Category: Hawkwatch

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that David Kay’s Iraq Survey Group found–contrary to what Kay said in public or told the US Congress– that “it is now clear [Saddam] had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key material;s or obtain the technology he needed for either.”
Read that great piece. And read my commentary on it in the next post beneath this one.

Washington Post and NYT both full of great stories today. One in the NYT gave me particular pleasure. It’s Douglas Jehl and David Firestone’s piece about how even some of the Republican senators are getting pissed off with Rumsfeld.
These reportedly even include one of my own senators, John Warner, the very senior Repub who also chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee. Warner himself did not go on the record for the story. But staff in somebody’s office on the GOP side were talking “The Pentagon is not exactly Capitol Hill’s favorite department any more,” one prominent GOP staff member is reported as saying. “Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz just give off this sense that they know better than thou, and that they don’t have to answer our questions.”
Jehl and Firestone also report, possibly significantly, that, “Republican lawymakers and top staff members who were interviewed on Thursday would not say whether they had expressed concern about Mr. Rumsfeld to the White House.”
Well, let’s hope they actually have done so! Let’s hope the Prez takes the advice I gave (at no cost!) back in my Sept. 11, 2003, column in the Christian Science Monitor and gives Bombs-Away Don back his freedom from drudgery in the Pentagon…
And on another note, also in today’s NYT, don’t you just gotta love the freshness and naivete displayed by the Prez after his first few (whirlwind) encounters with the outside world while he was in Asia.
David E. Sanger, traveling with W, has a piece titled “On High-speed Trip, Bush Glimpses a Perception Gap.” He reports:

Minutes after President Bush finished an hour-long meeting with moderate Islamic leaders on the island of Bali on Wednesday, he approached his staff with something of a puzzled look on his face.
“Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?” he asked, shaking his head. He was equally distressed, he told them, to hear that the United States was so pro-Israel that it was uninterested in the creation of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel, despite his frequent declarations calling for exactly that.
It was a revealing moment precisely because the president was so surprised.

Like, maybe the Prez should read more full-text newspapers (or hey, how about blogs?) himself, rather than the carefully-edited gobbets of favorable reporting that the staff presents to this modern-day Emperor of Few Clothes every morning?
So did some of the people he met on the Asia tour successfully suggest to him that his global policy wardrobe has fewer real clothes in it that he previously thought?
Sanger reports:

[E]ven some of Mr. Bush’s aides concede that Mr. Bush has only begun to discover the gap between the picture of a benign superpower that he sees, and the far more calculating, self-interested, anti-Muslim America the world perceives as he speeds by behind dark windows.
“On a trip like this he can get a glimpse of it, but only a glimpse,” one senior official who sat in on several meetings said. “Of course, when you are moving at warp speed, there isn’t a lot of time to think about what you’re hearing.”

Yesterday, Al-Hayat published a column I wrote earlier this month titled Six Months after the fall of Baghdad. I wrote it in a tremendous hurry, but it still seems to hold up pretty well.
I think it took me a while–after my February reading of the book on “Shock and Awe” written by Harlan Ullman and others; and after also, might I add, just missing having the chance to catch up w/ Harlan himself at the house of mutual friends in Dorset, UK, last August– before I suddenly “got” that the whole S&A thing is as much (or more) about third-party onlookers as it is about the immediately ostensible “target” of such operations…
So here’s the lead on what I wrote in Hayat:

It is six months since Baghdad fell to General Tommy Franks’ forces, and already it is clear that the Bush administration’s decision to launch the fundamentally unilateral, preventive war of early 2003 will change the whole Middle East and the whole global balance – but just not in the way they intended it to.
When Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld persuaded the President to launch this kind of war, in this kind of way, they were evidently hoping that it would send a huge wave of “shock and awe” not just through Iraq’s military leadership, not just through the Middle East – but throughout the whole world. The swift and victorious assault against Iraq was designed to be the dramatic opening scene in a broader campaign to persuade the whole world of the sheer unstoppability of the unilateralist, “preventive war” doctrine that the President had outlined in his infamous “National Security Strategy” document of September 2002.
One can recall the thinking behind the design of President Truman’s decision to employ not one but two of the U.S.’s brand-new atomic bombs over tightly-populated urban areas in Japan in August 1945. Was a campaign of such terrible and lethal consequences as that one necessary to persuade Japan’s emperor to surrender? Probably not. (Many historians have argued, for example, that a “demonstrative” detonation of one or both bombs out at sea, but visible to Tokyo, could have brought about the surrender with considerably less loss of life. They have noted, too, that not sufficient times was allowed between the first detonation and the second to see if just one bomb could bring the offer of surrender.) But then, much of the intended “audience” for the launching of those two bombs was not in Japan – but in Russia, a country that in the eyes of many Americans would likely be the next challenger to Washington’s worldwide power.
As U.S. strategist Harlan Ullman has noted, the intent of the Hiroshima bombing, as of the assault against Iraq, was primarily to induce “shock and awe”. (Other people might use the term “terror”.) But what needs noting in particular is that the aim is to spread this effect far more widely than just within the ranks of the immediate target. The aim on both occasions was shock and awe on a worldwide scale…

Nice to see Hayat putting more things up on their English-language website. I should check it out a bit more regularly than I have been.

