Shaun Mullen’s powerful post, “Iraq Status Of Forces Agreement: No Time To Break Out The Party Hats,” brought back the flood of memories, the emotions, the pent-up anger and frustration Americans have experienced over the past six years as a result of, as Mullen puts it, “the evil that [Dick Cheney’s, Donald Rumsfeld’s and Richard Perle’s] little adventure in Iraq unleashed.” (Of course that list of adventure seekers is by no means complete, and we know all too well who is at the top of that list.)
Also on top of the list of emotions Americans have experienced, and continue to experience, over this “adventure” is the unfathomable sadness at the loss of so many American and Iraqi lives. None of these losses as cruel, heartwrenching and needless as those of innocent little children, the thousands of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés “Little Iraqi Madonnas.”
Helping me recall some of the many missteps, promises, slogans, tragedies, deceptions, and just plain lies that were part-and-parcel of the Iraq “adventure,” were the “running-script-like” headlines in Mullen’s post.
One “headline” in particular caught my attention: “Missing billions.”
It caught my attention because it encapsulates the rampant corruption that has been such an intrinsic part of the Iraq adventure—both on the U.S. administration’s side and on the Iraqi side.
And, the corruption continues.
Witness this morning’s headlines in the New York Times, “Premier of Iraq Is Quietly Firing Fraud Monitors.” Apparently, the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is getting rid of Iraqi oversight officials, who were appointed to fight corruption.
According to the Times:
The dismissals, which were confirmed by senior Iraqi and American government officials on Sunday and Monday, have come as estimates of official Iraqi corruption have soared. One Iraqi former chief investigator recently testified before Congress that $13 billion in reconstruction funds from the United States had been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste by Iraqi government officials.
And in today’s USA TODAYay a report that the Pentagon spent about $600 million on more than 1,200 Iraq construction contracts that were eventually canceled, nearly half of them for mismanagement or shoddy construction. Also, in the same newspaper, another report that a company that was suspended from U.S. government contracts for allegedly bribing Army officers was awarded a new contract from Iraq two days after the suspension was imposed. The Pentagon apparently paid the suspended company more than $1 million under the new contract.
And so the beat goes on.
Corruption was rampant under Saddam Hussein, albeit mostly benefitting a single family and a few select ones; corruption was and continues to be rampant under the U.S. occupation; and corruption will probably continue to be rampant after the last U.S. soldier leaves Iraq.
Perhaps the Iraqis (and the U.S.) can live with that. It is my hope, however, that the killings, the massacres, the sectarian violence will not return to the “Iraqi beat” when that last soldier leaves Iraq.
November 14th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
GEORGE WALKER BUSH: THEN AND NOW
I had long planned to post an abridged text of George Bush’s 2000 Republican National Convention acceptance speech closer to Inauguration Day and compare his words with his deeds, but the post-mortems already are flying fast and furious. This includes a lot of revisionist clap-trap from conservative bloggers whose heads remain firmly up their backsides, including drivel to the effect that because Bush “is a kind and decent man” the excesses and failures of the last eight years should be overlooked if not excused.
I happened to be in the hall when Bush accepted the nomination that steamy August night in Philadelphia and was horrified not just by the vacuity of his words but the knowledge that up on the podium was a resume without a man into which every neoconservative and other Republican with a burr in their saddle would pour their pet animosities, causes and policies.
It was going to be rocky four or eight years, but no one could have foreseen the scope and magnitude of the Bush administration’s epic failures, including its inability to confront every major crisis on its watch.
Following are excerpts from the speech in italics and what has transpired:
According to a report released by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday it appears that the military ignored reports of dangerous conditions in the showers at a military facility in Iraq.
In February of 2007 the contracting firm of Kellogg, Brown and Root found “several safety issues concerning the improper grounding of electrical devices. In July of 2007 Sgt. Justin Hummer filled out a work order that reported “Pipes have voltage”. He told investigators that he sometimes had to use a wooden stick to turn off the water.
But nothing was done to repair the problem and in January 2008 Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a 24 year old Green Beret was electrocuted in the same showers.
As you might imagine we have had the predictable response with the Army blaming the contractors for failing to fix the problem and the contractors blaming the Army for not properly informing them of the problems.
According to Senator Robert Casey the problem persists in many Army bases in Iraq with soldiers being repeatedly shocked. It is hardly surprising that facilities in Iraq might have these problems, in many cases they are using facilities built during the Saddam Hussein era and it is possible they didn’t build them up to code.
