Crusades

Final link of the morning: Harper's scaring the shit out of me with another analysis of the Christianization of the military. The most horrifying example in this story lends it its title: "Jesus Killed Mohammad" -- taken from an incident when these young fucks thought it would be hilarious to paint that on the front of their Bradley, then ride through the holy city of Samara yelling that from their bullhorns. Both print and voice in Arabic, so the people would know they're being insulted and provoked. And what do you know, a massive battle begins against "a city full of terrorists." It's just too depressing.

down the memory hole

Shred, shred, shred.

Last month, Salon published a story reporting that U.S. Army Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez were killed by U.S. tank fire in Ramadi, Iraq, in late 2006, in an incident partially captured on video, but that an Army investigation instead blamed their deaths on enemy action. Now Salon has learned that documents relating to the two men were shredded hours after the story was published. Three soldiers at Fort Carson, Colo. — including two who were present in Ramadi during the friendly fire incident, one of them just feet from where Nelson and Suarez died — were ordered to shred two boxes full of documents about Nelson and Suarez. One of the soldiers preserved some of the documents as proof that the shredding occurred and provided them to Salon. All three soldiers, with the assistance of a U.S. senator's office, have since been relocated for their safety.

It's sure going to be hard to write the history of this regime. Which is exactly what they want.

Proconsul Petraeus

We might want to re-think our org chart here... looks like Petraeus is our chief diplomat too now. (WaPo: Petraeus Mounts Strategy Review)

The Obama Doctrine

The American Prospect interviews Obama's foreign policy team and gives him his own Doctrine. It's not just about specific foreign policy issues, but about - as he often says - "the mindset that got us into war in the first place." And more than anything, it's about Democrats finally abandoning their reflexive tendency to play Republican light because they fear looking weak.

Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades. It cuts to the heart of traditional Democratic timidity. "It's time to reject the counsel that says the American people would rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right," Obama said in a January speech. "It's time to say that we are the party that is going to be strong and right." (The Democrat who counseled that Americans wanted someone strong and wrong, not weak and right? That was Bill Clinton in 2002.)

That's a bit unfair to Clinton, I think, because it comes off as if he's advocating being wrong. I think he was just observing, accurately, the reason Dems got pummeled that year: they hadn't stood up for their beliefs. But of course his wife is Exhibit A of that, as are most of the Boomer Dems in leadership over the last 15 years.

The Obama foreign-policy team describes it as "the politics of fear," a phrase most advisers used unprompted in our conversations. "For a long time we've not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that very political fear. Obama's admonition to Democrats is much like Pope John Paul II's to the Gdansk shipyard strikers -- first, be not afraid.

A good start for a new century. If a few years too late... but it's never too late!

latest outrage

The Kos diarist I saw this first from called it "worse than Abu Ghraib." I dunno about that. But it has, I guess, similar incindiary potential in the Muslim world. Remember the allegations about Koran desecration? Well now one was used for target practice by a 4th Infantry Division sniper.

The CNN follow-up story ("Behind the Scenes: Apology for a Desecration") is pretty interesting as it chronicles the general's public apology to local religious leaders. It's very ceremonial, and a good example of the challenges in an occupation of this nature.

A former college quarterback, Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, stood facing the angry crowd. His face was grim and fixed as tribal sheikhs swirled around him.

"I am a man of honor, I am a man of character. You have my word, this will never happen again," the general told the angry crowd through loudspeakers, pounding the makeshift podium three times with his fist.

"In the most humble manner, I look in to your eyes today and I say, please forgive me and my soldiers." The act of his sniper was criminal, he said. "I've come to this land to protect you, to support you...this soldier has lost the honor to serve the United States Army and the people of Iraq here in Baghdad."

Martin stood before the crowd next, opening his address with an Islamic blessing. He announced the sergeant had been relieved of duty with prejudice; reprimanded by the commanding general with a memorandum of record attached to his military record; dismissed from the regiment and redeployed from the brigade.

