Iraq War, Round Two

Missing from the discussion over Iraq in the United States is the growing likelihood that the Bush administration will escalate, not de-escalate, the war. If they do, their goal will be to employ another round of “shock and awe” - namely, massive U.S. military air and ground” - in a desperate effort to tip the balance in Iraq in America’s favor in advance of the 2006 elections. The failed war in Iraq is overwhelmingly the key factor driving down poll numbers for the president, vice president and the Republican Party in general.

It’s by no means clear that Democrats will capture either or both houses of Congress in November, but if they do it will open the floodgates for a never-ending series of partisan investigations by congressional committees, not only into Iraq but the myriad other scandals plaguing the administration. That’s a terrifying prospect for the Bush-Cheney team, and one they cannot allow at any cost.

The so-called “doves” in the Bush administration - who sometimes like to call themselves “realists” - have apparently settled on the idea of a slow drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq, combined with the stepped-up effort to cobble together a shaky government of national unity in Iraq that could take the lead in fighting the Sunni-led resistance. The idea behind that strategy is to convince American voters in advance of November, 2006, that Iraq is stabilizing, that the war is being won and that American troops are coming home. The fact that American troops will probably be in Iraq for a decade at least, if not far longer, is an ugly reality that the administration’s doves hope will dawn on Americans after the election.

The same goes for the fact that Iraq is already engulfed in a civil war that no “national unity” regime can put an end to-particularly a regime made up of the same gaggle of exile leaders and warlords who, in succession, led the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003, the interim and transitional governments of 2004-2005 and the so-called “permanent” government of 2006.

Problem is, the Bush administration’s hawks have a different idea, and there is no reason to think that they are not in control. As in 2003, the hawks are led by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the staffs of the office of the secretary of defense and the office of the vice president. And, as in 2003, President George W. Bush - stubborn to the point of being pig-headed and obsessed with the goal of “winning” the Global War on Terror - is likely to go along, no matter how strong the opposition from the realists. In 2003, the war in Iraq was opposed by virtually the entire professional class at the State Department, the CIA and the U.S. military, yet Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld launched their illegal, unilateral war anyway.

Against a backdrop of editorials from the Weekly Standard, the National Review, The Wall Street Journal and Commentary, along with predictable emanations from such thinktanks as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation all calling for the Bush to resist calls to reverse course in Iraq, there are at least two recent calls for a sweeping new U.S. offensive in Iraq to complete the objectives of the invasion of 2003.

Robert Dreyfuss | TomPaine.com (read more. . .)

April 19th, 2006 || PermaLink

Descent into Anger and Despair

Seymour Hersh, citing a ”former official,” reported that US warplanes near Iran ”have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions — rapid ascending maneuvers known as ‘over the shoulder’ bombing — since last summer.” Such an exercise puts on display an American readiness to use tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian nuclear facilities. Whether the maneuvers have actually been carried out or not, even authoritative reports of them represent an extraordinarily irresponsible brandishing of the heretofore unthinkable weapon: To keep you from getting nukes, we will nuke you.

As if that were not irrational enough, the Bush administration chose this month, in the thick of its nuclear standoff with Tehran, to reveal plans for a new nuclear weapons manufacturing complex of its own — a major escalation of US nuclear capacity. This represents a movement away from merely maintaining our thousands of warheads to replacing them. The promise of new bombs to come, including the so-called bunker-buster under development, may be the final nail in the coffin of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which binds Washington to work for the elimination of nukes, not their enhancement.

Set the cauldron of Iraq to boiling even hotter by daring Iran to join in against us. Justify Iran’s impulse to obtain nuclear capacity by using our own nuclear capacity as a thermo-prod. How self-defeating can our actions get?

Surely, something besides intelligent strategic theory is at work here. Yes. These are the policies of deeply frustrated, angry, and psychologically wounded people. Those of us who oppose them will yield to our own versions of anger and despair at our peril, and the world’s. Fierce but reasoned opposition is more to the point than ever.

James Carroll | Boston Globe (read more. . .)

April 18th, 2006 || PermaLink

Daniel Ellsberg: Still blowing the whistle

It was obvious to me that we were being lied to about the reasons for going to war. Even though I did think they had WMDs. Trying to say that Saddam Hussein, after ten years of sanctions, is the number-one threat to the U.S. and world security was an absurd statement. It was just ridiculous. In a world where Russians have loose nuclear weapons, and with India and Pakistan facing each other with nuclear weapons, to say that Saddam was the number-one threat, I could not believe Powell believed that. I felt he had to be consciously lying.

The press had been compliant right along. They are getting a little critical now. There is a synergy between public dismay and disillusion and the press. When there is more unrest in the public, the press gets a little nerve to criticize the president. But they have been very dismayingly compliant — and essentially passing on government handouts and cheering things on.

It was the same thing with the Democrats in Congress. They were afraid of being called names. The fear is a well-justified expectation that they would be called unpatriotic by the White House. Dick Armey was calling Tom Daschle unpatriotic and giving aid and comfort to the enemy by criticizing the president or questioning strategy.

