Subscribe3,000 is a lot
At least 20 Iraqis were killed and more than 200 wounded in fresh violence through Baghdad and fears grew for a British hostage whose two US colleagues were savagely beheaded by Islamist captors.-The Assoc. Foreign Press, one hour ago
A year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.-Richard Perle, exactly one year ago today
On a Washington street corner, he now asked me how he had done. You have a tough job, I responded. The Bush campaign has succeeded in convincing the mainstream media that the key question is, what is Kerry's plan for Iraq? Not, say, what is Bush's plan for Iraq? If Kerry is so fortunate to win on November 2, he won't take office until January 20, and the situation in Iraq could be dramatically different. Any specific plan he tossed out now could be--and probably would be--totally irrelevant at that point. Yet Republicans and echo-chamber reporters keep asking Kerry to state precisely how he would undo Bush's mess.- David Corn
"I have two young daughters at home," I said to this Kerry aide. "If one takes a glass jar and throws it on the ground of their bedroom and smashes it into thousands of pieces, I don't point my finger at the other one and say, 'Okay, what's your plan for cleaning this up.'"
The best analogy I've seen is the Philippine-American_War.
no formal declaration of war was ever issued. Two reasons have been given for this. One is that calling the war the Philippine Insurrection made it appear to be a rebellion against a lawful government, when, in fact, the only part of the Philippines under American control was Manila. The other was to enable the American government to avoid liability to claims by veterans of the action.Nah, I don't see any parallels there.
There are estimated to be some 25,000 guerrillas in Iraq engaged in concerted acts of violence. What if there were private armies[in the US] totalling 275,000 men, armed with machine guns, assault rifles (legal again!), rocket-propelled grenades, and mortar launchers?Isn't this what the NRA does?
The latest polling numbers released today by the Iraq office of the International Republican Institute highlight the democratic aspirations of the Iraqi people. These results are from a public opinion survey fielded throughout the nation between August 10th and 20th.My my, you must really be dreading those coming elections, even more than you must be dreading the re-election in November.
2,325 household interviews distributed across Iraq's 18 governorates form the basis of IRI's fourth nation-wide poll, conducted by the Independent Institute for Administrative and Civil Society Studies (IIACSS). Respondents were split nearly evenly between men and women, with 34% of respondents living in rural areas of the country.
IRI's poll shows that a large majority of Iraqis have a positive outlook on their young democracy and the elections that are to take place by January 2005. More than 77% of respondents feel that "regular, fair elections" would be the most important political right for the Iraqi people and 58% feel that democracy in Iraq is likely to succeed. When asked about the upcoming elections, 62.2% expressed confidence that their ballot selection would be kept secret and above 75% felt that the elections would reflect the will of the Iraqi people.
Iraqis remain optimistic about the future and committed to seeing Iraq through her democratic transition. 50% disagree with the statement that "my life was better before the war." In contrast to daily media reports of the hardships of today's Iraq, more than 70% of respondents would not leave their country if given the opportunity to live elsewhere. An overwhelming majority express an optimistic streak that belies foreign naysayers, with 75% expressing hopefulness about the future.
In measuring levels of trust for various civic organizations and leaders, teachers and university professors came out on top with 79.3% of respondents answering that they either "completely trust" or "somewhat trust" leaders in the education field. 78.5% of respondents expressed trust for religious leaders. The media and tribal leaders followed with 56.8% and 54.7% respectfully.
Government officials and governing bodies have also earned the trust of the Iraqi people. President Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawer and Prime Minister Ayed Allawi are "completely" or "somewhat" trusted by 68% and 60.6% respectfully. While IRI's July/August poll showed that Iraqis were concerned with security, the Iraqi Police and Army are well-placed to deal with these concerns, with 80.3% and 71.6% of respondents expressing trust for the Iraqi men and women trying to bring about peace. The Interim Government of Iraq (IGI) is trusted by 65.1% of Iraqi citizens. Iraqi courts and judges -- critical in implementing the rule of law in Iraq -- maintain the trust of 64.4% of respondents.
The organization is almost exclusively funded by the U.S. government and related agencies. IRI's stated mission is to "support the growth of political and economic freedom, good governance and human rights around the world by educating people, parties and governments on the values and practices of democracy." However, it has also been linked to efforts to foment a violent military coup in Haiti. Max Blumenthal reports that Stanley Lucas is the program officer for the I.R.I.'s Haiti program.
