Wondering why Major Hasan attacked the US Army at Fort Hood

I don't think there is much doubt now that Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 US soldiers and wounded 30 others at Fort Hood Thursday. There have clearly been a lot of reports about the event in the news since then, many inaccurate. But it is not at all clear what happened yet.

I am a retired Army Reserve Major who has spent quite a bit of time at Fort Hood. I also love the Army. It is my family, as much as is my real family. Major Hassan killed my brothers-in-arms. The emphasis is on brothers (or sisters.) But Major Hasan was also one of us. How could he do this? I know he is only a doctor and not a real soldier, but I'm an Ordnance officer and a REMF. Neither of us are (were) combat arms. We were both technicians supporting the guys at the tip of the spear. It's still my family. I need to know what the fuck happened.

The LA Times offers an early report that seems to me to get to some of the answers. But first we need to look at how he got where he is. Major Hasan was a graduate of Virginia Tech. The reports I have seen say that he graduated in 1997. He must have been a damned good student, because he convinced the Army to send him to Medical School. It's one of the Army programs designed to train Army Doctors. He obtained a degree in Osteopathic Medicine and was further trained as a psychiatrist. The training required a commitment to serve in the Army for a number of years. I think it is very important that the commitment was made well before 9/11.

There appears to be no question that Major Hasan was born in the U.S. He is a native born American. He is also a devout Muslim. Is he an eldest child? I'd bet he is. His parents are Muslim, so he has to be in order to please them. And since he is native born American, he is especially devout. He is pleasing his parents. (OK. Pop psychology. But I'll bet it is true.)But it makes him very different from his peers and it makes it very difficult for him to find a wife. He is very demanding that she be devout and practicing Muslim. The important thing is that it means that at age 39 he is still alone and without anyone to support him emotionally. He is a lonely man. Since Muslims consider dogs unclean, he probably doesn't even have a dog.

9/11 was clearly a major event in Major Hasan's life. He was a devout Muslim in the Army after Muslims had attacked America in a big way. Many "Americans" have considered the battles since then to be wars between Christian America and Islam. Then Captain Hasan clearly was questioned regarding his loyalty, even if not officially.

He as already a loner. The questions regarding his loyalty would have driven him even further into distrust of those around him. It doesn't really matter if the questions come from only one in fifty of those around him, the questions are what he would have taken to bed with him at night before falling asleep. It sounds like his profession was his social life.

But his profession was psychiatrist in the Army when the Army was at war with Muslims. And he was a Muslim. Major Hasan's job since the invasion of Iraq has been to listen to and deal with the confessions of American soldiers who very often were confessing war crimes against Muslims.

Major Hasan's identity seems to have been very much wrapped up in his religion. He is at his core a Muslim. How does he feel listening to people who have killed Muslims, often for no better reason than the fact that they were Muslim?

There is a known psychological disorder called Compassion Fatigue. It is common among individuals that work directly with victims of trauma. as they hear more from the victims they themselves literally shut down.

So here we have a man whose profession is to help the enemies of his people deal with the stresses of killing his people. He is also a man who is a loner, one who cannot find a wife who is sufficiently devout.

But he is committed to serving in the Army because they sent him to Medical School and to the advanced training. He asked to leave, but was denied. Then they tell him he is not doing his job satisfactorily because (apparently) he was professing his religion. Then they reassign him and inform him that he is going to be sent to Afghanistan, a war he does not believe should be fought.

So he broke. And he committed a violent suicide, by killing others and expecting to be killed in the process.

He was defending both himself and his religion. His experiences listening to individual American who came back from Iraq will have clearly demonstrated both that Muslims were being killed, war crimes were being committed, and that for many of the American soldiers it was considered a war between Christianity and Islam - a crusade. This would have built into a case of Compassion Fatigue.at the very least. But it would have been more for Major Hasan, since it was his coreligionists who were being killed.

The fact that Major Hasan broke is, in retrospect, no real surprise. The failure to predict is was a clear failure in the Army Medical system. Every psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker should have a personal counselor to help the individual deal with their job, and major Hasan either had none or the individual was too influenced by the needs of the Army to deal properly with the Major.