Holding a new Quran in his hands, he turned to the crowd. "I hope that you'll accept this humble gift." Martin kissed the Quran and touched it to his forehead as he handed it to the tribal elders. The crowd's voice rose, "Yes, yes, to the Quran. No, no, to the devil."

But would it be enough to appease the mood in Radhwaniya? A local sheikh came to the microphone. "In the name of all the sheikhs," he said, "we declare we accept the apology that was submitted."

And the kicker, to me, was the phrase scrawled on this Koran -- "FUCK YEAH." And so the uncritical jingoist embrace of that film continues apace. Lovely.

Mission Accomplished!

Happy Mission Accomplished Day, everyone!! Yes, it's been five years. And 4,000 dead Americans - but who's counting? Wasn't Bush HAWT in that manly flight suit?

Editor & Publisher roundup of the NYT coverage of this stunt and its aftermath. One interesting note:

“The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today.”

Guess that statement is 'no longer operative'... For more, see Greg Mitchell's So Wrong for So Long.

But the worst of course are the jock-sniffing reactions of our major media figures, which Media Matters provides for your throwing-up-in-the-mouth-a-little pleasure. There's too much to quote here, but it just makes you sick over and over.

antiwar voices

In the wake of the NYT military analysts story, we're paying more attention to who was allowed on tv in 2002-3. Kevin Drum provides an alaysis done by some cats at Syracuse ("Whose Views Made the News? Media Coverage and the March to War in Iraq"):

The data flatly contradict the claim that dissenting views were "shut out" of news coverage....When the two networks are aggregated together, the distribution of source quotes is 34% supportive, 35% neutral, and 30% opposed.

What a relief! But wait. It turns out that virtually all of the supportive quotes came from the Bush administration (no surprise) while nearly all of the opposed quotes came from....

Foreigners. Yep. Despite the fact that plenty of Democratic politicians and U.S. experts opposed the war, the news networks almost completely shut off domestic sources of criticism...

There's a chart of who's in what category. So it's mostly Iraqis, UN nerds, etc. who presented the case against the war. Helpful? Hardly.

Needless to say, relying on Saddam Hussein, Jacques Chirac, and Kofi Annan to be the almost exclusive face of the anti-war movement is even worse than ignoring it. As the authors say blandly, "It is well known that source credibility is central to the persuasiveness of communication, political or otherwise. And while many Americans were skeptical of the Bush administration's motivations for a confrontation with Iraq, we would surmise that even greater skepticism infused Americans' perceptions of Saddam Hussein's arguments about why war was a bad idea."

And the American public says... La la la, I'm not listening.

history of Feith's stupidity

Lefty blog First Draft presents a series of historical posts on the idiocy/criminal maliciousness that is Doug Feith, with the purpose of reminding people that waaaaay back in 2003 people were already trying to call bullshit on his intelligence cooking. Not that anyone really noticed.

Has a link to a book Special Plans: The Blogs on Douglas Feith & the Faulty Intelligence That Led to War, which collects blog posts on the matter. Also includes:

People like ABW, who put together an exhaustive timeline of all Feith's missteps and mistakes in a Kos diary, such that you can go all the way back to 1996 to see how this mess got started.

People like Matt Yglesias, who put the blame where it really belonged, on the Congress that did absolutely zero oversight of anything Feith and his cronies were doing.

People like Jack K at The Grumpy Forrester who brought home why what Feith did isn't just some silly insider Washington issue.

And the post finishes with the funny line: "the history's worth knowing so the present mound of bullshit makes sense."

right-wing outrage tactic #347

Straight outta the Beauchamp experience, righty bloggers go straight for the accusations of lying and treachery whenever a military source steps up with a story they don't like. Hilzoy posting over at AS has a good roundup of the fallout from Obama's debate statement, which referenced:

an Army captain, who was the head of a rifle platoon, supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24, because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn't have enough ammunition; they didn't have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.

