Obsidian Wings

After the Election: Iraq Reality Coming Home to Roost

Via a thought-provoking diary by Spin Doctor on Tacitus
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Freedom may be on the march in Iraq, but it's very likely about to hit a serious pothole. Regardless of who wins the White House this week, what's waiting for him to deal with in Iraq is no Inaugural Ball. From Newsweek:

And so the bloody battles of the Iraq war—which never quite ended—are about to start up again in full force. Much depends on the new offensive. If it succeeds, it could mark a turning point toward Iraqi security and stability. If it fails, then the American president will find himself in a deepening quagmire on Inauguration Day. The Fallujah offensive "is going to be extremely significant," says one U.S. official involved in the planning. "It's an attempt to tighten the circle around the most problematic areas and isolate these insurgents." But it will also be "the first major test" of the new Iraqi security forces since the debacle in April, says Michael Eisenstadt, an Iraq expert at the Washington Institute. Their performance, he says, will "provide a key early indicator of the long-term prospects for U.S. success in Iraq."

For months the American people have heard, from one side, promises to "stay the course" in Iraq (George W. Bush); and from the other side, equally vague plans for gradual withdrawal (John Kerry). Both plans depend heavily on building significant Iraqi forces to take over security. But the truth is, neither party is fully reckoning with the reality of Iraq—which is that the insurgents, by most accounts, are winning. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former general who stays in touch with the Joint Chiefs, has acknowledged this privately to friends in recent weeks, NEWSWEEK has learned. The insurgents have effectively created a reign of terror throughout the country, killing thousands, driving Iraqi elites and technocrats into exile and scaring foreigners out. "Things are getting really bad," a senior Iraqi official in interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's government told NEWSWEEK last week. "The initiative is in [the insurgents'] hands right now. This approach of being lenient and accommodating has really backfired. They see this as weakness." (emphasis mine)

Endorsement

It has been absolutely clear since my first post that I would vote for the Democratic nominee for President. I would guess most of you also made up your own minds long ago—I would be a little upset with you if you hadn’t. But this is almost certainly the most important election in my life to date, and I find I can’t keep my mouth shut.

I’ve never been able to figure out George W. Bush. I couldn’t figure him out in the 2000 campaign. Here was this man who proclaimed his own compassion, who spoke of his Christian faith with all apparent sincerity—and presided over the Texas capital punishment system, a well-oiled execution assembly line that makes a mockery of equal protection of the law, the right to counsel, and due process of law, and which has probably killed at least one innocent person.

This is the quotation that explains the Bush administration for me, better than any other:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”--The Great Gatsby

I Was Wrong

Apparently I was wrong about Osama being dead. I'm not sure he references anything super-current, but I can't imagine Al Qaeda would have held on to a video for 2 years after he was dead. So I suspect he is alive after all.

How is this for a crazy denial of responsibility though--9/11 was apparently Bush's fault:

It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the country (Bush) would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone ... because he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more important...

Yeah, because after you sent the planes into the towers, the only reason why people in the top floors had to leap to their deaths or be incinerated was because Bush wasn't personally supervising the evacuation. You are such an understanding guy Mr. bin Laden.

The Ultimate Political Debate

As if the nation were not divided enough, Will Collier over at Vodka Pundit goes where angels fear to tread:

For all of us who were repulsed by yesterday's insufferably-cutesy NY Times bit on catblogging, here's the indispensible Lileks to remind us that real Americans have dogs.

In all fairness, Kevin Drum did call this upon himself.

Arnold's Seed Bears Unacceptable, er, Fruit

I love a good insult. I'm a bit thicked skinned about them so long as I'm free to fight back with the drunken-sailor language that rolls quite naturally off my tonuge. Given license to let loose, I even enjoy a good gutter-level war of words. I've had exchanges in the streets of New York that would make Howard Stern blush. But, as with everything in life, there are times and places such actions are inappropriate.

Back when Arnold Schwarzenegger mocked the California legislators who wouldn't pass his budget as "girlie men," I understood the uproar among some folks in the gay community, but never really felt it myself. (In fact, if anyone should have been insulted by that it was women, who in my experience are just as tough negotiators as men and don't deserve the slur.) Even his RNC taunt to not be "economic girlie men" was more embarassing (must he run every one-liner his writers hand him into the ground?) than insulting.

Of course Arnold's overall record on gay rights comes into play here, buying him some benefit of doubt that he wasn't slurring the gay community (again, not everyone will agree with me here), but Arnold's words may have had an unfortunate side-effect in that they lowered the bar of acceptable rhetoric.

