Tag: Iraq

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: The Real Terrorist Threat

I’m just the editor of a Memphis newspaper and by no means an expert on foreign affairs. But I read a lot, and what I’m reading lately has me nervous.

On Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show Countdown last week, Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, said the following: “These people [al-Qaeda] are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States … and we’re going to have no one to blame but ourselves.”

I’ve been reading article after article citing terrorist experts here and abroad who are worried about increased “chatter” concerning new terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Remember the infamous August 6, 2001, White House briefing paper entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.”? It was, of course, ignored by the Bush administration, which decided the matter could wait until after cabinet members finished their summer vacations.

Terrorist expert Richard Clarke testified before Congress in 2004 that his warnings to this administration had been summarily ignored, even though he famously was “running around like a man with his hair on fire” trying to get someone in power to take him seriously.

I’m not trying to be alarmist here, but our national security is in the hands of the same incompetents who brought us the Iraq war and the Katrina response. It’s the people who have been wrong about almost everything it is conceivable to be wrong about — from “we’ll be greeted as liberators” to “Mission Accomplished” to “we’ll get bin Laden, dead or alive.”

They’ve stretched our military to the breaking point and taken them away from the very real threat to our homeland. And in spite of the open resistance to such insanity from our own generals, this administration continues to make warlike moves toward Iran.

I fear dark days may lie ahead if we don’t get our priorities straight — and very soon. We can’t afford to ignore the warnings again. I wish I had more confidence in the president to do the right thing, to have competent people in place to counter the threat. But I don’t.

I hope I’m wrong.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

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Opinion Viewpoint

Don’t Get Fooled Again

Credibility is a precious trait, but once it is lost, it’s darned difficult to restore. That’s the main problem of the Bush administration. After the outrageously false claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the White House has no credibility. Hence, its new claims that the Iranian government is supplying weapons to the insurgents in Iraq are rightly met with great skepticism.

I notice that some of the television news outlets have already fallen into the administration’s trap. In this case, the administration wants us to accept as fact that the weapons are from Iran but argue about whether they were sent with the complicity of the government. This is an easy argument for the administration to win, since the Iranian government is tightly controlled.

But the claim that the weapons came from Iran is not an established fact. Look at the peculiar circumstances of the briefing in Baghdad on the subject. Cameras and recorders were barred. Officials conducting the briefing are to remain anonymous. No direct evidence that the weapons came from Iran was presented. Instead, reporters were told that this was “inferred from other intelligence.”

One question I have that hasn’t been answered is why a mortar shell allegedly from Iran would have markings written in English. The English writing is plain to see in the photographs.

As for the claim that the U.S. has traced the serial numbers back to Iran, how does the United States have access to Iranian serial numbers? And why, presumably, were the numbers written in the system used by the West instead of in Farsi? (Part of the great fun of traveling in the Middle East on an expense account is to come home and dump a large package of receipts — all written in Arabic — on the company accountant’s desk. The glyphs used in Iran are known as East Arabic-Indic.)

The administration also made much of the fact that some of these munitions were what is known as shaped charges, which are designed to penetrate heavy armor. It was implied that this was new on the battlefield. In fact, shaped charges have been around for decades. Since Saddam Hussein had the fourth-largest army in the world before our wars and sanctions, it’s dead certain that there were tens of thousands of shaped charges in the form of tank and artillery rounds in his arsenals.

Here we come back to another strategic blunder. There were so few U.S. soldiers in Iraq that we lacked the manpower to guard and dispose of all of the arsenals we found. Many of these were looted. There are two things Iraq has never been short of: weapons and people who know how to use them.

Another reason for suspicion is the timing. Claims that Iran was sending weapons to Iraq surfaced 16 months ago. The British stopped making the claims for lack of evidence. So why did the Bush administration choose this particular time to make the charge, and why did it do so in such a way as to ensure skepticism? The way to restore credibility is to lay all the evidence out in a transparent manner and to say truthfully what is known and what is not known.

The American people must be careful not to let this administration lead them into yet another war, this time with Iran, with the same kinds of deception it used to justify the Iraq war.

Perhaps the Iranians are supplying some weapons to Shiite militias, but the Bush administration has yet to prove it.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years. He writes for Lew Rockwell Syndicate.

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News The Fly-By

Q&A: David Romano, Middle-East Expert

It seems everyone has an opinion about the situation in Iraq. We should stay; we should go; we should make a plan for going. But it is rare to hear an informed insider talk about what has happened and how it can be fixed.

The Flyer recently spoke with David Romano, an expert on Middle Eastern minority groups and a professor of International Studies at Rhodes College, to learn exactly how conditions in Iraq have evolved.

