CEASE FIRE IRAQ

It is hard not to get depressed and overwhelmed by our inability to stop the madness of this war.

It was particularly difficult to read the last post from “A Star of Mosul.” A young girl/woman she has always managed to reach for hope as she and her family have tried to survive in the midst of war. We have been blessed that she has chosen to share snippets of her life over the past few years.

This is some of what she recently told us on Friday, October 26:

Breathing slowly.. In and out … that’s what I have to do to keep myself from crying, and stay alive.

I’m more depressed than I’ve ever been in the last year I think.
It’s weird. I thought going to college would be all I need …

Most of the lecturers this year are very educated, mostly professors with PhDs. I feel stupid. Is it possible that I have forgot so much of what I’ve studied before, or is it that my brain needs to be reactivated? …

I’m sick of talking about the bad situation. I just hate the mornings, there’s always shooting and many explosions. I always have doubt that I’ll not make it to college, the roads are rarely open.

I’m so very very depressed. I almost cry everytime people ask me why I look so sad. I can’t even see the full half of the glass I used to cling to …

When my cousin drives me, I feel the need to keep talking, I just hate the silence. But because of my deep depression, and to keep myself from crying, I didn’t talk much this time. I concentrated on the road, something I rarely do (I still haven’t learned the way to my school, I can’t get my brain to concentrate on roads at all). I couldn’t believe all the wreckage on the way. Building after building, destroyed, burnt. Black signs announcing deaths. Smoke from a new explosion. We had to stop few times to clear the road for the police or the Americans …

That’s not what I call home. We’re really strangers in our country. Oh well, excuse me, I don’t think “our” should be used anymore. I’m not sure whose country it is, but it’s not mine for sure.

A classmate’s brother was injured with a shrapnel and died on the first day of Eid. She came to college wearing black. We gave her our condolences. She started crying, my friend started crying with her. We would’ve all started crying if it wasn’t for that new lecturer who shouted at us for not going into the lab at time. We all hate him now.

She’s the second classmate who lost her brother this year.

Studying engineering in college is hard enough in the best of times. Our hearts go out to The Star of Mosul who must study in the middle of the madness of war.

And from the trauma of Iraqis, we move to what we have done to our soldiers. Two articles in particular illuminate the price the soldiers must pay.Michael Weisskopf reports in Time magazine about a new study of Army reservists from the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Army reservists — who constitute nearly a third of the 1.5 million Americans who have served in Iraq — require psychological treatment at twice the rate of active duty soldiers …

The study by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) focused on 88,235 soldiers who were screened twice: first when they returned from Iraq; and second, after three to six months at home. Although reservists had similar battlefield experiences as active-duty troops, they suffered substantially higher rates of depression, interpersonal conflict, suicidal thoughts and post-traumatic stress disorder — a disparity that grew dramatically over time.

Both groups reported higher rates of psychological problems in the follow-up screening, leading authors from Walter Reed Army Medical Center to conclude that assessing soldiers right after they had come home significantly underestimated the mental health toll of the war. For example, only 3.5% of active-duty soldiers and 4.2% of reservists were initially worried about fighting with spouses, family members and close friends. Asked several months later about actual conflicts, rates rose to 14% and 21.1%, respectively. Depression rates doubled for active duty and tripled for reserve soldiers over time …

42.4% of reservists had a mental health problem identified by a clinician, a high rate that the authors attribute to the fear of losing military health benefits, separation from a supportive military community and the stresses of civilian work.

The British seems to admit their failures far more easily than American military leaders. General Sir Richard Dannatt, the UK Chief of the General Staff, offered a particularly frank evaluation of the morale of the British soldiers who have been serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The UK Telegraph reports:

General Sir Richard Dannatt … reveals in a top-level report that the present level of operations is “unsustainable”, the Army is “under-manned” and increasing numbers of troops are “disillusioned” with service life … [and] our forces can’t carry on like this …

“We must strive to give individuals and units ample recuperation time between operations, but I do not underestimate how difficult this will be to achieve whilst under-manned and with less robust establishments than I would like … ”

In the new report, he says that operations on the two fronts of Iraq and Afghanistan are putting soldiers and their families under “great pressure”, and that the long-term impact of operations is “damaging” and is “mortgaging the goodwill of our people”.

Taking into account what’s happening to both the British and American soldiers, it is not surprising to learn that more and more GIs are taking drastic action to escape this unending nightmare.

Lolita C. Baldor of the Associated Press reveals that the desertion rate in the US Army is up 80% since 2003:

Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980 …

While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam War, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year …

The Army defines a deserter as someone who has been absent without leave for longer than 30 days. The soldier is then discharged as a deserter.

According to the Army, about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier. Overall, 4,698 soldiers deserted this year, compared to 3,301 last year ..

While the Army does not have an up-to-date profile of deserters, more than 75 percent of them are soldiers in their first term of enlistment. And most are male.

The price that we pay for this war - Iraqis and Americans and British - continues to grow.

It’s Time To Come Home!

On a single day in October 2007, the sheer absurdity of the American adventure in Iraq was revealed in the largest of letters. But was anybody reading?

