Iraq open thread #11

I’ve been really busy. No time recently, alas, to blog. I’ll resume as soon as I can. Meantime, this thread is for discussing Iraq.

22 thoughts on “Iraq open thread #11”

  1. There are few incidents lat wee none of the not reported in the western media:
    1-On last Sunday the US base in Al-Taji (north Baghdad) had be mortared and ten chops was affected by that incident as reported in Arab news 3 US solders killed.
    2- In Ba’aqoba (North East Baghdad) US base mortared and 2 ABC journalists killed.
    3- In surprise vast Alhakim in Washington as he claims for medical check?

  2. On ex-Army-Colonel W. Patrick Lang’s webite (see Helena’s link supplied somewhere to the right of this text), something of a discussion has broken out involving opinions that American military and diplomatic service personnel find “Arabic” too hard to learn (for some unsubstantiated reason or another) with the implication that this supposition of inherent language “difficulty” explains or somehow refutes complaints by native Iraqis and other foreigners that our blundering foreign legion and its camp-following political/corporate pirate/meddlers somehow just can’t manage to learn the native lingo well enough so that they can stop screaming unintelligible English at their brutalized and befuddled Iraqi victims. So I attempted to post the following thoughts on the matter.
    …
    As a graduate of the Defense Language Institute: in my case, the 32-week intensive Vietnamese Southern Dialect course, I have some understanding of, and experience with, this subject of language learning out of military/civilian necessity. In my opinion, the discussion in this forum thus far tends toward the formally academic and fails to address the truly effective practical language-learning successes that our government and military have at times produced in the past. Please allow me to elaborate.
    As a Navy enlisted electrician with a public high school diploma (circa 1965) and one year of college, I managed to successfully complete the Navy’s one-year intensive nuclear power plant operator school curriculum. However, since cutbacks in the nation’s nuclear ship-building programs left too few billets for many of us recent graduates, I then got orders to attend foreign language school in Monterey, California, since someone with access to my personnel records discovered that — in addition to Algebra II — I had taken two years of high-school French. Thousands of us enlisted men, from all branches of the military services found ourselves in similar circumstances in 1969 when the doomed “Vietnamization” (or “Yellowing the Corpses”) stall for more time, blood, and money got underway. At any rate, it only took eight months of language work and three months of “counter-insurgency” training before off to South Vietnam I went along with those thousands of other enlisted men whose only appointed task involved “standing up” (in today’s jaded parlance) the demoralized and unmotivated South Vietnamese military in the technical aspects of our various lowly military occupation specialties. Nothing about us or our mission involved rocket-science or high strategic policy in any way, shape, or form. We just considered ourselves ordinary.
    Once “in country,” however, those of us with a good, practical, rapidly-acquired working knowledge of Vietnamese — as applicable to our own technical specialties — quickly separated out into two general types: (1) those who got to reinforce and add to their basic language competence through daily work with the Vietnamese and (2) those who pretty much remained in all-American units with little or no interest or incentive to do anything but forget, serve out their indentured time, and go home. Most of us, at least initially, fell into the second group because both the American and Vietnamese political/military establishments, each for their own self-serving reasons, did not want “their men” “fraternizing” with the inscrutable and untrustworthy (at least at the officer level) “other.” In my case, though, I got “percussively sublimated” (i.e., “kicked upstairs”) into the first group of active language learners when I grew a beard (as authorized fleet-wide by Navy CNO, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt) only to have my commanding officer retaliate against me for doing so by exiling me to the furthest, most remote outpost he could locate: “Solid Anchor,” a river outpost support base two kilometers from the very southern tip of the country. For those who wish to know the precise location of the world’s asshole, I can still clearly locate it for them on a map (although, some will now say that it has moved to Baghdad, right down the street from the increasingly-besieged Green Zone Castle).
    Upside, though: I got to spend the next year actually using and improving upon my Vietnamese since I had no choice but to acually work and live beside Vietnamese in a situation of mutual dependence.
    I have since gone on to obtain a second bachelor’s degree in Japanese (which I even taught in an American high school for one semester), and I can function quite well in Mandarin Chinese, too. So, I understand full well the difference between formal high school and college approaches to language learning through reading and writing (for a few hours a week), as opposed to more natural, short-duration, intensive “aural-oral” (listening and speaking) methods of language acquisition as implemented (at least in former days) by the outstanding and highly effective Defense Language School programs. Everything I have heard or read about to date concerning the ludicrous and haphazard American “advisory” program in Iraq (i.e., “Iraqification,” or “Browning the Bodies”) convinces me that the bureaucratic bungling I alluded to in my third paragraph above still characterizes the Lunatic Leviathan: namely, Parkinson’s Law meeting the Peter Principle in an atmosphere of rampant military careerism and political schizophrenia. None of this has anything to do with — except to make impossible — effective language learning by our military and civilian government employees.
    I owe nearly all of my lifelong interest and competence in foreign languages to two principal sources: (1) the practical-intensive “listening-speaking” (as opposed to the usual “book translating” classroom stuff) course in Vietnamese that I took — along with thousands of other ordinary enlisted men — at DLIWC; and (2) the petty, vindictive American officer who found some authorized hair on my face so offensive that he banished me to a year of crushing boredom (with occasional terrifying interludes of bloody mayhem) so that I could and would learn Vietnamese from the Vietnamese in about one year’s time.
    In summary, then, no human language (at least as spoken by fellow humans) presents any insurmountable obstacle to learning by ordinary American enlisted men with a high-school diploma, about a year’s worth of intensive/practical language study, and one year in-country working in a situation of mutual dependence with the “natives.” Two years, tops. If America cannot afford that minimal commitment of time and resources to training our foreign legion — at least its working, enlisted component — then America ought not to have one.

