and he didn’t explain why the greatest drop in such deaths, which peaked in December, occurred between January and February, before the surge began.

And while both officials said that the Iraqi security forces were improving, neither talked about how those forces had been infiltrated by militias, though Petraeus acknowledged that during 2006 some Iraqi security forces had participated in the ethnic violence.

Both officials said they believed that Iraq was on the path to potential success. Petraeus said that “the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met.” Crocker was similarly optimistic: “In my judgment, the cumulative trajectory of political, economic and diplomatic developments in Iraq is upwards, although the slope of that line is not
steep.”

They both pleaded for more time, even as Petraeus said that the U.S. should begin pulling troops out, with the goal of being back to the pre-surge level of 130,000 troops by next July. Further reductions would be considered next spring, as conditions allow, he said.

Both men celebrated their plan’s success in encouraging residents in once-restive Anbar province to work with U.S. troops against al Qaida in Iraq.

Petraeus conceded that that success didn’t extend to Ninevah province, where progress “has been much more up and down.” But he didn’t say that many believe that al Qaida numbers increased there only after the surge began.

Ninevah is where some of the largest bombings of the year occurred, including the attack on the Yazidis, which killed more than 300.

He also offered a tepid endorsement of the Iraqi security forces, at times saying that they were increasingly capable of defending Iraq, while conceding that they needed to show more progress.

“Iraqi security forces have also continued to grow and shoulder more of the load, albeit slowly and amid continuing concerns about the sectarian tendencies of some elements in their ranks,” Petraeus said. “In general, however, Iraqi elements have been standing and fighting and sustaining tough losses, and they have taken the lead in operations in many areas.”

He said 445,000 people were on the security forces’ payroll, but didn’t discuss that many officials believe that thousands of those don’t actually exist, but are phantoms whose salaries actually go into ministry officials’ pockets.

Both Iraqis and U.S. officials concede that militias have infiltrated the security forces and that political leaders continue to interfere with their operations to serve their sects’ interests.

Petraeus presented a series of maps to show how sectarian violence had dropped in Baghdad from December 2006 to August 2007. But all of the maps showed the same color-coding for Sunni, Shiite and mixed neighborhoods, even though the ethnicity of many neighborhoods have shifted dramatically over the previous year. U.S. military officials say that Baghdad was once 65 percent Sunni and is now 75 percent Shiite.

Questions from the 107 members of Congress who sat in on the hearing rarely produced more detail.

Still, the two men, considered by many to be among the most capable U.S. public servants to have served in Iraq, didn’t attempt to hide their reservations. Both said they couldn’t guarantee success.

Crocker, a fluent Arabic speaker and a lifelong student of the area, questioned the U.S. criteria for measuring success and said that the Iraqi government might never meet most of the 18 benchmarks laid out by Congress in a May law. Petraeus, who wrote the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, acknowledged that violence remained at unacceptable levels.

Independent observers said the numbers that Crocker and Petraeus provided showed the violence has dropped to about where it was in May 2006, a few months after a February 2006 bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in the mostly Sunni city of Samarra, which the military uses to mark the rise in sectarian violence.

“At best, what you’ve got is the status quo from May or June of 2006,” said Kirk Johnson, who served for 13 months as the chief statistician for Crocker and who said he supports the current strategy in Iraq.

Rand Beers, a former White House counterterrorism aide who resigned to protest the invasion of Iraq, noted there was another troop surge, in Baghdad, in summer 2006.

“We’ve had two surges, and in a way, things are back to the level before the first surge,” Beers said in a conference call with reporters.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Robert Gard said that it was understandable that Petraeus emphasized the positive.

“He’s a human being and he’s a military human being that wants to accomplish the mission,” Gard said.

Youssef reported from Washington, Fadel, from Baghdad. Warren P. Strobel in Washington contributed.

US auditor queries military Iraq casualty figures
AFP via Yahoo
Fri Sep 7

An independent US government auditor on Friday cast doubt on US military statistics expected to show a huge dip in sectarian violence in Iraq under the current troop surge strategy.

Comptroller General David Walker said there was a “significant difference” of approach between the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which he heads, and Pentagon evaluations of violence in Iraq.

“The primary difference between us and the military is whether or not violence has been reduced with regard to sectarian violence,” Walker told the Senate Armed Services committee.

A GAO report published this week on 18 benchmarks for progress for the Iraqi government set down in law by Congress, found that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s administration had failed to reach targets for cutting violence.

“It is unclear whether sectarian violence in Iraq has decreased — a key security benchmark,” the report said, pointing to the difficulty in judging whether a killing was sectarian or criminal in nature.

In long-awaited testimony on Monday to Congress on the progress of the surge, Walker said war commander General David Petraeus will cite a large decrease in sectarian violence.

“I think you need to ask him how he defines sectarian violence,” Walker told senators.
“The other thing you have to look at is if it’s sustainable.”

Some reports say Petraeus will argue that sectarian violence in Iraq has fallen by up to 75 percent under the surge.

“We could not get comfortable with (the military’s) methodology for determining what’s sectarian versus nonsectarian violence,” Walker told senators.

“You know, it’s extremely difficult to know who did it, what their intent was.”

Walker was unable to go into further details, as the rest of the GAO’s conclusions in the report on sectarian violence have been declared secret by the Pentagon, and urged senators to read the classified version of the study.

Democratic Senator Jack Reed asked why such vital information to assessing the state of US policy in Iraq was such a closely guarded secret.

“This may seem like a dumb question — why is this classified? I mean, who are we trying to keep this information from: the American people?” Reed said.

Democratic committee chairman Carl Levin meanwhile said he would make a request by the end of Friday for relevant portions of the report to be declassified, so senators could discuss them in a public setting.

The Fakery of General Petraeus: What Iraqis Think About the Surge
PATRICK COCKBURN, CounterPunch
September 11, 2007

At first sight the Petraeus report looks as if it is going to be one of those spurious milestones in the war in Iraq, (like the Iraq Study Group’s report last December), heavily publicized at the time, but not affecting the political and military stalemate in the country.

Unfortunately, the propaganda effort by the White House now underway may have a more malign impact than most propaganda exercises. It claims that victory is possible where failure has already occurred. It manipulates figures and facts to produce a picture of Iraq that is not merely distorted but substantively false.

The ’surge’, the dispatch of 30,000 American reinforcements, was announced by President Bush on January 10 as a bid to regain control of Baghdad and reduce the level of violence. But the achievements are more apparent than real. The Interior Ministry in Baghdad says that 1,011 people died violently in Iraq in August, but an official at the ministry revealed to the US news agency McClatchy that the true figure for the month is 2,890 killed.

The truest indicator of the level of violence in Iraq is the number of people fleeing their homes because they are terrified that they will be murdered. According to the UN High Commission for Refugees the number of refugees has risen from 50,000 to 60,000 a month and none are returning.

