Recently in Iraq war Category

....John McCain, according to the NY Times' Nicholas Kristof, here. Kristof explains why that could be so:

An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits.

During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam.

In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of "Islamofascism" elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests.

Yet this supple form of reasoning will always seem like dangerous malarkey to most people, due to cognitive biases that are detailed here in this famous Foreign Policy article on "Why Hawks Win."

So the dilemma of a democracy is this: You can usually win an election by being tougher-than-thou, and you will usually lose by talking about finding ways to get along with real and perceived rivals. How can you govern sensibly, how can you avoid being bankrupted over the long haul (see bin Laden's statement here), when hawks will accuse you of treason if you attempt to govern sensibly?

This CNN.com piece about Colin Powell's endorsement is must-reading for those who have taken the bait about how "un-American" Obama is. Some salient passages (emphasis mine):

Reporter: Sir, what part did McCain's negativity play in your decision, the negative tone of the campaign?

Powell: It troubled me. We have two wars. We have economic problems. We have health problems. We have education problems. We have infrastructure problems. We have problems around the world with our allies. So those are the problems the American people wanted to hear about, not about Mr. Ayers, not about who's a Muslim or who's not a Muslim. Those kinds of images going out on Al-Jazeera are killing us around the world.
And we have got to say to the world, it doesn't make any difference who you are or what you are, if you're an American, you're an American. And this business, for example, of the congressman from Minnesota who's going around saying, "Let's examine all congressmen to see who is pro-America or not pro-America" -- we have got to stop this kind of nonsense, pull ourselves together and remember that our great strength is in our unity and in our diversity. And so, that really was driving me.

And to focus on people like Mr. Ayers and these trivial issues, for the purpose of suggesting that somehow Mr. Obama would have some kind of terrorist inclinations, I thought that was over the top. It was beyond just good political fighting back and forth. I think it went beyond. And to sort of throw in this little Muslim connection, you know, "He's a Muslim and, my goodness, he's a terrorist" -- it was taking root. And we can't judge our people and we can't hold our elections on that kind of basis.
So, yes, that kind of negativity troubled me, And the constant shifting of the argument. I was troubled a couple of weeks ago when in the middle of the crisis, the [McCain] campaign said, "We're going to go negative," and they announced it, "We're going to go negative and attack [Obama's] character through Bill Ayers." Now I guess the message this week is, "We're going to call him a socialist, Mr. Obama is now a socialist, because he dares to suggest that maybe we ought to look at the tax structure that we have."

Taxes are always a redistribution of money. Most of the taxes that are redistributed go back to those who paid them, in roads and airports and hospitals and schools. And taxes are necessary for the common good. And there is nothing wrong with examining what our tax structure is or who should be paying more, who should be paying less. And for us to say that that makes you a socialist, I think is an unfortunate characterization that isn't accurate.
I don't want my taxes raised. I don't want anybody else's taxes raised. But I also want to see our infrastructure fixed. I don't want to have a $12 trillion national debt, and I don't want to see an annual deficit that's over $500 billion heading toward a trillion. So, how do we deal with all of this?

So Powell has forcefully used his American military-hero credentials to refute the bizarre and contradictory "commie/terrorist/pacifist/Muslim/angry-Christian" characterization of Obama.

As John McCain polishes what will be a crafty prime-time tribute tomorrow the Iraqi war effort, and as he frames it as the compelling reason for electing him, let us consider the prescient words of erstwhile Republican strategist Kevin Phillips from several years ago: "Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out."

How exactly does Sen. McCain know he is immune to this tendency, what with a stance that amounts to, "See, I told you that $600 billion in current costs and $3 trillion in long-term costs, as well as immense human suffering, could stabilize Iraq and make it a place that won't threaten us...."?

So any reader of mine knows that I enjoy crashing protests and reporting from within. But yesterday, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't bear to see the signs stating that deposing Saddam wasn't worth it, that the U.S. was the evil aggressor -- particularly considering that this weekend is the 20th anniversary of Halabja.

I write about the grim anniversary this weekend at Pajamas Media:

"...Being no stranger to crashing war protests, I can bet that if you held a poster bearing one of the infamous images of a man who fell and died at the base of a home’s steps clutching an infant whose mouth was frozen in a vain gasp for air, or the pile of bodies in traditional colorful clothing strewn across an otherwise verdant hill, most demonstrators would assume the grisly images are products of the American war machine. They wouldn’t like to hear that these murders were committed by the dictator we deposed.

