Hope is not a plan

American contractor Roy Hallums and an Iraqi national were rescued from a farmhouse just south of Baghdad. Hallums was kidnapped on the first of November, 2004.

The BBC story

Two British soldiers are in an Iraqi prison in Basra:

The men, who were reportedly under cover, are thought to have exchanged fire with police, after failing to stop at a checkpoint.

Two British tanks, sent to the police station where the soldiers are being held, were set alight in clashes.

The BBC story (note that scrolling down will take you to a picture of a British soldier on fire, rolling out of one of the burning vehicles. I hope he's okay.

Officials said they had received no reports of UK personnel being injured, but local council spokesman Nadhim al Jabari said two civilians were killed in the clashes.

The two British soldiers jailed in Basra are now freed. Just how is a matter of perspective:

According to the MoD, the release was negotiated, though one wall was demolished during the men's retrieval.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry claims six tanks were used to smash the prison walls in a raid, called a "barbaric act of aggression" by Basra governor Mohammed al-Waili.

Witnesses claim 150 prisoners escaped during the raid.

Iraqi officials say that no prisoners escaped.

Here's the BBC story.

...and an explanation of my title.

Injuries to the burning soldiers from the prior report are said to be "minor."

The BBC continues to report on the situation in Basra.

As I'd guessed when reading the first article, the two British soldiers were SAS. Delta would be running around in wigs and such for an American operation; SAS would do the same here. According to the British Army, the two soldiers were arrested by police and then turned over to a Shia militia, prompting what is now acknowledged as a rescue by British forces. In that light, I can understand why they went ahead and used force -- it's no good having British soldiers handed over to militia troops.

More in the extended, including the view from Al Jazeera.

Private Lynndie England is being retried:

Her defence lawyer said he would argue that her learning disability made her too compliant to authority figures.

...and...

In court in Fort Hood in Texas on Wednesday, defence lawyers told the jury of five military officers that they would argue that Pte England was overly influenced by Graner. [Her boyfriend at the time.]

"She thinks: 'I love him, he loves me, he's not going to do something to hurt me'."

So the basic defense is that she was too compliant and trusted her boyfriend not to let her do anything illegal.

I think this case highlights the ease with which people mistreat other people. If you make an environment where it can happen and it's allowed or encouraged, then it will happen.

Woman Suicide Bomber Strikes Iraq

As the article notes, it's the first female suicide bomber (that they know of, I suppose) since the initial invasion. Here's the other recent bombings, as tallied by the BBC:

Wednesday's bomb was the fourth major attack on Iraqi security forces in as many days.

On Sunday nine people were killed when a suicide bomber drove into a convoy of Iraqi special forces on patrol in the capital.

George Bush noted that there may be an increase in violence leading up to the referendum on the proposed Iraqi constitution. He kicked out this line again:

"They can't stand elections; the thought of people voting is anathema to them."

I'm sick of this inept attempt to place this conflict into some odd sword-and-sorcery fantasy mold. It's not that the insurgents are somehow burned by free elections as vampires are burned by sunlight. Instead, they've very rationally determined that they can achieve their end goal, be it a Sunni Iraq, worldwide Caliphate, or whatever, by targeting those who participate in key features of a working, civil society.

They're evil, for murdering folks like this, but they're not fantasy-book evil. They won't be scared back under the bed by free elections and they don't hiss dramatically and recoil at the sight of an American flag.

Perhaps Bush is just assuming they're knee-jerk reactionaries like him. Unfortunately, they're a lot more calculating and rational. Good can't win just by being good -- it has to be good and smart.

A letter to the president, inspired by the prior post:

Mr. Bush --

"They can't stand elections; the thought of people voting is anathema to them."

You said this recently while warning of a possible upswing in violence before the constitutional referendum in Iraq. Though the threat of violence is real, your thinking isn't, and that must change if we're going to succeed in Iraq.

You say that "voting is anathema" to the Iraqi insurgents. I say that I'm sick of this kind of magical thinking that couches the conflict in terms of some sword-and-sorcery fantasy story. Voting isn't anathema to the insurgents -- they don't burst into flame at the sight of a free election and wither into nothingness when a ballot is cast. They have, instead, rationally determined that they can best achieve their end goal, be it a Sunni Iraq or a worldwide caliphate, by targeting the construction of a working, civil society.

I'm deeply disturbed that a violent sect that wants the world to live under medieval Islam nonetheless thinks more clearly than you do. This is not a fantasy world, you are not the hero and the insurgents are not evil goblins. They're thinking carefully and choosing their best possible course of action.

Are you?

Believers in the Mandean faith reside largely in Iraq and Iran. Following the breakdown of law in post-invasion Iraq, many have been fleeing the country to avoid persecution.

The BBC story

Mandeans, described in this Wikipedia article, are the last remaining gnostics. They believe John the Baptist is a great prophet, but do not believe in Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. They number in the tens of thousands, and now face great danger in Iraq:

Mandeans have traditionally been protected under Islamic law, as believers in one god - like Jews and Christians.

"Either you embrace Islam and enjoy safety and coexist amongst us, or leave our land and stop toying with our principles. Otherwise, the sword will be the judge between belief and blasphemy."

Right there is the value of civil society, defined by its absence.

The BBC has a good overview article about advances in roadside bombs since the end of the invasion. Three adaptations have made them far more effective:

1. The use of shaped charges
2. The use of much, much larger quantities of explosives
3. Mounting them to attack side and roof armor, rather than the baseplate (that is most heavily armored in convoy vehicles)

Also discussed is the adaptive race between triggering mechanisms and countermeasures. Insurgents have largely abandoned radio triggers for unjammable methods such as landlines and IR tripwires.

The punchline is that we've passed the point where physical countermeasures such as additional vehicle armor will be effective against IEDs. What is needed now is better prediction to allow avoidance.

American casualties in Iraq hit the arbitrary threshold of 2,000 today.

According to this BBC story unofficial estimates put Iraqi civilian deaths at 25,000. I've heard much higher estimates, but will have to look into that later.

By comparison:

American Revolution: 217,000 soldiers, 4,435 combat deaths (2%)
War of 1812: 286,730 soldiers, 2,260 combat deaths (0.8%)
Mexican War: 78,718 soldiers, 1,733 combat deaths (2.2%)
Spanish-American War: 306,760 soldiers, 385 combat deaths (0.1%)
World War I: 4,735,000 soldiers, 53,402 combat deaths (1.1%)
World War II: 16,113,000 soldiers, 291,557 combat deaths (1.8%)
Korean War: 1,789,000 soldiers, 33,741 combat deaths (1.9%)
Vietnam War: 3,403,000 soldiers, 47,410 combat deaths (1.4%)
Gulf War: 665,476 soldiers, 147 combat deaths (0.02%)

These figures were taken from infoplease.com

Iraq War: roughly 350,000 soldiers, 2,000 combat deaths (0.6%)

I don't know the rotation schedule, so my estimate of troops that have passed through Iraq is a back-of-the-envelop rough based on total numbers at any one time, taken from documents such as this one.

A group of Shia Mehdi Army militia men (followers of Moqtada Sadr) went into the town of Nahrawan near Baghdad along with Iraqi police to retrieve a member of their militia who had been kidnapped by Sunni fighters. They were ambushed on the way out, leaving an assorted group of twenty militia and police dead.

The BBC story

The town has a mixed Sunni and Shia population, and some Arabic television stations said the clashes came against a background of tensions between the two communities.

Sunni-based militant Islamic insurgents in Iraq are openly waging a war against the Shia community, says our correspondent.

The Iraqi government is now calling for officers from previous incarnation of the Iraqi military to return to service.

In a statement on Wednesday, issued on the eve of the main annual Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, Defence Minister Saadoun Dulaimi, one of the few Sunnis in government, invited former officers with the ranks of major, captain and lieutenant to return.

After most Sunnis boycotted an election in January, they seem likely to turn out in force at the December 15 ballot; US and Iraqi officials hope this engagement in the political process can undermine popular support for the revolt.

It can be reasonably argued that the sudden unemployment of 400,000 trained soldiers following the overthrow of Hussein set up the perfect basis for the current insurgency.* Whether this effort to reengage them will help defuse it at all is hard to say. It's easy to buy people's cooperation up front; it's much harder to buy it once they've chosen and fought for a side.

The Al Jazeera story
The BBC story

*One thing that should be clear to us from the last decade -- the best recruiting tool in the world is unemployment and its associated feeling of disenfranchisement.

The BBC has an article about psychological casualties in the current American military. Some notables:

A study at Walter Reed has found that 17% of Iraq veterans suffer depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This means of 425,000 who have served since 2003, 70,000 would be experiencing psychological trauma.

This aligns reasonably well with a study cited in On Killing, which projected nearly total psychological casualties after half a year of continuous warfare.

This is hardly the biggest deal in procurement corruption -- that belongs to the legal corruption of no-bid contracts to Halliburton, the disastrous consequences of which I have heard about firsthand from serving members of our armed forces -- but a second member of the Coalition Provisional Authority is up on charges.

The US Justice Department said Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Debra Harrison, 47, who served with the Coalition Provisional Authority, was arrested on Thursday on charges involving bribery, money laundering and fraud.

Harrison is the second army officer and the fourth person charged in the past few weeks in connection with the scheme.

According to court papers, Harrison and her co-conspirators accepted money and gifts in return for using their official positions to rig contract bids.

I found this story on Al Jazeera. I looked, but did not find it on CNN, MSNBC or Fox. I did, of course, find news about crimes committed in small towns nowhere near where I live, a sex con targeting the Amish and the giveaway of a very expensive ring. Damn it.

Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster (UK) has written a report assessing his impression of failings of the U.S. Army in dealing with the situation in Iraq. The BBC says "UK officer slams US Iraq tactics" and Al Jazeera says "US Army in Iraq gets harsh appraisal" but having read the piece, I think both headlines are overdramatic.

The BBC article
The Al Jazeera article
The article in Military Review

Brigadier Aylwin-Foster's essay is, instead, a fairly sober critique of the Army's specific weaknesses in dealing with the current effort in Iraq. He argues that the U.S. Army is first and foremost designed to be a tool for national survival, rather than for enforcement of political policy. As a consequence, its focus is on warfighting. Combined with a strong institutional culture, this means that though the Army can innovate effectively in warfighting, it has failed to learn how to successfully win a counterinsurgency and often resorts to "kinetic" solutions -- search and destroy missions -- rather than effectively winning over the local populace and in so doing isolating insurgents.

The part that may have irked some American officers is his section about the deprofessionalizing of the Army, but the facts there -- about massive loss of mid-level officers who fail to re-up -- are clear.

Overall, this is a useful outside critique. Though he never suggested it, it makes me think that we might just need a new force dedicated to specific counterinsurgency operations. Then we'd have the Marines for strikes, the Army for conventional warfare and garrison duty and a third force for counterinsurgency, nation building and support.

More notes and quotes in the extended entry.

Al Jazeera has recently aired video of Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll, as they report in this article. The group holding her has threatened to kill her unless the United States frees all female Iraqi prisoners.

At a glance, this is a ridiculous demand. Even divorcing ourselves from knowledge of American policy vis-a-vis such threats, one can empirically see that the United States has not responded positively to such methods in the past few years in Iraq. It is a foregone conclusion that whatever happens to Ms. Carroll, the kidnappers will not achieve their stated goal. What, then, is the intent?

The first option is that they do not understand that their method won't yield the results that they expect. There's compelling evidence from past human behavior to think that this may be true. Rather like bank robbers trying to negotiate a helicopter ride to the airport, they may simply think they can achieve more than is realistically possible.

The second option is that they know very well that their demands will not be met, and their intent is to kill Ms. Carroll. That being so, why wouldn't they just do that in the first place, as other insurgents have done in the past few years? One potential explanation is that by presenting this fake choice, they combine the two missions of making Iraq an explicitly costly place to operate (1) and putting the United States in the role of choosing to let bad things happen (2). It's only a bonus that they picked Iraqi women as their release target -- the concept of women being in prison (and, by the way they phrase it, American prisons) can't go over well with the general audience in the Arab world.

It can be very hard to differentiate genuine, foolish fanaticism from the calculated veneer of foolish fanatacism with an underlying, achievable goal. I couldn't say myself which one this is.

One final note:

Carroll's former employers The Jordan Times published a Sunday editorial, stating: "The kidnappers who abducted her could not have chosen a more wrong target. True, Jill is a US citizen. But she is also more critical of US policies towards the Middle East than many Arabs… Jill has been from day one opposed to the war, to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. "

It seems quite plausible that they didn't know who she was (beyond "press", perhaps) when they took her. She was probaby just an accessible target. The CSM most likely can't afford much in the way of security for its people.

icasualties.org, whose title sounds like some horrific Mac product, is a database that tracks coalition fatalities in Iraq. In addition to the front page summary information, the site has a query function. From this, you can see some things that aren't clear watching the normal news cycle. For example:

There have been seven homicides. Two occurred when a soldier rolled a grenade into an officers' tent before the invasion; this incident was widely reported. Two more I recall hearing about on the news. The other three I hadn't heard anything about, but one occurred as recently as last November. Note that homicides are distinct from any hostile action -- this means a Coalition member killed another Coalition member.

There have been fifty deaths by illness. This is notable because it reflects the spectacular advances we've made in medical care and disease prevention. By comparison, the first and second World Wars saw deaths from disease on the order of the number of combat deaths. We're almost certainly past the point where an accidental outbreak could wipe out our military.

62 Captains, 47 1st Lieutenants and 26 2nd Lieutenants have been lost to hostile action. The highest-ranking officer killed in Iraq to date is Colonel William W. Wood, Commander, 1st Battalion, 184th Infantry Regiment, who died as the consequence of an IED attack in southern Baghdad on October 27th of last year.

I think that someone got their wish in Iraq -- the bombing of the Shia Al Askari shrine has sparked massive reprisals against Sunnis and their shrines, as reported in many places, including this Al Jazeera article.

The BBC took an atypically odd tack on the story with this article, which focuses on the deaths of three journalists working for Al Arabiya, capping it with this sentence:

Police in the capital, Baghdad, say they have recovered the bodies of 50 people overnight.

I'm aware that journalists care a lot about what happens to journalists, but is three dead journalists really the story when fifty people were killed last night in Baghdad?

Update: The BBC changed the headline and focus of their article overnight. I wrote to them asking if their emphasis was correct yesterday; I wonder how many other people did as well.

Over a month ago, I wrote about the kidnapping of Jill Carroll in the context of looking at the reasoning behind blatantly unrealistic demands.

The kidnappers, having let their first ultimatum slide, announced a new due date that is now approaching, as reported in this Al Jazeera article.

From the article:

Jassem Boudai, the station owner [of Kuwaiti station Alrai], said the kidnappers set a Sunday deadline for US and Iraqi authorities to meet their demands or they would kill her.

The kidnappers had demanded the release of all women detainees in Iraq but Boudai indicated the group had provided more specific conditions which he refused to reveal.

Jill Carroll, who I wrote about here and here is still out there somewhere, status unknown.

The Christian Science Monitor has a status page that tracks new information about her. In addition, a public service message campaign has been airing on Iraqi television. You can see the PSA video here, and read the transcript here.

JIll Carroll, captive since early January, was released into the custody of a Sunni political group that had been negotiating for her release.

The BBC story
The Al Jazeera story

Ms. Carroll has been emphasizing that she was treated well, and "never hit or hurt." This is in contrast with her obvious upset in the video that was released of her by her kidnappers, but is very much in accord with her desire for things to work out in Iraq. She's definitely motivated.

Edit: Tim points out the obvious possibility that I missed -- Stockholm syndrome. It would be instructive to hear what Ms. Carroll has to say after some crisis counseling. After all, she may not have been hit, but barring great acting ability, she seemed convinced they were going to make good on their death threat earlier when she was filmed.

I'm glad she made it out alive.

Edit 2: Jill Carroll has now made it out of Iraq, and says that she was required to make this video before she could be released. So it was under duress.

Anyone trying to develop a counterinsurgency plan for present-day Iraq should be able to develop a reasonable plan for this scenario:

It's just after Christmas, 1776. You have just been placed in command of the British effort in the Americas. Though large-scale military efforts have largely succeeded in diminishing the insurgents' ability to directly contest your government in the field, insurgent attacks continue. Notably, an allied contingent was captured the day after Christmas in Trenton. Earlier administrative and warfighting policies have led to an environment of discontent, with wide-spread support for insurgent forces. Many outside powers also view this as an opportunity to contest your nation's dominance on the world scale. How do you propose to effectively halt the insurgency, retain civil government in the area and avoid the appearance of vulnerability to other world powers?

Iraq saw another large suicide bombing attack today, with a triple strike on the Buratha Mosque that killed 51 people and injured three times as many.

The BBC story

Layla al-Khajifa, a Shia Muslim who works for the United Iraqi Alliance, told the BBC the Buratha mosque was an extremely popular place to pray on a Friday - so much so that in recent times she had not been able to get in.

"It's a very famous mosque - there is a cemetery in there," she said. "Iraqis who don't have money to go to Najaf, they bury their dead there."

In attempting to prevent these attacks, we need to look at the chokepoints. There are four obvious potential limiting factors for suicide bombings:

1) Viable targets
2) Access to these targets
3) Bomb materials
4) Suicide bombers

As is apparent from the quote I put in above, there is no shortage of viable targets in Iraq -- even in this climate of mass killing, people gather at religious sites and marketplaces. Similarly, there is no lack of access, though, as Tim and I have discussed, this may be a reason why attacks are focused on Iraq right now rather than Western nations -- Iraq represents "low-hanging fruit" by dint of its very porous security. The third point, bomb materials, is also a non issue by dint of the relative lawlessness of Iraq.

This leaves suicide bombers as the rate-limiting factor in suicide attacks. A Washington Post article from last July places the number of suicide attacks since the U.S. invasion or Iraq at about 400, or 15 per month -- one every two days. Another Washington Post article indicates that based on websites maintained by militants, anywhere from half to two thirds of suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudis.

So how do we convince 7-10 young Saudi men per month not to kill themselves? Though we can always try to harden the targets and limit access to materials, neither one of these methods will actually work. We can only succeed by striking at motivation.

Consider this in a contemporary American context. Any adult can go right now to a sporting goods store, buy a shotgun and ammunition and go murder a bunch of people. Depending on where you live, you may have to wait a week or two before your killing spree can start. Notably, this isn't endemic, and we aren't suffering hundreds of events like this every year. The motivation isn't there.

The only success we'll see is if we alter the rate-limiting step -- motivation. And a lot of that's coming from outside Iraq right now.

In case you missed it, former analyst Ray McGovern directly challenged Donald Rumsfeld on whether or not he misled the United States to lead us into war. This was during one of those theoretically "friendly audience" events.

You can read some interview extracts with him from CNN here.

MCGOVERN: Well, you know, she [a protester] talked about lies. And I get very upset when Donald Rumsfeld shakes his head and says, "Lies, gosh, lies. I hate it when somebody says that our president would tell lies."

And when he used that wonderful non sequitur by looking at the uniformed personnel in the front row and saying: "Well, they went in with protective gear; they certainly thought there were weapons of mass destruction there." Well, my goodness, of course, they did. Because you, Donald Rumsfeld, told them that they were there.

The best coverage has been on Anderson Cooper 360, where they factchecked at least two of the things Rumsfeld asserted he had not said -- that there was bulletproof evidence of ties between Saddam Hussein and the WTC and Pentagon attacks, and that we knew exactly where the WMD facilities were. They have video of Rumsfeld saying the latter, and the direct cite for the former.

It's good to see him being called on this. His willful malfeasance is killing our people daily.

During my review of Nigel Aylwin-Foster's critique of the U.S. military, I pointed out his mention of the book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, by Lt. Col John A. Nagl. In his book, Lt. Col Nagl compares the successful British counterinsurgency during the Malayan Emergency with the failed American effort in Vietnam, with the goal of determining how the organizational culture of each group affected its ability to learn and adapt.

Nagl isn't the first to make this comparison, as he himself points out. Notably, British officers who were part of the successful effort in Malaya were sent over to Vietnam to adivse the Americans. Just as notably, they were ignored and sidelined, eventually leaving in frustration.

As described in detail in this book, the British succeeded in Malaya because they did not cleave to doctrine and were fairly quick to realize that in Malaya, the political situation came ahead of the military -- and the goal was to create a secure environment. To that end, political and military efforts were put under a unified command. Locals were relied on and heavily integrated into British efforts. CTs, or communist terrorists, were encouraged to come over to the government side, where they were taken on as advisors and asked to record messages for or speak personally to their old allies. Lines of communication were open from the bottom up, and the officer in charge frequently went to personally visit various areas under his command to see how things were going.

This is not to say that Malaya was clean -- one of the British administrative heads was assassinated, his replacement being driven from the airport in the still bullet-riddled car.

In contrast, Vietnam was marked by many disconnects. There was a disconnect between the goals of the military high command (protecting Vietnam from an external invasion) and the situation on the ground (an internal insurgency). There was a disconnect between continuing analysis of the situation and the ideas of the military high command -- several analyses, including one called PROVN (Program for the Pacification and Long-term Development of Vietnam) recommended a completely different approach that would focus on increasing security and local integration, rather than attempting to fight a conventional war against the insurgent opponent. FInally, there was a disconnect between military command and real outcomes. When the USMC's CAP program, which integrated troops into communities, actually succeeded in preventing communist political gains, General Westmoreland still denied its utility and thought it would be too complex to enact.

Again, it boils down to the fact that the American military is geared toward national survival and standardization, whereas the British military is quirky and eschews doctrine. At the end of the day, Nagl concludes that the American military still is not a very good learning organization when it comes to adapting out of its role in national survival. Much as Brigadier Foster found, the American military is very good at adapting within its box of direct military action, but is not very good at pacification, security and counterinsurgency.

However, he points out in a very brief mention that other militaries that have a strong culture of individual identity, regimental traditions and "small wars" aren't actually very good at mainstream military action -- the British among them.

Organizational culture and its associated inertia is very hard to overcome -- and this may mean that it really ought not to be the military's job to do the kind of work they're doing right now in Iraq. It also means that at the end of the day, Lt. Col Nagl doesn't have any firm recommendations about how to promote organizational learning -- just a case study of two organizations in similar situations with very different outcomes.