  3. “[N]o human language (at least as spoken by fellow humans) presents any insurmountable obstacle to learning by ordinary American enlisted men with a high-school diploma, about a year’s worth of intensive/practical language study, and one year in-country working in a situation of mutual dependence with the “natives.” Two years, tops. If America cannot afford that minimal commitment of time and resources to training our foreign legion — at least its working, enlisted component — then America ought not to have one.”
    It is scarcely a question of cannot afford. Republican Party extremism at the moment controls Ike’s whole military-industrial-academic complex and so could easily afford to shell out a paltry few hundred million taxpayer bucks for such purposes. Probably Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi would not even attempt to obstruct, for there is an obvious soft — educational and cultural — side to this proposal as well as the hard-nosed preëmptive retaliation side.
    The reason our pols don’t do it has to be that they don’t want to do it, not that they can’t. Perhaps they don’t want to do it merely because they never even thought of doing it, but that seems a bit unlikely to me, who distinctly recall the good old days when even Prof. Chomsky’s abstract linguistics could be funded under United States Air Force Contract such-and-such, not to speak of all the money poured out for learning and teaching actual languages, Russian especially.
    I even managed to snag some of that loot myself, quite apart from Polish at DLI. Arabic seems to have been accounted rather more critical in 1970 than it is in 2007. That discrepancy does seem rather odd, come to think of it, but presumably there is some reasonable explanation. It would be pleasing to think this explanation is that, apart from a tiny contigent of jihád careerists — Fitzgerald, Horowitz, Kramer, Pipes, Spencer — even Wingnut City isn’t really as totally terrorized of global terrorism as it pretends to be. Perhaps the clowns “know in their hearts,” as their pal Barry Goldwater used to say, that it is not merely craven but downright ridiculous to be as scared of ’Usáma b. Ládin as they formerly were of Messrs. Khrushchev and Brezhnev, who really could have made half the planet radioactive for a very long time in the course of a single afternoon if suitably provoked.
    (Or maybe the clownish heart knows nothing of the sort? I certainly do not claim to be privy to its secrets.)
    On another aspect of the same quotation, Mr. Murry writes “foreign legion” sarcastically, but perhaps the Kiddie Krusaders should consider a little borrowin’ from the detestable French and set up a copy of the real thing? If the Party people are really serious about havin’ themselves a Long War, they will simply have to make their warfare cost a great deal less and be far less visible than hitherto. There is no need for DLI to be involved at comparatively great expense, however, not when the world is not short of poor people who know Arabic already and only require to be enlisted and trained a little in the violence profession and then shipped out to reinforce The Surge of ’07™. The IED fodder would not even need to be shipped all that far.
    (What’s wrong with General Mubárak, I wonder? Why does he wait to be asked and not go ahead and raise a few hundred thousand Hessians to lend to the militant GOP on his own hook? In addition to showing proper gratitude for a great deal of previous assistance, that plan would put him in a strong position to make sure that neo-Iraq does not eventually get settled in what he would consider the wrong way. The general had better watch out, it seems to me, for the Party of Charles Murray has been known to take a very dim view of freeloaders and welfare dependents.)
    ™™