On Monday October 22, 2007, President George Bush asked for money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another $189.3 billion.

In announcing the latest war request at the White House, flanked by veterans and family members of fallen soldiers, Mr Bush prodded Congress to approve the request swiftly and without conditions.

He said: “Congress should not go home for the holidays while our troops are still waiting for the funds they need.”

This on top of the $600 billion we’ve spent so far.

If you turned the page of your newspaper or happened to be watching CNN, there was this: Most of $1.2 billion to train Iraqi police unaccounted for!

The U.S. State Department is unable to account for most of $1.2 billion in funding that it gave to DynCorp International to train Iraqi police, a government report said Tuesday …

“The bottom line is that State can’t account for where it went,” said Glenn D. Furbish, who was involved in putting together the 20-page report for the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR) …

Gregory Lagana, a spokesman for DynCorp, said the company’s work in Iraq is a “really complex program. … We buy weapons, body armor, vehicles, communications equipment — that all belongs to the State Department.”

Sometimes, he said, “it’s coded wrong or double-billed. We actually find a lot of that ourselves in the normal auditing process.”

So really, really complex that $1.2 billion fell through the cracks.

Remember all the flack that anti-war activists got for suggesting that oil played a major role in the decision to go to war in Iraq. Well it’s now OK for some to admit how much a part oil really played.

It seems a bunch of Stanford alumni/illuminati gathered to share their wisdom at a roundtable discussion entitled: “Courting Disaster: The Fight for Oil, Water and a Healthy Planet.” CNN’s Carlos Watson moderated the conversation amongst 4-star retired General John Abizaid, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Dean Pamela Matson, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, Stanford President John Hennessy, and Edison International CEO John Bryson. Well, they got the disaster part right. And god knows they might be living on their own private “healthy planet,” but as for the rest of us … Anyway after a lot of talk about the climate crisis, Gerry Shih and Susana Montes report:

While Hennessy, Matson, Friedman and Bryson discussed green technology, the subject of America’s operations in Iraq was also a hotly debated topic. Abizaid, who was formerly the Commander of the United States Central Command, quickly established a connection between the two topics.

“Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that,” Abizaid said of the Iraq campaign early on in the talk.

Of course, the general said. “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that!”

So, of course, as many predicted we’ve shed blood for oil!

But what about bringing democracy to Iraq?

If you kept up with your reading, you would have come across this. One by one, the leaders fess up once the messes catch up with them.

An NBC News report entitled “Ex-top envoy calls Iraqi government a failure” reveals:

A principal architect of Iraq’s interim constitution, who resigned in August as one of the country’s top diplomats, has laid out a devastating critique of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the U.S. occupation, telling NBC News that, functionally, “there is no Iraqi government.”

The diplomat, Feisal Amin Istrabadi, said in his first interview since stepping down as Iraq’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations that “this government has got to go …”

Istrabadi made it clear in an exclusive interview with NBC News that he was dismayed by al-Maliki’s government and the U.S. occupation, saying the government was stocked with incompetent administrators who had helped bring about “chaos and instability.”

The Iraqi government is an illusion, said Istrabadi, who is now a visiting professor at the Indiana University Law School. “You’ve got patently incompetent men appointed to important positions.”

Many government departments were apportioned to religious parties for political reasons, Istrabadi said, citing the Health Ministry, which he said was dominated by the Mahdi Army militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical anti-U.S. cleric …

Istrabadi blamed the Bush administration for pushing for the elections at least two years before Iraq was ready for them.

“What did we accomplish, exactly, [with] this push towards an appearance of institutions … merely an appearance?” he asked.

“Except that an American politician can stand up and say, ‘Look what we accomplished in Iraq.’ When, in fact, what we accomplished in Iraq over the last three years has been chaos and instability.”

Blood spilled for oil. And chaos. And instability.
3,839 Americans killed as I write this. And an official tally of 28,276 wounded. God knows how many Iraqis have died.

Hell. Fiery and demonic. Endless agony.

It’s fair to say that however bleak and painful and tragic life might have been under the dictator Saddam, it now approaches Hell.

Car from Blackwater shootout in Mansour Sq - Photo: Khalid Mohammed AP

James Glanz and Alissa Rubin of the New York Times of October 3, 2007 tell us more of the story of Blackwater and the Hell it unleashed on innocent Baghdad civilians:

It started out as a family errand: Ahmed Haithem Ahmed was driving his mother, Mohassin, to pick up his father from the hospital where he worked as a pathologist. As they approached Nisour Square at midday on Sept. 16, they did not know that a bomb had gone off nearby or that a convoy of four armored vehicles carrying Blackwater guards armed with automatic rifles was approaching.

Moments later a bullet tore through Mr. Ahmed’s head, he slumped, and the car rolled forward. Then Blackwater guards responded with a barrage of gunfire and explosive weapons, leaving 17 dead and 24 wounded — a higher toll than previously thought, according to Iraqi investigators.