Why was Major Hasan pushed into this position? The current military was never designed to fight a war this long without calling up the reserves or a draft. The American military has been pushed to the breaking point, and this is another of the cracks it has demonstrated. It is a surprise and a credit to the American military that this kind of event has not happened more often. As it is, the increase in suicides, murders and PTSD demonstrates just how much we Americans are demanding from our military. It is too much and long past too much.

Major Hasan is only another example of the idiocy of the Bush administration. The invasion of Iraq should never have been undertaken unless the Reserves were called up and then the draft were activated. But that was not something the Bush administration felt they could have sold to the America people. They knew how obviously idiotic it was. Iraq is not a war that should have been fought. Then, Afghanistan may have been reasonable, but it simply has not been fought. The resources it required were sent to Iraq, and there was no rational strategy for winning there. Again, it is an example of Bush administration incompetence. Afghanistan couldn't be fought with Iraq and without the draft. The result has been that the American ground military has been destroyed. Major Hasan's actions in Fort Hood are merely one more example of a broken military.

This evaluation of what Major Hasan did is, of course, speculation based on news reports. Someone familiar with Major Hasan's career and file might find a very different time line and situation. But I'll bet based on what I have seen in the last two days this is pretty close.

ABC News has a good story on Sgt. Kimberly Munley who was the civilian police officer who stopped Major Hasan. She saved a lot of lives.

Ted Kennedy on the Bush/Cheney lies that led us to invade Iraq

Teddy Kennedy's memoir has come out today, and talking Points Memo has just published what Kennedy wrote about the way the Bush/Cheney administration lied America into invading Iraq for American domestic political purposes. America has lost all the lives and treasure, and Iraq has been devastated to advance the political fortunes of the American conservatives.

Here is Kennedy on the lack of justification for the war:

My views on war drew upon the teachings of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. A distillation of their philosophies has yielded six principles that guide the determination of a "just" war, and these principles were my guiding arguments:

• A war must have a just cause, confronting a danger that is beyond question;
• It must be declared by a legitimate authority acting on behalf of the people;
• It must be driven by the right intention, not ulterior, self-interested motives;
• It must be a last resort;
• It must be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved; and
• It must have a reasonable chance of success.

There was no just cause for the invasion of Iraq, I declared time and again. Iraq posed no threat that justified immediate, preemptive war, and there was no convincing pattern of relationships between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The "legitimate authority," the Congress, indeed approved authorization for the use of force in Iraq in October 2002, but it acted in haste and under pressure from the White House, which intentionally politicized the vote by scheduling it before midterm elections. By contrast, in 1991, the administration of the first President Bush timed the vote on the use of military force against Iraq to occur after midterm elections, in order to de-politicize the decision.

As for "motives," those stated by the Bush administration itself were unacceptable on their face. "The Bush administration says we must take preemptive action against Iraq," I pointed out from the Senate floor in October 2002. "But what the administration is really calling for is preventive war, which flies in the face of international rules of acceptable behavior." I was far blunter less than two years later, when the loss of life among our young troops and the devastation to Iraqi society had grown grotesque. The war, I charged on the Senate floor in July 2004, was "a fraud, cooked up in Texas" to advance the president's political standing.

Besides being a fraud, the War in Iraq caused the Bush/Cheney administration to take the resources away from Afghanistan where they were actually needed. The result is that America did nothing to improve Afghanistan at a time when the population was a lot more prepared to accept what we had to offer. Because of the Bush/Cheney blindness and self-centered conservative, the Taliban has been reconstructed and now threatens the nuclear-capable Pakistan and al Qaeda is becoming a new and more dangerous entity world wide.

In every way the Bush/Cheney administration failed to provide for American security and failed to adequately protect the American people.

Cheney's AEI speech today: "it's Torquemada or 1984 but only after getting rescripted by Mel Brooks. "

Josh Marshall comments on Dick Cheney's upcoming well-announced speech at the American Enterprise Institute today.

"This is someone who not only organized and seemingly directed a policy of state-sponsored torture. He did it in large part to get people to admit to crankish conspiracy theories he got taken in by by a crew of think-tank jockeys in DC whose theories most even half way sensible people treated as punch lines of jokes. So it's Torquemada or 1984 but only after getting rescripted by Mel Brooks.