It's a good book, but it's mainly one of questions rather than answers.

Koizumi has announced that Japan's contingent of six hundred troops will be leaving Iraq. Their presence in Iraq has been very unpopular in Japan. Koizumi stood firm, however, even through the kidnapping of three Japanese aid workers and the killing of five or six others. The decision to pull out follows on the news that security around their posting in Samawa is about to shift over from British and Australian forces to the Iraqis.

There's definitely something to be inferred from that.

The BBC article
The Al Jazeera article

They're not stopping their work in Iraq entirely:

After the withdrawal of ground troops, Japan's air force is expected to expand its transport activities in Iraq from a base in neighbouring Kuwait.

An unconfirmed posting by an al Qaeda-associated group indicates plans to kill four Russian embassy staffers kidnapped earlier this week.

The message follows on the heels of the group's unreasonable demands that Russia withdraw from Chechnya and release its Muslim prisoners in the space of 48 hours. Once again, even were the Russians entirely gung-ho on this idea, the impossible deadline points toward the validity of the actual demand as anything but a propaganda piece.

However, there's an important footnote in this story:

Chechen fighters on Tuesday demanded the release of the hostages.

Akhmed Zakayev, the exiled foreign minister in the Chechen rebel "government", denied any links to the Mujahidin Shura Council.

Much like Hamas before them, the Chechens, while showing very few qualms about using similar tactics, refuse to be associated with al Qaeda.

The Al Jazeera story

The Russian diplomats who were kidnapped last week in Iraq have been killed. Putin doesn't plan on letting the murders slide:

News agencies on Wednesday, quoting the Kremlin press service, said: "The [Russian] president has ordered the special forces to take all necessary measures to find and destroy the criminals who killed Russian diplomats in Iraq."

Presumably, Russia could pull teams from Chechnya who have already been working on this kind of detail and will be motivated and not terribly sympathetic toward the natives.

The Al Jazeera story

The UN currently estimates about 100 civilian deaths per day in Iraq. To compare, there were roughly 190 civilian deaths per day during the American civil war, with the key caveat that the majority of those were from disease rather than violence, which is definitely not the case in Iraq.

The Los Angeles Times has apparently already made the policy decision to refer to the fighting in Iraq as a civil war. One speaker I heard today made the case for referring to it as a civil war, with the hope that this will drive the international community to take measures that have been used in other civil war situations, such as Sri Lanka. As long as the United States is making Iraq largely our backyard, however, I think this is unlikely.

Saddam Hussein is now on trial for genocide in the killing of over 180,000 kurds during the Anfal campaign of the late 80s. Following testimony against him in court, he said this (to the court): "You are agents of Iran and Zionism. We will crush your heads."

Have to watch out for those damned Zionist-Iranian conspiracies. They're just so common.

The BBC story

A report on Anfal from Human Rights Watch that opens with a heartbreaking letter from a soldier who returned from the Iran-Iraq war only to discover his family had been killed in his absence.

As reported by many news agencies today, Burnham et al have followed up on their 2004 Iraq war mortality analysis with a survey intended to develop a reasonable estimate of "excess" deaths since the 2003 invasion. In this case, "excess" means deaths exceeding those expected based on pre-war mortality rates.

As described in their paper, which the journal The Lancet has made publicly accessibly here, they used teams of medical professionals as surveyors, sending them to survey "clusters" of forty households in fifty areas in Iraq's 16 Governorates (they ended up only doing forty-seven clusters due to security problems). Based on extensive interviews, they estimate that roughly 651,000 additional deaths above the expected mortality rate have occurred since the invasion (with a fairly wide margin for inaccuracy, ranging from a low estimate of 393,000 to a high of 942,000). Of these, the vast majority -- an estimated 601,000 -- have been violent deaths.

It is not unusual for more people to die in a warzone simply from the lack of proper food and medical care. However, this "excess" mortality would account for about 2.5% of the total Iraqi population -- again, with over 90% of that from violent causes.

Others have, naturally, dismissed this estimate, as it is remarkably higher than the administration's estimate of 30,000, or even the official tally of the government of Iraq. However, as the authors point out, other than in Bosnia, they were unable to find any conflict where passive surveillance -- that is, found body counts, news and morgue reports -- successfully identified more than 20% of actual deaths. Considered in this light, the administation's tally of 30,000 civilian dead would lead to a low estimate of 150,000 dead -- about half the low estimate from the current Burnham study. As they also point out, in other violent conflicts, such as in Guatemala between 1960 and 1990, during periods of intense violence, only 5% of deaths were successfully reported. That would give us a modified administration estimate of 600,000 dead.

In other words, matching the Burnham study's conclusion.

Of the violent deaths reported in this study, the majority were from gunshots, with a substantial number from car bombs as well. About a third were attributed to Coalition forces, which brings up the important point that the Burnham study did not ask respondents to distinguish between combatant and noncombatant deaths (they were worried people would either not answer, or that the question would draw dangerous attention to the surveyors). Even if we assume that (1) these attributions are correct (I don't necessarily believe they are) and that (2) these represent combatants, that would leave an estimated 400,000 violent deaths of innocent civilians.

I buy the estimate. This is the same kind of door-to-door surveying that's used to calculate presidential popularity or figure out which radio stations people listen to. They sampled nearly 2,000 households, or about 12,000 people, which is far more than most opinion polls in the U.S. sample, but applied to a population less than 10% that of the U.S.

The upshot is that a tally of 600,000 violent deaths in the last three years is entirely credible.

And horrifying.

The BBC story
The al Jazeera story
The CNN story

Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army took over the city of Amarah today. 800 Madhist troops moved in, stormed and then demolished the town's three police stations and are now patrolling the streets.

When cities are changing hands, that's a civil war.

The CNN story

Oh, and Sunnis under the Shura Council took over Ramadi yesterday. It's meant to be the first step in their creation of a Sunni Islamic state within the current territory of Iraq.

Update: Amarah (or Amara, depending in your spelling preference) has been retaken by Coalition forces.

As I wrote about previously, the Mandeans (also known as Sabeans), a minority religious group in Iraq, are in serious danger of being wiped out completely. Numbering in the low tens of thousands, this last remaining gnostic group has found itself at great risk in the sectarian deathbed that Iraq has become, despite the supposed provision in Islamic law that all believers in the one God (i.e. Christians, Jews, Mandeans) should be protected. Of course, given that most of the murdering in Iraq is rival Islamic sects going at each other's members, it's not surprising that they've thrown out this tenet regarding non-Muslims.

The month of October found Mandeans and Iraqi Christians (Assyrians) pushing for an autonomous region in the current governorate of Ninawa, as described here and promoted by Assyrian Christians here. An article on the site of the Kurdistan Regional Government indicates that the entire Mandean population -- which the article numbers at 60,000, three times higher than most other estimates -- is asking for a safe haven in Kurdistan (that is, northern Iraq).

All of these efforts are in addition to the many Mandeans who are simply trying to get out of Iraq, and have been trying since 2003 or even earlier.

They need some kind of protection. Mandean leader Sheikh Raad Mutar Saleh was gunned down in Suweira earlier in October, as reported here. Again, when Muslims are murdering each other in bulk, every one else is fair game.

Four months ago, four Russian embassy staffers were kidnapped and killed in Iraq, as I discussed here. Putin reportedly ordered Russian special forces to "take all necessary measures to find and destroy" the killers. Checking back on things, there has been exactly zero news on this topic -- as there would have to be, if Russian special forces were actually at large in U.S.-occupied Iraq.

But the organization responsible for the murders, the Mujahidin Shura Council, was the same group that took to the streets in Ramadi earlier in October to declare the town part of a (Sunni) Islamic state within Iraq.

This suggests Russia has not been able to resolve this problem. Then again, the vigorous declaration up front may have been an end in itself.

The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) will cease to exist October 1, 2007.

Washington lawmakers have reacted with shock at the discovery that an obscure clause in a military spending bill will terminate the work of the auditor.

Indeed, it's odd that the Inspector General's office would have this built-in timeout, as they have diligently exposed problems in Iraq, such as lying on the part of KBR (one of many happy recipients of massive contracts for reconstruction -- and, as I learned from speaking with military personnel, a company that is prone to only feeding American soldiers once a day within a tightly constrained one-hour period, rather than giving them the three meals a day their contract required...).

It's also odd that lawmakers are "shocked" this week, given that Senator Leahy of Vermont was arguing for an amendement that would remove SIGIR's expiration date all the way back in May of this year, as indicated here.

You can read the relevant language yourself by looking in section 2207 (d) in this copy of the law. I understand how easy it would be to miss it, given that the note in the margin immediately next to this line says "Expiration date."

Totally hidden. Easily missed (well, except when it was openly debated and the effort to remove it was shot down by Senate Republicans).

Among other problems, the office has identified the disappearance of billions of dollars in Iraq and the disappearance of one in every twenty-five weapons brought into Iraq.

Republican Senator Susan Collins told the New York Times she was mystified about how the termination clause had found its way into the bill.

Really? Is the legislative record so poor that we can't identify the person who put this timeout in? Or was it just a chance for her to distance herself and her party from the problem?

Honestly, I could understand how a spirit of optimism would have put the original expiration date in, back when the office was formed. What is indefensible is the quashing of efforts earlier this year to let the office continue, especially in light of its many substantial and recent discoveries in service to our soldiers in Iraq.

The BBC story

You can read the office's reports by clicking here.

Last month there was a little bit of hubbub -- mainly in the form of repudiation by American and Iraqi officials -- over Burnham et al's estimate that on the order of 600,000 violent deaths had occurred since the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. At the time, the official American tally of Iraqi deaths came in at about 30,000, with the Iraqis saying something similar.

Yesterday, Health Minister Ali al-Shemari posited a civilian death toll of 150,000. This value is apparently based on an attempted total count of civilian and police dead, including people who were abducted and later found dead. al-Shemari still denies that 600,000 is a credible figure. Note, however, that due to the nature of the Burnham study's estimation technique, the full range of possible values is 393,000 to 942,000. Also consider that Burnham did not try to distinguish between people killed while fighting as insurgents, and those killed as civilians.

And also consider that a family will notice when someone goes missing, but the Health Minister's tally requires a body.

All things considered, the Burnham estimate is still quite solid, especially given the tendency of morgue and other government-based reporting methods to underreport civilian deaths in wartime.

The Forbes article

Lawyers for several Abu Ghraib and Guantamo Bay detainees filed suit in Germany against Donald Rumsfeld and a number of other defendants. German law allows filing of war crimes charges regardless of where the cases are alleged to have occurred.

Charges are being filed by attorney Wolfgang Kaleck at the head of an effort backed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the International Federation for Human Rights and others. You can read the whole list of defendants here. Notables include Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Alberto Gonzales and William Haynes.

Equally notable is the case's lead witness, former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski:

Former U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the one-time commander of all U.S. military prisons in Iraq, said she would testify against her superiors because only a handful of low-ranking soldiers have been convicted over the abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail.

"They were tried and convicted in the world court before they ever set foot in any courtroom ... while people who are far more culpable and responsible have walked away blameless," Karpinski said during a presentation of the case in Berlin.

The CNN story
The BBC story

Today, al Jazeera reports on the increasing tendency of American news outlets to refer to the conflict in Iraq as a civil war, rather than labeling it an insurgency, terrorism, or something else. Naturally, the Bush administration is not pleased with this label, and disputes its applicability:

Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser, said the Iraqis "don't talk of it as a civil war" because the army and police had not fractured along sectarian lines and the government continued to hold together.

It's hard for Americans to visualize a "civil war" that doesn't involve large armies of men dressed in blue and gray, fighting on formal battlefields and taking cities. It's true that this is not happening in Iraq. However, that doesn't mean the army and police aren't fractured on sectarian lines. Consider the many, many reports of Iraqi security forces standing by as a Sunni or Shia militia moves into a neighborhood dominated by the other sect and begins killing.

A civil war can happen even when the security forces all receive their paycheck from the same place. All they have to do is let someone else handle the killing.

I'm currently reading the Thomas Ricks book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Among many of those described in its pages who pushed very, very hard for a war in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz is a real standout. He believed that not only was an attack on Iraq necessary, we would be greeted as liberators, and American troop levels could be dropped to something on the order of 30,000 soldiers within months of the invasion.

I heard a discussion last month in which a speaker said that Wolfowitz would emerge as the "true tragic figure" of the Iraq story, because he (Wolfowitz) honestly believed in what he was doing.

Not so.

A tragic figure not only believes what they're doing, but does their best with what they know at the time.

In contrast, Wolfowitz ignored fact-based thinking and preferred to live in -- to adapt from Rommel -- cloud cuckoo land.

When General Shinseki was called on to develop a speculative plan for an invasion of Iraq, his troop level estimates for post-invasion Iraq were, quite reasonably, based on troop levels that had succeeded in keeping the peace in ethnically torn Bosnia. That was one soldier per fifty people. In Iraq, after ruling out the relatively peaceful Kurdish territories, this would have meant about 300,000 soldiers, or ten times the number Wolfowitz was writing in his dream journal every night.

Called on to testify on likely occupation needs just months before the invasion, Shinseki decided to reach farther back in history and looked at troop levels used in the occupations of postwar Germany and Japan. Based on these levels, the estimate for Iraq was 260,000 soldiers. Once again, much, much higher than what Wolfowitz had in mind.

What did Paul have to say about this?

"Some of the higher end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark." His reasoning, he explained, was that "it is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army -- hard to imagine." (from Fiasco, pp. 97-98)

That was it. It was hard, for him, to imagine. Despite the evidence from Bosnia. More importantly, despite the exact same estimates coming from the postwar occupations of Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogenous nations that did not offer widespread partisan resistance after the war. One would imagine that a man who saw such a profound link between World War II and Iraq would have been able to see that, as well.

One might also imagine that a military theorist such as Wolfowitz could see that the U.S. might well induce Iraqi regular army forces to surrender solely by precision-bombing them into paste. Our ability to destroy and demoralize the regular army, and to force the regime into hiding, was never an issue (though even then, the "light and fast" approach pushed by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz indubitably did more harm than good, even in the initial invasion).

Wolfowitz refused to run the numbers when they got in the way of his imagination. His involvement is a tragedy, but he is no tragic figure. Just a negligent philosopher responsible for widespread chaos and death.

BBC: Nine US servicemen killed in Iraq

Slow news day so far.

Quite a bit of reporting and discussion followed last week's revelation that Rumsfeld had, after several years of abject failure, decided that maybe a policy change was needed in Iraq. He included recommendations he liked, as well as those he found more distasteful.

But honestly, it was more of the same old crap.

Consider this quote from the memo (as quoted by the BBC):

The memo also suggests "beginning with modest withdrawals of US and coalition forces... so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country".

"...have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility..."

That's it, really. The Iraqis are a bunch of children, who, as a group, are irresponsible and refuse to try and help because we're around. As if patriotic Iraqi men weren't still signing up for the security forces, despite the regularity with which busloads of recruits are kidnapped and executed. This comment, just on its own, stands up as a glaring example of the type of irresponsible, fairy-tale-driven thinking that Rumsfeld uses. Think of the old "We need to have a smaller, faster military" idea. Did he model whether that would work or not? No. It's not about reasoning, it's about a near-dogmatic belief in an idea, with an utter terror of subjecting that idea to rational analysis.

The memo above is pure conjecture, of the worst and most irresponsible sort. What if, instead, we had seen this:

"Studies on Iraqi culture and subsequent wargaming indicate that a drawdown in American military presence would lead to a temporary spike in violence, followed within 4-6 months by increased security and a normalization of relations between official government actors and local militias."

I made that up, of course. I have no idea whether modeling suggests that's what would happen -- because our current leaders do not believe in modeling, or evidence-based analysis, or historical analogy. They just believe.

The problem is that Rumsfeld's beliefs do not shield our soldiers from snipers, RPGs and IEDs.

Better that he fulfill that role in person. That, as nothing else has, might have forced him to temper his beliefs with reality.

The BBC coverage on the memo

Fifteen members of a Shia religious foundation (the Shia Endowment) killed by gunmen in Northern Baghdad.

Sixteen people killed by a triple car bombing near a gas station in Southwest Baghdad.

Two killed by a car bomb in the Shia neighborhood of Amil.

Two killed by a mortar attack on a Baghdad market.

One American soldier killed during an ambush on a convoy.

Two Iraqi soldiers killed by a roadside bomb in the Sunni Yarmouk district.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

Five American soldiers killed during fighting in Anbar province.

Five American soldiers killed by a roadside bomb near Kirkuk.

Ten people killed by a mortar attack in the cental Midan district in Baghdad.

Four people killed by a suicide bomber in Sadr City.

One person (the driver) killed during an attack in western Baghdad on the car of Brigadier General Muhsin al-Yassri, the security chief for the Higher Education Ministry (the chief was critically injured).

Ali Hussein al-Daiyan, a general from Hussein's regime, killed by gunmen in Ghazaliya.

School principal Sadiq Ali Jassim killed by gunmen in Jihad.

Four people killed by a bombing in Iskandariya.

Forty-five bodies found in various parts of Baghdad, all shot.

CNN article
al Jazeera article

One more American soldier reported killed on Wednesday, in Ramadi, Anbar province.

One American soldier died from wounds received a day earlier in Anbar province.

Twelve people killed in Ramadi.

Two police officers killed by a car bomb in Fallujah.

One bystander girl killed in Mosul.

Professor Mohammed Haidar Sulaiman killed by gunmen in Mosul.

al-Harith Abdul-Hamid, director of the Baghdad University psychology center, killed on the way to work.

One person killed by a car bomb in the Baghdad neighborhood of Karrada.

Police Colonel Mudim Abdullah and two guards killed in eastern Baghdad.

One person killed by a drive-by shooting in Diyala province.

One police officer killed by a roadside bomb in Diyala province.

35 bodies found, blindfolded and shot, in various parts of Baghdad.

Reporting today from the AP.

Eight people killed by a car bomb near al-Abbas shrine in Karbala.

Three people killed by a car bomb in Mosul.

Two people killed by a mortar attack in the Shia suburb of Kadhimiya in Baghdad.

Four people killed by gunmen in a series of attacks in Baquba.

al Jazeera article
BBC article

Five Shia men, brothers, shot in their home in Jihad, Baghdad.

A Shia man and his three sons also shot in their home in Jihad.

Five people killed in fights between Shia militias and Sunni Janabi tribesmen in neighborhood of Al-Amil.

Nine people killed in Diyala province, including a police officer and two children.

A professor and student killed in Ramadi during an attack on a police patrol.

A hospital security guard killed in Tikrit.

A barber killed in Kirkuk.

Sixty bodies found, tortured and shot, in Baghdad.

al Jazeera article

Four American soldiers killed by roadside bombs in Baghdad.

One police officer killed by a suicide car bombing in Dora, southern Baghdad.

One student killed by a roadside car bomb near al-Maamoun college in western Baghdad.

One person killed by another bombing in Baghdad.

Four people killed by mortar attacks in Baghdad.

Colonel Yaarub Khazaal, working security for Ahmed Chalabi, killed by gunmen in Yarmouk, western Baghdad.

Fifty-one bodies found, all shot, in Baghdad.

Reporting from the AP and the BBC.

Three Marines killed fighting in Anbar province.

Seventy Shia day laborers killed by dual car bombs in Tayaran Square in central Baghdad.

Associated Press Television Network cameraman Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah killed by gunfire in Mosul.

Five people killed and thirteen bodies found in Baquba.

BBC article
al Jazeera article
AP reporting

(As a note, it's a given that deaths are underreported, especially in whatever news makes it to the international level, but when a major attack occurs, that tends to push all the smaller, "incidental" violence off the screen.)

Seven Iraqi soldiers killed by dual truck suicide bombings of an army base in Riyadh, northern Iraq.

Ten people killed by a car bombing near the Shia al-Kamaliyah mosque in eastern Baghdad.

Five people killed by a pair of car bombs near the Sunni al-Samuri mosque in southern Baghdad.

A police officer killed by a bombing.

A mother and two children killed by a mortar attack in Hawija.

Nine members of a Shia family, including children, killed by gunmen south of Baghdad.

Five people killed in Baquba.

Three people killed elsewhere in Iraq.

A note on casualty reporting from the BBC:

Mass casualty attacks get more attention, but reality is that the violence is going on all the time, claiming an estimated 120 lives a day in Baghdad, the BBC's Andrew North says.

There are now at least 50-60 violent incident a day in the capital, our correspondent says.

al Jazeera article

A common deflection tactic used by some promoters of the war in Iraq is to point out that Hussein was a tyrant, and did cruel things to his people. True as this is, I term it a deflection because the case for war was not based on humanitarian issues (and if we were people who regularly invaded countries over humanitarian issues, then we should already have invaded Sudan, North Korea and several others).

Deflection or no, I think a supporter of the war could make a strong case for "it was all worth it even though the basis was false" if things were better for people within Iraq now.

But that's not the case, and they certainly know it. In a survey of 2,000 Iraqis conducted by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies, 95% of respondents indicated they think the security situation in Iraq has deteriorated since the U.S. invasion. They're right -- over a hundred people are killed every day as a consequence of sectarian violence, and the government of Syria estimates that they have 800,000 Iraqi refugees on their hands (with more coming daily).

It's not better, even given that what came before was very bad.

al Jazeera article

One Iraqi soldier and one civilian killed by a suicide car bombing at a Baghdad checkpoint.

One Iraqi soldier killed by a roadside bomb in Musayyib.

Two department of interior commandos killed by a roadside bomb in Samarra.

A mixed Shia and Sunni group of thirty (or perhaps many more) people kidnapped in Sanak in Baghdad. Twenty-five Shiites later released, suggesting a "gill-netting" operation designed to pick up Sunnis, with incidental Shiites captured.

Seventeen bodies, tortured and shot, found in Wahda in Wasit province.

Forty-five bodies found, tortured and shot, across Baghdad.

Three bodies found southwest of Baghdad.

A guard killed at a Shiite boys' school in southwetern Baghdad.

Two people killed by gunmen northeast of Baghdad.

A police officer killed in Mosul.

Two police explosives experts killed trying to defuse a car bomb in Sadr City, Baghdad.

BBC article
CNN article
AP reporting

The quarterly report Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq indicates that an average of 959 attacks per week -- that's over 130 a day -- occurred between August 12 and November 10 of this year.

