Followers

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Soldier Home From Iraq Can't Find Comfort

DEAR ABBY: I'm a man who feels all alone in the world. My mother once told me I was the “experimental child” ( I'm the oldest of two).

My girlfriend doesn't understand the living hell of post-traumatic stress from a tour in Iraq, and every time I need comforting, I am pushed away. The only friends who I'm in contact with are her family. Support from my family isn't easy to get.

My father, a Vietnam veteran, understands what I'm going through, but has told me he chooses to stay away because he's afraid of a possible relapse. Help!

— STRESSED IN PENN.

DEAR STRESSED: Consider this: You may have been the “experimental child,” but the outcome was obviously a success because your mother went on to bring another child into the world.

I'm not sure anyone who hasn't been through it — or isn't a trained psychotherapist — can understand post-traumatic stress.

More than in wars past, the military medical system seems to appreciate that a large number of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will need professional help. Help is available, so please don't wait to reach out for it. And while you're at it, take your father with you.

Please let me hear from you again in a few months, because I care. And I have a strong hunch you will have started healing.


COPYRIGHT 2006

UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Secret US Iraq Plan: Go Public, Go Home, Go Mecca

By James Joyner

WaPo fronts a piece by Thomas Ricks on the Pentagon’s long term strategic planning for Iraq.

The Pentagon’s closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials. Insiders have dubbed the options “Go Big,” “Go Long” and “Go Home.” The group conducting the review is likely to recommend a combination of a small, short-term increase in U.S. troops and a long-term commitment to stepped-up training and advising of Iraqi forces, the officials said.


“Go Big,” the first option, originally contemplated a large increase in U.S. troops in Iraq to try to break the cycle of sectarian and insurgent violence. A classic counterinsurgency campaign, though, would require several hundred thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi soldiers as well as heavily armed Iraqi police. That option has been all but rejected by the study group, which concluded that there are not enough troops in the U.S. military and not enough effective Iraqi forces, said sources who have been informally briefed on the review.


“Go Home,” the third option, calls for a swift withdrawal of U.S. troops. It was rejected by the Pentagon group as likely to push Iraq directly into a full-blown and bloody civil war.

The group has devised a hybrid plan that combines part of the first option with the second one — “Go Long” — and calls for cutting the U.S. combat presence in favor of a long-term expansion of the training and advisory efforts. Under this mixture of options, which is gaining favor inside the military, the U.S. presence in Iraq, currently about 140,000 troops, would be boosted by 20,000 to 30,000 for a short period, the officials said.

Setting up two strawmen so that the alternative preferred all along looks great by comparison is a classic bureaucratic strategy. Both “Go Big” and “Go Home,” in their purest forms, as non-starters for reasons outlined above. That leaves “Go Long.”

As noted in the longer piece, that option is hardly without risks.

That combination plan, which one defense official called “Go Big but Short While Transitioning to Go Long,” could backfire if Iraqis suspect it is really a way for the United States to moonwalk out of Iraq — that is, to imitate singer Michael Jackson’s trademark move of appearing to move forward while actually sliding backward. “If we commit to that concept, we have to accept upfront that it might result in the opposite of what we want,” the official said.

And, of course, even aside from the perception issue, it might not work. Providing interim security while training up a competent Iraqi defense force who would take over the job has always been the plan. We got off to a poor start and rebooted that effort under the command of Dave Petraeus and appear to have made substantial progress. Still, it has been maddeningly slow and it has proven virtually impossible to prevent the infiltration of the security forces by the enemy.

The U.S. Special Forces managed to square that circle in El Salvador, ultimately defeating the insurgency while maintaining a very small footprint. The operation was, to say the least, not without controversy and there are myriad operational and practical differences with the situation in Iraq. Still, it is doable.

Friday, November 17, 2006

She Survived Iraq - Then Shot Herself at Home

By Greg Mitchell
Editor and Publisher
Monday 13 November 2006

New York - Her name doesn't show on any official list of American military deaths in the Iraq war, by hostile or non-hostile fire, who died in that country or in hospitals in Europe or back home in the USA. But Iraq killed her just as certainly.

She is Jeanne "Linda" Michel, a Navy medic. She came home last month to her husband and three kids (ages 11, 5, and 4), delighted to be back in her suburban home of Clifton Park in upstate New York. Michel, 33, would be discharged from the Navy in a few weeks, finishing her five years of duty.

Two weeks after she got home, she shot and killed herself.

"She had come through a lot and she had always risen to challenges," her husband, Frantz Michel, who has also served in Iraq, lamented last week. Now he asks why the Navy didn't do more to help her.

Michel's story has now been probed by reporter Kate Gurnett in today's Albany Times-Union. It's headlined, "A casualty far from the battlefield."

And yet, in many ways, not far at all.