This is an extremely gullible man who has just come off being the driving ideological force in an administration that most people can already see produced more fiascos and titanic, self-inflicted goofs than possibly any in our entire history. By any standard the guy is a monumental failure -- and not one whose mistakes stem in some Lyndon Johnson fashion from tragic overreach, but just a fool who damaged his country through his own gullibility, paranoia and bad judgment. Whatever else you can say about the Cheney story it ain't Shakespearean."

If you disagree with this analysis, then you haven't read Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman>

The great Republican defender of torture as American government policy is, in fact, scared to death that he will be blamed for using torture to get fake confessions to support is ridiculous belief that Sadam Hussein and al Qaeda were working together, when in fact they were deadly enemies. But in particular is is now quite clear that Ahmed Chalabi, probably working as an agent of Iranian Intelligence, ran an operation to get Cheney and other top Republicans to commit to attacking Iran's deadly enemy, Iraq. It worked.

Sinceso much of the media was extremely complicit in supporting Cheney's idiocy, it is no surprise that the media is now hyping the sick, cranky old man's idiotic statements with great publicity.

Waldman asks the right questions about Cheney's torture efforts

David Waldman properly describes the torture effort directed by Dick Cheney. This is based on the recent revelations from McClatchy News and from Lawrence Wilkerson.




We now know that the so-called "ticking time-bomb" scenario did not occur. What did occur is that Dick Cheney used his position as Vice President to direct the invasion of Iraq, a nation which was no real threat to the U.S. and which had no capability to threaten the U.S. Cheney's real reasons for directing the invasion of Iraq are not known, unless perhaps it was a symptom of his paranoia.

Cheney could do this because he was the Vice President in a White House in which the person occupying the office of President permitted him to run anything he wanted in the federal government without oversight. He collected many of his acolytes onto the White House staff and ran the White House Iraq Group, pushing the propaganda effort that worked to justify the invasion of Iraq.

It is well known that Bush had no knowledge of national security matters and deferred to Cheney's widely acknowledged greater expertise. Bush himself concealed his lack of knowledge of government operations and his total lack of interest in them behind a wall of supposedly setting goals and then delegating their achievement to subordinates. Apparently no one ever got it through to him as he was handed his Harvard MBA (based on who is father was) that the manager who delegates in that manner has to set goals and hold the subordinates to their achievement with close oversight. Bush certainly never did that. He let Cheney run wild. For that failure, Bush is a failed President.

But for his successful efforts to invade an non-threatening country and then to try to direct the torture of prisoners to obtain confessions to justify that illegal invasion, Dick Cheney is a war criminal.

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Addendum 10:45am
How do we know that the torture was used to justify the war crime after the fact? Dick Cheney knows or should know the truth about torture, which Bob Cesca states very clearly:

"According to multiple accounts and experts, the efficacy of torture is limited to ascertaining what the torturer wants to hear -- rather than information that's actually true. "

Given that fact, the only possible reason for torturing prisoners is to obtain false confessions to justify the idiocy of invading Iraq when the real enemy was al Qaeda, an enemy of Saddam Hussein.

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Addendum II 12:45 pm
Batocchio has written an extremely good analysis of the torture situation and provides links to many good resources.

Why was the invasion of Iraq a major mistake?

Here is a discussion of what was wrong with invading Iraq. Nothing significant has changed since this was earlier written.

Libertarian solution to Iraq economy has failed (of course)

One of the goals of the invasion of Iraq was to shrink the government and let the Iraqis create a free enterprise paradise that would be a beacon to the rest of the Middle East. It's success would cause envy in the populations of the other Middle Eastern nations so that they would replace their authoritarian governments and create thriving democracies and free enterprise utopias. Remember that? That's why Jerry Bremer was staffing his Coalition Provisional Authority with his kiddie corps recruited for their ideology rather than their expertise through the American Enterprise Institute.