From the BBC article:

This constituted a 22% increase in attacks and a 2% jump in civilian casualties, compared to the three previous months.

Most casualties were Iraqi, despite the fact that 68% of the attacks targeted US-led coalition troops.

From the al Jazeera article:

These figures could underestimate the bloodshed as the defence department's figures exclude most attacks, as the Iraq Study Group report noted.

"There is significant under-reporting of the violence in Iraq," the Iraq Study Group said.

In a classic case of failiing to listen to quality work from our own people, the Bush administration has been insisting for quite some time that their (very low) casualty figures for Iraqi civilians are correct. After disregarding the Burnham estimate of 600,000 violent deaths and glossing over the declaration of 150,000 dead by Health Minister Ali al-Shemari, President Bush and colleagues can now achieve a brilliant trifecta by ignoring this conclusion from the Iraq Study Group.

On a more general note, violence in Iraq has, for some reason, shifted out of news coverage in the last several days. Given its continuous nature, I'm not clear why all three of al Jazeera, the BBC, and CNN have failed to report anything -- even appended to other articles on Iraq, as they sometimes do. The AP has been similarly quiet.

The BBC article
al Jazeera article

One marine killed in Anbar province (sixty-one American soldiers have been killed so far in December).

An Iraqi army captain killed outside his home in Diwaniyah.

Two people killed by mortars in southern Baghdad.

Two people killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Three children killed by mortars near Baquba.

Two police officers killed by insurgents in Baquba.

A student killed by a drive-by shooting in Mosul.

Fifteen bodies turned in at the Baquba morgue, one of them of an Iraqi soldier.

Seven bodies turned in at the Kut morgue.

Fifty-three bodies found in Baghdad, many tortured.

AP picked up the reporting slack today.

Eleven people killed by a suicide car bombing in Baghdad.

BBC article

Once again, reporting has been nearly absent today.

...and not in the good way.

President Bush says that we need to expand the military, and he's considering the possibility of increasing troop strength in Iraq.

Like a child, Bush runs things his way as long as he can, ignoring valuable advice given by experts in the field. Only a severe time out in the form of the congressional defeat of his party, gave him sufficient pause to start this half-assed attempt to change his plan.

But despite talking about "hard choices" and his usual return to the concept of sacrifice, Bush is mainly running his same old game. This week he signed the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 into law. When this is mentioned in the next election cycle, keep in mind that Bush is buying your affections very cheaply -- the average savings to you individually amount to just $99.33, and it will cost our country $45 billion over the next decade.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have $45 billion to spend on supporting our soldiers? Because for every four households getting a new tax break each year, one more American soldier doesn't get body armor. It's not such a pretty tax cut after all.

Someone should perhaps remind Bush, again, that in every war we ever won, we raised taxes. If he's not serious about this war, he probably shouldn't have started it.

Al Qaeda in Iraq (a title as unwieldy as "West Coast Avengers") has offered the U.S. the ridiculous "option" of leaving the country, additionally abandoning all heavy miltiary equipment so that a new, Islamic state can use it as the foundation for a new army.

I've mentioned before some potential motivations underlying unreasonable demands, including genuine failure of comprehension and the desire to place the recipient in an untenable position. There's a third option, epitomized by this fairly silly style of declaration -- the need for attention.

The need for attention is both an organizational and a very personal motivation. As much as Bush attempts to pin the sectarian violence in Iraq on Al Qaeda, the truth is that it's sectarian violence for its own sake. As such, al Qaeda in Iraq is overshadowed, and really isn't in charge of the violence. It makes a bid for relevancy by asserting that it has founded an Islamic state in the heart of Iraq, and by acting as if it had the wherewithal to make a large nation not only leave, but leave and equip it with a standing military.

Any organization that makes a routine task of bombing its own civilians is a mix of True Believers and people who were going to do bad things anyway -- in the U.S., they might the ones working up to poisoning their neighbors, or making bomb threats to their workplace. It's the member of this second group who will drive the personal side of the need for attention. As they lose their front-page status and their organization merges with the background noise in Iraq, they lose their special place of perceived personal power. Divorced from the concept of organizational relevancy, they probably just need to be perceived as a power and a threat to feel worthwhile.

The real joke of all of this is that there's already a historical example for what happens when a revolutionary, Islamic power finds itself with a truckload of American equipment -- it can't maintain it.

One American soldier killed west of Baghdad.

Three marines and a sailor killed in fighting in Anbar province.

"Dozens" of bodies found in Baghdad.

BBC article
CNN article

Two American soldiers killed in twin roadside bombings south of Baghdad.

Seven police officers killed by a suicide bombing in Muqdadiya, Diyala.

Five people killed in Samawah.

The body of an Iraqi military officer found in Diwaniya, along with the body of a member of the facilities protection force.

CNN article
al Jazeera article
AP reporting

President Bush, from his latest press conference:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, Lyndon Johnson famously didn't sleep during the Vietnam War, questioning his own decisions. You have always seemed very confident of your decisions, but I can't help but wonder if this has been a time of painful realization for you as you, yourself, have acknowledged that some of the policies you hoped would succeed have not. And I wonder if you can talk to us about that. Has it been a painful time?

We'll accomplish our objective; we've got to constantly adjust our tactics to do so. We've got to insist that the Iraqis take more responsibility more quickly in order to do so.

According to Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad Bolani, 12,000 Iraqi police officers have died since 2003.

That's more than one in sixteen Iraqi cops who've been killed. That's 6.3% of everyone who's signed up to be a cop since the invasion, or roughly 2% per year. The single most dangerous job in America -- fisherman -- had a fatality rate of 0.118% this year, or about twenty times less than being a police officer in Iraq.

In contrast, 270 American police officers have died from violence since 2003. That's 0.09 per 100,000 people, versus 44.8 per 100,000 people in Iraq (that is, the violent death rate for police is 498 TIMES HIGHER in Iraq).

More responsibility. Right.

American police figures taken from The Officer Down Memorial Page. Even those numbers are disheartening.

Three Iraqi police officers killed by a suicide bomber near a university in Ramadi.

Ten people killed by a car bombing in Jadida, western Baghdad.

Two people killed by a suicide bomber in Talbyia in northeastern Baghdad.

al Jazeera article
BBC article

(The BBC article adds this note: At least 100 people are killed on average every day in Baghdad, many of them in sectarian attacks, correspondents say.)

Three American soldiers killed by a roadside bomb northwest of Baghdad.

Four American soldiers killed under other circumstances.

Twenty-five people killed by a triple car bombing in southwestern Baghdad.

Seventeen people killed by a car bomb near the Abu Hanifa mosque in Azamiyah, Baghdad.

Five people killed by a roadside bomb in the Bab al-Sharji market, Baghdad.

Five people killed by a bomb in a CD player in a market in Baghdad.

A police officer killed by a roadside bomb in Sheikh Omar district.

One police officer killed by a mortar in central Baghdad.

Three children killed by a roadside bomb in Kirkuk.

Major General Imad Mohsen Jaafar of the Interior Ministry killed by gunmen in northern Baghdad.

Forty-nine bodies, most tortured, found across Baghdad.

al Jazeera article
CNN article
AP reporting

Earlier this week, a substantial British force hit the al-Jamiyat prison in Basra, home of that city's Serious Crime Unit. They released the prisoners and demolished the building. Now city officials in Basra are complaining:

Mohammed al Abadi, head of the city's council, had said the raid was illegal and threatened to stop co-operation.

And Basra police commander Brigadier General Ali Ibrahim said: "This storming operation is illegal and violates human rights."

Hussein al-Taakhi has something to say on the matter of "violating human rights." He was held and tortured at al-Jamiyat for two months, and was probably among those slated to be killed in advance of the planned, Iraqi-controlled, "prisoner release." The accelerated threat of death was the British motive for moving in.

You can read al-Taakhi's story in this IRIN report. After his ordeal he's quitting the city of Basra:

"Today I’m with my family, but I will be leaving later today to the capital before another crazy group arrests me again. My wife is taking care of my wounds which I sustained as a result of torture, but no one can heal the memories of those terrible 48 days in that prison.”

The BBC article

Three American soldiers killed in two roadside bomb attacks in Baghdad.

Ten people killed by a car bomb in central Baghdad.

Seven people killed by dual car bombs in Baab al-Sharji.

BBC article
AP reporting

Three Marines killed in combat in Anbar province (that's 106 American soldiers killed this month).

One British soldier killed in Basra.

Ten people, including imam Khadhum Hamid, killed by a suicide bomber near a Shiite mosque in Khalis.

Thirty-two bodies, tortured, found across Iraq.

Two oil company employees killed by gunmen in Mosul.

A police officer and two other people killed in attacks in Musayyib.

Two police officers killed during an attack on a checkpoint in Jurf al-Sakhar.

The AP's low estimate for this month's violence is about seventy-six deaths per day across Iraq (focused in Baghdad, of course).

A police officer and another person shot by gunmen in Ramadi.

AP reporting
al Jazeera article

The official Iraqi Interior Ministry civilian violent death tally for December is 1,930. Their official tally for the year is 12,320.

The UN tally for December is not yet available, but its October tally was much higher -- 3,700. The UN estimate is based on health ministry and Baghdad morgue tallies, and is disputed by the Interior Ministry (who apparently are arithmetic challenged, or don't believe the health ministry and the morgue). Notably, even this value is much lower than the 16,000 deaths per month estimated by Burnham et al. If the Burnham estimate is correct, the Interior Ministry tally is off by roughly fifteen-fold, which is better than the usual twenty-fold underreporting they mention in their article.

The Interior Ministry reports 125 police officers and 25 soldiers killed in December.

We lost 112 soldiers in December, marking it as a terrible month for us.

al Jazeera article
BBC article

Al Jazeera today features an article about Western news agency biases and how they are perceived to be causing harm in Iraq. Many in the area think that Western reporting actually spurs sectarianism by promoting the Shia-Sunni divide, and by inaccurately portraying Hussein's regime as Sunni in nature:

The spokesman for the Arab Baath Socialist Party, which ruled Iraq from 1968 to 2003, who asked to be identified as Abu Muhammad for security reasons, said: "Most Western media outlets have been helping the US occupation authorities to portray the Baath party as a Sunni party which suppressed the Shia and deprived them of their rights.

"It is a character assassination campaign instructed by Western lobbies and carried out by Western media."

That last part is well off the mark. There's nothing that organized going on. It's just that there was a power shift, and now there is sectarian violence, so it's an easy simplification for news agencies to make -- and they are, by and large, about simplification. Especially in broadcast media.

Various estimates place the Shia population of Iraq at from 50-60%, which is, indeed, not an "overwhelming majority." However, NPR reporting from Iraq has indicated that many Iraqi Sunnis are unaware of even this percentage, and believe that Sunnis are in the majority. In addition, the relative disenfranchisement of the Sunni population owes much to the fact that a substantial portion of the Sunni total is also Kurdish, and they have aligned on ethnic, rather than religious lines. And if one looks at it that way -- Shia, Sunni, Kurd -- then the Shia are by far the largest single group.

[Mustafa Bakri, chief editor of the Egyptian newspaper El-osboa] expressed surprise that no Western media outlet has ever apologised to its readers for promoting false Iraq war pretexts.

Maybe El-osboa is an amazing paper, but it's nothing new that media outlets don't apologize for weak or inaccurate reporting.

There are some dissenting views on this topic, naturally:

However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

Bader completes his thought with this very, very important point:

"I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

Thirteen people killed by a dual car bombing at a gas station in the Mansour district of Baghdad (the second bomb was set off once emergency services arrived).

One person killed by an additional car bombing in Mansour.

One person killed by a mortar attack in Saba al-Bour.

Five people killed by a mortar attack in the Baghdad neighborhood of Amel.

Forty-seven bodies found around Baghdad, four of them decapitated, most tortured.

al Jazeera article
BBC article
CNN article

Amidst all the talk of a "surge" in Iraq, there's been no clear indication on what this concept is based. What modeling, wargaming or even broad theoretical idea suggests that this ballpark figure of 10-20,000 additional troops will provide any benefit?

I wondered if, perhaps, it was based on one of the recommendations in the report from the Iraq study group. Now, that value does turn up, but not in the context of "let's add more troops." Quite the opposite, in fact:

One of the most important elements of our support would be the imbedding of substantially more U.S. military personnel in all Iraqi Army battalions and brigades, as well as within Iraqi companies. U.S. personnel would provide advice, combat assistance, and staff assistance. The training of Iraqi units by the United States has improved and should continue for the coming year. In addition to this training, Iraqi combat units need supervised on-the-job training as they move to field operations. This on-the-job training could be best done by imbedding more U.S. military personnel in Iraqi deployed units. The number of imbedded personnel would be based on the recommendation of our military commanders in Iraq, but it should be large enough to accelerate the development of a real combat capability in Iraqi Army units. Such a mission could involve 10,000 to 20,000 American troops instead of the 3,000 to 4,000 now in this role. This increase in imbedded troops could be carried out without an aggregate increase over time in the total number of troops in Iraq by making a corresponding decrease in troops assigned to U.S. combat brigades.

(From The Iraq Study Group Report, page 71)

The recommendation there is clearly to shift 10-20,000 troops from other duty in Iraq over to imbedded positions with Iraqi military and security forces, to get them up and running faster. The report goes on to recommend the first troop withdrawals in early 2008. That is, no extra troops, and the first troop reductions in about a year.

So it's not from there. It's clearly not coming from the people who've actually asked for more troops, as they've requested a lot more troops, more in line with the Powell doctrine and legitimate estimates based on prior post-war occupation efforts.

This is more half-assed deflection, aimed at preserving image and nothing else. Bush is going to put another 10-20,000 Americans in harm's way so he can pretend to be doing something.

Consider this. We have, say, 120,000 soldiers in Iraq right now. In December, 115 of them were killed (which means roughly 800 were wounded, by the way). For each 10,000 troops we add to this rotation, that's another 9.6 soldiers dead, and another 67 wounded, each month -- and that's assuming the new soldiers don't get killed more often than those currently in the field, as some soldiers in Iraq are worried might occur. If we go to another 20,000 troops, that about 19 dead and 134 wounded each month, above our current tally.

Killing 19 more Americans each month to preserve an image is cowardice, pure, simple and sick.

Fifteen people killed during an attack on a bus in Baghdad.

al Jazeera article
BBC article

"Who remembers now the destruction of the Armenians?"

From this CNN article, transcripts of taped conversations between Husein and his aides prior to killing 180,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign:

"I will strike them with chemical weapons and kill them all," a voice identified by prosecutors as that of Majeed, Hussein's cousin and a senior aide, is heard saying.

"Who is going to say anything? The international community? Curse the international community," the voice continued.

This is not to make the Hitler-Hussein comparison, but to point out that anytime a genocide is ignored, it sends the message that you, too, can get away with genocide.

This is also not a time for people to self-righteously say "Well, we toppled this genocidal bastard," because the Anfal campaign happened on the Reagan-Bush watch, and we left it alone because it had very little to do with us.

Just like Sudan.

This is a map of U.S. fatalities grouped by city, as shown by icasualties.org on their US Iraq Fatalities: City Map page (they hold the copyright in this image, which I'm using here in a review capacity).

I was struck by how much this looks like a map of "blue" states from the 2004 presidential election.

And if you look at California, you can see why it's a little harder to forget about war deaths here, especially if you live in Southern California.

Seventy people killed by a combined car and suicide bombing at Mustansiriya University.

Ten people killed by a a drive-by shooting in a market in the al-Bounuk district of Baghdad.

Fifteen people killed by a motorcycle bomb in central Baghdad.

Two police officers and two other people killed by a roadside bomb in Karrada, in central Baghdad.

Six people killed by a car bomb in Sadr City in Baghdad.

A guard for the newspaper al-Sabah killed by a sniper in northern Baghdad.

The UN estimates 34,400 Iraqis died from violence in 2006.

al Jazeera article
BBC article
CNN article

A predominantly Kurdish battalion based in the northern city of Sulaimaniya, has started the move towards Baghdad as the Iraqi military prepares for a major security operation aimed at pacifying the Iraqi capital.

Hundreds of soldiers have boarded dozens of vehicles to begin the trip to Baghdad, 260km away.

Can't trust the locals, and don't want an American presence? Bring in the Kurds.

On the plus side, the Kurds have fielded a fairly coherent military force for over a decade. I don't know enough about Iraqi attitudes, however, to predict how they'll be accepted by the locals in Baghdad. Certainly, it's better to have people who look and speak like Iraqis, rather than some of our boys from San Diego and Boston who have learned bits and pieces of Arabic.

al Jazeera article

Two American soldiers killed in Anbar province.

Fifteen people killed by a bomb in Sadr City, Baghdad.

A police officer killed by a roadside bomb in central Baghdad.

A professor at Baghdad University's veterinary school killed by gunmen.

Ten people, including four police officers, killed by a truck bomb in Kirkuk.

An American, a Hungarian, a Croatian and an Iraqi working for the NGO National Democratic institute killed during an ambush in Baghdad.

Thirty bodies found across Baghdad.

In a note of bravery, many students gathered today outside Mustansiriya university to hold a protest against the killing of seventy people there one day earlier.

al Jazeera article
BBC article
CNN article

Ten people killed by a triple car bombing in a market in Dora, Baghdad.

One more person killed by another car bombing in Dora.

Three people killed by a car bomb in eastern Baghdad.

Four people killed by mortar fire in Adhamiya, northern Baghdad.

Two people killed by a car bombing in western Baghdad.

Four people, including two police officers, killed by a car bomb in central Baghdad.

al Jazeera article
CNN article

Twelve American soldiers killed when their Blackhawk went down, likely from hostile fire.

Five American soldiers killed in Karbala.

Three more American soldiers killed by roadside bombs and a grenade attack.

Five Americans killed in Anbar province.

A British soldier killed by a roadside bomb in Basra.

Six killed by a bomb on a minibus in central Baghdad.

One person killed by a car bomb in eastern Baghdad.

CNN article
al Jazeera article
BBC article

Eighty-eight people killed in a double car bombing in a Baghdad market.

Twelve people killed in a bomb and mortar attack in Baquba.

Twelve people killed in Khalsi (note: Khalis is very near Baquba, but it seems as if these are actually two different attacks with the same casualty count).

Mayor Khaled al-Sinjari of Baquba kidnapped.

On the American death count to date:

The number of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq war stands at 3,048, including 53 in January. Seven civilian contractors of the Defense Department also have been killed in the war.

BBC article
CNN article

Five police officers killed in a gun battle in Mosul.

Seven people killed in bombings across Baghdad.

CNN article

An operation this week is said to have picked up six hundred members of Moqtada al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi -- the Mahdi Army. If this is the beginning of a protracted crackdown on the Sadr's forces, that would represent a major sea change in Iraqi security operations.

On the other hand, if this makes it in the State of the Union speech this evening and then disappears into the aether, I'll be disappointed, but not surprised.

I'm unwilling to put down odds on either outcome.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

Nineteen people, including three police officers, killed by a car bomb in central Baghdad.

Four people killed by a motorcycle bomb in central Baghdad.

Three people killed by a roadside bomb in western Baghdad.

al Jazeera article

The single greatest strength George Bush has is his willingness to repeat the same thing over and over again until people believe it. It is his one aptitude.

From this CNN article:

The president had strong words for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are lining up to support resolutions opposing his decision to send 21,500 troops to Iraq. He challenged them to put up their own ideas.

"I know there is skepticism and pessimism and that some are condemning a plan before it's even had a chance to work," the president said. "They have an obligation and a serious responsibility therefore to put up their own plan as to what would work."

He -- and the others around him -- have been hammering home the idea that no one else has offered a plan. As others have pointed out, this is simply untrue. In fact, the Iraq study group offered a plan -- which I've read and commented on here -- that explicitly warned against adding troops. Instead, it suggested redeploying our current troops to place many more of them in imbedded positions within the Iraqi military. John McCain, with whom I now deeply disagree, also offered an alternate plan involving many more troops in Iraq -- although he's tentatively supporting the current half-assed escalation (with enough qualifiers that he can claim not to have really supported it, come election time).

The idea that there are no other plans is a straw man, and nothing more. Put more plainly, it's a lie. There have been other plans for years, starting with occupation plans for Iraq that included enough troops, but which were shot down by Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and friends because the empirical evidence did not match their theory of war. There continue to be "other plans" -- these would be the pieces of advice and the military modeling that Bush continues to ignore.

It speaks to the duplicity of the man that Bush convened a "study group," they wrote a plan for him, yet he insists that no one has offered him a plan.

That is neither politics nor rhetoric, but simply lying, and it is sad.

I meant to write about this a few days earlier.

Four American soldiers were kidnapped and executed last week by a group of people driving five American-government-style SUVs, wearing American uniforms, using American weapons and, according to some reports, speaking perfect English.

Following an attack on a compound in Karbala:

They drove into a neighbouring province and then abandoned the SUVs.

Such a brazen attack is believed to be unprecedented, and the US military say the militants bypassed Iraqi police to reach their goal.

It is not surprising that a military effort rife with unsupervised contracters is leaky as hell. If USB drives from inside secure areas can turn up in public markets in Kabul, it's not a stretch to think that insurgents could pick up all the trappings of an American nonmilitary convoy.

And notice that they were pretty cavalier about ditching those SUVs, so they certainly expect to be able to acquire more.

The legacy of the Bush-Bremer-Wolfowitz-Cheney-Rumsfeld half-assed approach to war and occupation continues to murder our soldiers.

BBC article

President Bush recently spoke with Juan Williams of NPR. You can read the full transcript by clicking here. Many of his answers feature what I might call a "tactic" of connecting dots that don't actually connect. I say I might call it that, because I am never sure just what he himself does or doesn't believe. If you lie enough to other people, you often end up believing it yourself.

On believing in his plan for Iraq:

Well, one way to – and one of the things I have found here in Washington amongst those who were skeptical about whether the Iraqis will do what it takes to secure their own freedom, is to remind them of what would happen if there's failure.

This is a non sequitur. Replace "Iraqis" in that sentence with something more prosaic, like "the Brooklyn Bridge." If someone said this to you:

One of the things I've found among those who were skeptical about whether the Brooklyn Bridge will collapse or not, is to remind them of what would happen if it did collapse.