  4. JHM:
    If did not use the term “foreign legion” sarcastically, but advisedly. In addition — and even more germanely — about 40% of our foreign legion used to go by the now-no-longer-appropriate title: “National Guard.” You can’t usually find them at home guarding the nation or assisting with their supposed duties of community disaser relief, et cetera, as neither can you our “regular” army posted all over the globe doing whatever unneccessary and irritating (to the foreign locals) things they do. Unlike the French and Roman versions of the Imperial Storm Troopers (I’ll plead guilty to irony on that one), our current corps of clueless crusaders does get to come home at least for a few months at a time once in awhile. Of course, long-disance global travel has gotten a lot cheaper and easier than those other former legionnaires found it in their day.
    I agree that our gluttenous hardware-pork weapons-appropriations scams loot far more from the treasury (and produce far more vast political campaign conributions) than any “human-assets” investments — like foreign language competence — possibly could. We don’t want to invest in educating people (military or civilian) because (1) that might make them ungovernable and (2) a threat to replace the incompetents above them in the career “command” food chain. The maintenance of profitable ignorance seems the rule as concerns the ever-erratic and monstrously destructive Lunatic Leviathan.
    As I suppose I may have implied with my comments about learning how to learn foreign languages rapidly at DLI, the priceless experience led me to eventually branch out into travel, work, and family associations in other parts of Asia than just the little southeast corner of it that the American military thought I should visit for eighteen months. In fact, I maintain that the education I got in practical language acquisition during my enforced indentured military servitude helped make me something more than merely an American: something more like a citizen of a larger world. Educating too many of our civilian, military, and government employees like that would, of course, make them far less jingoistic and thus immune to fascist nationalism. Call that sarcasm, if you will (and I won’t argue the point), but the general decline in the teaching of foreign languages in America’s public school system (and I’ve taught in it) since my own days back in the early 1960’s (my high school offered French, Spanish, German, Greek, and Latin) has seriously eroded America’s once formidable academic, scientific, economic, and cultural potential for progress and good in this world.
    As to the latest-guru-management theory of “hiring it done” (linguistically speaking), the Romans tried that and got the Visigoths and a sacking of their own imperial capital. Our current American regime seems to require Kurds and Shiites (and other, non-Iraqi speakers of Arabic) to “interpret” for our monolingual goons as they go around kicking in the front doors and rummaging through the underwear closets of Sunni Arabs. That doesn’t seem to have helped increase our imperial effectiveness in the least — in fact, quite the opposite. In any event, as a Chinese businessman admonished me during one six-month job I had in Beijing in 1994: “Never trust your interpreter. He’s the one selling your secrets to your competitor.” As with anything else in life: if we don’t learn for our own purposes, someone else will train us for theirs.
    I guess I’ll close this with those two crucial distinctions: “education” versus “training.” We seem, as a society and polity, to have opted for the latter — and at as low a level of it as we can get away with paying for with sub-subsistence-level wages. We can do much better for ourselves than that, and we used to do it regularly. Deputy Dubya Bush may have lived a charmed, subsidized life of lowered expectations, but we common citizens of the world have to expect far more of ourselves — and develop the intellectual endurance to achieve it. I learned how to do some that intensive-intellectual-endurance stuff at DLIWC. I recommend a similar experience for all of our military and government employees, if not for all of our citizens generally. It might make them somewhat less “American,” but far more humane.

