Obsidian Wings

"More Realistic"

by hilzoy

Reuters:

"Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible."

The Spiegel interview is here:

"SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited."

Transcription error? Reckless and unrealistic assessment by someone who hasn't spent enough time on the ground? We report; you decide.

In all seriousness, Spencer Ackerman has a good analysis of the background (expletives altered):

"When those negotiations [on the terms of a continuing US presence in Iraq] began, the U.S. reportedly presented the Iraqis with terms so breathtaking that they'd embarrass Lord Curzon. Bush wanted unilateral control of Iraqi airspace; legal immunity for all U.S. troops and contractors; the unilateral right to arrest and detain any Iraqis his commanders desired, and for unspecified periods; and several military bases. When Maliki indicated discomfort over acting like Gaius Baltar on Occupied New Caprica, Bush gave another indication of his "friendship and cooperation" -- blackmail.

All this came in a political context that Bush was either unattentive to or dismissive of. Despite spotty media coverage in the U.S., the deal prompted a massive backlash in Iraq, where basically every organized political force not part of Maliki's government rejected it. Maliki's allies were likely to lose the looming provincial elections already; now he had given them the albatross of clear collaborationism. And something similar was at work in the U.S.: the candidate with a clear and consistent history of opposition to the Iraq war won the Democratic primary, while the Republican candidate backed an endless occupation that he said might last a hundred or even a thousand years.

Maliki has read the tea leaves and evidently realized what the rest of us considered obvious: that the only one demanding that he turn Iraq to permanent foreign domination is a president thoroughly discredited in his own country who'll be out of office in a few months. That president's replacement might very well decide on a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq, abrogating any deal Maliki was strongarmed into signing, at which point the U.S. would essentially be cutting Maliki off. Oh motherf*cking sh!t, Maliki surely thought, if I sign this deal, my people will run my body through the streets and hoist me from a f*cking lamppost. Not that the electricity works, but still."

It will be interesting to see how McCain responds. Thus far, he has not been forced to explain what he would do were he forced to choose between his view that withdrawal in sixteen months, with or without a timetable, would be a disastrous move that could lead to "horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide", and this earlier statement:

"Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it's a hypothetical, but it's at least possible.

McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it's obvious that we would have to leave because— if it was an elected government of Iraq— and we've been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don't see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people."

Now, perhaps, he will.

***

Amusing note from Joe Klein Karen Tumulty:

"Curious. The White House apparently just emailed the Reuters story linked above to its entire press list, with a subject line: "Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan - magazine." This hit my emailbox at 12:59PM, with the sender listed as "White House Press Releases.""

Electrocuted

by hilzoy

Note to self: if I am ever put in charge of contracting out services in the Pentagon, I will require that all work come with a warranty. Especially when its malfunction could cost people their lives. I will then insist that whoever fails to take steps to make sure that malfunctions that risk injuring or killing people are fixed is immediately fired. Then I won't have to read stories like this:

"Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.

During just one six-month period — August 2006 through January 2007 — at least 283 electrical fires destroyed or damaged American military facilities in Iraq, including the military’s largest dining hall in the country, documents obtained by The New York Times show. Two soldiers died in an electrical fire at their base near Tikrit in 2006, the records note, while another was injured while jumping from a burning guard tower in May 2007.

And while the Pentagon has previously reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted in Iraq, many more have been injured, some seriously, by shocks, according to the documents. A log compiled earlier this year at one building complex in Baghdad disclosed that soldiers complained of receiving electrical shocks in their living quarters on an almost daily basis. (...)

The Army report said KBR, the Houston-based company that is responsible for providing basic services for American troops in Iraq, including housing, did its own study and found a “systemic problem” with electrical work.

But the Pentagon did little to address the issue until a Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, was electrocuted in January while showering. His death, caused by poor electrical grounding, drew the attention of lawmakers and Pentagon leaders after his family pushed for answers. Congress and the Pentagon’s inspector general have begun investigations, and this month senior Army officials ordered electrical inspections of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR.

“We consider this to be a very serious issue,” Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday in an e-mail message, while declining to comment on the findings in the Army documents."

But not serious enough to actually do anything about until the family of a dead soldier, who should by rights have had their son with them, alive, and if not, then at least be able to mourn for him in peace, were instead forced to "push for answers." The Army ought to do right by its people, and by their families, and that means both doing what it takes to keep them alive and not forcing them to "push for answers". It also means not telling them that he might have brought his electrocution on himself when it wasn't true, which is despicable.

Back to the NYT:

Speeches And Strategy

by hilzoy

Both Obama and McCain made major foreign policy speeches today. It's worth reading both in their entirety. They are very interesting, and very different. Obama got at one of the most important differences here:

"Our men and women in uniform have accomplished every mission we have given them. What's missing in our debate about Iraq - what has been missing since before the war began - is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq and its dominance of our foreign policy. This war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize. This war diminishes our security, our standing in the world, our military, our economy, and the resources that we need to confront the challenges of the 21st century. By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe. (...)

Senator McCain wants to talk of our tactics in Iraq; I want to focus on a new strategy for Iraq and the wider world."

This is exactly right. If you read the two speeches together, it's striking how much Obama focusses on understanding our foreign policy goals not just one by one, but in terms of their relation to one another, and to our broader interests: the costs of the war in Iraq to Afghanistan, to our military, and to our broader interests; the importance of having a good Pakistan policy to Afghanistan, terrorism, and nuclear nonproliferation; the relationship of our energy policy and our alliances to each of these things.

If you look at McCain's speech, by contrast, it does not have much strategic vision at all. (It's worth noting that his major new proposal is to create separate Czar-ships for Iraq and Afghanistan: to separate, not to combine.) Here, as best I can tell, is what he says about the relationship between Iraq and Afghanistan:

"Senator Obama will tell you we can't win in Afghanistan without losing in Iraq. In fact, he has it exactly backwards. It is precisely the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to succeed in Afghanistan."

I take it that by the claim that Obama thinks "we can't win in Afghanistan without losing in Iraq", McCain is referring to the idea that we can't send more troops to Afghanistan until we bring some of them home from Iraq. This is, of course, true, and it's worth asking whether McCain's Iraq policy makes enough troops available to allow him to do what he says he wants to do in Afghanistan. He does not consider that question, as far as I can tell. And that's the only way in which he discusses the impact those two wars have on one another.

The relationship he's really interested in is quite different: it's not about the effects our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan have on one another, but the idea of using what we did in Anbar province as a model for Afghanistan:

"It is by applying the tried and true principles of counter-insurgency used in the surge -- which Senator Obama opposed -- that we will win in Afghanistan. With the right strategy and the right forces, we can succeed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I know how to win wars. And if I'm elected President, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq, with a comprehensive strategy for victory."

McCain also notes that there are differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, and that these need to be taken into account. That's good, since a lot of his speech consists in saying: we need to take the approach that has worked in Iraq, and use it in Afghanistan. And at times, he doesn't take nearly enough account of those differences. For instance, he says -- apparently about Pakistani tribes -- that "We must strengthen local tribes in the border areas who are willing to fight the foreign terrorists there -- the strategy used successfully in Anbar and elsewhere in Iraq." But there are huge, huge disanalogies between these two cases. One is that we are, thank God, not occupying Pakistan, which means both that we have a lot less control over what's going on and that thr tribes do not in any way have to deal with us. Another is that the Sunnis in Anbar province were facing the threat of an extremely hostile government composed of people they believed to be dedicated to their destruction, and needed our protection and support while they beefed up their militias. Nothing of the kind is true in Pakistan.

