It appears that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, will be calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
He wants half of the troops out in a year.
Petraeus still wants to increase troops (do I feel a draft?), but he’s not retiring shortly, and he knows that his best chance is to suck up to Bush and His Evil Minions™.
Well, it appears that an Astroturf group loaded with money from Bush contributors, Freedom Watch, is doing its bit to try to extend the war in Iraq: It’s running attack ads against Republicans who are going weak kneed on the war.
Seriously, this is being run through either current, or former, or soon to be former *cough* Rove *cough*Bush political operatives.
“For those who believe in peace through strength, the cavalry is coming,” said former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who is a founding board member of the group.
The big ad buy, funded by high-profile Republicans who were aides and supporters of President Bush, reflects a furious public relations battle that will unfold as Congress debates the crucial progress report by Gen. David Petraeus, which is due Sept. 15.
BTW, there is no Petraeus report. The Bush White House is writing the report with “input” from Petraeus.
FWIW, Tom Matzzie of Americans Against Escalation in Iraq has written their spokesman, Ari Fleischer, a thank you note, in which an analysis of the first ad buy is made, 37 targeting Republicans vs. 4 Democrats, and only one of the Democrats is not sharing a District with a Republican.
BTW, one of the people that they are targeting is Mitch McConnell, Republican leader of the Senate.
This is truly a WTF moment, and typifies Bush’s idea of loyalty. Even if it does not backfire, and I think that it will, because it shows how narrow and petty Bush and His Evil Minions&trade are, it gets these folks voting pro-war, and makes them vulnerable.
He’s crossing a line, a very big one, and it might be enough to shake some Republicans loose from mindlessly goose-stepping with him.
The Christian Science Monitor has an article on the US Air Force looking at developing a mach 6+ hypersonic missile.
Though they bury the lede, they do get to the point:
“The [Air Force] today is looking for ways to become more relevant in the global war on terrorism beyond the smart bombs and the unmanned aerial vehicles it’s already providing mainly in support of ground (counterinsurgency) operations,” writes Guy Ben-Ari, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, in an e-mail.
In the fight against terrorism, the US’s most-wanted, such as Mr. bin Laden, are essentially moving targets. If bin Laden wants to have a meeting with his top lieutenants, for example, it will be called at the last minute and be short, intelligence officials say. That leaves the US military a small window in which to strike, posing a challenge to commanders and intelligence officials at the Air Force, which often oversees such operations. One option is to have missile assets in the area of the target already, perhaps by basing a bomber squadron in that region. Last year, when the Air Force zeroed in on a building where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was meeting, it was able to get two F-16C Fighting Falcon jets near the target in time to get Mr. Zarqawi, considered the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
This is about the USAF creating a weapon intended for assassination in order to gain more relevance in what looks to be the dominant mode of conflict in the next few decades.
Stephen Biddle, who appears (quick Google) to be one of the more reality oriented members of the foreign policy establishment, though he worked on the current “surge” policy with Petraeus, is suggesting that a British from Iraq will be ugly and violent, with Shiite forces attacking them on the way out in order to create bragging rights that they “pushed the British out”?
If what he says is true, and I am not convinced, these people already largely control Basra, and there are very real advantages to facilitating the UK exit, it’s irrelevant, because it will be a factor whenever the troops pull out.
We cannot fix what was broken in Iraq.
This is a VERY good OP/ED in the New York Times, The War as We Saw It, written by recent Iraq war vets in the 82nd Airborne. Their point is that , “Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence.”
The Serbian Government is calling to reinsert its troops back into Kosovo. You know, the folks who committed genocide?
Enough is enough. I know that the Russians will veto any UN resolution giving Kosovo independence, but this does not prevent the US, UK, France, etc. from recognizing the nation.
It should be remembered the Serbian authorities are not victims, but rather perpetrators of unspeakable acts, and because of this, they lack any moral claim over the region.
It should be noted that McClatchy was pretty good before the invasion too. They were pretty much alone on covering the claims of Bush and His Evil Minions™ and comparing them to reality.
This article follows this course. It not so subtly calls the Whitehouse and Pentagon Liars.