Interviews with 12 Iraqi witnesses, several Iraqi investigators and an American official familiar with an American investigation of the shootings offer new insights into the gravity of the episode in Nisour Square. And they are difficult to square with the explanation offered initially by Blackwater officials that their guards were responding proportionately to an attack on the streets around the square.

“Difficult to square!” Then Glanz and Rubin add new layers of information:

The car continued to roll toward the convoy, which responded with an intense barrage of gunfire in several directions, striking Iraqis who were desperately trying to flee.

¶Minutes after that shooting stopped, a Blackwater convoy — possibly the same one — moved north from the square and opened fire on another line of traffic a few hundred yards away, in a previously unreported separate shooting, investigators and several witnesses say …

Not one witness heard or saw any gunfire coming from Iraqis around the square. And following a short initial burst of bullets, the Blackwater guards unleashed an overwhelming barrage of gunfire even as Iraqis were turning their cars around and attempting to flee.

As the gunfire continued, at least one of the Blackwater guards began screaming, “No! No! No!” and gesturing to his colleagues to stop shooting, according to an Iraqi lawyer who was stuck in traffic and was shot in the back as he tried to flee.

Blackwater Helicopter

“The shooting started like rain; everyone escaped his car,” said Fareed Walid Hassan, a truck driver who hauls goods in his Hyundai minibus.

He saw a woman dragging her child. “He was around 10 or 11,” he said. “He was dead. She was pulling him by one hand to get him away. She hoped that he was still alive.”

As the shooting started in earnest Jabber Salman, a lawyer on his way to the Ministry of Justice for a noon meeting, described people crying and shouting. “Some people were trying to escape by crawling,” he said. “Some people were killed in front of me.”

As Mr. Salman tried to drive away from the shooting, bullets came one after another through his rear windshield, hitting his neck, shoulders, left forearm and lower back. “I thought, ‘I’m sorry they are going to kill me and I can do nothing.’”

Iraqi investigators believe that during the shooting Blackwater helicopters flew overhead and fired into the cars from above. They say that at least one the car roofs had bullets through them. Blackwater has denied that its helicopters discharged any weapons.

The UK Independent reports on “Shattered Lives: Iraq through the eyes of its women,” a photography exhibit in London. The photos and commentary come from “ordinary” Iraqi women asked to document their daily lives.

Lu’lu’a

My husband distanced himself from me for a month after I was kidnapped and my mother still blames me for ruining the family. I open my eyes. I see the gun by my bed. My husband and I no longer talk, nor do we laugh together. We worry someone will attack us. I used to watch out of the window and feel alive. Now I make sure my face is hidden by the curtain. I look with longing at the street that was alive once upon a time.

Um Mohammad

Everything in my city has been looted, stolen and burnt. Basra used to be full of life. Now, everything is black. Women are compelled to wear black robes and veils. My life has becomeblack. Everything is forbidden now: laughter, coloured clothes, music, walking in the markets, going to the parks. And the British who came in the name of liberating just watch it all, smiling.

Sam Dagher of the Christian Science Monitor offers more insight into life in Basra. Remember Basra in the south of the country, and how the British touted its success there. Well this is how Dagher sees it:

The billboard in Umm al-Broom Square was meant to advertise a cellphone service. Instead, it has become a message to those who dare to resist the rising tide of fundamentalist Islam in Iraq’s second largest city.

The female model’s face is now covered with black paint. Graffiti scrawled below reads, “No! No to unveiled women.”

That message joins the chorus of ultraconservative voices and radical militias that are transforming this once liberal port city that boasted some of Iraq’s most lively nightclubs into a bastion for hard-line Shiite Islamists since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Billboard in Basra - Photo: Sam Dagher

Now, as the British prepare to exit Basra Province altogether after pulling out from this provincial capital last week, they leave behind what has been described by many here as an emerging “Shiite Taliban state,” a reference to Sunni extremists in Afghanistan.

And with the British gone, many say, they leave open the possibility that Iran could extend its influence within the mosques, religious schools, and militant party headquarters. Over the past four years, Basra has undergone its own Islamic revolution of sorts.

Hell. Blackwater Hell. A hellish life for women. And for this 3,808 Americans have died.

Thanks to Marc Lynch who blogs at Abu Aardvaark for alerting his readers about a short piece by embedded filmmakers Rick Rowley and David Enders that aired on Al Jazeera. The piece offers a look at the price some Shiites are paying for the alliance with Sunnis tribes in Anbar.

It offers a fair overview of both its successes and its enormous complexity, giving plenty of air time to American military officials but pushing considerably deeper into the story than you’ll often see …

Perhaps the most poignant part of the program, though, comes when Enders tracks down the former Shia residents of one of these Anbar towns in a slum outside Baghdad. Their descriptions of how they were forced from their homes, and their fears of going back, are both heart-wrenching and a powerful statement of the real underlying problems facing Iraq.

Well this is what President Bush offered us the other day. A measure of success and an extended war.

“Because of the measure of success we are seeing in Iraq, we can begin seeing troops come home,” Bush said from the Oval Office.

“At the same time, (Iraqis) understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency.”

Thanks to Glenn Pressler of the Washington Post, we can see how well some of the facts match the assertions of this success.

