Jesus it’s bad there.

NYT:

The Americans found it difficult to spot the guerrillas, though they would occasionally see a black-clad figure sprinting through a house or down a street. Some officers called in airstrikes. Others ordered Abrams tanks to blast away with their main cannons. “I got bombs; he got bombs,” Colonel Davis said. “I got more bombs than he got.”
…
Yet they also acknowledge that it is as hard as ever for the Americans to win widespread support among the people of Anbar. “It’s a very primal fight,” Colonel Davis said. “We don’t do a lot of hearts and minds out here because it’s irrelevant.”

This:

The diplomatic work of the next few months, from the Administration’s perspective, is to simultaneously convince the Sunni and Shiite leadership that a US presence is the only thing that will protect its communities from each other. To that end, a certain �enduring base� (if you will) of distrust between the two communities is a boon to US policy. Forthcoming news may make more sense interpreted in that light.

And I think he’s quite right. Notice that this general claim comes in all kinds of flavours. You can go all-out-paranoid, as usual, but there are also subtler, and more charitable interpretations available if that’s how you prefer to interpret your clusterfucks.
Continue Reading »

Here.

Interesting.

Long-time readers of this site will know that I’m obsessed with the question of long-term U.S. military bases in Iraq. I’ve made this point in a comment on the last post, but I think it’s worth promoting it to an actual post of its own: I’m not obsessed with long-term bases because I think the U.S. is going to do much harm with them, though they could, of course. In fact, I never thought it terribly likely that the U.S. would be able to get permanent basing rights in Iraq in the long term (that is, they might get permanent basing rights at some point, but would likely have that permission rescinded later by a hostile government). What I do think very, very likely is that it will be difficult for planners and administration officials to really give up the idea of permanent bases. And I think that as long as the Bush administration – or whatever administration, Republican or Democrat, comes after them – holds on to this ambition, they will do a lot of damage to Iraq in the meantime. The ambition to hold on to long-term bases will surely lead to all kinds of meddling, which is bound to do Iraq no good, and also bound to backfire.

So my fear was never really that the U.S. would succeed in getting long-term bases. It’s that it will do an awful lot of mischief before it finally realizes it can’t have them.

Bases, bases, bases.

Upyernoz reminds me how strange it is that the mainstream media has so little interest in whether U.S. bases in Iraq are supposed to be permanent.

As Upyernoz points out, the question is really important, since your view on this one question influences your view on a whole lot of other ones. Anyway, I got half-way through a longish post on the subject and then thought, “Aw, fuck it. I’ve been there, done that.”

Go read that Henley guy on neocolonialism in action.

Says Larry Diamond:

If Iraq is going to be stabilized, and if democracy is to have any chance of emerging, the terrorist and insurgent violence must be diminished. As senior American military officers keep insisting, this cannot be done through military and intelligence means alone. It requires political steps as well to widen the circle of Iraqis who have a stake in peace and order, and to take the nationalist steam out of the insurgency.

Four steps are now urgently needed. First, the Bush administration must declare that the United States will not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. Its refusal to do so has aroused Iraqi suspicions that we seek long-term domination of their country. Second, we should declare some sort of time frame (but not a rigid deadline) by which we think we can withdraw militarily�if Iraqi groups that are supporting or tolerating the violence will instead help build the new political order. Third, we need to talk directly to the (largely Sunni) political groups connected to the insurgency, some of which have been seeking to talk to the United States for more than a year now. Fourth, we need an honest broker to help mediate these discussions and build confidence in the process. This role could be played by a small international contact group consisting of a high-level representative of the United Nations and perhaps one or two of the European ambassadors now resident in Baghdad.

Both the terrorist violence and the postwar political mobilization have deepened ethnic tensions and insecurities in Iraq. Ultimately, an inclusive and federal democracy is the best way of containing these tensions. Even if we take the above steps, there is no guarantee that such a viable democracy will emerge in Iraq. However, if we do not depart more sharply from our imperial posture in Iraq, we are doomed to fail.

Good stuff, and all of it together might well produce an occupation I might be able to stomach a bit longer. But what are the chances that the Bush administration will credibly (that is, unambiguously and with real deadlines) forswear long-term military bases in Iraq? And what are the chances that the Bush administration will otherwise cease meddling in harmful ways in Iraqi politics, long-term bases or no? (E.g., covert support for favoured political parties, and if Seymour Hersh is to be believed, also stuff like ballot-stuffing. With Syria and Iran playing the same sorts of covert games in Iraq, it’s not as if the temptation for the U.S. to play them is going to diminish.)

As for the second point, the Bush administration seems dead-set against timetables. I can imagine it breaking down and producing some sort of wishy-washy time-frame, but nothing honest, clear or precise. And here Diamond seems to want it both ways: He says that the time-table should be flexible, but only the clearest and least ambiguous declaration is going to have the sort of political effects he wants.