So because this has unpleasant connotations for the conduct of this wonderful war, the captain has to be destroyed. Hilzoy hits on an important aspect of the situation:

[C]onsider two things. First, the bloggers I quoted above are accusing this unnamed Captain of lying. It's not exactly clear why they think the Captain lied, or why he would go on lying to various TV networks, but that's what Curt, Rusty, and the gang seem to think. And why do they think this? For the most part*, they cite claims like this (from Ace): "Milbloggers say the platoon is the basic organic unit of the army, and troops are never picked out of a platoon to serve elsewhere", or this (from one of Steve Spruiell's correspondents): "units as small as platoons are not pulled apart like that." That is: claims that the sorts of things the Captain described never happen.

And as H says, such claims are generally problematic. ("I think that any claim of the form "X never, ever happens" are generally dubious when made about an organization as large as the US Army. They are especially dubious when made about the Army in wartime.") And so they emerge out of wish fulfillment and a desire to deny reality, more than an honest engagement with the issues. It's their same, basic reaction to Beauchamp: This couldn't happen. Blanket denial rather than actual research. And whether or not any specific instance plays out, this can never happen is hardly a mature standpoint from which to debate.

The 935

Countless lies that got us into Iraq? No, 935 of em.

And actually, if you check the study from the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, the way they limited the study means there were actually thousands more. The 935 only includes (methodology link here):

• public statements from eight top officials (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Fleischer, McClellan, and Wolfowitz)
• statements about Iraq's possession of WMDs and its relationship to Al Quaeda
• statements for which dates are known

Most emphatically, the study OMITS "indirect lies" in which they do not directly say something false, but rather convey the same misinformation through implication or inference.

...and also does not include the thousands on thousands of cases in which other Republican warmongers, pseudo-Democratic cowards, and compliant media lapdogs repeated these lies. So the power of each lie is magnified.

This is the point Rachel Maddow just made on Countdown, who added that the timing of deception implies a concerted effort -- the number of lies spiked across the eight during strategic points at which they needed to sell the war.

And OMG it's even searchable!!

Beauchamp update

This is still going on? Yesiree. No links to the right-wing rampage (at Drudge, Ace of Spades, etc) but they've been claiming SB recanted. Of course in the end it turns out that it's the Army's manipulation of information, selective leaking of documents, and Big Brother monitoring of his conversations. TNR report here.

Blackwater hijinks

More on Blackwater from Dailykos, including the fun little fact that they busted a corrupt Iraqi minister out of jail and spirited him to affluent exile in Chicago. Sweet!

Blackwater roundup

All from Salon:

Video from this week's Congressional hearing.

"Bush and Blackwater" details Blackwater's ties to a vast array of Republicans.

"The Dark Truth about Blackwater" describes the company's role in Iraq and the reasons the Bushies chose to use them.

Finally, "Blackwater by the Numbers" has screen shots (and a full pdf version here) of a Congressional memo on the eve of the hearings, which details Blackwater's contracts, role, (lack of) oversight, connections to Republicans, etc.

Vietnam revisionism

"The Best Wars of their Lives" in The Nation.

Conservatism's cherished fantasy of American omnipotence has died once again, this time in the sands of Iraq, and the grieving process has begun. But conservatives mourn differently from you and me. They begin with denial, anger and bargaining, just like everyone else. And that's where they stay--forever paralyzed by a petulant refusal to acknowledge their fantasy's passing, a simple inability to process reality.

See also Spencer Ackerman's "War-niks" in TNR.

maps of Baghdad's sectarian violence

Really good tool to understand what's going on; very similar to a map you could make of German cities in 1929-1933.

From the Petraeus/Cocker pony show this week on the Hill. Shows "ethno-sectarian violence" in neighborhoods - but also the ethnic composition of neighborhoods. And so as Matthew Yglesias writes, this actually means that violence is going down because the neighborhoods are becoming less mixed. Put that together with the fact that violence dropped *before* the surge and you have your explanation - not American troops, but the success of ethnic intimidation in getting people to re-locate into clan neighborhoods.