Why did it happen? "Like thousands of others returning from Iraq, her mental state was fractured," Gurnett explains. "And it went untreated. Within two weeks, Linda Michel would become a private casualty of war. Re-entry into the world of peace can be harder than deployment, experts say. Picking up where you left off doesn't just happen...."

Women experience stronger forms of post-traumatic stress disorder and have higher PTSD rates, experts say. In response, the Veterans Affairs Department launched a $6 million study of female veterans.

Seeking treatment - seen by some as a weakness - may be even tougher for women, who still feel the need to prove themselves to men in military service.

In fact, this past August, three veterans in New York's Adirondack region committed suicide within three weeks, according to Helena Davis, deputy director of the Mental Health Association in New York.

Michel has served under extremely stressful conditions at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, a US-run prison where guards shot four inmates dead in a 2005 riot - and an episode of female mudwrestling drew headlines. Michel was treated for depression and prescribed Paxil, but they took her off that medicine when she returned home. Her husband was not informed.

"I just wish the Navy would have done some more follow-up, instead of just letting her come home," Frantz, who is on the division staff of the Army National Guard, told the reporter. "If somebody needs Paxil in a combat zone, then that's not the place for them to be. You either send them to a hospital or you send them home and then make sure that the family members know and that they get follow-up care."

He has pressed the Navy for answers: "Why wasn't she sent to a facility to resolve the issues? Not keep her in Iraq and give her some antidepressant medication and then just send her home. So those are the answers that I don't have. Which makes me a little angry because I know what is supposed to occur."

The Times Union carried another lengthy story on Sunday, by Dennis Yusko, on post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and Iraq veterans. "The number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans getting treatment for PTSD at VA hospitals and counseling centers increased 87 percent from September 2005 to June 2006 - to 38,144, according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs," Yusko revealed.

"At least 30 percent of those who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan are now diagnosed with PTSD, up from 16 percent to 18 percent in 2004," said Charlie Kennedy, PTSD program director and lead psychologist at the Stratton Veterans Affairs Medical Center. "Of the 400 Capital Region vets in the program, 81 served in Iraq or Afghanistan," Kennedy said, and that number is growing. "This kind of warfare is devastating," Kennedy said. "You don't know who is your friend and who is your enemy."

Friday, November 10, 2006

Outlaw Empire Meets the Wave

5 Questions for Our Future

By Tom Engelhardt

11/08/07 "TomDispatch" -- -- The wave -- and make no mistake, it's a global one -- has just crashed on our shores, soaking our imperial masters. It's a sight for sore eyes.

It's been a long time since we've seen an election like midterm 2006. After all, it's a truism of our politics that Americans are almost never driven to the polls by foreign-policy issues, no less by a single one that dominates everything else, no less by a catastrophic war (and the presidential approval ratings that go with it). This strange phenomenon has been building since the moment, in May 2003, that George W. Bush stood under that White-House-prepared "Mission Accomplished" banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared "major combat operations have ended."

That "Top Gun" stunt -- when a cocky President helped pilot an S-3B Viking sub reconnaissance Naval jet onto a carrier deck and emerged into the golden glow of "magic hour light" (as his handlers then called it) -- was meant to give him the necessary victory photos to launch his 2004 presidential reelection campaign. As it turned out, that moment was but the first "milestone" on the path to Iraqi, and finally electoral, hell. Within mere months, those photos would prove useless for anyone but liberal bloggers. By now, they seem like artifacts from another age. On the way to the present "precipice" (or are we already over the edge?), there have been other memorable "milestones" -- from the President's July 2003 petulant "bring ‘em on" taunt to Iraq's then forming insurgency to the Vice President's June 2005 "last throes" gaffe. All such statements have, by now, turned to dust in American mouths.

In the context of the history of great imperial powers, how remarkably quickly this has happened. An American President, ruling the last superpower on this or any other planet, and his party have been driven willy-nilly into global and domestic retreat a mere three-plus years after launching the invasion of their dreams, the one that was meant to start them on the path to controlling the planet -- and by one of the more ragtag minority rebellions imaginable. I'm speaking here, of course, of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, of perhaps 15,000 relatively lightly armed rebels whose main weapons have been the roadside bomb and the sniper's bullet. What a grim, bizarre spectacle it's been.

The Fall of the New Rome

But let's back up a moment. After such an election, a bit of history, however quick and potted, is in order -- in this case of the post-Cold War era of U.S. supremacy, now seemingly winding down. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, to be followed by the relatively violence-free collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a brief moment of conceptual paralysis among leadership elites in this country, none of whom had even imagined the loss of the "Evil Empire" (in President Ronald Reagan's famous Star Wars-ian phrase) until it suddenly, miraculously evaporated. In this forgotten moment, we even heard hopeful mutterings about a "peace dividend" that would take all the extra military money that obviously was no longer needed to defend against a missing superpower and use it to rebuild America.

