Decline and Fall

I knew America was militarily involved in the horn of Africa (we've got troops stationed in Djibouti) but I didn't know how badly we had screwed things up there. Martin Fletcher reports:

I am referring to the Bush Administration's intervention in Somalia in the name of the War on Terror. It has helped to destroy that wretched country's best chance of peace in a generation, left more than a million Somalis dead, homeless or starving, and achieved the precise opposite of its original goal. Far from stamping out an Islamic militancy that scarcely existed, the intervention has turned Somalia into a breeding ground for Islamic extremists and given al-Qaeda a valuable foothold in the Horn of Africa.

Remember as you read the article that Afghanistan embraced the Taliban when they first took control for the same reasons Somalis embraced the Islamic Courts: after decades of civil war, the strongmen imposed order. I'm not as ready as Fletcher to laud the tyrannical rule of the Islamic Courts, whose thugs once opened fire on a crowd of World Cup fans.

But I do understand why the Somalis were quick to embrace trading in their right to drink and listen to music for the ability to walk to the store with a reasonable expectation of survival. That's where I see Iraqis heading now; I've been told as much by a lot of them. With all the talk of the statist "Road to Serfdom," it turns out that the quickest route to Serfdom is civil war, collapse of the state, several years of chaos, and the emergence of a strongman who imposes order. This is what we've given Somalia and Iraq: the desire to live under an iron hand.

This quote from the piece felt all too familiar:

“The Americans see an extremist under every Muslim stone,” one European official complained bitterly....

Doesn't that just give you the warm fuzzies?

Link via Obsidian Wings.

Labels: Bush, GWOT, Islam, terrorism

The first day of the Republican National Convention has been more or less called off and both the current President and Vice President of the United States will be skipping their party's convention so that Bush and the rest of the GOP can focus on New Orleans relief. I'm surprised but admittedly heartened that Bush would do such a thing, although we all know that his presence at the convention would be poison to McCain's campaign, so it's not a purely statesmanlike move. Given the choice between Bush hiding his head in the sand, behaving like a petulant child and insisting that his surrogates are doing a "heck of a job," and him acting like an actual President, I'll take the latter.

But this is frightening: a contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers filled New Orleans floodwalls with newspaper, in direct violation of the terms of their contract no less, according to an eye witness in this WWLTV report, complete with video:

“It's like putting a Band-Aid on the hole of a gas tank of an airplane,” the resident said.

Instead of an airplane, it's a floodwall, and instead of a Band-Aid, the witness says two years ago, he saw the contractor filling the expansion joint or opening between the floodwalls with newspaper.

“The whole length of the wall was stuffed with newspaper.”

And when he confronted the contractor, the contractor blamed Washington for the substandard work.

“He basically told me when Congress sent down the money, it would be repaired the proper way.”

But during a recent trip to the area, two years later, it was apparent that didn't happen. Much of the newspaper had deteriorated or been eaten by bugs, but some still remained. In fact WWL cameras even captured the date May 21, 2006, on a page of the Parade magazine from the Times-Picayune.

I hope the people on the gulf coast are getting out now, or are already gone. This one looks big, and I doubt anyone in its path feels confident in the U.S. government's ability (or inclination) to make sure they are safe. I sure hope they don't still think the walls will save them.

Via Sadly, No!

Labels: Bush, McCain, politics

Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings:

Some day, other countries' versions of neocons will say "It's just like
2007, and [insert leader here] is just like Bush. If we don't start a
pointless war RIGHT NOW, he'll take yet another country! We must act NOW
to prevent another world war!"

Labels: Bush, humor, Iran, Iraq

Kevin Drum's onto something here: the casualty figures in Iraq mean very little unless you take seasonality into account, which means, basically, that the level of violence in Iraq has been consistently higher in Spring and Autumn than it has been in Summer and Winter. Remember this when the Administration trots out a comparison between violence levels in April 2007 and August 2007 to show that the surge is working. It isn't. To quote Jim Henley, " They're bullshitting us."