To implement all this, Bremer also disbanded the Iraqi Army, led the deBathification of the civil service, and canceled payment of all government pensions to retirees and their survivors. This essentially turned what remained of the government over to the Shiite parties, which they staffed with politicians and inexperienced relatives, all advised by Bremer's kiddie corps. Bremer also removed protective tariffs and import controls to allow cheap goods from nations such as China to enter Iraq, effectively wiping out what was left of the Iraqi free market. And of course, the previously socialized government of Iraq left no significant banking industry behind it.

The result was massive unemployment, with the only legal sources of employment being the government and the U.S. military. The population generally had no income, and the Sunnis were blocked from employment in the government by the Shiites. When the Iraqis looked around to find out who was to blame for the disaster that had befallen them, the answer was obvious. The American military was occupying Iraq and was the cause of all the disaster.

Combine this awareness with the fact that the American military had not taken control of the weapons left over from the Saddam military and the result was a no-brainer. Iraqis had to conduct an insurgency to remove the source of the problem. Since the Shiites had control of the government and support from their fellow Shiites in Iran and the Kurds were protected by the Americans and were already well-along in building an independent Kurdistan, the Sunnis were the logical insurgents. They were the group facing starvation and seeing no hope.

The Libertarian "solution" to the situation in Iraq (created in the first place by the idiotic invasion of Iraq pushed by the White House, the NeoConservatives, FOX News, and conservatives such as Bill Kristol to somehow solve earlier problems with Iraq) was unrealistic to begin with and has disastrously failed. That's the story told in the article Iraq Private Sector Falters; Rolls of Government Soar in the New York Times.

BAGHDAD — Hampered by years of violence, a decimated infrastructure, a lack of foreign investors and a flood of imports that undercut local businesses, Iraq’s private sector, particularly its small non-oil economy, has so far failed to flourish as its American patrons had hoped.

In its absence, the Iraqi government has been sustaining the economy the way it always has: by putting citizens on its payroll. Since 2005, according to federal budgets, the number of government employees has nearly doubled, to 2.3 million from 1.2 million.

The impetus is not only economic: In exchange for abandoning the insurgency that plunged the nation into civil war, many of the 100,000 members of civilian patrols known broadly as the Awakening movement have been promised jobs in the security forces or in reconstruction, though many Sunni Muslim members complain it is not happening quickly enough.

Is it any wonder that the current government of Iraq is demanding that the American government set an early fixed timetable for withdrawal of the military? The first step in the cure of any illness is to eliminate the source.

The American military in Iraq, besides the many other flaws it has for Iraqis, is the vector that has carried the disease of Libertarianism to ravage their country.

War Crimes trials for Bush and Cheney? An interesting discussion

How likely is it that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will face war crimes trials in the future? The revelations from the Senate Hearings the last few days make it appear somewhat more likely. Here is what Scott Horton has to say in The New Republic today.

Tuesday's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing provided the latest evidence that top Bush administration officials directed the use of torture techniques on detained suspected terrorists. Three panels of witnesses traced the use of highly coercive techniques back to the high echelons of the administration. The day ended with the grilling of William J. Haynes II, the former general counsel of the Department of Defense and a protégé of Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, who is now widely viewed as the "station master" of the administration's torture policy. And in April, ABC News reported that officials including Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld had held a series of meetings to discuss the use of specific torture techniques on detained suspect terrorists. The ABC report amplified earlier stories which said the decision to destroy videotapes of interrogations of suspects in CIA captivity involved four senior White House lawyers and other senior figures.

At the same time, Philippe Sands's new book The Torture Team reveals the falsity of White House claims that the push to introduce torture techniques came from interrogators in the field. Sands demonstrates that the decision to use techniques like waterboarding came from the top, and tracks the elaborate scheme to make it appear that the practices began with a request from Guantánamo.

These disclosures and others have put the issue of war crimes on the front burner. Major General Antonio Taguba just released this statement in the forward to a report just out by Physicians for Human Rights: "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba says. "The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held to account." In a House Judiciary hearing on June 5 looking into the rendition of Canadian software engineer Maher Arar, for instance, members pressed to know if sufficient evidence had been presented to warrant a criminal investigation into the conduct of administration officials; all three witnesses (including the author) answered affirmatively. In other hearings, witnesses have treaded lightly and experienced frequent failures of recollection, perhaps driven by a concern over self-incrimination. And, indeed, in what may be a sign of things to come, 26 American civil servants are being tried in absentia by an Italian court in Milan for their involvement in the rendition of a radical Muslim cleric to Egypt. So, is it really feasible for Bush administration officials to be tried for war crimes?