People like Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter and others are great name callers. Coulter writes a book with the title “Treason.” And I am in that book not only as a traitor like everybody else, but she also describes me as a felon. That is interesting. Isn’t Ann Coulter supposed to be a lawyer? You don’t have to be a lawyer in America to be aware that you are not a felon if you haven’t been convicted of anything.

I don’t want to label Republicans in general, but these people are extreme slanderers. They are very vicious. These people are unusual. In many respects we have a White House now that is extremely dangerous. And among other things, I would say very anti-democratic. They don’t believe in democracy, in my opinion. And that’s why I am very, very concerned that they will exploit the next 9/11. I expect there to be another 9/11. They will use that as a Reichstag fire to close down democracy very seriously in this country. I don’t use that analogy lightly either. We really are in a pre-authoritarian situation here.

This is the time for people to show courage. People have more courage than they realize. It is the situation that challenges them. I think a lot about what happened in Germany in 1933 and I also wonder what people could have done in ‘32 to try to avert that in Germany. With each year it got much harder, and after that it was very hard to do anything about it. It took increasing courage. Now is the time for people to show that courage, and one thing specifically that I would like to see is a lot more whistle-blowing.

Daniel Ellsberg | Salon (read more. . .)

April 17th, 2006 || PermaLink

US firms suspected of bilking Iraq funds

American contractors swindled hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi funds, but so far there is no way for Iraq’s government to recoup the money, according to US investigators and civil attorneys tracking fraud claims against contractors.

Courts in the United States are beginning to force contractors to repay reconstruction funds stolen from the American government. But legal roadblocks have prevented Iraq from recovering funds that were seized from the Iraqi government by the US-led coalition and then paid to contractors who failed to do the work.

A US law that allows citizens to recover money from dishonest contractors protects only the US government, not foreign governments.

In addition, an Iraqi law created by the Coalition Provisional Authority days before it ceded sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004 gives American contractors immunity from prosecution in Iraq.

”In effect, it makes Iraq into a ‘free-fraud zone,’ ” said Alan Grayson, a Virginia attorney who is suing the private security firm Custer Battles in a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by former employees. A federal jury last month found the Rhode Island-based company liable for $3 million in fraudulent billings in Iraq.

Even the United Nations panel set up to monitor the use of Iraq’s seized assets has no power to prosecute wrongdoers.

”The Iraqi people are out of luck, the way it stands right now,” said Patrick Burns, spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, a watchdog group that helps US citizens file cases such as the Custer Battles action.

Farah Stockman | Boston Globe (read more. . .)

April 16th, 2006 || PermaLink

Car Bombs With Wings

Twenty-first century hindsight makes it clear that the defeat of the U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1983-84, followed by the CIA’s dirty war in Afghanistan, had wider and more potent geopolitical repercussions than the loss of Saigon in 1975. The Vietnam War was, of course, an epic struggle whose imprint upon domestic American politics remains profound, but it belonged to the era of the Cold War’s bipolar superpower rivalry. Hezbollah’s war in Beirut and south Lebanon, on the other hand, prefigured (and even inspired) the “asymmetric” conflicts that characterize the millennium. Moreover, unlike peoples’ war on the scale sustained by the NLF and the North Vietnamese for more than a generation, car-bombing and suicide terrorism are easily franchised and gruesomely applicable in a variety of scenarios. Although rural guerrillas survive in rugged redoubts like Kashmir, the Khyber Pass, and the Andes, the center of gravity of global insurgency has moved from the countryside back to the cities and their slum peripheries. In this post-Cold-War urban context, the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks has become the gold standard of terrorism; the 9/11 attacks, it can be argued, were only an inevitable scaling-up of the suicide truck bomb to airliners.

Washington, however, was loath to recognize the new military leverage that powerful vehicle bombs offered its enemies or even to acknowledge their surprising lethality. After the 1983 Beirut bombings, the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico began an intensive investigation into the physics of truck bombs. Researchers were shocked by what they discovered. In addition to the deadly air blast, truck bombs also produced unexpectedly huge ground waves.

“The lateral accelerations propagated through the ground from a truck bomb far exceed those produced during the peak magnitude of an earthquake.” Indeed, the scientists of Sandia came to the conclusion that even an offsite detonation near a nuclear power plant might “cause enough damage to lead to a deadly release of radiation or even a meltdown.” Yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1986 refused to authorize the emplacement of vehicle barriers to protect nuclear-power installations and made no move to alter an obsolete security plan designed to thwart a few terrorists infiltrating on foot.

Indeed, Washington seemed unwilling to learn any of the obvious lessons of either its Beirut defeat or its secret successes in Afghanistan. The Reagan and Bush administrations appeared to regard the Hezbollah bombings as flukes, not as a powerful new threat that would replicate rapidly in the “blowback” of imperial misadventure and anti-Soviet escapades. Although it was inevitable that other insurgent groups would soon try to emulate Hezbollah, American planners — although partially responsible — largely failed to foresee the extraordinary “globalization” of car bombing in the 1990s or the rise of sophisticated new strategies of urban destabilization that went with it. Yet by the mid-1990s, more cities were under siege from bomb attacks than at any time since the end of World War Two, and urban guerrillas were using car and truck bombs to score direct hits on some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions. Each success, moreover, emboldened groups to plan yet more attacks and recruited more groups to launch their own “poor man’s air force.”

