Contest for the dunce’s cap

After thinking more about the topic of this post, from yesterday, I’ve been trying to think which individual in the Bush administration has been most culpably detrimental to the common good.
Should I choose Paul (Jerry) Bremer, for example? I note that when he was “given” the Iraq proconsulship last May, he was hailed in some quarters as some kind of a wonder-worker.
For example, the Prez himself, when announcing the appointment, called Bremer “a man of enormous experience” and “a can-do type person.” The president said Bremer “goes with the full blessings of this administration, and the full confidence of all of us … that he can get the job done.”
It was noted by some at that time that Bremer didn’t actually know very much about the Middle East (!) But Vince Cannistraro, former CIA director of counterterrorism, was quoted in this USA Today article as saying that, “His lack of knowledge about Iraq might actually help him… ” (!)
Or, moving right along here in our nominations process, we might nominate… Ricardo Sanchez, Jean Abizaid, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, or… you guessed it… the big enchilada himself!
Actually, I’m thinking maybe the JWN Golden Dunce’s Cap belongs on no other head than W’s. Not just for that quote about Bremer, above. Not just for the idiotic things he keeps mouthing to the global media these days like a person who has zero clue about what’s going on– in Iraq (“the situation in Iraq has improved”), anywhere else in the world, or here in the United States.
Oh well. Tomorrow evening we get to see him do his very best to pretend he’s in charge, during the press conference. Will that performance just merely confirm the decision I am close to making, to give him my prestigious award?

History lesson, anyone?

Maybe you were not among the longtime JWN readers who read this lesson from history when I posted it here in March 2003?
Anyway, here below, on much the same theme is a literary excerpt that came my way recently, thanks to an old friend connected with the U.S. uniformed military… [I haven’t had time to check the exact citation, but I’ll take this person’s word for it, for old times’ sake.]

    The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, nsincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and MAY SOON BE TOO INFLAMED FOR ANY ORDINARY CURE. WE ARE TODAY NOT TOO FAR FROM A DISASTER…
    …We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish Government and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil…Our government is worse than the old Turkish system…We have killed fourteen thousand Arabs in this rising this summer…We cannot hope to maintain such an average…We are told the object of the rising was political, we are not told what the local people want…
    Colonel Wilson fails to control Mesopotamia’s three million people with ninety thousand troops…we have not reached the limit of our military commitments…where is the balance to come from? Meanwhile, our unfortunate troops…under harsh conditions of climate and suppy, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad.

Attribution? T.E. Lawrence writing about the British experience in Iraq, in [my old employer] the Sunday Times of London, August 27, 1920

How they made ‘the perfect storm’

“It has been the perfect storm.” This was just one of many fine quotes in this extremely long retrospective of the past 12 days’ events in today’s WaPo, bylined to Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Anthony–yay! he got the Pulitzer he deserved!–Shadid.
The WaPo had extraordinarily comprehensive news coverage from Iraq and Washington today. (Sorry I didn’t post anything here earlier, but I needed a break.)
The Chandra/Shadid piece was the best of the fine bunch, imho. It was actually one of those big compilation articles, bylined to those two heroes but with additional reporting coming from other good reports elsewhere in Iraq, and in DC.
I was reading it very carefully to try to get a handle on how exactly all those disastrous decision got made eight or nine days ago: primarily, the decision to launch a big, bed retal raid against Fallujah at the same time they were upping the ante against Moqtada al-Sadr.
On such issues, I wanted to figure out, does Bremer report to Sanchez, or Sanchez to Bremer? Or, do they both report separately to Abizaid? Or, do they both report directly to Wolfie’s office and leave Abizaid to handle the (not inconsiderable) task of managing the military logistics?
Who was it exactly, who cooked up ‘the perfect storm’? (Btw, that quote was attributed in the article to an unnamed “official with the occupation authority.”)

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Urgently needed: Big shift in U.S. policies in Iraq

I’m guessing the U.S. military leadership has finally understood the scope
of the problems their people face in Iraq, and the stunning depth of the
failure of Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the man appointed by the suits in
the Pentagon to run the “political” side of the occupation?

On the ground, the military has reportedly pulled out of Sadr City–just
a mile or so from the Green Zone!– and is suing for a ceasefire in Fallujah.
Meanwhile the quasi-puppet IGC is collapsing and there are many, many
reports of U.S.-“trained” Iraqi security units defecting en masse to the
insurgents.

Evidently, a massive, top-level shift in the politics of running this
occupation is the only thing that can save the 120,000 highly over-exposed
and over-stretched American troops in Iraq from a total and humiliating disaster.

(Yes, it is already a disaster that they have killed as many Iraqis as they
have in this past week, and have lost as much political support on the ground–and
internationally–as they have. But at least, the losses of U.S. troops
are still not at this point massive.)

So, about this urgently needed shift in the politics of running the occupation

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US occupation of Iraq: the last act?