  5. (1) I thought the French Foreign Legion was called that because only foreigners could enlist in it, not because it was used to fight wars outside France and the French Empire. Isn’t that right?
    (2) As to the latest-guru-management theory of “hiring it done” (linguistically speaking), the Romans tried that and got the Visigoths and a sacking of their own imperial capital.
    More recently, though, the Gurkhas have not taken over London or the Senegalese sacked Paris.
    (3) Isn’t it really a bit odd that our GOP geniuses, who don’t mind outsourcing everything else in sight except of course Big Management themselves, should be so reluctant to do it with the military? (The idea that they are afraid of getting vandalized and visigothed seems unlikely to me.)
    Happy days.

  6. 24 Organizations Ask Pelosi and Reid to Leave Iraq Its Oil
    May 18, 2007
    The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
    The Honorable Harry Reid
    United States Congress

    Dear Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid,

    We recognize and applaud your escalating efforts to bring peace to Iraq and to bring our troops home. However, we are concerned about the proposed Iraqi hydrocarbon law and the benchmark in the Iraq supplemental urging the Iraqi government to pass this law as soon as possible.
    Americans are counting on your efforts in Congress to end the war and bring the troops home in a way that rebuilds the credibility of our nation and reaffirms America’s position as a force for freedom and democracy in the world. However, if Democrats are perceived to be advocating withdrawal only after access to Iraqi oil has been assured this will do little to reassure critics.
    The proposed Iraqi Oil Law will open up Iraq to international oil companies for the first time in decades, and potentially rob the Iraqis of billions of dollars. We are therefore joining Hasan Jum’a Awad, Head of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions urging you “not to link withdrawal with the oil law”.1
    As you know, Iraq has at least 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves – 10 per cent of the world total. Oil accounts for more than 70 per cent of Iraq’s GDP and 95 per cent of government revenue.

  7. Al-Hakim flew suddenly to the United States on Wednesday for tests after doctors at a U.S.-run hospital in Iraq detected signs of cancer in one of his lungs. The diagnosis was confirmed at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, the officials said.
    Early Sunday, al-Hakim left the U.S. for Iran, where he will receive chemotherapy treatment, the officials said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
    Al-Hakim lived in exile in Iran for more than two decades. His party was founded there in the early 1980s.
    News of al-Hakim’s diagnosis came hours after another key Iraqi leader, 73-year-old Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, also flew to the U.S. for a medical checkup. Talabani was hospitalized in Jordan nearly three months ago after collapsing with what doctors called exhaustion and dehydration from lung and sinus infections.

  8. Our Gurkha and Serbian dogs-of-war mercenaries (as well as our own “Blackwater” native ones) have not sacked Washington — yet. They’ve merely drained it a bit with their exhorbitant “support costs.” They probably won’t have to personnally do the actual deed, since their lawless activities on Washington’s behalf — alongside those of our regular military and CIA forces — have so enraged their foreign victims that Washington’s own Pentagram, while not sacked and looted, did sustain a rather devastating direct hit by a hijacked airliner on 9/11/2001.
    Furthermore, I understand that our goverment has now started recruiting our Army from non-citizens abroad because our own people, like those of Rome and France previously, have no appetite for military service given the corrupt emperors and political generals they could expect to get for “leadership.” As well, since the French foreign legion gave some of their own native French “undesirables” the option of the Foreign Legion in lieu of prison, I’d say that our recruiting from our own prison alumni has started moving in that direction as well. So while not a one-for-one analogy in all instances, I see our staffing and maintenance of over 700 military bases worldwide, as well as our conducting foreign invasions, bombings, and “regime changes” wherever and whenever we desire as so characteristic of an imperial foreign legion, that I feel it unnecessary to quibble over fine distinctions without a difference. America doesn’t have a military that “defends” America (anywhere near a “threatened” America) and hasn’t had one in over half a century. America has a de-facto foreign legion that occasionally gets to spend a little Rest and Recuperation time at “home.” That, too, though, has begun to change.
    The hired native interpreter business, as with our Phoenix Program in Vietnam, has only resulted in the “natives” passing us self-interested target information to see us use in settling their own grudges and vendettas. Even worse than serving as our own paid foreign legion, our vastly equipped and overpriced monolingual morons now practically serve as the Kurdish and Shiite (if not Iranian) militia and air national guard — and all gratis in the service of these foreign interests, too. (I won’t even bother going into the divide-and-conquer services we provide at no charge to Israel.) In a real turn of the ironic screw, then, our imperial forces have now become volunteer Visigoth legionnaires themselves! Now that implausible distinction does set us apart from historic France and Rome. The sheer crushing tax burden of half-a-trillion dollars a year (largely borrowed) to maintain this imperial legion will surely loot Washington’s treasury more thorougly and effecively than any platoon-sized troop of Gurkha and/or Senegalese goons could ever hope to do. We’ll sack and loot ourselves long before anyone else has to do it for us.