...you might feel compelled to point out how nonsensical it is. The statement "Gosh, that would be bad, so stop thinking about it" is not a real answer to "What if this goes wrong?" But it is the answer Bush is giving above.

On the nature of the Iraq war:

See, the difference, Juan, between other conflicts in the past and this one is that failure would endanger the homeland. In other words, the enemy isn't going to be just contained in the Middle East if they succeed in driving us out or succeed in wrecking the Iraqi democracy. The enemy would be likely to follow us here. And that's why I tried in my State of the Union speech, why I reminded people that September the – the lessons of September the 11th need to be remembered.

This is mainly another chance for Bush to do a callback to September 11th to justify an unrelated war, but it's worth noting that the explicit inciting incident for September 11th was the American presence in Saudi Arabia (and not, say, ethnic tensions in Iraq). The lesson of "they will try to hit us at home" is absolutely valid, but the associated lesson might be "so it would be good to actually go after the people who hurt us, rather than an unrelated third party."

On a balanced budget:

The budget is going to be balanced by keeping taxes low. In other words, we're not going to raise taxes. And as a result of keeping taxes low, the economy is doing just fine, and when the economy is doing well, it yields a certain level of tax revenues that we can live with. And then making sure that we constrain federal spending, and you do that by setting priorities.

I imagine someone tapping on his shoulder. "Sir? Sir? We've been running an enormous deficit. We're selling out to China. I thought you should know before you go on about..."

...and then he says this about why he's never vetoed an appropriation, ever:

Because the United States Congress that was controlled by Republicans exercised spending restraint.

Say what? Then where'd that enormous deficit come from? What happened to our surplus? Why are you on about earmarks (in the same paragraph, no less) if that Congress exercised spending restraint?

The problem with Bush's lack or misuse of evidence is that it's either a cover for a callous disloyalty to and disregard for Americans or he believes it all and he's a fool. Evil acting dumb or dumb yielding evil -- neither is good.

Last month, the GAO issued a report titled Securing, Stabilzing, and Rebuilding Iraq: Key Issues for Congressional Oversight. In it, they compare their earlier advice on these efforts in Iraq with what's actually going on (and going wrong) on the ground there. As with almost any GAO report, it's a treasure trove of useful information. As you might expect, it could be succinctly summed up as "there's a lot going wrong in Iraq."

This GAO report touches on a number of key concerns and problems related to Iraq: (1) The cost of the war has been steadily increasing, and may not be accurately reported; (2) Iraqi security forces are ineffective, and their numbers are overreported; (3) Nearly 200,000 small arms issued to Iraqis are unaccounted for; (4) Up to to a third of Interior MInistry employees are "ghosts", their salaries going to someone else; (5) Oil production, both refined and crude, is well below target levels, and up to a third of refined product may be going onto the black market, with some of its proceeds funding insurgents; (6) The failure to secure conventional munitions -- both in 2003 and on an ongoing basis -- continues to lead directly to the deaths of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

A full discussion, with quotes, is in the extended.

As reported in this BBC article, Italian prosecutors are charging Specialist Mario Lozano with murder in the death of Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari at an American checkpoint in Iraq in 2005.

This BBC article compares the American and Italian government analyses of what happened at that checkpoint. Their primary points of disagreement are on just how fast the Italian-driven vehicle was going, how quickly it stopped, and how long they had to react to warning shots. The Italian report posits that:

"It is likely that the state of tension stemming from the conditions of time, circumstances and place, as well as possibly some degree of inexperience and stress, might have led some soldiers to instinctive and little controlled reactions,"

This is probably true. I imagine the relative perception of time for parties on both sides had a lot to do with their position on that night. If you're manning a checkpoint in a country rife with suicide bombers, the approach time of a car seems like seconds, at best. If you're in the car, and some soldiers have just started shooting at you, it seems like forever until they stop.

Both accounts agree that communication between Italian government officials and American officials before the incident was insufficient. It's possible the miscommunication between them led the Italians' American contact to believe that the Italians did not want the presence of their rescue operation (of journalist Giuliana Sgrena) announced, whereas the Italian intelligence officers may have believed the Americans had been warned in advance -- which would naturally lead them to approach the checkpoint with a little less caution.

Sgrena and her associated newspaper have pushed the idea that she was deliberately targeted by "the Americans." Of course, why we'd choose to use a random Army Spec. to assassinate someone, I have no idea. I think bad plans like that really only turn up in movies. In general, the official Italian and American accounts match each other better than either matches some of Sgrena's assertions, at least as I've seen them reported in the BBC.

This looks very much like it's about making a point locally, within Italy, rather than to us or any other outside country. The official reports on both sides say "accident."

After all, were it anything else, why would Sgrena and the other agent be alive?

(As an additional note, I haven't seen anything more specific on the type of murder they're charging Spec. Lozano with, so I don't know if the official case is asserting specific intent on his part to kill an Italian special agent, or some equivalent of voluntary manslaughter.)

George Bush has said, in various ways, that he listens to our military commanders.

But consider this...

As I've discussed earlier, he's already ignored both the Iraq study group report and worries from our military that new troops would be a liability in Iraq.

At the same time, (American) General Bantz Craddock, representing the allied group in Afghanistan, is in Brussels begging for an additional two thousand troops from the other NATO member states.

So, to clarify cause and effect here.

No request for troops and a recommendation against it = Over 20,000 additional troops.

A desperate need for troops, and our officers begging for months for help from our allies = No additional American soldiers.

When Bush says that he listens to our military officers and their needs, he lies.

Right now, we're escalating in Iraq by adding fifteen percent again on top of our troop totals there, when no such increase was requested. The exact same number sent ot Afghanistan would be a whopping fifty-eight percent increase, perhaps enough to put paid to the remnant Taliban and their al Qaeda allies for good.

And remember, al Qaeda were the ones who attacked us, and the Taliban their bastard allies who harbored them. Not Hussein, not Iraq.

As a final bonus, whereas 20,000 soldiers sent to Iraq means another 19 Americans dead and 134 Americans wounded each month, 20,000 soldiers sent to Afghanistan means less than a third as many more Americans dead and wounded per month (6 and 42, respectively).

It's obscene that our officers must go, hat in hand, to our allies to try and fulfill critical needs neglected by George Bush, Dick Cheney and their league of incapable administrators.

In his editorial piece Victory is Not an Option, retired Lt. General William Odon gives a sober, cogent overview of the failings of current policy and offers an alternative plan.

For the record, that's one more plan offered as an alternative to the President's warplan.

The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options. Withdrawal will take away the conditions that allow our enemies in the region to enjoy our pain. It will awaken those European states reluctant to collaborate with us in Iraq and the region.

Fourth, we must redefine our purpose. It must be a stable region, not primarily a democratic Iraq. We must redirect our military operations so they enhance rather than undermine stability. We can write off the war as a "tactical draw" and make "regional stability" our measure of "victory." That single step would dramatically realign the opposing forces in the region, where most states want stability. Even many in the angry mobs of young Arabs shouting profanities against the United States want predictable order, albeit on better social and economic terms than they now have.

The full essay is in the extended as I don't know if the Washington Post will keep the link live, but I recommend clicking here to read it on their site, as it crosslinks to other good content, such as a breakdown of the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

CNN yells in large point type that U.S. ties Iranian leader to bombs killing U.S. troops. From this article:

The U.S. military Sunday presented evidence it says shows an elite Iranian force under the command of Iran's supreme leader is behind bombings that have killed at least 170 U.S. troops in Iraq.

The U.S. military officials said EFPs are manufactured in such a specific way that they can be traced to Iran.

Of course Iran is moving money and weapons into Iraq, just as they moved money and weapons into Lebanon.

This is not justification for military action against Iran. More to the point, what are we going to do? Bomb them? Ramp the entire region up another massive notch, and possibly tilt the balance in Pakistan so that we definitely have nuclear weapons in the hands of extremists?

In addition to pretending to be Truman, Bush has often pretended to be Reagan. However, during our low-level warfare with Iran in the gulf in the 80s, Reagan had the wit to deal with the problem where it was happening -- in the shipping lanes. Of course, he also engaged in the profound foolishness of backing Hussein against Iran -- perhaps here, as in all things, Bush is choosing to follow the lesser of two examples.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard lit into Barack Obama today for the latter's support for withdrawal from Iraq. Mr. Obama reached pretty much the same conclusion I did the moment I read Howard's ranting (see the end of Obama's statement):

Mr Obama, who has described the Iraq war as "tragic", said he was "flattered" by Mr Howard's statement.

He added: "Otherwise it's just a bunch of empty rhetoric."

To be fair to Mr. Howard, if you base the contribution on population, Australia might be expected to pony up a total of 9,400 soldiers, or about another 8,000 more than they currently have deployed.

So far, two Australians have died in Iraq, both from non-hostile causes:

David Russell Nary

Jake Bruce Kovco

BBC article
CNN article

This al Jazeera article reports that US government has indicated we'll be considering a lot more Iraqi refugees for resettlement here. According to that report, we've accepted 466 refugees since 2003, and only 202 in 2006, but have plans to interview another 7,000 by September of this year. We're also going to offer $18 million to UNCHR to help them handle Iraqi refugees elsewhere. Given the estimate of 2 million externally displaced Iraqis, that's about nine bucks a head. We can probably do better.

The DHS 2005 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics has some numbers on refugees and asylees accepted from various areas in 2005. Here are some values for the combined totals of refugees and asylees obtaining legal permanent resident status from various areas in 2005 (note that this is not the same as refugees arriving in 2005, which I'll discuss later, and which the al Jazeera report is talking about):

(Continued in the extended)

The National Security Archive at George Washington University has published a series of presentations produced by the POLO STEP group, constituting the Iraq "war plan" as generated for and okayed by Tommy Franks. Note the quotes there, as these are Power Point presentations that glibly assume a drawdown to 5,000 troops in Iraq by 12-18 months post-invasion (see the last slide in this file).

Again, I must return to that empiricism thing, and the willful ignorance displayed by the lethal tetrad of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld. Not only did historical evidence tell us that the occupation force would have to be on the order of 300,000 soldiers, it also told us that they'd be there for a while. The occupation of Japan -- again, I remind you, a place neither riven with sectarian violence nor absolutely loaded with weapons -- lasted until 1951 (and that "early" end date was partially driven by the pressure of the Korean war). That's fully half a decade of postwar occupation -- and we still have over 40,000 troops on the ground there defending the place, fifty years later.

Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld committed manslaughter on a grand scale when they approved of this imaginary plan, aided by sloppy thinkers like Tommy Franks. If the Iraq war plan were a product design and the war its product, it would have been recalled years ago based on its design flaws and their tragic consequences.

5,000 troops after 12-18 months? As of 2005, we still had 2,000 soldiers on the ground in Kosovo as part of a larger NATO force of nearly 18,000 troops, policing an area of about 11,000 square kilometers with a population of 2 million -- and that's over half a decade after we went in with NATO. Iraq is 437,000 square kilometers and 27 million people.

Did no one do the math?

As reported, well, everywhere, British forces will be drawing down in Iraq, from about 7,000 soldiers on the ground to about 5,500. In the wake of this announcement, Denmark has indicated that almost all of theiir nearly 500-strong contingent will be leaving as well.

Naturally, this is being read as either a loss of support for Bush administration policies, or as operational success in Basra allowing the British to leave on schedule. Certainly, the Lins de Albuquerque / Cheng map showing killings by location in Iraq for last month suggests that Basra is relatively peaceful, with ten reported deaths. It's possible that this comes from the relative lack of ethnic diversity in the area, which naturally decreases conflict and increases the chances that the local cops aren't killing the locals. In that light, it may well be that Basra is successfully transitioning over to Iraqi control, without the huge problems that come bundled with increased Iraqi control in Baghdad.

The British appear to have been running their veteran anti-insurgency game, avoiding the kinetic failings of our military:

CNN's Nic Robertson said British forces had adopted a "softly-softly approach" to policing Basra in comparison with their American allies in Baghdad.

"They would go out with berets on their heads instead of helmets, they would patrol the streets more frequently than U.S. troops typically would and try to engage the local population. But in the last year that has not been as successful a tactic as it was in the first year or so."

No one on the Iraqi side, government or otherwise, seems incredibly panicked at the idea of the British leaving:

Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme: "It's very good news and the British Army will be thanked and we are grateful for everything they have done in the southern part of Iraq, they've done a brilliant job.

But he added: "We would have hoped that the process would've been accelerated further and speeded up rather than be spaced out."

...and...

Salam al-Maliki, a senior official in the bloc loyal to radical young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr which has long opposed a foreign presence in Iraq, said any violence in the city would cease once the foreign troops have left.

"The militias and militant groups in these areas only fired their weapons at the occupier and when they go, all of the violence here will end," he said.

CNN article
BBC article
Another BBC article
al Jazeera article

From Merriam-Webster:

sacrifice

1 : to offer as a sacrifice
2 : to suffer loss of, give up, renounce, injure, or destroy especially for an ideal, belief, or end
3 : to sell at a loss

waste

1 : to lay waste; especially : to damage or destroy gradually and progressively
2 : to cause to shrink in physical bulk or strength : EMACIATE, ENFEEBLE
3 : to wear away or diminish gradually : CONSUME
4 a : to spend or use carelessly : SQUANDER b : to allow to be used inefficiently or become dissipated
5 : KILL; also : to injure severely

Even though McCain has officially regretted it by now, and Obama, while backing McCain's dedication to the troops, also officially regretted his own statement, it's clear that everyone has to actively try not to say "wasted" when talking about what Bush has done to our people in Iraq.

Compare the two words. We have no "ideals" here, unless the neocon fairytale of a magically democratic Middle East after we kill the big, bad wolf were to count as one. There is an end of some kind -- that same fairytale, as well as the additional end of "Bush trying to stall long enough to not have to admit failure on his own watch." In contrast, Bush and his coterie have clearly lain waste to our military. They have caused it to shrink in both physical bulk -- witness the continuing recruiting failures -- and in strength. They have gradually consumed our military, killing off its men and women, breaking its supplies, and grinding down those who yet live. And certainly, blatantly, they have squandered our people, carelessly throwing them into harm's way, choosing not only to go to war, but to do it in the worst, least-organized way possible.

There is a taboo against saying that our soldiers' lives are ever "wasted," as if to admit that would be to dishonor their personal sacrifice -- their choice to serve. This is exactly backwards. By refusing to admit that lives are wasted when we know that's what's happening, we let more lives continue to be thrown away for no reason at all.

It discourages me that both Senator McCain and Senator Obama are so easily bullied as to perpetuate the fiction that good people's lives are not being wasted in Iraq.

In their report titled Stabilizing Iraq: Factors Impeding the Development of Capable Iraqi Security Forces, the GAO takes stock of the current status of security forces in Iraq, and why their impact on the violence in that country has been less than astonishing.

This chart compares the increase in total numbers of Iraqi security forces with an apparently matching increase in violence. If you look more carefully at the violence track, you'll notice that the biggest "gains" come in attacks on civilians and security forces. In a way, the second part is logical -- the more security forces there are, the more there are to attack. One might expect things to reach a tipping point, however, and see attacks finally decrease. As the GAO notes, the exact opposite has happened so far, with the daily attack rate more than doubling from 70 (in January of 2006) to 160 (in December of that year).

GAO identifies several roadblocks standing in the way of effective security forces in Iraq. First, despite the monicker "security forces," only 40% of the reported numbers -- the Iraqi army, specifically -- are tasked to counterinsurgency. The rest are, in short, cops, and one does not effectively pit cops against insurgents. Second, it's hard to say exactly how many of the reported 327,000 trained security forces are really still on the job, or on the job at any one time. Although Iraqi Ministry of Defense figures exclude soldiers who are AWOL, Ministry of Interior figures include them. Military units deployed outside their home area report up to 50% absentee rates. In addition, GAO estimates that about a third of the Iraqi army is on leave at any one time.

So for the army, that's a starting tally of 130,000 troops, with 44,000 on leave, and up to 50% absentee rates among the 86,000 left on the job. It's hard to say where to begin with the Ministry of Interior, since they don't even bother to track absentee rates.

Third, and a big one, is the problem of sectarian "influence" in Iraqi police units. This has hit the news repeatedly in the last year, with American and British raids conducted against Iraqi "police" stations to rescue kidnap and torture targets.

Finally, GAO notes that Iraqi security forces are still quite dependent on coalition forces for logistical, command, and intelligence support. Their effectiveness is limited by their dependence.

GAO caps its report by reiterating an earlier complaint. Chiefly, DOD continues to balk at handing over to GAO its TRAs -- readiness reports on each of the Iraqi units trained and equipped by us. Without these, it's especially hard to say whether an Iraqi security unit should really be counted among the "ready" responders to the insurgency.

The BBC recently posted this snapshot of life in post-invasion Iraq. It would be sobering, if one did not already know how bad things were.

It's clear from this snapshot that infrastructure is simply not advancing in Iraq. The GAO has already reported that a lot of the money tasked to infrastructure simply isn't being spent. As a consequence, oil exports remain low, and electrical generation simply fluctuates around prewar levels -- well below contemporary requirements.

The BBC overview cites the official figures for Iraqi security forces, placing their numbers at about 320,000. Again, the GAO tells us that these numbers simply aren't accurate. Optimistically, it's maybe a third of that number. Maybe.

It's worth looking at the oil overview to see why alert sunnis in the middle of Iraq don't want the country split into three independent units.

Finally, make sure you check out the cost of living and wage comparison.

BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson writes in his column about an intelligence official who now says it is "one of the great regrets of his career" that he did not challenge how intelligence on Iraq was publically presented by Tony Blair in 2002.

I've gathered from government sources over a period of time that British intelligence had two or three agents on the fringes of Saddam Hussein's inner circle here.

But that wasn't the impression Mr Blair gave to Parliament. As we've seen, he called the intelligence "extensive, detailed and authoritative".

Although their human intelligence sources were indubitably better than ours -- we were just believing whoever Ahmed Chalabi threw our way -- they still weren't providing any kind of information that suggested Iraq represented a clear and present danger to the UK or the US.

It's surpassingly unfortunate that no one called Blair or Bush on their misrepresentations. I wonder to what extent compartmentalization in intelligence contributes to this. You may not have the inside track, but you figure the President or Prime Minister is talking to someone who does.

Except, of course, if you know you're in charge of the top British agents in Iraq, you should suspect that you do, in fact, have the inside track.

In light of the recent problems at Walter Reed, I was very interested in hearing what the GAO had to say about the VA. In a report titled Veterans' Disability Benefits: Processing of Claims Continues to Present Challenges, the GAO tells us that the VA has actually improved its procedures over the years, but that filing claims and appeals is still an arduous, overlong process, and that the VA's disability policies are probably out of step with the modern world.

As the following chart shows, the VA actually reduced its pending claim backlog in the early 2000s.

However, following a commendable low in 2003 -- the year of the Iraq invasion -- the backlog started to pile up again. By the end of last year, initial compensation claims took an average of 127 days to be processed, up 16 days from the year before, and appeals resolution took an average of 657 days.

Consider that this means that our veterans are currently waiting just over four months to have claims processed, and potentially another two years if they try to appeal a rejected claim. That's a long time to hang out, disabled, waiting for help.

The VA notes that they're receiving quite a few more claims than they used to, due to our pair of wars and other causes:

The increase in VA’s inventory of pending claims, and their average time pending is due in part to an increase in claims receipts. Rating-related claims, including those filed by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, increased steadily from about 579,000 in fiscal year 2000 to about 806,000 in fiscal year 2006, an increase of about 39 percent. While VA projects relatively flat claim receipts in fiscal years 2007 and 2008, it cautions that ongoing hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Global War on Terrorism in general, may increase the workload beyond current levels. VA also attributes increased claims to its efforts to increase outreach to veterans and servicemembers. For example, VA reports that in fiscal year 2006, it provided benefits briefings to about 393,000 separating servicemembers, up from about 210,000 in fiscal year 2003, leading to the filing of more original compensation claims. VA has also noted that claims have increased in part because older veterans are filing disability claims for the first time.

Newer claims also take longer to process because they involve harder-to-substantiate conditions, all neurological -- post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and brain injuries (the latter a notable consequence of near hits by IEDs). In processing PTSD the VA runs into specific roadblocks based on the need to substantiate the causative incident(s):

Additionally, claims-processing timeliness can be hampered if VA cannot obtain the evidence it needs in a timely manner. For example, to obtain information needed to fully develop some post-traumatic stress disorder claims, VBA must obtain records from the U.S. Army and Joint Services Records Research Center (JSRRC), whose average response time to VBA regional office requests is about 1 year. This can significantly increase the time it takes to decide a claim.

The VA, aware that its improving outlook has taken a retrograde turn since the invasion of Iraq, has a number of plans to fix the situation. Their fiscal year 2008 staffing request is a 6% increase over 2006 levels. They intend to bring the additional staff up to speed quickly using overtime from regular staff and training led by retired VA employees. They also want to capture more of a servicemember's military records electronically at discharge, so they can cut down on problems such as that one-year wait time from JSRRC. They're also trying to cut down on problems that lead to appeals.

The GAO applauds these efforts, but points out that the VA may have an antiquated idea of just how disability works these days:

Specifically, our research showed that the disability programs administered by VA and the Social Security Administration (SSA) lagged behind the scientific advances and economic and social changes that have redefined the relationship between impairments and work. For example, advances in medicine and technology have reduced the severity of some medical conditions and have allowed individuals to live with greater independence and function in work settings. Moreover, the nature of work has changed in recent decades as the national economy has moved away from manufacturing-based jobs to service- and knowledge-based employment. Yet VA’s and SSA’s disability programs remain mired in concepts from the past, particularly the concept that impairment equates to an inability to work.

If I'm reading that correctly, GAO is pushing in a good direction here. The ability to work in some capacity should not, alone, be a metric that a veteran is no longer in need of assistance and care. We want our injured veterans to return to a real life, not just to survive.

Republican Representative Christopher Shays was quoted today as saying that Congress should not "micromanage" the war in Iraq.

"Congress is not the commander in chief, and it shouldn't be," Shays said in an interview on Capitol Hill with The Associated Press.

"What happens if we stayed four more months (after the fall 2008 deadline) and we could win it?" he said. "A lot can happen in a year."