On March 16, 1988, Iraqi warplanes bombed the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons including sarin and mustard gas, targeting civilians as part of the Anfal campaign to rid Iraq of its Kurds. Five thousand — three-quarters of them women and children — died from the chemical cocktail. Children trying to rush home fell in the street, while the insidious gasses claimed those who cowered in basements from what they thought was a traditional bombardment. Thousands were left with chemical burns, blindness, cancers, birth defects, etc.

The Halabja attack was, in Josef Mengele fashion, an experiment to determine which of the various chemical agents worked best on the population, where were the best strategic places to drop the poisonous canisters, where victims would fall and how many. 'These were field tests, an experiment on a town,' Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza, the former director of Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program, told then-New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg in 2002. 'The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as "How far are the dead from the canisters?"'”

Read the whole thing!

Acknowledging Halabja, though, means acknowledging that ousting Saddam served a purpose -- and that the international community turned a blind eye (again) to genocide.

If you want to burst the enthusiasm of soldiers in Iraq, few words can do it like these two: Commo Blackout.

It means two very significant things, and, in the death-as-commodity environment of Baghdad that I knew in 2005, it was hard to judge which was worse. On the one hand, it meant all instant communication with the outside world was cut off. No Internet, no phones. Mail was delivered, but it took days any way.

The other thing it meant was that somebody was dead, or pretty close to it. Commo Blackout is the Army's way of keeping parents and spouses from being informed of a soldier's death by a passing comment in a grocery store, or via a reporter arriving at a door step ahead of the Notification Team.

There's a lot just about any Joe can complain about with regard to the Green Machine, but the dedication to supporting families is not really one of them. They honestly do the best they can, and inconveniencing troops for a couple of days so the most solemn ceremonies can be conducted as best possible is not even a question.

Of course, as soldiers, when you've survived another day, it's hard not to curse at prety much all involved when you walk to the phone trailer and find a scribbled note on the door, one that effectively says: "you're wife's just gonna have to wonder if you're alive, 'cause somebody else's is about to find out that her husband ain't."

I bring this up because an interesting trend has recently developed on my personal blog, Reasons to Believe. I've been posting a lot there lately, because over in the other Valley, my little town of Monrovia has been having a gang war in recent days. Certainly nothing akin to Baghdad, but enough to give me strange tickles, and make sure the personal protective systems for my family are in full working order, just like I would before a patrol in combat.

Anyway, while the traffic for my blog has spiked significantly, I've been getting a lot of referrals from Google, many of which are searches for those same two words. They all lead to this post: Things That Go Boom, Things That Do Not.

Now, two years seperated from the war zone, my heart sinks at that thought. Somewhere, somebody is getting the worst news possible. Somewhere not far away, someone else thinks she might. At some Army post in the south, or maybe Texas, a new bride who goes to bed worried each night hasn't heard from the love of her life for a week. Her nervous query has been met with a polite, stilted re-assurance from the head of the Family Readiness Group, "ah, don't worry, they're probably on a Commo Blackout." Knowing she already asks enough silly questions about the strange system in which she finds herself, she decides to figure that one out on her own.

My post, I assure you, supplies no solace.

I wonder if her silent world will awaken with a ring of the phone. Or, a knock at her door.

I want to defend the people who disposed of the CIA tapes showing us interrogating Al Qaeda suspects. I want to indict the people who did the both the taping and the torturing. I believe that torture is wrong. I believe that videotaping our agents torturing bad guys is just stupid. This is like celebrities taping sex acts and expecting them not to show up on the net. They will show up and at the very worst possible time.

So, just what were they thinking when they taped prisoners who were (I am confident in fact bad guys), undergoing “stress questioning?” I’m assuming it wasn’t for pornographic reasons—though that is possible. (Please see: Herr Doktor Kraft-Ebbing). Someone thought it might be a good idea to document the interrogations. Well, someone was wrong.

I am not shocked that we transgress. I am very shocked when we are stupid, cover up badly and hold no one accountable. There are times when we push the boundaries. Torture is not legal and should never be legal. But it happens. What should we do when it happens? We should count on the bravery and patriotism of our people, and they should own up and take the hit. They should tell the truth and go on trial. If it was important enough to make someone choose to break our laws, they should be subject to justice. With any luck, their peers will acquit them if the case was urgent enough.

The same should be the case with taping these interrogations and then disposing of the tapes. I’d send the idiot who called for the tapes to be made to jail for gross incompetence. The people who disposed of the tapes however could be heroes. Had these tapes come out—and as with sex tapes, you have to count on it—they would have been played 24/7 on Al Jazeera and Al Arabia. And if you believe our standing is low in the Arab and Muslim World today, please know that there is still a great distance we could and would fall.