  9. The US forces are kicking in the front doors of the Shi’a in Iraq, along with the Afghan people too.
    Now, in Afghanistan, some of those doors are attached to mud huts. I wonder where the people will get the money to replace the door.
    I also wonder when the US forces will wake up and realize that this is not helping…..

  11. “An article in Russian scientific journal that also makes a political sense.
    Hope you’ll be able to translate/understand it and broadcast at your independent resources.
    Russian chemists prooved that USA concealed their illegal nuclear collaboration with Iraq. USA had provided to Iraq technology to enrich uranium up to levels suitable for use in nuclear weapon, thus violating article 1 of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
    http://www.chem.msu.su/rus/jvho/2007-1/158.pdf

  12. I’m no ME expert and I’m genuinely hoping that someone can set me straight on this quite basic question about Iraq that has been bugging me inrceasingly over the last few years.
    How is it exactly that we are sure the Bush administration didn’t expect ongoing chaos in Iraq? At least enough for them to end up with an army in permanent bases fighting the “terrorists’ over there instead of “over here” as they quip. How could they not expect at least enough violence to provide some ready causa belli with the next country or two on the list of strategic ME targets when ready?
    So have they in fact got just what they expected by invading and occupying Iraq, albeit perhaps a little hotter than necessary? Bush will serve out his two terms for all the low polling.
    The Bush administration are happy to act really really stupid whenever it suits. It’s good PR. Americans showed with Ronald Reagan they will tolerate a lot that looks like stupidity, or even dementia, from their leaders, so long as they appear strong and seem to uphold conservative moral values. And if Americans buy that Bush is really really stupid, that’s his excuse for just about any situation where people discover the facts deviate from the rhetoric.
    Could not any reasonably educated lay person know in 2003 that if your American and European army invades an Arab country with very high ethnic tensions, and you remove what is surpressing them, along with destroying much of the economy, government down to petty official Baath party level, and national infrastructure;- food and water supply, hospitals, jobs, utilities, etc. then there is going to be violent chaos? And that is without considering the tendency peoples have to resist ongoing occupation by foreign armies, especially such distinctly foreign ones.
    One can try and imagine an alternate history of the 2003 invasion where there had not been such mounting chaos, that per the supposed “plan” Iraq had morphed into some sort of peaceful Pro-American and of course Pro-Israeli Arab Democracy. That this happened despite a rapid succession of dramatic acts likely only to magnify destabilisation. Then I guess the boys would have been home for Xmas? “Oops, we invaded the wrong country by mistake, thank God it ended well, better get out of there fairly quickly?
    Is it possibly to rationally believe that was ever the expectation?” Was it really as some suggested just that “some arabs” had to pay for what “some arabs” had done on 911, and who is it going to be? Was invading Afghanistan somehow not enough retaliation, even if the terrorist threats there and elsewhere have been as haphazardly attended to as the New Orleans levees? Even if not Iraqis but other Arabs were involved in 911, as Bush & Co must have known? Even if they had no major WMD; as Bush & Co also must have known? As if you would ever conventionally attack countries you believed had terrorist connections and significant WMD that could target your troops and cities.
    Is it the Bush administration that is stupid about how events have unfolded in Iraq, or is it us? Isn’t there pretty overwhelming evidence that even had Bush &Co really been too stupid to work it out for themselves that they had plenty of advice, albeit unsought advice to that effect pre- invasion?
    Next year there will be another US Presidential election. How long will any likely following administration maintain those permanent bases, and the friendly american hand around the neck of the Iraqi government? It seems very unclear to me how much will change in Iraq during the terms of the next president, terms that end in 2016. Which will be the 13th year of what we supposedly can believe was an accidental, mistaken occupation. How can this be believable? How can we not simply know we are being lied to about the occupation of Iraq at a very fundamental level?