But there's more to it than that. It turns out that the numbers don't include casualty figures for civilian deaths if they were the result of Sunni-on-Sunni or Shia-on-Shia violence:

Unfortunately, there's simply no reliable data series for civilian casualties over the course of the war, and the data for this year in particular gives every indication of being massaged to within an inch of its life (intra-Shiite violence doesn't count, car bomb fatalities don't count, al-Qaeda attacks against Sunni tribes don't count, the figures change mysteriously from one report to the next, the supposedly lower numbers for August are classified, etc. etc.)

The Administration and Pentagon are so invested in the "sectarian violence" meme that their statisticians rule out the possibility that intra-sect killings are meaningful. Which of course they are, because this isn't merely a sectarian conflict. The battle lines have been drawn in so many directions that there's no way to accurately characterize it.

Tribal feuds, for example, are often completely non-sectarian. The massacres of Sunni policemen by Sunni Islamic militants and Ba'ath Party loyalists are clearly non-sectarian. Ditto for the ongoing battles between Badr and Jaysh al-Mahdi.

My experience in 2004-2005 interrogating almost no Shiites testifies to this. Of the hundreds of Iraqis I met, almost none of them were killing or otherwise terrorizing Shias. The vast majority of them weren't radical Muslims, bin Laden acolytes or Saddam hardliners; they were motivated by nationalism. They opposed the U.S. occupation of what they saw as their sovereign land (silly them!) so they lashed out in the most meaningful way they could: at the "collaborators" in their midst aiding and abetting the occupying, colonial power. It's basic insurgency doctrine, folks. In my experience, "religious fanaticism" is the veneer that some in Iraq, and even more in the West, use to cover what is essentially the struggle to get out from under the thumb of a strongman.

The Administration won't cop to that, though, because they need to be able to paint the current troubles as "those crazy Muslims and their backward ways." Any hint that these people are motivated by the same desire for self-government that every other people who have sought to break their yokes of bondage has been motivated by must be carefully avoided to maintain the illusion that we're "liberating" them. The media and the Right scoffed when some reality-based thinkers declared that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," but deep down I think we all knew that was true. Ask the Irish, the Algerians, the French Partisans or the Sioux about that distinction.

This in no way excuses the use of suicide bombs and the targeting of innocents: these tactics are deplorable no matter who employs them. But they are effective, and that's something we still don't understand, four years after "Mission Accomplished."

Labels: Bush, Iraq, military, politics

Labels: Bush, mercenaries

Great piece of photoshop art from Stiftung Leo Strauss. More of their artwork here.

The worst Attorney General in American History has agreed to step down. I wonder how long it will be before he's officially persona non grata at the annual Straussian picnic?

I'm with Glenn Greenwald: it's time for the Democrats to grow a pair and block the hell out of whichever toadies Bush nominates until someone who isn't a member of the club is put forth:

It is difficult to overstate how vital this is. The unexpected resignation of Gonzales provides a truly critical opportunity to restore real oversight to our government, to provide advocates of the rule of law with a quite potent weapon to compel adherence to the law and, more importantly, to expose and bring accountability for prior lawbreaking. All of the investigations and scandals, currently stalled hopelessly, can be dramatically and rapidly advanced with an independent Attorney General at the helm of the DOJ.

That is not going to happen if the Democrats allow the confirmation of one of the ostensibly less corrupt and "establishment-respected" members of the Bush circle -- Michael Chertoff or Fred Fielding or Paul Clement or some Bush appointee along those lines. The new Attorney General must be someone who is not part of that rotted circle at all -- even if they are supposedly part of the less rotted branches -- since it is that circle which ought to be the subject of multiple DOJ investigations.

And don't tell me that congress can't afford to blow a bunch of political capital mucking up the political process while they, for "blindly partisan reasons," obstruct whoever the king deigns to nominate to be the next emanation of his will: despite the media spin, Congress's approval ratings aren't low because the American people really hate the ultra-liberal partisan politics and San Francisco values of Nancy Pelosi, they're low because they wish Congress would actually hold the Administration accountable instead of just talking about it.

