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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.”
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?”
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.
I’m happy to see the DNC finally doing some real oppo for a change and pushing it into the media with the same finesse the GOP has shown for the last 12 years. It turns out that Dick and Dubious have been for high oil prices much more recently than 1986. Here’s hoping that this gets disseminated as well:
1999: World Oil Said Bush Would Be the Perfect Presidential Candidate to Deal With Low Oil Prices.
In 1999, World Oil wrote that Bush “would be well aware of the fact that oil prices have collapsed” and “would seem to be the perfect individual to lead the charge in doing something about the [low] price of oil.” The editorial said one possibility was that Bush and his father could persuade the Middle East to hold production, increasing prices, and that if Bush was successful in increasing the price of oil, “he could parlay his actions into substantial contributions.” [World Oil, 2/99]
1999: Cheney Praised OPEC Production Cuts That Raised Oil Prices.
According to the Associated Press in March 1999, “OPEC members agreed today to cut crude oil production by 2.1 million barrels a day and maintain lower levels of output for a full year starting April 1, oil ministers said. The group of 11 oil producing nations approved the cuts in an effort to strengthen prices and end a global oil glut.” Then-Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney praised OPEC’s decision. “I’ve been struck by the extent OPEC seems to have gotten its act together,” said Cheney. [Dow Jones, 4/12/99; Mickey Kaus, Slate, 7/28/00; AP Online, 3/23/99]
I was always somewhat confused by the comments of our brilliant National Security Advisor when she said:
“How can one mention Hitler and the U.S. president in the same sentence? And above all, how can such a comment come from the mouth of a German when one considers the sacrifices made by the United States when it acted to liberate the Germans from Hitler.”
Seeing US involvement in WWII as a sacrifice made by the United States to “liberate the Germans from Hitler” always struck me as just a tad eccentric. That it came from one of the most powerful people in the government and one who considers herself a “Europeanist” certainly gave me pause. I worried that she might not be as smart as she should be.
The most straightforward solution [to the security situation in Iraq] would be a draconian crackdown on all unrest — curfews, house-to-house searches, firing on armed rioters, mass internment, widespread use of capital punishment for terrorists, and so on.
Western democracies only have the stomach for such harsh methods, however, when they believe they are fighting truly radical evil. The Allies in postwar Germany executed large numbers of German resisters because, among other reasons, Belsen and Dachau showed that Nazism was utterly bestial and the most brutal methods of suppressing it justified. Even so, the Allied occupation of Germany was before CNN, NGOs, and the “human-rights revolution.” It is highly unlikely, even in the aftermath of Fallujah, that either the U.S. government would carry out — or American public opinion support — the execution of terrorists on a similar scale today.
That really is too bad. Some people might think that there is a tiny distinction between Germany, which invaded and occupied a huge portion of Europe, attacked Russia, declared war on the US, tried to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews and created the bloodiest carnage in the history of the world — and Iraq which we invaded and are occupying and which we ostensibly were liberating from a dictator whom we now have in custody. But they would be wrong. Obviously, the Iraqis are behaving just as badly as many of the Germans did when we liberated them from Hitler and they should, in a just world, be treated with the same iron hand.
If it weren’t for the stupid American public, the liberal media and the idiotic “human rights revolution” we could do what is necessary to liberate the Iraqis by killing large numbers of them and thereby showing them what freedom is all about. But we can’t.
Thank goodness O’Sullivan has a fallback position:
A second solution would be to establish order by bringing in massive numbers of U.S. and allied troops, imposing a regime of surveillance and supervision that is widespread and almost totalitarian but not brutal, using both human and technical intelligence to track down and remove the terrorists from society, and settling down to stay in Iraq for at least 30 years. In that way terrorist resistance might be administratively smothered over time. But since the U.S. has decided to reduce troop levels and hand over power to Iraqis in three months, this option has been foreclosed.
This would be the East German example, I guess. (Hey, when it came to occupying a country, the Soviets really knew how to keep a lid on trouble. Word to the wise.) Once again, the pussified US screwed the pooch because we don’t know how handle a bunch of ingrates who fail to realize that we only care about their freedom. Otherwise we could create a totalitarian regime for them to live under for their own good. That is, after all, why we liberated them from Saddam, the totalitarian dictator.
But, we messed up and promised to turn over the country to the Iraqis themselves. What a mistake. So:
That leaves the third option — which also happens to be the most practicable one in current circumstances — namely, handing over power to a new Iraqi government and supporting it in its suppression of terrorism. A new Iraqi government will be in an improved version of the U.S. position a year ago.
It will be feared by its opponents; it will not have shown any psychological uncertainty in the face of “resistance;” and it will have the additional advantages of being (a) Iraqi, b) at least aspiringly democratic, and (c) knowledgeable about all sorts of local conditions. This combination will give it the legitimacy and the moral self-confidence to crack down on any unrest that either last-ditch Saddamites or foreign jihadists try to mount. And it may well conclude that it needs such weapons as the internment of suspected terrorists without trial to restore order and prevent a civil war.