  13. Nice one
    http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m223/emdawal/wipe.jpg
    Roland
    the friendly american hand around the neck of the Iraqi government?
    نائب كردي يتهم الأميركيين بالتدخل في شؤون العراق كافة حتى البرلمان
    http://www.radiosawa.com/arabic_news.aspx?id=1259182
    قال النائب الكردي المستقل محمود عثمان ان السبب في الضعف الذي لازم الحكومة العراقية خلال سنة من تشكيلها يعود الى عدم وجود علاقات متوازنة ومعقولة تربط بين السياسيين من جهة وبين الاميركيين من جهة اخرى. وأضاف النائب الكردي في تصريحات أدلى بها اليوم الاحد أن حكومتين في البلاد الاولى أميركية والثانية عراقية ، واتهم الاميركيين بالتدخل في كل شيء حتى في مجلس النواب.وأوضح النائب عثمان ان على الحكومة عقد اتفاقية متوازنة تمنع الاميركيين من التدخل في جميع الامور وتحترم السيادة العراقية.
    A Kurdish MP from Iraqi Parliament accusing US interfering with Iraq politics even the parliament……..We have two governments one Iraqi and one American,

  14. Q. “How is it exactly that we are sure the Bush administration didn’t expect ongoing chaos in Iraq?”
    A. But they never SAID they expected chaos!
    Q. Of course not, it is not respectable to expect chaos to result from one’s aggressions and interventions. Smart people do not talk about such things. The question is, what if they expected the chaos but did not say so out loud?
    A. You’re making them sound sneaky. Aren’t these folks innocent and pure-souled and Yale-credentialed cowboys, as devoid of guile as the not-cloudy-all-day skies out Crawford way are free from smog?
    Q. You jest?
    A. In part. But you have to admit that by your theory they have made double-damned liars of themselves every time they pretended to be surprised by their own doo-doo.
    Q. Didn’t you read the part where I suggested they they were also only pretending to be klutzes and bozos? “And if Americans buy that Bush is really really stupid, that’s his excuse for just about any situation where people discover the facts deviate from the rhetoric.”
    A. I don’t think that analysis quite does the trick, sir. Sorry.
    Q. What’s wrong with it?
    A. Well, to begin with, where I come from an “excuse” is what you say when you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar. I mean, it is what YOU say, not what your hired hands or your fan club or your attorneys say for you. What’s-his-name at _Slate_ collects “Bushisms,” weird English-like noises emitted by the Dynastic and Presidential mouth, but no Bushism I know of is at all like “Don’t blame me, please, I’m not clever enough to be blameable.” Actually, Señorito Tony Snow and the other dubyapologists never talk like that either. It seems pretty clear that they don’t think Himself would like it much if they did. Most people wouldn’t like it, after all.
    Q. Aren’t you going to let me say anything against Bush and the Busheviki unless they say it themselves too? Haven’t you ever heard of “wink, wink, nod, nod”?
    A. Dr. Winque and Prof. Nodd are old acquaintances, but their brilliant theory does not apply to Republican Party extremism quite like that. It applies when one wingnut signals to another silently after they both heard somebody else, probably a l*b*r*l fiend from the MSM, suggest that Himself may not be the brightest bulb that ever shone. The Secret Right-Wing Truth (SRWT) that they thereby jointly acknowledge can be translated approximately “If that jerk is so smart, how come he ain’t President?” That’s not a SRWT about George XLIII, really, but a SRWT about how mere school-type intelligence is overrated by perfessers who can’t park their bicycles straight. It should be filed in the same GOP pigeon hole with their “History is bunk.”