The administration may well be moving on Diamond’s third point, as odious as it finds such talks.

And the fourth suggestion is unlikely to sit well with the Bush team, unless the group had a symbolic role only, i.e., was useless.

So we have three out of four decent suggestions which simply aren’t going anywhere. Not because they’re impossible, but because the Bush administration would refuse to carry them out, at least in a way that would do some good. Diamond says that if the Bush administration doesn’t depart from its imperial posture it’s doomed to fail. But since it obviously won’t depart from its imperial posture, it seems to me that Diamond ought to be solidly against the occupation. Is he? I’m not sure. But it seems to me that his support for it is clearly conditional, and that all that remains is to make a sober estimate as to whether those conditions are ever likely to be met. The fact that Diamond could run a better occupation than Bush ought not to weigh much with Diamond as he decides whether or not to support Bush’s occupation.

Just as before the war, commentators argued in favour of a war without looking very carefully at the particular war they were likely to get, I’m afraid that many of us – myself included – have argued in favour of the occupation by appealing to the occupation we could have if only the administration were sensible, rather than the occupation we do have, and the occupation we’re likely to have for the foreseeable future. I hope Diamond makes clear in the Slate dialogue that follows that he’s not doing that.

I would be astonished if there weren’t some substance to the latest from Seymour Hersh:

In the months before the Iraqi elections in January, President Bush approved a plan to provide covert support to certain Iraqi candidates and political parties, but rescinded the proposal because of Congressional opposition, current and former government officials said Saturday.

In a statement issued in response to questions about a report in the next issue of The New Yorker, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that “in the final analysis, the president determined and the United States government adopted a policy that we would not try – and did not try – to influence the outcome of the Iraqi election by covertly helping individual candidates for office.”

The statement appeared to leave open the question of whether any covert help was provided to parties favored by Washington, an issue about which the White House declined to elaborate.

The article, by Seymour M. Hersh, reports that the administration proceeded with the covert plan over the Congressional objections. Several senior Bush administration officials disputed that, although they recalled renewed discussions within the administration last fall about how the United States might counter what was seen as extensive Iranian support to pro-Iranian Shiite parties.

Any clandestine American effort to influence the Iraqi elections, or to provide particular support to candidates or parties seen as amenable to working with the United States, would have run counter to the Bush administration’s assertions that the vote would be free and unfettered.

Juan Cole (about whom I have the occasional reservation – wtf?) nails it:

Americans who are in a tizzy about the possibility that a Chinese company might buy the American petroleum company Unocal should stop and think how they would feel if China were actively throwing covert support to one or another American political party and buying up US congressional representatives, causing them to make policy helpful to China but harmful to, say, US workers. That is the kind of world in which Middle Easterners have been living for two centuries.

Indeed. These days my mind keeps drifting back to this.

I wish I had more time to write about this here, and indeed to write a letter to the editor. However, just take a look at the conclusion the WaPo editorial writers draw after five or six paragraphs recounting the “Carnage in Iraq”:

Yet, as the insurgents increasingly go after Iraqi civilians, one thing has become clear: Theirs is not, as many people maintained before the Jan. 30 elections, a struggle against American “occupation.” It is a fight against a legitimate government trying to operate under the principle of self-rule — and trying for the most part, notwithstanding terrible provocations, to include every ethnic group. As Mr. Rumsfeld said, their only strategy is butchery. That doesn’t mean they are sure to lose; their barbarism can go a long way toward slowing the economic and political progress that Mr. Rumsfeld said is necessary. It does mean that the United States is right to help the Iraqis battle back.

Great! Proof positive that the resistance is resistance to “legitimate government”, not resistance toward a government chosen in blind elections, without the voice of a majority of the minority Sunnis, and which has yet to call for the removal of US troops despite poll after poll saying that the majority of Iraqis want it and despite its being a campaign promise by the current Iraqi political “leaders”. I am of course not advocating violence, but the idea that resorting to the targeting of innocents is somehow a move away from the ultimate goal of getting the US the hell out of here is sheer lunacy. The “insurgents” know where the country is vulnerable, and they’re looking to make a huge dent.

Finally, the WaPo writers make my point, even though they believe otherwise. The US will never allow a regime that is not made in its own image. This is perfectly clear from what Bremer et. al. has done, and what Iraqi political leaders have refused to do. And so resistance toward–and carnage in the hopes of destabilizing–the Iraqi government (i.e., the occupation’s Iraqi government) is indeed resistance toward “the economic and political progress that Mr. Rumsfeld said is necessary.” A government committed, for reasons of might over right, to the US’s vision of economic and political progress in Iraq is a government begging for resistance. Add to that the heavy fortification of the Green Zone, and you have a recipe for a general campaign of violence could appear only to the willfully blind as a campaign against the abstract concept of legitimacy.