So the conclusion is that - Yes, War Crimes were committed, and Yes, they were instigated and organized out of the White House by at least five top administration attorneys who acted on the guidance of the President and the Vice President.

Mark Kleiman, discussing a conference held at Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, adds his analysis to the issue:

"Here's their case, as I understand it, with my reactions to each item in italics following that item.

1. The United States has inflicted torture on captives in the course of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both directly and by the use of foreign intelligence services as proxies. [Certainly true. BushCo officials have admitted waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, and sleep deprivation.]

2. Torture is forbidden by domestic and international law. [True.]

3. The relevant domestic statute provides the death penalty if the victim dies. [True.]

4. Liability under that law isn't limited to those actually turning the rack; those who give the orders are also vulnerable. [True, though again the issues of proof are complex.]

5. George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and other senior officials ordered that torture be carried out, both as a matter of general policy and in specific instances. [Seems likely, but establishing beyond reasonable doubt exactly what orders were given, by whom, with what knowledge of how those orders would be carried out would be a nightmare at trial.]

6. The law provides no exemption for officials, or for wartime actions. [True, though no doubt John Yoo will write a brief arguing that the President's Commander-in-Chief power makes him constitutionally invulnerable to criminal liability for issuing such orders.]

So the case that Bush, Cheney, and a cabal of a few of their inside supporters committed war crimes has ceased to be in much doubt. The question remains whether they will ever be tried for their crimes.

The general conclusion seems to be that they will not be tried in the United States, but that other countries may well arrest and try them if they visit the wrong nation after leaving office. A recent precedent was the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in Great Britain on a Spanish warrant. Age and ill health allowed Pinochet to avoid being tried. It is very unlikely that Bush could use a similar excuse.

Bush better enjoy his current trip to Europe as Chief of State. Once he leaves office, any trip back there will involve exactly the risk of arrest that Pinochet suffered. Certainly there are many in Europe who would be happy to see Bush or Cheney suffer such a fate.

Bush may well need his rumored Paraguayan land near Brazil and Bolivia.

Did Iranian Intelligence dupe Cheney and company into the Iraq invasion?

Journalists are frantically wading through the long delayed (four years?) but finally issued Phase II of the Senate investigation into the US Government's use of Intelligence before invading Iraq. Trust McClatchy News to come up with a really big issue. Did Iranian Intelligence use a small cabal of American government officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney's office to feed fake Intelligence to the government and cause the American invasion of Iran's worst enemy, Iraq?

By John Walcott | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that a small group of Pentagon officials who'd collected dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran from Iranian exiles might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service . . . to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the group's activities after only a month, and Pentagon officials never followed up on investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. [Snip]

The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials' contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar [1}, whom the CIA had labeled a "fabricator" in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen [2], a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran's Islamic regime.

According to the Senate report, the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity unit concluded in 2003 that Ledeen "was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar."

The counterintelligence unit said, however, that Ledeen's association with Ghorbanifar "was widely known, and therefore it should be presumed other foreign intelligence services, including those of Iran, would know."

Stephen Cambone [4], then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, shut down the counterintelligence investigation after only a month, the Senate report said.

The Senate report said that Pentagon officials never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a comprehensive analysis of whether Ghorbanifar or his associates tried "to directly or indirectly influence or access U.S. government officials."

The counterintelligence investigators recommended that U.S. officials attempt "to map Ghorbanifar's relationship within Iranian elite social networks and, if possible, his contacts with other governments and/or intelligence organizations," but that effort was never undertaken.

The Senate committee also found that Pentagon officials concealed the contacts with Ghorbanifar from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Pentagon officials also provided Senate investigators with an inaccurate account of events and, with support from two unnamed officials in Cheney's office, continued meeting with Ghorbanifar after contact with him was officially ordered to stop.