“For instance, Bush asserted that “Iraq’s national leaders are getting some things done,” such as “sharing oil revenues with the provinces” and allowing “former Baathists to rejoin Iraq’s military or receive government pensions.”

Yet his statement ignored the fact that U.S. officials have been frustrated that none of those actions have been enshrined into law — and that reports from Baghdad this week indicated that a potential deal on sharing oil revenue is collapsing …

Patrolling Diyala - Photo: Sgt. 1st Class Robert C. Brogan, U.S. Army

Bush also asserted that Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, was once an al-Qaeda stronghold but that “today, Baqubah is cleared.” But in a meeting with reporters on Aug. 27, the head of the State Department team in Diyala said the security situation was not stable, hampering access to food and energy, though he acknowledged that commerce was returning to Baqubah … The president also painted a relatively favorable picture of Baghdad, saying that a year ago much of it “was under siege” but that today “ordinary life is beginning to return.” He did not mention that much of the once-heterogeneous city has been divided into Shiite and Sunni enclaves.”

President Bush & Sunni tribal leader Abdul-Satter-Abu-Rishi

It didn’t take long for the facts on the ground to overtake the rhetoric. The great success of Anbar - recruiting our former enemies the Sunni tribal leaders - was quickly tempered by the assassination of Bush’s and Petraeus’ ally, Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha.

Meanwhile the car bombs continue to explode:

Mansour neighborhood Baghdad - Photo AFP/Ali Yussef

As for the measure of success, the Los Angeles Times reported on September 14, 2007 about a new British poll that notes that civilian casualties in Iraq may have reached one million. ONE MILLION CIVILIAN DEATHS IN IRAQ. Tina Sussman writes:

The military has said civilian deaths from sectarian violence have fallen more than 55% since President Bush sent an additional 28,500 troops to Iraq this year, but it does not provide specific numbers.

According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million.

ORB said it drew its conclusion from responses to the question about those living under one roof: “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003?”

Based on Iraq’s estimated number of households — 4,050,597 — it said the 1.2 million figure was reasonable.

Wounded civilians Kirkuk bomb - Photo Marwan Ibrahim/AFP

What is really happening in Iraq? Well Al Jazeera English takes some of the realities we mentioned in the last post and puts them all together.

Around and around and around we go. I watched General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker try their best to find progress where there is very little to be found.

Yes, there are Sunnis cooperating with us in Anbar to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq, but they more than we understand that Al Qaeda was nowhere to be found before we arrived. If they haven’t finally decided that the enemy of their enemy can also be insane and ruthless, that has little to do with General Petraeus’ persuasiveness and more to do with the fact that they have suffered just as terribly at the hands of Al Qaeda in Iraq as they have under the occupation.

You can argue the statistics all you want - IED attacks, civilian deaths in Baghdad and elsewhere - but most commentators ignored the recent BBC poll of Iraqis who firmly declared the surge isn’t working for them.

The headline and, of course, the findings are illuminating:

US surge has failed - Iraqi poll
About 70% of Iraqis believe security has deteriorated in the area covered by the US military “surge” of the past six months, an opinion poll suggests.

The survey for the BBC, ABC News and NHK of more than 2,000 people across Iraq also suggests that nearly 60% see attacks on US-led forces as justified.

This rises to 93% among Sunni Muslims compared with 50% for Shia.

If half of the Shia - with whom we have allied ourselves under the political stewardship of Al-Maliki - think it’s OK to attack us, what can General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker offer the mothers and fathers, and sisters and brothers, and children of our soldiers and Marines. Half of our allies want us out of there badly enough to condone killing us!

Why? This is the story that is hardly reported back here in the United States. Because life has become largely intolerable.

The McClatchy newspapers, formerly Knight-Ridder, have provided some of the best coverage from Iraq. Here’s how they analyze some of the statistics:

Baghdad has become more segregated. Sunni Muslims in the capital now live in ghettos encircled by concrete blast walls to stop militia attacks and car bombs. Shiite militias continue to push to control the city’s last mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods in the southwest, by murdering and intimidating Sunni residents and, sometimes, their Shiite neighbors. Services haven’t improved across most of the capital — the international aid group Oxfam reported in July that only 30 percent of Iraqis have access to clean water, compared with 50 percent in 2003 — and tens of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing their homes each month in search of safety.

Iraqi security forces remain heavily infiltrated by militias, and political leaders continue to intervene in their activities.

Civilian deaths haven’t decreased in any significant way across the country, according to statistics from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, and numbers gathered by McClatchy Newspapers show no consistent downward trend even in Baghdad, despite military assertions to the contrary. The military has provided no hard numbers to back the claim.

The only sign of progress is in the homogenous Sunni Arab province of Anbar, where tribes have turned on al Qaida in Iraq and established relative security in a once violent area. But that success has little to do with the 4,000 U.S. troops who were sent to Anbar as part of the surge of 30,000 additional troops to Iraq. Instead, it began more than four months earlier, with the formation last September of the Anbar Salvation Council to fight the escalating terror of Sunni extremists. Officials agree that the anti-Islamist coalition in Anbar has yet to ally itself with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and a recent National Intelligence Estimate warned that it might even threaten it.

