still lying

If the war is going according to plan, someone needs to rethink the plan. Progress has been measurable on the political front. But even staunch supporters of the war, like the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a hearing this week that President Bush was losing public support because the military effort was not keeping pace. A top general said this week that the insurgency was growing. The frequency of attacks is steady, or rising a bit, while the repulsive tactic of suicide bombings has made them more deadly.

If things are going to be turned around, there has to be an honest discussion about what is happening. But Mr. Rumsfeld was not interested. Sneering at his Democratic questioners, he insisted everything was on track and claimed “dozens of trained battalions are capable of conducting anti-insurgent operations” with American support. That would be great news if it were true. Gen. George Casey, the commander in Iraq, was more honest, saying he hoped there would be “a good number of units” capable of doing that “before the end of this year.”

Americans cannot judge for themselves because the administration has decided to make the information secret. Senator John McCain spoke for us when he expressed his disbelief at this news. “I think the American people need to know,” he said. “They are the ones who are paying for this conflict.”

NYTimes Editorials (read more. . .)

June 25th, 2005 || PermaLink

How Americans Are Seduced By War

As far as religion is concerned, [Andrew J.] Bacevich goes even farther than Howard Dean. A chapter titled “Onward” opens with the bold statement that the United States remains, “as it has always been, a deeply, even incorrigibly, Christian nation.” Noting that about 100 million people in this country define themselves as evangelicals, he states bluntly that they tend to be conservative and vote Republican.

Beyond that, evangelical Christians also celebrate the military as a bastion of the values needed to stop the current slide toward perdition and thus have provided religious sanction to militarization. This links up nicely with neoconservative logic, offering support for the idea of striking the first blow. Books like The Church and the Sword and One Nation Under God replace the “just war” idea with a “crusader theory of warfare.” As Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth, argues, “The Bible supports building a powerful military force. And the Bible is telling the U.S. to be strong again.”

With evangelicals leading the way, both within the military chaplaincy and the GOP, “Conservative Christians have conferred a presumptive moral palatability on any occasion on which the United States resorts to force,” Bacevich concludes. “They have fostered among the legions of believing Americans a predisposition to see U.S. military power as inherently good, perhaps even a necessary adjunct to the accomplishment of Christ’s saving mission. In doing so, they have nurtured the preconditions that have enabled American infatuation with military power to flourish.”

Greg Guma | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

June 25th, 2005 || PermaLink

The War President

On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its “last throes,” says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.

We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.

The good news is that the public seems ready to hear that message - readier than the media are to deliver it. Major media organizations still act as if only a small, left-wing fringe believes that we were misled into war, but that “fringe” now comprises much if not most of the population.

In a Gallup poll taken in early April - that is, before the release of the Downing Street Memo - 50 percent of those polled agreed with the proposition that the administration “deliberately misled the American public” about Iraq’s W.M.D. In a new Rasmussen poll, 49 percent said that Mr. Bush was more responsible for the war than Saddam Hussein, versus 44 percent who blamed Saddam.

Once the media catch up with the public, we’ll be able to start talking seriously about how to get out of Iraq.

Paul Krugman | NYTimes (read more. . .)

June 24th, 2005 || PermaLink

The real news in the Downing Street Memos

But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that “the U.S. had already begun ’spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime.” This we now realize was Plan B.

Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.

But these initial “spikes of activity” didn’t have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn’t retaliate. They didn’t provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.

The way in which the intelligence was “fixed” to justify war is old news.

The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.

Michael Smith | Los Angeles Times (read more. . .)

June 23rd, 2005 || PermaLink

Recruiters Reach New Lows

Recruiters are paying a high price, suffering from depression, headaches and stomach problems brought on by the tremendous pressure of having to find two new recruits per month to meet their quotas, avoid their commanders’ wrath and fulfill their mission. One Texas recruiter told the New York Times’ Damien Cave that he’d rather be fighting on the front lines of the war in Iraq than recruiting weary teenagers and coping with anxious parents in the states.

“The evidence is overwhelming that the Army is slowly being worn down by its commitment in Iraq,” a Pentagon adviser and military analyst at the Lexington Institute told Newsday. The handwriting is on the wall: This is a failed war, and the American people are refusing in their wisdom to fight it.

Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation (read more. . .)

June 23rd, 2005 || PermaLink

A turning point at home

“They’re starting to talk numbers again,” Pat Lang remarked to me about the return of body counts. Lang is the Defense Intelligence Agency’s former chief for the Middle East, South Asia and counterterrorism. “They were determined not to do that. But they can’t provide a measurement to tell themselves they’re doing well. As you know, it means nothing.” Lang, who served as an intelligence officer in Vietnam, observes, “For almost all of [that] war, Vietnam was a better situation than Iraq. During the conduct of the war the security situation was far better than this.”

The Iraqi elections, Lang adds, are “irrelevant to the outcome of the war because the people who voted were the people who stood to gain.” Iran is the long-term winner, he says. “Iran intends to pull the [Shiite] state of Iraq into its orbit. You can be sure that Iranian Revolutionary Guards are honeycombed throughout Iraq’s intelligence to make sure things don’t get out of hand.” About the “euphoria” after the elections, an idea especially echoed by the press corps, Lang simply says, “Laughable, comical, pathetic.”

……….

Bush’s “light at the end of the tunnel” vision can only accelerate the cycle of disillusionment. His instinctive triumphalism inevitably has a counterproductive effect. His refusal to insist on responsibility for blunders — instead rewarding and honoring their perpetrators — enshrines impunity and hubris. His doctrine of presidential infallibility, the election being his only “moment of accountability,” can no longer be sustained by reference to Sept. 11. His defense of the abuse and torture of detainees at Guantánamo and other prisons in violation of laws formerly upheld by the United States blots out his attempts to explain the purity of his motives.

Sidney Blumenthal | Salon (read more. . .)

June 23rd, 2005 || PermaLink

the seeds of the failure

Up until early March of 2003, I was not forced to choose between Justice and the Rule of Law because it appeared entirely plausible that the UNSC would pass a resolution authorizing the war, or that a majority, at least, would vote for it. It was during that period that I said I could not bring myself to protest the building war. It was because I knew Saddam’s mass murders, and thought there was still a chance that he could be removed within the framework of international law.

When the UNSC declined to do either, very late in the game, it became apparent that I could have either justice or the rule of law. At that point I chose the rule of law. I did not see the invasion, the war, or the subsequent occupation as legitimate.

Just because I chose the rule of law over justice, however, does not mean that justice as a consideration had evaporated. The US troops who gave their lives to depose Saddam and free Iraqis from his yoke were helping achieve justice, which any Kurd or Shiite in Iraq will tell you. I stand by that, and I assure every grieving parent who has lost a child in the Iraq war that it was a meaningful sacrifice, because the Baath system was monstrous. But this achievement was deeply flawed (and may yet be undone) because it was done illegally.

Bush’s turn to illegal aggression contained the seeds of the failure of his Iraq policy. If he had remained within international law, he would have either had to give up the invasion or he would have gone in with the full support the international community, which would have given him the kind of troop strength and administrative expertise that might have made a success of it all.

The Neocons cannot for the most part imagine such a thing as a fraught internal debate over ethics on the part of the individual. This because they are mostly, quite frankly, sleazeballs.

Juan Cole | Informed Comment (read more. . .)

June 22nd, 2005 || PermaLink