But to my mind, the most important difference between the two speeches, apart from the enormous differences in policy, is that Obama consistently relates one foreign policy goal to another, while McCain seems to view them in isolation. As for the policy differences, they're pretty obvious. Obama:

"I strongly stand by my plan to end this war. Now, Prime Minister Maliki's call for a timetable for the removal of U.S. forces presents a real opportunity. It comes at a time when the American general in charge of training Iraq's Security Forces has testified that Iraq's Army and Police will be ready to assume responsibility for Iraq's security in 2009. Now is the time for a responsible redeployment of our combat troops that pushes Iraq's leaders toward a political solution, rebuilds our military, and refocuses on Afghanistan and our broader security interests.

George Bush and John McCain don't have a strategy for success in Iraq - they have a strategy for staying in Iraq. They said we couldn't leave when violence was up, they say we can't leave when violence is down. They refuse to press the Iraqis to make tough choices, and they label any timetable to redeploy our troops "surrender," even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government - not to a terrorist enemy. Theirs is an endless focus on tactics inside Iraq, with no consideration of our strategy to face threats beyond Iraq's borders. (...)

So let's be clear. Senator McCain would have our troops continue to fight tour after tour of duty, and our taxpayers keep spending $10 billion a month indefinitely; I want Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future, and to reach the political accommodation necessary for long-term stability. That's victory. That's success. That's what's best for Iraq, that's what's best for America, and that's why I will end this war as President."

Exactly.

One more bit from Obama's speech is also worth thinking about. I've put it below the fold.

Packer Says, "Iraq 4-Evah!"

by publius

One can only hope that the Obama campaign will completely ignore George Packer’s political advice on Iraq:

Obama has shown, with his speech on race, that he has a talent for candor. One can imagine him speaking more honestly on Iraq. If pressed on his timetable for withdrawal, he could say, “That was always a goal, not a blueprint. When circumstances change, I don’t close my eyes—I adapt.”

It’s really hard to overstate how stupid listening to Packer would be – on both a policy and political level.

But first, a word about Packer. Look, he’s a smart guy – and Assassin’s Gate is a phenomenal book. If you don’t have it, you should go buy it – it’s that good. But let’s face it – he has some conflicts of interest here. He was a war supporter and has a vested interest in being proven correct. Plus, Packer routinely suffers from Broderian false equivalence in his recent Iraq writing, which always strains to equate the relative badness of war supporters with war critics. If only we could see above the fray, as he does…

Anyway, on to policy. To be clear, I don’t want Obama to get up and lie. If he thinks withdrawal has become an unwise policy, then he should acknowledge that. But the fact that George Packer says it’s unwise policy doesn’t make it so. While Packer apparently believes that reduced violence strengthens the case for indefinite occupation, I would argue that it does just the opposite. (By the way, what facts actually would support withdrawal? Are there any?)

Admittedly, the surge has played a partial role in reducing violence, but not as much as other events such as the Awakening political agreement and ethnic cleansing. (Notably, Packer concedes this). But reducing violence wasn’t the goal of the surge – neither is it the goal of the occupation more generally. There has to be some political endgame – and I’ve never seen this endgame articulated in anything but the most make-believe fairy tale terms.

In any event, it’s not at all obvious that our occupation is making things better over the long term. Indeed, you could just as easily argue that our ongoing presence is a long-term destabilizing force, which is hardening ethnic divisions by supporting a government that's essentially a Shiite militia with fancier clothes. Plus, Iraq is a post-colonial country whose people want us gone.

But the larger point is that there must be some endpoint – some way to know when our mission will be over. It’s not fair to our soldiers or to the Iraqi people to continue the occupation hoping for the pony.

In this sense, Packer’s “conditional engagement” is, frankly, Bush-lite in that it’s simply calling for troops to hang around while hoping longer-term political reconciliation will materialize. There’s no concrete sense at all, however, of when troops would be allowed to come home.

For instance, Packer writes that conditional engagement would (1) keep heat on the politicians; and (2) allow for a phased withdrawal based on the facts on the ground. You can dress that up however you’d like, but that’s essentially Bush’s “run out the clock” strategy. You don’t keep heat on politicians by never leaving, but by leaving. And as I’ve noted, there are apparently no facts on the ground that would justify leaving. Packer’s policy simply shifts the inevitable, politically painful decision to someone else, while allowing him to escape blame for the consequences.

But policy aside, embracing Packer’s strategy would be complete political suicide. Obama won the nomination largely because of his opposition to Iraq. McCain was forced by the dynamics of the GOP primary to hug tightly to an extremely unpopular president on his most unpopular issue. Packer is essentially urging Obama to go hug Bush from the other side.

The beauty of an Obama-McCain contest from the Democratic perspective is that it offers the type of clean contrast that Kerry couldn’t provide. War supporter vs. war opponent. Bush III v. change. And so on. To change course at this point and adopt the Bush “let’s wait and see” approach would undermine the whole thing. Again, it would be different if staying in was clearly the right policy – but it’s not. George Packer has been wrong before.

To be honest, I’ve been less than impressed with Obama in the general. Some movement to the center is to be expected – that’s American politics in the shadow of the Electoral College. But what’s troubling is how defensive he seems on the foreign policy front (Clark, AIPAC Iran pandering, etc.). It’s frustrating because his seeming lack of defensiveness on these issues is precisely why he was superior to Clinton.

On this issue, though, it’s absolutely vital that the campaign resist the defensiveness. They should take a page from Rove and flatly ignore the Packer/Broders of the world on Iraq. The country is over Iraq – they want it done. There’s no need to keep wasting American and Iraqi life to vindicate George Packer.

Returning To The Battlefield: Abdullah Salih al Ajmi

by hilzoy

Bill Roggio has a story today called "Released Guantanamo detainee behind March suicide truck bombing at Combat Outpost Inman in Mosul". The bombing itself is a few months old, and got some press at the time. From the Boston Globe:

"Pentagon officials yesterday said Ajmi, who was among more than 500 former Guantanamo inmates who have been released or transferred to other countries, was a dramatic reminder of the danger in releasing those who are avowed terrorists - even to US allies who promise to ensure they will not pose a future threat."

Several months ago, I hadn't just read the Seton Hall report on released detainees. But now that I have, I recognized the story. It's a bit more complicated than those Pentagon officials make it sound.

"While Justice Scalia is clearly wrong about the number of detainee recidivists, his larger point seems to be that the Government, not the courts, should be trusted with separating the sheep from the goats. However, one of the greatest ironies of the whole recidivism debate is that not a single detainee has been released as a result of habeas corpus. All recidivists have been released by the Department of Defense, which has never explained why it released such individuals to “return to waging war” against us. Any assessment of the relative strengths of judicial and political processes should be made with full awareness of the story of ISN 220 [Ajmi], who “returned to the fight” not as the result of any judicial ruling but rather because of a decision made by the political appointees at the Department of Defense who released him despite the objections of the military. (...)

The Combat Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) declared ISN 220 to be an enemy combatant. See Appendix 2. The Tribunal held that he was a “fighter for” the Taliban who engaged in “hostilities” against either the United States or its coalition partners. The Tribunal based its first finding that ISN 220 was a Taliban fighter on two incidents. First, he went AWOL from the Kuwaiti military so that he could travel to Afghanistan to participate in the Jihad. Second, the Taliban issued ISN 220 an AK-47, ammunition, and hand grenades. With respect to the latter finding, the Tribunal considered allegations of five events to conclude that ISN 220 engaged in hostilities: he admitted that he fought with the Taliban in the Bagram area of Afghanistan; the Taliban placed him in a defensive position to block the Northern alliance; he spent eight months on the front line at the Aiubi Center in Afghanistan; he participated in two or three fire fights against the Northern Alliance; and he retreated to the Tora Bora region, and was later captured while attempting to escape to Pakistan.