Of course, U.S. troops will still be needed in force to support the new regime. Nor can Washington give a blank check endorsing any methods, however brutal, that it employs. Equally however, we should not seek to impose on Baghdad the kind of constitutional restraints that cripple American police in their everyday battles against conventional crime — and that hobble Washington’s responses today to the murder of Americans in Fallujah.
Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere. We’ve had a little practice at supporting brutal puppet governments. This we know how to do. And the good thing is that we don’t have to “cripple” the Iraqi government with all those unfortunate constitutional restraints that keep the US police from being able to shoot down suspected criminals or round them up and send them to jail indefinitely without a trial. Now that’s what I call freedom.
Our Dear Leader himself said yesterday:
“We are being challenged in Iraq because there are people there that hate freedom.”
Or was it “We are being challenged in Iraq because there are people here that hate freedom?” I’ll have to check.
…with Congress and the Bush Administration reluctant to pay for more active-duty troops, the use of contractors in places like Iraq will only grow. A Pentagon official who opposes their use nonetheless detects an obvious if unsentimental virtue: “The American public doesn’t get quite as concerned when contractors are killed.”
Now that Jim Wilkinson has hung up his GI Joe costume and is bustling all over Washington smearing Richard Clarke and saying the word “comfort” 437 times per minute, they’ve had to go to the bench for Operation FUBAR’s spin team:
“Inside the marble-floored palace hall that serves as the press office of the U.S.-led coalition, Republican Party operatives lead a team of Americans who promote mostly good news about Iraq.
Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who’s now Energy Secretary, heads the office that includes a large number of former Bush campaign workers, political appointees and ex-Capitol Hill staffers.
More than one-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush’s re-election effort with Iraq a top concern. Senor and others inside the coalition say they follow strict guidelines that steer clear of politics.
One of the main goals of the Office of Strategic Communications — known as stratcom — is to ensure Americans see the positive side of the Bush administration’s invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, where 600 U.S. soldiers have died and a deadly insurgency thrives. “
(Other than that, everything is going just swimmingly.)
…The U.S. team stands in deep contrast to the British team that works alongside it, almost all of whom are civil or foreign service employees, not political appointees. Many of the British in Iraq display regional knowledge or language skills that most of the Americans lack.
They speak English, for instance.
The drive to re-elect Bush is a sensitive topic. Several coalition officials angered by what they see as CPA politicking — with U.S. accomplishments in Iraq being trumpeted to help Bush — grumbled privately, but would not go on record with complaints.
But Gordon Robison, a former CPA contractor who helped build the Pentagon-funded Al-Iraqiya television station in Baghdad, said Republicans in the press room intensely followed the Democratic presidential primaries as John Kerry emerged as the presumed nominee.
“Iraq is in danger of costing George W. Bush his presidency and the CPA’s media staff are determined to see that does not happen,” Robison said. “I had the impression in dealing with the civilians in the Green Room that they viewed their job as essentially political, promoting what the Coalition Provisional Authority is doing in Iraq as a political arm of the Bush administration,” he added.
Robison, a journalist who said his political affiliation is a private matter, left Baghdad in March after finishing his contract with U.S. defense contractor Science Applications International Corp. A new U.S. contractor, Harris Corp., has taken over the Al-Iraqiya operations.
One CPA staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity said the press office had sent targeted “good news” releases to American television, radio and newspaper outlets that were timed to deflect criticism of Bush during the Democratic primaries.
Stratcom’s schedule of news releases shows that stories were sent to media outlets in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and Virginia and other states in the days before their Democratic primaries. But the schedule also shows releases sent to Virginia, Ohio and Florida after the primaries were over. Senor said any correlation to the vote was a coincidence.
Rich Galen, 57, a well-known Republican strategist, oversees the daily news releases sent directly to media outlets in the United States. Before joining the CPA press operation late last year, Galen wrote a GOP insider column and appeared on Fox News to harpoon liberal critics of Bush.
[…]
Outside political analysts, however, said Galen’s vast expertise lies in political campaigning, not shipping radio and TV spots to local audiences. Putting a sharp strategist like him in the press room is a campaign masterstroke, said Bob Boorstin of the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan political think-tank in Washington.
“You know they’re in trouble if they shipped Rich Galen over there,” said Boorstin, who worked on four presidential campaigns, all Democratic.
“They’re desperate to control the story over there. It’s a very smart thing on their part. He knows what he’s doing.”
Galen was Newtie’s flack. He’s a master spinner. His web site says he is “what you get when you cross a political hack with a philosopher.” No joke. Here’s a little deconstruction of some typical Galen spin by Brendan Nyhan from September of 2001. This guy wrote the book.
Like all Republicans, he had himself photographed in an elaborate costume, leaning on a very butch piece of heavy equipment. He looks a little like a chorus boy in the road show of Kismet.