Elsewhere in Iraq, violence continues to flourish. In the north since the surge began, suspected Sunni extremists have carried out some of the deadliest terror attacks of the war, killing hundreds in car and truck bombings.

In the southern city of Basra, death tolls have increased as rival Shiite militias square off for control.

Here are some other glimpses into daily life in Iraq. IRIN reports that hunger is increasing:

 

Ali Hasan, a food agent, uses his shop as a distribution point - photo IRIN

 

The monthly food rationing system on which millions of Iraqis depend is not working properly, according to officials. They warn that delays in food deliveries will have a serious impact on those fasting during the upcoming holy Islamic month of Ramadan (beginning around 13 September), when Muslims go without food and drink from dawn to sunset.

“There are many reasons why the monthly food ration system is not working very well,” Muhammad Ala’a Jabber, director of the west Baghdad office for delivering food rations, said. “There is a shortage of food products, the available products are of bad quality and sometimes are expired and there is a delay in delivery to the distribution offices.”

According to Jabber, Iraq’s food rationing system has continued to worsen since an escalation of sectarian violence began in February 2006. But in the past four months, he said, the problem has reached critical levels.

So there’s a problem with food. And there’s a major problem with healthcare.

Iraqi patient & doctor - Photo Irin

Here’s a report about what’s happening around the issue of medical care in Iraq these days:

More than half of Iraq’s doctors, nurses and pharmacists have fled the country over the past four years, leaving the task of providing health services increasingly difficult for those who stay …

According to the Iraqi Medical Association (IMA), the shortage of doctors and nurses in Iraq is now critical and having a devastating effect, especially on small towns and villages.

”I love my country and would like to stay to help my people but… I’m scared that any time a militant will come and shoot me dead.”
“Our latest research shows that up to 75 percent of doctors, pharmacists and nurses have left their jobs at universities, clinics and hospitals,” Walid Rafi, a senior member of the IMA, told IRIN. Of these, at least 55 percent have fled abroad, he added.

According to Rafi, low salaries and the shortage of equipment and medicines, are other push factors. “Medical staff earn US$50-300 per month. They might persevere for a while but if the opportunity arises, they don’t think twice and leave the country,” Rafi said …

It is often hard enough to get to a hospital but the real problems begin once a patient gets inside. It can take hours to see a doctor or nurse, Seif Abdel-Rahman, 29, a shopkeeper and resident of Baghdad’s Yarmouk District, said.

If you are lucky enough to see a doctor, the next problem is getting the medicines, which are either unavailable or exorbitantly expensive at private pharmacies.

So for all the efforts of General Petraeus and Ambassador, this is the bleak reality the Iraqi people endure every day.

This reality was largely ignored during both the reports and then the question and answer sessions.

There is no light at the end of this tunnel for Iraqis. And as the BBC Poll so clearly demonstrates, as long as life is as dreadful as it is, our soldiers will be regarded as a problem more than a solution. And if many Iraqis are afraid to see us go, it is only because we have so decimated the social fabric that they are rightly afraid that a miserable life will only get more miserable.

That is a diabolic kind of progress.

This just in: according to a report by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon, President Bush had received reliable intelligence that Iraq didn’t possess WMDs - the weapons of mass destruction we went to war over.

Blumental writes:

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

Secretary of State Powell detailing information about WMDs at UN

Did Sidney Blumental say the Iraqi Foreign Minister?
The Iraqi Foreign Minister!

On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri’s intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

 

No WMDS, just plain old regime change:

But the CIA officers working on the Sabri case kept collecting information. “We checked on everything he told us.” French intelligence eavesdropped on his telephone conversations and shared them with the CIA. These taps “validated” Sabri’s claims, according to one of the CIA officers. The officers brought this material to the attention of the newly formed Iraqi Operations Group within the CIA. But those in charge of the IOG were on a mission to prove that Saddam did have WMD and would not give credit to anything that came from the French. “They kept saying the French were trying to undermine the war,” said one of the CIA officers.

The officers continued to insist on the significance of Sabri’s information, but one of Tenet’s deputies told them, “You haven’t figured this out yet. This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about regime change.”

And from the AP, notice that we price we pay continues to mount:

The U.S. military command is announcing the deaths of 8 U.S. soldiers in Iraq — including some who were victims of a weapon that may come from Iran.

3 of the soldiers were killed and two were wounded when their Humvee was hit yesterday with a type of bomb that the U.S. alleges is being supplied to Shiite militias by Iran.

Two others U.S. soldiers were killed in eastern Baghdad today during combat operations. And two others were mortally wounded in a blast north of the capital.

Officials say another soldier was killed during fighting yesterday in western Baghdad.

More Iran. More regime change?

Iraqi soldier kisses girl, Fallujah

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Wayne Edmiston.