The first meetings with Ghorbanifar, which were disclosed in August 2003 by the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, took place in Rome in December 2001. They were attended by two Pentagon Iran experts, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin; by an Italian military intelligence official, and by Ledeen.

On the Iranian side were Ghorbanifar, an unidentified Iranian exile from Morocco and an alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps defector.

Among other things, the Iranians told the Americans about:

_ Iranian "hit teams" they said were targeting U.S. personnel and facilities in Afghanistan.

_ What they claimed was Shiite Muslim Iran's longstanding relationship with the secular Palestine Liberation Organization.

_ "Tunnel complexes in Iran for weapons storage or exfiltration of regime leaders," and about the alleged growth of anti-regime sentiment in Iran.

Franklin [1], who, in an unrelated matter, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to prison in 2006 for providing classified information on Iran policy to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, passed the information about the alleged Iranian hit squads to a U.S. Special Forces commander in Afghanistan. Although a DIA analyst told the Senate committee that he couldn't speculate on whether the information had been "truly useful," Ledeen and Pentagon officials claimed it saved American lives, the committee said.

During the Rome meetings, Ghorbanifar also laid out a scheme to overthrow the Iranian regime on a napkin during a late night meeting in a bar. "The plan," said the Senate committee, "involved the simultaneous disruption of traffic at key intersections leading to Tehran that would create anxiety, work stoppages and other disruptive measures" in a capital city famous for its traffic congestion.

Ghorbanifar asked for $5 million in seed money, Franklin told the committee, and indicated that if the traffic jam plan succeeded, he'd need additional money.

"The proposed funding for, and foreign involvement in, Mr. Ghorbanifar's plan for regime change were never fully understood," the Senate committee said.

Nevertheless, Ghorbanifar's proposals grew more ambitious — and expensive. A February 2002 memo from Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman referred to an unnamed foreign government's support for a Ghorbanifar plan that would cost millions of dollars. A later summary referred to contracts "that would assure oil and gas sales in the event of regime change". The U.S. ambassador to Italy said that DOD officials "were talking about 25 million for some kind of Iran program."

After Franklin and Rhode returned from the Rome meetings, the Senate report said, two series of events began to unfold in Washington that were typical of the gamesmanship that plagued the Bush administration's national security team.

"First," the report said, "State Department and CIA officials attempted to determine what Mr. Ledeen and the DOD representatives had done in Rome, and second, DOD officials debated the next course of action."

When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen's contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were "nefarious and unreliable," the Senate committee reported.

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein's archenemy. This time, the report said, Ledeen solicited support from former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and from three then-GOP senators, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Rhode and Ghorbanifar met again in Paris in June 2003 with at least the tacit approval of an official in Cheney's office, the Senate report said.

He reported back to officials in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, but "there is no indication that the information collected during the Paris meeting was shared with the Intelligence Community for a determination of potential intelligence value," the report said.

[1] Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar was suspected by the CIA of passing forged documents to the U.S. during the Iran-Contra situation, and had been completely abandoned by the CIA as totally unreliable. He had been a close associate to LtC. Oliver North.

[2} American civilian, Michael Ledeen was another individual who used Ghorbanafar as a source, and was upset with the CIA when the issued a "burn Notice" (meaning do not use this individual or information he provides - he is a known liar.) Ledeen had vouched for Ghorbanafur to National Security Adviser Robert McFarland who then used his data in the Iran-Contra situation. Ledeen was also tightly linked to the Yellow Cake Forgeries which led George Bush to include the statement "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." in his 2003 State of the Union speech. The book The Italian Letter describes how a forged letter became a key element in the invasion of Iraq. Michael Ledeen is a key player in the book, in large part because of his connections with Italian Military Intelligence. The NeoCon Michale Ledeen still supports the invasion of Iraq and pushes actively for air strikes on Iran.

[3] Larry Franklin worked in Douglass Feith's Office of Special Plans, an organization set up to use Intelligence reports rejected by the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence community. The so-called Intelligence reports from OSP were then stove-piped directly into Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Cheney was known to dislike and distrust the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence Community because he felt they ignored, downplayed, or rejected significant Intelligence reports.

