Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

Okay, it seems that the evaluation I wrote last Monday of the situation in
Fallujah and other parts of Iraq was overly optimistic– based on an overly
generous estimation of the strategic intelligence of the people running the
US occupation in Iraq.

Nothing wrong with a bit of optimism and a bit of generosity of spirit, I
reckon. Except that in this case both were misplaced and I ended up
being wrong.

How can the people making the big decisions regarding the running of the
occupation fail to see that it is totally in their interests to climb down
the ladder of escalation that they’d hoisted themselves up onto in both Fallujah
and Najaf? It is only a very short-sighted, immature strategic “thinker”
who could maintain that there would be anything to be gained over the long
haul from winning the military “victory” in Fallujah that everyone knows
in advance is–because of the US side’s access to weapons of truly massive
destructive power–quite within their power there.

So the purely military outcome of any such outcome would not be in doubt.
But if the US forces were to “win” in such a battle– a battle that
quite predictably would involve causing the deaths of tens of thousands of
Iraqis, most of them noncombatants– then what?

What would cocky little Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the head of the
1st Marines Expeditionary Force that is currently besieging Fallujah, do
the day after his forces achieved such a victory?

Continue reading “No US de-escalation yet”

I’m just praying that the ceasefire reportedly agreed on for Fallujah sticks, and that it’s the harbinger of a serious US commitment to de-escalation and diplomacy in Iraq.
I think the weekend’s fighting in Qusaybeh must have come as a shock to the US commanders there. Somehow some of those “sneaky” (or should we just say well organized?) insurgents from Fallujah and Ramadi had managed to spirit themselves 150 miles to the west and launch a fairly large-scale ambush there. Despite Gen. Myers’ huffing and puffing about a possible Syrian role in it, it seems there wasn’t one– though Qusaybah is right there near the Syrian border.
In addition, the insurgents’ ability to render many vital roads unsafe– allied of course to the fact that the drivers of many of the U.S. military supply convoys aren’t members of the military and therefore can’t be forced to drive when they are scared to–means that many U.S. forward units have come close to facing shortages.
Logistics, logistics, logistics. The Brits–as I’ve mentioned before here, more than once– should have remembered that this is what can really stymie western military adventures in Iraq.

Continue reading “Climbing down in Iraq?”

One of the many things I love about Yankeedoodle’s blog is the state-by-state listing he gives of U.S. fatalities. On today’s post he has this link to a story about the shooting death Friday of Virginia Beach contract worker Steven Scott Fisher, 43.
According to that story, Fisher “was transporting oil between Fallujah and Bahgdad for Halliburton subsidiary KBR- Kellogg, Brown and Root.”
Why are private contractors hauling oil for the U.S. military? I reflected on the general phenom of the military’s massive use of contractors in this April 1 post. In that one, I pointed out that these contractors are not under any military discipline– basically, they often have carte blanche to act as they please. Who’s going to haul them into court?
The whole, disastrous Fallujah crisis was sparked off, remember, after some contractors drove through the city and got caught in an ambush.
There are other clear dangers from the use of contractors, too…

Continue reading “Virginia contractor; contractors revisited”

Read Riverbend’s latest. Read Faiza. Faiza, you need to scroll down thru the Arabic if you want to find the English translations.
‘Specially, read these two blogs if you’ve never been a war zone and really don’t have much of a clue what it’s like to live in one. (That includes you, George W. Bush.)

On the ‘Comments’ board to my Monday night post about which US government deserves JWN’s Golden Dunce’s Cap for culpable misdoing, astute commenter Shirin made a fairly good case that both Bremer and Ricardo Sanchez were strong contenders…
In thinking about her response, I concluded that nearly all of the mistakes, tragedies, and just sheer bloody chaos that Iraq has seen over the past year and until this day can be traced back to two major, and majorly mistaken, decisions Bremer took as soon as his hand-crafted desert boots hits the ground in Baghdad. He:
(1) disbanded the army without a fare-thee-well, putting 400,000 breadwinners with military training out onto the streets, and
(2) set about dismantling the national economy in the name of ‘privatization’, economic ‘liberalization’, and a number of other neocon/neoliberal fads.
So yes, Shirin, he has to be right up there as a contender.
On the other hand, I really don’t believe those were his decisions. Whose were they? That person, I think, is the one who truly deserves the Golden Dunce’s Cap.

… Okay, well maybe it’s not quite that. But the old fox certainly sounded pretty darn’ pleased with himself and the general situation in the sermon he gave in Teheran last Friday.
Okay, I have a problem here. I have the text of his sermon, that came to me via an impeccable source, but without an actual WWW link. I have no reason to suppose the following is fallacious or faked in any way. It’s attributed to BBC Monitoring in Caversham, UK (which is sited just half a mile from the boarding school I went to when I was but a girl, but that’s a different story). But I can’t find this text in the public-domain web. If someone can get me a link, that wd be great…
So anyway, this below is part of the text of the sermon that former Iranian President and present Iranian eminence grise Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani reportedly gave in Teheran last Friday, according to the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Tehran, in Persian, as translated and trasncribed by BBC Monitoring.
The whole sermon is an intricately constructed argument, divided into a description of the 13 goals the US was pursuing in Iraq, followed by a description of 34 issues that they face there today.
It was the 18th of the 34 issues that really caught my eye:

Continue reading “Rafsanjani’s victory stomp”

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?

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

“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.”)

Continue reading “How they made ‘the perfect storm’”

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
…

Continue reading “Urgently needed: Big shift in U.S. policies in Iraq”