Now is the perfect time for the Dems to show that they've actually got some convictions. The Fox/Limbaugh/GOP smear machine will go after them no matter what they do, but this time they've got a good, solid majority of America hoping they will step up to the plate.

Labels: Bush, politics

Here's Jacob Sullum on the Bush Administration's politicization of information classification:

Whenever Bush administration officials have claimed that releasing information would harm national security, I always assumed they meant that the information would be useful to our enemies—that it would help terrorists plan attacks or avoid detection....

Evidently, that is not necessarily the argument. A recent interview with Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, suggests that the administration also feels duty-bound to withhold information when it might be useful to critics who oppose President Bush's anti-terrorism policies, since those policies are necessary to protect national security. But the very same information can—indeed, should—be released at a more opportune time, when it will help the president pursue his policies.

You see, The Decider by definition only acts to protect America. Dissention from His will only gives aid and comfort to America's enemies. Democracy and the rule of law are luxuries we can no longer afford now that the terrorists are trying to take away our liberty. Put your trust in Him. Balko hits the nail on the head:

Politicizing what information gets classified is pretty ugly. But doing so because you fervently believe that any information that might make people think less of the president is ipso facto a threat to national security is downright pathological.

Maybe now is the time to remember the Oath of Office that the President took while, apparently, crossing his fingers behind his back:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Notice what he's supposed to "preserve, protect and defend"? The Constitution. Not his office. Not his policies. Not the borders. Not even America's security. His charge is to protect the constitution. Given the range of opinion on what that actually means, there's actually a fair amount of leeway there. But there's no way in hell that keeping information about his Administration's activities from the American people when it might make him look bad and then releasing it when it might make him look good, all the while claiming that the relevant laws don't apply to him anyway, passes the test. How this isn't grounds for impeachment I have no idea.

Labels: Bush, liberty

Last week I had a conversation with someone who sincerely believed that she was not born on this planet. Wanting to know how anyone could come to such a conclusion about their life, I asked her how she knew this, what evidence she had for her belief. But it turned out she had no evidence, only some sort of intangible belief. She simply smiled at me and said, "I just know."

I mention this because she is apparently not alone. Karl Rove, the power behind the Bush throne, said something yesterday so fantastically delusional that I can only imagine he would give the same response if challenged. He was asked whose idea it was to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq and responded,

I think it was Osama bin Laden's.

Osama bin Laden's. He said that. He meant it. Even though his boss and puppet recently admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Even though there have been no operational links between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda. Even though the entire world knows this already and has known it for years.

Well, not the entire world. His comment was greeted "with a round of applause."

At what point do we get to vote no confidence in these people? Or, as Thoreau asked last week, what does it take to get fired?

Via The Questionable Authority, The Cosmic Tap, and Think Progress.

Labels: Bush, conservatism, Iraq, reason

This post at Welcome to Pottersville resonated with me because I've been in a similar predicament before, and I know the feeling. But Iraq is long, long past its diagnosis stage. These words haunt me, even as I prepare to go back there:

Every day we keep our troops there, another two or three soldiers die. Ten more died over the Easter weekend. We don’t need surges and another hundred billion depleting our treasury or fancy strategies long on goal and short on policy. The backdrop of four plus bloody years tells us at 100 decibels that we don’t need any hi tech solutions to tell us what over 26,000 dead, maimed and injured bodies can at a fraction of the cost:

It’s time to pull the plug on Iraq because not only can we not solve the problems that we’ve created, not only can we not wait for the next administration to competently attack these problems, we are the problem. We are the cancer and we need to cut ourselves out regardless of the prognosis. Iraq believes that it’s strong enough to continue without American involvement.

I do, too.