    If they care at all about whether Little Brother has parked his neo-Iraqi subjects straight, the winkers and nodders don’t mean to let him off the hook because he couldn’t be expected to do any better, they take refuge instead in another very impotant SRWT, one you can scarcely glance at a Boy-‘n’-Party website without stumbling over: neo-Iraq is really in much better shape than it looks, the wicked MSM systematically misrepresent all the glorious achievements of Boy and Party and Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton, &c. &c. — in short, there is nothing to excuse and therefore no need for excuses.
    Q. But don’t you see that I was talking about liberals and Democrats and foreigners being deceived by Bush’s feigned incompetence, not his domestic and Party supporters? You have to know that most of the former think he’s pretty dumb.
    A. Of course, but I have yet to hear anybody like that suggest that Little Brother’s incompetence somehow excuses his malfeasance. “Go easy on him for his mistakes because he’s not very smart” is not a product there is any significant market for that I can make out. Those still deluded by the militant GOP deny that there have been any important mistakes, and those of us hostile to it are not going to accept any excuses whatsoever. The very concept of an “excuse” makes no sense unless it is offered to somebody who perceives and understands the sinning clearly enough but is at the same time prepared to be charitable to the sinner. In the case of the Big Management Party, and their Kiddie Krusade, and their occupation policy in the former Iraq, where is there any audience to be found that will sit down quietly to listen to excuses from them or about them at this point in the clown show? Any audience that wouldn’t fit in a telephone booth, that is?
    At the outset of the aggressions and related foreign policy misjudgments, Extremist Republicanism took (and publicly trumpeted) the line “Either you are with us, or you are against us!” That was not the case in the beginning — and it should not have been allowed to become the case ever –, yet here we are several years later and at this point it’s true enough. If you’re FOR ’em, you’re for ’em no matter whether you think they are smart, or dumb, or dumb attemptin’ to be smart, or smart pretendin’ to be dumb. Should you be AGAINST them, as I hope you are, it would be equally a waste of time and energy to worry about that particular multiple choice question for more than half a second or so.
    =====
    That’s all politically and practically speaking, of course. If you propose to take a purely academic interest in the mind of the amok elephant the same way one might investigate the annals of Sennacherib or the volcanos of West Neptune, I should respond differently. At that level also I disagree, however. To imagine that the Crawfordites have cleverly done everything on purpose in order to arrive where they are at the moment takes more imagination than I possess. Probably you and I disagree about exactly where they in fact are, although you may be working backwards from a future situation that I’d agree with you about. It is only too likely that we are never going to really get out of the former Iraq at all, that the “responsible nonwithdrawal lobby,” so to call the Hamilton-Baker folks and the CFR and most of our august and revered bipartisan foreign policy community, will take over what has been pretty strictly a Party fiasco up to now. (Exactly the reverse of the Vietnam pattern, notice.)
    That seems to me a reasonable speculation about the day after tomorrow, but it does not seem so reasonable to argue that the Bushies have carefully constructed our present today in order to produce that sort of day after tomorrow. My guess remains that the petulant brats would much rather win it all, and win all by themselves and all for themselves, and furthermore, that most of them still dreamily expect that Gen. Petraeus or Father Zeus or somebody will turn up at the last moment to allow them to do so.
    We’ll see. God knows best.