And as Congress prepares to receive the September progress report from General Petraeus, another expert weighs in on how well the war (oops, the regime change) is going. The BBC reports on a new study by retired General James Jones:

Iraqi forces ‘cannot stand alone.’ Iraq’s security forces are not capable of taking over from US troops within the next 18 months, a new report says.

The study by retired US marine General James Jones said Iraq’s national police force was ineffective and so rife with sectarianism it should be scrapped.

The Iraqi military showed signs of progress but would not be able to work independently for some time, he said.

 

U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq at 3,750

As of Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2007, at least 3,750 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Don’t know where to begin. 1800 Iraqis died as a result of violence in August. According to David Rising of the AP:

“U.S. deaths remained well below figures from last winter when the U.S began dispatching 30,000 additional troops to Iraq.

At least 1,809 civilians were killed in the month, compared to 1,760 in July, based on figures compiled by the AP from official Iraqi reports. That brings to 27,564 the number of Iraqi civilians killed since AP began collecting data on April 28, 2005.”

How do we make these numbers real to us? Government officials always find a way to minimize the casualties.

“The top U.S. commander, Gen. David Petraeus, was quoted Friday as saying the troop increase has sharply reduced sectarian killings in Baghdad. Petraeus is expected to make the same point when he reports to Congress in about two weeks …. It’s a bit macabre but some areas were literally on fire with hundreds of bodies every week and a total of 2,100 in the month of December ‘06, Iraq-wide. It is still much too high but we think in August in Baghdad it will be as little as one quarter of what it was,” the newspaper quoted Petraeus, who gave no specific figures.”

Meanwhile despite General Petraeus’ optimism, the number of Iraqis fleeing violence greatly increased.

In an earlier report, David Rising wrote:

“The number of Iraqis who have fled their homes under threat of sectarian violence has more than doubled since the start of the year, despite the increase in American troops that began in February, a humanitarian organization said.

The number of displaced Iraqis shot upward from 447,337 on Jan. 1 to 1.14 million on July 31, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization said Saturday …

In addition to those who have fled their homes but have stayed within the country, some 2 million Iraqis have fled, with many now living as refugees in neighboring Syria and Jordan.”

Congress added a few numbers of its own. Remember the issue of benchmarks? Some way of demonstrating the success of the effort in Iraq; some way of checking how well the Iraqi government was doing? Well, the Government Accounting Agency (GAO) did a study of those benchmarks. The White House had previously said 8 of the 13 benchmarks had been met. Well, here’s another view:

“Iraq has managed to reach only three out of 18 progress benchmarks set by the US, a draft of a key report seen by the Washington Post newspaper says …

“Key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high,” is the report’s bald assessment, the Post says.

Juan Cole sheds some light on these numbers:

“The average number of Iraqis killed in 2007 per day exceeds those killed in 2006. Independent counts by news organizations do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths over-all. Nation-wide attacks in June reached a daily all-time high of 177.5. True, violence in Baghdad has been wrestled back down to the levels of summer, 2006 (hint: it wasn’t paradise), but violence levels are up in the rest of the country. If you compare each month in 2006 with each month in 2007 with regard to US military deaths, the 2007 picture is dreadful.

I saw on CNN this smarmy Bush administration official come and and say that US troop deaths had fallen because of the surge, which is why we should support it. Just read the following chart bottom to top and compare 2006 month by month to 2007. US troop deaths haven’t fallen. They are way up. Besides, they would be zero if the US were not occupying Iraq militarily, so if we should support a policy that leads to fewer troop deaths, that is the better policy.

Here are the US troop death via Icasualties.org.

8-2007 77             8-2006 65
7-2007 79             7-2006 43
6-2007 101           6-2006 61
5-2007 126           5-2006 69
4-2007 104          4-2006 76
3-2007 81            3-2006 31
2-2007 81            2-2006 55
1-2007 83            1-2006 62

Kevin Drumm of the Washington Montlhy turned those statistics into a graph:

As Bob Dylan reminds us in “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “there’s no success like failure. And that failure’s no success at all.”

Well we can always surrender to the madness. There’s always Iran. Reports mount that the administration is thinking of war with Iran. From Juan Cole:

“Barnett Rubin relays a message from a well-connected friend in Washington on the Cheney Administration’s plans to roll out a military confrontation with Iran in September …

They [the source's institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this–they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

Some more numbers. Three days. That is what the UK Sunday Times says is the plan:

“The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.”

Numbers, Iran and yet another chapter for the Neverendingwar. Why, after all we have seen, is it still hard to imagine?

Let’s return back to Iraq and hear from 7 GIs courageous enough to write about their war in the New York Times:

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb …

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

From “The War as We Saw It”
By BUDDHIKA JAYAMAHA, WESLEY D. SMITH, JEREMY ROEBUCK, OMAR MORA, EDWARD SANDMEIER, YANCE T. GRAY and JEREMY A. MURPHY, The New York Times, August 19. 2007.

What have we asked our young men and men to do? And when we will apologize to them. And truly take care of them. And when will we apologize to the Iraqi people and insist on a true Reconstruction.

I will end with some excerpts from another post from the very brave and talented Dude of War:

Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Dude!