The director of the main hospital in Fallujah is reporting that 450 Iraqis have been killed there during this week’s fighting, and more than 1,000 wounded. If this is anywhere close to an accurate tally, then one way or another this marks the beginning of the endgame for the US occupation of Iraq.
Even if the US forces stopped operations in Fallujah and nationwide right now, these kinds of losses inflicted on the indigenous population mean that the US has lost all its credibility as the governing force in Iraq, as well as much of its ability to dictate the timing and other modalities of its by-now inevitable exit from the country.
How many people in the Bush administration have even heard of the Amritsar massacre?
The circumstances of that April 1919 atrocity, in which British forces mowed down 400 unarmed Indian protesters on a single day were, I admit, very different. But just as the Amritsar Massacre signaled the beginning of the end of the Brits’ “thousand-year Raj” in India, so too does the Fallujah Massacre of April 2004 signal the beginning of the precipitous crumbling of the US occupation of Iraq.
History moves a lot faster nowadays than it did in the early 20th century. It took the Brits a further 28 years after Amritsar to bring their colonial rule over India to an end, though after that fateful day the writing was very evidently on the wall for them.
At the rate the US military is currently going, I doubt that its presence in Iraq will last even a further 28 weeks. One way or another, the Fallujah Massacre will certainly be in every history book in every Muslim country from here on out.

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News from Cole

Great stuff, as always, over at Juan Cole’s blog today. Especially this snippet from a friend of his who managed to call a friend inside Najaf:

    The Americans are repeatedly sending in envoys to Sistani, who rejects Americans the permission to enter the city. They have now told Sistani that they are going to enter the city in four days after religious celebrations are over. Sistani has ongoing negotiations with Muqtada trying to make him leave the city…
    A lot of pilgrims from Iran are caught in this mess, sleeping in the streets, roaming streets trying to find shelter and something to eat. Pilgrimage in Najaf these days coming won

National unity, anyone?

I’m just wondering where all those people are who’ve been earnestly worrying that Iraq will collapse into sectarian civil war if the US forces should leave? (I wrote a little about that issue, here— scroll down about halfway.)
It seems to me that, by deciding to strike simultaneously against targets significant to both the Sunni and Shi-ite communities in Iraq, the US military has been doing a magnificent job of cementing a robust sense of national unity among them.
Maybe that was the plan?

Peace, war, and John Kerry

Whenever I’m in my hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia, on a Thursday I try to take part in the pro-peace “presence” that the C’ville Center for Peace and Justice maintains on a busy intersection in town for one hour during rush-hour, every week.
I was back there today with a great group of CCPJ friends. Our best sign is one that says “Honk for [peace symbol]”. It’s simple, it’s clear, and best of all it’s interactive.
Today, there was more honking and waving from passing drivers than ever. People seemed really charged up about the situation. I think there’s a convergence between the very disturbing news about the big new fighting in Iraq and the equally disturbing news coming out of the 9-11 Commission that is telling everyone that the whole move to invade and occupy Iraq was all along a big and dangerous diversion from the “real” war against terrorism.
I was just looking at the nationwide polling figures at this handy site that gathers all the recent data from the big national polling companies together in one place. A Zogby poll conducted April 1-4 found that 44% of respondents would re-elect Bush, while 51% wanted “someone new”. Bush against Kerry, however, it was 45% to 47%. So Kerry probably needs to come out and define himself more. He has seemed very tentative so far– but let’s hope that’s because he’s planning a really excellent campaign.
A Fox News poll conducted April 6-7 had Kerry ahead of Bush by a statistically insignificant hair: 44% to 43%.
Kerry, it seems to me, has to say something big and significant about the war–and soon. This time around, unlike in 1992, it is not just “the economy, stupid” that people are worried about. They are worried a lot about the economy, yes; but they’re also worried about the war and what it portends for the economy and for many other facets of American life. (Like the physical safety of close family members in Iraq, or like civil liberties at home.)
What would I advise Kerry to say?

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Friedman–marbles–loses

I had a quick read of the NYT and the WaPo today. NYT news coverage on Iraq seems ways better conceptualized and better organized than WaPo’s. The quality of NYT reporting from inside Iraq is also pretty good. And then, at the back, there’s a world-class column by Maureen Dowd:

    Maybe after high-definition TV, they’ll invent high-dudgeon TV, a product so realistic you can just lunge through the screen and shake the Bush officials when they say something maddening about 9/11 or Iraq, or when they engage in some egregious bit of character assassination…
    Even though the assumptions the Bush administration used to go to war have now proved to be astonishingly arrogant, na

Chickens–home–roost (Part 2)

After three days of fighting in Fallujah, AP reports that a Marine Lt.-Col. from the nearby military camp estimated that the Marines “now control 25 percent of Fallujah”.
That, after actions that included damaging two mosques:

    The Abdel-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque was hit by U.S. aircraft that launched a Hellfire missile at its minaret and dropped a 500-pound bomb on a wall surrounding the compound…
    During fighting elsewhere in Fallujah, U.S. forces seized a second place of prayer, the al-Muadidi mosque. A Marine climbed the minaret and fired on guerrilla gunmen, witnesses said. Insurgents fired back, hitting the minaret with rocket-propelled grenades and causing it to partially collapse, the AP reporter said.

The U.S. commanders’ decision to launch such a highly escalatory operation against Fallujah should come under strong scrutiny at home. Okay, many people in Fallujah (but actually, only a tiny proportion of the city’s people) took part in the gleeful desecration of the corpses of those killed U.S. “contract personnel” (i.e., mercenaries). It was tragic, it was inhumane, but stuff like that happens in war.
And anyway, those contractors were not part of a military chain of command. What the heck were they even doing going as fully armed foreign civilians into downtown Fallujah– a place where up to that point few military patrols ever wandered?? What kind of reckless craziness is that?

Continue reading “Chickens–home–roost (Part 2)”