One guy was laughing at me and saying how ironic it is that the Americans are being attacked with RPGs purchased with their own money. Sad to say, the U.S. taxpayer is actually funding the Iraqi resistance.One thing that struck me in Bright Shining Lie was the analysis of "Vietnamization" as one of the best resupply mechanisms for the NLF resistance in southern Vietnam. It describes the process whereby local rebel leaders would extract tithes of arms and munitions from local, well-supplied police and national guard stations. The administrators in those stations would then fabricate detailed accounts of engagements with local "enemy factions" and submit them to the Pentagon. The Pentagon would then resupply the stations with new arms and munitions.
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From the Brookings Institution is The Iraq Index: Tracking Reconstruction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq, which is updated Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
From CSIS is Progress or Peril? - Measuring Iraq's reconstruction - The Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project Here, via ReliefWeb, is an html version of its Executive Summary:
Iraq has not yet reached the realistic goals described in this report as the tipping points in any of the five sectors of reconstruction.
Both Progress or Peril ? and the Iraq Index have ample and chilling graphs and charts.
Here is a great source on topic: The War on Terrorism: Post-Saddam Iraq
And, for more background, note Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story. Mark Danner reviews The Schlesinger Report.
What is credible, or at least comprehensible, is the subtle bureaucratic strategy that has been adopted in these reports, and which has been visible, indeed obvious, from the moment the story of Abu Ghraib broke. For at that moment, in late April, a bureaucratic and political war erupted over torture and its implications, and over Abu Ghraib and how broad-reaching and damaging the scandal that bore its name was going to be. On one side were those within the administration, many of whom had opposed the use of "enhanced interrogation tactics" from the beginning, including many in the judge advocate generals' offices of the various military services and career lawyers in the Justice Department, who for the last four months have been leaking a veritable flood of documents detailing legally questionable and politically damaging administration decisions about torture and interrogation. On the other side are those at the highest political levels of the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the White House who have struggled, so far successfully, to keep Abu Ghraib from becoming what it early on threatened to be: a scandal that could bring down many senior officials in the Department of Defense, and perhaps the administration itself...
The delicate bureaucratic construction now holding the Abu Ghraib scandal firmly in check rests ultimately on President Bush's controversial decision, on February 7, 2002, to withhold protection of the Geneva Convention both from al-Qaeda and from Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The decision rested on the argument, in the words of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez, that "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," in fact, a "new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions...." In a prefiguring of later bureaucratic wars, lawyers in the State Department and many in the military services fought against this decision, arguing, prophetically, that it "would undermine the United States military culture, which is based on a strict adherence to the law of war."
For torture, this decision was Original Sin: it made legally possible the adoption of the various "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have been used at CIA secret prisons and at the US military's prison at Guantánamo Bay. As it turns out, however, for the administration, Bush's decision was also Amazing Grace, because, by implying that the US military must adhere to wholly different rules when interrogating, say, Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo, who do not enjoy Geneva Convention protection, and Iraqi insurgents at Abu Ghraib, who do, it makes it possible to argue that American interrogators, when applying the same techniques at Abu Ghraib that they had earlier used in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo, were in fact taking part not in "violent/sexual abuse incidents," like their sadistic military police colleagues, but instead in "misinterpretation/confusion incidents."
misinterpretation/confusion incidents...
And, unsurprisingly, we see emerge a strident minority: anti-Bush US troops in Iraq:
Inside dusty, barricaded camps around Iraq, groups of American troops in between missions are gathering around screens to view an unlikely choice from the US box office: "Fahrenheit 9-11," Michael Moore's controversial documentary attacking the commander-in-chief. "Everyone's watching it," says a Marine corporal at an outpost in Ramadi that is mortared by insurgents daily. "It's shaping a lot of people's image of Bush."
The film's prevalence is one sign of a discernible countercurrent among US troops in Iraq - those who blame President Bush for entangling them in what they see as a misguided war. Conventional wisdom holds that the troops are staunchly pro-Bush, and many are. But bitterness over long, dangerous deployments is producing, at a minimum, pockets of support for Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry, in part because he's seen as likely to withdraw American forces from Iraq more quickly.
"[For] 9 out of 10 of the people I talk to, it wouldn't matter who ran against Bush - they'd vote for them," said a US soldier in the southern city of Najaf, seeking out a reporter to make his views known. "People are so fed up with Iraq, and fed up with Bush." With only three weeks until an Oct. 11 deadline set for hundreds of thousands of US troops abroad to mail in absentee ballots, this segment of the military vote is important - symbolically, as a reflection on Bush as a wartime commander, and politically, as absentee ballots could end up tipping the balance in closely contested states.
Ain't we got fun.
posted by y2karl at 10:22 PM on September 21, 2004