It will doubtless come as no surprise to readers of the Moderate Voice that people around the world have been outraged by the Bush Administration’s conduct of the Iraq War. But the passing of the fifth anniversary of the war has triggered a particularly strong upwelling of anger, which one can get a sense of by reading this article by Reinaldo Spitaletta of Colombia’s El Espectador.
Spitaletta writes, “Is it worth killing over 450,000 people, mostly civilians? Yes. And destroying a culture thousands of years old? Yes. And as if the matter was of little consequence, torturing prisoners in a jail? Yes, indeed. That’s how the president of the United States, George W. Bush, sees it, now five years after invasion of Iraq.”
As for the Iraqis, Spitaletta writes, “Perhaps it never occurred to the Gringos that their bombers, their infantry, their paraphernalia - yes- of mass destruction, would be unable to overcome an entire people … the Iraqi people, who today are suffering through the most unspeakable criminal invasion, know that never in their history has any foreign occupier triumphed. Neither the Romans nor the British. Today, without jobs, without social security, without tranquility but with the living hope of expelling the invader, they continue their resistance. And for those who have been displaced and mutilated - for the humiliated Iraqis of today - it will all be worth it to reverse the situation and defeat the troops of the superpower.”
By Reinaldo Spitaletta
Translated By Douglas Myles Rasmussen
March 25, 2008
Colombia - El Espectador - Original Article (Spanish)
Is it worth killing over 450,000 people, mostly civilians? Yes. And destroying a culture thousands of years old? Yes. And as if the matter was of little consequence, torturing prisoners in a jail? Yes, Read the rest of this entry »
That’s how the Rand Corporation is describing the large-scale intervention we’ve gotten ourselves into in their most recent study. This is from the Rand Corp., which, I am pretty sure, is supposed to skew conservative.
Recognizing that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will not be the last of their kind, a new RAND Corporation study issued today finds that U.S. capabilities to meet the threat of Islamist insurgencies are seriously deficient and out of balance.
The report finds that large-scale U.S. military intervention and occupation in the Muslim world is at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible. The United States should shift its priorities and funding to improve civil governance, build local security forces, and exploit information — capabilities that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Violent extremism in the Muslim world is the gravest national security threat the United States faces,” said David C. Gompert, the report’s lead author and a senior fellow at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “Because this threat is likely to persist and could grow, it is important to understand the United States is currently not capable of adequately addressing the challenge.”
The findings are from a major review of strategies to combat insurgencies RAND initiated at the request of the Department of Defense.
What is so absolutely, positively, bottomlessly aggravating about these conclusions is that people could have and would have and were telling us this certainly before we entered Iraq and perhaps before we entered Afghanistan (I recall the former, I do not recall the latter). And if you don’t believe me, well, here’s the Rand again:
The authors cite data from some 90 conflicts since World War II that show the surest way to defeat insurgencies is to foster local governments that are seen by their citizens as representative, competent and honest. “Foreign forces cannot substitute for effective local governments, and they can even weaken their legitimacy,” said co-author John Gordon.
Historically, large-scale military intervention against insurgencies — e.g., France in Indochina and Algeria and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan — more often fails than succeeds.
The study finds that because it can take time for a local insurgency to acquire strength and turn jihadist, the chances of defusing an insurgency are better than 90 percent when caught early. But those chances drop to less than 50 percent if the insurgency has the chance to become a full-blown uprising. Thus, the United States needs the ability to interpret “indicators and warnings” so it can act in the early stages of the insurgency.
Sickening. What and who was President Bush and his advisors listening to when making their decisions to begin military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq? Feh. Don’t bother answering.
If this is the first time you are hearing this news, you aren’t alone - no one seems to have reported it. You know where I heard it, of all places?
Paul Wolfowitz has screwed up virtually everything he has done in association with the Bush administration and America is the worse for it.
The smarmy neocon was a key architect of the Iraq war and as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy secretary of defense proved to be adroit at assigning blame to practically everyone except himself as the war came a cropper.
Wolfowitz then went on to become president of the World Bank, which had been widely criticized by the White House for corruption and cronyism. He promptly installed his girlfriend in a key position with a hefty compensation package and resigned only after a bitter and protracted showndown with the bank’s board.
Now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who knows a thing or three about screwing up, will name Wolfowitz to head a high-level advisory panel on arms control and disarmament.
It so happens that Wolfowitz has substantial experience in arms-control matters, but that’s not the point. The reality that the Bush administration repeatedly and shamelessly rewards bad behavior is.