Iraqi society is breaking down. It is no longer possible to get medical treatment for many ailments because 75 per cent of doctors, pharmacists have left their jobs in the hospitals, clinics and universities. The majority of these have fled abroad to join the 2.2 million Iraqis outside the country.

The food rationing system on which five million Iraqis rely to stay alive is also breaking down with two million people no longer being fed because food cannot be distributed in dangerous areas. Rice and beans are of poor quality and flour, tea and baby formula are short. Unemployment is 68 per cent of the workforce, so without a state ration and no jobs, more and more Iraqis are living on the edge of starvation.

No wonder then that what Iraqis believe is happening to them and their country is wholly contrary to the myths pumped out by the White House and the Pentagon. The opinion poll commissioned by ABC news, the BBC and Japanese Television NHK and published yesterday shows that 70 per cent of Iraqis say that their security has got worse during the last six months when the US increased the number of its US troops in Baghdad and surrounding provinces. A solid 57 per cent believe that attacks on coalition forces are acceptable. Some 93 per cent of Sunni approve such attacks and 50 per cent of Shia also back them.

Interestingly, 46 per cent of Iraqis believe that full-scale civil war would be less likely if the US withdrew before civil order is restored. Some 35 per cent say it would be more likely to occur.

There are some other telling statistics showing the differences between the Shia and Sunni communities. Some 30 per cent of Shia Arabs say the security situation in their neighborhood has become better in the last six months and 21 per cent say it is getting worse. But more than half the Sunni — 56 per cent — say their security is worse and only 7 per cent say it is better. These figures confirm the belief that the Sunni are being pushed out of Baghdad or into small enclaves within the city.

Ever since the summer of 2003 the US has never admitted the political and military consequences of the lack of support for the occupation outside Kurdistan. The latest poll shows that 79 per cent of Sunni and 59 per cent of Shia have no confidence at all in the US and UK forces.

This basic lack of support for the occupation undermines the elaborate tactics which Gen David Petraeus is supposedly carrying out in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. The US and Britain have been training Iraqi forces for four years now without producing Iraqi units willing to fight alongside them. The difficulty is not equipment or training but legitimacy and loyalty.

At the start of yesterday’s Congressional hearings congressmen asked how it was that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was unable to produce a power sharing government. The answer is that he was not elected to do so. He was elected because the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shia parties, won the greatest number of seats in the December, 2005 general election and formed a government in alliance with Kurdish nationalist coalition. Some 54 per cent of Shia Arabs now support the government and 98 per cent of Sunni Arabs disapprove of it.

The Shia know they are 60 per cent of the population and are suspicious that the US is endlessly trying to find ways of robbing them of the power they were denied for centuries under the domination of Sunni Arabs who are only 20 per cent of Iraqis. They are deeply worried that the US is in effect creating a Sunni militia under US control by turning the Anbar Sunni tribes against al Qaida in Iraq.

The Shia leaders also notice that President Bush visited Anbar and not Baghdad earlier this month (though he may also have been seeking to to avoid the mortar bombs which rain down on the Green Zone these days to greet visiting foreign dignitaries).

Essentially there is a political and military stalemate in Iraq which the US ’surge’ has not changed. The departure of Mr Maliki under pressure from the US would produce no more benefits than the sacking of his predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari last year. So-called moderate politicians like Iyad al-Allawi have limited local support though he has been heavily backed by the Sunni Arab states.

All the players in the Iraq tragedy who were present at the beginning of the surge in January are still there. Thanks to the US there are more militias than there used to be. General Petraeus might make a case for saying that the US position in Iraq is not much worse, but it is certainly no better.

Iraqi reporter: Baghdad ‘100 times worse’ than a year ago
David Edwards and Muriel Kane, Raw Story
Monday September 10, 2007

Ayub Nuri, an Iraqi journalist residing in the United States, told CNN on Monday that even when he was last in Baghdad in 2006, “the situation was very, very dangerous,” but that things are much worse now.

“When I speak to my friends and family these days on the phone, they tell me that it is 100 times worse than when I was there,” Nuri stated. “Even the regular people cannot leave their own neighborhoods. … If you go to another neighborhood, that’s completely unknown to you, and you might not be able to come home alive.”

When asked about General Petraeus’ suggestion last week that “Iraqi soldiers and police are very much in the fight,” Nuri replied, “I think that’s not true at all. … I have to be honest with you and with everyone else in the world. When I was traveling around Iraq, in Baghdad or anywhere else, I was afraid of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police more than I was afraid of a militia or unknown men.”

Nuri explained that after the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded Saddam’s army, “They were desperate to recreate another Iraqi army, and in case of desperation, of course, you accept anyone to join your army, and many of them were criminals, many of them were drug dealers, and many of them had … affiliation only to their own areas.” He said that as a result, many Iraqis these days would prefer to have their neighborhood patrolled by a US unit rather than an Iraqi unit.

“I personally do not have any faith or any hope in the Maliki government,” Nuri stated, though he emphasized that the problem wasn’t just with Maliki. “The Iraqi government is neither willing nor they are able to do anything,” he concluded.

The following video is from CNN’s Newsroom, broadcast on September 10. [Open link]

Baghdadis dismiss report as ‘theater’
Agence France-Presse via Washington Times

BAGHDAD — A group of Iraqis watching the stuttering start of proceedings before the U.S. Congress yesterday, which could influence whether U.S. troops remain in their country, said they were unimpressed.

Student Abdelbaqi al-Shimmari scoffed when the microphones went dead just as the chief U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, was to testify.

“If the Americans can’t make their own microphones work, how can they may things work in Iraq?” he asked.

“It is like a theater,” said teacher Abdullah Kadhim, 58, who, like others interviewed for this article, was watching the congressional hearing live on Al-Hurra television at a general store in an inner Baghdad neighborhood.

“Each day, they say there is a new report. They say they will bring a new change in Iraq. We can only hope there will finally be progress in security,” Mr. Kadhim said.

Saleh Adnan, 34, a car mechanic, also watching the broadcast, was dismissive.

“I don’t think this will change anything in our country because the Americans will never leave Iraq. For us, the main point is when the occupation will end,” said Mr. Adnan.

“For me, the main report will be the one which announces the American departure.”

Here’s the Smell of Blood Still
Norman Solomon, AlterNet
September 13, 2007

When Martin Luther King Jr. publicly referred to “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government,” he had no way of knowing that his description would ring so true 40 years later. As the autumn of 2007 begins, the reality of Uncle Sam as an unhinged mega-killer haunts a large minority of Americans. Many who can remember the horrific era of the Vietnam War are nearly incredulous that we could now be living in a time of similarly deranged official policy.