Ignoring the gambler's mentality of "just one more play, maybe I'll win this time" that he's espousing, return to 1993 and take a look at what Senator John McCain had to say about the situation in Somalia:

What is the criteria and what should be the criteria is our immediate, orderly withdrawal from Somalia. And if we do not do that and other Americans die, other Americans are wounded, other Americans are captured because we stay too long--longer than necessary--then I would say that the responsibilities for that lie with the Congress of the United States who did not exercise their authority under the Constitution of the United States and mandate that they be brought home quickly and safely as possible. . . .

Similarly, from Republican Senator Dirk Kempthorne:

But, Mr. President, the longer we leave United States troops in Somalia under U.N. command, the longer we leave United States troops in unjustified danger. I owe my allegiance to the United States, not to the United Nations. It is time for the Senate of the United States to get on with the debate, to get on with the vote, and to get the American troops home.

For the record, Mr. Shays did not speak on Somalia in Congress in 1993 -- largely because the debate on Somalia was held entirely in the Senate. So he may be on solid ground peronsally, as much as Republican members of Congress may not be on such ground generally. However, it's worth mentioning that while John McCain spoke up defending the power of the president to commit troops, he similarly spoke up to defend Congress's right to defund a war of which it disapproved:

My concern is based on constitutional grounds. The President is the Commander in Chief. As such, he has the power to commit U.S. troops to meet any contingency. The Constitution grants the Congress the power of the purse. With the powers given it, the Congress may end those military operations by cutting off funding. The Constitution does not give the Congress the power to prevent the President from committing forces.

He also had this to say. See if it feels like it might apply a little more to today's Administration (except, perhaps, the idea of "assertive multilateralism"):

Let me stress, Mr. President, that I sympathize with Senators Dole and Nickles as they seek to impose some guidance for American foreign policy in an environment where little guidance, as well as little consultation with Congress on these matters, is forthcoming from the administration. There is a vacuum in foreign policy leadership in Washington at the moment, and that is a dangerous situation for this Nation to risk at such a challenging moment in history. Neither would I like to see a repeat of the administration's inattentiveness, miscalculations and vague inclinations toward assertive multilateralism that result in our recent misadventure in Somalia. Understandably, Senators Dole and Nickles have sought some action which would reduce the likelihood of future repetition of this kind of folly.

One would hope that with adequate consultation with Congress, the administration would avoid future blunders that needlessly put at risk the lives of our troops. If they do not avoid such mistakes, Congress has the right to refuse to fund them. However, I do not believe Congress should preclude or circumscribe the President's foreign policy leadership in advance of the policy's formulation. Congress should work closely with the administration to help keep the President from making future mistakes like the debacle in Somalia. But should he persist in making them, our legislative resources should be to terminate them as quickly as we can by denying them funds for further implementation once they have been made.

These later McCain quotes are from the Congressional record for the Senate, October 19, 1993.

So remember, kids -- John McCain says it's Congress's right to terminate erroneous wars "as quickly as we can by denying them funds."

In a paper in the Lancet published in October of last year -- which I reported on here, Burnham et al made a survey-based estimate of violent deaths in Iraq since the invasion. Their estimate of 390,000-942,000 deaths (best guess 600,000) spurred a lot of complaint, and was dismissed out of hand by Bush, Blair, and the government of Iraq. Even Iraqi health minister Ali al-Shemari's quiet revision of his own estimate up to 150,000 did not dissuade Bush from our excessively conservative estimate of 30,000.

Note the horror of thinking 30,000 civilian deaths is swell, as long as it's not 600,000.

As it happens, a BBC freedom of information request filed in November of last year finally bore fruit, and in this report they reveal that the British Ministry of Defence's chief science advisor, Sir Roy Anderson, had this to say about the Lancet study:

"The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to "best practice" in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq."

Other internal memos revealed by the BBC request show that Blair administration officials accepted the methodology of the study while simultaneously denying its results, thinking they were "too high." How you accept the methods yet question the results is not clear, but probably has something to do with the results being uncomfortable.

Some have also expressed worries that the study might have "mainstreet bias," as explained below:

Some scientists have subsequently challenged the validity of the Lancet study. Questions have been asked about the survey techniques and the possibility of "mainstreet bias".

Dr Spagat has previously conducted research with Iraq Body Count, an NGO that counts deaths on the basis of media reports and which has produced estimates far lower than those published in the Lancet.

This would be a stronger argument against the results of the study if the majority of deaths came from bombings. However, 31% of reported deaths were by gunshot, and only 7% by bombing (you can check these numbers by reading the study yourself). So the potential "mainstreet bias" effect can only account for 42,000 deaths, leaving a whopping 560,000 or so, still over eighteen times the official figure.

Also note that Iraq Body Count and others who rely on media reports are guaranteed to massively undercount casualties. As I mentioned before, media and government reporting of deaths in wartime typically catches only 5-20% of actual deaths. Even taking the conservative 20% reporting estimate, we'd have a casualty figure of 150,000 -- which matches al-Shemari's estimate.

Finally, it's farcical to complain that "they were only able to sample a small sliver of the country". They used sampling methods and numbers equal to any Gallup poll or other rock-solid, reliable surveying method employed on a regular basis to determine public mood and needs in the United States.

The methods are sound, and the results, while hard to fathom, are reasonable.

Yesterday, Senator John Cornyn (R - Texas), said this on the Senate floor:

Madam President, I agree with the Senator from Arizona that the consequences of playing politics with this important funding for our troops is simply the wrong strategy; that what we have is a game of chicken between the House of Representatives, which is larding up a supplemental appropriations bill with a bunch of extraneous pork, and the President, recognizing that there are nonsecurity provisions in that supplemental appropriations, has said if that and the timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is included as part of this emergency supplemental, he will veto it. So this is a high-risk game of chicken, with the impact of delaying passage of the supplemental being felt directly by our troops on the ground, if that is in fact the result.

He's expressing agreement with Senator Jon Kyl, (R - Arizona). One wonders if perhaps he's not so hot about agreeing with the other Senator from Arizona, who, as I mentioned this week had this to say about defunding a war in progress:

One would hope that with adequate consultation with Congress, the administration would avoid future blunders that needlessly put at risk the lives of our troops. If they do not avoid such mistakes, Congress has the right to refuse to fund them.

Mr. Kyl is not on the record from 1993 on his views on Somalia and Congress's control over war funding because he wasn't a Senator at the time. Instead, he was over in the House, arguing for a reduction in the capital gains tax.

He probably is the safer one to agree with, if you're going to argue for this fundamental change in the Republican position on the powers of Congress over war.

Judge Thomas Hogan of the DC District Court has dismissed a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld and others on the grounds that nine people who were tortured on Rumsfeld's watch did not have American constitutional rights, and that Rumsfeld was immune to such lawsuits anyway.

Hogan simultaneously accepted that the evidence demonstrated that the nine men -- five Iraqi, four Afghan -- had, indeed, been tortured while being held in American facilities. This torture included:

• Being hung upside-down and beaten unconscious
• Being stabbed
• Being electrocuted
• Sleep deprivation
• Being attacked by dogs
• Sexual humiliation

I have no idea if courts elsewhere care about things being on the record in the US, but it's there now. The case was dismissed on expected procedural grounds, but the torture evidence was firm enough to convince a judge.

BBC article

Yesterday, in opposing a planned withdrawal date from Iraq, John McCain said this:

You might not know it from reading newspapers or watching the evening news, but in Iraq today there are real signs the new strategy is working. I wish to spend a few moments outlining some of this progress, not to paint an overly rosy scenario but, rather, to correct what has become an almost single-minded focus in the Congress on the prospects of defeat. The debate in Congress has an ``Alice in Wonderland'' quality about it: We are debating efforts to micromanage a conflict based on what the conditions were 3 months ago, not on what the reality is today. Conditions have changed in Iraq. The Baghdad security plan--the ``surge''--is working far better than even the most optimistic supporter had predicted. The progress is tangible in many key areas despite the fact only 40 percent of the planned forces are in Iraq.

In Baghdad, the military has reported an increase in real-time, actionable intelligence provided to U.S. and Iraqi forces by a newly confident population. Prime Minister Maliki, who prevented U.S. troops from conducting certain Baghdad operations last year, has given the green light to American incursions throughout the city, including Shiite strongholds. All of the Iraqi army battalions called for under the plan have arrived, many at or above 75 percent of their programmed manning levels. Bomb attacks and murders are down since the surge began. Civilians killed in Baghdad numbered 1,222 in December, 954 in January, and fell to 494 in February. There are reports of Sunni and Shia moving back into neighborhoods from which they had fled constant and horrific violence. Markets that have been subject to horrific car bombings have been turned into pedestrian malls that facilitate commerce and thwart terrorists.

That does sound impressive -- that would be a 60% drop in civilian deaths in just two months.

Let's take a longer look back. Now, these are all-Iraq numbers, so they'll be a little higher. That said, most death totals for Iraq largely reflect deaths in Baghdad. It's also hard to actually untangle civilian and police deaths, since they tend to be reported together, so these numbers include both. I've also appended a percentage change from the preceding month to the listed month.

I'm really not sure where McCain managed to find stats suggesting that 60% drop, by the way. I suspect very creative accounting at work there. Applied to deaths, that's fairly obscene.

March 2007: 1,396 (-9%)
February 2007: 1,531 (-15%)
January 2007: 1,802 (+3%)
December 2006: 1,752 (-6%)
November 2006: 1,864 (+20%)
October 2006: 1,539 (-56%)
September 2006: 3,539 (+19%)
August 2006: 2,966 (+230%)
July 2006: 1,280 (+47%)
June 2006: 870 (-22%)
May 2006: 1,119 (+10%)
April 2006: 1,009 (-7%)
March 2006: 1,092

So, the first troops of our new surge arrived in Baghdad in late January. Perhaps they're responsible for the drops seen in February and so far in March (although March isn't done yet, and the totals may not include the revenge mass murder in Tal Afar yesterday, or the truck bombing that precipitated it). That said, the record shows far bigger variances that were apparently independent of any change in our strategy. The drop between May and June of last year is about the same as that one we've seen across the entire "surge" period to date, and the drop between September and October is positively precipitous compared to the current mild decline.

John McCain also appeared on television saying that Baghdad was so safe that General Petraeus moves around in a normal HMMWV -- this is part of McCain's repetition of the tired assertion that Donald Rumsfeld used to pull out to insist that "things are going better than you think" in Iraq. CNN Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware had this to say when asked to reality check McCain's remarks:

It's unclear what part of Neverland that Senator McCain is talking about, where Americans can stroll the streets of the capital, Baghdad. If al Qaeda doesn't get an American, if a Shia militia isn't tipped off, if the Sunni insurgents don't grab him, then a criminal gang will see dollar signs and take him immediately.

Also note that American military casualties since the surge began have been higher than all but two months of 2006.

Casualty figures for Iraqis and Americans are taken from icasualties.org. Remember, as they indicate as well, Iraqi deaths are chronically underreported.

As I just mentioned this week, John McCain claimed that violence in Baghdad was way, way down:

Civilians killed in Baghdad numbered 1,222 in December, 954 in January, and fell to 494 in February.

So said John. Again, I have no idea where his magic numbers come from, but consider these official tallies from Iraqi ministries:

Data compiled by several ministries put civilian deaths in March at 1,861 - compared with 1,645 for February.

That's a 13% increase. And remember, they are guaranteed to be dramatically underreporting. Some of the violence does appear to have been pushed out of Baghdad to other areas:

A BBC correspondent in Baghdad says insurgents seem to have shifted their focus outside the capital to avoid recently introduced security measures.

US diplomats say violence in the Iraqi capital has fallen by 25%.

This only underscores the unfortunate ineffectiveness of "surging" by putting 20,000 more soldiers in harm's way.

Remember, the research has been done. We have historical precedent. It's 300,000 troops, not 160,000. 300,000.

Six American soldiers died yesterday and today southwest of Baghdad.

I can't understand how a man can go from straight through bent to warped, but John McCain has done so. He's actually lying about a war gone wrong for political gain.

BBC article

I'll just quote the CNN article:

The Arizona Republican, who is one of the war's most outspoken supporters, became testy when pressed about his recent remarks that there are areas of Baghdad where Americans can travel safely.

"I just came from one," he said, referring to his trip to the outdoor market, which required a heavy military escort. "I've been here many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport. Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today."

I even voted for him in the 2000 primary.

And I mean that seriously. In this article, al Jazeera repeats part of one of the coerced "confessions" given by British military personnel in Iranian custody. The Iranian government statement is as follows:

"All evidence, including the GPS carried by the British military and also the frank confessions of all 15 British personnel shows that they have entered Iran's territorial waters without permission," Iranian state television said earlier on Monday.

However, listen to what Captain Chris Air actually says, even though he's stuck in unfriendly custody and is doubtless subject to substantial off-screen coercion:

Captain Chris Air, one of the 15 naval service personnel, was shown saying: "At about 10 o'clock in the morning, we were seized, apparently at this point here, from their maps, from the GPS they've shown us, which is inside Iranian territorial waters.

"...from their maps, from the GPS they've shown us..."

That's not an admission, even if the Iranian executive wishes it were. Smart.

The New York Times actually bothered to reality check John McCain's fabrications about Americans being able to travel freely in a Baghdad market:

“What are they talking about?” Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. “The security procedures were abnormal!”

The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.

Apparently, that's what Indiana markets are like, according to Representative Mike Pence:

Congressional colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,” offered Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who was a member of the delegation.

I'll remember to watch out for those suicide bombers the next time I'm in Indiana. On the upside, if a member of Congress chooses to go to one of those Indiana markets, I guess they'll get a company with air and sniper support to watch their backs, and roadblocks and checkpoints to keep all but a carefully selected subset of people from interacting with them in any way.

I don't blame General Petraeus at all for protecting the Congress members so heavily. I wouldn't want to be the officer who lost a Congressional delegation. But for McCain and his companions to lie about what went on is sad, weak, and wrong.

If you're curious, I've quoted Pence's full blog entry on the trip in the extended (I would have simply linked to it, but there doesn't seem to be a permanent link available).

In this al Jazeera interview, former Republican Guard commander Saifeddin Fulayh Hassan Taha al-Rawi tries to save some face and get some screen time by claiming that the US used phosphorous weapons and neutron bombs to kill defending forces at the Baghdad airport while leaving the infrastructure intact.

Apparently, he belives in the magical kind of phosphorous that does no damage to buildings, and the even more magical neutron bombs that also do no damage at all to buildings, and yet scorch people into ash:

"The enemy used neutron and phosphorus weapons against Baghdad airport... there were bodies burnt to their bones," he said.

Leaving aside the fact that we've never deployed neutron munitions in quantity, they just don't work like that. They aren't magical martian death rays that reduce people to ash while leaving buildings pristine.

But it got him on television, and its a claim lots of people will be happy to believe, especially as it, like many urban legends, frames the "offender" as a hypocrite.

A fierce battle in central Baghdad on Tuesday left four Iraqi soldiers dead, 16 US soldiers wounded and a US helicopter damaged by ground fire.

...

In other news, the US military announced the deaths of four more soldiers - three killed by a roadside bomb and secondary explosion in southeastern Baghdad and a fourth in combat in Iraq's western Anbar province.

The roadside bomb victims had been conducting raids against anti-government fighters in the area, and had recently captured five suspects, the military said in a statement.

Mr. Pence's analogy still isn't selling me on any trips to Indiana. As a completely related aside, Indiana has lost its fair share of people -- 63 American soldiers from Indiana have been killed so far in Iraq. Considered in proportion to its population, this is comparable to the 341 soldiers lost from California. I'm guessing all of them would have been safer back at home.

al Jazeera article

Casualty tally taken from the icasualties.org "By State" index.

Star player of the manslaughter-prone lethal tetrad, Paul Wolfowitz, has taken a break from his world tour promoting privatization as the cure to all ills to get into serious trouble over his own corruption.

Given that he was rewarded for his American-killing incompetence with a job heading the World Bank, it's no surprise that Wolfowitz thinks nepotism is okay.

Earlier it was revealed that he had directly intervened in the arrangements for Ms Riza’s transfer to the US State Department in mid-2005 to avoid a conflict of interest after his contentious appointment as head of the World Bank at the behest of the White House. Under World Bank rules, staff are banned for working under the direction of a colleague with whom they are romantically involved.

Details emerged of a memorandum from Mr Wolfowitz instructing Xavier Coll, the Bank’s human resources head, over the terms for Ms Riza’s secondment. This led to her being given an exceptional salary rise and enhanced annual pay awards, lifting her earnings to $193,000 (£97,600) a year tax-free — an $61,000 rise overall. The memo also set out arrangements for her promotion.

He'll probably keep this job, and get to keep up his policy of following his beliefs over reality, no matter how many people die as reality proves him wrong.

The Times Online
al Jazeera article

The first really strong push back against the Baghdad surge has come. A series of bombings in various parts of Baghdad has killed upwards of 150 people in Baghdad. The BBC report places the tally at 157, al Jazeera has it at 169, and CNN places it at 171. The single biggest death toll came from a car bombing in a Sadriya food market, where over a hundred people died.

The bombings came a day after Moqtada al Sadr pulled his support from the Iraqi parliament, and as Prime Minister Maliki was announcing that Iraqi forces would be in charge of security by the end of the year.

Note that the second-largest bombing occurred in Sadr City.

BBC article
al Jazeera article
CNN article

In a photo op with General Petraeus today, George Bush said this:

I believe strongly that politicians in Washington shouldn't be telling generals how to do their job.

Really?

So you wouldn't, say, ignore the war plan one of your best generals put together and instead choose to promote a belief that doesn't fit reality but which your political cronies like, leading to the deaths of several thousand of our people? And you wouldn't then add 20,000 troops to Iraq against the recommendations of your own military officers, even as you ignore requests for more troops from our officers in Afghanistan?

That's good. I feel better, knowing you don't believe politicians should overrule generals. What other wisdom do you have for us?

An artificial timetable of withdrawal would say to an enemy, just wait them out; it would say to the Iraqis, don't do hard things necessary to achieve our objectives; and it would be discouraging for our troops.

Hmmm. So by having an open-ended commitment in Iraq, we're forcing the Iraqis to do the hard work now? Really? Because I've seen how the average American student approaches a task when no deadline is given. Maybe Iraqis just work differently.

And therefore I will strongly reject an artificial timetable withdrawal and/or Washington politicians trying to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their job.

Ah. Perhaps he needs to be told that he's a Washington politician who has consistently told those who wear the uniform how to do their job -- and how to do it poorly, at that.

One of the key arguments for the Wolfowitz post-war-heaven that Iraq was meant to be was that we could totally rebuild their ragged infrastructure. Instead, as the GAO has reported, although large piles of cash were shoveled vaguely toward infrastructure, little effective rebuilding has been done.

Consider the case of the failing generators at Baghdad International Airport. Before ending its operations in Iraq last year, Bechtel built 17 generator sets at that airport for a total cost of $11.8 million. These provide the power necessary to keep the airport running. Now, two years after the generators were handed over to the Iraqi government, 10 of the 17 don't work. What's going on there?

The airport power plant manager told inspectors that his staff hadn't received any maintenance manuals for the generators. The same manager, however, had received maintenance manuals and signed for them, according to the U.S. government agency overseeing Bechtel.

While I'm no Bechtel booster, I'm inclined to think they wouldn't screw up something as basic as handing the manuals over. I also think it's quite reasonable that the manuals were signed for and disappeared without the current manager knowing anything about it.

But how does something like that go for two years without word coming back out to, say, Bechtel? It's a set of manuals. Surely some part of the 91.6% of the Iraqi national capital goods budget that isn't currently being used could go toward a mail-ordered set of documentation for the power generators that run the only major airport in Baghdad.

These are not the hallmarks of a functioning national government.

You may have heard or read in the news about a serving officer criticizing the failures of American generals in Iraq. The Army was quick to distance itself officially from this letter -- unsurprising, since the letter calls into question most of the military's "business as usual." Heard as a sound bite, the letter sounds like pure criticism, and something that can safely fall off the news cycle and be ignored.

It's not, though. Lt. Col. Paul Yingling has written a strong, important critique of how the American military works. More to the point, he tossed aside George Bush's pathetic straw man defense and provided a plan for change.

When Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster critiqued the US military, I read and reviewed what he wrote. Similarly, I read and reviewed Lt. Col. John A. Nagl's book on counterinsurgency, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Not coincidentally, Yingling mentions Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife in his piece.

Yingling opens with a discussion of "the responsibilities of generalship." Choosing war, he tells us, is the province of policymakers and the people. Generals, on their own, are no more qualified to choose war than any other citizen. Their job -- and it's a critical job -- is to prepare for war and evaluate our readiness for war. When policymakers and the people choose to go to war, the generals must give a sober evaluation of whether or not we can achieve success. If they determine that we can't, they have to tell policymakers that, and then the policymakers can figure out whether they can drum up enough support to gain the resources we need -- whether it be in manpower or economic assets -- to meet the requirements of the generals.

No one can perfectly prepare for the next war, but one can try to get as close as possible. Yingling quotes Sir Michael Howard on this point:

"In structuring and preparing an army for war, you can be clear that you will not get it precisely right, but the important thing is not to be too far wrong, so that you can put it right quickly."

As he points out, one can either fight the last war, and lose -- as the French military did in the second world war -- or rethink things and win -- as the Germans did against France in that very same war.

Yingling moves on to Vietnam, the first major failure of American generalship. As he and many others have pointed out, the American military failed to acknowledge a basic shift in the kinds of wars we'd be fighting after World War II and Korea, even in the face of explicit evidence from the French experience in Indochina. Even when President Kennedy saw that war would be heading toward counterinsurgency rather than salients and tank battles, the generals stayed in their comfort zone.

The biggest failures in Vietnam, however, came from generals who explicitly saw the problems and simply said nothing about it:

Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson estimated in 1965 that victory would require as many as 700,000 troops for up to five years. Commandant of the Marine Corps Wallace Greene made a similar estimate on troop levels. As President Johnson incrementally escalated the war, neither man made his views known to the president or Congress. President Johnson made a concerted effort to conceal the costs and consequences of Vietnam from the public, but such duplicity required the passive consent of America's generals.

After the war, the generals made a concerted effort to forget any lessons that might have been learned:

An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War," by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.