Are Americans as well-informed as it would appear, given the country’s mind-boggling number of media outlets? According to this feature article from Germany’s Die Zeit, it takes a man like journalist Seymour Hersh to ‘to open their eyes about their own country.’
The people of New York are surrounded by media. Nonetheless, it took an hour of questions and answers with star journalist Seymour Hersh to open their eyes about their own country.
By Eva Schweitzer
Translated By Ulf Behncke
October 7, 2008
Germany - Die Zeit - Original Article (German)
New York is globally connected like no other city in the world. Here, there are 350 television channels including the BBC and Al-Jazeera, the Internet via cable, DSL or WiFi, newspapers from overseas, AP, Reuters, The New York Times and the news studios of CNN, Fox and NBC. Nevertheless, even New York seems at times strangely disconnected from the world. “Plato imagined prisoners in a cave, backs to its opening, who saw reality as shadows reflected off a wall,” writes journalist Mort Rosenblum . America, he says, is still very much like this to this very day.
Every now and then, though, a saber-toothed tiger breaks into the cave and delivers real news, as occurred on Saturday at a festival for The New Yorker magazine at the Directors Guild Theatre, where Sy Hersh spoke. Hersh reports for the magazine on what the Pentagon and CIA are up to, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Iran. Over 500 people came (and paid), to hear about it first hand. Amazing in a city where one trips over the media at ever step.
Utterly unpretentiously, Hersh sits on the stage casually dressed and jokes with his editor-in-chief David Remnick, all the while saying the most unbelievable things. Iran? Yes, an attack against Iran is imminent (Hersh reported this just recently in The New Yorker ), but against small targets like training camps and the Revolutionary Guard. “The U.S. has specialists at the borders who, with the assistance of Kurdish and Israeli experts, install “eavesdropping boxes” capable of listening into buildings in Teheran. “We know what’s going on in Iran” Hersh says. The nuclear bomb will take another five years. The bomb is a threat – first and foremost to Israel because it means the end of Zionism. “Once Iran has the bomb, the middle class will give up and say, ‘We’d rather go to Argentina or London, where we can live in peace.’”
The war on terror? “If it comes out, what really happens in Guantanamo Bay, we will all be very ashamed.” This is equally true of Abu Ghraib. “Iraqi girls who are imprisoned there, have begged their fathers to kill them because they were dishonored. I saw photos of GI’s grabbing at naked Iraqi women and girls while showering.” And there are twelve countries in which the CIA or their local henchmen can torture. “Afterwards, they burn the bodies, so that no trace can be found.”
I did a pretty fair job yesterday of trashing Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack for their myopic New York Times op-ed on military progress in Iraq, but another journo puts the firestorm over the piece in a must-read perspective after actually interviewing one of the authors.
Money graf from a post at Interesting Times by George Packer:
“[The interview] was a step back from the almost definitive tone of “A War We Just Might Win†(a bad headline, and not the authors’). That tone was misplaced, and it is already being used by an Administration that has always thought tactically and will grasp any shred of support, regardless of the facts, to win the short-term argument. But look at this little tempest outside of politics, in the context of the war: Pollack and O’Hanlon were genuinely surprised by the changes they saw and heard about in Iraq, and they considered those changes significant enough to tell war critics here—in the overconfident shorthand of an Op-Ed—not to pull the plug just yet. Whatever you think of their past mistakes and present methods, it’s a case that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.â€
A New York Timesop-ed piece this week by Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack stating that the U.S. is finally making progress militarily in Iraq has gotten enormous coverage – and deservedly so.
I offer two overarching and interrelated observations pertaining to it:
First, the response to the piece by the Brookings Institution braniacs puts the lie to the notion flogged by conservatives and right-wingers that many liberal and left-wing commentators want the U.S. to be humiliated in Iraq.
While there is always the lunatic fringe, this assessment couldn’t be more wrong.
As someone who initially supported the war, I believe that I speak for many people in saying that I feel great enmity for President Bush and his harem of dangerous hacks – Cheney, Rove, Gonzo and Condi come easily to mind, and Rummy and Wolfie will not be soon forgotten. My heart breaks anew with every American death in Iraq, which easily is the most disastrous foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.
These harsh views do not translate into wishing ill for the troops. Quite the contrary. Which is why I briefly felt a surge (pardon the term) of optimism as I read the O’Hanlon-Pollack piece.
But that feeling quickly passed because, secondly and ultimately most importantly, the piece exhibited a rather shocking myopia.
While there does seem to be some movement on the battlefield, that situation is not playing out in an hermetically sealed environment, and there was but one passing reference in the entire piece to the other major conflict in Iraq – a deeply dysfunctional central government obdurately unwilling to work for sectarian reconciliation.