In addition some of the newer complexes were built on the fly and in the midst of chaos so there could be problems with that as well. I won’t go into the many reports of outright incompetence on the part of some of these builders.
So there are plenty of possible reasons for the problem.
Frankly at this point I don’t give a (expletive deleted) who is to blame for the incident. That is something for the courts to figure out. But what we need now is for the problem to be solved and solved NOW.
Our troops are over there fighting in a war of dubious wisdom but I think everyone on both sides of that debate would agree that our men and women should not have to wear protective clothing to take a shower.
We need to have real leadership here to resolve this problem. We don’t need investigative committees, we don’t need partisan attacks, we don’t need people trying to score election year points.
We need to protect our troops and we need to protect them NOW.
If the military can’t manage that then it is time to bring everyone home where they can take a voltage free shower.
As we’ve seen over the past week, the global reaction to Barack Obama’s world tour has been largely positive - if not at times skeptical. But particularly in the Arab world - disappointment is the dominant theme.
Writing for Le Quotidien-Oran of Algeria, K. Selim focuses in on Obama’s 45-minute visit to the Palestinians, and the conclusions many Arabs are drawing from it.
“Anxious to forge an international image, the mixed-race candidate - courageously we were told - decided to visit the President of the Authority. And it was even expected that after their discussion, a luncheon was to be offered by President Abbas. The Authority had in mind “putting small dishes into the larger ones” (A French expression meaning preparing a grand meal), no doubt anxious, for once, to dine on something other than illusions and receive the potential future president of the United States with dignity. Alas, Barack Obama canceled the culinary portion of the meeting and rushed back to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where, doubtless, the electoral kitchen is more nutritious.”
“Democrat or Republican, Black, White or mixed race, man or woman, U.S. officials are implementers of a Middle East policy that constitutes the basis of their international relations. That policy, which is based on the dispossession of the Palestinians, is that of the military-industrial complex - at the heart of which the Zionist lobby plays a major role. … The Palestinians know that freedom isn’t something to be granted by the United States - that grand patron of the last colonial state [Israel], and that the only realistic course of action is that of resistance.”
As someone who is concerned about government accountability, I admire exceedingly Alan Grayson, now running for our 8th District here in Florida (see here and here).
Because of his track record suing defense contractors, Grayson is completely uninterested and unintimidated by ridiculous arguments about secrecy and national security. He thinks that war crimes have been committed, that people need to be put in prison, and that we absolutely cannot let bygones be bygones with the 2000-2008 era. He’s also running a good campaign with one of the best commercials I’ve ever seen., and doing it without any help from the DC establishment.
It’s good news, isn’t it, he pointedly notes, that our troops’ sacrifices have got the Iraqis to a point when their government might actually be about ready to take off the training wheels and ride off without us holding the handlebars? (NYT)
And whether they are ready are not — see this BBC article clarifying the quote on which Obama relied — isn’t it about as clear as it could possibly be that we can’t go on babysitting them indefinitely, or even very much longer, without severe strain to major muscle groups?
But while McCain temporizes about when, and maybe even whether, we should leave Iraq, Obama is being called out for ‘flip-flopping’ because he has said that his 16 month withdrawal date was only ever aspirational. At least he is committed to leaving.
What is it like to have your proverbial arm twisted by Washington when it really wants something from your country? This by By Pawel Wronski of Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza gives one a pretty good sense.
“In the negotiations over hosting the U.S. anti-missile base, the Americans are using all the same tricks they used when they were selling their F-16 aircraft to Poland in the late 1990s. I’m surprised that the politicians are falling for them again.”
“1. It’s a great honor for Poland; 2. New prospects for Polish industry and the opportunity to modernize the country; 3. Negotiations are running out of time; 5. Inviting influential politicians to the United States; 6. The argument that Poland is unprepared, unprofessional and doesn’t know what it wants.”
“The Americans are among the most effective negotiators. There’s a saying that the U.S. administration could sell igloos to Eskimos. Several years ago, Poland purchased F-16 aircraft. …U.S. lobbying was exceedingly effective. But the deal proved very favorable to Poland; the F-16 is a great aircraft and the value of the dollar is less than half it was since we signed the agreement. But the issue of the anti-missile shield is far too important from the point of view of Polish politics to leave purely to luck.”
The Iraqi government is feeling its oats because of a semblance of stability on the military front, there is a chance that provincial elections in the fall might bring some calm to the fractious political front, and a security agreement that gives Washington the ranch and Baghdad sloppy seconds will be DOA unless it is rewritten to respect Iraqi national sovereignty and includes a U.S. troop withdrawal timetable.