Less than a year after ISN 220’s CSRT, on May 11, 2005, the Administrative Review Board of the Department of Defense affirmed the CSRT assessments and decided that ISN 220 should be further detained. See Appendix 3. Even with the extraordinary redaction of the Review Board’s report, ample evidence apparently existed for these assessments and the recommendation for continued detention. Specifically, a Government memorandum prepared for the ARB identified three factors that favored continued detention for ISN 220: (1) he is a Taliban Fighter; (2) he participated in military operations against the coalition; and (3) he is committed to Jihad. Moreover, the ARB primarily relied upon two factual bases for its conclusion that ISN 220 was committed to Jihad:

1. [ISN 220] went AWOL [from the Kuwaiti military] because he wanted to participate in the jihad in Afghanistan but could not get leave from the military.

2. In Aug 2004, [ISN 220] wanted to make sure that when the case goes before the Tribunal, they know that he is a Jihadist, an enemy combatant, and that he will kill as many Americans as he possibly can. (Emphasis added). (...)

While the documents which have been released strongly suggest that ISN 220 should still be detained, there are no available records indicating why he was released or who is responsible for the release. The only thing that can be said with assurance is that, Justice Scalia to the contrary notwithstanding, no federal judge is responsible. Perhaps if the process were more transparent, such a grave mistake would not have been made."

So: Ajmi was captured on a battlefield. He said he was there because he wanted to join the jihad. He also said that if released, he would kill as many Americans as possible. That means that the government had plenty of evidence that he was an enemy combatant, as alleged. And this evidence wasn't somehow suspect; it was his very own statements.

All that habeas motions give a detainee is the right to ask: is the government holding me for a good reason? If the answer is 'yes', then the detainee goes back to jail. (That's why there's no problem with allowing Osama bin Laden habeas rights: there's more than enough evidence to hold him either as an enemy combatant or on any number of straightforward criminal charges, like murder.) In Ajmi's case, the military seems to have had excellent reasons for thinking that Ajmi was an enemy combatant. Had he been allowed to file a habeas motion, he would probably have been sent back to jail.

The only reason why he might have been released is if all the evidence against him was produced under torture. That seems unlikely, given that some of the evidence that he was an enemy combatant was his having been captured at Tora Bora. But even if that were true, it would indicate not a problem with our legal system, but with this administration's use of torture, which defied not only basic moral norms, but also the requirements the government should have followed if it wanted to convict actual terrorists in a court of law.

Returned To The Battlefield

by hilzoy

In his dissent in Boumedienne (pdf), Justice Scalia wrote:

"At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield."

When I read this, I wondered about the word 'returned', since it seems to assume that these detainees were enemy combatants when they were captured. But I didn't wonder whether 30 prisoners had, in fact, taken up arms against the US since their release. I don't keep track of these things, and the idea that people whom we had locked up for years, without justification, might take up arms against us didn't seem all that farfetched.

Silly me. Luckily, researchers at the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research were paying closer attention. They tracked down the sources of Scalia's claim (Scalia cites a Senate Minority Report, which cites a CNN story, which cites the DoD.) One published statement by the DoD's Principal Deputy General Counsel, made shortly before the CNN story, cites the number thirty, but gives no details. But a DoD press release issued about six weeks after the CNN story does. This press release seems to have been pulled, but luckily, a copy is included as Appendix 1 in this paper (pdf).

The first thing to notice about it is that it says that 30 detainees have returned not to the battlefield, but to "the fight". Since I have become accustomed to treating the words of this administration the same way I treat such words as "Orange Juice Drink: Made With Real Orange Juice!" (which automatically makes me wonder: OK, so exactly how many drops of orange juice per vat of corn syrup would that involve?), I naturally thought: ah, "the fight". I wonder what counts as returning to "the fight"? Luckily, the DoD elaborates:

"we are aware of dozens of cases where they have returned to militant activities, participated in anti US propaganda or other activities through intelligence gathering and media reports. (Examples: Mehsud suicide bombing in Pakistan; Tipton Three and the Road to Guantanamo; Uighurs in Albania)"

Well, this clarifies things somewhat. The Tipton Three were three British citizens who were captured in Afghanistan, and suspected of being members of al Qaeda, in part because they were thought, wrongly, to be in a videotape of a rally featuring bin Laden. After British intelligence cleared them of that charge (one of the three had in fact been working at a Curry's electronics store in Birmingham when the rally was taking place in Afghanistan), they were released. And after that, they participated in the movie The Road To Guantanamo. Apparently, this counts as "returning to the battlefield".

And then there are the Uighurs. Here's Sabin Willett:

"It turns out that clients of our firm, who were sent to Albania in 2006, were two of the 30. What fight had they returned to? Abu Bakker Qassim had published an op-ed in The New York Times. Adel Abdul Hakim had given an interview. These press statements were deemed hostile by the Department of Defense.

Surely the Pentagon was joking? They weren't.

So I can't speak for the other 28, if indeed there are another 28, but for the two men I do know about, giving hostile interviews constituted "returning to the fight.""

You can read Abu Bakker Qassim's "return to the battlefield" here. Be careful of the bullets whistling past your ears as you click through to the NYT Op-Ed page battlefield!

Last December, the researchers at Seton Hall compared the DoD's claims to publicly available government documents and concluded (pdf):

"Extending to the Government the benefit of the doubt as to ambiguous cases, the list of possible Guantánamo recidivists who could have been captured or killed on the battlefield consists of two individuals: Mohammed Ismail and Mullah Shazada. If an apartment complex in Russia falls within the definition of “battlefield,” then as of June 2007—after the Department of Defense had already cited thirty (30) as the total number of recidivists—an additional individual, Ruslan Odizhev, can be added to the list. Thus, at most—of the approximately 445 detainees who have been released from Guantánamo—three (3) detainees, or less than one percent (1%), have subsequently returned to the battlefield to be captured or killed. Two (2) other detainees (Abdul Rahman Noor and Mohammed Nayim Farouq), while not re-captured or killed, are claimed to be engaged in military activities, although the information provided by the Government in this regard cannot be cross-checked."

Since then, the DoD has changed the number of detainees it claims have returned to the battlefield from thirty to twelve, of whom six are new. (They did this before Scalia wrote his opinion, but oddly enough, he didn't mention this change.) The Seton Hall researchers (pdf):

"Of the twelve, five (5) are listed as “killed” (one of whom is ISN 220, a Kuwaiti national whose story is spelled out below), and one is listed as “at large.” There are five more listed as “arrested” and only one listed as “captured.” It is not clear what the distinction is, but it may indicate where the apprehension occurred – “on the battlefield” or elsewhere. The “arrested individuals” included two Moroccans, two Russians, and one Turkish national, all of whom were arrested in their home country. There is no information about the charges filed, nor any information that these individuals attacked or plan to attack America. Further, it is not clear that actions against Morocco, Russia, and Turkey can be fairly characterized as "return[ing] to the fight""

***

In this country, we assume that people are innocent until proven guilty. It should go without saying that innocent people will die because we adopt this principle. When we let people we suspect committed homicide go free because the government cannot prove the case against them, for instance, we run the risk that they will kill again.