Cut to the Kentucky US Senate race between Republican incumbent Jim Bunning and Democratic challenger Daniel Mongiardo. Top state Republicans campaigning for Bunning have been pushing the envelope on acceptable insults, with regards to slurs generally insinuating homosexuality (via Marshall):

Allies in the War on Terrorism

One of the key contentions in different outlooks on the War on Terrorism centers around the suggestion that it is in every civilized nation's best interest to control terrorism. This outlook is part of the intellectual framework that lets Kerry suggest that greatly helpful allies would have been available if only the President were better at diplomacy. The best interest argument may be true as a long term concept, but short term factors may interceed.

Saudi Arabia makes an excellent example of this. It is definitely in the long term interests of the Kingdom to eliminate Islamist terrorism because one of the major goals of such terrorism is to gain control of places like Saudi Arabia in order to create governments more like those found in Iran. Many Islamist terrorist factions are closely tied to the more fundamentalist sects found in Saudi Arabia. The government of Saudi Arabia is afraid to alienate these fundamentalist sects, so it attempts to accommodate them. Historically, one of the ways it has done so is by failing to investigate such groups when found in its own borders, so long as such groups carry out terrorism outside its borders. It also funds, or allows funding to go to these terrorist groups. This is a kind of 'throw them to the crocodiles and hope the beasts are satisfied' appeasement which can actually work quite well in the short term--though it tends to make the beast stronger in the long term. So long as the Saudi government can deflect the violence to other places, it makes some level of sense to do so. It is this type of appeasement that the administration tried to counter with the "for us or against us" idea.

Similar incentives are at work in Europe. France, especially, has a large and unassimilated Muslim population. If France can deflect terrorism onto the United States, it is in the best short-term interest of France to do so. And so long as everyone believes that the United States will act against terrorism when it gets too bad, the free rider effect comes into play. It is certainly in the best interests of all civilized countries that terrorism be dealt with. So long as the United States is forced to deal with it, and when you notice that dealing with it is going to take a long time, it may not be in the best interest of many countries to join (and especially to be seen to join) the US in actively fighting terrorism outside their borders. If the US is dealing with the problem, why attract attention to yourself? If you don't want to spend money on your military, why do so if the US will fill the gap? If the danger can be deflected onto the US, why get involved? This likely is not the total reasoning of many European governments, but it is a strong incentive to stay out of the conflicts as much as possible, and perhaps even demonize the US when they get a chance.

A similar logic operates in the Sudan and exposes much of the European rhetoric about 'just wars' and their attachment to treaties as mere words. Genocide in the Sudan is not a threat to Europe. It is a Muslim country with long-standing ties to terrorism. Why risk getting involved over ethnic cleansing which will be over after a couple hundred thousand more people are killed? The attachment to 'international law' in the form of treaties suddenly vanishes. It can't be used against the US, and might cause terrorists to notice them. So why bother with it?

All that is assuming that Europe has military might to offer. That might not be true. But in either case, Kerry's belief that Europe will be offering much to the War on Terrorism is a fantasy, and that goes double for Iraq. And that isn't even considering economic incentives which may play a part in certain country's unwillingess to engage in confrontation in the Middle East.

The incentives are not inevitabilities, of course. But I suspect that resisting them is not so much a matter of diplomacy as national outlook.

Election Week Music Blather Friday

While listening to a number of old CDs, I came across one of my favorite late 80s, early 90s bands that wasn't as successful as I would have wanted--Information Society. If you remember them at all, you would probably recognize them as the band that sang "What's On Your Mind" the techno song which sampled Dr. Spock saying "Pure, Energy. Pure, Pure, Energy". I believe they initially became popular with "Running" which is a fun song in its own right.

But their best song was "Peace & Love, Inc." It is absolutely perfect for this year's political season. The lyrics take a bit harder aim at the left I think, but there is plenty for everyone to enjoy. And the video takes aim at product marketing with: "Envy" shoes, "Morality" Deodorant, "Good Cause" bleach, "Guilt" Soap, "Family Values" toilet paper, "Shame" toothpaste, a "Clean Conscience" gun, and "Compassion" perfume. It ends with the words "We'll Protect You from Loneliness" on the screen.

Here are the lyrics:

(spoken)

Peace and Love Incorporated: because the Truth is available in limited quantities.

(sung)

Look at the world
It's a complicated place
And it's hard to keep the pace
You've got to wear a smiling face

But what we've got is a blue-light special on truth
It's the hottest thing with the youth
You've got nerves we need to soothe

If you've got to believe in something
Believe in us 'cause we make it easy

Peace and Love, Incorporated

Shop around, see if you dont agree
We think it fits you to a "T"
And the best part is its free

I do believe we've got the market cornered this time
We can make you feel fine
It could impact your bottom line

If you've got to believe in something
Believe in us 'cause we make it easy
If you've got to belong to something
Belong to us and we'll make you P.C.