A mighty country, soon to be termed a "hyperpower," straddling the globe alone and without obvious enemies -- that should have been a formula for declaring victory (as many Cold Warriors promptly did) and acting accordingly (which none of them did). It should have been the moment for the Long Peace.

But in an enemy-less world, there was a small problem called the Pentagon (and the vast military-industrial complex that had grown up around it). So, while the peace-dividend-that-never-was vanished in the post-Cold-War morning fog, some new, prefab enemies did make their appearances with startling speed. They essentially had to.

These new dangers to our country were termed "rogue states," an obvious step or two down from a single Evil Empire. They were, in fact, so relatively weak militarily that you needed to pile them up into a conceptual heap to get an enemy that would keep an empire and its global network of bases in military restocking mode. Not too many years down the line, the Bush administration would indeed pile three of them up in just this way into the gloriously labeled "axis of evil"; this was that old Evil Empire rejiggered for midget powers (or alternatively the Axis powers of World War II shrunk to Mini-Me standards).

Back in 1990, Saddam Hussein, our former ally in a Persian Gulf struggle with Iran for regional supremacy, invaded Kuwait and, voilà!, you had the first Gulf War. His military, already weakened by its eight-year bloodletting with Iran, was not exactly a goliath for a superpower to reckon with; but Americans took a tip from the dictator (who liked to see images of himself puffed to gigantic proportions everywhere in his land), blew his face was up to Hitlerian size, and stuck it on every magazine and in every TV news report in town ("Showdown with Saddam"). His genuinely evil-dictator face took the place of a whole nuclear-armed Evil Empire, while American troops slaughtered helpless Iraqi conscripts, burying them alive in their own trenches or wiping them out from the air on the aptly named "Highway of Death" out of Kuwait City.

Not so long after, in 1992, under the aegis of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, a small group of unknown Defense Department staffers -- Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad – unveiled a new draft Defense Planning Guidance, a document for developing military strategy and planning Pentagon budgets. It was the first such since the Cold War ended and, leaked to the New York Times, it was denounced as an extremist vision and buried. As the website Right Web describes it, the document "called for massive increases in defense spending, the assertion of lone superpower status, the prevention of the emergence of any regional competitors, the use of preventive -- or preemptive -- force, and the idea of forsaking multilateralism if it didn't suit U.S. interests."

Sound familiar? No wonder. It was the very imperial program for eternal American dominance and endless war against the planet's rogue states that George W. Bush's administration would officially adopt. By then, Wolfowitz was the number two man at the Pentagon; Libby, the Vice President's good right hand; and Khalilzad was the new, post-invasion U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

In a post-9/11 atmosphere of belligerent fear, their program went mainstream. Having been attacked not by a rogue state but by a squad of 19 terrorists pledging allegiance to a stateless terrorist organization, we were "at war" with evil itself. By 2002, the administration had conducted a "successful" war in Afghanistan; the Taliban had been crushed; Osama bin Laden was MIA; and the neocons were riding high. The rest of us found ourselves in a Global War on Terror, or the Long War, or World War III, or even World War IV or whatever our rulers chose to call it that week. (As we would learn in Iraq, counting was not one of their skills.)

Dazzled beyond any reasonable imperial sense by the power to dominant that they believed American military superiority gave them, top Bush administration officials essentially proclaimed the U.S. an empire by fiat, a superduperpower the likes of which the world had never seen. In their infamous 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (essentially the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document recycled), they swore that we would remain so forever and feed the Pentagon so much money that it would be bulked up into the distant future to suppress any potential superpower or bloc of powers that might emerge.

They insisted that we would go our own way, strike whomever we pleased, torture anyone we wished, and jail without recourse anyone we cared to sweep up or kidnap anywhere on Earth. The rest of the world could either approve or be damned, but it would be full speed ahead for us. Their acolytes in right-wing think tanks and lobbying outfits around Washington, along with Washington's assembled punditry (and some liberal tag-alongs) declared the world on the verge of a Pax Americana and this nation the globe's New Rome.

In the meantime, domestically, Karl Rove and his pals were working to ensure that the Republican Party would be dominant against all challengers for a generation or more. This was to be a domestic version of "full spectrum dominance." The two -- the global Pax Americana and the Party's Pax Republicana seemed joined at the hip back then, each reinforcing the unilateral, don't-tread-on-me, I'll-do-anything-I-wish dominance of the other. It was Rovian Abramoffism at home and Cheney-izing Wolfowitzism abroad.

How deeply they misunderstood the nature of power in our world, and how thoroughly they miscalculated the limited nature of the power of the New Rome! If you want to take the measure of how far we've come since then, consider the spectacle of this last election season. Take Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Like the President, deep into this September he was still excoriating the Democrats not just for their positions on the Iraq War, but for their "surrender" policies in the war on terror. As he put it in a PBS interview with Jim Lehrer on September 14th:



"I'd say, ‘Wake up, Harry Reid. Wake up, Harry Reid…' I think that [the president] has got it right, that we're not going to do what Harry Reid wants to do, and that is surrender, to wave a white flag, to cut and run at a time when we're being threatened… as we all saw just three or four weeks ago, in a plot from Britain that was going to send 10 airplanes over here."