We think it is worth it because we do not have the option of locking up all and only guilty people against whom we have insufficient evidence. We have to choose between letting the government lock people up when it cannot make a case against them, knowing that some, perhaps most, of these people will be innocent; and requiring that the government actually make a case against someone, in which case we will of course let some guilty people go free.

If we want to call this principle into question, it's not enough to say: if we let people go, they might kill Americans. That's what I call "cost analysis": asking whether some alternative has costs, and if it does, deciding that we can't possibly adopt it, without asking whether it has benefits as well, and whether any proposed alternative is better. Of course requiring that the government be able to make a case against people it throws in jail has costs.

But those costs are exactly the same in the rest of the law. And it would amaze me if the number of Americans who were killed during the last decade as a result of our letting people accused of homicide go free did not exceed the number killed on 9/11. Should we conclude from this fact that we should stop asking the government to prove its case against suspected murderers? That we should give up not just our right not to be thrown in jail unless there's a case against us, but also a fundamental principle of justice? I don't think so. And I don't think that terrorism is, in this respect, different from other crimes. I do think that the rules required to hold someone captured on a genuine battlefield and held as an enemy combatant should be different from those required to hold an ordinary criminal: as right-wing bloggers are forever reminding us, wartime does not allow for, say, a careful recitation of Miranda rights. But I think this holds only on actual battlefields, and this line of argument is made untenable by the Bush administration's insistence on calling the entire earth the battlefield in the war on terror.

But if we're going to get into a debate about whether the costs of taking people to be innocent until proven guilty are too high, it's crucial to know what those costs actually are. And claiming that participating in a documentary about your arrest and detention, granting an interview, or writing an op-ed constitute "returning to the fight" do not help at all. They merely darken counsel by words without knowledge.

Two Minutes A Week

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.

Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television “with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad.” He said CBS correspondents can “get in there very quickly when a story merits it.”"

Give me a break. What does it mean to say that the news division "does not get reports" from Iraq? Surely not that the reporters there are incapable of sending stories, or that they have nothing to write about. It has to mean that they are not sending things that CBS wants to put on the news. And that's very, very different.

A lot of people are quite interested in what's happening in Iraq. How many? I have no idea: my attempts to find out via Google haven't gotten me very far. But even supposing, for the sake of argument, that our interest has waned: so what? "Viewer interest" isn't static and unalterable. The media decides to hype stories all the time, and in so doing makes people care about things they wouldn't care about otherwise. The war in Iraq has a lot more intrinsic interest than the death of Anna Nicole Smith, the vagaries of Paris Hilton, or any of the other completely inane stories that the networks somehow manage to find time for. It shouldn't be beyond the imaginations of reporters and producers to find a way to bring that interest out.

And we ought to care. We are responsible for the present state of Iraq, and we ought to care what happens there. Besides, we have men and women risking their lives in Iraq. We owe both Iraqis and our troops more than 181 weekday minutes, for all three networks. That's about two minutes of Iraq coverage, per network, per week. And that's far too little.

Privatizing The Army

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block."

The obvious way to read this is as indicating that Halliburton had the connections to block any investigation of its recordkeeping. And while that's true, I'm not sure that's what's going on here. The next paragraph of the NYT story:

"Army officials denied that Mr. Smith had been removed because of the dispute, but confirmed that they had reversed his decision, arguing that blocking the payments to KBR would have eroded basic services to troops. They said that KBR had warned that if it was not paid, it would reduce payments to subcontractors, which in turn would cut back on services."

In fact, KBR did at one point threaten to stop providing basic supplies -- little things like food -- to our troops in Iraq. (I've put the account of this episode below the fold.) What that means is, to my mind, even more scandalous than simple corruption by a company with good connections. It means that we have outsourced absolutely critical functions to private companies, companies which, unlike military personnel, can threaten to stop doing their jobs without facing courts-martial. In wartime, when a company is doing something as important as providing food to our troops, the military has no choice but to cave to their demands. (That's one reason I said it was more scandalous than simple corruption: it virtually ensures that that corruption will occur, while simultanously leaving our troops at risk.)

To my mind, we should not allow any company to assume any critical function in wartime without putting in place some guarantee that it will go on performing that function whether it wants to or not. If it's impossible to do that legally, then that function should not be outsourced. Period. We cannot allow any private company to threaten to stop supplying our troops during wartime. But we have.

Department Of Hmmmm...

by hilzoy

Big news! The rules governing soldiers having sex in Afghanistan have been changed. Sex used to be forbidden. Now, it's a conundrum:

"A new order signed by Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of Combined Joint Task Force-101, has lifted a ban on sexual relations between unmarried men and women in the combat zone.

General Order No. 1 outlines a number of prohibited activities and standards of conduct for U.S. troops and civilians working for the military in Afghanistan. Previously, under the regulation, sexual relations and "intimate behavior" between men and women not married to each other were a strict no-no. The regulation also barred members of the opposite sex from going into each other’s living quarters unless they were married to each other. (...)

The new regulation warns that sex in a combat zone "can have an adverse impact on unit cohesion, morale, good order and discipline."

But sexual relations and physical intimacy between men and women not married to each other are no longer banned outright. They’re only "highly discouraged," and that’s as long as they’re "not otherwise prohibited" by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, according to the new order.

Single men and women can now also visit each other’s living quarters, as long as everyone else who lives there agrees, and as long as visitors of the opposite sex remain in the open "and not behind closed doors, partitions or other isolated or segregated areas," according to the new regulation.

Unmarried men and women who are alone together in living quarters must leave the door open, according to the new policy.

Men and women "will not cohabit with, reside or sleep with members of the opposite gender in living spaces of any kind," unless they are married or if it’s necessary for military reasons, the new policy states.

A cursory reading of the order would seem to suggest that unmarried men and women could have sex in their living quarters, as long as all other persons who live there agree, or if they left the door open, if they were otherwise alone. But that’s not the case, said Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for Regional Command East and Combined Joint Task Force-101.

"Sex in both scenarios … would be a chargeable offense under the UCMJ," Nielson-Green said, referring to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, in an e-mail to Stars and Stripes. (...)

"The bottom line is that the troops are responsible for their own behavior," Nielson-Green said. She declined to "speculate" on the conditions under which soldiers could engage in legal sexual behavior." (h/t)

So: sex used to be against the rules. Now, it isn't, but no one can think of any actual circumstances in which it would be allowed.

So, um, why did they bother to make this change?

The Costs of Polarizing War

by publius

Fred Kagan's recent screed is hardly worth the effort. It's not even an argument -- it's an attempt to shore up conservative support by demonizing liberals (or "hyper-sophisticates," as he calls them). Like many other neoconservatives, his foreign policy vision is conceptually reactionary in that it's rooted in hippie hatred and ressentiment. To the extent there's an actual argument lurking in there, it's classic Green Lantern Fallacy -- our only obstacle to success is a lack of will.

I did, though, want to address Kagan's claim that war critics are essentially rooting against our military:

The antiwar party rather gleefully seized upon recent Iraqi Security Forces operations against Sadr’s militia and other illegal gangs as proof of this — the general glee with which the antiwar party has greeted any setback in Iraq is extremely distasteful and unseemly, whatever domestic political benefits they believe they will receive from those setbacks. Even if one believes that defeat is inevitable and withdrawal necessary, no American should take pleasure in the prospect of that defeat.

