Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Looking For Trouble

According to this article, “Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia are filled with young volunteers eager to fight the US-led occupation forces.”

Outside, hundreds of young men chanting “Allahu Akbar,” or God is the Greatest, listened to another cleric shouting vows to fight the occupation from the rooftop.

A Mehdi Army spokesman, Amer al-Husseini, said the militia had orders to stay calm, but warned that “after they bombarded our headquarters and prayer room with Apache helicopters and tanks, we are ready to resume combat until the last drop of our blood.”

“We will never let anyone arrest our leader Moqtada Sadr,” he added, alluding a coalition arrest warrant for the firebrand in connection with the murder of a rival cleric after Saddam Hussein (news – web sites)’s regime was ousted last April.

Following several days of clashes with the US-led occupation forces across the country during which the Mehdi Army seized police stations and government offices, the coalition has vowed to destroy the militia.

“We will attack to destroy the Mehdi Army. Our offensive operations will be deliberate, they will be precise, and they will be powerful and they will succeed,” said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt.

Sadr, who is only in his early 30s and whose father and great-uncle were killed by Saddam’s regime, formed the Mehdi Army last summer after the US-led military coalition invaded Iraq (news – web sites).

[…]

A steady flow of new volunteers have been presenting themselves to mosques and Sadr offices in defiance of the coalition’s ban on militias.

Its ranks are largely composed of desperate and unemployed young men from poor Shiite areas — notably Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City which switched its name from Saddam City after the fall of the deposed regime to honor the firebrand’s slain father.

Many are also from southern Shiite cities which suffered brutal repression at the hands of Saddam’s Sunni Muslim-dominated regime.

The militiamen often wear black pants and shirts, as well as green headbands symbolizing Islam. They are fiercely attached to Sadr’s guidance and his family’s lineage of revered clerics.

Their recent fierce battles with the coalition revealed they mostly have access to light weapons, including assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns.

“We have light weapons, but our most lethal weapon is our faith in God. Nothing can defeat God’s will,” said one militiaman, Ali Hussein.

“We started new training last week. But we don’t really need to train the new recruits. Saddam had built a militarized society over decades. So we were trained by the best killer,” he said.

Let’s hope that this does not become a fraternity of aimless young men because there are a huge number of them in Iraq. The demographics of Iraq are not heartening:

Iraq is a young country: Sixty-six percent of Iraqis 15 and up are under age 35, compared with 36 percent of Americans age 15 and up.

Drip, Drip Drip

After today’s revelation that Condi and Andy didn’t follow up with the FBI after the July “domestic threat” meeting, next week’s testimony by Louis Freeh, Thomas Pickard and John Ashcroft should be much more interesting. The commission obviously has homed in on a serious weakness:

Commission officials said their evidence showed that Mr. Ashcroft had taken little interest in counterterrorism before Sept. 11 and, days before the attacks, had rejected pleas from senior F.B.I. officials for more money for counterterrorism even as intelligence agencies warned of an imminent, possibly catastrophic, terrorist attack.

They said the commission may make public a series of internal memorandums written by Thomas J. Pickard, who was the F.B.I. acting director in the summer of 2001, criticizing what he perceived to be Mr. Ashcroft’s disinterest in counterterrorism. Mr. Pickard, who did not return phone calls seeking comment, is also expected to testify next week.

But, of course, there were those structural problems, so nothing could have been done.

Important Correction: Fixed controversial typo.

Swatting That Bug In His Ear

I don’t know if anyone got this subtle point in Condi’s testimony, but it appears that there were structural impediments in the US government that meant that no one could have prevented 9/11. She did everything possible, but the structural problems meant nothing could be done. Because of the structural problems. If they had known that the terrorists were going to attack Washington and new York, they would have moved heaven and earth to stop them. But, there were these structural problems. So there was nothing they could do.

Oh and also, the August PDB was not a “warning” it was an “historical assessment.” So, even though this “historical assessment” entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States” was undertaken during the very time that George Tenet was running through the White House with his hair on fire about an impending terrorist attack, there was no reason to be alarmed. The president wanted to stop swatting flies, so they put this little bug in his ear. It was no big deal.