As even General Petraeus, the architect of the modest battlefield successes, has said, there cannot be a military victory without a political victory. The former remains highly unlikely; there is zero chance of the latter.
Counterinsurgency = Political Action + Civic Action + Counter-guerrilla Operations — BERNARD FALL
The great war correspondent Bernard Fall understood Vietnam better than the French, whom he predicted would fail in their war against Ho Chi Minh’s national liberation movement, as well as the Americans, whom he also predicted would fail although they went about doing so a great deal more creatively.
Fall, who reported from Vietnam from 1953 until he stepped on a landmine in 1967, took no pleasure in being right. He supported both the French and American causes, but he was harshly critical of the U.S.’s failure to learn from France’s mistakes, especially its inability to understand the value of counterinsurgency warfare instead of relying on the 1960s version of Shock and Awe.
As Fall’s terse equation above this article indicates, counterinsurgency warfare is in essence a multi-pronged effort against insurgent forces — guerrillas, if you will — the goal of which is to beat them at their own game. Robert the Bruce, Mao Zedong, Josef Broz Tito and Ho, among other legendary figures in the history of warfare, conquered Scotland, China, Yugoslavia and Vietnam, respectively, because they were able to run circles around their foes although they were substantially larger and better equipped.
So it has been with the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
Although the Bush administration would like you to believe otherwise, those guerrillas have taken far more American lives than highly publicized Al Qaeda bombings, and attacks are at their highest level in four years despite claims that the surge is succeeding.
Bernard Fall would have been saddened but not surprised that the politicians and generals planning the war made a conscious decision to avoid confronting the Ghost of Vietnam Past.
The rank dereliction of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Franks — that is, their fundamental inability to understand the battlefield and what had to happen after the U.S. secured an inevitable victory by conventional means — becomes more astonishing with every passing year. That dereliction is directly responsible for the catastrophic mess that is Iraq today.
The ghost haunted the first three years-plus of the war until two savvy generals — General David Petraeus and Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno — arrived on the scene in the umpteenth change of command ordered by a White House that was finally beginning to understand that bluster was no substitute for results.
So now that the U.S. command has appeared to have learned from a fundamental mistake, can this new strategy — the key component of the surge — succeed?
The answer is complex but ultimately disheartening because Iraq has morphed into another Vietnam insofar as the conduct of the war itself is concerned, and that is not going to be wished away.
Editor’s note: Bill Moyers delivered this essay on his PBS program Bill Moyers’ Journal.
Begging His Pardon
by Bill Moyers
We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington’s ruling clique ofneoconservative elites-the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.
It is well known that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby-once Vice President Cheney’s most trusted adviser-has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie.
Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice. Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places-including his boss Dick Cheney-outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. To throw investigators off the trail, he kicked sand in the eyes of truth. “Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered,” wrote the chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. Judge Reggie B. Walton-a no-nonsense, lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key type, appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush-called the evidence “overwhelming” and threw the book at Libby.
You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his cheerleaders. They flooded the judge’s chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to “free Scooter.”
June 1st, 2007 By MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor
Earlier this week, President Bush tapped Robert Zoellick, Goldman Sachs executive and former deputy secretary of state, to head The World Bank. And because Bush says so, it’s a go. It is the president of the United States who nominates the World Bank president — and the position is always given to an American — but any nomination is merely a formality. The banks’s executive board will appoint Zoellick just as it appoints (i.e., rubber stamps) every other nominee.
There is no good reason for this to be the case. Why should the president of the United States be the one effectively to fill the position with his (or her) own nominee? Why should the position always go to an American? Why, more specifically, should the position always go to a partisan of the president?
Well, of course, because The World Bank is an instrument of American global hegemony. It always has been. That was the original intent, for all intents and purposes, and nothing has changed. If other countries approved of this, it was only because they approved of American global hegemony at least to some degree. This should change. China, Brazil, South Africa, India, and Russia, along with others, are right to call for a new and open process to select World Bank presidents. But the U.S. will refuse. Why would it agree to have its hegemonic position weakened? (It’s already doing a stellar job weakening itself.)
For, though, it’s Zoellick, and people seem to be happy with his nomination. He’s no Wolfowitz, after all — though, of course, pretty much anyone would have been an improvement over the outgoing president. And is there good reason for them to be happy? Perhaps. He seems to know where Africa is, which is good, and he has already presented himself as an internationalist. An American internationalist, but still. Even the European seem to like him.