Pretty distasteful stuff. Not only is this "stab in the back" rhetoric venomous and nasty, but it's not true. War skeptics feel very strongly that our current policy is wrong, dangerous, and a tremendous waste of both blood and money. The events in Basra tended to support these arguments in particularly relevant ways. Thus, airing these criticisms -- even passionately -- is hardly "glee." In Kagan's defense, it's easier to rationalize criticism as military hatred, particularly if your Iraq commentary has transformed you into an object of national ridicule. But that doesn't make the claim any more accurate.

But just for the sake of argument, let's assume that he's right. Let's assume there are substantial numbers of progressive Americans actively rooting against the effort in Iraq. If anyone is to blame for this unfortunate state of affairs, however, it's the administration and its pundit cheerleaders such as Kagan who have -- from Day 1 -- treated the war as a partisan weapon.

This is a serious point. There's a reason that successful wars require bipartisan support. When wars are conceived and maintained as purely partisan affairs, then the fates of political parties become intertwined with the fate of the war, thus creating horrible incentives. As a result, rooting against the war -- while extremely distasteful -- becomes rational for the anti-war party.

To be clear, I morally and emphatically reject this point of view. While I may disagree strongly with the war, I root for success whatever the domestic effects. But that said, you can see the rationality of the boogeymen Kagan describes. The fate of America's two primary political parties -- because of the White House's deliberate polarization strategy -- now turns on the success of the war. For instance, in 2002, the GOP consciously and loudly integrated the Iraq War into its election strategy. It did the same thing in 2004. Had the war gone well, we can all agree that the military success would have been eagerly used by the GOP (including Kagan) to bash Democrats for a generation. Thus, Bush's polarization strategy forced progressives to root for military success while simultaneously knowing that success would result in the decimation of their political party. That's not a choice people should have to be making.

(On an aside, the same thing has happened with Petraeus. Republicans have been so eager to use him for political purposes that criticism of him becomes politically rational for the Democrats.)

The larger point is that, when war is required, we need to go to war as a country. Bundling the war with domestic politics not only undermines the mission itself, but creates poisonous divisions at home. In fact, I'm starting to increasingly fear the "Weimar hangover" (i.e., the domestic effects of withdrawal). As this week's hearings illustrate, the administration's strategy is to stall and kick the can to the next administration. When we inevitably withdraw (particularly if it's a Democrat), it will be easy for the ultra-nationalists to adopt a "stab in the back" narrative that will further poison the domestic well.

The trick I think is to convince sane conservatives not to join them. Specifically, whether the "hangover" develops depends on whether fact-based conservatives remain focused on the facts or fall under the sway of the "blame the traitor liberals" narrative that Kagan is already pushing.

Iraq: Roundup

by hilzoy

This is not good at all:

"U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in the vast Shiite stronghold of Sadr City, and military officials said Friday that U.S. aircraft bombed militant positions in the southern city of Basra, as the American role in a campaign against party-backed militias appeared to expand. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the Sadr City fighting, as U.S. troops took the lead.

Four U.S. Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of U.S. weapons, along with the Mahdi Army's AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. U.S. helicopters and drones buzzed overhead.

The clashes suggested that American forces were being drawn more deeply into a broad offensive that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday, saying death squads, criminal gangs and rogue militias were the targets. The Mahdi Army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite rival of Maliki, appeared to have taken the brunt of the attacks; fighting spread to many southern cities and parts of Baghdad."

And this just makes it worse:

"Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials. With little U.S. presence in the south, and British forces in Basra confined to an air base outside the city, one administration official said that "we can't quite decipher" what is going on. It's a question, he said, of "who's got the best conspiracy" theory about why Maliki decided to act now.

In Basra, three rival Shiite groups have been trying to position themselves, sometimes through force of arms, to dominate recently approved provincial elections.

The U.S. officials, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said that they believe Iran has provided assistance in the past to all three groups: the Mahdi Army; the Badr Organization of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Iraq's largest Shiite party; and forces loyal to the Fadhila Party, which holds the Basra governor's seat. But the officials see the current conflict as a purely internal Iraqi dispute.

Some officials have concluded that Maliki himself is firing "the first salvo in upcoming elections," the administration official said.

"His dog in that fight is that he is basically allied with the Badr Corps" against forces loyal to Sadr, the official said. "It's not a pretty picture.""

It's made even less pretty by the reports that Iraqi forces are holding back and letting us take the lead, or not fighting at all, or switching sides:

"Abu Iman barely flinched when the Iraqi Government ordered his unit of special police to move against al-Mahdi Army fighters in Basra.

His response, while swift, was not what British and US military trainers who have spent the past five years schooling the Iraqi security forces would have hoped for. He and 15 of his comrades took off their uniforms, kept their government-issued rifles and went over to the other side without a second thought."

So: Maliki launched an assault on the Mahdi Army without telling us. [UPDATE: Eric Martin says: don't take the claim that we weren't told at face value. He's right. END UPDATE] We're not sure why he did this, but it appears to be about internal Iraqi politics. And yet, for some reason, our forces are heavily involved, and possibly taking the lead.

More below the fold.

"Seriously Misguided"

by hilzoy

Some people have wondered: in all those retrospectives on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, why were there so few people who actually opposed the war from the outset? Megan McArdle thinks that that's "seriously misguided":

"We learn by gambling on what we think the best answer is, and seeing how it turns out. Most of us know that we have learned more about the world, and ourselves, from failing than from success. Success can be accidental; failure is definite. Failure tells us exactly what doesn't work.

Failure tells us more than success because success is usually a matter of a whole system. And as development economists have proven over and over and over again, those complex webs of interactions are impossible to tease apart into one or two concrete actions. Things can fail, on the other hand, at a single point. And even when they fail in multiple ways, those ways are usually more obvious than the emergent interactions that produced a success. (...)

The people who were right can (and will) rewrite their memories of what they believed to show themselves in the most attractive light; they will come to honestly believe that they were more prescient than they were. (...) The people who failed will also do this. But unlike the people who were right, there is a central fact stopping them from flattering themselves too much: things are blowing up in Iraq and people are dying. Thus they will have to look for some coherent explanation."

There's something right about what McArdle says, and something wrong. To start with the first: most of us sometimes get things right, and sometimes get things wrong. Suppose God grants you the chance to question someone about an important decision, and gives you the choice: would you rather question that person after she has screwed up, or after she has gotten something right? Other things being equal, I think I'd rather question the person after she screws up, for more or less the reasons McArdle suggests. Notice, though, that in this case, we have to choose whether or not to question one and the same person after a success or a failure. The identity of that person, and with it, her good or bad judgment, her wisdom or naivete, and so forth, is held constant; and this is essential to the example.

The question McArdle claims to be asking is a different one: given a particular decision, would you rather question the people who got it right or those who got it wrong? Here what we hold constant is not the people we question, but the decision itself. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Different people have different track records. On foreign policy, George Kennan had a very good track record: he got a lot of things right, including some very difficult ones. That is in large part due to the fact that he knew a lot and had exceptionally good judgment. Jonah Goldberg, by contrast, has a terrible track record: he gets things wrong all the time, and when he gets them right, it seems to be more or less by coincidence. That is because he knows almost nothing and has terrible judgment. Their respective track records mean that on any given decision, people with good judgment, like George Kennan, are much more likely to have gotten it right than to have gotten it wrong, while the opposite is true of people with bad judgment, like Jonah Goldberg.*

If I ask myself whether I would rather hear from the people who got a given question right or wrong, I can assume that the people with good judgment on questions of that type will be overrepresented among those who got it right, and underrepresented among those who got it wrong; and that the opposite will hold true of the people with bad judgment. So one way to think about the question: who would I rather hear from? is that it is a question about whether I would rather hear from people likely to have good judgment, like George Kennan, or people who are likely to have bad judgment, like Jonah Goldberg. This is, frankly, not a hard call to make at all.