He then characterized the Democratic Party as a group "who basically belittle in many ways this war on terror, who do want to wave this white flag and surrender."

By late October, however, according to Washington Post reporters Peter Slevin and Michael Powell, Frist had fully grasped that the global and domestic programs of dominance no longer were working together. So he offered the following succinct advice -- a flip-flop of the first order -- to congressional candidates: "The challenge is to get Americans to focus on pocketbook issues, and not on the Iraq and terror issue."

Just another "milestone" on the path to… well, that's the question, isn't it?

Oil Wars

After September 11, 2001, the President and his advisors were determined to run an invasion of, and war against, Iraq that would be the anti-Vietnam conflict of all time. From the draft to the body count, they were going to reverse all our Vietnam "mistakes." Above all, they were going to win quickly and decisively. The result? In no time at all, they had brought us deep into the Iraqi "big muddy" (as the Vietnam-era phrase went). Now, looming in the distance -- think of it as the dark at the end of this particular horror-fest of a tunnel -- is the worst Vietnam nightmare of all: defeat. Just check Juan Cole's Informed Comment website, for his "Top Ten Ways We Know We Have Lost in Iraq," if you don't believe me.

Unlike in Indochina, however, this time there's something essential at stake. Whatever we were doing in the largely peasant land of Vietnam, in terms of global wealth and resources, it was just what Henry Kissinger and other frustrated U.S. policy-makers of that era always called it, a third- or fourth-rate power of no real value to anyone (other, of course, than its own inhabitants).

In Iraq, where a continuing American presence only ensures a deeper plunge into chaos, mayhem, blood, and horror as well as fragmentation and potential dissolution, departure nonetheless remains largely inconceivable. After all, Iraq has something everyone desperately values: Oil. In quantity. A "sea" of oil in the words of former Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz. In a backhanded way, the President has finally acknowledged the obvious -- that his war in Iraq was, in significant part, an oil invasion, an oil occupation (remember it was only the Oil Ministry that we guarded in otherwise looted Baghdad), and so is also bound to be an oil defeat. As energy-obsessed Bush administration planners saw it, Iraq was to be the lynchpin -- hence those permanent bases that were on the drawing boards as American troops invaded -- of a Bush administration strategy for dominating the oil heartlands of the planet.

After Vietnam, the United States proved quite capable of putting itself back together (despite years of fierce culture wars). After Iraq -- and keep in mind that we undoubtedly have at least a couple of years of horror to go -- the question is whether the world will be similarly capable or whether the oil lands of the planet will lie in ruins along with the global economy.

Extremity on Display

So, just past the midterm election mark of 2006, what's left of the New Rome? You could say that George W. Bush's dark success story has involved bringing his version of the United States into line with the look of the "rogue" enemies and terrorist groups he set out to destroy. By the time Americans went to the polls on November 7th, 2006 to repudiate his policies, he had given our country the ultimate in makeovers, creating the look of an Outlaw Empire.

We now have our own killing fields in Iraq where, the latest casualty study tells us, somewhere between 400,000 and 900,000-plus "excess Iraqi deaths" have occurred since the 2003 invasion. And do you remember Saddam's "torture chambers" (which the President used to cite all the time)? Now, we are the possessors of our own global prison system, our own (rented, borrowed, or jerry-rigged) torture chambers, our own leased airline to transport kidnapped prisoners around the planet, and a Vice President who has openly lobbied Congress for a torture exemption for the CIA and spoke glibly on the radio about "dunking" people in water. And, thanks to a supine Congress, we have the laws to go with it all.

The administration went after the right to torture or treat captives any way its agents pleased in places not open to any kind of oversight remarkably quickly after the September 11th attacks. By late 2001, Donald Rumsfeld's office was instructing agents in the field in Afghanistan to "take the gloves off" with a captive. (Inside the CIA, as Ron Suskind has told us in his book The One Percent Doctrine, Director George Tenet was talking even more vividly about removing "the shackles" on the Agency.) Inside the White House Counsel's office and the Justice Department, administration lawyers were already hauling out their dictionaries to figure out how to redefine "torture" out of existence. But why such an emphasis on torture (which is largely useless in the field, as everyone knows)?

What administration officials grasped, I believe, is this: If you could manage to get the right to legally employ extreme (and normally repugnant) acts of torture, then you would have in your possession the right to do anything. Think of the urge to abuse as the initial extreme expression of this administration's secret obsession with the creation of a "wartime" commander-in-chief presidency which would leave Congress and the courts in the dust.