I'm not ready to withdraw just yet, if only for the reason that this will tell the Islamists, the criminals and any other enemies of America that all they have to do is stir the pot and make things miserable for a while and we will abandon everything we said we stood for. I wish we hadn't gotten into this war, but we're there, and we can't afford to bow out disgracefully.

But I understand why that seems like a good option and I can't fault people for wanting the whole thing to be over and done with. It's certainly a better option than "more of the same."

Labels: Bush, GWOT, Iraq

It's odd that this hass to be a major story, but some people, particularly in the Bush Administration, still don't get it: Iraq was not working with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion. Period. But here's Dick Cheney, continuing the disinformation:

Remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, an Al-Qaeda affiliate. He ran a training camp in Afghanistan for Al-Qaeda, then migrated after we went into Afghanistan and shut 'em down there, he went to Baghdad. He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then of course led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June. He's the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shi'a and Sunni. This is Al-Qaeda operating in Iraq, and as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq. There's no way you can segment out and say, "Well, we'll fight the war on terror in Pakistan or Afghanistan but we can separate Iraq. That's not really, in any way, shape, or form related." It's just dead wrong. Bin Laden has said this is the central battle in the war on terror.

OK, let's just take this one bit at a time:

Remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, an Al-Qaeda affiliate. He ran a training camp in Afghanistan for Al-Qaeda, then migrated after we went into Afghanistan and shut 'em down there, he went to Baghdad.

Well, no, he went to Northern Iraq, the Kurdish-controlled area, the part of Iraq where U.S. Special Forces were training Kurds and Saddam had almost no say in what went on. Zarqawi was not welcome in Baghdad.

He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then of course led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June.

Yes, but his connection to al-Qaeda proper, i.e., bin Laden and Zawahiri, was shaky at best. Zarqawi was considered a rogue by UBL and the al-Qaeda leadership, among other reasons for Zarqawi's insistence on fighting the Shi'a first.

He's the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shi'a and Sunni.

But Cheney can't even get this part right: believe me when I tell you that the Shi'a and Sunni were slaughtering each other long before the Samarra mosque was destroyed in early 2006. But this is exactly in line with the Administration's insistence that prior to that event the Shi'a, with the exception of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, were all blissfully pro-American and pro-Iraqi unification. They weren't, and everyone on the ground in Iraq knew that. That civil war began as soon as America "liberated" Iraq and Iraq's sectarian and ethnic groups started coalescing and relocating outsiders in 2003. To make any other claim is to be indifferent to the plain truth.
This is Al-Qaeda operating in Iraq, and as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.

There's no way you can segment out and say, "Well, we'll fight the war on terror in Pakistan or Afghanistan but we can separate Iraq. That's not really, in any way, shape, or form related." It's just dead wrong. Bin Laden has said this is the central battle in the war on terror.

Al-Qaeda went from enemy of the state to one of the many paramilitary organizations in Iraq at precisely the mopment America invaded. Iraq was not only segmentable, it was one of the few nations we might have felt secure in ignoring back when we were actually concerned with fighting al-Qaeda. Saddam knew that the Islamist threat to his regime was palpable, so he kept them at arm's length, while not seeking to alienate them completely. Iraq is only the central battle because America has made it so; UBL is only taking advantage of the opportunity we've given him.

It is unbelievable to me that the Vice President can go on the radio and say what he knows, what everyone knows, to be a blatant lie. But he's talking to his crowd here; Rush Limbaugh's audience doesn't care about the truth, they care about showing support for their President, no matter how far down he wants to drag his country.

But this kind of thing can be instructive, too. It's one thing to record what the Administration says to the world at large, but it's another to take note of what they say to a supportive audience. This is an example of craven coalition politics at work: keep the troops happy by feeding them a bunch of processed lies and they'll continue to doubt what the rest of the world knows to be true: their man in Washington is an incompetent, lying charlatan.

