time for some candor

What I didn’t see in Iraq

Rep. Jim McGovern, The Nation

“Trust me when I tell you things are so much better in Iraq,” said one US military official to me on my recent visit to that war-ravaged country. I didn’t know whether to scream or pull the remaining two strands of hair out of my head. I was in Iraq as part of a delegation of eight members of Congress, led by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Everything we have been told about Iraq by the Bush Administration has either been an outright lie or overwhelmingly false. There were no weapons of mass destruction; we have not been greeted as liberators; and the cost in terms of blood and treasure has outpaced even their worst-case scenarios. Trust is something I cannot give to this Administration.

If things in Iraq are so much better, why are we not decreasing the number of US forces there? Why is the insurgency showing no signs of waning? Why are we being told that in a few months the Administration will again ask Congress for billions of dollars more to fight the war? Why, according to the World Food Program, is hunger among the Iraqi people getting worse? It’s time for some candor, but candor is hard to come by in Iraq.

Rep. Jim McGovern, The Nation ( more. . .)

April 18th, 2005 || PermaLink

dubious Pentagon claims

Most violent incidents in Iraq go unreported. We saw one suicide bomb explosion, clouds of smoke and dust erupting into the air, and heard another in the space of an hour. Neither was mentioned in official reports. Last year US soldiers told the IoS that they do not tell their superiors about attacks on them unless they suffer casualties. This avoids bureaucratic hassle and “our Generals want to hear about the number of attacks going down not up”. This makes the official Pentagon claim that the number of insurgent attacks is down from 140 a day in January to 40 a day this month dubious.

Patrick Cockburn, The Independent ( more. . .)

April 17th, 2005 || PermaLink

playing politics with a critical report

Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism.”

But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s office ordered “Patterns of Global Terrorism” eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush’s administration’s frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

“Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public,” charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of last year’s mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.

“This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it - or any of the key data - from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report.”

Jonathan S. Landay, Knight Ridder Newspapers ( more. . .)

April 16th, 2005 || PermaLink

Domestic terrorism from the radical right

Ten years after a homemade bomb ripped through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, experts say the threat of another large-scale act of domestic terrorism remains real.

“There are extremist plots and crimes that go on every year,” said Mark Pitcavage, who heads the Anti-Defamation League’s efforts to track extremist groups and movements. “Luckily, most of the major acts are prevented, but there are still people trying. There still are these angry homegrown groups and movements out there. There’s no doubt about it.”

Sean Murphy, Associated Press ( more. . .)

April 15th, 2005 || PermaLink

The Doubling Of Child Malnutrition In Iraq Is Baffling

A report to the UN human rights commission in Geneva has concluded that Iraqi children were actually better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now. This, of course, comes as a bitter blow for all those of us who, like George Bush and Tony Blair, honestly believe that children thrive best when we drop bombs on them from a great height, destroy their cities and blow up hospitals, schools and power stations.

It now appears that, far from improving the quality of life for Iraqi youngsters, the US-led military assault on Iraq has inexplicably doubled the number of children under five suffering from malnutrition. Under Saddam, about 4% of children under five were going hungry, whereas by the end of last year almost 8% were suffering.

Terry Jones, Znet ( more. . .)

April 14th, 2005 || PermaLink

a tactic of unilateral separation,

The most hopeful development in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict across the last decade was the arrival by both sides at a broad consensus, articulated by various ‘’peace plans,” on the shape of a final settlement. Central to every envisioned end point was the so-called ‘’two-state solution,” with anticipated compromises on the nettlesome questions of Jerusalem and the status of Palestinian refugees. No complete agreement was ever achieved, but at least the goal had become clear, and both populations embraced it. Peace could be imagined.

But now that vision itself is at risk, repudiated even by some who created it. The Sharon government is in no hurry to take up final-status questions again. Instead, a tactic of unilateral separation, coupled with the new ‘’facts on the ground” — the security barrier, expanded settlements around Jerusalem — preempt negotiations. Palestinians want no part of the truncated state that such facts define.

James Carroll, Boston Globe ( more. . .)

April 13th, 2005 || PermaLink

destroying the all-volunteer Army

“If you want to ask how to destroy the all-volunteer Army, the Bush administration has provided a textbook case,” Lawrence J. Korb told an audience at a Center for American Progress debate on the draft this month. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, said the strain may soon become overwhelming — and Bush is not doing enough about it. “It may be that at some point we have cracked the all-volunteer force so much, we will have to do something else.” Korb said that he thinks that three combat tours is the breaking point. Some combat units, such as the Army’s famed Third Infantry Division, are in Iraq for the second time now.

Ironically, while some experts think the draft exacerbated the desolation of the Army after Vietnam, others argue that it is one option to maintain national security given the current strain on the all-volunteer force. “America has a choice. It can be the world’s superpower or it can maintain the current all-volunteer military, but it probably can’t do both,” Phillip Carter and Paul Glastris wrote in the Washington Monthly last month.

Mark Benjamin, Salon ( more. . .)

April 12th, 2005 || PermaLink