If only Richard Clarke had tried to “buck her up” before his September 4th memo (in which he raised the spectre of hundreds of dead Americans) about how the bureaucracy would fight implementing the terrorism policy. Maybe then she would have been more aware of how to deal with the national security bureaucracy. But then, that whole “shaking the trees” thing is bs, so probably not.

Besides, the Clinton administration should have fixed the structural problems and locked up the cockpit doors long before the Bush administration came into office. They couldn’t possibly have done anything about all that in only 233 days. They had tax cuts and missile defense to take care of.

Update: For those who didn’t know previously about the title of the August 6th memo, here’s a copy of the article in the Washington Post from Common Dreams, dated May 18, 2002.

Be All That You Can Be

Read this fascinating combat account by a female American soldier in Iraq this week The Alamo is over-rated as a tourist attraction, dammit

I can’t even grasp that we lived through it. I don’t think it’s hit me yet.

What makes it worse was that we kept trying to get reinforcements and air cover and evac, and eventually we had to do it ourselves. We called up around 1500 because it became apparent that we weren’t going to get out, requesting air cover. We thought it would be over by 1700. By then, though, we realized something else was going on—darkness falls at seven. We heard that the whole province was under control, and that Sadr’s representatives had offered a cease fire while they negotiated. No other government building in the province was not under his control. Our little force, outmanned and outgunned, held him off for better than twenty hours, and then slipped out under his nose. He wanted to keep us there, be his bargaining chips while he tightened his fist around the province. And that fucking governor went along with it. We eventually found out the governor was contacting the command and telling them, no, no Evac behind our backs. He wanted US Marines dropped off and the civilians put in the helicopters while they secured his villa and offices. His own people were running around trying to arrange Evac, and kept counter-manding him. Then he’d go on the air and countermand them. I kept overhearing conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear.

I can’t describe what it’s like. You’re wearing twenty pounds of gear in helmet and vest, and the sound the bombs make screeching in seems not so much audible as it sensory. You feel it first. You know what sound a bullet makes going through the air? SWWWWWiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhh. It seems to burrow through the air with an odd slowness, as if it were greasy and that makes it slip through the air. If I were 11 Bravo, I’d have earned my combat infantrymen’s badge, except of course the fact that I’m a woman means I don’t get stuff like that. The way the Army has it set up, it doesn’t matter if you do the job, if you’re a woman—-you’re not supposed to do it, so you don’t get acknowledgement if you do.

We didn’t sleep last night. The cease fire lasted seven hours. The attack resumed at one AM with RPGs and machine guns opening up on us from across the other bank of the river. We kept calling to Higher for Air Support, for Evac, for reinforcements. They’d say, “Sure, they’re on their way…” Twenty minutes later, we’d find out–not be told—that in fact they weren’t. This happened about eight times. During the time they weren’t reinforcing us, the enemy mined the bridge that’s the sole way out of there with IEDs. Then Higher ordered us to Evac our way across that bridge. It was explained to them over and over that the bridge was mined. They’d listen, then issue the order again.

This must be that hi-tech third wave electronic battlefield that Rummy and Newtie are so proud of. I didn’t know it was faith-based, too.

Read the whole thing. It’ll blow your mind.

Another Insider Comes Forward

In tonight’s Salon, Sidney Blumenthal reveals yet another national security staffer, Flynt Leverett, who quit the Bush administration in disgust — this time over the feckless middle east peace process. It is clear that Condi Rice is, quite simply, incompetent. But, Blumenthal doesn’t lay it all on her:

The story of the Middle East debacle, like that of the pre-9/11 terrorism fiasco, reveals the inner workings of Bush’s White House: The president, aggressive and manipulated, ignorant of his own policies and their consequences, negligent; the secretary of state, prideful, a man of misplaced gratitude, constantly in retreat; the vice president as Richelieu, secretive, conniving, at the head of a neoconservative cabal, the power behind the throne; the national security advisor, seemingly open and even vulnerable, posing as the honest broker, but deceitful and derelict, an underhanded lightweight.

Sounds right to me.