  15. “Considering that medical facilities for the treatment of such serious ailments are far better in the United States than in Iran — and that al-Hakim was in just such a U.S. facility over the weekend — it is not likely that this trip to Iran is really for the purpose of receiving medical attention. Instead, considering the severity of his illness and the critical role he plays as an interlocutor between Iran and the United States, he likely is carrying an important message from the Bush administration to Tehran. Washington has likely transmitted through al-Hakim its response to the Iranian proposed framework for direct public talks on Iraq, which are scheduled to begin in Baghdad on May 28.
    Before al-Hakim’s sudden visit to the United States, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney made a trip to Baghdad, where he held meetings with Iraqi government officials. Cheney and al-Hakim also met, even though al-Hakim does not hold any official government position other than that of the parliamentary leader of the ruling bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance. However, al-Hakim and his group are the critical link between the United States and Iran, especially in the context of realizing the nations’ respective interests in Iraq.”
    http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/read_article.php?id=288955

  16. Salah I very quickly pressed that Pop Up Window button you linked to but the next window just comes up “Are you sure you wish to install Hillary Clinton?”
    JWN I enjoyed reading your elegant and pithy reply immensly. We seem to agree about the “day after tomorrow” in Iraq. I’m really not sure how important any residual disagreement you & I might have can be in real terms.
    My basic feeling remains; ordinary people can’t possibly be so much more prescient about the effects of US ME policy than this administration is, just by thinking for a minute or two. So why has it seemed for 4 years and counting that they can be?
    Political entities that violently change the world in their own interests; against the genuine will of their democratic electorates, through changes of presidents and through decades of mounting global misery and anger, and in breach of the law, simply cannot be idiots. Not even if their leaders superficially appear to be “just idiots”, or “just bullies” etc. They in fact have unasailable dominion, even if individual politicians may be sacrificed and not every single plan works. This is no longer an issue of two parties with different constituencies, members and policies. It’s just the opposite issue in fact. There is only one electable US policy on Iraq and the ME. The current one. Invade and Occupy, one target at a time. No that the voters want it.
    If so then America is the worlds greatest failed state; with no vote to cast but for disaster, and is no longer the functioning, rational democracy it once was. Don’t tell me I’m wrong, far better to show me, if you can. Sometime before 2016.

  17. Roland,
    thanks, its up to you what like?
    To me o difference between GWB, and HC different colors for same horse

  18. ,i.Is it the Bush administration that is stupid about how events have unfolded in Iraq,,/i.
    There was no stupidity
    ““Any manager mentioned in the press is attacked afterwards,” he said. And when I asked whether the company was being sold, he gave this oblique response: “If the decision was up to the workers, they are against privatization; but if it’s up to the high-ranking officials and government, then privatization is an order and orders must be followed.”
    I left the plant feeling that I knew less than when I’d arrived. But on the way out of the gates, a young security guard handed my translator a note. He wanted us to meet him after work at a nearby restaurant, “to find out what is really going on with privatization.” His name was Mahmud, and he was a twenty-five-year-old with a neat beard and big black eyes. (For his safety, I have omitted his last name.) His story began in July, a few weeks after Bremer’s privatization announcement. The company’s manager, on his way to work, was shot to death. Press reports speculated that the manager was murdered because he was in favor of privatizing the plant, but Mahmud was convinced that he was killed because he opposed the plan. “He would never have sold the factories like the Americans want. That’s why they killed him.”
    http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197

  19. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/03/18/widip218.xml
    In the process, London created an inherently unstable country comprising three mutually loathing groups. The Kurdish people dominated the north, Shia Muslims ruled the south and Sunnis ran Baghdad. Welding them into one nation risked chaos.
    The League of Nations mandated Iraq to Britain at the San Remo conference in April 1920. Within weeks, this provoked a brutal uprising and the declaration of a jihad against the British in the Shia holy city of Kerbala. The revolt spread and it took 20,000 British troops and four squadrons of RAF bombers nine months of hard fighting – and 425 deaths – to restore control.
    The British were driven to consider extreme methods. T E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)wrote to The Observer saying: “It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions.”
    The RAF asked Churchill for permission to gas the rebels. “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas,” he replied. “I am strongly in favour of using gas against uncivilised tribes.”
    The RAF failed to master the technology of gas bombs and they were never used. The British did, however, bombard Shia rebels with gas-filled artillery shells.

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