The cover up attempt however is wrong on so many levels. We cannot have a system of law and justice when our agencies and branches of government lie to each other—and lie under oath. If you want to know why there are conspiracy theories regarding nearly everything we do, it is because we chip away at our own credibility. The damage is mostly self-inflicted. The CIA does not get to lie to the 9-11 Commission. They do not get to swear that no tapes exist when tapes do exist. A patriot might order the destruction of the tapes and stand up and justify the act. But we cannot have a government of liars who continue to harm our us by evading and avoiding their patriotic duty to serve the interests of our nation.

The great question is not if we are perfect. We are not. The question is if we can violate our laws with absolute impunity or if we believe in and practice accountability? The elephant ate my homework evasion should not be allowed to stand.

Americans ought to be delighted that Rep. Jack Murtha -- a strong opponent of President Bush's policies in Iraq -- reports that we're (finally) making some progress over there. Unlike administration officials, who have so discredited themselves in recent years as to make their own rosy assessments suspect, if Murtha says things are improving, they probably are.

So when Murtha says the "surge is working," we should all cheer -- this is a hopeful sign. But not, according to The Politico, in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office:

But Pelosi, who is scheduled to speak to a Democratic National Committee event in Virginia on Friday, will surely face tough questions from reporters regarding Murtha's statement on the surge.

"This could be a real headache for us," said one top House Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "Pelosi is going to be furious."

What would she be furious about? That our troops are making some headway? That Murtha spoke plainly about what he saw in Iraq? That this could theoretically undermine a strong Democratic 2008 campaign issue?

Let's hope these are only the words of some young political hack, and not a reflection of what the Speaker really thinks. But it's not a good sign that Murtha has gone on to issue a clarification (read: flip-flop) on his remarks ...

If Turkey invades, which that trigger-happy tank and others poised along the Iraqi border may do soon. From the Guardian:

"Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came under intense pressure last night to order an invasion of northern Iraq following the deadliest attacks for over a decade on the Turkish military and civilians by separatist Kurdish guerrillas.

Mr Erdogan, who has resisted demands from the Turkish armed forces for the past six months for a green light to cross the border into Iraqi Kurdistan, where the guerrillas are based, called an emergency meeting of national security chiefs to ponder their options in the crisis, a session that some said was tantamount to a war council.

A Turkish incursion is fiercely opposed by Washington since it would immensely complicate the US campaign in Iraq and destabilise the only part of Iraq that functions, the Kurdish-controlled north."

Understatement of the year! Thing is, the Turkish military tends to get its own way, like with, ahem, four coups since 1960. Erdogan's under enough pressure from the military as it is, as the avowed defenders of Turkish secularism call him out on any moves perceived as a slide toward an Islamist state.

Messy, messy, messier...

As of Sept. 25, 2007, the Department of Defense has these figures for Americans slain in a war where the goal is acceptable levels of chaos.

U.S. Deaths Confirmed By The DoD -- 3800

Reported U.S. Deaths Pending DoD Confirmation -- 1

Total -- 3801

I ask this -- and answer it -- in my column today, after Al-Jazeera asked me to analyze the Petraeus brouhaha and beyond for an Arabic-speaking audience. These audiences have a pretty long attention span, so you can go into an issue deeper than just offering a few quick sound bites. Some of my thoughts:

"But all in all, my answer is simple, something that people around the world can relate to: It's all about the votes. It's about being 14 months out from the next presidential election.

And unfortunately, the welfare of Iraqis, the prevention of genocide and the ominous interference of Iran are not going to be key topics of concern among those flinging volleys.

It's about the Democratic Party capitalizing on dissatisfaction with the war, and the Republican Party trying to steal some thunder from the Dems' issue du jour when debating measured troop cutbacks. It's not just about Sen. Hillary Clinton accusing Petraeus of a 'willing suspension of disbelief,' but Clinton making the accusation as would-be supporters of the White House hopeful watch their televisions at home."

Honestly, what's been ringing in my head lately, though, is something Osama bin Laden said back around when the War on Terror officially began:

"In the end, the audience may be wondering about Americans' will to fight, and I would confess that, given the discourse lately, I've had similar fears, especially when reflecting upon the unified war effort of my grandparents' generation.

The network could then replay an October 2001 interview with Al-Jazeera in which bin Laden said, 'We experienced the Americans through our brothers who went into combat against them in Somalia, for example. ... There was a huge aura over America - the United States - that terrified people even before they entered combat. ... America exited dragging its tails in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing. ... America left faster than anyone expected. ... We pray to God to give us his support and to make America ever more reluctant.'

Viewers on Arab-language TV might remember that interview, and nowadays wonder if the terror leader was being prophetic."

Read the whole thing!