If you want to measure where this has taken Bush officialdom in five years, consider their latest legal defensive measure. According to the Washington Post, the administration has just gone to court to declare American "alternative interrogation techniques" -- which simply means "torture" -- as "among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets." It is trying to get a federal judge to bar "terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons" from even revealing to their own lawyers details about what was done to them by American interrogators. In other words, torture is now to be put in the secrecy vault like a national treasure. Next thing you know, we'll be sending it to the Smithsonian.

Reflected in this desperate maneuver, you can catch a glimpse of an administration driven to the extremity of going to courts it despised -- and thought it had cut out of the process of foreign imperial governance -- simply to bury its own extreme misdeeds. You can feel the fear of the docket (and perhaps of history) in such a stance.

Another example of the extremity into which this administration has driven itself and the rest of us lies in an editorial published in the four main (officially private) military magazines, the Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times, and Marine Corps Times, on the very eve of the midterm elections. It called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation just after the President had given him his vote of confidence once again. Realistically speaking, this can only be seen as an extreme military intervention in the American electoral process.

In so many ways, the American Constitutional system has been shredded and this -- whether we are to be an outlaw empire (and a failing one at that) -- is what Americans were voting about this last Tuesday (though it was called "Iraq").

The Wave

The history of recent American politics at the polls might be seen this way: Not so long after he declared the successful completion of his Iraqi dreams, George W. Bush found himself, to the surprise of his top advisors and supporters, hounded by Iraq's Sunni insurgency. He essentially raced not John Kerry (who recently offered yet another example of his special lack of dexterity on the campaign trail) but that insurgency to the finish line in November 2004. With a little help from his friends in Ohio and the Rove smear-and-turnout operation, he managed to squeak by. Then, in another of those milestone moments on the way to disaster, he declared that he had "political capital" to spare and would spend it.

The next summer, two storms hit the endlessly vacationing President in Crawford, Texas -- Hurricanes Cindy and Katrina. Cindy Sheehan tore away the bloodless look of casualty-lessness in Iraq (where body counts, body bags, and the return of the dead to these shores was being hidden away from both cameras and attention). She gave a mother's face to a son's death and to a nation's increasing frustration. Katrina revealed to many Americans that the Bush administration had been creating Iraq-like conditions in the "homeland." And that was more or less that. The President's approval rating plunged under 40% and has (a few momentary blips aside) bounced around between there and the low 30s ever since. By election 2006, presidential "capital" was a concept long consigned to the dustbin of history.

Imagine where that "capital" will be by 2008. Our President has been wedded to his war of choice in a way unimaginable since Lyndon Baines Johnson quit the presidential race after the Tet Offensive in 1968. Based on what's happened so far, there's every reason to believe that, in 2008, he will still be wedded to it (as would potential Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain) and his approval ratings may be bouncing in the 20%-30% range by then.

So what part of the 2001 dream team and its "vision" of the world are we left with? To answer this, you first have to realize that yesterday's electoral "wave" of repudiation is hardly an American phenomenon. It's global and, if anything, we were way late into the water. All you have to do is look at the latest polling figures (which are but extensions of previous, similar polls) to see that wave in country after country. The most recent international survey of opinion -- in Britain, Canada, Israel, and Mexico -- found that Bush's America is viewed as "a threat to world peace by its closest neighbors and allies." In Britain, the land of the "special relationship," only Osama bin Laden outranks our President as a global "danger to peace." While he comes in a dozen points behind bin Laden, he does manage to best Kim Jong Il, North Korea's grim leader, as well as those shining stars of the diplomatic firmament, the President of Iran and the leader of Hezbollah. And these are the countries most likely to have positive views of the U.S.

As hectorer-in-chief, George W. Bush has, hands down, used the word "must" more than any combination of presidents in our history. Only recently, he repeatedly told the North Koreans that they must not develop (and then test) nuclear weapons; he told the Iranians that they must halt their nuclear program; and his minions told the Nicaraguans that they must not vote for former Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. The results: The North Koreans tested a weapon; the Iranians went right on enriching uranium; and the Nicaraguans, poverty-stricken and threatened with nothing short of economic ruin if their democratic vote went into the wrong column, simply ignored him.

All these decisions were based on assessments of the limits of power that had been revealed by the desperate acts of a failing empire stretched to its military and economic limits. If these are the "rogue" parts of the global wave, all you have to do is look at Russia's reassertion of interest and power in its old energy-rich Central Asian bailiwick (much coveted by the Bush administration); or the expansion of Chinese economic power in Southeast Asia and energy power in Africa to see other aspects of the global wave of reassessment under way.

In fact, the global part of the election was long over by November 7, 2006. For vast majorities abroad, the vision of the U.S. as an Outlaw Empire is nothing new at all. The wave here has perhaps only begun to rise, but here too those presidential "musts" (along with the President's designation of the Democrats as little short of "enemy noncombatants") have begun to lose their effect. Hence the presidential plebiscite of yesterday. No matter what else flows from it, the fact that it happened is of real significance. A majority of the American people -- those who voted anyway -- did not ratify Bush's Outlaw Empire. They took a modest step toward sanity. But what will follow?