More here: U.S. Terrorism Policy Spawns Steady Staff Exodus

A Good First Step

Who could have ever predicted that members of the Shi’a majority would rebel like this? They hated Saddam and would surely be grateful that the US had liberated them. Yet, there were some little clues. Even during the exciting early days of the liberation, days when George W. Bush was so proud of his accomplishment — “I love the stories about people saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be able to express our religion, the Shia religion, on a pilgrimage…’ — there were some signs of trouble:

KARBALA, April 23, 2003 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Huge crowds of ecstatic Shiites surging through the holy city of Karbala on Wednesday, April 23, chanted slogans against a U.S.-imposed government in the second day of such protests coinciding with a major pilgrimage.

“No to an American government, no to Chalabi,” the Shiites shouted, referring to Ahmad Chalabi, the pro-U.S. leader of the Iraqi National Congress, who has returned to Iraq after decades of exile with eyes on power.

It would appear that our “enemies” have been plotting against us for some time. And, to this day, Chalabi sticks in the Shiites’ craw. His seat in the governing council is one of the seats allocated to the Shiite majority:

The composition of the Governing Council may reflect the Shia majority status for the first time ever in Iraq, but for some it does not reflect the representation. “There is an attempt to distort the truth about the Shia in order to deprive them of their rightful role,” says Sheikh Qais Al-Khazali, who runs an office for the Al-Sadr movement in Sadr City. “The Americans are not giving a chance to the true representatives of the Shia. Instead they bring people who claim to represent the Shia, like Ahmed Chalabi. He‘s a crook who‘s stolen from the bank in Jordan.”

Josh Marshall reminds us today that Ahmad’s nephew Salem is in charge of setting up the war crimes tribunal. And, Ahmad has another nephew, Ali ‘Alawi, who is the new Minister of Trade. And, then there’s Kamil Mubdir al-Kaylani, the Minister of Finance and Banking who’s a pal of Chalabi and was installed at his urging. No doubt there are more examples of Chalabi’s cronyism.

And the fact that the interloper Chalabi takes up one of the 13 Shi’a slots on the Governing Council is a real problem. Via Susan at Suburban Guerilla, I found this post from Riverbend, inside iraq, in which she points out that the marginalizing of Sadr seemed a little bit capricious, considering who else the CPR was willing to deal with:

[Sadr was]just as willing to ingratiate himself to Bremer as Al-Hakeem and Bahr Ul Iloom. The only difference is that he wasn’t given the opportunity, so now he’s a revolutionary. Apparently, someone didn’t give Bremer the memo about how when you pander to one extremist, you have to pander to them all. Hearing Abdul Aziz Al-Hakeem and Bahr Ul Iloom claim that Al-Sadr is a threat to security and stability brings about visions of the teapot and the kettle.

But, you see, we had to keep Ahmad happy and Ahmad is not well liked by the Sadr faction.

I don’t know what the hell to do about the mess we are in in Iraq. It’s truly beyond my ken. But, I can think of one thing that might make an immediate difference.

Get rid of that parasite Ahmad Chalabi and his band of cronies right this minute. Do it before it becomes a demand. Do it as a gesture of solidarity with all these ordinary Iraqis who see this opportunist for the scam artist he really is. It’s a first step.

The Last Frontier

Paul Waldman has an interesting article in The Gadflyer on faithbased missile defense.

But this administration, the entire Republican Party, and healthy numbers of Democrats are still gripped by the idea that we can erect a missile defense “shield,” a big dome sitting atop the United States that keeps us safe from all who would do us harm. The Bush administration has requested an increase of 20% in the missile defense budget for next year, to over $10 billion. The eventual cost of missile defense is hard to predict, but given that Bush wants to spend over $50 billion in the next five years alone, it’s reasonable to conclude that the total cost of the program from this point forward will easily exceed $100 billion and perhaps $200 billion. Although it’s difficult to precisely calculate what we’ve spent since the 1980s, reasonable estimates climb toward $100 billion, which has bought us…well, nothing.

It seems inexplicable that these people would continue with this quixotic obsession year after year knowing that it will not work. Except as a form of welfare for engineers, it’s hard to understand.

Unless it’s really about R&D for space-based weapons. Then it makes a little more sense.

This is another little program in the Revolution in Military Affairs and the Third Wave crapola that Rummy and the Wohlstetter crowd have been obsessing about for years (and which has shown such spectacular success here on planet earth.)