Peace and Love, Incorporated

Peace and love, it's the newest cause by far
And we've got all the biggest stars
Get your politics up to par

If you've got to believe in something
Believe in us 'cause we make it easy
If you've got to belong to something
Belong to us and we'll make you P.C.
If you've got to have faith in something
Have faith in us, it can be so easy

Peace and Love, Incorporated

Still More Missing Weapons

Knight-Ridder has a new story out about looting of weapons depots in Iraq. It's worth reading in its entirety. A few excerpts:

"The more than 320 tons of missing Iraqi high explosives at center stage in the U.S. presidential election are only a fraction of the weapons-related material that's disappeared in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion last year.

Huge amounts of arms and ammunition were stolen from military sites, and there's "ample evidence" that Iraqi insurgents are firing looted weapons at U.S. troops and using some of them in car bombs and improvised explosive devices, said a senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

U.N. officials also are concerned about the disappearance of sensitive equipment and controlled materials that could be used to develop nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

"If this equipment is finding itself on the open market, then anybody with money can buy it," said Dimitri Perricos, acting head of the U.N. Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC), the U.N. weapons inspection agency. (...)

In a new disclosure, the senior U.S. military officer and another U.S. official, who also spoke on condition he not be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that an Iraqi working for U.S. intelligence alerted U.S. troops stationed near the al Qaqaa weapons facility that the installation was being looted shortly after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.

But, they said, the troops took no apparent action to halt the pillaging.

"That was one of numerous times when Iraqis warned us that ammo dumps and other places were being looted and we weren't able to respond because we didn't have anyone to send," said a senior U.S. military officer who served in Iraq. (...)

Al Qaqaa was on a classified list of Iraqi weapons facilities that the CIA provided to Pentagon and military officials before the invasion, said the U.S. intelligence official.

But when the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command produced their own list of sites that a limited number of U.S. "exploitation teams" should search, priority was given to those identified by exiled Iraqi opposition groups, he said. Al Qaqaa wasn't one of them.

"The top of the list was dominated by nuclear facilities and places where we expected to find chemical and biological weapons," he said. "Iraqi exiles had a very heavy hand in determining which places got looked at first.""

(Funny how we failed to secure the nuclear sites, then.)

Several aspects of this story are interesting. First, it's further confirmation that a large part of the problem was that we simply didn't have enough troops. ("We weren't able to respond because we didn't have anyone to send".) Second, if it's true that we were warned that al Qaqaa was being looted shortly after the fall of Baghdad, that's one more reason to doubt the claim that the DoD just doesn't know when the looting took place. (That idea has never seemed all that plausible to me. Besides, if it is true that despite knowing, from IAEA declarations, that there were huge quantities of very high explosives at al Qaqaa, we didn't bother to check it out until May, that would be damning in itself.) Third, the very idea that we might have constructed our list of priority objectives on the basis of what Ahmed Chalabi told us, and taken his word over the CIA, is completely incomprehensible to me. If this is true, what could the relevant officials possibly have been thinking? And finally, it underscores the fact that this story is not just about the explosives at al Qaqaa. As people on the right side of the blogosphere have been telling us for days, there were a lot of weapons sites in Iraq. This one was, of course, one of the largest, and we knew what was there; but of course there were others. We already know that others, including nuclear sites, were looted as well. I keep wondering: what did Rumsfeld et al think they were doing? On what possible set of assumptions could this have made any sense at all?

More on the Sudan

I'm not sure how I missed this when looking into the last post on the Sudan. Apparently Syria has been involved in testing chemical weapons on civilians in the Sudan.

It makes the European denial of genocide look completely crass.

Al Qaqaa Update

ABC News, via Josh Marshall:

"Barrels inside the Al-Qaqaa facility appear on videotape shot by ABC television affiliate KSTP of St. Paul, Minn., which had a crew embedded with the 101st Airborne Division when it passed through Al-Qaqaa on April 18, 2003 — nine days after Baghdad fell.

Experts who have studied the images say the barrels on the tape contain the high explosive HMX, and the U.N. markings on the barrels are clear.

"I talked to a former inspector who's a colleague of mine, and he confirmed that, indeed, these pictures look just like what he remembers seeing inside those bunkers," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

The barrels were found inside sealed bunkers, which American soldiers are seen on the videotape cutting through. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency sealed the bunkers where the explosives were kept just before the war began.

"The seal's critical," Albright said. "The fact that there's a photo of what looks like an IAEA seal means that what's behind those doors is HMX. They only sealed bunkers that had HMX in them."

After the bunkers were opened, the 101st was not ordered to secure the facility. A senior officer told ABC News the division would not have had nearly enough soldiers to do so.

It remains unclear how much HMX was at the facility, but what does seem clear is that the U.S. military opened the bunkers at Al-Qaqaa and left them unguarded. Since then, the material has disappeared."

You can examine the photos of the IAEA seal here.