Here, briefly, are five "benchmark" questions to ask when considering the possibilities of the final two years of the Bush administration's wrecking-ball regime:

Will Iraq Go Away? The political maneuvering in Washington and Baghdad over the chaos in Iraq was only awaiting election results to intensify. Desperate call-ups of more Reserves and National Guards will go out soon. Negotiations with Sunni rebels, coup rumors against the Maliki government, various plans from James Baker's Iraq Study Group and Congressional others will undoubtedly be swirling. Yesterday's plebiscite (and exit polls) held an Iraqi message. It can't simply be ignored. But nothing will matter, when it comes to changing the situation for the better in that country, without a genuine commitment to American withdrawal, which is not likely to be forthcoming from this President and his advisors any time soon. So expect Iraq to remain a horrifying, bloody, devolving fixture of the final two years of the Bush administration. It will not go away. Bush (and Rove) will surely try to enmesh Congressional Democrats in their disaster of a war. Imagine how bad it could be if -- with, potentially, years to go -- the argument over who "lost" Iraq has already begun.

Is an Attack on Iran on the Agenda? Despite all the alarums on the political Internet about a pre-election air assault on Iran, this was never in the cards. Even the hint of an attack on Iranian "nuclear facilities" (which would certainly turn into an attempt to "decapitate" the Iranian regime from the air) would send oil prices soaring. The Republicans were never going to run an election on oil selling at $120-$150 a barrel. This will be no less true of election year 2008. If Iran is to be a target, 2007 will be the year. So watch for the pressures to ratchet up on this one early in the New Year. This is madness, of course. Such an attack would almost certainly throw the Middle East into utter chaos, send oil prices through the roof, possibly wreck the global economy, cause serious damage in Iran, not fell the Iranian government, and put U.S. troops in neighboring Iraq in perilous danger. Given the administration record, however, all this is practically an argument for launching such an attack. (And don't count on the military to stop it, either. They're unlikely to do so.) Failing empires have certainly been known to lash out or, as neocon writer Robert Kagan put the matter recently in a Washington Post op-ed, "Indeed, the preferred European scenario [of a Democratic Congressional victory] -- 'Bush hobbled' -- is less likely than the alternative: ‘Bush unbound.' Neither the president nor his vice president is running for office in 2008. That is what usually prevents high-stakes foreign policy moves in the last two years of a president's term." So when you think about Iran, think of Bush unbound.

Are the Democrats a Party? If Rovian plans for a Republican Party ensconced in Washington for eons to come now look to be in tatters, the Democrats have retaken the House (and possibly the Senate) largely as the not-GOP Party. The election may leave the Republicans with a dead presidency and a leading candidate for 2008 wedded to possibly the least popular war in our history; the Democrats may arrive victorious but without the genuine desire for a mandate to lead. Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats in recent years were not, in any normal sense, a party at all. They were perhaps a coalition of four or five or six parties (some trailing hordes of pundits and consultants, but without a base). Now, with the recruitment of so many ex-Republicans and conservatives into their House and Senate ranks, they may be a coalition of six or seven parties. Who knows? They have a genuine mandate on Iraq and a mandate on oversight. What they will actually do -- what they are capable of doing (other than the normal money, career, and earmark-trading in Washington) -- remains to be seen. They will be weak, the surroundings fierce and strong.

Will We Be Ruled by the Facts on the Ground? In certain ways, it may hardly matter what happens to which party. By now -- and this perhaps represents another kind of triumph for the Bush administration -- the facts on the ground are so powerful that it would be hard for any party to know where to begin. Will we, for instance, ever be without a second Defense Department, the so-called Department of Homeland Security, now that a burgeoning $59 billion a year private "security" industry with all its interests and its herd of lobbyists in Washington has grown up around it? Not likely in any of our lifetimes. Will an ascendant Democratic Party dare put on a diet the ravenous Pentagon, which now feeds off two budgets -- its regular, near-half-trillion dollar Defense budget and a regularized series of multibillion dollar "emergency" supplemental appropriations, which are now part of life on the Hill. What this means is that the defense budget is not what we wage our wars on or pay for a variety of black operations (not to speak of earmarks galore) with. Don't bet your bottom dollar that this will get better any time soon either. In fact, I have my doubts that a Democratic Congress with a Democratic president in tow could even do something modestly small like shutting down Guantanamo, no less begin to deal with the empire of bases that undergirds our failing Outlaw Empire abroad. So, from time to time, take your eyes off what passes for politics and check out the facts on the ground. That way you'll have a better sense of where our world is actually heading.