Rumsfeld personally has a vested belief in weaponized space and the National Missile Defense system, having headed the commission that in 1999 helped to persuade the Clinton Administration to push ahead with missile defense. His staff’s long-range projections envision threats not from Europe, where the Army is heavily positioned, but from Asia—possible conflicts in which Navy missiles and Air Force precision bombs would be the preferred assets.

This fantasy of a “shield” is phony. As former arms control negotiator Jonathan Dean and Jonathan Granoff of the Global Security Institute wrote back in 2001:

The rushed deployment of a costly and almost certainly unworkable national missile defense system makes no sense. But it does make sense if the underlying motive is to use the missile defense issue as grounds for moving to the weaponization of space and ultimately to its domination.

Repeated UN resolutions calling for the prevention of space weaponization have been nearly unanimous and without any no votes. Recognizing this fact, the United States, backed by only two small client states, has dared only to abstain. The community of nations will not tolerate one country’s dominance of a weaponized space. Political and ultimately military challenges will certainly be mounted to contest U.S. dominance.

Not only is this very bad for our security, it contradicts our identity as a nation. Our country was founded in response to the actions of an over-reaching, hegemonic empire. In placing weapons over everyone on the planet, the United States is in peril of over-reaching itself.

Remember. These people are always wrong about everything. They are Austin Powers, not James Bond. Gawd help us.

Pure Class

President Bush has a penchant for dishing out good-natured insults, and usually the victim laughs along. But Sammie Briery didn’t seem much amused when Bush fired one at her Tuesday.

Bush was wrapping up a town hall-style appearance at South Arkansas Community College when he let the jest fly. It was a mother joke, a blonde joke and an insult all in one.

“You and my mother go to the same hair-dye person,” Bush said to Briery, whose blondish bob bore little resemblance to Barbara Bush’s shock of white hair.

The audience in the gymnasium laughed, and Briery smiled, but replied firmly: “President Bush, I’m a natural blonde.”

“Oh, yes,” Bush agreed.

“I’m just a natural blonde,” she repeated.

“I couldn’t help myself, sorry,” Bush shrugged.

With that, Bush moved quickly to end the session. He turned to Bob Watson, superintendent of the El Dorado Public Schools who had opened the meeting by inadvertently insulting Bush.

“Governor excuse me, President,” Watson said.

Bush muttered, “How quickly they forget.”

When Watson offered to shake Bush’s hand, the president shot back: “Just don’t hug me.”

Whaddaya think? Prescription drugs?

Update:

Commenter Evan writes:

This story comes on top of the “who are you talking to?” business, where he got snippy with a reporter who called him “Sir” instead of “Mr. President”.

And then there’s the one Atrios posted, about how cutlery wasn’t allowed at his fundraising luncheon because the sound might interrupt his speech.

And a couple of weeks ago, there was that business about paving a footpath at a park he was visiting because the President’s feet aren’t supposed to touch dirt.

At this point, would it actuallly *surprise* anybody if he started wearing epaulets and sleeping in an oxygen tent?

Don’t forget the codpiece.

The Enemy

I have noticed a new proclivity among the press to call the Iraqi insurgency “the enemy.” No doubt the military sees them as such since they are exchanging gunfire. And, perhaps the CPA and the US government see see them as “the enemy” too. It’s strange, though. I thought “the enemy” was Saddam Hussein and his Sunni “bitter enders.” But, the pictures I saw of the 4 corpses being defiled in Fallujah showed that many of the perpetrators were children. Are they bitter enders, too? Are they “the enemy?”

Now we are calling Sadr and his militia “the enemy,” too. Fred Barnes is saying on Fox that the military has to “take out” the bad guys in Fallujah and Ramadi as well as “take out” Sadr and his followers before the June 30 takeover. Presumably, “taking out” means things like this:

U.S. warplanes firing rockets razed four houses in Fallujah late Tuesday, witnesses said. A doctor said 26 Iraqis, including women and children, were killed and 30 injured in the air-strike. The rockets destroyed the houses in two neighborhoods in the city after nightfall, the witnesses said.

And this:

Coalition troops opened fire on thousands of supporters of Shiite Muslim radical leader Moqtada Sadr headed towards the headquarters of the Spanish-led Plus Ultra Brigade on the outskirts of this Shiite holy city, an AFP correspondent witnessed.