Despite all the differences, the deep parallels between the two war efforts inform us that the basic madness of entrenched power in our midst is not about miscalculations or bad management or quagmires. The continuity tells us much more than we would probably like to know about the obstacles to decency that confront us every day.

The incredulity and numbing, the frequent bobbing-and-weaving of our own consciousness, the hollow comforts of passivity, insulate us from hard truths and harsher realities than we might ever have expected to need to confront — about our country and about ourselves.
Of all the words spewed from the Pet Crock hearings with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, maybe none were more revealing than Petraeus’s bid for a modicum of sympathy for his burdens as a commander. “This is going on three years for me, on top of a year deployment to Bosnia as well,” he said at the Senate hearing, “so my family also knows something about sacrifice.”

There’s sacrifice and sacrifice.

“It is as bad as it seems,” longtime activist Dave Dellinger told a gathering of protesters outside the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach as it prepared to re-nominate a war-criminal president. “We must achieve a breakthrough in understanding reality.”

I listened, agreeing. But it was, and is, easier said. How do we truly grasp what’s being done in our names, with our tax dollars — and, most of all, with our inordinate self-restraint that tolerates what should be intolerable?
* * *

From an Oval Office tape, May 4, 1972: “I’ll see that the United States does not lose,” the president said while conferring with aides Al Haig, John Connally and Henry Kissinger. “I’m putting it quite bluntly. I’ll be quite precise. South Vietnam may lose. But the United States cannot lose. Which means, basically, I have made the decision. Whatever happens to South Vietnam, we are going to cream North Vietnam … For once, we’ve got to use the maximum power of this country … against this shit-ass little country: to win the war. We can’t use the word, ‘win.’ But others can.”

By mid-1972, U.S. troop levels in Vietnam were way down — to around seventy thousand — almost half a million lower than three years earlier. Fewer Americans were dying, and the carnage in Vietnam was fading as a front-burner issue in U.S. politics. Nixon’s withdrawal strategy had changed the focus of media coverage.

The executive producer of ABC’s evening news, Av Westin, had written in a 1969 memo: “I have asked our Vietnam staff to alter the focus of their coverage from combat pieces to interpretive ones, pegged to the eventual pull-out of the American forces. This point should be stressed for all hands.” In a telex to the network’s Saigon bureau, Westin gave the news of his decree to the correspondents: “I think the time has come to shift some of our focus from the battlefield, or more specifically American military involvement with the enemy, to themes and stories under the general heading ‘We Are on Our Way Out of Vietnam.’”

The killing had gone more technological; from 1969 to 1972 the U.S. government dropped 3.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, a total higher than all the bombing in the previous five years. The combination of withdrawing U.S. troops and stepping up the bombardment was anything but a coincidence; the latest in military science would make it possible to, in President Nixon’s private words, “use the maximum power of this country” against a “shit-ass little country.”

In December 1972, Nixon delivered on his confidential pledge to “cream North Vietnam,” ordering eleven days and nights of almost round-the-clock sorties (Christmas was an off day) that dropped twenty thousand tons of bombs on North Vietnam. B-52s reached the city of Hanoi. During that week and a half, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg later noted, the U.S. government dropped “the explosive equivalent of the Nagasaki A-bomb.”
* * *

Visiting Baghdad near the end of 2002, I looked at Iraqi people and wondered what would happen to them when the missiles arrived, what would befall the earnest young man managing the little online computer shop in the hotel next to the alcohol-free bar, who invited me to a worship service at the Presbyterian church that he devoutly attended; or the sweet-faced middle-aged fellow with a moustache very much like Saddam Hussein’s (a ubiquitous police-state fashion statement) who stood near the elevator and put his hand over his heart whenever I passed; or the sweethearts chatting across candles at an outdoor restaurant as twilight settled on the banks of the Tigris.
* * *

That winter, movers and shakers in Washington shuffled along to the beat of a media drum that kept reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a virtual certainty. At the same time, millions of Americans tried to prevent an invasion; their activism ranged from letters and petitions to picket lines, civil disobedience, marches and mass rallies. On Jan. 18, 2003, as the Washington Post recalled years later, “an antiwar protest described as the largest since the Vietnam War drew several hundred thousand … on the eve of the Iraq war, in subfreezing Washington weather. The high temperature reported that day was in the mid-20s.”

The outcry was global, and the numbers grew larger. On Feb. 15, an estimated 10 million people demonstrated against the impending war. A dispatch from Knight-Ridder news service summed up the events of that day: “By the millions, peace marchers in cities around the world united Saturday behind a single demand: No war with Iraq.” But the war planners running the U.S. government were determined.
* * *

During one year after another, the warfare intensified in Iraq. And an air war kept escalating. The U.S. media assumed that almost any use of American air power was to the good. (Exceptions came with fleeting news of mishaps like dropping bombs on wedding parties.) What actually happened to human beings every day as explosives hit the ground would not be conveyed to the reputedly well-informed. What we didn’t know presumably wouldn’t hurt us or our self-image. We thought ourselves better — incomparably better — because we burned people with modern technology from high in the air. Car bombs and detonation belts were for the uncivilized.

One of the methodical quirks of U.S. Air Force news releases has been that they consistently refer to insurgents as “anti-Iraqi forces” — even though almost all of those fighters are Iraqis. So, in a release about activities on Christmas Day 2006, the Air Force reported that “Marine Corps F/A-18Ds conducted a strike against anti-Iraqi forces near Haqlaniyah.” The next day, it was the same story, as it would be for a long time to come — with U.S. Air Force jets bombing “anti-Iraqi forces” on behalf of missions for “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in order to “deter and disrupt terrorist activities.”
* * *

In my kitchen is a dark-red little carpet with black designs, imported from Baghdad. I bought it there one afternoon in late January 2003 at the bazaar (not so different, to my eyes anyway, from the market I later visited in Tehran). My traveling companion was a former high-ranking U.N. official, Denis Halliday, who had lived in Baghdad for a while during the 1990s before resigning as head of the “oil for food” program in protest against the draconian sanctions that caused so much devastation among civilians. Denis was revisiting some of the shopkeepers he had come to know. After warm greetings and pleasantries, an Iraqi man in his middle years said that he’d heard on the BBC about a French proposal for averting an invasion. The earnest hope in his voice made my heart sink, as if falling into the dirty stretch of the Tigris River that Denis and I had just hopped a boat across, where people were beating rugs on stones alongside the banks.

Often when I look at the carpet in the kitchen I think that it is filled with blood, remembering how one country’s treasures become another’s aesthetic enhancements. I had carted home the rolled-up carpet and less than two months later came “shock and awe.” Now, more than four years afterward, the daily papers piled up on the breakfast table a few feet away tell of the latest carnage. I don’t think the rug has ever given me pleasure since the day it unfurled across the hardwood floor. It hasn’t been cleaned since presumably it soaked up the Tigris water during its last washing. There’s blood on the carpet and no amount of trips to the dry cleaners could change that.

Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 1:

“Out, damned spot! out, I say! … What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? — Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? … What, will these hands ne’er be clean? … Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

This article is adapted from Norman Solomon’s new book Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State. For more information, go to: www.madelovegotwar.com

Why Can’t They All Just Get Along?
Mark W. Bradley, Smirking Chimp
Sep 13 2007

Four years ago (shortly after moving into the neighborhood where I currently live), it was brought to my attention that a thoroughly unpleasant individual resided in the house across the street and two doors down from mine. Not only was he known to be crude and obnoxious in his personal habits, it was widely rumored that he routinely and mercilessly beat his three sons. These reports disturbed me, to say the least, so one day I plucked up the courage to go down to his place and tell him, in no uncertain terms, that he had better straighten up and fly right. He didn’t, so I shot him.

Now I’m one of those people naive enough to believe that performing an act of kindness like this for three newly-liberated orphans would be enough to earn me their undying gratitude, but such was not the case. In fact, they seemed curiously mistrustful of me after that.

I suppose their reaction was understandable under the circumstances, and I must admit that I did feel a little responsible for the death of their father (I had killed him, after all). But as I told the children myself, (once they’d calmed down a bit),”Look, are we going to continue to dwell on the past and spend a lot of unproductive time discussing ‘how we got to this point’, or are we going to sit down together like men and figure out how to move forward on this thing?” Before long, the boys (who, at that point, ranged in age from eleven down to six) took one look at the smoking gun in my hand and decided to take a fresh look at the facts as they then existed on the ground.

The truth is that once the rental truck finished hauling away all the unnecessary clutter that had sprung up during the unspeakable reign of their despotic father (including a completely outdated plasma TV, a Land Rover with dangerously under-inflated tires, a broken-down pallet of rat-infested gold bullion, and a frightfully miscataloged collection of post-impressionist paintings), the poor kids finally had enough room to run around the house without tripping over hazardous piles of stuff every time they turned around. And since I didn’t see anybody else volunteering to do it, I agreed to store the whole god-awful mess at my house, at least until the boys were old enough to have adult grandchildren capable of looking after it in a responsible way.

Anyway, like I said, it’s been four years since their father’s untimely demise, and even now I don’t feel I can trust them to act responsibly unless I’m personally there to keep an eye on them. For one thing, every time I go out to get them another bag of food pellets at the pet store, they reach through the steel bars on the windows like idiots and try to pick the padlock on the outside of the front door. Even worse, all I have to do is forget to feed them for a while, and within a week or so they start fighting amongst themselves. I just wish they’d learn to take responsibility for their own behavior, so I wouldn’t have to. After all, I only got involved in all this because I thought I could help out. The last thing I wanted was an “open-ended” commitment, for God’s sake.

As it happened, a few months ago, I finally settled on a new approach. I told the boys I’d be “willing to stand down as soon as they were ready to stand up.” They asked me what I meant, so I told them, “Look guys, it’s simple; If you can prove to me your willingness to pool your available resources and share them with each other in an equitable way, I’ll turn the house back over to you, and you can enjoy the boundless fruits of democracy.”

The good new is, they’ve all agreed in principle to the conditions of my offer. Make no mistake - it’s an important first step, yet difficult challenges lie ahead that will continue to test my resolve. Recently I presented the young men with a draft of changes they must agree to as a prerequisite to earning their full measure of personal sovereignty. These proposed rule changes I refer to collectively as the “Methane Resources Production and Sock-Sharing Bill.” Here’s how it works:

Between them, the three boys own one-and-a-half pairs of socks. This means that if they simply stop their endless bickering and divvy up the socks evenly, they’ll find themselves in possession of one full sock each, which is more than sufficient to provide warmth and protection for one of their feet during the frigid winter months ahead.

And that, essentially, is all there is to it.

Yet (for reasons perhaps known best to them), the parties concerned seem unwilling or unable to agree to these simple terms. After months of contentious wrangling over various alternative methods of sharing out the three socks (each of which favors one of the boys at the expense of the other two) they have reached a virtual impasse. Given this unfortunate development, I can only hope that everyone involved will eventually discover in a comprehensive solution a satisfactory means of meeting his particular needs.

But whatever the obstacles that lie in my way, I cannot afford to abandon my efforts, as the well-being of these impressionable young people must continue to be my paramount concern, now, and for the foreseeable future. Failure is not an option…

Author’s note: In the past few days, some irresponsible persons have been posting flyers around the neighborhood accusing me of enriching myself at the expense of the young men under my protection. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that I should (at my own expense, I suppose) double the number of socks available, thus providing all three of them with an entire “pair” of socks. Needless to say, anyone familiar with the less well-publicized provisions of the agreement knows full well that such a profligate waste of cloth footwear is rendered utterly superfluous by Section 914B of the proposed agreement, which unambiguously stipulates that “each party to the said contract (insofar as he is designated a ward of the aforementioned ad hoc guardian) shall, as a show of good faith, undertake (at a time and place agreed upon by said guardian) to amputate his own right leg above the knee with a bacterially-infected oyster knife…”

Mark W. Bradley is a history teacher and political satirist in Sacramento, California.

“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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Add comment September 13th, 2007

The General — “ass-kissing little chicken-shit”

… and if we aren’t careful, that might be President Chicken Shit to you, citizen! Yes, General Dave has ambitions — and while the world is hesitant to suggest he isn’t a hero, a patriot and an all-round-great guy, I’ll just say I found him stiff and unappealing. Pappy had Norman Schwarzkopf, larger than life and full of it [life AND military mind] but you could relate to him in personal terms … Dubby has been forced to wait until the curdled cream rose to the top, and has given us the best of what was left over after the wiser military leaders were skimmed from the mix.

I don’t want to be too hard on old Dave — he is what he is. You can’t kill a general for being a general; he’s just doing his job, ass-kissing notwithstanding — but I’d like to point out that in the military pecking order the grunts are hero’s and patriots by the very fact of showing up [and until proven otherwise] but I’ve never heard of a modern-day General getting fragged in the heat of battle, they’re the well-protected “suits” moving the pawns for the geopolitical will of their Capital Hill chess masters. These guys rise to the top by being hard-nosed and subservient, driven and loyal-to-a-fault. The flap, years back, about whether or not Wes Clark had the skills to be president showed the public misperception about military officers; they’re political animals — but some are driven more by real public service and others, by ambition and competition, the “thrill of the game.” In short, Dubby’s man, Dave … and the authoritarian model that makes Republicans everywhere hard … ummm … headed.

Dave’s ambitions, in this collection, and his feud with Admiral Fallon — THE question he got real with, American safety, and the fallout — and don’t miss Joe Lieberman’s most recent crackpottery; dangerous little jerk, Joe, with six more interminable years in the Senate.