What Will Happen When the Commander-in-Chief Presidency and the Unitary Executive Theory Meets What's Left of the Republic? The answer on this one is relatively uncomplicated and less than three months away from being in our faces; it's the Mother of All Constitutional Crises. But writing that now, and living with the reality then, are two quite different things. So when the new Congress arrives in January, buckle your seatbelts and wait for the first requests for oversight information from some investigative committee; wait for the first subpoenas to meet Cheney's men in some dark hallway. Wait for this crew to feel the "shackles" and react. Wait for this to hit the courts -- even a Supreme Court that, despite the President's best efforts, is probably still at least one justice short when it comes to unitary-executive-theory supporters. I wouldn't even want to offer a prediction on this one. But a year down the line, anything is possible.

So we've finally had our plebiscite, however covert, on the failing Outlaw Empire of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But what about their autocratic inclinations at home. How will that play out?

Will it be: All hail, Caesar, we who are about to dive back into prime-time programming.

Or will it be: All the political hail is about to pelt our junior caesars as we dive back into prime-time programming? Stay tuned.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt

THE INTEGRITY OF SADDAM HUSSEIN

by Malcom Lagauche

By now, everyone has heard the verdict that Saddam Hussein will be hanged. And, many people have read the obligatory remarks from the stooge Iraqi government and the U.S. and U.K. governments. I will not get involved with these idiotic statements. All those who praise the decision do not take into consideration that the verdict will make Iraq a much more deadly place that it already is.
I will talk about Saddam Hussein, the man. This is not a history of his regime, but a view of him and his steadfastness after April 9, 2003.
To me, it is hard to conceive how a man of his age endured more than a lifetime of hardship, torture and personal bereavement in just three-and-a-half years without losing his mental faculties or selling out to his opponents.
In July 2003, Saddam Hussein saw photos of his two dead sons on television. Their bodies were ridden with bullet holes. His 14-year-old grandson was killed along with his sons in the hours-long attack on a house by hundreds of U.S. military personnel. The U.S. government probably considered it to be in bad taste to exhibit the grandson’s body on television.
In December 2003, Saddam was kidnapped by U.S. forces. However, he was not found in a "spider hole" as the commonly-accepted myth states. He was surrounded in a friend’s house by U.S. Marines. For a while, he fought it out with the Marines, but finally surrendered because he and his friend were well-outnumbered.
For the next two days, Saddam was drugged and tortured. Then, the U.S. administration showed a disheveled Saddam to the world in an attempt to denigrate him. Although he had been captured two days earlier in a house, the administration made it appear that the pictures they showed of Saddam were taken on the spot of his apprehending. The attempt at degradation backfired. Within minutes of the pictures being shown in Iraq, thousands took to the streets in pro-Saddam demonstrations.
For the next few months, he was not allowed to see a lawyer. In that time, he was tortured and questioned. Also, he was allowed deals by the U.S. that would get him an "out of jail free" pass if he cooperated. He never capitulated to their whims.
Saddam Hussein was not allowed to see his family. Most of his correspondence to them was either not delivered, or highly censored. By now, most humans would be willing to say anything their captors desired.
One day, I was talking to my friend Frank Morrow who produced the finest political show ever on U.S. television: Alternative Views. We discussed how Manuel Noriega collapsed in a few days in U.S. incarceration and spilled his guts. Frank said to me, "Saddam is made of sterner stuff." He could not have been more accurate.
On his first day in court, Saddam was a few minutes late. The judge asked him why he was not on time and Saddam told him that the elevators of the building were not working. The judge then said he would ask the Americans to try to fix the faulty lifts. Saddam looked the judge in the eye and said, "Don’t ask them. You tell them. You are an Iraqi." The judge was silent. The accused prisoner had to give him a lesson in citizenship.
We have read page-after-page of the illegality of Saddam’s trials. The anomalies are far too many to address in this column. However, with each preposterous turn, Saddam kept his ground and never capitulated to the court.
For months, every conceivable scenario emerged: Saddam was dragged out of court; his lawyers were kicked out of court; defense witnesses were tortured by the court; the judge destroyed a videotape that clearly showed the head prosecutor was lying; and Saddam and a few of his comrades went on hunger strikes.
Still, he showed up in court with the wit and physical appearance of a man decades younger. All the atrocities committed against him never made him appear to be desperate and he never showed signs of caving in.
Several times, Saddam was approached by U.S. officials to make a deal. The Iraqi resistance had grown to a formidable foe that was on the verge of forcing a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and they knew that Saddam still held enough power to persuade a major portion of the resistance to lay down their arms. Instead of accepting an offer for his freedom on some small island in the Pacific, Saddam retained his dignity. I must also add that other Ba’ath Party members who were imprisoned were given chances to be freed and made rich if they testified against Saddam. They all refused to sell out.
The farce of the first trial is over and Saddam has been sentenced to death. Although he is in the midst of another trial, he will probably be executed and the trial will resume with a dead man as the defendant.
Today’s headlines portray outrage from various groups, individuals and governments over the verdict. Many will try to get the U.N. to intervene in the fiasco, but the chances of justice are slim to none.
I read many quotes from Saddam’s foes and friends today. Two stick out. The most preposterous comes from the traitor Nouri al-Maliki, the so-called Iraqi prime minister:
This ruler has committed the most horrible crimes. He executed the best scientists, academics and thinkers.
The statement is so incredible that most people who read it will believe it. For the past year, we have read about hundreds of professors, scientists and doctors being killed in Iraq by agents of the Malaki government. During Saddam’s time, these professionals flourished and were the pride of Iraq. Malaki has now added them to the long list of fictitious victims of Saddam Hussein’s rule.
Here’s a very courageous quote from Haitham, a 42-year-old resident of Mosul:
I feel sad for Saddam, we have wronged him. We did not support him but now, after what we have seen, what has happened since he was toppled, it has become clear to us that he was the best man in the world.
I just received a message from someone who is knowledgeable about occurrences on the ground in Iraq. It stated:
We learned that demonstrations are all over Iraq in protest of the sentence.
In Baghdad American soldiers are busy painting over the slogans that people wrote on the walls and in intersections.
I am sending you some pictures. These are only a sample of what is going on.
Of course, the U.S. press will not show any of these photos. This is only the beginning. If, within a few hours of the verdict, demonstrations and destruction of U.S. vehicles are occurring, the backlash from the verdict will only increase.
In the U.S., we have the term "family values" shoved down our throats. But, it does not apply to those who are not U.S. citizens. We have already seen how the U.S. treated Saddam’s sons and grandson. Currently, his daughter and wife are living outside Iraq. Malaki has designated both as "terrorists" and they are on the country’s top-20 Most Wanted list.
The regulations for Saddam after his death are quite straight forward. After the hanging, his body will be available for family members to retrieve. No one will pick it up because they would be arrested on the spot. In lieu of this, the body will be buried with no funeral.
The U.S. government (Republican and Democrat alike) are the monsters, not Saddam Hussein. They are perverted and have an affinity for violence and delight in showing the bodies of dead enemies like they are trophies. But, the same people are aghast if someone utters an obscenity or make a joke about the president of the U.S. They are the misfits in the world who should be subjected to a show trial and then unceremoniously dropped into a hole in the ground. This is their version of "family values."