However, as McArdle notes, a given person who has just gotten something very wrong is more likely to have something interesting to say about it than she would be had she just gotten it right. If the differences between people with good judgment and people with bad judgment were very small, or the additional insight conferred by confronting one's own errors were very large, then the effects of having just made a mistake might be big enough to swamp the effect of having good judgment overall. In that case, even though the people who got something wrong would be likely to have had worse judgment initially than the people who got it right, the fact that they had just gotten something wrong might make them suddenly become more interesting and better to talk to, on the whole, than the group who got things right.

Obviously, though, this isn't the way it works. First, the difference between George Kennan and Jonah Goldberg is very, very large. Second, the fact that Jonah Goldberg has terrible judgment doesn't just lead him to screw up foreign policy; it also makes him far less likely to learn from his mistakes than George Kennan would. Someone who is thoughtful, perceptive, and insightful, and who had gotten the Iraq war wrong, might find his or her judgment changed forever, in very interesting ways. (Then again, George Kennan would be almost as likely to learn something really interesting from observing other people's errors. He would be interesting to talk to either way.) Jonah Goldberg, by contrast, seems to have learned nothing whatsoever from his mistakes. And this doesn't seem to be entirely unrelated to the defects that made him get Iraq wrong at the outset. He was a shallow, thoughtless idiot then, and he is a shallow, thoughtless idiot now.

And this is what's so wrong about what Megan McArdle says. She is making an argument whose natural application is to the question: given one person, would you be likely to learn more from her after she had gotten something right or after she had gotten something wrong? And she is extrapolating it to the quite different question: would you rather talk to the people who got a given decision right or wrong? It would be fine to extrapolate in this way if the fact that someone got that question right or wrong showed nothing whatsoever about their wisdom or judgment; if the George Kennans and Jonah Goldbergs of this world were tossed at random into either category.

But that's not the way things work. Decisions reveal things about those who make them. People who get them right are, on average, more likely to have wisdom and judgment and insight than those who get them wrong. This means that they are both more likely to be worth talking to in general, and more likely to profit from any mistakes they make, than people who get them wrong.

This is what McArdle missed. It's an interesting omission for someone who, by her own account, got Iraq wrong.

In her post, McArdle suggests that people who get a decision right are likely to revise their memories "to show themselves in the most attractive light", and that this kind of self-deception is more difficult for those who got it wrong. Her own post, with its implicit assumption that major errors do not reflect anything about the judgment of those who make them, suggests that people who get things wrong are just as prone to self-deception as the rest of us.

(See also: Richard "we were right to be wrong" Cohen.)

Bad News

by hilzoy

This could be very, very bad news:

"Serious fighting broke out Tuesday in Basra and Baghdad, Iraq’s largest cities, between restive members of Iraq’s biggest Shiite militia and Iraqi Army forces backed by American troops.

The scale and intensity of the clashes kept many residents home in Baghdad. Barrages of what appeared to be rockets hit the fortified Green Zone area for the second time in three days. In Basra, Iraq’s most important oil-exporting center, thousands of Iraqi government soldiers and police officers moved to drive out Shiite militia members who have taken over big swaths of that city.

The Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, had been observing a cease-fire that began in August and has been partly credited, along with the influx of thousands of extra American troops, with improved security in the country. But Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who leads the Mahdi Army, called Monday for a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in response to what his followers characterized as unwarranted crackdowns on them.

The violence raised fears across Iraq that the cease-fire was in danger of collapsing, erasing the security gains of the past six months."

The Guardian:

"The radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr today called for "civil revolt" after a crackdown on Shia factions in Basra killed 22 people. (...)

"We call upon all Iraqis to stage sit-ins all over Iraq as a first step," Sadr said in a statement. "And if the people's demands are not respected by the Iraqi government, the second step will be to declare civil revolt in Baghdad and all other provinces.""

IraqSlogger reports that heavy fighting has broken out in eastern Baghdad, and that many government checkpoints there have been deserted in anticipation of attacks against them. The WSJ adds:

"Residents in two Shiite-controlled neighborhoods here said armed militias have taken over rooms in several schools and stocked them with rockets, in a sign they could be gearing up for more attacks against the U.S.-backed government."

Ilan Goldenberg, who has been burrowing around in casualty statistics, explains why this is such bad news:

"The drop in violence in Iraq has generally been attributed to four elements 1) More American forces and the change in tactics to counterinsurgency; 2) The Awakening movement; 3) The Sadr ceasfire; and 4) The ethnic cleansing and physical separation of the various sides.

It's hard to say for sure, which of these factors was the most important. The Bush Administration will tell you it's all about the troop levels. I've tended to believe it's more of a mix and was most inclined towards the Anbar Awakening and the sectarian cleansing as the important factors. But when you look at the data it really seems to indicate that the Sadr ceasefire may have been the key.

If you look at the graph that MNF-I has been using on civilian casualties it looks to tell a pretty clear story. The first major drop in violence came in early 2007 before the troop surge. It looks like it was mostly based on the fact that the worst of the sectarian cleansing in Baghdad had been completed (I outlined this argument more throughly a few months back).

The second drop in violence came in September. By that time the full surge had already been in effect for 2-3 months and the Awakening had been going on for a year. The Sadr ceasefire occured on August 28 and suddenly boom a big drop in violence. That could be a coincidence and it could be that all four factors came together. But the data seems to point to the fact that the Sadr Ceasefire more then anything else is what caused the drop in violence in the early fall.

If that is in fact the case, we really have to hope that this is only a temporary spat and that the ceasefire holds. If not, the situation could deteriorate very quickly."

And just to make things even worse, don't forget that some of the Sunni militias are on strike because, for some unfathomable reason, they are not getting paid. See also Abu Aardvark.

The surge has never achieved its stated purpose: namely, to enable political progress and reconciliation between Shi'a and Sunnis. Violence has gone down, which is a wonderful thing, but it has never been clear how much of that was due to the surge itself, and how much to the fact that we paid off the Sunnis, and Sadr declared his cease-fire. I hope we're not about to find out.

4000

by hilzoy

Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

I Know It's Not News That Our Government Is Nuts. But Still.

by hilzoy

From the Department of Sometimes Our Government Is So Stupid It Just Makes Me Want To Scream:

"During his nearly four years as a translator for U.S. forces in Iraq, Saman Kareem Ahmad was known for his bravery and hard work. "Sam put his life on the line with, and for, Coalition Forces on a daily basis," wrote Marine Capt. Trent A. Gibson.

Gibson's letter was part of a thick file of support -- including commendations from the secretary of the Navy and from then-Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus -- that helped Ahmad migrate to the United States in 2006, among an initial group of 50 Iraqi and Afghan translators admitted under a special visa program.

Last month, however, the U.S. government turned down Ahmad's application for permanent residence, known as a green card. His offense: Ahmad had once been part of the Kurdish Democratic Party, which U.S. immigration officials deemed an "undesignated terrorist organization" for having sought to overthrow former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Ahmad, a Kurd, once served in the KDP's military force, which is part of the new Iraqi army. A U.S. ally, the KDP is now part of the elected government of the Kurdish region and holds seats in the Iraqi parliament. After consulting public Web sites, however, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services determined that KDP forces "conducted full-scale armed attacks and helped incite rebellions against Hussein's regime, most notably during the Iran-Iraq war, Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Ahmad's association with a group that had attempted to overthrow a government -- even as an ally in U.S.-led wars against Hussein -- rendered him "inadmissible," the agency concluded in a three-page letter dated Feb. 26."