Jude

Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge
Gareth Porter, IPS News
Sep 12

WASHINGTON, (IPS) - In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus’s superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be “an ass-kissing little chickenshit” and added, “I hate people like that”, the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

That extraordinarily contentious start of Fallon’s mission to Baghdad led to more meetings marked by acute tension between the two commanders. Fallon went on develop his own alternative to Petraeus’s recommendation for continued high levels of U.S. troops in Iraq during the summer.

The enmity between the two commanders became public knowledge when the Washington Post reported Sep. 9 on intense conflict within the administration over Iraq. The story quoted a senior official as saying that referring to “bad relations” between them is “the understatement of the century”.

Fallon’s derision toward Petraeus reflected both the CENTCOM commander’s personal distaste for Petraeus’s style of operating and their fundamental policy differences over Iraq, according to the sources.

The policy context of Fallon’s extraordinarily abrasive treatment of his subordinate was Petraeus’s agreement in February to serve as front man for the George W. Bush administration’s effort to sell its policy of increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq to Congress.

In a highly unusual political role for an officer who had not yet taken command of a war, Petraeus was installed in the office of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, in early February just before the Senate debated Bush’s troop increase. According to a report in The Washington Post Feb. 7, senators were then approached on the floor and invited to go McConnell’s office to hear Petraeus make the case for the surge policy.

Fallon was strongly opposed to Petraeus’s role as pitch man for the surge policy in Iraq adopted by Bush in December as putting his own interests ahead of a sound military posture in the Middle East and Southwest Asia — the area for which Fallon’s CENTCOM is responsible.

The CENTCOM commander believed the United States should be withdrawing troops from Iraq urgently, largely because he saw greater dangers elsewhere in the region. “He is very focused on Pakistan,” said a source familiar with Fallon’s thinking, “and trying to maintain a difficult status quo with Iran.”

By the time Fallon took command of CENTCOM in March, Pakistan had become the main safe haven for Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda to plan and carry out its worldwide operations, as well as being an extremely unstable state with both nuclear weapons and the world’s largest population of Islamic extremists.

Plans for continued high troop levels in Iraq would leave no troops available for other contingencies in the region.

Fallon was reported by the New York Times to have been determined to achieve results “as soon as possible”. The notion of a long war, in contrast, seemed to connote an extended conflict in which Iraq was but a chapter.

Fallon also expressed great scepticism about the basic assumption underlying the surge strategy, which was that it could pave the way for political reconciliation in Iraq. In the lead story Sep. 9, The Washington Post quoted a “senior administration official” as saying that Fallon had been “saying from Day One, ‘This isn’t working.’ ”

One of Fallon’s first moves upon taking command of CENTCOM was to order his subordinates to avoid the term “long war” — a phrase Bush and Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates had used to describe the fight against terrorism.

Fallon was signaling his unhappiness with the policy of U.S. occupation of Iraq for an indeterminate period. Military sources explained that Fallon was concerned that the concept of a long war would alienate Middle East publics by suggesting that U.S. troops would remain in the region indefinitely.

During the summer, according to the Post Sep. 9 report, Fallon began to develop his own plans for redefine the U.S. mission in Iraq, including a plan for withdrawal of three-quarters of the U.S. troop strength by the end of 2009.

The conflict between Fallon and Petraeus over Iraq came to a head in early September. According to the Post story, Fallon expressed views on Iraq that were sharply at odds with those of Petraeus in a three-way conversation with Bush on Iraq the previous weekend. Petraeus argued for keeping as many troops in Iraq for as long as possible to cement any security progress, but Fallon argued that a strategic withdrawal from Iraq was necessary to have sufficient forces to deal with other potential threats in the region.

Fallon’s presentation to Bush of the case against Petraeus’s recommendation for keeping troop levels in Iraq at the highest possible level just before Petraeus was to go public with his recommendations was another sign that Petraeus’s role as chief spokesperson for the surge policy has created a deep rift between him and the nation’s highest military leaders. Bush presumably would not have chosen to invite an opponent of the surge policy to make such a presentation without lobbying by the top brass.

Fallon had a “visceral distaste” for what he regarded as Petraeus’s sycophantic behaviour in general, which had deeper institutional roots, according to a military source familiar with his thinking.

Fallon is a veteran of 35 years in the Navy, operating in an institutional culture in which an officer is expected to make enemies in the process of advancement. “If you are Navy captain and don’t have two or three enemies, you’re not doing your job,” says the source.

Fallon acquired a reputation for a willingness to stand up to powerful figures during his tenure as commander in chief of the Pacific Command from February 2005 to March 2007. He pushed hard for a conciliatory line toward and China, which put him in conflict with senior military and civilian officials with a vested interest in pointing to China as a future rival and threat.

He demonstrated his independence from the White House when he refused in February to go along with a proposal to send a third naval carrier task force to the Persian Gulf, as reported by IPS in May. Fallon questioned the military necessity for the move, which would have signaled to Iran a readiness to go to war. Fallon also privately vowed that there would be no war against Iran on his watch, implying that he would quit rather than accept such a policy.

A crucial element of Petraeus’s path of advancement in the Army, on the other hand, was through serving as an aide to senior generals. He was assistant executive officer to the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Carl Vuono, and later executive assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Henry Shelton. His experience taught him that cultivating senior officers is the key to success.

The contrasting styles of the two men converged with their conflict over Iraq to produce one of the most intense clashes between U.S. military leaders in recent history. ++

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in June 2005

CentCom Chief Fallon: Petraeus Is ‘An Ass-Kissing, Little Chickensh*t,’ ‘I Hate People Like That’
ThinkProgress

During the Iraq war, the Central Command (CENTCOM) head — who leads U.S. operations in the entire Middle East region — and the Multinational Force Commander (MNF) have regularly testified together about the course of the war in Iraq.

Former-MNF Commander Gen. George Casey and his CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid constantly briefed Congress about the situation in Iraq and its regional effects. In at least four public hearings after Casey took office in 2004, the pair testified together:

Senate Armed Services [6/23/05]
House Armed Services [6/23/05]
House Armed Services [9/29/05]
Senate Armed Services [9/29/05]

In January, President Bush replaced Abizaid and Casey, who were “surge” skeptics, with Adm. William Fallon and Gen. David Petraeus. This week, Petraeus — in the first public hearings since taking on his new role — delivered his Iraq assessment to great media fanfare. But where was his boss, Admiral Fallon? Inter-Press Service suggests animosity between the two might be one reason for Fallon’s absence:

Fallon told Petraeus [in March] that he considered him to be “an ass-kissing little chickensh*t” and added, “I hate people like that”, the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

The Washington Post reported this weekend that there is an internal military debate, described as “Armageddon,” brewing between Petraeus and Fallon because the two men have “profoundly different views of the U.S. role in Iraq.”

Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) announced today that he will be asking Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) to call Fallon to testify on “his views on the region.” Webb decried the lack of independence in Petraeus’s reporting, observing that there are “a lot of control factors going on that haven’t been visible” from the one-sided testimony of Petraeus:

WEBB: [T]here’s something of a kabuki going on right now. You know, the Petraeus report was brought in. On the one hand they’re calling it independent; on the other, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, from my understanding, gave a one-hour exclusive interview to Fox News after their first day of testimony. […]

So it was a very narrow and focused two days of hearings…we need to hear from people like Admiral Fallon and others to get a sense of how the region is in play.

He was, by many accounts, questioning keeping these troop levels this high. […]

So I’m going to be recommending to Senator Levin that we get Admiral Fallon in and get his views on the region.

President Petraeus? Iraqi official recalls the day US general revealed ambition
Patrick Cockburn, Independent UK
13 September 2007

The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, expressed long-term interest in running for the US presidency when he was stationed in Baghdad, according to a senior Iraqi official who knew him at that time.

Sabah Khadim, then a senior adviser at Iraq’s Interior Ministry, says General Petraeus discussed with him his ambition when the general was head of training and recruitment of the Iraqi army in 2004-05.

“I asked him if he was planning to run in 2008 and he said, ‘No, that would be too soon’,” Mr Khadim, who now lives in London, said.

General Petraeus has a reputation in the US Army for being a man of great ambition. If he succeeds in reversing America’s apparent failure in Iraq, he would be a natural candidate for the White House in the presidential election in 2012.

His able defence of the “surge” in US troop numbers in Iraq as a success before Congress this week has made him the best-known soldier in America. An articulate, intelligent and energetic man, he has always shown skill in managing the media.

But General Petraeus’s open interest in the presidency may lead critics to suggest that his own political ambitions have influenced him in putting an optimistic gloss on the US military position in Iraq .

Mr Khadim was a senior adviser in the Iraqi Interior Ministry in 2004-05 when Iyad Allawi was prime minister.

“My office was in the Adnan Palace in the Green Zone, which was close to General Petraeus’s office,” Mr Khadim recalls. He had meetings with the general because the Interior Ministry was involved in vetting the loyalty of Iraqis recruited as army officers. Mr Khadim was critical of the general’s choice of Iraqis to work with him.

For a soldier whose military abilities and experience are so lauded by the White House, General Petraeus has had a surprisingly controversial career in Iraq. His critics hold him at least partly responsible for three debacles: the capture of Mosul by the insurgents in 2004; the failure to train an effective Iraqi army and the theft of the entire Iraqi arms procurement budget in 2004-05.

General Petraeus went to Iraq during the invasion of 2003 as commander of the 101st Airborne Division and had not previously seen combat. He first became prominent when the 101st was based in Mosul, in northern Iraq, where he pursued a more conciliatory line toward former Baathists and Iraqi army officers than the stated US policy.

His efforts were deemed successful. When the 101st left in February 2004, it had lost only 60 troops in combat and accidents. General Petraeus had built up the local police by recruiting officers who had previously worked for Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus.

Although Mosul remained quiet for some months after, the US suffered one of its worse setbacks of the war in November 2004 when insurgents captured most of the city. The 7,000 police recruited by General Petraeus either changed sides or went home. Thirty police stations were captured, 11,000 assault rifles were lost and $41m (£20m) worth of military equipment disappeared. Iraqi army units abandoned their bases.

The general’s next job was to oversee the training of a new Iraqi army. As head of the Multinational Security Transition Command, General Petraeus claimed that his efforts were proving successful. In an article in The Washington Post in September 2004, he wrote: “Training is on track and increasing in capacity.

Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being re-established.” This optimism turned out be misleading; three years later the Iraqi army is notoriously ineffective and corrupt.

General Petraeus was in charge of the Security Transition Command at the time that the Iraqi procurement budget of $1.2bn was stolen. “It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history,” Iraq’s Finance Minister, Ali Allawi, said. “Huge amounts of money disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal.”

Mr Khadim is sceptical that the “surge” is working. Commenting on the US military alliance with the Sunni tribes in Anbar province, he said: “They will take your money, but when the money runs out they will change sides again.” ++

Asking The Right Questions About Iraq
We Haven’t Lost In Iraq, But We Aren’t Winning
Bob Schieffer [’s commentary on Face the Nation this week]
Sept. 9, 2007

WASHINGTON, (CBS) Weekly commentary by CBS Evening News chief Washington correspondent and Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer.

For months now, the administration has been telling us, let’s wait until we hear from General Petraeus before we decide where to go next in Iraq.

Well, tomorrow we hear.

The atmosphere is much like the time during the Vietnam War, when the commander then, General William Westmoreland, was brought home to answer the question: Are we winning?

He assured us we were, and the government offered a blizzard of statistics to back him up. They weren’t wrong. They were just irrelevant.

All we really learned then is that we were asking the wrong question. When we have to ask, “are we winning?” we’re probably losing. Victory is always obvious.

The right question would have been: Is it worth the cost?

America eventually concluded it was not, and we left the war.

Let me preempt that question to General Petraeus. We haven’t lost this war, but we’re not winning it. We’re hanging on. Victory would be obvious. Iraqi families would be strolling the streets of Baghdad, and Osama bin Laden would be walking out of a cave somewhere with his hands up.

Instead of that question, let’s hope the general will be asked what we so often forgot during Vietnam: Is this worth the cost in lives and money?

And here’s a follow-up: When the Iraqi parliament went on vacation during August, I gave up on trying to help them find a way to have an effective government. They have to do that. What we need to know now is whether keeping a large American military force in Iraq is the best way to make America safer.

To me, that’s the real question. ++

Petraeus: I “Don’t Know” If Iraq War Makes U.S. Safer
David Corn, The Nation
09/11/2007

Did General David Petraeus today suggest that the war in Iraq may not make the United States safer?

During his second day of appearances on Capitol Hill, Petraeus this afternoon appeared before the Senate armed services committee. Fortified with charts and graphs, he presented the same we’re-on-the-right-course pitch he delivered to the House armed services and foreign affairs committees (on Monday) and to the Senate foreign relations committee (this morning). During the Q&A round at the armed services committee, Senator John Warner, the Virginia Republican who used to chair the committee and who has called for beginning a disengagement in Iraq, took a few sharp (albeit respectful) jabs at Petraeus, noting that one intelligence report after another has said that political reconciliation in Iraq could be a bridge too far. He then asked Petraeus a pointed question: “Do you feel that [Iraq war] is making America safer”?

Petraeus paused before responding. He then said: “I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq.”

That was, of course, a non-answer. And Warner wasn’t going to let the general dodge the bullet. He repeated the question: “Does the [Iraq war] make America safer?”