An internationally renowned author and lecturer, Romano spent 2003 in northern Iraq, where he studied the Kurds and watched the early stages of the war unfold.

— by Zac Hill

Flyer: Why did violence in Iraq — sectarian violence as well as violence against American troops — begin to escalate in the months after U.S. intervention?

David Romano: You have to understand the background. A big segment of the Iraqi population became unemployed with the fall of Saddam’s government, and the United States was unable to replace their jobs.

Some surrounding nations didn’t want to be our next targets, and those nations largely had better intelligence than we did. Under these conditions, insurgent groups — both Islamists and Baath Party remnants — consciously targeted the Shiites to try and provoke a reaction. Prominent Shia clerics, however, were telling their followers not to look for revenge.

This led to the rise of Moqtada al-Sadr. At first he had 200 people in his militia, but he was the only one who offered a chance to strike back. The violence naturally began to get worse from there, and society became more polarized. People increasingly turned to their kin groups for protection, vengeance, and jobs.

What was the situation like when you first arrived?

When I first got to Iraq, it was relatively stable. The Kurdish part of the country is still relatively stable. There was a window of opportunity where we could have got it right.

What should we have done differently?

We would have done very well to keep elements of the Iraqi army that did not desert and offer them salaries to guard buildings, ministries, the oil facilities, and so forth. By doing that, we would be providing jobs to a couple hundred thousand military-trained, otherwise-embittered individuals. Think about it! These people aren’t possibly the kind of people that would feed well into an insurgency? Angry people with guns! Why not keep them on your payroll?

The Baathist system of control wasn’t just fear. Anyone with skill was offered a job and made dependent, to the effect that more than 50 percent of the Iraqi population was employed by the government. We went in there, and we had some wonderful ideas about the free market, private enterprise, reducing the government payroll — those all make sense economically. But economics don’t function well when everything is being blown up.

We put all these people out of work overnight, and they became especially susceptible to joining the insurgency. Syrian and Iranian agencies were offering $200 to anyone who would throw a grenade at a U.S. Army patrol. That’s a pretty good incentive to someone who is unemployed.

The other thing is that all these contracts that we have, both [paid] from Iraqi oil revenues and from U.S. taxpayers, are for rebuilding and so forth. What would have been the problem with giving those contracts to Iraqi companies? Not only would they have done it much cheaper, they would have been a lot more cooperative.

When I was in Baghdad, I saw the Iraqi Professional Corps of Engineers marching with signs that said, “We Built Our Country; We Know How To Rebuild It!”

We even installed ourselves in Saddam’s old palaces. How could the Iraqi people not notice the symbolism?

Some people think that the solution is to divide Iraq into three separate states. Will that work?

The worst part about that is the extreme destabilization of Iraq. How dangerous would it be to have the militaries of [Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey] competing for pieces of the disintegrating Iraq? In the long term, you might have autonomous nation-states with a lot less to fight about, but there are still minorities within those states.

What are the other options?

If you go for the strong, unified central government, I’m sorry, your only option is authoritarianism, because the minority groups — especially the Kurds — will fight. A hundred thousand [of them were killed] in 1987 and 1988, and they don’t want to see that happen again.

The vast majority of Iraqi Kurds doesn’t want to be part of Iraq. At the same time, they are aware of the risks if they were to separate. They would be setting a destabilizing example of Kurdish statehood to surrounding nations and would be a magnet for those nations’ Kurdish minorities. Those nations might intervene, especially Turkey. So most Kurds are willing to settle for a degree of autonomy.

We have to remember that Iraq was not a union of consenting peoples. This was a British creation. Government in Baghdad became progressively more authoritarian. Promises for a bi-national state [were] made in the 1920s. They were promised Kurdish-language rights, official bi-national recognition, and all that. All those promises were betrayed. So now you have this 80-year history of blood, massacres, and rebellions as a result of this colonial creation. What you see happening in Iraq now makes you wonder how many people put an Iraqi identity ahead of their Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen, who knows what identity.

One option is a very decentralized Iraq where each region has power, and the Sunni region is promised their fair share of the oil reserves in order to not overturn the cart. Each group can pursue enough national self-determination that they are satisfied.

The president’s latest plan calls for sending an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq. Will the troop surge help quell sectarian violence?

You know, I would love it to. But I just don’t see how. I don’t understand what sending more troops over there would accomplish.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Stand Against the Surge

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Suez-Sinai war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure in Iraq is that WE simply cannot let it continue.

It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. General John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. “You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically,” he said.

His assessment is supported by General George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of goals for the additional troops.