I cannot for the life of me imagine in what possible world being a member of the KDP ought to be disqualifying. I just can't imagine it. I mean, we supported them. Moreover, they were not some random bunch of marauding thugs; they were the de facto government of part of an enclave that we established and maintained, and a significant part of their resistance was keeping Saddam's troops from reestablishing control over their part of the Kurdish region. Do we wish they hadn't done that? And does doing it make them terrorists?

We also discouraged the Kurds from trying to break away from Iraq entirely. Had they done so, members of the KDP might be members of a regular Kurdish army, as they are now members of the regular Iraqi army. Does the fact that they did not break away, partly because we exerted pretty heavy pressure on them not to, mean that everyone in the army of the de facto Kurdish government counts as a terrorist rather than a soldier?

Honestly: this is just completely crazy.

But here's the kicker:

"The second youngest of five children, Ahmad was away at college when Saddam Hussein, striking at rebellious Kurds, launched a chemical gas attack against Ahmad's home town, Halabja, in 1988. The infamous assault, in which more than 5,000 died, was often cited by the Bush administration as part of its justification for invading Iraq. It left Ahmad without a single living relative, as he has recounted to Americans many times over the past six years."

So I guess that someone in another part of the world doesn't get to engage in armed resistance to a regime that has killed his entire family with poison gas, by joining an organization that the US completely supports, without being labelled a terrorist. We, apparently, get to support that organization, invade and occupy that country, and kill any number of its inhabitants, all to overthrow a regime we don't like. But someone in that country, someone whose entire family has been wiped out in a horrific and wildly illegal attack, do not get to take up arms against it. And if they do, then no amount of service to us can overcome that original sin.

This is in every respect the opposite of the way things ought to be. It just makes me furious.

Five Years And Counting

by hilzoy

I am too angry about the war in Iraq to say anything intelligent about it. The lives lost or broken. The country shattered. The crimes in which we are complicit.

I can only hope that somehow, some way, we can begin to redeem our honor. The only way I can think of is by doing an awful lot of good in the world, living by the principles we claim to espouse, and resolving never, ever to do anything as pointlessly destructive as this again.

In the meantime, this might be a good occasion to donate to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, Fisher House, the Wounded Warrior Project (for veterans and their families); or the International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, Direct Relief, or the American Friends Service Committee (for Iraq and Iraqi refugees.) The AFSC also has a list of refugee resettlement agencies in this country. There aren't a lot of Iraqi refugees here, much to our shame, but if someone from Darfur or the Congo is trying to start a new life in your community, it would be worth giving them a hand.

Finally, if you didn't get around to it before, you can still send a check to the Capt. Thomas Casey Children'™s Fund, P.O. Box 1306, Chester, CA 96020. That's the fund set up for the children of CPT Thomas Casey, who was killed with Andy in Iraq.

***

Each war is itself, and not another war. We always get into trouble confusing wars with the ones that came before: thinking that the first Gulf War might be Vietnam; thinking that this war might be as easy as the first Gulf War. (See, e.g., Richard Cohen: "I also learned a wrong lesson from the first Gulf War, which I had supported. Predictions of a quagmire had not materialized...") But there was one huge and obvious difference between the first Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq that should have prevented anyone from assuming that our success in the first would be repeated.

The first Gulf War had a purely military objective: kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. This was popular with Kuwaitis, for obvious reasons. More to the point, however, Kuwait had not been occupied for long. There was an existing social and political structure that just needed to be put back in place. So we had no complicated political tasks to achieve within Kuwait itself. Everything we needed to do could be done with military force, and we have the best military force in the world.

Invading Iraq was, obviously, completely different. Iraqis needed to set up a society virtually from scratch. They badly needed our help: help like ensuring basic law and order after the regime fell, and protecting infrastructure from looting. Even if we had not failed utterly to do those things, though, their task would have been immensely difficult. Imagine how much is presupposed by the fact that I can walk down a street in Baltimore and assume that no one will rob me, or bundle me into a car and hold me for ransom; or by the fact that people who own warehouses or equipment yards need to protect their property against small groups of people, but not against trained private armies. There are, after all, a lot of people who need money, and yet, oddly enough, very few of them do these things. A whole lot goes into making that true: culture, policing, a whole network of shared understandings and assumptions and social mores. In a country like Iraq, when you excise a tyrannical government, all of that is gone.

Likewise, consider how difficult the Democrats are now finding it to agree on a fair resolution of the problem of the Michigan and Florida delegates. What counts as fair? we wonder. Who can we trust? Different sides have different arguments, and many of them are colorable; and yet it seems awfully hard to adjudicate. Now imagine this situation, with the following differences: (a) it's not just Michigan and Florida; the whole political system is up for grabs; (b) for that reason, there is nothing like the DNC rules to appeal to, or to base your arguments on; (c) if your side loses, you and those you love and your entire community might be killed; (d) the people on the other side are people you hate and distrust not the way people hate and distrust those who have pulled the odd unfair political trick or said something that seems way out of line, but the way people hate and distrust those who have killed their friends and families. Or, in brief: the stakes are life and death, not just for distant people but for you; there are no rules; and anything goes.

Fixing problems like these is orders of magnitude more difficult than anything we did in the first Gulf War. And no amount of purely military skill or power will do the trick.

In a sane world, we could count on people with high policy-making positions to know these things, and to bear them in mind. Apparently, we don't live in a sane world. We live in a world in which Danielle Pletka, "vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute", can describe mistakes she made before the Iraq war as follows:

"Looking back, I felt secure in the knowledge that all who yearn for freedom, once free, would use it well. I was wrong. There is no freedom gene, no inner guide that understands the virtues of civil society, of secret ballots, of political parties."

The appropriate next sentence would be: Of course, the fact that I thought there was a freedom gene means that I am a complete idiot, so having confessed this in the New York Times, I plan to retire to a life of small good works, carefully chosen so that my complete ignorance of human affairs and my staggering lack of judgment will henceforth be unable to do anyone serious damage. Alas, Ms. Pletka does not seem to have drawn the appropriate conclusion.

Having been completely let down by our government, by many policy analysts, and by a lot of people in the media, we have to remember these things ourselves. War sucks. It is horrendously destructive to everyone it touches. It can shatter entire societies. Sometimes it's necessary, just as sometimes it's necessary to amputate all your limbs, but that doesn't make it any less awful. It should never be undertaken lightly -- and it was certainly advocated lightly by a lot of conservatives. (Ledeen Doctrine, anyone?)

There should never be a rush to war, any more than there should be a rush to an outbreak of plague, or having your city hit by an asteroid, or any other utter catastrophe. Any time people seem to be rushing to war, that is a time to stop short, catch your breath, and think things through as carefully as you possibly can. Because if people are rushing to war, they have probably gone collectively insane, and it is imperative not to join them.

If the case for war is not clear, it is probably wrong. (For instance: "Though as a realist, I felt queasy about the "democratic peace theory" behind the war ("only despots make war, while democracies are inherently pacific"), I hesitantly thought, Why not? Maybe the fall of this horrifying regime would serve as an example to all the other despotisms in the neighborhood." -- "Why not?" is never, ever a good enough reason for a war.) If the case for war rests on magical thinking, it is certainly wrong. And if it relies on the idea that a country can be reconstructed essentially from scratch without enormous effort and commitment and skill and luck, then it rests on magical thinking.