The US House and Senate this evening passed different versions of the bills the White House had sent them, authorizing the funding of the US occupation of Iraq (and US operations in Afghanistan) for a further year. It was very significant that in the Senate, 8 Republicans broke party ranks and gave the Dems there a majority for the idea of making half of the $20.3 billion for Iraqi reconstruction into a loan, rather than a grant.
My personal opinion is that if you send your army into someone else’s country and bust it up, at the very least you ought to pay outright the costs for the repair of what you did (or, through your criminal lack of advance planning, allowed others to do) there. I think saddling any emerging Iraqi government with a hefty $10 billion of debt is not only mean-spirited but also just plain wrong.
(I also think that in any reconstruction effort, the process ought to be controlled by the Iraqis themselves as much as possible, and the work done by Iraqi companies and Iraqi workers–rather than have Halliburton and Co hauling off the profits from the reconstruction and specially imported migrant workers hauling off the paychecks while Iraqis themselves are out of work… But I guess most of that goes without saying?)
But I guess the good folks from Win Without War, MoveOn, etc., all thought differently, and have been mounting a heavy grassroots phone-in campaign to have people try to persuade their congressional representatives not to give Bush the reconstruction money as an outright grant.
I can see the logic in their position. At a time when 43 million US citizens have no health insurance and schools and bridges throughout this country are crumbling for lack of investment, maybe it does seem inappropriate to “give” huge chunks of US taxpayer money to (re-)build schools, bridges, and hospitals in Iraq….
Well, maybe the folks in the Senate and House should have thought about that before they voted last November to give the Prez a blank check to launch a war against Iraq???
I do recall back in January, when the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice was at the height of the (successful) campaign to have the city council in our cute small city here in central Virginia pass a vote against the launching of any war against Iraq without express UN sanction, I was one of the people who went down to the city council meeting and spoke in favor of the resolution.
Speaking from all my decades of experience of matters Middle Eastern, I explained to the council members that any war would lead to any extremely long-drawn-out and expensive US occupation in Iraq– and that the money to pay for it would ultimately be shorn from the already-dwindling funds available for social programs inside this country.
And that, sadly, is exactly what’s happening now.
So yes, I totally see where Win Without War, MoveOn, etc, are coming from. But I still think that the US “broke” Iraq, so now the US needs to “mend” what it broke…
But then again, there is a big side of me that loves to note how many increasingly significant political defeats the Prez is starting to rack up as the ongoing tragedy of the war erodes his political charisma more and more. Eight Republican Senators voting against him? Wow! This is really getting interesting.

Regular readers of JWN may have noticed that I’m not the biggest fan of Ahmed Chalabi. Still, I admit there’s something just a touch delightful about seeing him use all his old charms and slipperiness to start turning on his erstwhile handlers in the Pentagon while he gives aid and comfort to “the enemy”, i.e. the French. (The enemy thing is Tom Friedman’s analysis, not mine.)
The other naughty spectator sport I’m engaging in these days is watching all those serried ranks of Op-Ed columnists and various self-styled “experts” who sold Chalabi’s supposed virtues on an eager-to-believe US political class for so many long years– and seeing how those individuals are dealing with the current apparent dust-up between Chalabi and his former friends in Bombs-Away Don’s Pentagon.
Jim Hoagland comes to mind, first and foremost. (Jim should have known better, but for some reason he’s been foaming at the bit to have the US support Chalabi and topple Saddam for the past few years.) Danielle Pletka comes to mind, too: the former foreign-affairs aide for Senator Jesse Helms and now a recognized neocon in her own right.
So today, Danielle has a just-about-indecipherable Op-Ed in the New York Times. I’ve read it a couple of times and still can’t figure what exactly it is she’s trying to say. I’ll give a handsome prize to any JWN reader who can give a reasonable explanation of what she means in this particularly opaque paragraph:

Members of Iraq’s Governing Council [read: Chalabi–HC]have argued strenuously against an infusion of additional troops–American or otherwise. Already chafing at the cloying stewardship of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraq’s interim government is eager to take more responsibility for security and governance of the country. Unlike United States commanders–who some of Mr. Rumsfeld’s skeptics in Washington say have been stifled by the secretary’s lean transformation dream–the interim government has no vested interest in keeping United States troop levels down.