http://www.albasrah.net/pages/mod.php?mod=art&lapage=../en_articles_2006/1106/lagauche_061106.htm

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Iraq exit the No 1 priority for Rumsfeld successor

By Philippe Naughton


Robert Gates, the 63-year-old career intelligence officer chosen to replace Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, takes over with the clearest of missions: get American troops out of Iraq as quickly and cleanly as possible.

Mr Gates was, subject to Congressional approval, propelled into the top ranks of the Bush Administration today as Secretary of Defence only hours after voters handed President Bush what he agreed himself was a "thumping" in mid-term elections.

The deeply unpopular Mr Rumsfeld, seen by his enemies as a reckless warmonger and attacked even by senior military officers for strategic blunders, was the obvious scapegoat for the electoral meltdown. Since the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, more than 2,800 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq.

Although Mr Bush told a White House press conference this afternoon that Mr Rumsfeld's departure should not be taken as a signal that America would be withdrawing from Iraq, he made it clear that the former CIA director had not been chosen as continuity candidate.

The President freely admitted that his Iraq policy was "not working well enough, fast enough" and needed new leadership.

Although Mr Gates is currently serving as president of Texas A&M University, he has been active recently as a member of the Iraq Study Group led by James Baker, the Bush family confidant and former Secretary of State.

That Group has yet to report, but its draft recommendations have been widely leaked and amount to a radical reshaping of US Iraq policy that would have been unthinkable a year ago - including a large reduction of US troop levels and a diplomatic push to engage Iraq's neighbours, including Iran and Syria.

The Group has also pushed for the Iraqi Government to take more responsibility for its own affairs, politically and militarily.

Since those recommendations have not been formally given to the White House, Mr Bush has not had to accept or reject them. But the Administration has noticeably changed its language on Iraq - Mr Bush no longer speaks of "staying the course" for example - and Mr Rumsfeld's departure allows the unthinkable to become policy.

And it would be unthinkable for Mr Bush to appoint his new Pentagon chief from among the group's members if he did not agree with their conclusions.

Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1943, Mr Gates joined the CIA in 1966 and rose from working-level officer to become its director, also serving as a member of the National Security Council.

He was first nominated as CIA director in 1987 by Ronald Reagan but withdrew amid questions over his and the CIA’s role in the secret sales of arms to Iran and the diversion of profits to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels - the accusation against him being that he hid the truth about the Iran-Contract affair from Congress.

He was nominated again by the first President Bush and led the CIA from 1991 to 1993.