If any good can come of this war, it would be that we remember these things.

***

I can't write this without quoting Richard Cohen again:

"I owe it to Tony Judt for giving me the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade, who, wrongheaded though he might have been, neatly sums it all up for me: "You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.""

Wouldn't it be nice to think so?

Richard Cohen: you were wrong to be wrong, and wrong yet again for choosing a self-gratifying fantasy over an honest acknowledgement of that fact. The idea that there is anything noble about wrongly advocating war, or that when you feel a weakening in your resolve to send good men and women to their death, the right response is to "(steady) myself by downing belts of inane criticism", is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. The heroes are the men and women, Iraqis and American, who have died*, in part, because of fantasies like these.

[UPDATE: Of course, not all the people who died were heroes. Sorry. I wrote too quickly.]

What A Tangled Web We Weave...

by hilzoy

Via Spencer Ackerman, a piece from IraqSlogger (sub. req.):

"In an act described by witnesses as verging on the "unthinkable," scores of Iraqis staged a protest against the Shi'a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Sunday inside a region known as a stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia.

On Monday, in the Kasra wa Atash area, in the Eastern part of the capitol near Sadr City, assembled protesters chanted anti-Sadr slogans, and voiced objections to the recent trends in Sadr's leadership of the Sadrist Current, the Shi'a religious tendency named after his father and his father-in-law.

The marchers chanted in Arabic: "The traitor is a soldier and we have discharged him" (i.e. from his military service). When a Slogger source asked to confirm who the "soldier" was referred to in the chant, marchers indicated that the "dismissal" was indeed directed to Muqtada al-Sadr, using the nickname "Qaddu," an Arabic nickname for the young cleric that derives from his first name."

Before you start thinking: oh goody! Sadr's people are rising up against him!, ask why they are protesting:

"They considered Sadr to have betrayed the Sadrist Current to the Americans, by his recent order that the Mahdi Army militia should stand down, and by distancing himself from Iraq's political affairs lately, witnesses said. (...)

Some marchers reportedly accused the Sadrist leadership of reaching a quiet agreement with U.S. forces in order to pacify the capital, but said they opposed such an agreement, preferring that the Sadrist current offer resistance to the American presence."

Meanwhile, eight US soldiers and an interpreter were killed yesterday, and at least 44 people were killed in Iraq today. In news that should surprise no one, a study sponsored by the Pentagon has concluded that there were no links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. In more news that should surprise no one, Gateway Pundit either can't read or thinks that saying "An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network" is the same as saying "there is no Al-Qaeda in Iraq".

News flash for Mr. Pundit: Saddam Hussein has not been in power for quite some time now. He's not even alive any more. Just saying.

(PS: Thanks again to IraqSlogger for giving me access to their site.)

Speaking Of Iraqi Justice...

by hilzoy

This is bad news:

"Two former high-ranking Shiite government officials charged with kidnapping and killing scores of Sunnis were ordered released Monday after prosecutors dropped the case. The abrupt move renewed concerns about the willingness of Iraq's leaders to act against sectarianism and cast doubts on U.S. efforts to build an independent judiciary.

The collapse of the trial stunned American and Iraqi officials who had spent more than a year assembling the case, which they said included a wide array of evidence.

"This shows that the judicial system in Iraq is horribly broken," said a U.S. legal adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly. "And it sends a terrible signal: If you are Shia, then no worries; you can do whatever you want and nothing is going to happen to you." (...)

The trial of Hakim al-Zamili, a former deputy health minister, and Brig. Gen. Hamid Hamza Alwan Abbas al-Shamari, who led the agency's security force, was the most public airing of evidence that Baghdad hospitals had become death zones for Sunnis seeking treatment there. The officials, followers of anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the feared Mahdi Army militia, were accused of organizing and supporting the murder of Sunni doctors; the use of ambulances to transfer weapons for Shiite militia members; and the torture and kidnapping of Sunni patients. (...)

Eventually the panel announced that the trial would begin on Feb. 19, but three hours after it was scheduled to begin, a spokesman for the Iraqi court system, Judge Abdul Satar Ghafur al-Bayrkdar, said the case would be delayed until March 2 because witnesses had failed to appear.

American officials, however, said evidence had emerged that one of the trial judges had promised to find the defendants not guilty and that a senior judge had ordered him to be replaced.

Witness intimidation has been one of the most significant concerns in the trial.

Many of the witnesses agreed to testify only because they believed their names would be kept secret, but their names were leaked and supporters of the former Health Ministry officials threatened to kill them or their families if they didn't recant their testimony, American officials said."

It just goes on, and it just gets worse. Eventually the charges are dropped and these men were set free.

If that doesn't depress you enough ...

Ashamed

by hilzoy

Owen West, an ex-Marine who served in Iraq:

"As a Marine, I was taught never to leave a comrade-in-arms behind on the battlefield. But that's exactly what the State Department is doing to men and women who've sacrificed everything to help our troops - our Iraqi interpreters.

When I last left Iraq 12 months ago, I promised to save two "terps" marked for assassination. Last month, I received a desperate e-mail from one of them: "Sir my situatione is so bad naw please save my life. Please help me sir."

A year after making my promise, I'm deeply ashamed that I haven't completed the mission. And I'm not alone: To help "their" terps, Marines and soldiers across the country are battling a bureaucracy that is at times more maddening than the Iraqi insurgency."

Read his account of the idiotic hoops these Iraqi interpreters are being made to jump through in order to get to safety, and weep.

Then read this:

"The State Department has stopped processing the applications of 551 Iraqi and Afghan translators seeking special visas to come to the United States, because the current legal quota of 500 visas for the program this year is about to be reached, according to department officials.

The applicants, all of whom have worked for U.S. military forces, received an e-mail notice from the State Department's National Visa Center last week. "We have temporarily stopped processing cases," the message said, adding that "the applicant should NOT make any travel arrangements, sell property or give up employment until the US Embassy or Consulate General has issued a visa."

The halt is the latest obstacle for many of the several thousand translators who have worked for U.S. military units in Iraq and Afghanistan, risking their lives and leaving their families vulnerable to retaliation from insurgents who see them as accomplices of American troops. More than 250 interpreters working for U.S. forces or their contractors have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003."

What makes this completely incomprehensible is that Congress recently passed a law increasing the quota:

"A bill sponsored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and signed into law by President Bush last month raised to 5,000 the number of special visas available this year to Iraqi translators and other Iraqis who worked for the U.S. government or American contractors in the war zone. Officials with the departments of State and Homeland Security are still analyzing the legislation to work out the details of how the new program will be implemented. (...)

Kennedy, in a statement issued yesterday, said: "It's appalling that the administration is taking so long to issue the guidance necessary to continue the Special Immigrant Visa program for Iraqis with close ties to our government. . . . Every day we delay only further endangers these heroic Iraqis who have saved American lives.""

What the article I just quoted doesn't say is that this bill was passed over a month ago. (It was actually an amendment to the Defense Reauthorization Bill, which was signed into law on Jan. 28.) We had a month to work out the details before we had to tell people who risked their lives to help us out that they'll just have to risk their lives some more.

This is shameful. It is inexcusable. When people help us out, we should help them in return. Some serious attention from the President or the Secretary of State could have prevented this. For that matter, some serious attention might have led the administration to deal with this problem a long time ago. Someday, we might once again have a President who takes his or her responsibilities seriously. That day cannot come soon enough.

Links from