And while top U.S. officials insist that 50 percent of the capital is now under effective U.S. or government control, compared with 8 percent in February, statistics indicate that the improvement in violence is at best mixed.
U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don’t support the claim.
More at the story.
Even more amazing, it has been practiced by the normally quite hacktacular Nedra Pickler in debunking a right wing troll storm.
A few days back, Obama said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.”
Not only is this an accurate assessment, the US tactics are bad enough that the Brits want US troops and aircraft out of their sector because they are generating too much support for the Taliban through their indiscriminate bombing.
Now we see a real fact check:
As of Aug. 1, the AP count shows that while militants killed 231 civilians in attacks in 2007, Western forces killed 286. Another 20 were killed in crossfire that can’t be attributed to one party.
That’s about the only thing that might break our army worse now.
This is sad, and likely repeated thousands of times. Iraqi interpreters and other people who helped US forces are simply being cut loose to be killed by various militias and insurgents in Iraq.
We did the same thing in Viet Nam, and Republicans in the congress are trying to do the same with Filipino soldiers who fought the Japanese during WWII.
If there is anything that we should do, it is allow these people to come to the United States as refugees.
This is interesting, it appears that the British operating in Southern Afghanistan want the US to stop operations in their area.
A senior British commander in southern Afghanistan said in recent weeks that he had asked that American Special Forces leave his area of operations because the high level of civilian casualties they had caused was making it difficult to win over local people.
ther British officers here in Helmand Province, speaking on condition of anonymity, criticized American Special Forces for causing most of the civilian deaths and injuries in their area. They also expressed concerns that the Americans’ extensive use of air power was turning the people against the foreign presence as British forces were trying to solidify recent gains against the Taliban.
An American military spokesman denied that the request for American forces to leave was ever made, either formally or otherwise, or that they had caused most of the casualties. But the episode underlines differences of opinion among NATO and American military forces in Afghanistan on tactics for fighting Taliban insurgents, and concerns among soldiers about the consequences of the high level of civilians being killed in fighting.
The US military has a culture that is disastrous in a counter-insurgency situation.
There is a general disregard for civilian casualties, and an understanding of these consequences that I believe comes from an unwillingness to ascribe basic human motives to the indigenous population, along with an over-reliance on air-power.
This racism (and what else can you call dehumanizing someone in this way) is disastrous in a counter-insurgency situation, and the British are calling the US on this.
I understand the difficulties of dealing with a situation where the insurgents blend into the population, but if a police force were to, as a matter of policy, shoot hostages, there would be justified outrage.
This is worse than wrong, it’s aiding the enemy.
Got the graphics from the Group News Blog. The list you can get to by clicking the picture.
As a consequence of Bush’s policies, the military is increasingly broken. To use just one metric, the number of incoming soldiers with prior felony arrests or convictions has more than tripled in the past five years.
A number of these are gang bangers who be bringing back their training to the streets when they get out.
This article by Mohsin Hamid gives an excellent picture of the lack of concern in both the American policy apparatus and the American public to the tremendous damage that is done by American policies towards people and institutions who are NOT the target of these operations.
He is in a unique position to understand this, having spent his time from ages 6-9 in the US before moving back to Lahore, Pakistan, and then returning to the US for college.
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For another, growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s let me see firsthand the devastating effects that the best of U.S. intentions can have.
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But there is another major reason for anti-Americanism: the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans.
They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences.
America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
He moved back to Pakistan just as the civil war that Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brezinski bought* was ramping up, and he saw the effects:
He makes the very wise commnet, “Simply because America has — often for what seemed good reasons at the time — intervened to shape the destinies of other countries and then, as a nation, forgotten those interventions.”
The Taliban and al Queida are a result of both our policies in the Afghan civil war, and then our ignoring the mess that we made.
*It’s clear that the Afghan civil war was a product of American to create it. While there was always banditry in Afghan countryside, Brezinski, with Carter’s approval paid money to, and armed those bandits, with the hope of creating, and embroiling the Soviets in, a Vietnam Style civil war.
It worked all too well, and given that this was about half a decade from the fall of Saigon, they both had to know the suffering and death that this would create.