Through the 80s the American military focused on large-scale warfare with the Soviets. Our subsequent success in pushing the conventional forces out of Iraq were taken as a sign that we were on the right track, as was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, as Yingling points out, we sped the collapse of the Soviet Union by funding an insurgency in Afghanistan. In other words, we attacked our opponents by insurgency, but refused to admit its power or importance. Thus, the 90s saw us continuing to gear up for conventional warfare -- even though the Battle of the Black Sea showed us that the odds were good we'd be fighting against folks with rifles and man-portable antitank weapons, rather than Soviet T-72s and MiGs.

Then, we went to war in Iraq -- and the first, and most critical, failure of generalship struck:

The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America's generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.

This is important, and stunningly similar to Vietnam. Bush and his apologists like to say that no one knew how bad it would be. Perhaps that's true -- although that represents a massive failure that Yingling addresses later on. But everyone knew, from hard, empirical evidence, taken from recent history, that we would need far, far more troops than we planned to send. As Yingling points out, only General Shinseki, whom the Bush administration did their best to shame, said that we needed a couple hundred thousand more soldiers to safely pacify Iraq. All the other generals stood by as manslaughter was committed in advance by "planners" who suggested we'd be down to only 5,000 troops in Iraq 12-18 months after the invasion.

Troop strength alone was not the only failure. Despite their own modeling showing that the State Department would be unable to pick up many of the tasks required for occupation, the "planners" still assumed State would handle most of the governing duties. Then, after making these two critical missteps, the generals made a huge third mistake by failing to adapt to the counterinsurgency in Iraq. This is unsurprising, given the assiduous avoidance of counterinsurgency theory and training over the last half century.

Finally, in another sick mirror of Vietnam, "America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public."

The Iraq Study Group concluded that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq." The ISG noted that "on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America's generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America's generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation's deployable land power to a single theater of operations.

So, that's a lot of critiquing. We have a general officer corps that misrepresents things when they don't fit executive policy, that says it is "intimidated" into silence by upper management, that will let our men and women be sent to war with half (or less!) the troops they need, and that have eschewed training in the key areas of modern war.

How do we fix this?

Yingling sets out some key areas where things need to change, and he tasks Congress with exercising its power to make sure this happens. Note that here, a military officer believes that Congress should exercise control over the military, something that George Bush has a problem with. Curious disagreement, isn't it?

Here are the changes Yingling wants us to make:

• Congress should require the armed services to implement 360-degree evaluations for field-grade and flag officers. Junior officers and noncommissioned officers are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly. They are also less wed to organizational norms and less influenced by organizational taboos. Junior leaders have valuable insights regarding the effectiveness of their leaders, but the current promotion system excludes these judgments. Incorporating subordinate and peer reviews into promotion decisions for senior leaders would produce officers more willing to adapt to changing circumstances, and less likely to conform to outmoded practices.
• Congress should also modify the officer promotion system in ways that reward intellectual achievement. The Senate should examine the education and professional writing of nominees for three- and four-star billets as part of the confirmation process. The Senate would never confirm to the Supreme Court a nominee who had neither been to law school nor written legal opinions. However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer's potential for senior leadership.
• To reward moral courage in our general officers, Congress must ask hard questions about the means and ways for war as part of its oversight responsibility. Some of the answers will be shocking, which is perhaps why Congress has not asked and the generals have not told. Congress must ask for a candid assessment of the money and manpower required over the next generation to prevail in the Long War. The money required to prevail may place fiscal constraints on popular domestic priorities. The quantity and quality of manpower required may call into question the viability of the all-volunteer military. Congress must re-examine the allocation of existing resources, and demand that procurement priorities reflect the most likely threats we will face. Congress must be equally rigorous in ensuring that the ways of war contribute to conflict termination consistent with the aims of national policy. If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail. Current oversight efforts have proved inadequate, allowing the executive branch, the services and lobbyists to present information that is sometimes incomplete, inaccurate or self-serving. Exercising adequate oversight will require members of Congress to develop the expertise necessary to ask the right questions and display the courage to follow the truth wherever it leads them.
• Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war. By exercising its powers to confirm the retired ranks of general officers, Congress can restore accountability among senior military leaders.

There you go. Lt. Col. Yingling has given us solid suggestions for fixing the critical problems that have led us to failure not once, but twice in the last half century. The next time a politician uses the dodge that "we shouldn't tell our generals what to do" to defend bad policy, we might all do well to read Lt. Col. Yingling's essay one more time, then find ourselves some new generals.

You can read Lt. Col. Yingling's piece by clicking here.

Retired General William Odom, head of the NSA during the Reagan administration, is advising President Bush to sign the current budget legislation that would mandate an American withdrawal from Iraq.

"The challenge we face today is not how to win in Iraq; it is how to recover from a strategic mistake: invading Iraq in the first place," he said. "The president has let (the Iraq war) proceed on automatic pilot, making no corrections in the face of accumulating evidence that his strategy is failing and cannot be rescued. He lets the United States fly further and further into trouble, squandering its influence, money and blood, facilitating the gains of our enemies."

As it happens, Odom agrees with something John McCain said way back in 1993. Here's the McCain quote:

One would hope that with adequate consultation with Congress, the administration would avoid future blunders that needlessly put at risk the lives of our troops. If they do not avoid such mistakes, Congress has the right to refuse to fund them. However, I do not believe Congress should preclude or circumscribe the President's foreign policy leadership in advance of the policy's formulation. Congress should work closely with the administration to help keep the President from making future mistakes like the debacle in Somalia. But should he persist in making them, our legislative resources should be to terminate them as quickly as we can by denying them funds for further implementation once they have been made.

From the article discussing General Odom's advice to Bush:

Odom said he doesn't favor congressional involvement in the execution of foreign and military policy, but argued that Bush had been derelict in his responsibilities.

Indeed, it seems like military officers everywhere are calling for Congressional intervention in Iraq.

No longer quite so proud of his Gold Star for Exceptional Failure in the Line of Duty from Bush, George Tenet now claims that he really, honestly, is Totally Not to Blame for even a smidgen of the war in Iraq.

He points out -- accurately -- that there was "never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat..." as if that exonerated him for his complicity in tilting the intelligence and going to war on the strength of a single, compromised source and wish fulfilment.

In other words, he's saying that he knew their case was broken, and he remained silent. This is exactly the kind of career-minded cowardice that Lt. Col. Yingling wrote about in his recent essay.

Fortunately, others aren't letting Tenet get away with this disgusting attempt to shift blame away from himself. As reported in this CNN article, six former CIA officers have written a letter to Tenet calling him out on his cowardice:

In a letter written Saturday to former CIA Director George Tenet, six former CIA officers described their former boss as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership."

"This intelligence was ignored and later misused."

You can click here to read the full letter.

These men are absolutely right. Tenet should give up the medal. His attempt to cover his ass with his new book compounds his failure of courage with abject immorality. It would be better simply to admit failure and then attempt to fix some of the damage.

Maybe he could volunteer for an NGO in Iraq.

George Bush has, unsurprisingly, vetoed the current military spending bill with its withdrawal clause, despite being urged to sign the bill by an experienced military officer.

"Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure, and that would be irresponsible," Bush said in a televised address after the veto.

He's right. You can't just rush a failure. Something that's merely a terrible failure that's cost us thousands of lives right now could really blossom into a spectacular failure that costs us tens of thousands of lives. As long as we don't set a date, or define success, or have clear goals, there's always room for more failure.

CNN article
BBC article
al Jazeera article

In a report titled Stabilizing and Rebuilding Iraq: Coalition Support and International Donor Commitments, GAO checks in with our "coalition of the willing" and with the pool of international donors providing grants and loans to Iraq.

GAO includes this chart by way of showing how non-US coalition participants have dropped off the scene in the last year or so. Currently, American forces are 92% of what's on the ground in Iraq, and 2006 was the first year we lost coalition partners with no new ones to replace them.

This chart is perhaps even more notable for how directly it illlustrates the lie of the surge. In December of 2005, coalition forces numbered 178,100. We recently "surged" up to a whopping 157,600. In other words, the "surge" took us to just 88% of a historical troop level that didn't stop the violence back in late 2005. Do you really feel the need to "give the plan a chance" at this point?

The report also includes a view of our current force structure in Iraq, which I've included in the extended. Our major partners in Iraq at this point -- that is, those nations actually in charge of a region of the country -- are the United Kingdom, Poland, and South Korea. Although the Korean role in Iraq is rarely reported on in the US, the Korean force is in charge of operations in the northeast of Iraq, from Irbil to Kirkuk. They're also planning on leaving the country in 2007.

In addition to the force structure chart, I've also included GAO's coalition participation chart in the extended. As mentioned above, 2006 was the first year that saw only dropouts from the coalition, with no replacements:

• 2004: Japan and Singapore join, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Hungary, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Philippines, Spain, and Tonga drop
• 2005: Armenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina join, Singapore drops
• 2006: Estonia, Macedonia, Mongolia, and Netherlands drop

The remaining coalition is mostly a "who's who" of former Eastern bloc nations.

The US has spent about $1.5 billion in support of coalition partners since the start of the war, with nearly $1 billion of that going to Poland (as befits their relatively large contribution of troops and concomitant inability to transport or house them). The second-place recipient here is actually Jordan, to whom we've paid about $300 million to help them secure their border.

The report also takes a look at international (non-US) aid offered to Iraq. About $15.6 billion in aid has been offered to Iraq, with the substantial caveat that 70% of this is as loans, rather than as outright payment. The biggest "givers" overall are the European Commission ($921 million), Iran ($1 billion), Japan ($4.9 billion), and the IMF and World Bank (which together amount to at least $5.5 billion in proposed loans).

But that's loans. Who's giving the most money outright? It turns out that the big gift-giving nations (again, non-US) are Japan ($1 billion), the United Kingdom ($775 million), Korea ($153 million), Canada ($110 million), and Spain ($100 million).

The GAO gave no specific recommendations in this informational report. I do think the total troop levels over time shown in the very first chart provide mute witness to George Bush's lies about Iraq.

US and Iraqi forces are conducting a massive search for three soldiers missing since their patrol was attacked south of Baghdad on Saturday.

Five soldiers were killed in the insurgent attack on the patrol of seven Americans and their Iraqi interpreter near the town of Mahmudiya.

...

In the past year, six US soldiers have been abducted and killed by insurgents in two similar incidents.

The bodies of two soldiers were found days after they went missing in the same area last June, while four soldiers were abducted and killed by insurgents in Karbala in January this year.

...

US commanders say the "surge" in troops has reduced the number of sectarian murders in the capital but the number of car bombings remains undiminished at more than 100 a month, says the BBC's Andrew North in Baghdad.

BBC article

The city of Samarra, in central Iraq, has been under curfew for just shy of two weeks in the wake of insurgent attacks. Combined with damage to the city's power and water supplies during those same attacks, the curfew is slowly killing the city off. Strict transit controls mean that the 300,000 people in Samarra are running out of fuel, fresh water, and food. Doctors for Iraq, an Iraqi-initiated NGO, is calling this "collective punishment," and it certainly seems like that's what's going on.

A spokesman for the US military in Iraq admitted the security measures had "made living very difficult", but said the local authorities had imposed them because of the risk of attacks by insurgents.

The problem is that the half-assing of security measures means that security isn't going to be achieved. Locking down a city the size of Bakersfield is conceptually fine, but you must, absolutely must, keep the people safe in all ways. If they can't move in and out, then food and water must be brought in to them. If they have no power or fuel, then power must be reestablished and fuel supplied. As it is, whatever the intent, the reality is that these people will feel like they are being punished for having been the victims of violence.

BBC article

You may have missed this, but the Washington Post has recently covered the fact that our tax-dollar funded, theoretically American-propaganda-oriented Arabic-language news station, Al Hurra, has been broadcasting all sorts of fundamentalist rantings and ravings.

From Joel Mowbray's opinion piece in the Post:

Al-Hurra was intended to cut through the anti-West and anti-U.S. propaganda that permeates even mainstream Arab media. Stories in that vein no longer see significant airtime, and nowhere is this more apparent than Al-Hurra's new approach to the Holocaust--the treatment of which in Arab society embodies so much that is wrong in that critical region of the Muslim world.

Also broadcast unchallenged were the remarks of the infamous French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, who informed Arab viewers: "Gas chambers and mass killings of the Jews, in the way that it is pretended (by the Jews), is completely untrue, and an historical lie."

Al Hurra also broadcast all of an hour-long speech by Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Yes, that's the Hezbollah that we've classed as a terrorist group.

Should it seem peculiar that new Al Hurra programming director Larry Register would do such a thing, consider the fact that he speaks no Arabic. In fact, most of the upper echelon folks currently overseeing the channel speak no Arabic. This may be quirky of me, but I think if I were in any way responsible for a broadcast station meant to foster good public relations with a hugely critical part of the world, I'd bust my ass trying to learn the language.

Mowbray closes his editorial with this message:

But that's not enough. The people who already monitor the network--its employees--need to be empowered to report dubious decisions without fear of reprisal. Transparency will allow concerns to be investigated swiftly. Employees simply won't come forward, though, if they believe no one in power cares. For that reason, a clear signal must be sent by firing Mr. Register.

After all, if you can't get fired for using U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide a platform for Islamic terrorists and help further Holocaust denial, then wouldn't Congress and the Bush administration be communicating that pretty much anything goes?

I agree. Write a letter to the fool we have in the executive now, as well as your Senators and Representative. The trickle-down pattern of rank incompetence costs us money and lives, and now it's promoting radical terrorism on our dime.

The full opinion piece
Another opinion piece, reprinted on Representative Steve Rothman's site

Here's a template, if you'd like to write to the President and your Senators and Rep about the travesty of Al Hurra promoting terrorist messages using your money.

[Politician's name] -

I am writing to express my deep dismay at the fact that Alhurra, a news station funded by American taxpayers, has been broadcasting extremist messages by known terrorist leaders. This negligence and disregard for the safety of the many American soldiers and civilians working in the Middle East is intolerable, and must be stopped immediately. Programming director Larry Register must be fired, to be replaced by someone who understands the driving purpose of Alhurra, and who also has the basic competence to speak the language the station broadcasts in. Alhurra itself must also be completely reviewed, especially the levels of upper management. This includes the Broadcasting Board of Governors, who have been derelict in their duty as the true directors of Alhurra.

We need quick, decisive action on this topic before any American lives are lost as a result of continued incompetence.

[My name]

Thanks to Tim for the original link. Two weeks ago the University of Massachusetts, Amherst piled onto the honoring mediocrity bandwagon by deciding to give an honorary degree for "public service" to Iraq war co-founder Andrew Card. The actual honor grads and the audience were having none of it:

hedge, v

1. To plant or cultivate hedges.
2. To take compensatory measures so as to counterbalance possible loss.
3. To avoid making a clear, direct response or statement.

(from The Free Dictionary

According to DOD spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, the US has now finally deployed the full 28,500 troops of the "surge" and counterinsurgency operations can finally get under way.

"All the forces initially identified as part of the surge have completed their strategic movements into theatre in Iraq," he said.

"Now everyone is here, this is when General Petraeus intends the surge to start as it was envisaged, with everyone working together to bring the levels of violence down in Baghdad."

But maybe not really:

He warned it would take 30 to 60 days for the final brigade, which arrived this week, to become fully operational.

Now, while it may confuse some people like John McCain, who thought the surge was already working, apparently the surge is only now, finally ready to start working. Or, perhaps, it's ready to start working in one to two months. It's clear that the consequence aversion disease is as robust as ever, as spokespeople get stuck with the unenviable task of making rah-rah declarations about the surge while still hedging heavily so that people aren't disappointed if things don't work out. Rather than move the goalposts after the fact, the strategy now is to populate the field with goalposts in series, in the hopes of hitting a positive note on at least one of the goal lines. For the surge, we could have claimed success from good outcomes (1) at the start of the surge, (2) right now, with all the troops in place, (3), in a month or two, or (4) a month or two after that, since that's a month or two after the 30-60 days to get the final troops up and running. So if you haven't seen anything good out of Iraq by the end of August, be prepared to be told to wait another two months -- to "give the surge a chance to work," in the paraphrased words of George Bush.

The Bush strategy now is this -- if you set up enough benchmarks, maybe you'll actually hit one of them and claim success. Like a bad cold reader trying to cheat you out of five bucks, the Bush administration throws out as many goals and timelines as possible, in the hopes that one will end up smelling like success.

The hope now rests on the intelligence and creativity of our troops and General David Petraeus, because all Bush's "surge" has done is push our troop total to 88% of our 2005 level, far short of what's really needed to fight an insurgency. If our troops can't pull this one off, I don't blame them at all. Bush won't blame them either, but only because that's politically unsound. He'll blame a lack of support at home, or the Iraqis, or al Qaeda, or maybe some other scapegoat that's just a glimmer in Karl Rove's eye.

But that won't happen yet. There are still some goalposts to move.

Police in Iraq have raided the home of Minister of Culture Asaad Kamal al-Hashemi, missing the Minister but arresting six of his bodyguards. Hashemi, a member of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, is thought to be spending some time in Jordan right now.

The charges involve the early 2005 murder of the two sons of Sunni politician Mithal al-Alusi. Hashemi was not the Minister of Culture at the time.

The warrant for Mr Hashemi's arrest was issued on Monday by Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council.

"The minister was then an imam in a mosque."

The response?

Mr Hashemi's party condemned the arrest warrant as part of the "marginalising policy against prominent Sunni leaders to push them away from the political process".

It warned the Iraq's Shia-dominated government to avoid "playing with fire by continuing the policy of fabricating lies to exclude Sunni politicians and officials from the Iraqi arena".

Who do we believe? Hard to say.

BBC article

Senator Richard Lugar and Senator George Voinovich, both senior Republicans, have called this week for some kind of coherent Iraq exit strategy to be developed.

Senator Voinovich had this to say:

"It's time for the United States to put together a comprehensive plan for gradual disengagement in Iraq," Voinovich said. "We're running out of time and I don't think it's fair to the next administration to say, 'Hey by the way, we're leaving this baby for you guys to figure out.' "

It's inspiring to see a partisan voice clearly call for not making this "someone else's problem", where that "someone else" is anyone other than George Bush, Dick Cheney, and friends.

Senator Lugar said this:

"The president may believe that he can simply continue on with or without the congress, but I think he is wrong in that assumption.

"My fear is that at some point we will have a withdrawal from Iraq that is very disorderly and not very well planned," he said in excerpts released by the station.

"That would be a tragedy for the troops, a tragedy for Iraq, a tragedy for us."

Again, the Senator sees the actual strategy of "failure after, but not on, my watch" that the current administration is using and refuses to go for it.

Of course, they're already being sniped at by other members of their own party. Consider this particular bit of nonsense from Lindsey Graham:

As much as I respect Sen. Lugar, I think it's unfair to the troops in the field to say the surge is not working."

"The military part of the surge is definitely working," Graham said. "There's no question in my mind that there's improvement in stability and new political alliances being formed."

It's unfair to the troops to say that the asinine, not-actually-a-surge "surge" strategy isn't working? Seriously? It's a little more unfair to them to put them continuously in harm's way to try and hide George Bush's ever-swelling shame. But Mr. Graham feels okay, because there's "no question in [his] mind" that the surge is working, and new alliances are being formed. Of course, John McCain thought it was working two months ago, but his numbers were made up. Despite the real and continuing trend of increasing violence over time and the fact that both the Iraqi military and that nation's infrastructure are largely imaginary, die-hard war supporters won't let reality stand in the way of their strong beliefs.

Curiously, reality still appears to disagree with people like Mr. Graham. Consider the fact that the Iraqi army can't hold areas cleared by American troops during our recent offensive in Baquba. But that's okay, because new alliances are being formed. Specifically, we're making deals with local militant groups to help fight al Qaeda.

Obviously, part of the pressure here comes from the pending election season. While it's sad that people need to be kicked into action by the possibility of losing their jobs, this highlights something very important -- this is why we have elections. Whether they're caring people or cynical bastards, our political figures depend on our continued good mood to keep their jobs.

This, at least, is democracy in action.

CNN article
al Jazeera article

(Notice that the al Jazeera article is willing to show a wounded American soldier in the field. This is something our own media and government bodies tend to assiduously avoid, in an act of intense disrespect for our soldiers who have volunteered to serve us around the world. It's not a good thing to pretend that our people don't pay for our choices.)

Joe Lieberman spoke yesterday in the Senate against a number of amendments to a pending defense bill. Setting aside discussion of those amendments, consider his remarks:

Six months ago, this Chamber voted unanimously to confirm GEN David Petraeus as commander of our forces in Iraq. The fact is - which we all acknowledge - before that, the administration had followed a strategy in Iraq that simply was not working. It was a strategy focused on keeping the U.S. force presence as small as possible, regardless of conditions on the ground, and of pushing Iraqi forces into the lead as quickly as possible, regardless of their capabilities to do so.

General Petraeus oversaw - let me step back. General Petraeus was part of a process, along with others, that presented a dramatically different strategy to the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief. He accepted that dramatically different strategy, which was to apply classic principles of counterinsurgency that have been successful elsewhere, so that instead of our main goal being to get out of Iraq, our main goal became to protect the civilian population that the terrorists were persistently attacking, bringing chaos throughout the country, including particularly in the capital city of Baghdad, and making it impossible for a new Iraqi Government to take shape.

Wait...so Joe's saying our old strategy was to eschew decades of counterinsurgency strategy and keep our force in Iraq as small as possible, and now General Petraeus has turned this all around?

I'll give him the latter half of that remark -- we did, indeed, fail to apply time-tested counterinsurgency techniques for much of our time in Iraq to date, despite a respected British officer clearly pointing out that we were screwing things up and despite many junior to mid-rank officers knowing we were screwing things up. If General Petraeus has finally reversed Lt. Col. Paul Yingling's failure in generalship, that can only be a good thing. In fact, it appears that Petraeus is on course to do one of the things Lt. Col. Yingling requires of a good general -- tell the truth. He recently said that the Iraq counterinsurgency could take quite a while, citing the long, long-term example of Northern Ireland, and saying the "average counter insurgency is somewhere around a nine or a ten year endeavour." Maybe he'll follow this up by discussing our troop totals in Iraq.