Iraq for Sale

The depth of corruption and depravity the Bushies unleashed in Iraq knows no bounds. The whole war was basically an unsupervised giveaway to any corporation with Republican ties. These were then given millions - billions, total - of taxpayer money with no means of accounting for it. The waste and fraud have been document in the film Iraq for Sale. But new reports are coming out all the time, including a new Rolling Stone article that details the incompetence and contempt these people display:

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

OK, I'm gonna stop reading this morning because I'm getting really angry.

insane.

This is just insane. Madness. Evil. WHAT THE FUCK:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted. Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

Pentagon creates campaign war room

From Talking Points Memo: the Pentagon is setting up a 24/7 news desk to control info coming out of Baghdad and develop rapid response to critics:

For the Pentagon, getting out Iraq information will now include a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week Iraq Communications Desk that will pump out data from Baghdad _ serving as what could be considered a campaign war room.

But you shouldn't think of this as a propaganda group, oh no!:

Less than a year ago, Smith developed plans for teams of people to "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and "correct the record" when news agencies put out what the Pentagon considered inaccurate information.

At the time, he outlined an operation that resembled a political campaign _ such as that made famous by Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign war room _ calling for a "Rapid Response" section that quickly answers opponents' assertions.

It was set up to focus more resources on the Internet and blogs and book civilian and military guests on television and radio shows.

While portions of the plan were put in place, much of it was shelved when Donald H. Rumsfeld stepped down as defense secretary and Robert Gates took over. At the time, Rumsfeld was complaining bitterly that the news media were focusing too much on bad news coming out of Iraq and not enough on progress there.

Defense officials denied that the program was a propaganda tool or that it was set up to respond to the eroding public support for the war.

Army of Dude

Army of Dude - One of the few remaining milbloggers the army hasn't yet shut down. A recent post:

What has been bothering me this whole deployment is the brevity and formality in which the media handles the death of soldiers. It always goes, “PFC John Smith, Norman, Oklahoma, killed by enemy small arms fire in Baghdad. Assigned to 1/43 Engineers, Third Infantry Division.” What a crock to read that in a paper. It would be wholly appropriate to dedicate a full color photo and a real biography in every paper in America. The anonymity of dead soldiers would evaporate and the public would be forced to look at the faces of the fallen. Would it set in progress change? Perhaps. It certainly would go to show that we’re out here every day, dying for an ideal long forgotten. As for me, I started to sign these entries with my initials long ago to avoid detection by superiors. I could and still can get in trouble for what I’ve written. Lately this blog has been passed around to dudes of every rank, and those who would be punishing me have become readers. So it’s no longer necessary to be sneaky and secretive, another anonymous soldier. My name is Alex Horton, and I’m a 22 year old from Frisco, Texas. I can recite Pulp Fiction line by line and my favorite color is blue. I want to be a journalist when I grow up, and I want to see every part of the world. For the first time in my life I’m an avid reader. Fifteen months here has been fifteen months away from Lauren, the girl I’m crazy about. This wouldn’t be much of a blog without her, as she’s the inspiration for anything creative coming out of me, my beautiful muse.

In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn’t deem that idea unpatriotic.

Herbert Hoover said, "Older men declare war. But it is the youth who must fight and die." These are the young men we can’t afford to go without. Brian Chevalier and Jesse Williams, George Bush and Secretary Gates, we’re all flesh and blood. Every life is sacred. You probably don’t know the names of the first two. But you should.

Makes me cry. This guy and other like him are the Eric Maria Remarques of our time, and I can only hope that it's him and not the Ernst Jungers who influence how this war is interpreted here after it's over.

Another recent post describes the juxtaposition of meaning and meaninglessness experienced by a self-aware soldier with the soul of a writer:

This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasbord of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second. It’s maddening to think that more than a year’s worth of blood, sweat and tears will lead to little more than a pat on the back and a hideously redundant speech from someone who did none of the bleeding, sweating or crying.