Worse still, President Bush and John McCain find themselves in an exceedingly uncomfortable position because Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki and his security surrogates and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama seem to be on the same page regarding that timetable.
But then the Iraq war has never really been a war of liberation for Bush and the man who would represent a third Bush term. Any doubt about that was removed yesterday when the White House rejected out of hand any kind of timetable.
The war, of course, has been about advancing America’s agenda in the Middle East. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was just a pretext for foisting the neocon wet dream of democracy on a bunch of people who worship a false God and wear funny clothes.
The welfare of Iraq has been well down a priority list that includes a slew of military bases from which Iran can more conveniently be subverted, target practice for thugs from Blackwater and other U.S. security firms ostensibly guarding diplomats, awarding tens of billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected U.S. corporations to supply troops with six bucks a pop Coca-Colas and contaminated water, opening the door to rapacious U.S. oil giants to suck up Iraq’s vast untapped oil wealth, and of course scratching Israel’s back.
Bush will soon be back at his own ranch searching among the scrub brush for his squandered legacy, but this turn of developments is particularly inconvenient for McCain, who in response to a question posed at a Council on Foreign Relations confab in 2004 regarding what should happen if a sovereign Iraq government asked the U.S. to withdraw its troops, said:
“Well, if that scenario evolves then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because — if it was an elected government of Iraq, and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. . . . I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.”
McCain is pretty much at sea without cue cards, so this was a typically mumble-jumble response, but it was about as unambiguous as he gets.
June 26th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
I spoke to Ed Warner last night, a board member of the Sand County Foundation that has great heart and works in Zimbabwe. The Foundation has expanded from being caretaker of The Leopold Memorial Reserve — 1500 acres of cooperatively mananged private land– to advising the managers of hundreds of thousands of acres of land in several countries. The Foundation works with private landholders to improve the quality of their lands through science, ethics, and incentives.
Warner is a geologist, who’s funded two endowed chairs in Geosciences, a spatial analysis laboratory, graduate teaching assistantships, and a research assistantship. He created an innovative community-based conservation institute, the Center for Collaborative Conservation, college-wide research grants, and endowments to the Department of Geosciences and the College of Natural Resources at CSU.
Hugely successful man by most standards, but last night he had that sound in his voice that men have when they’re filled with tears inside. And resolve. Still.
Warner’s been to the big Z many times, and as he filled me in about its huge beauty and what a incredible culture and strong economy it once had… and then as he described the shambles that it is in right now, how Mugabe has unleashed teenagers and young men to raid and violate and murder across the land, huge roving hoards who Warner says, are unemployed men who have nothing to live for and nothing to lose… and that Mugabe pays them with… oddly enough the same thing Than Shwe the dictator of Burma pays his soldiers with: food. Food for themselves and whomever they rage with.
I began to wonder again for the umpteenth time what the UN does for a living, anyway? I mean starting with the smallest things that somehow don’t seem right at the UN… Does anyone besides me think it’s dangerous to wear blue helmets so adversaries can get a good head shot?
And much more serious entreaties, and much more serious failures to act, as well. I do know some of the programs and people at the UN, and some, with regard to children and education and health are well warranted. But I also know some at the UN who deadly want to live like Kings and Princesses, and their ‘holding office’ is more like holding court… and their throne is more important to them and their sashaying around and making pronouncements and doing nothing, than anything else.
Making pronouncements doesn’t cut it. Not with the thug of Zimbabwe, Mugabe, and not in Burma either. In fact, the UN emissary to Burma pathetically pleading with Than Shwe to please please let aid and aid workers in after hundreds of thousands of people were drowned and maimed by the earthquake and tsunami on the Irrawaddy delta recently. What did the UN accomplish there? Make nice to the demon, literally days and weeks after help was so so needed.
What is the UN doing with regard to the mayhem, blood on black skin, in Zimbabwe that Mugabe has given the go-ahead to… and with grinning greed? Nothing. Tonight I heard one of the UN Princes on TV saying, Oh, I believe eventually Mugabe will lose power
Really? Meanwhile, red blood flowing like rivers over black skin.
I swear, if I were Reverend Sharpton, instead of scolding Don Imus over what this time amounts to a vague reference to ‘it figures’ about a black sportsman’s arrest, I would rush over to Zimbabwe and take on the real deal, a real wrecker of the ancestral black people. Man, think of it: Jesse and Al up against Robert Mugabe. Read the rest of this entry »
