Just World News with Helena Cobban

A horrible connection here in Martinborough, New Zealand. I’ll leave this thread here for you all to discuss Iraq, Bush’s Tuesday speech, etc.
I have reams of things I’ve written about NZ on my laptop but I can’t transfer it onto this hotel computer which doesn’t appear to have a spare USB port for my thumbstick. Grrr.
I’ll do what I can connection-wise over the next few days. But I’ll be home in Virginia on July 3 so normal posting on JWN will definitely resume then… maybe before.

It is now becoming increasingly clear that the US position in Iraq is, quite literally, unwinnable. (This is the case despite the absence of any defintive statement from the US command authorities regarding what it would be that would actually constitute a US “victory” there.) We therefore all need to pay close attention to the implications and the possible modalities of the US defeat that will be unfolding there over the months and years ahead.
One of the first things to bear in mind is that, whereas the US has shown in the past that it is capable of being a (relatively) generous, gracious, and far-sighted winner, these are qualities that it has notably not shown when faced with defeat. In Cuba, in 1961, the invasion that President Kennedy launched at the Bay of Pigs was repulsed by the island’s Cuban defenders– and the US has consistently, through every single change of administration in Washington ever since, continued to try to punish Fidel Castro and the Cuban people for having done that. In Vietnam, in 1975, the nationalist forces were also able– after a long and difficult struggle– to force the last remaining US forces to quit Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in a very humiliating form of disorganized scramble. And for 20 years after that, the US continued to try to punish the Vietnamese people for having inflicted that defeat on them…
I am not saying here that the anti-US forces in Iraq will necessarily be able to inflict that same kind of “decisive” defeat on the US forces there– though I wouldn’t rule that out completely. What I am saying is that if the US is forced to withdraw forces from Iraq in some form of disorder, as now seems extremely likely, then we should expect that withdrawal to be accompanied (“covered”) by the US taking some extremely vindictive actions against the country. These would have two aims:

Continue reading “US/Iraq: dimensions of the pullback to come”

Great writing from embedded WaPo journo Ann Scott Tyson. (Formerly of the CSM.) She was with a combat unit in Ramadi.
Short excerpt:

When the platoon medic sees that insurgents have taken out another of her “boys,” she swears, grabs her medic’s bag and walks back to her Humvee, slamming the side of it with her fist. Then she pulls out the gray body bag she has learned to carry at all times, and waits for a vehicle to evacuate Miller’s body.
Hayes and Dermer ride back to camp in their M-113, the roses still tied to the back. They’ve barely cleaned the blood off the vehicle when frustration begins to erupt that afternoon over what seemed to some a flawed, futile mission.
Their faces dusty and streaked with sweat, the soldiers huddle to talk through the incident, raising more questions than answers. Why had the engineers been operating in daylight, when insurgents could easily “template” their position? Why had the infantry left them vulnerable? Why hadn’t they caught the sniper who killed Miller?
“What sucks the most,” says Miller’s platoon leader, Lt. Tom Lafave, of Escanaba, Mich., “is we sweep an area and five hours later an IED goes off in the same spot.”
Miller’s squad leader, Staff Sgt. Steve “Shaggy” Hagedorn, is more blunt. “We spent three days clearing a route and I guarantee it’s worse now than when we started,” he says. “So everyone’s asking, ‘What are we doing it for?’ Everyone’s asking, ‘Am I next?’ ”

Anyway, read the whole thing. It’s great reporting.
But why does the WaPo put it in the (generally more frivolous) “Style” section?
Give the woman a Pulitzer.
Hat-tip to Kebot who sent it to me. Being “down under” I’d missed it.

John Burns, who is the NYT’s “our man in the Green Zone” of Baghdad, has an important piece in Sunday’s paper that refers clearly to (un-named) US officers there complaining in his hearing that the troop levels at their command are far too low for them to be effective.
The piece also clearly indicates a growing realization among some top US officers that the war in Iraq is unwinnable.
Burns writes that earlier in the past week, the Pentagon had publicly offered a date for a reduction in the current troop levels “even earlier” than the October 1, 2006 date earlier requested by two Republican and two Democratic members of Congress in a letter to Prez Bush. But, Burns notes,

in recent weeks, American generals here have been telling Congressional visitors that the disappointing performance of many Iraqi combat units has made early departures impractical. They say it will be two years or more before Iraqis can be expected to begin replacing American units as the main guarantors of security.
Commanders concerned for their careers have not thought it prudent to go further, and to say publicly what many say privately: that with recent American troop levels – 139,000 now – they have been forced to play an infernal board game, constantly shuttling combat units from one war zone to another, leaving insurgent buildups unmet in some places while they deal with more urgent problems elsewhere.
… American commanders here have been cautioned by the reality that the Pentagon, in a time of all-volunteer forces and plunging recruiting levels, has few if any extra troops to deploy, and that there are limits to what American public opinion would bear. So the generals have kept quiet about troop levels.
Soldiers in the field, though, have not. Among fighting units in the war’s badlands – in Falluja and Ramadi, in Haditha and Qaim, in Mosul and Tal Afar – complaints about force levels are the talk of officers and enlisted personnel alike.

Burns writes:

Continue reading “‘Our Green Zone correspondent’ on troop levels, unwinnability”