Petraeus replied, “I don’t know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind.”

Don’t know? Is it possible that the war is not making the United States safer? Petraeus went on to note that he has “taken into account” the war’s impact on the U.S. military and that it’s his job to recommend to the president the best course for reaching “the objectives of the policy” in Iraq. Yet he did not say that the Iraq war is essential to the national security of the United States. Warner did not press the general any further on this point. The senator’s time was up.

That was quite a statement from the fellow who is supposed to save Bush’s war. He advocates pursuing Bush’s course of action in Iraq but he cannot attest that this effort is crucial for America’s safety. Is that being a good soldier? [open link for video] ++

Sen. Hagel on Iraq: ‘Where is this going?’
Frank James, The Swamp, Baltimore Sun
September 11, 2007

Questioning of Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Amb. Ryan Crocker by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was much livelier than was the case yesterday when the two men appeared before two House committees.

Some of the most caustic questioning came from Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who has long been the Bush Administration’s harshest Republican critic in the Senate. Hagel clearly had a lot he wanted to get off his chest.

From his questions, it was clear Hagel was disatisfied with the assessments he heard from the officer and the diplomat, with the senator at one point saying to them:

Ambassador and General, as much as you want to put a good picture on this, and that’s partly, I understand, your job, and I understand it’s your responsibility, and I don’t question you believe exactly what you have come before this committee to say. But I have to ask this question: Where is this going?

Here’s the interchange between Hagel, who announced yesterday that he wouldn’t be running for re-election or anything else next year, and the general and ambassador.

SEN. CHARLES HAGEL (R-NE): Mr. Chairman, thank you.

Gentlemen, welcome. As Senator Dodd and others have noted this morning, every American is proud of the service of our American military and those who are serving in whatever capacity in a very difficult situation in Iraq. And we should not at all confuse the sense of support and the gratitude that all Americans have for your leadership and your service.

That said, we, just as you, each have responsibilities. We are elected by the people of our states. To question strategy is not unpatriotic.

Now, with that said, Ambassador, General, when you look at — and I know you have — the preceding reports that we have talked about today and you have added to with information, numbers, General Jones’ report, the General Accountability report — I have spent some time

with Stuart Bowen, the IG for Iraqi Reconstruction — the latest National Intelligence Estimate, Anthony Cordesman’s latest report, thread throughout those reports and then listening carefully to what the two of you have said this morning are some very bright-line contradictions.

And let’s start with the one that almost everyone that I’m aware of has said the core issue is, the most important issue, and that is political reconciliation. And I have quotes from you, General Petraeus, and you, Ambassador Crocker, from the president.

Every senior member of our government involved in our policy and our strategy in Iraq all agree, as you’ve said, General Petraeus, there will be no military solution in Iraq. Now when you look at the reports — let’s start with the question I asked the comp. general — comptroller general last week, when I asked him his analysis of the current Iraqi government, is it a functioning government, and his response to me was, at best it is dysfunctional. You may disagree with that.

But when you take the sum total analysis of these reports that we’ve looked at, they lead us to a pretty clear conclusion — that in fact this government in Iraq is dysfunctional, and when you add further to what the chief of staff of the United States Army had to say, General Casey, about tactical effects of surges and how minimal they are and how they will, as Admiral Fallon has said, quote, “no amount of time will make or troops will make much difference unless there is a political reconciliation,” I doubt either of you disagree with that analysis. If you do, please tell the committee why.

The other part of this is, it seems to me logical that when you flood a zone with more troops, when you put more troops in Baghdad or Anbar province, you’re going to see some consequence to that; you’re going to see some result.

So I don’t think that that’s particularly news that we’re — we have inserted more American troops costing more American lives. We’ve seen some differences. But as just as one of the most flawed dynamics of our policy invading Iraq four-and-a-half years ago is we never had enough troops, we still don’t have enough troops, so it seems to be logical that it would follow.

But when you look at the southern part of Iraq, which I noted neither one of you noted today, one of the senior members of General Jones’s task force said to me when he returned, we’ve probably lost Southern Iraq. And I said, you must be kidding. He said no. He said, the four provinces of Southern Iraq are gone; they are lawless; there’s no Iraqi national army down there.

The police are corrupt, as indicated in General Jones’s report, incidentally, as well as others. The British used to have 40,000 troops in Iraq. As you all know, they are at about 5,000. They’re huddled in the airport in Basra.

What I was told by not just this individual from General Jones’s group but other reports, intelligence reports and other reports I get, actually in the newspaper, is lawless gangs of marauders of Shi’a militia are in charge in Basra and those four provinces.

As you both know, two governors have been assassinated in the last two months. I was told by one individual who has been down there recently that we are essentially paying tribute to these people to keep open the port.

Now, the contradictions in my mind, Ambassador and General, as much as you want to put a good picture on this, and that’s partly, I understand, your job, and I understand it’s your responsibility, and I don’t question you believe exactly what you have come before this committee to say. But I have to ask this question: Where is this going?

Now, let’s don’t get down into the underbrush of the 18 benchmarks. And by the way, let’s clear some of the record on that. Those 18 benchmarks didn’t come from the Congress of the United States. Those benchmarks came from the Iraqi government and this administration. Somehow it’s the Congress dictated these benchmarks. Well, we didn’t. We didn’t.

Let’s not argue about who’s got better numbers or better numbers in the context of more frequent numbers. Let’s get above the underbrush and look at the strategic context, which essentially we’ve never done. That’s not your fault, General. It’s not Ambassador Crocker’s fault. It’s this administration’s fault. We have never ever looked at Iraq from the larger strategic context of, not of Iraq only but Iran, Syria and the Middle East.

Now, where is this going to go? Because the question that is going to continue to be asked, and you all know it and you have to live with it when you ask questions, as we all do, about, is it worth it, the continued investment of American blood and treasure?

When Senator Dodd presents to you the evaluation of one lowly enlisted man and, by the way, I assume you read The New York Times piece two weeks ago — seven NCOs, in Iraq today, finishing up 15-month commitments.

Are we going to dismiss those seven NCOs? Are they ignorant? They laid out a pretty different scenario, General, Ambassador, from what you’re laying out today.

Senator Biden said to me once — I think it was on our first trip to Iraq. He turned around, and I was gone. He said, where’d Senator Hagel go? He found me out talking to the guys in the Jeep, the corporals and the sergeants who have to do the dying and the fighting.

I’ve always found that you want an honest evaluation, and not through charts, not through the White House evaluations. You ask a sergeant or a corporal what they think. I’ll be on them every time, as I know you will. General, I know you will.

Now, where’s this going? We’ve got too many disconnects here, General, way too many disconnects. Are we going to dismiss the five reports that I just noted?