This brings us to the curious part of Lieberman's comment, where he says that our initial, incorrect goal was to keep the American presence "as small as possible, regardless of conditions on the ground." While that may have been the goal of the currently unnamed all-star moron who claimed U.S. force levels would be down to 5,000 troops on the ground within 12-18 months of the invasion, it doesn't fit the reality of our numbers in Iraq over the years, as highlighted in a recent GAO report. To summarize:

• Late 2003 - 127,000 troops in Iraq (+24,000 coalition troops)
• Mid 2004 - 127,000 troops in Iraq (+22,000 coalition troops)
• Late 2004 - 152,000 troops in Iraq (+25,000 coalition troops)
• Mid 2005 - 139,000 troops in Iraq (+23,000 coalition troops)
• Late 2005 - 155,000 troops in Iraq (+23,000 coalition troops)
• Mid 2006 - 133,000 troops in Iraq (+19,000 coalition troops)
• Late 2006 - 132,000 troops in Iraq (+15,000 coalition troops)
• Mid 2007 - 145,000 troops in Iraq (+13,000 coalition troops)

So, Joe, where were we trying to minimize that troop total? We actually had a huge spike in troop totals at the end of 2005 - more, in fact, than our current "surge," especially if we include our coalition partners into the tally, as we probably should. Although the "surge" added some troops back in, it still doesn't reach our troop total heights in years past.

Yeah, Joe's misrepresenting again.

I'm convinced, at this point, that Senator Lieberman does not have America's best interests at heart. He shares that neo-con dream of mechanically punching a hole in the midst of the Middle East, inserting a compliant democracy, and thus making the world safer for Israel. He has the gall to go on and say this:

But the plain truth is that Iraq in this month, July 2007, is a very different and better place than Iraq in January or February of 2000, and it is because of the so called surge counteroffensive strategy.

Really, Joe? So a repressive, totalitarian regime is clearly worse than random torture and mass murder and 600,000 extra violent deaths? No, Joe. Those are two bad choices, and Iraq now is plainly a more wantonly violent place than it was in 2000. It takes a gross disregard for human life to blithely claim that the "plain truth" is that Iraq is a better place now than it was before -- and by repeating that callous mantra, you deny anyone the chance to see the real situation, and actually make Iraq a better place than it was.

Remember, human life is valuable. And Israel is not our 51st state.

In late March of this year, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and Democratic Senator Jim Webb proposed a bipartisan amendment to the Iraq War supplemental spending bill, intended to protect the readiness of our troops and limit deployments. In the words of Senator Hagel's press release concerning the amendment:

The amendment:

- and requires the President to report to Congress on the comprehensive diplomatic, political and economic strategy of the U.S. regarding Iraq.

Hagel had this to say about the amendment and its intent:

"This amendment puts the focus where it should be: on the men and women of our military. No American wants to allow a single soldier or Marine to be deployed without meeting the military's standard of readiness. Yet that is what we are doing. We are breaking our military and this amendment will help put a stop to it. This amendment is about taking care of our troops."

He said this in support of the amendment during recent debate about allowing it to receive a vote:

"The war in Iraq has pushed the U.S. military to the breaking point. I, like most of my colleagues, have been told by military leaders, both on active duty and those who are retired, that we are doing tremendous damage to our Army and to our Marine Corps, as well as our Army National Guard. Our troops are being deployed longer than they should be, more frequently than they should be, and without full training and equipment. We are eroding our military power at a time when our country faces an increasing arc of challenges and threats across the globe. We are abusing our all-voluntary force in a dangerous and irresponsible way. Senator Webb recited a number of the facts--facts, not interpretations, not subjective analysis, but facts--as to what is happening to our military today because of the burden we are placing on them in Iraq, our fifth year in Iraq, our sixth year in Afghanistan.

This amendment goes to the heart of ensuring the readiness of our military and the time between deployments. This amendment will ensure that all Active units that have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan have time at home that is at least equal to the length of the previous deployment. If we can't commit at least that to our forces, then what can we commit to them?"

So, did the Senate allow this to go to the floor for a vote?

No.

The vote to end debate was 56-41, short of the 60 votes needed.

So what was so wrong with this amendment that 41 Senators, largely Republican, felt the need to never let it see a vote? Perhaps it was the fact that a natural consequence of limiting deployment length is the inability to arbitrarily extend tours, which would in turn mean that the president would have to be honest about just how taxing the Iraq war is on our people. Maybe it was the presidential reporting requirement? If it's neither of those, it's hard to see what the issue was. Are 40 Republicans and Joe Lieberman so callous that they just don't give a damn about our soldiers being able to come home, rest, retrain, and go back out in proper order with the right equipment, instead of being overextended, worn down, and outgunned?

But then, maybe it's a matter of perspective. While Joe was off in law school, Chuck Hegel and Jim Webb were in Vietnam. That may explain why it's so easy for Joe to glibly lie in the face of the truth and support George Bush's phenomenal mishandling of this war.

The Congressional Record should have a bit more information, such as who voted against ending debate, tomorrow.

Update: Here's the list of Senators who voted against allowing this amendment to proceed to the floor for a normal vote.

Yesterday, 41 Senators voted against the Hagel / Webb readiness and troop protection amendment. As I mentioned then, the Congressional record gives us their names. Here's the honor roll:

Wayne Allard - Republican, Colorado
John Barrasso - Republican, appointee from Wyoming
Bob Bennett - Republican, Utah
Kit Bond - Republican, Missouri - his son is a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps
Jim Bunning - Republican, Kentucky
Saxby Chambliss - Republican, Georgia
Tom Coburn - Republican, Oklahoma
Thad Cochran - Republican, Mississippi - served in the Navy
Bob Corker - Republican, Tennessee
John Cornyn - Republican, Texas
Larry Craig - Republican, Idaho
Mike Crapo - Republican, Idaho
Jim DeMint - Republican, South Carolina
Elizabeth Dole - Republican, North Carolina
Pete Domenici - Republican, New Mexico
John Ensign - Republican, Nevada
Mike Enzi - Republican, Wyoming
Lindsey Graham - Republican, South Carolina - served as a lawyer in the Air Force, and is currently a reservist JAG instructor
Chuck Grassley - Republican, Iowa
Judd Gregg - Republican, New Hampshire
Orrin Hatch - Republican, Utah
Kay Hutchison - Republican, Texas
James Inhofe - Republican, Oklahoma - served in the Army
Johnny Isakson - Republican, Georgia - served in the Air National Guard (from 1966-1972)
Jon Kyl - Republican, Arizona
Joe Lieberman - Independent, Connecticut
Trent Lott - Republican, Mississippi
Richard Lugar - Republican, Indiana
Mel Martinez - Republican, Florida
John McCain - Republican, Arizona - served as a Naval aviator during the Vietnam war
Mitch McConnell - Republican, Kentucky
Lisa Murkowski - Republican, Alaska
Pat Roberts - Republican, Kansas - served in the Marine Corps
Jeff Sessions - Republican, Alabama
Richard Shelby - Republican, Alabama
Arlen Specter - Republican, Pennsylvania
Ted Stevens - Republican, Alaska - served in the Army Air Corps during World War II
John Thune - Republican, South Dakota
George Voinovich - Republican, Ohio

It took fame to make it happen, but it seems as if the Army may be starting to follow Lt. Col. Paul Yingling's advice. As you may recall, Lt. Col. Yingling recommended several fixes for our military's critical failure in generalship. Here's one of them:

Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war. By exercising its powers to confirm the retired ranks of general officers, Congress can restore accountability among senior military leaders.

Congress has not yet exercised this right, but the principal may potentially be applied to retired three-star general Phillip Kensinger. Kensinger has been officially censured for his role in misleading the family of Corporal Pat Tillman about his unfortunate death by friendly fire during action in Afghanistan (you can read the censure letter by clicking here). Despite the fact that the circumstances of his death were clear nearly from the beginning, Tillman's family were mislead for quite a while about exactly what happened to him. It seems likely the Kensinger and others did not want to have to publicly admit that a famous individual who'd volunteered to serve his country had died by friendly fire (although this is a simple fact of war, and happens much less often now than it did during earlier wars). The same fame that motivated their fibbing also gave Tillman's family enough pull to get the truth out, and demand accountability for the lies.

The reduction in rank would hack a thousand dollars a month off of Kensinger's pension. Although I can't comment on Kensinger's attitudes or thoughts, it seems fair to say that the risk of direct, financial punishments during retirement might curb the ethical laziness of such extreme cases as Tommy Franks, who could not be bothered to properly plan for Iraq nor to care about American casualties as they occurred.

CNN article

This Time Magazine was on the rack last week in gas stations throughout California. The intent of the imagery is clear, blatantly so -- the star-spangled "A" that represents America is shown being hoisted out of Iraq. The choice of a helicopter is particularly evocative, since it's a call-back to the classically tragic images of the last helicopter leaving South Vietnam.

But let's talk about that helicopter. The silhouette on the Time Magazine cover is clearly that of a Soviet-made Hind helicopter. Now, that could be a subtle meta-statement comparing America's presence in Iraq to that of the Soviets in Afghanistan. It could be, but I find myself doubting it. Instead, I suspect that the cover artist just pulled up reference on military helicopters irrespective of national origin, and the editors at Time didn't fact-check properly, or didn't care to make a correction.

Either way, Time is once again placing itself firmly in the mainstream of sloppy journalism. If you can't pick the right reference for a magazine cover -- especially when the silhouette of one American helicopter is so well known -- why should we trust you to handle actual news?

Mr. Bush --

Time and again, you emphasize that we are at war. We are at war against terror, and specifically at war in Iraq. You like to think of yourself as a wartime president.

Maybe it makes you feel special.

But clearly, you don't actually believe we're in a real war. At the very least, you're deeply ignorant of how America actually wins wars.

Despite saying we're at war, you have not made the war part of our regular budget. You continue to cheat much of the cost in as special expenditures, as if that means we're not actually spending the money. This is the first time we've ever let a conflict stretch this long without putting its costs into the regular budget. Even the Vietnam and Korean Wars, both "police actions," were put into the regular budget quite soon after they began.

Despite saying we're at war, you've pushed for lower taxes. Perhaps you don't know your history. I understand you weren't a very good student. During the first World War, the marginal tax rate went as high as 77%. During the second World War, the marginal tax rate went even higher, up to 94%. During Korea, it went up as high as 87%. During Vietnam, up to 70%. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon all understood that wars can't be won without true sacrifice on our part -- at the very least, taxes must go up. None of these men would have actually tried to fight a war on credit, with that credit coming from another, not necessarily friendly, power.

I learned these numbers from the U.S. Treasury. They're part of the Executive Branch. Maybe you can ask them for a refresher.

Despite saying we're at war, you're trying to cheat on how many troops we send. Despite historical precedent and smart men telling you what to do, you chose to send half as many troops as we needed to hold Iraq. Now our soldiers are hit every day by munitions that we didn't have enough soldiers to secure. Now they clear an area only to have it retaken by our enemies a week later, because we don't have enough soldiers to leave a garrison behind.

I understand that we aren't likely to have a draft. It would be too politically damaging for you. But if this war on terror were a real war to you, you'd aggressively recruit new soldiers. You'd offer large pay increases and solid family support. You could even support this with the taxes you would have raised.

If this were a real war to you.

I understand you were a poor student. You probably turned in essays that were just barely long enough, and copied your math and science homework from someone who actually put in the time to learn the material. I understand that you think that the appearance of trying should be good enough, success be damned. I understand that you're just putting in the time, collecting your paycheck, clocking in and out until your time in office is done.

I understand that you quit when things get hard. I understand this because if you weren't this kind of person, then you'd treat this war like a real war.

If you did that, we might even win.

Mr. Bush --

In a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention today, you tried to describe the potentially disastrous consequences of an American withdrawal from Iraq by relating it to the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. You also showed your usual comfort with screwing up the facts, leaving out the inconvenient ones, and generally just saying what your speech writers wrote for you, totally at peace with your ignorance.

Naturally, you led with the ever-present conflation of September 11th with the Iraq war, and your gigglingly strident declaration of yourself as a war president. I must say I've been hard-pressed to find examples of Truman and Roosevelt spending that much time lauding themselves for that role.

You then moved on to rise of democracy in South Korea and Japan, hoping to highlight the possibilities in Iraq. After all, if we defended South Korea and occupied and rebuilt Japan, why wouldn't it work in Iraq?

But Iraq is not post-war Japan. In Japan, there was no active insurgency. Our troops were not under constant attack every time they went on a street patrol. Japan was largely ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Roving murder squads and ethnic militias didn't walk the streets, torturing and killing people of other sects and ethnicities. Japan was, at heart, a single country. Iraq has for decades been a compilation of unrelated peoples, held together by a torture regime.

Nor is Iraq the Korean war. We did not come in to stop a totalitarian power from overtaking a nascent democracy. We ousted a frankly brutal dictator, but did so with no coherent plan for what happened afterward, and with an arrogant misunderstanding of local culture and civilization. We took an impoverished, unhealthy nation and brought down on it a plague of sectarian violence that you even now try to blame on al Qaeda alone.

Oddly enough, Iraq is not the Vietnam war, either. It made much more sense for us to come to the aid of South Vietnam than it ever made for us to invade Iraq in 2003. The threat to South Vietnam was clear and present, in a way that your wishful thinking about changing the Mideast through war, backed by the lies of Ahmed Chalabi, never was.

You argue that the after-effects of our withdrawal from Vietnam were harsh. This is unarguably true, but we must also match it against the millions of Vietnamese who died during the war. Unfortunately for Iraq, it is still not Vietnam. In Vietnam, the divide was purely political. In Iraq, sectarian violence may lead to a partition of peoples, whether we stay or go. In staying, we keep the vultures of al Qaeda in Iraq in business, and lose our own soldiers on a daily basis.

You point to the killing fields in Cambodia as the ultimate example of the disastrous effects of the American withdrawal from Vietnam, with the clear implication that these fields will be repeated in Iraq. I, in turn, remind you that the killings in Cambodia were stopped by the 1978 invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam.

Maybe you didn't know that.

Let me say it clearly. You are incompetent, and arrogantly so. As long as you are in charge, we must press for our soldiers to leave as soon as possible, because you will bleed them dry to save your image. You will conflate Iraq and al Qaeda, Cambodia and Vietnam, and anything else you possibly can to confuse people for just a little bit longer.

Do please learn your history. Read about these vital parts of the American story before you misuse them in aid of your ill-conceived ideas. Perhaps then you'll start thinking, really thinking, about what it means to lead a nation at war.

(Letter sent today.)

In a report titled Defense Contract Management: DOD's Lack of Adherence to Key Contracting Principles on Iraq Oil Contract Put Government Interests at Risk, GAO examines the $2.5 billion "Restore Iraq Oil" (RIO I) contract awarded to KBR in 2003. This dual-purpose contract was intended to help restart the oil industry in Iraq -- remember that paragon of planning Paul Wolfowitz said that Iraq would be able to pay for its own reconstruction -- as well as ensuring a continuing supply of fuel into Iraq. A recent audit by the Defense Contract Audit Agency identified $221 million in questionable contract costs stemming from ten task orders included in the overall RIO I contract. GAO was, in turn, asked to look at these questionable costs, and how DOD addressed them.

Notice that about two-thirds of the questionable costs are fuel delivery overcharges. You may recall hearing about those on the news last year. GAO did not address the nature of disputed charges in this case (DCAA did that); GAO was simply tasked with figuring out in what ways DOD dealt with DCAA's findings, how often DOD payed award fees (bonuses for good performance), and if they followed their set procedure for doing so.

As it happens, DOD formally decided that most of the disputed fees found by DCAA were just fine, and paid them. Apparently, there's still a lot of leeway given to KBR despite their corporate tendency to cheat us.

In looking at award fees, GAO found that DOD regularly did not follow their own procedures for assigning awards, failed to have reviews at proper intervals, and instead just handed out awards at the end of the task with no input before then. DOD retorted that it's awfully hard to put together review boards in present-day Iraq.

GAO agrees, and has officially recommended that DOD be more realistic when writing its own rules. Given that the original rules were written in 2003, it's entirely likely that some optimistic soul within DOD really thought Iraq was going to be peaceful enough to have regular review boards and routine oversight of KBR's mission. Instead, of course, we have Iraq as it is now, with massive violence and very little oil flowing.

DOD agreed, in writing, with this recommendation from GAO. Perhaps the forces of deliriously blind optimism are finally waning.

This week, the GAO released a report on the progress of the Iraqi government toward various benchmarks.

The report was titled Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq: Iraqi Government Has Not Met Most Legislative, Security, and Economic Benchmarks. There is additional content in the associated Congressional testimony, which was released in parallel with the report, under the same title.

All the media coverage I've seen on this most recent GAO report emphasizes the failings of the Iraqi government. However, the more important punchline may be GAO, in its quiet way, saying that the Bush administration is misrepresenting progress in Iraq. They explicitly state that the administration's interim progress report in July overstated progress in many areas, most notably by suggesting that sectarian violence has diminished.

Specifically, the entirety of the decrease in overall violence is due to reduced attacks on Coalition forces. Attacks on civilians have actually risen slightly. In short, the Bush administration is lying, and sectarian violence persists.

See the extended for a full review and explanation.

For many years now, a major complaint about our extensive reliance on private security contractors in Iraq has been their careless neglect of civilians. Whereas our military forces institutionally take pains to avoid civilian casualties or even the appearance of disrespect for local traditions and feelings, private contractors are notorious for barreling everywhere at high speed and taking a shot at anyone who seems half threatening. After all, without any official oversight (which one imagines could have come from, say, the State Department), what's their motivation to do anything other than put their own safety first?

As described in Thomas Ricks' book Fiasco, contractors can end up undoing a lot of good relationship-building work done by our more attentive soldiers.

Now, the hammer has finally come down on Blackwater, following the alleged killing of eight civilians by Blackwater operatives during the defense of an American convoy that was under attack. This is preceded by other alleged killings of civilians by Blackwater personnel, but this is the first time the Iraqi government has taken major action in response to this kind of thing. It is, indeed, major -- they have rescinded Blackwater's operating license in Iraq and have ordered all Blackwater employees to leave the country immediately, with the exception of those involved in the alleged shooting.

If we don't lean on the Iraqi government to overturn this (and we really shouldn't), this may pose a large problem for the State Department. Of Blackwater's $800 million in contracts in Iraq, a good $300 million is said to come from a contract involving security for State Department employees. A number of non-security contractors in Iraq (perhaps KBR?) will also be left in the lurch if Blackwater pulls out.

We'll see in the coming week if Blackwater complies and actually pulls out, or if they go to their friends in State and elsewhere to request assistance in staying in country.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

At the tail end of this BBC article about the rescinding of Blackwater's operating license by the Iraqi government is a tally of civilian deaths in Iraq, as measured by various groups:

Sunday's violence followed the publication of a survey of Iraqis which suggested that up to 1.2m people might have died because of the conflict in Iraq.

However, these estimates are both far higher than the running total of reported civilian deaths maintained by the campaign group Iraq Body Count which puts the figure at between 71,000 and 78,000.

I've written about the original Burnham "600,000 deaths" estimate here. I believe it's credible. When that report appeared, the official American tally was on the order of 30,000 civilian deaths, a total that was supported by official Iraqi government figures until about a month later, when Iraqi Health Minister Ali al-Shemari gave a much higher estimate of up to 150,000 dead since the invasion, basing his count on bodies delivered to morgues.

It's worth noting that all "civilian death" estimates are necessarily fuzzy, because it's hard to firmly classify male dead as "civilian" rather than, say, "militia" or "insurgent." Based on extensive interviews and anecdotes I've read, I'm willing to ballpark the utter low-end cutoff of half the deaths being "true civilians" -- people without allegiance to specific armed forces. More to the point, as Thomas Ricks noted in a recent radio interview, the overall tally of "violent Iraqi deaths" is still the single most relevant metric of success and failure that we have. Whether it's militias torturing and killing innocent civilians in an attempt to ethnically cleanse a neighborhood, or two militia groups torturing and killing each other, an excess of violent deaths is a clear marker that things are not yet working properly.

A point to consider on violent deaths. Recent homicide rates in the United States are about 5.8 per 100,000 people, per year. If Iraq were merely as violent as the United States (as Mike Pence imagines it is), then we'd expect a baseline of about 1,600 violent deaths per year, or just under 11% of the actual rate if the 75,000 lowball figure is correct -- that's only 1.3% of the 600,000 or so estimate. So, even if we decide to believe the honestly implausible 75,000-dead estimate, that's still egregious when compared with the kind of violence American voters still fear and complain bitterly about to their politicians.

I'm willing to bet that no one you know personally has been tortured to death by a sectarian militia recently, at any rate.

This week, al Jazeera reminds us that violence often comes as a result of a mismatch between national borders and ethnic boundaries. In our modern age, these conflicts are the unwieldy children of sometimes arbitrary and sometimes very intentional batching and dividing by the major powers of the twentieth century. The territory once bounded by Soviet borders is a poster child for this issue, whether it's Georgia trying not to further subfragment following its release from the USSR, or the ongoing problem of Tatars returning to the Crimea half a century after Stalin banished them to Central Asia. Similarly, the wake of the Ottoman Empire continues to be alive with conflict, most recently embodied in the declaration by the government of Turkey that they will take military action against Kurdish separatist groups hiding within Iraq, despite past requests from their NATO allies that they not cross that border.

Given the increasing power of the smaller party in modern conflict, and the loss of a major bilateral struggle to drown out other noises, it seems likely that wars of ethnic identity will continue as the defining kind of conflict well into the foreseeable future.

I've been hearing people cite a "77% drop" in American casualties in Iraq during reporting today. 77% since when, exactly? The helpful people at icasualties.org have compiled this chart showing American soldiers killed in Iraq from the invasion up until a little over a week ago:

You can see an expanded version (that may be more up to date, depending on when you check) by clicking here. They've labeled major events in the war, including Fallujah, the "surge," and so forth.

The big conclusion I draw from this chart, viewing the war effort as a whole, is that I am unwilling to cite any immediate drop in casualties as an indicator of success, or even hope that things will stay that way. It's hard to draw a clear correlation between our strategy such as we know it and American casualty numbers. I can point to a sharp drop-off in deaths from June of this year until now, but I can point to the exact same drop-off between May and July of 2004...and that was followed by a return to May 2004 death rates in roughly December of that same year...and then followed by another substantial drop-off, and so forth.