Despite being in a meaningless situation, my life has never had this much meaning. I watch the backs of my friends and they do the same for me. I’ve killed to protect them, and they’ve killed to protect me. For friends and family, being deployed is like being pregnant or surviving a car wreck; everyone is nice to you all of a sudden. People I don’t even know send me kind words and packages from all over. They came out of the woodwork knowing my plight and shared with me heartfelt hope and luck. The fact that you’re reading this now, dear reader, is a testament to that. Would you have cared about what I thought, felt or did two years ago? This position I’m in, shared by less than one percent of the U.S. population, has given me the distinct privilege of sharing my experiences and ruminations of this war, observations undiluted by perpetually delirious officials like General Petreaus and mainstream media sirens. I have felt every extreme of the human condition, physically, morally and emotionally. I’ve never laughed so hard, cried so long or felt more ashamed of myself in all of my life. In a matter of weeks it’ll be over, and I’ll have just the memories of enduring 130 degree heat, and poker games lasting well into the night. I’ll look back on the hysterical laughter during fifteen hour Baghdad clears, the terror of being pinned down by machine gun fire, the sight of a Stryker on its side and the unfolding of a body bag under the flames of a nearby school, unzipped tenderly to fit the body of Chevy as RPGs screamed overhead. Soon this place will all be in the past.

We need to bring him and his brothers home for good. Now.

mercenaries in Iraq

Oh wait, we're supposed to call them 'private contractors.' Walter Pincus writes in the Washington Post on how

While U.S. contractors have provided personal security to officials in other conflict zones, those in Iraq are now being used in all aspects of the struggle because, as the CRS report says, doing otherwise would require policymakers "to contemplate an increase in the number of U.S. troops, perhaps increasing incentives to attract volunteers or re-instituting the draft."

This has a couple implications - obviously, the ways in which they can operate in a legal gray zone and the way in which these companies become a shadow enforcement arm of unaccountable elites are among the most severe. (Indypendant article of Aug 15 by Jeremy Scahill - of Blackwater fame) Also that it proves this war is, among other things, designed to funnel money to US corporations allied with Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc.

And it suggests that The Surge is actually more expansive than we've thought, because they can funnel Blackwater into the region without having to report it to anyone.

And also it upps the number of US casualties by at least 1,000.

And it promises the future expansion of warfare around the world -- with, as a bonus, extremist religious connotations. As Scahill says in his interview with Democracy Now:

You know, something happened last year that got no attention whatsoever. In October, President Bush lifted sanctions on Christian Southern Sudan, and there have been reports now that Blackwater has been negotiating directly with the Southern Sudanese regional government to come in and start training the Christian forces of the south of Sudan. Blackwater has been itching to get into Sudan, and Erik Prince is on the board of Christian Freedom International, which is an evangelical missionary organization that has been targeting Sudan for many years.

And finally that there's a good chance our own country is going to be fucked. up. when these people come back from their mercenary adventure. Within 10-20 years after our inevitable pull-out of Iraq, we are going to have to deal with our own home-grown warlords. Of course, they're already in charge now. So how much worse can it get? Scahill:

[W]hat’s really frightening is that you have a man in Erik Prince, who is a neo-crusader, a Christian supremacist, who has been given over a half a billion dollars in federal contracts, and that's not to mention his black contracts, his secret contracts, his contracts with foreign friendly governments like Jordan. This is a man who espouses Christian supremacy, and he has been given, essentially, allowed to create a private army to defend Christendom around the world against secularists and Muslims and others, and has really been brought into the fold. He refers to Blackwater as the sort of FedEx of the Pentagon. He says if you really want a package to get somewhere, do you go with the postal service or do you go with FedEx? This is how these people view themselves. And it embodies everything that President Eisenhower prophesied would happen with the rise of an unchecked military-industrial complex. You have it all in Blackwater.

So maybe that's the best argument for keeping these insane people fighting their happy colonial wars in other countries. Because if they ran out of those to fight they'd just set up their fiefdoms here. Of course, this might just upset people the slightest bit in the countries we choose as our playgrounds, but it's not like a couple dozen pissed off brown people with box cutters could ever attack us back in any way...