Let’s face it, Danielle Pletka was never particularly bright or well-informed. Such a pity that she has now been reduced to blithering idiocy.

From John Pilger via the Sydney Morning Herald via this post on Juan Cole’s blog comes a useful reminder that we should look at what Bush administration heavies were saying about Iraq’s WMD capabilities before Sept. 11, 2001.
Pilger had apparently found a tape of Colin Powell speaking to an audience in Cairo in February 2001, when CP apparently said that Saddam “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction…”
That prompted me to go into the State Department’s website and see what relevant texts and transcripts I might find there from that same period. Just a quick search turned up some very similar utterances by CP. Like this one from a press briefing he gave while on his plane traveling to Cairo Feb 23, 2001:

I think it’s important to point out that for the last 10 years, the policy that the United Nations, the United States has been following, has succeeded in keeping Iraq from rebuilding to the level that it was before… [E]ven though they may be pursuing weapons of mass destruction of all kinds, it is not clear how successful they have been. So to some extent, I think we ought to declare this a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box.

Or this one, when CP was on a plane two days later, traveling to Kuwait:

QUESTION: Are you stunned that he [Saddam] is still in power after all these years?
SECRETARY POWELL: Stunned isn?t the word. I never ever have underestimated the power of a dictator, and I don?t think you?ll find me on the record ever predicting his demise at that time. But I also thought that we had pretty much removed his stings and frankly for ten years we really have.

Or this one, which records remarks he made on arrival in Kuwait:

it is at the top of the agenda to make sure that we continue to contain Iraq so that it does not develop the kind of weapons that it is trying to develop. We have been successful for the last ten years in keeping him from developing those weapons and we will continue to be successful.

So, having found those extremely suggestive quotes, I thought let’s hike on over to the White House website, see what they have in the National Security Council archive over there that relates to pre-Sept. 11, 2001 utterances by, oh, the Prez, or Condi Rice, or whoever…
But here’s something scary. If you go to the White House site and look for the texts of speeches etc on the subject of “National Security” by clicking this button, the texts they give only go back to September 11, 2001. Not a day earlier!
Is someone trying to whitewash the record there or something? (By contrast, if you click on “Middle East”, which is a section that deals with Israeli-Arab issues but NOT Iraq, the statements there go back to February 14, 2001.)
There is one intriguing-looking button on the White House site that says simply: “Iraq: Apparatus of lies”. But my understanding is that it may not actually refer to the White House itself…

Here is the link to my CSM column, out in Thursday’s edition of the paper. Buried inside there you’ll see a proposal for a big personnel change.
Eagle-eyed readers of JWN will see the extent to which I use the blog to explore ideas for the column.

Reactions to Sunday night’s speech:
(1) Back to the scared-deer look. Makes you sorry for the guy.
(2) Notably peevish and ungracious toward the UN. UN has “an opportunity, and the responsibility” to help out. So says Nanny Bush. But where was even one moment of reaching out to the United Nations by, for example, expressing his sympathy over the loss of Sergio de Mello and the other UN people there? Bush had actually met Sergio, after all… A couple of sentences of memories of the man’s human qualities would have spoken volumes to key audiences both inside the US and overseas.
(3) Still trying the tired old trick of labeling all actions he doesn’t like as “terrorism”. Has the guy read read no history??? (Silly question, Helena!) But just for the record, I can say throughout my entire lifetime, from watching the British dismantle their empire until now, it’s notable how often imperial powers fall into this particular discourse of (anti-)terrorism. Why, for the pillars of the apartheid regime, Nelson Mandela was for decades the “arch-terrorist”! This discourse not only doesn’t solve problems, it actually aggravates them, because the imperial power ends up using highly counter-productive means to react to understandable and quite predictable political setbacks.
Oh well, I’m off to Richmond, VA today to give a talk. Also have to write a CSM column for Thursday (9/11). Better stop now.