Labels: Bush, GWOT, Iraq

More perspective, this time from John Allen Paulos at ABC News. We throw terms like "billion" and "trillion" around but we scarcely understand just how big a number "trillion" is. Via 3 Quarks Daily, here's a helpful guide:

it would take almost three decades to spend a trillion dollars at $1,000 per second, and if spending at this rate occurred only during business hours, more than 120 years would be required to dispense the sum.

Another time analogy is illuminating. A million seconds takes approximately 11.5 days to tick by, whereas a billion seconds requires about 32 years. Fully 32,000 years need to pass before a trillion seconds elapse.

Of course, some might argue that the $1 trillion expenditure in Iraq has made us both more secure domestically and more respected internationally than ever before. Perhaps as many as a dozen people agree with Cheney's recent hallucinatory comment that "we've had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes" in Iraq."

At times, it seems that the nightmare and expense of these enormous successes will continue for the next trillion seconds.

Labels: Bush, GWOT, Iraq

As someone who once supported the Iraq War, I am keenly interested in those who have come around as I have. I'm also interested in those who have proposed actual solutions to that fiasco, instead of standing around making "Dubya's an idiot" jokes. (As much as I enjoy those.)

Robert F. Kaplan's cover story in the latest New Republic is a great example of giving a cogent account of the things that have worked and the things that haven't in our mess o' potamian project. He's also a fan of General Petraeus, and cites the progress made in Ramadi as a case-study in how to win, or at least not lose, the battle for hearts and minds. One of the big problems over there is the Baghdad-centric mindset of the war's strategists:

The problem in Iraq has never been a lack of military capability. The problem has been confusion--at the top--over how to use it. There has always been a self-defeating tautology at work in the management of this war: The absence of guidance from Baghdad encourages commanders to innovate, but it also means their innovations aren't elevated to the level of guidance. Lacking a framework for fighting the insurgency, one brigade confines itself to a city's edge, another blasts its way through, and a third finally gets it right. Across the country, the pattern repeats itself over and over. Hence the awful question mark that may double as the epitaph of the U.S. enterprise in Iraq: What if there were one true path all along?

As much as I am apalled by the Bush Administration's unwillingness (or, rather, unwittingness) to learn from the lessons of Tall Afar, Mosul and Ramadi, that doesn't mean those lessons can't be learned. I wish we had never attempted to rebuild Iraq, but now that we're there, it would be nice if we managed to leave without making the world unambiguously worse.

Labels: Bush, GWOT

Tyler Drumheller, former CIA Chief of European Operations, has made it very clear in this Der Spiegel interview who was responsible for the CIA's extraordinary renditions program:

Drumheller: It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences.

SPIEGEL: So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so called "war on terrorism"?

Drumheller: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality.

Notice what he identifies as the approach of the administration: to "turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences." Unfortunately it's worse than that, because the administration specifically authorized those illegal programs and interrogation techniques. So they didn't just turn everybody loose, they set everybody up to fail and then let them twist in the wind when the failure inevitably happened.

Further down in the interview, Drumheller mentions his surprise to discover that intelligence he knew to be dubious, which he had specifically caveated as such, was used as the centerpiece of Colin Powell's famous U.N. speech laying out the argument for going to war with Iraq:

Drumheller: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.

SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue?

Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don`t know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this."

It seems to me that this goes a long way toward answering the question of what the Bush Administration knew and when it knew it.

A commenter at A Tiny Revolution sees the Stalin parallel in an interview with Slavoj Žižek:

From the top, you received an order, say, "Cossacks should be liquidated as a class." It was not stated clearly what this order meant - dispossess them, kill them etc. That ambiguity was part of Stalin's logic. Being afraid of being denounced as too soft, local cadres went to extremes, and then, the interesting irony is that the only positive concrete intervention of Stalin was his famous dizziness with success. Here, he would say, "No, comrades, we should respect legalities." Stalin's obscenity was that he put in this kind of abstract, superego injunction which threw you into a panic, and then he appeared as a moderate.

Just remember, they hate us for our freedom.

Labels: Bush, GWOT, interrogation, torture