I must say, this past week has been quite exciting. On the morning of August 25, half my company convoyed in filthy and battered Strykers from Baqubah to Taji, our final mission of the deployment. Taji was our second home in Iraq and our springboard into Baghdad during the winter months. Now it acts as a staging area to get equipment, vehicles and men home next month.

Every trivial action was exhilarating when you realize it’s the last time you’ll ever do it. Loading a magazine, chambering a round, catching a warm desert breeze in your face going down the road for the final time. The air of finality is intoxicating, and you can feel it in your bones and see it in the face of everyone around you. A great burden was lifted as soon as we pulled into the wire and safety of Taji. We flew from Kuwait to Mosul on July 21, 2006, 72 hours after my twenty-first birthday. We ended operations on August 25, 2007. For exactly 400 days we held onto our humanity the best we could, sometimes forgetting we had it. The day we got to Baqubah and a Stryker had already been destroyed by an IED, I was on a rooftop with a bird’s eye view of everything around. Rockets and tracers were going overhead and buildings were catching fire. I looked at the carnage happening below, with my heart in my throat, and repeated in my head, how are we going to get out of this? How are we going to get out of this? I didn’t even know my friend was dead yet.

But everything that has a beginning has an end. After 400 days, we’re done. Over with! For my French readers, Le Fin. In a few short weeks we’ll return home with happy, yet heavy, hearts …

The intention of this blog from day one was to chronicle my experiences in a way for people to understand and interpret what was going on beyond what was being filtered, distilled and spat out of the mainstream media. When the deputy prime minister came to Baqubah for the first time a few weeks ago, an envoy of officers followed. Captains, lieutenant colonels and generals all took part in the tour of the local shops and visits with the residents. We were ordered to stay out of any pictures taken. Why? To falsely show that the Iraqi Army was in charge and we were on the sidelines.

In the last month of the deployment, on one of our few days off, we risked our lives so the Army, at some level, could throw a rose colored lens onto a news camera for the benefit of…I don’t know who.

Later on that day, a two star general got on our truck to be escorted back to the base. The captains and colonels around him talked about how Diyala was really shaping up and that Baqubah would be a shining example of the surge in no time, thanks in part by the 1920s! This was great for me to see and hear, because I finally got it. It took me fifteen months, but my epiphany was complete. Generals see Iraq in a unique way for two reasons. One, they take the word of anyone under them, which will almost always be positive no matter what. I doubt many have the guts to tell a general that things aren’t going exactly as planned. And two, they view Iraq in quick spurts with over-the-top security measures. I took a picture of the mob next to the deputy prime minister’s SUV, and there was an entourage of no less than fifteen American and Iraqi soldiers in a span of ten feet. Needless to say, the two star was well protected. We’ve walked the most dangerous streets on planet earth with less people. Surprise, some of us have a different perspective on the way this country is going.

I’m not a radical or an extremist, as you might think. My biggest fans are in my platoon. The most common thing I hear from them is, this is what I’ve been thinking the whole time. So my thoughts and ruminations aren’t entirely unique. I just simply have the attention of people to tell it to in the country we left behind fifteen months ago.

President Eisenhower warned of the growing military industrial complex in his farewell address. Since Dick Cheney can now afford solid gold oil derricks, it’s safe to say we failed Ike miserably. After losing two friends and over a dozen comrades, I have this to say:

Do not wage war unless it is absolutely, positively the last ditch effort for survival.

I was a struggling senior in high school when the invasion took place, and I supported it. I was mesmerized by the way we raced across the desert and took Baghdad in less than a month. War was a sleek, glossy commercial on TV, and we always won at the end. It’s easy to be for a war when you have absolutely no connection with it. Patriotism lead me to believe what we were doing was right and noble. What a difference a deployment can make.

The public can do something about this. It doesn’t have to be a hopeless cause forever. Write your Congressmen, go to a rally, read as much as you can about Iraq to see it for what it is: a place men go to lose their minds and their lives. And most importantly, love your children. Teach them that war is not honorable, it’s no plaything cast with an indifferent hand. It’s the most terrible thing man ever brought to the world. My generation didn’t learn from Vietnam, but the next one can learn from us. The memories and spirit of Chevy and Jesse compel you, America. Do not forget your fallen sons.

Thank you, Dude.

Thanks to Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times I’ve found the Army of Dude. At a time when the White House was trying yet another end run around reality - the specter of Vietnam - it was heartbreakingly refreshing to hear what the war is like from someone who
is actually fighting it.

“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left,” Bush told members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at their convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields,’ ” the president said.

Pretty simple. Leave Iraq like the Democrats and the American want, and millions of innocent people will die. Who in their right mind would want that to happen?

Someone at the White House never bothered to review the history of the Vietnam War. The killing fields were Cambodia. The Cambodia we bombed in a secret illegal war. Cambodian politics and history are extraordinarily complicated but President Bush’s black-white formulation misses the point. There was great suspicion between the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot - the mad architect of the killing fields - and the Vietnamese. And our intervention in Vietnam only made things worse for the Cambodians.