I have written here before about Ahmad (“You can’t blame me for trying”) Chalabi and the way this convicted fraudster was so easily able to put one over on Bush administration hawks who desperately– oh, so desperately– wanted to believe that what he told them was true… (Try hitting “Chalabi” in JWN’s Search window for past posts to this effect. Also, look at yesterday’s post.)
But today, during our continuing Tour de France, Bill and I stumbled onto the story of what must be one of the all-time-great instances of gullible Westerners– people who oh, so strongly wanted to believe that what their Middle Eastern interlocutors were telling them was true.
You’ve heard of the (ill-fated) Shroud of Turin? Welcome, friends, to the story of the Shroud of Cadouin.
So, this morning I was driving, generally east along the Dordogne valley. And let’s just say a wrong turn was taken, okay? I was reluctant to turn round, and besides, 400 pesky French drivers were pressing on my tail. Bill, sitting beside me with the map, charted a new course to bring us to where we wanted to aim for. By chance, that new course took us through the small Dordogne town of Cadouin.
And there was a Romanesque (11th-12th century) abbey advertised as being there. Well, we’re both suckers for Romanesque religious buildings. (We visited three great ones yesterday.) So of course we had to stop and have a look. We found a large, beautiful church with some ovoid arches. And next to it, which we almost missed, the cloister from when there was body of Cistercian monks there. We’re suckers for Cistercian cloisters, too. Five Euros each? Sure. We paid up and went in.
Bill got our his handy Michelin Guide Verte for the region. “Oh, there’s a shroud here, reputed to be the shroud of Christ, that was picked up in Antioch by a local priest and brought here in 1115,” he said, scrabbling through the pages.
Antioch, 1115. That would be one of the early Crusades that took a local priest to that spot on the eastern Mediterranean in today’s Turkey.
In a room off the cloister there was a little museum giving the history of the Shroud of Cadouin. In the years that followed, it seems that everyone who was anyone in early-modern Europe made the pilgrimage here to see it. That includes Richard the Lion-heart, Saint Louis, France’s King Charles V, etc etc. Then, as the centuries rolled on, the French Revolution put a bit of a crimp in the pilgrimage business (basically, by outlawing it, I think). But as those restrictions eased in the mid-1800s, believers started flocking to Cadouin once again…
It was great for the local economy.
In that same room, they even had the Shroud!! It was so exciting!! It was displayed flat in a tab;e-like display case: maybe four feet by ten feet. Beautifully fine woven cloth. Mostly near-white. Nothing that to my eyes looked remotely like the image of a man’s face. (But hey, that was the so-called “Shroud” of Turin that purported to have that, I guess.) And at each end, a number of half-inch bands of very intricately woven designs in colored yarns: mainly floral and geometric, very even, repetitive, and skilfully done.
The Guide Verte told us, slightly abruptly, that in 1935 this “Shroud” was discovered to be not authentic. It didn’t tell us why.
We walked to the next section of the little museum. One of the informational panels told us that in 1935, someone figured out that the designs on the embroidered bands actually read, in Arabaic, “God is great. Muhammed is the messenger of God. Ali is the friend of the prophet… ”
Oops!
We walked back, of course, and pored over the decorative bands. At which point the Arabic script leapt out at us immediately.

So for more than 800 years, no-one who had visited the so-called “Shroud of Christ” in Cadouin had noticed that….
Or perhaps, some people had noticed, and understood the writing, and been too scared of upsetting the tourism/pilgrimage-industry applecart to draw any attention to it?
It is kind of amazing, to think of all those Western-Christian pilgrims, people who so desperately wanted to believe that this was the Shroud of Christ, coming here and expressing their veneration for an object that actually turned out to be an expression of Muslim religiosity.
The God is the same of course. That’s okay. But I’m not sure Charles V, Richard the Lion-heart, and all those simple folks who invested their life savings in making this pilgrimage would have been so happy about the part about the Prophet.
Oh well. O tempora, o mores, as I believe I have remarked on JWN once before. (Which means, “Oh, the times, oh the habits!” or, more roughly translated, There’s nowt so queer as folk.)
In our own times, there was also, throughout the 1990s and down to this year, a desperately eager desire on behalf of many well-positioned Westerners to believe the story being peddled to them by another latter-day Middle Eastern snake-oil salesman. The Westerners in question were Richard (he not of the lion-heart) Perle, Douglas (ye of little) Feith, Wolfie, etc etc. And the salesman was Chalabi.
What he sold them, that they really wanted to believe, was roughly speaking:
(1) that he had networks of supporters throughout Iraq who would rise in support of the US forces and make for an easy US takeover, a.k.a. the cake-walk;
(2) that these supporters could provide/were providing lots of excellent, well-authenticated intelligence about Saddam’s WMD programs and his regime’s links with Al-Qaeda (!); and
(3) that once he had ridden to power in Baghdad on the hood of a US tank, he and his supporters would be happy to install a government that would make peace with Israel.
Quite possibly, it was this last part that they really, really wanted to believe… So now, the poor battered Iraqis, the poor battered US grunts, and the much-abused US taxpayers all find ourselves stuck where we are, thanks to that desperate, and desperately informed desire on behalf of those individuals to believe in the myth that they had created.
A footnote here. In the French towns we’ve visited, I’ve been interested in checking the war memorials erected by each community, in which they list the names of local sons who died in each of the two “World Wars” of the 20th century. In Cadouin, a very small town, fifteen local men lost their lives in WW-1 and five in WW-2. The proportion is roughly the same in each of the places we’ve visited.
I remember, growing up in England, that the numbers there were more equal between the two World Wars.
But those losses, repeated throughout Europe, do a lot to explain Europe’s current war-aversion. People in the US should take note, and be sympathetic rather than mindlessly derogatory.