I don’t follow British politics very closely, but somehow I had managed to get a semi-favourable impression of Ann Clwyd. Not any more. This letter in the Guardian makes me sick:

Haifa Zangana (Comment, April 22) accuses the multinational forces in Iraq of using a “modern form of napalm” against the people of Falluja, “a crime that has been met with silence not just by Tony Blair but also by Ann Clwyd, his human rights envoy”. In fact I raised the allegations with Foreign Office minister Elizabeth Symons, who told me in her February reply that “the reports are completely without foundation. Coalition forces have not used napalm – either during operations in Falluja, or at any other time.” It’s a pity Zangana ignores those Iraqis working with great courage to rebuild the country after the horrors of Saddam.
Ann Clwyd
Prime minister’s special envoy on human rights in Iraq

There’s no charitable explanation for this letter. Clwyd must know that the U.S. used a modern form of napalm in Iraq; incompetence simply can’t suffice here as an explanation. It’s just a lie – and a depressing one too, considering what Clwyd’s job is supposed to be.

I’ve never believed that offering a humanitarian justification for the war in Iraq requires anyone to lie about U.S. conduct. So why does Clwyd act as if it does?

via

Anyone catch Meet the Press yesterday? Now I know I have no idea what it must be like to live in Iraq these days, but maybe the New York Times should stop sending its reporters there. What good are they doing? After explaining that the New York Times “has a huge operation” in Iraq, Dexter Filkins, a Times correspondant there, went on to describe the current mood in Iraq:

MR. RUSSERT: Dexter Filkins, you spent the better part of two years in Iraq. What’s your sense of how things are going?

MR. DEXTER FILKINS: I think it’s better. It feels better. I mean, you know, in the last four or five months, you’ve had two pretty significant events. One was the recapture of Fallujah, which had become a safe haven for the insurgents, and the other was the election, which I think gave a lot of Iraqis a sense that they were going to get their country back and they were going to be able to control its destiny. And I–just being on the streets there you can feel some of the anger having been drained away…So at the moment, things are feeling a little better.

Compare that with Jim Miklaszewsk’s description on the same show of a recent experience in Falluja:

Again, I’ll go back to Fallujah, because I was just there for a couple of days last week. Nine thousand homes and buildings in Fallujah were destroyed when the Marines went in in November. There have been 32,000 claims against the government by homeowners and business owners. Of those 32,000 claims, only 2,400 have been paid off so far. And when you walk in and–let’s say your house is worth $10,000. They will only give you 20 percent of the amount of your claim for now. It’s because–and those funds are controlled by the Iraqi government. They’re husbanding those funds for use in the future. And as I stood next to the line of those claimants, all you have to do is ask them what their complaint is, and within seconds, their rage surfaces, so badly at one point the cameraman said to me, “Mik, we’re about to start a riot here. I think we’d better leave.”

And the current president of the temporary council, Sheik Khaled, admitted to me that the people in Fallujah are already growing impatient, and predicted it will take at least another year before reconstruction actually begins to take hold.

Given what actually happened in Falluja (MSWord; PDF here), I’d say Mik’s view is probably the more reliable. I pity the fool who reads the NYT for international news. But I pity even more the fool who braves Iraq’s terror in order to bring us such shoddy journalism.

WaPo:

From inside a vacant building, Sgt. 1st Class Domingo Ruiz watched through a rifle scope as three cars stopped on the other side of the road. A man carrying a machine gun got out and began to transfer weapons into the trunk of one of the cars.

“Take him down,” Ruiz told a sniper.

The sniper fired his powerful M-14 rifle and the man’s head exploded, several American soldiers recalled. As he fell, more soldiers opened fire, killing at least one other insurgent. After the ambush, the Americans scooped up a piece of skull and took it back to their base as evidence of the successful mission.
…
Although Ruiz is not the highest-ranking soldier in the unit, his command over the 4th Platoon is absolute. Last fall, commanders transferred a platoon leader just 48 hours after he tangled with Ruiz.

When another young platoon leader, Lt. Colin Keating, 23, of Clinton, Md., arrived Feb. 6, Ruiz greeted him warmly and introduced him to every soldier in the platoon, but told him: “Just let me fight my war.”
…
Ruiz said the decision to pick up the skull fragment and take it back to the base was a “sarcastic” gesture to confirm the kill to the battalion. [Capt. Rob] Born, who was not present during the attack, said the soldiers picked up the fragment not as a trophy, which is prohibited under military regulations, but to confirm “that we had the remains of a terrorist.”