Mike Davis | TomDispatch.com (read more. . .)

April 15th, 2006 || PermaLink

Bush’s bluster

No doubt the disturbing sound of war drums emanating again from the Pentagon and the White House is meant to discourage Iran from the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Combined with wise diplomatic and economic strategy, the tactical deployment of aggressive noises might help prevent that distant but disturbing prospect from becoming a scary reality someday.

The bulk of evidence indicates that Iran is far from obtaining enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb, despite much alarmism from right-wing advocates of violent “regime change.” But just as the threat of military action persuaded Saddam Hussein to admit the United Nations weapons inspectors whose work might have prevented war, the possibility of force could induce the mullahs to meet the West in productive negotiations.

For warning noises to be taken seriously, however, the noisemakers must possess credibility — and over the past three years, the Bush administration has squandered that precious commodity, along with many lives and much treasure. Having gone to war under the false pretense of preventing a rogue state from obtaining nuclear weapons, President Bush has badly undermined his government’s capability to cope with the real thing.

So still another of the nightmare scenarios foreseen by opponents of the Iraq war may now be coming true. The White House hawks bluster about American power, but Bush’s war has weakened us politically, diplomatically, militarily and economically in a dangerous world.

Joe Conason | Salon (read more. . .)

April 14th, 2006 || PermaLink

The Poor Man’s Air Force: A History of the Car Bomb

In the new millennium, 85 years after that first massacre on Wall Street, car bombs have become almost as generically global as iPods and HIV-AIDS, cratering the streets of cities from Bogota to Bali. Suicide truck bombs, once the distinctive signature of Hezbollah, have been franchised to Sri Lanka, Chechnya/Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait, and Indonesia. On any graph of urban terrorism, the curve representing car bombs is rising steeply, almost exponentially. U.S.-occupied Iraq, of course, is a relentless inferno with more than 9,000 casualties — mainly civilian — attributed to vehicle bombs in the two-year period between July 2003 and June 2005. Since then, the frequency of car-bomb attacks has dramatically increased: 140 per month in the fall of 2005, 13 in Baghdad on New Year’s Day 2006 alone. If roadside bombs or IEDs are the most effective device against American armored vehicles, car bombs are the weapon of choice for slaughtering Shiite civilians in front of mosques and markets and instigating an apocalyptic sectarian war.

Under siege from weapons indistinguishable from ordinary traffic, the apparatuses of administration and finance are retreating inside “rings of steel” and “green zones,” but the larger challenge of the car bomb seems intractable. Stolen nukes, Sarin gas, and anthrax may be the “sum of our fears,” but the car bomb is the quotidian workhorse of urban terrorism. Before considering its genealogy, however, it may be helpful to summarize those characteristics that make Buda’s wagon such a formidable and undoubtedly permanent source of urban insecurity.

First, vehicle bombs are stealth weapons of surprising power and destructive efficiency. Trucks, vans, or even SUVs can easily transport the equivalent of several conventional 1,000-pound bombs to the doorstep of a prime target. Moreover, their destructive power is still evolving, thanks to the constant tinkering of ingenious bomb-makers. We have yet to face the full horror of semi-trailer-sized explosions with a lethal blast range of 200 yards or of dirty bombs sheathed in enough nuclear waste to render mid-Manhattan radioactive for generations.

Second, they are extraordinarily cheap: 40 or 50 people can be massacred with a stolen car and maybe $400 of fertilizer and bootlegged electronics. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, bragged that his most expensive outlay was in long-distance phone calls. The explosive itself (one half ton of urea) cost $3,615 plus the $59 per day rental for a ten-foot-long Ryder van. In contrast, the cruise missiles that have become the classic American riposte to overseas terrorist attacks cost $1.1 million each.

Third, car bombings are operationally simple to organize. Although some still refuse to believe that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols didn’t have secret assistance from a government or dark entity, two men in the proverbial phone booth — a security-guard and a farmer — successfully planned and executed the horrendous Oklahoma City bombing with instructional books and information acquired from the gun-show circuit.

Fourth, like even the ‘smartest’ of aerial bombs, car bombs are inherently indiscriminate: “Collateral damage” is virtually inevitable. If the logic of an attack is to slaughter innocents and sow panic in the widest circle, to operate a “strategy of tension,” or just demoralize a society, car bombs are ideal. But they are equally effective at destroying the moral credibility of a cause and alienating its mass base of support, as both the IRA and the ETA in Spain have independently discovered. The car bomb is an inherently fascist weapon.

Fifth, car bombs are highly anonymous and leave minimal forensic evidence. Buda quietly went home to Italy, leaving William Burns, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Bureau of Investigation (later, to be renamed the FBI) to make fools of themselves as they chased one false lead after another for a decade. Most of Buda’s descendants have also escaped identification and arrest. Anonymity, in addition, greatly recommends car bombs to those who like to disguise their handiwork, including the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, the Syrian GSD, the Iranian Pasdaran, and the Pakistani ISI — all of whom have caused unspeakable carnage with such devices.