I would say to you, Ambassador, one of your quotes: If we don’t be careful, we’re going to see Iraq devolve into a civil war. Come on. Our National Intelligence Report earlier this year said we’re in a civil war. It’s sectarian violence. But yet you said that in your testimony this morning.

You gave us a great inventory of what a brutal, bloody dictator Saddam was. Well, we know that. That’s not the issue here. Are we going to continue to invest American blood and treasure at the same rate we are doing now?

For what? The president said let’s buy time. “Buy time”? For what? Every report I’ve seen — and I assume both of you agree with this — there’s been really very little, if any, political process that is the ultimate core issue — political reconciliation in Iraq.

I know my time is up, but I would appreciate, Mr. Chairman, if I could get an answer with — from these two gentlemen on that question.

Thank you.

AMB. CROCKER: Thank you, Senator. I’ll just touch very briefly on the key and critical points you raise here.

There is an enormous amount of dysfunctionality in Iraq; that is beyond question. The government, in many respects, is dysfunctional, and members of the government know it.

There is a lot of discontent about that in and out of government, and, if you will, that’s some qualified good news. People who previously espoused a strict sectarian or ethnic line in how positions were apportioned, for example, are now saying this isn’t working. That’s part of the debate in Iraq and a fairly common part of the debate. The application is going to be a lot more difficult, but Iraqis are talking about precisely that kind of dysfunctionality.

A second point I’d make is on security and violence. Iraq, in my judgment, almost completely unraveled in 2006 and the very beginning of 2007 as sectarian violence after February ‘06 just spiraled up.

Under those conditions, it is extremely difficult — it is impossible to proceed with effective governance or an effective process of national reconciliation. It’s just in the last couple of months that those levels of violence have come down in a measurable way.

And we can have lots of debates about what measure is used, but the one that, as a Foreign Service officer, that I take the most seriously is the perception among Iraq’s leaders — all the main communities — that the security situation has improved. That gives you an environment when you can start working on meaningful national reconciliation.

And that’s why I placed an emphasis in my statement on the need for Iraqis to work out these fundamental questions that are as yet unresolved: What is this state going to look like? What is the relation between the provinces and the center and the provinces and each other? That’s still unresolved. Now they’ve got — they’re starting to get the space to work on it.

What I do point to as a moderately encouraging factor is that when security does improve, as we saw in Anbar, political life starts up again.

For example, in Anbar now every significant town has a municipal council, has an elected mayor. That was not the case six months ago. We have also seen provinces and the center connecting to each other.

And if there is one thing where the government is showing some functionality on, in marked difference to last year, it’s distributing revenues. Provincial budgets are being funded and are being funded in a reasonably equitable way. We do not hear from the Sunnis that they’re getting shortchanged, for example.

So that suggests to me that at a minimum now, we’ve got an environment developing — not fully developed, but developing — with violence at low enough levels where a meaningful discussion on national reconciliation can take place. That’s now what needs to happen.

GEN. PETRAEUS: Senator, first of all, with respect, my responsibility as I see it is not to give a good picture, it’s to give an accurate picture, as forthright a picture as I can provide, and that is what I’ve tried to do.

Second, we certainly will not be at the same rate of forces. What I — if the recommendations are approved, as I mentioned, the Marine Expeditionary Unit, 2,000-plus, will be coming out this month and we’ll then draw down one-quarter of our ground combat brigades and two additional Marine battalions.

SEN. BIDEN: General, point of clarification; excuse me.

GEN. PETRAEUS: Yes, sir.

SEN. BIDEN: Was that expeditionary force — they were scheduled to come out anyway, right?

GEN. PETRAEUS: Sir, they are scheduled to come out, but I could have easily requested an extension of them.

SEN. BIDEN: No, no, I understand. You could have —

GEN. PETRAEUS: And in fact, we were — I considered that. We did request an extension earlier, and that was granted. And in fact so we are now allowing them to go home.

SEN. BIDEN: Excuse me again — (inaudible). You extended them to 15 months?

GEN. PETRAEUS: No, sir.

SEN. BIDEN: (How long ?).

GEN. PETRAEUS: This is a MEU that was an afloat MEU, came ashore a couple months ago, was extended on the ground just to continue the work — they’re working north of Fallujah cleaning up a pocket of al Qaeda — allow the Iraqi army to go in there and to replace them in that area. And they will now go home without replacement.

The key is, without replacement, actually. The MEU is scheduled to rotate out, and that was going to happen, but we’re not asking for the Central Command Strategic Reserve again. That’s the point.

SEN. BIDEN: Thank you for the clarification.

GEN. PETRAEUS: And then as I mentioned, the other forces. Another important point, Senator, is that many of the positive developments have not just been a result of additional forces. In some cases, they have.

There’s neighborhoods in Baghdad where we are sitting on a sectarian fault line trying to stabilize it, to stop the eating that continues, that literally just — the sectarian violence that never stops until the area is stabilized. And there are some neighborhoods where we are indeed trying to do that. The seven sergeants are in one such neighborhood.

But in a number of cases, the progress is not just because of more forces sitting on a problem; it’s the result of a fundamental change on the ground. Nowhere is that more visible, obviously, than Anbar province, where — and this bears out the whole idea that it is about political change. What happened in Anbar is politics.

It was the result of tribes, sheikhs saying, “No more,” to al Qaeda. That’s a political decision, to oppose an organization with which they were at least tacitly in league and perhaps supporting. And that has happened in other areas now as well. In Diyala province, a very, very challenging area, mixed ethnic — in fact, Sunni, Shi’a and Kurd — the sheikhs have come together there andsaid, “We reject extremism of any form,” including, therefore, Shi’a militia extremism.

GEN. PETRAEUS: And the government and we are trying to figure out how to help them, how to build on that, how to use that to augment, to reinforce, build on the success that our soldiers and Iraqi forces achieved in clearing Baqubah of al Qaeda, to then hold it and continue that effort with the support, again, of the tribes.

And that is hugely important, because that is a shift. Sunni Arabs by and large in Iraq for a number of years were supportive, at the least — at least tacitly, again — to al Qaeda because of their feelings of dispossession, disrespect, unemployment and a variety of other reasons. And that’s an important development. That’s an important phenomenon that we obviously want to work very hard to reinforce while ensuring that we still tie it in to the center sufficiently, so that it doesn’t create additional problems down the road.

We’re talking about really sort of finding who are the irreconcilables and trying to isolate them, and then to help the Iraqi government to bring the reconcilables to become part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. And that is what has happened, again most notably in Anbar, but is applicable to some degree in other areas as well.

Thank you, sir.

SEN. HAGEL: Thank you.

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Petraeus Under Heavy Fire
MARK THOMPSON, Time mag
Wednesday, Sep. 12, 2007

WASHINGTON — It took three hearings before General David Petraeus finally got asked the