Once again, it appears that part of the military’s account of Tillman’s death is a lie.
As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman’s side started praying.
“I thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me,” Sgt. Bryan O’Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. “He said something like, ’Hey, O’Neal, why are you praying? God can’t help us now.”’
Tillman’s intent, O’Neal said, was to “more or less put my mind straight about what was going on at the moment.”
“He said, ’I’ve got an idea to help get us out of this,”’ said O’Neal, who was an 18-year-old Army Ranger in Tillman’s unit when the former NFL player was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004.
O’Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting “Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!” again and again when he was killed, O’Neal said.
A chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman’s death later described this exchange to investigators conducting a criminal probe of the incident. But O’Neal strongly disputes portions of the chaplain’s testimony, outlined in some 2,300 pages of transcripts released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
There is something of greater significance here. It is that a Chaplain lied about this.
Christian conservative Dominionists have had the infiltration of the military as a goal for some time, look at the discrimination as the Air Force academy, and Tillman was known to be an Atheist.
I think that this guy chose to lie to investigators to further that agenda.
I appears that al-Maliki has asked George W. Bush to dump Petraeus.
Word is that he’s upset that the General is arming Sunni militias to fight the Jihadists.
My guess is that the real word is that it will be too difficult for him to do ethnic cleansing in Baghdad if these people get weapons.
SCIRI, al-Maliki’s base tortured Iraqi prisoners during the Iran-Iraq war. His security forces have been murdering and ethnically cleansing Sunnis.
The last thing he wants is something that gets in the way of this.
On the bright side, if he succeeds, I think that it will flip a number of Republicans who value their seats more than they fear Karl Rove, so maybe it will get us out.
To Quote my good friend Bladesmith, “Lessee here….Legless…..Legless……DICKLESS!!!!“
Here is the whole front page:
I read this story about Denmark evacuating Iraqi employees and their relatives in the IHT.
If the US behaves in a historically consistent matter, we will leave the tens of thousands of translators and other Iraqis hanging out to dry, where many will die, and more will become stateless refugees.
This is distressing for both ethical reasons, these people have risked their lives for us, and for pragmatic reasons, each time we do this, it makes it more difficult to recruit members of the indigenous population to help us.
The fact that we do not allow anyone who has already risked life and limb to help us entry into the US is largely an artifact of bigotry, and to be fair, the US military is far worse about this than the State Deartment, which is already making noises about getting its employees into the US.
It’s about bloody time.
Democrats move to rein in use of private contractors in Iraq
Mideast edition, Friday, July 20, 2007
The Senate’s nine freshman Democrats announced a new effort Wednesday to rein in the use of private contractors to rebuild Iraq and to do an array of war-related jobs normally assigned to the military, The Virginian-Pilot reported Thursday.
According to the report, the group will ask Congress to create a “Commission on Wartime Contracting” that would assign auditors already employed by the federal government to ferret out waste and mismanagement in the more than $300 billion Iraq reconstruction effort.
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This has been an ongoing scandal. Whether it’s the dangerously unaccountable mercenaries from groups like Blackwater, or KBR serving substandard food provided by slave laborers, this war profiteering has been a national disgrace.
You know the saying, fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me
U.S. says Iraqi militant nonexistent
The man known as Abu Omar Baghdadi is an actor and the group a front for Al Qaeda in Iraq, the military says.
By Tina Susman
Times Staff WriterJuly 19, 2007
BAGHDAD — In March, he was declared captured. In May, he was declared killed, and his purported corpse was displayed on state-run TV. But on Wednesday, Abu Omar Baghdadi, the supposed leader of an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Iraq, was declared nonexistent by U.S. military officials, who said he was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terrorist organization.
An Iraqi actor has been used to read statements attributed to Baghdadi, who since October has been identified as the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq group, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner.
Bergner said the new information came from a man captured July 4, described as the highest-ranking Iraqi within the Islamic State of Iraq.
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Bush has purged the military of anyone who might tell an unfortunate truth to the public.
If we want our government to work, we will need to de Bushify the bureaucracy and military after he is gone.
The problem is, that we need to de Bushify the courts too, and the Constitution makes that difficult.