And this:

Italian troops clashed with Shi’ite militiamen in the southern Iraq town of Nassiriya today in gunfights that killed around 15 Iraqis and wounded 12 Italians, the Italian military and coalition sources said.

[…]

The clashes began shortly after (0530 hrs IST) when members of a militia loyal to radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr fired on Italian forces as they began operations to restore public order after two days of violent unrest.

Major Simone Schiavone, a spokesman for the Italian military in Iraq, said Italian forces returned fire, engaging in several extended gunbattles in the middle of the town.

Witnesses said several civilians were killed and wounded in the crossfire. Four Italian military vehicles were set alight and 12 Italian troops, out of a force of around 500 involved in the operation, were lightly wounded, Schiavone said

And then there’s this:

l British officials said they had fought 18 skirmishes in a second day of clashes in Amarah near the Iranian border. Twelve Iraqis have been killed in two days of fighting, hospital officials were quoted as saying.

All those enemies (and all that “collateral damage”) from one end of Iraq to the other actually means, as a lighthearted George W. Bush laughingly explained to the press yesterday, “Well, I think there’s — my judgment is, is that the closer we come to the deadline, the more likely it is people will challenge our will. In other words, it provides a convenient excuse to attack.”

Meanwhile:

Sunni and Shi’ite residents of two Baghdad suburbs, once fierce enemies, said overnight they had put their differences aside to unite in their fight to oust the US occupying force from Iraq.

“All of Iraq is behind Moqtada al-Sadr, we are but one body, one people,” declared Sheikh Raed al-Kazami, in charge of the radical Shi’ite cleric’s offices at a mosque in the Shi’ite neighbourhood of Kazimiya, west of the Iraqi capital.

He spoke following three days of fierce clashes between militiamen loyal to Sadr that left at least 57 people dead and 236 wounded.

Al-Kazami said residents of the Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya, a stone’s throw from Kazimiya, had offered their support, as had residents from Ramadi and Fallujah, west of Baghdad, as well as residents of the northern city of Mosul.

The Muslim cleric, surrounded by armed bodyguards, said some Sunnis had even offered to join Sadr’s militia.

To prove his point he displayed about 100 men in the gardens of the mosque who were armed with Kalashnikov rifles and who stood ready to join the battle.

So the dream of a united Iraq may come to pass after all.

First they told us that we went into Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein, but there were no weapons. Then they said we went into Iraq because Saddam had worked with al Qaeda, but we have found no evidence of those ties. Finally, they insisted that the real reason we went into Iraq was to liberate the Iraqi people from their ruthless dictator. Now, Saddam is behind bars, his sons are dead and yet Iraqis from one end of the country to the other, Sunni and Shi’a alike, are “the enemies” that we must “take out.”

How generous we are. How much we love freedom. Once we “take out” all those ungrateful Iraqis, I’m sure that Iraq will be the democratic paradise we all imagined it could be and the tyrannical dominoes of Arab nationalism and Islamic Radicalism will crash into one another in rapid succession.

Today Tony Blair said:

“Our response to this should not be to run away in fright or hide away, or think that we have got it all wrong,” said Blair.

“Our response on the contrary should be to hold firm, because that’s what the Iraqi people want.”

Which Iraqi people? The freedom lovers or “the enemies?”

Unprepared

Do you think it would be too much to ask that James Carville to do a little bit of homework before he goes on Crossfire and represents the Democrats against the lying sack of excrement that calls itself Robert Novak?

Today, Novak dutifully regurgitates the Wing-nut Times’ claims that since the Clinton administration didn’t use the words al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden more than a handful of times in its national security assessment paper at the end of the last term that they were just as irresponsible about terrorism as Junior and the Retreads.

It’s all over the blogosphere this morning that the article ignores the fact that it did discuss terrorism in great detail throughout the document and even outlined possible military options.

Now, I don’t expect James Carville to immerse himself in the blogosphere, but since this article appeared in the GOP House organ, you’d think it might occur to him to question it or at least have someone on his staff look into what appears to be a total contradiction of all we have learned about Clinton’s priorities. It certainly should not come as a surprise that Cheney’s bitch might bring it up.

This happens all the time with him. Novak or Tucker Carlson hit him right between the eyes with a piece of propaganda and all he does is sputter “I know you are but what am I” instead of having the information at hand to refute the nonsense.