In short, the current trendline is by no means predictive. It's as if Bush supporters pointed to an off-season cold snap as proof that global warming had been turned around by voluntary emission controls.

Torture charges filed in the United States against Donald Rumsfeld were dismissed earlier this year based on Rumsfeld's immunity to such prosecution and the lack of Constitutional rights of the subjects, even as an American judge accepted that the evidence showed that they had, indeed, been tortured on Rumsfeld's watch. Late last year, the Center for Constitutional Rights led the way by filing war crimes charges against Rumsfeld in Germany. These charges were dismissed by the German judge, indicating that the US should spearhead such an investigation.

Now, coinciding with a Rumsfeld visit to France, the Center for Constitutional Rights, along with European human rights groups, have filed torture charges against Rumsfeld in France. They want French investigators to hold Rumsfeld and look into the case.

"We know that we can't get him into prison right now, but it would be great to make sure that he couldn't safely leave the U.S. anymore," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Donald Rumsfeld seems to be on track to follow in the footsteps of Pinochet, finding himself with progressively fewer and fewer places he can safely go without risking prosecution.

In this article, the BBC summarizes a 60 Minutes expose' on "Curveball," the sole source behind Colin Powell's false claims of mobile bioweapons factories in his pre-invasion speech to the United Nations.

As it happens, rather than being a top-notch chemical engineer, Rafid Ahmed Alwan was just a chem E student with bad grades and a natural desire to win asylum anywhere other than Iraq. Mindful of this exact possibility, German intelligence passed on Alwan's claims with an advisory letter warning that they had no way of verifying what he said. Failure medal winner George Tenet claims he never saw that letter. Maybe so, but surely he had some inkling that sole-source word-of-mouth intelligence with no material evidence backing it up is not enough.

For more exciting action without evidence, you may want to go look George up at his current job as a non-executive director at defense contractor QinetiQ. Perhaps a non-executive director is one who directs without actually taking action? That seems safest, given his track record.

One might, at the end of the day, be inclined to ask exactly how "conservative" it is go to war based on the unsupported statements of one random student bucking for his green card.

Rocket and mortar attacks in Iraq are reported to have fallen to their lowest levels for nearly two years.

Mortar and rocket attacks in Baghdad showed a similar pattern, falling to 53 in October from more than 200 in June.

This runs in parallel with the reported decrease in civilians deaths over the last few months (not a monotonic decrease -- October saw more reported deaths than September). The civilian death numbers, however, must be taken with several grains of salt.

We'll see what the end of November brings. Regardless, it will be very hard to properly attribute the reason for a decline in violence. Candidates include the temporary re-increase in American troops levels, our change in policy to work with certain militia groups, the separation of Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish groups via forced demographic shift, and presumably many others that aren't obvious from the outside.

BBC article

As part of the most recent wave of promotions to that position, Benedict has raised Chaldean Patriarch Emmanuel III Delly, a Baghdad resident, to the role of Cardinal. Per this al Jazeera report, Delly represents a much-diminished population of Iraqi Christians, participants in one of the oldest of the surviving Christian rites, the Chaldean. From a Hussein-era total of 700,000, the Christian population of Iraq is believed to have fallen by half to the ballpark of 350,000 since we invaded. Whether this will see a turnaround that matches the reported movement of refugees back into the country won't be clear for a while yet. As the Mandaeans can attest, Iraq has been a surpassingly hostile place for religious and ethnic minorities -- a problem they "solved" by retreating en mass into Kurdish territory.

Will the elevation make a difference? Unfortunately, although I have trouble seeing room for a positive effect, it does seem that it might paint an even larger target on the Patriarch's head. I hope his security team is both thorough and attentive.

The Iraqi Red Crescent reported this week that more than 25,000 Iraqi refugees returned from Syria to Iraq since mid-September.

The Iraqi Red Crescent says in a report released Tuesday, refugees are returning because Iraq's security situation has improved.

The Red Crescent report says most of the 25,000 to 28,000 refugees who left Syria did so in September and October, and the flow of returning refugees slowed in November.

However, other humanitarian groups claim that many of these refugees left Syria because they ran out of money or their visas expired.

Voice of America article

Last spring, the GAO reported that the coalition of the willing was becoming less willing, and that of the $15.6 million given in aid to Iraq, about 70% was loans. This October, they were asked to check in on the situation again. In their brief report Rebuilding Iraq: International Donor Pledges for Reconstruction in Iraq, December 18, 2007, the GAO brings us up to date on the situation.

The current pledge tally, as of October of this year, was $16.4 billion. Once again, it's a mix of loans and grants, coming in at 66% loans now (so the grant percentage has crept up a bit). Donors have ponied up $4.8 billion out of the $5.6 billion promised as grants, which isn't bad at all. The Iraqi government has signed agreements to use only $2.2 billion out of the $10.8 billion in offered loans, which is no surprise given that the Iraqi government wasn't using about 90% of their capital goods budget as of February of this year. A government that isn't organized enough to spend the money it has certainly won't be organized enough to finalize a bunch of loans.

The biggest non-US loans (so the people whose efforts apparently aren't being appreciated) are coming from the same places as before -- Japan, the World Bank, the IMF, and Iran. However, given the poor response from Iraq, it should be no surprise that the actual rate of loans taken (versus loans offered) ranges from a high of just below half (Japan) to none at all (Iran).

The top non-US donors (not on the loan side) are the largely same as before as well, with the addition of nearly a billion coming from the EC.

Recovery in Iraq is fundamentally not a problem of insufficient funding, but very much a problem of insufficient will, whether it be our choices in immediate post-war Iraq or the choices made by those now in some form of power within the country itself.

Full donor chart in the extended.

A 32-page draft document that was written as part of the general lead up to the war in Iraq was released this week following extensive pushing over the last few years. Written in late 2002 by foreign officer director of communications John Williams, it outlines a case for war in Iraq. Many people are trying to make hay out of its lack of support for the claim that Saddam was able to deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes, but that's not necessarily significant. As the British government notes, multiple drafts were made in parallel by different offices.

(Also, whether it takes 45 minutes or two days to deploy chemical or biological weapons is pretty immaterial.)

This language is more interesting:

In the document, written in late 2002, John Williams, director of communications at the foreign office, said: "Saddam remains the only man to have used chemical weapons to wage war on civilians: so far.

"It is not speculative to suggest he would do so again if he could: he has done it. And we know that he is now re-equipping himself with chemical weapons, while seeking to extend the range of the missiles that would carry them."

It may just be Mr. Williams' ignorance on the topic, but Hussein is at least the second authority to use chemical weapons on civilians, the first event of this kind being the use of biochemical agents against the Hmong minority by the Laotian government in the 70s (with presumptive Soviet backing).

Of course, we actually did not know Hussein was re-equipping himself with chemical weapons, bar our poor, single source intelligence that was actually the wild fantasy of an Iraqi student who really wanted to stay in Europe. All we really knew was that Hussein had used chemical weapons in war and on civilians, and that he was stonewalling U.N. inspectors. It was reasonable to presume that he still had an arsenal, but beyond that we knew very little.

The rest of the document shows the kind of "purpose drift" that was integral to selling the war and, more critically, reselling the war once people realized there were no vast arsenals of WMDs. The theoretical core purpose of reducing Iraq's threat to the world was heavily conflated with the idea of liberating its people from oppression. The adoption of that second point is cynical, as we and our allies have not been rushing in to liberate equally oppressed people in, say, China.

If liberation from oppression by force of arms is our aim, we have a lot of fighting to do.

al Jazeera article

Former KBR employees are speaking as witnesses before a Senate committee today. You can listen along to this kind of testimony on a daily basis on C-SPAN radio on iTunes, or from their website.

Highlights so far include the escorting out of the country of KBR employees who used their internal ethics hotline (oops), and, more notably estimates from former KBR employees Frank Cassaday, Linda Warren, and Barry Halley that from 30-80% of the billing that went out from their facilities was fraudulent.

This directly matches the stories related to me by military service members who reported KBR, contracted to provide food services for a base, serving food just once a day for exactly one hour (but naturally billing for three square meals).

Again and again, we see that KBR are war profiteers who hurt our own soldiers, often despite the best efforts of good employees who sign up thinking they're going to be doing real work.

As we've seen, KBR cheats like mad on its contracts and outsourcing Federal jobs to private contractors costs us more money.

In response to a combined protest by IAP Worldwide Services and Contingency Management Group against the awarding of an Army logistics contract to KBR, GAO released this decision supporting the protest.

In brief, GAO pointed out the drastic discrepancy between the actual evaluation of KBR's past performance by the Defense Contract Audit Agency, which tended to rank somewhere between disappointing and adequate, and the "oustanding" rating given to KBR in considering its expected performance on the logistics contract. Rather than letting the Army's procurement folks slap undeserved gold stars all over KBR before handing them a pile of money, GAO is forcing them to reconsider the contract victory in light of KBR's history of lowballing their estimates, overcharging, and providing inadequate services.

No mention, of course, of the ongoing fraud at KBR, although one imagines that plays into their contracts going over budget and their failure to properly serve our troops.

Here's a relevant snippet from this long and complex (and partially redacted for public release) decision:

Based on our review, while we recognize that the agency considered the DCAA audit report to some extent during its evaluation of KBRSI’s proposal, we have concern that the record does not support the agency’s rating of KBRSI’s proposal as “outstanding” under the business systems subfactor. Even though the agency has supported its “outstanding” rating for this subfactor with numerous significant strengths, AR, Tab 8, SSEB Report, at 43-44, it is difficult to reconcile that rating with DCAA’s expressed concerns regarding KBRSI’s accounting, estimating, purchasing, and billing business systems. In this regard, as noted above, the business systems were to be evaluated as to “how well it is able to provide effective contract oversight and tracking of costs, subcontracts, equipment, personnel, and changes in requirements in a contingency environment,” and “how well the proposed systems will provide complete, reliable, timely, consistent and transparent data to permit effective Government oversight and management,” to which matters the DCAA concerns are very pertinent. See RFP at 100.

In sum, although the record indicates that the Army considered or was at least aware of DCAA’s concerns regarding KBRSI’s business systems, it appears that DCAA had ongoing concerns with KBRSI’s business systems that had not been completely addressed by the time of the evaluation here. The Army does not explain why these concerns did not remain a factor in the evaluation or why the DCMA ACO’s “approv[al]” (either previous or subsequent) of the business systems in question addressed DCAA’s concerns regarding the merits of the business systems proposed. We also have concerns about the apparent inconsistency between the numerous instances in which the record characterizes KBRSI’s business systems as “adequate” and the agency’s ultimate evaluation of KBRSI’s proposal under the business systems subfactor as “outstanding.”

This is at least the second time within the last year that KBR has been taken to task by GAO on the basis of their history of failure and misrepresentation. It can only be a good thing if other contractors smell blood in the water on this one, and KBR can be taken off the war profiteering free ride it's been on for so many years.

After all, if we're going to end up paying more anyway, we should employ contractors who will actually deliver the services they promise.

The International Olympic Committee has warned the government of Iraq that it may not let that country or its athletes compete in the Beijing Olympics following the Iraqi government's decision to dissolve it's current national Olympic committee. The Iraqi government did so on the basis of supposed corruption and, more reasonably, the fact that several committee members have been kidnapped since it was formed and are probably dead by now. The point of contention here is that national Olympic committees are, per the Olympic charter, meant to be assembled by national, non-governmental sporting associations.

In other words, the government of Iraq was a little too obvious. They should have built a sporting association first, then mucked with the committee.

The attempt to sanction Iraq and its unfortunate athletes for this governmental misstep is risible. The IOC regularly manages not to sanction itself, even as the awarding of prior Olympics to Sydney, Salt Lake City, and Nagano (at least) are all under suspicion, or confirmed cases of corruption and buying off of IOC officials. And that's all independent of the recent attempt by China to use the torch run as a validation of territorial claims.

But then, what would the IOC do to a country like China, or the United States? In contrast, Iraq is an easy enough target for this kind of close attention, as the government is young, scattered, and highly unlikely to be bribing anyone anytime soon to have a summer Olympics in Baghdad.

BBC article

A new official Army account of the invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq says that the plan was flawed. Specifically:

"There were overly optimistic assumptions about how well Iraqi civil and local institutions of government would continue to function after Saddam was gone; and there was overoptimistic sense of how unified the Iraqi people would be when they had an opportunity to choose a new government,"...

Really?

The report lays a great deal of blame on Tommy Franks, who apparently surprised many of his colleagues by insisting on cutting staff in Iraq almost immediately after the invasion. Of course, this isn't a surprise historically, given that Franks approved an inane "warplan" that assumed we'd be able to cut back to just a couple thousand troops in Iraq within a year and a half of a successful invasion.

He may have slept through those classes about our occupation of Japan. Perhaps he slept through Kosovo, as well.

You can request a speaking appearance by Tommy -- perhaps your local community group can invite him over to explain exactly why he thought a force the size of two good-sized mid-Texas high schools would be able to secure a country of twenty-seven million people split across multiple ethnic and religious groups.

al Jazeera article

One of George Bush's Iraq mantras has been that he refuses to set a timetable for withdrawal of our troops. When challenged on this issue, he says that he defers to our people on the ground and their sense of how things are going. This fictional reason -- fictional inasmuch as he and his immediate staffers have overruled key military decisions like the size of the occupation force -- includes the concept that we don't want to abandon our friends in the current Iraqi government.

As it happens, we won't "abandon" them even if they want us to.

We are currently in negotiations with the government of Iraq over a security agreement for the period from 2008 onward. This is when the current UN mandate legalizing a foreign troop presence in Iraq expires. To stay in beyond this point, we need to have an accord with the current, legally elected government of Iraq.

Except they want us to have a timetable for troop withdrawals.

"We will not accept any memorandum of understanding if it does not give a specific date for a complete withdrawal of foreign troops," national security advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie told reporters in the holy city of Najaf.

The security pact, also known as Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), has to be signed by July 31 according to a previous agreement between Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, but it has provoked strong opposition in Iraq.

"The US government and the government of Iraq are in agreement that we, the US government, we want to withdraw, we will withdraw. However, that decision will be conditions-based," State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said.

So if the conditions on which this decision will be based do not include the Iraqi government saying it is ready, what do they include? Setting some benchmarks would be a real step up here. A maximum number of civilian deaths per month? A certain percentage of Iraqi homes with continuous electrical power?

We need a better plan here than "We'll stay there 'til it seems okay or something."

AFP article

One of the fears associated with our upcoming planned withdrawal from Iraq, and indeed, one of the fears that was promoted by the Bush administration to warn all of us off a timetable, is that Iraq will collapse into 2004-style chaos and bloodshed as our troops leave. In this commentary piece, RAND political scientist Lowell Schwartz lays out his understanding of why things turned around to the extent they did in the last couple years in Iraq, and explains why this militates against the idea of a general collapse on the wake of an American exit.

I've spoken in the past about the driving force of community self interest in opposing fanatic organizations. Briefly, this is the crossover moment when a community reaches the realization that a former ally does not have their best interests at heart, and places those best interests above that former alliance. This is very much Schwartz's point in his piece, where he discusses how neighboring nations have realized that al-Qaeda in Iraq is a general force for destabilization, and the "upshot" of injuring the U.S. is countered by the massive downside of funding a group of unfocused fanatics who may well bomb hotels and other public sites within neighboring nations. A failed state ends up being a deeply problematic neighbor.

Schwartz cites this self-interest effect as half the reason for the relative 'calm' in Iraq. The other half, unfortunately, amounts to ethnic cleansing. During the height of the violence in Baghdad, somewhere over a million Sunnis fled the city, pushing the ethnic mix from 35% Sunni to 10-15% Sunni. There just aren't as many mixed neighborhoods to be at war with each other anymore.

Schwartz concludes that Iraq is likely to remain relatively stable as American troops leave, and that we can now rely on a more intrinsically stable Iraq that is being buttressed rather than battered by its neighbors.

In looking at KBR of late, one has the impression that their all-access pass has been revoked. As evidence of their corporate tendency toward unethical or out-and-out fraudulent practices builds up, they more frequently find themselves on the failed end of bids for the kind of large-scale government contracts they used to just be able to assume a win on. Earlier this year, the GAO denied KBR's protest about their failure win a lucrative LOGCAP IV contract, as GAO indicated that KBR didn't have the right to tell the Army how to move its troops around, nor to charge the Army for not taking direction from KBR. So it appropriately goes.

Now the GAO has released another decision denying KBR's protest against yet more failed LOGCAP IV bids. Here's the story this time:

In late 2008, a contracting officer in the Army emailed program folks at KBR with what he thought was an attachment discussing their past performance issues. He realized immediately, however, that he'd instead emailed proprietary bid comparison information discussing KBR and its major competitors. Recognizing the error, he did the appropriate thing and emailed all recipients at KBR telling them to delete that email without opening it, and without reading the attachment. So far, so good. The contracting officer at the Army then asked KBR to provide sworn statements asserting that they had followed his directions and deleted the information without reading it.

The contracts manager at KBR complied, deleting the email without reading it. The program manager at KBR said he'd complied, but actually forwarded the email to his laptop, where he opened it and looked at the attachment (briefly, according to his later report).

The Army at this point asked for a more detailed explanation, since the statements they'd received from KBR were not sworn affidavits as requested, and now they had the issue of the program manager having seen proprietary information and having lied about doing so. KBR replied with affidavits and a cover letter explaining that no one had read the email (note that this contradicts what Army knew at this point).

Wanting to avoid any hint of impropriety or unfair advantage, Army requested that the program manager at KBR be further isolated from the LOGCAP IV bid process. KBR said they thought this was unnecessary, and refused.

Having already been lied to once by the program manager at KBR, and with the company refusing to carry out the required action to limit potential impropriety, the Army at this point disqualified KBR from the two associated LOGCAP IV bids.

KBR naturally freaked out, sending a letter that said, essentially, "Okay, okay, we've isolated the guy" and "Besides, we didn't really get an advantage here..." (Those are my paraphrases, and clearly not quotes).

The Army told KBR tough luck, and KBR protested to GAO. After evaluating the entire situation, GAO backed Army's decision, giving this final word on the matter:

Under the circumstances here, we cannot find unreasonable the contracting officer's request that, in order to preserve the integrity of the procurement system, the KBR program manager be isolated from these competitions. Nor can we find the agency's subsequent determination that KBR be disqualified from these competitions to be unreasonable, in light of KBR's refusal to isolate its program manager from these competitions when requested to do so by the agency. That is, although KBR complains that the agency's disqualification of KBR from these competitions was unduly severe, the record reflects that this action was taken by the agency only after KBR refused the agency's request to isolate the program manager. Given the circumstances, which include KBR's initial refusal to isolate its LOGCAP IV program manager from these open LOGCAP IV task order solicitations, we find the agency's elimination of KBR's proposals from these task order competitions to be reasonable and within the discretion granted to the contracting officer.

The protest is denied.

For much of the last eight years, KBR has been able to freely flaunt regulations and spit in the face of military officers with the expectation that it would be given a pass, and would continue to win contracts. The patient for this misbehavior seems to be running out, and now that KBR is more often being judged on what it does rather than who it knows, it is beginning to bleed just a little bit more with each failed protest that comes with a clear recounting of its business practices.

Reporting on American casualties in Iraq is intermittent these days. As we enter into the seventh year of war, it takes something 'exceptional' to merit American deaths making it beyond local news. If you'd like to keep yourself informed, however, remember that you can always refer to icasualties.org to track deaths among American and allied forces in both the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters.

So far in 2009, 75 American soldiers assigned to operation in Iraq have died. Of these deaths, 41 were due to enemy action, with a reasonably even mix of small arms fire and explosives.

One of the soldiers killed was 22-year-old Pfc. Jessica Sarandrea, who is remembered here, and whose husband is also serving.

Much to my dismay, torture facilitating hack (and, hey, likely war criminal) John Yoo continues to be Berkeley faculty. Right now, I'm rooting for disbarment so Cal can dump him.

Last time I wrote about Yoo, I hoped that some Cal students might go question him directly about justifying torture. As it happens, some highly motivated BBC folks did the job:

I am so pleased. I'd really love each of his lectures to go this way. I may need to take a day off once he's actively lecturing again.

Going into 1990, Iraq had the sixth-largest (if not the sixth-most-effective) airforce in the world. With the initiation of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the Iraqi airforce took the unexpected defensive posture of ceding air superiority and fleeing to neighboring Iran, which took the less surprising step of simply keeping all the aircraft.

However, that's not the end of the story for Iraqi airpower. Recently, the current government of Iraq, in doing some internal auditing of old military records, realized that nineteen jets, comprising a mix of MiG-21s and 23s, were sent to Yugoslavia for repairs in the 1980s and never made it back to Iraq before the blanket of sanctions fell on the country starting in 1990. The current government has now asked Belgrade if they could perhaps have the aircraft back.

Similar searches have turned up equipment elsewhere:

The Iraqi defence ministry spokesman said four Iraqi navy vessels had also been discovered in Egypt and Italy, as well as "aircraft and equipment in Russia and France".

This does not do much vis-a-vis the political state in current Iraq, but is fascinating nonetheless. I'd like to see an interview with the person or people who've been warehousing those MiGs for the last two decades.

BBC article

Sonangol, the state petrochemical company of Angola, has received a contract to manage the Qayara and Najmah fields in Iraq. These fields are the riskiest in Iraq, a risk reflected in relatively high per-barrel fees awarded to Sonangol.

At the same time, a Dutch court has ruled that it has jurisdiction to take a contamination case from the Nigerian delta that is being leveled at Royal Dutch Shell. Shell was naturally displeased:

"We believe there are good arguments on the basis of which the district court could have concluded that it lacks jurisdiction in respect of these purely Nigerian matters."

Although it's unsurprising that Shell made no comment on the actual allegations, it does feel just so intrinsically dodgy that they mainly just want to keep things out of a European court.

Finally, PetroChina has invested $1.7 billion in a 60% stake in two major Canadian oil sands projects. This comes a little over a year after a deal that gave PetroChina's parent company a management contract for other Iraqi oil fields.

BBC article about the Nineveh fields
BBC article about the Shell suit
BBC article about the PetroChina deal