The lessons of Vietnam have been completely lost on the neo-cons and generals who chose this war. Lessons about unnecessary occupations. Lessons about insurgencies and guerilla warfare. Lessons about waging war without sustained popular support.

So like Vietnam, there is the war political leaders and generals talk about, and the war American soldiers are fighting. And unfortunately the real war the civilian populations experience as we attempt to “liberate them.”

A U.S. commander in Iraq said he believes it’s not possible to withdraw troops from his region south and east of Baghdad by year’s end as an influential senator called for a day earlier. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said his forces would lose the edge they have gained if troops were withdrawn …

Speaking to Pentagon reporters Friday via teleconference from Iraq, Lynch said, “Only when the Iraqi security forces come forward and say, ‘OK, here I am, I’m trained and equipped, I’m ready, I’m the Iraqi army or I’m the Iraqi police,’ can I turn those sanctuaries over, and that’s not going to happen between now and Christmas.”

Lynch, whose operations cover the central part of Iraq, south of Baghdad, said soldiers have been helped by the “surge,” or additional troops, and have made strides against militants. But he said, “If we were to lose that capability, the enemy would come back.”

“We would take a giant step backward,” said Lynch, adding he needs the troops to fight both Shiite and Sunni militants and to confront significant Iranian influence in the region.

By next spring or summer, however, such a move might be possible if enough progress is made, he said.

Enter the Army of Dude. Alex from Frisco, Texas, Daydreaming in Diyala Province, Iraq. This dispatch from August 18, 2007

So without further ado, the nominees for Stupid Shit of The Deployment:

Working with 1920s – A Sunni insurgent group we’ve been battling for months, responsible for the death of my friend and numerous attacks, agreed to fight Al Qaeda alongside us. Since then, they’ve grown into a much more organized, lethal force. They use this organization to steal cars and intimidate and torture the local population, or anyone they accuse of being linked to Al Qaeda. The Gestapo of the 21st century, sanctioned by the United States Army.

The Surge – The beefing up of ground forces in Iraq at the beginning of the year, started by the 82nd Airborne. Unit deployments were moved up several months to maintain a higher level of boots on the ground to quell the Baghdad situation. What most don’t realize is the amount of actual fighting troops in a brigade, something in the area of 2,000 soldiers in a brigade of 5,000 depending on what unit it is. So for every 2,000 fighters, there are 3,000 pencil pushers sucking up resources in every brigade that was surged. A logistical nightmare that, surprise, failed miserably. The increase of troops in Baghdad pushed the insurgents to rural areas (like Diyala), hence our move here in March. The surge was nothing more than a thorn in the side of nomadic fighters having to move thirty five miles while the generals watched Baghdad with stubborn eyes.

Two Companies Clearing Baqubah – Which brings us to the next nominee. Since Baghdad was the showcase of the war and Baqubah was brimming with super IEDs taking our Bradleys and Abrams tanks, it was decided that a unit needed to be sent there to assist the cavalry unit who averaged a death per week. But how many to send? Someone, somehow, somewhere decided that two companies of Strykers would be adequate to take down what Al Qaeda had deemed their headquarters in Iraq. What came about this oversight? Two hours into the first mission, my friend was killed in a massive IED blast that busted the hell out of the squad leader’s face, resulting in traumatic brain injury and facial reconstruction surgery. The vehicle commander tore his ACL from the concussion. Shrapnel being thrown around the inside of the truck caught one dude in the knee as a dude in the back hatch got rattled around, bruising his back as the other in the hatch was thrown completely out the vehicle. He’s been quiet since then, and was sent home soon after. Returning fire from us and the Bradleys killed an untold number of kids unlucky enough to be in the school next to our position. A wrecker sent out to pick up the destroyed Stryker was the next victim of an IED explosion, killing two men inside. Two more wreckers were sent out, one for the Stryker, one for the now totaled wrecker. As we pulled out that evening, local Iraqis, men, women and children, danced in celebration by the massive crater where the Stryker had been. At once we realized reinforcements were needed but we didn’t get any for two more months. Many more men were killed because we were stretched to our operational breaking point. But there was always more to do. Whoever made the decision to send less than an infantry battalion should be in jail right now.

Which brings us around to Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times and her article of August 25, 2008 entitled: “GIs’ morale dips as Iraq war drags on.”

In the dining hall of a U.S. Army post south of Baghdad, President Bush was on the wide-screen TV, giving a speech about the war in Iraq. The soldiers didn’t look up from their chicken and mashed potatoes.

As military and political leaders prepare to deliver a progress report on the conflict to Congress next month, many soldiers are increasingly disdainful of the happy talk that they say commanders on the ground and White House officials are using in their discussions about the war.

And they’re becoming vocal about their frustration over longer deployments and a taxing mission that keeps many living in dangerous and uncomfortably austere conditions. Some say two wars are being fought here: the one the enlisted men see, and the one that senior officers and politicians want the world to see.

“I don’t see any progress. Just us getting killed,” said Spc. Yvenson Tertulien, one of those in the dining hall in Yousifiya, 10 miles south of Baghdad, as Bush’s speech aired last month. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”