Bush’s call for a “surge” or “escalation” also goes against the Iraq Study Group. Talk is that the White House has planned to do anything but what the group suggested, after months of investigation and proposals based on much broader strategic implications.

About the only politician out there besides Bush actively calling for a surge is Senator John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: “The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own — impose its rule throughout the country. … By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed.” But with all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.

A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country — we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls.

We know this is wrong. The people understand. The people have the right to make this decision. And the people have the obligation to make sure their will is implemented.

Congress must work for the people in the resolution of this fiasco. Ted Kennedy’s proposal to control the money and tighten oversight is a welcome first step. And if Republicans want to continue to rubber-stamp this administration’s idiotic “plans” and go against the will of the people, they should be thrown out as soon as possible, to join their recent colleagues.

Anyone who wants to talk knowledgably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. It’s like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?

As The Washington Post‘s review notes, Chandrasekaran’s book “methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq’s fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff, or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis.”

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, “Stop it, now!”

Editor’s note: We have gotten many e-mails and letters asking why we haven’t been running Molly Ivins’ columns. This is Ivins’ most recent column, written three weeks ago. She is in an Austin, Texas, hospital now, fighting the third reoccurrence of breast cancer. Friends describe her as “very sick” but determined to fight on. We hope you will join us in wishing for her full recovery.

— Bruce VanWyngarden

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Among the various awards to government officials,
let me offer one of my own: the Oveta Culp Hobby Award for a truly dumb statement. I have twice before cited the late Mrs. Hobby, the nation’s chief health official back in the Eisenhower administration, because she somehow managed to remain oblivious to the polio panic that struck each summer. When the government ran short of the new and downright miraculous Salk polio vaccine, the rich and fortunate Mrs. Hobby offered the following explanation: “No one could have foreseen the public demand for the vaccine.”

For sheer inanity, the remark is almost impossible to beat. Yet three times in the past couple of weeks I reached for the Hobby Award, thinking she had at least been matched. The first came when General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by Senator John McCain whether a year ago he anticipated that Iraq might be on the verge of civil war. “No, sir,” the general said.

Next McCain posed the same question to General John P. Abizaid, who is in charge of everything in Iraq. He knew a year ago that tensions were high, he said. But “that they would be this high, no.”

Finally, we have the remarks of Major General William B. Caldwell, spokesman for the American military in Iraq. He was not at the Senate hearing, but he caught its flavor and then some. When asked by The New York Times if the United States had moved too quickly to replace American troops with Iraqis, he said, “I don’t think we moved too quickly. I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the sectarian violence.”

Oveta, move over.

Can these high-ranking military officers possibly mean what they said? Even before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the term “civil war” was being bruited about. This was because even a casual viewer of the Discovery Channel or some such thing knew that the nation of Iraq was an artificial creation of Britain — Gertrude Bell, Winston Churchill, et al. The casual viewer also knew that a minority of Sunnis had governed a majority of Shiites through the application of violence and a not inconsiderable amount of torture. Why this country would hold together once the locks were clipped is a question whose answer we are now seeing: It won’t.

The high-ranking officers cited above are neither stupid nor ignorant of Iraq’s history. I can only conclude, therefore, that, like countless others before them, they feel compelled to say things that fit the political ideology and delusions of their civilian bosses in the Bush administration. The official line there, of course, is that Iraq is not and will not and could not descend into civil war because, well, that would aid the evildoers.

Whatever the case, we now have to understand that uttering the word “Iraq” does to Bush administration officials what a touch of tequila does to Mel Gibson. I could spend the rest of this column quoting Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others on what would happen when GI Joe got to Baghdad or why the war had to be fought in the first place. The collected quotes are funny in one context, sad and infuriating in another: the playing of taps, the folding of the flag, and the required lie about “a hero’s death.”

I dutifully read the news about Iraq. But I recognize most administration statements as lies or, if by accident the actual truth, a mere snapshot of a moment that will change over time. More troops one day, fewer the next. We have this town one day; we don’t the next. Iraqi troops are up to snuff; oops, no they’re not. This is the babble of chaos, the telltale rhetoric of defeat.

I share the concern of what would happen to Iraq if the United States pulled out precipitously. I share the concern over what will happen if the United States stays. I share the concern of those who say that no matter whether it stays or goes the outcome will be the same. I especially share the concern of those who say that the Bush administration does not have a plan to disengage and that rather than confront the immensity of its mistake — I pity Donald Rumsfeld if he should ever lose the gift of denial — it thinks that this or that adaptation to new conditions will somehow change the outcome. It will not. The end was set at the beginning. It is better that it come sooner rather than later.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group. Tim Sampson will return next week.