[4] Stephen Cambone was the much disliked Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld who shut down the investigation after only a month. He was known as Rumsfeld's chief henchman, and the orders to Intelligence personnel and contractors to "soften up" prisoners came from his office. He resigned shortly after Donald Rumsfeld left the job of Secretary of Defense. It seems probable to me that he and Douglas Feith worked closely together stovepiping Intelligence information to the office of the Vice President.

Consider also the Iraqi National Congress which was set up under the leadership of Ahmed Chalabi after the Persian Gulf War to coordinate the activities of the various anti-Saddam groups attempting to overthrow Saddam's government. Chalabi has a record of illegal dealings and is known to have numerous Iranian contacts. Since he is a Shiite, this is not surprising but it leads to speculation that he has long been an agent for Iran. Yet since he was close to the American NeoCons and considered one of them, the Pentagon had initially planned to install him as the new leader of Iraq after America removed Saddam. His inability to obtain on the ground support from Iraqis ended that effort shortly after the Pentagon delivered him to Baghdad in 2003. Suspicion that he is and has been an agent for Iranian Intelligence persist. Using the INC to confirm false intelligence sent thorugh other sources to the American NeoCons and the Pentagon and Office of the Vice President is exacly the kind of activity a foreign Intelligence agency bent on sending bad Intelligence to the top American Officials would conduct.

There is also the fact that America has used Iraq as a counter to Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and in fact covertly supported Iraq when Saddam attacked Iran in the early 80's. If Iranian Intelligence could get Americans to removed Saddam from power that action would make Iran much safer. It has to be assumed that the Iranian Intelligence Services has been working hard to distract America from Iran and to get Saddam removed. That certainly has been the effect of the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Have we been witnessing the very successful efforts of Iranian Intelligence to remove Saddam, Iraq and weaken America in the Middle East?

There's no smoking gun yet, but it certainly fits the publicly known motivations of the various players in the last two decades. Then there is the fact that Stephen Cambone shut down the internal investigation of those Pentagon - Office of the Vice President players after only one month with no results reported. That's so suspicious that it is close to an admission of guilt. Any report of an investigation that resulted in such a report would be politically disastrous to the Bush administration, and they have been very good at shutting down such investigations.

Maybe it's time to reopen that investigation. Hey! It might exonerate all the various Bush administration players from suspicion. But it might also show them as stupid rubes played for suckers by Iranian Intelligence, too.

I know which alternative that I consider more likely.

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If you are curious and have some time on your hands, here are the (large!) PDF files that contain the Phase II report:

• "Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information"


• "Report on Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq Conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans Within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy"

Talking Points Memo has bloggers reviewing those files and reporting what they find

• here.

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Addendum 6/6/08 3:40 PM
The New York Times has now published its reflections on the Senate report on Intelligence. It's not kind to the Bush administration. Instead it's a compendium of example of how it is possible to lie by misdirection and technically accurate yet highly misleading statements.

It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.

The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.

The report confirms one serious intelligence failure: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were told that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and did not learn that these reports were wrong until after the invasion. But Mr. Bush and his team made even that intelligence seem more solid, more recent and more dangerous than it was.

The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it — if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for.

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

The report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member Senate panel. The five dissenting Republicans first tried to kill it, and then to delete most of its conclusions. They finally settled for appending objections. The bulk of their criticisms were sophistry transparently intended to protect Mr. Bush and deny the public a full accounting of how he took America into a disastrous war.

The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.

The New York Times Editors also make it quite clear that this report was available nearly five years ago, but was buried by the Republican Senators on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

The lies told by the Bush administration are not the work of just a few individuals. The entire Republican leadership in Congress and in the White House all got behind those lies.

And why?

To misdirect the American public into a war against Iraq which was no threat to anyone other than their own people, and to direct Americans away from the real threats of terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, largely funded by Saudi Arabian money.

It sounds insane, unless the only purpose was to gain power in the American government for a permanent minority party by faking an external threat that did not exist. Still, why did they ignore the threat that did exist?

It still sounds insane. But that's the Party of Ronald Reagan and the movement conservatives. Threats and fear where none really exists while ignore real threats right in front of their eyes because to recognize the real threats would jeopardize their power in government, which allows them to corruptly steal taxpayer money left and right.

Gen. Rick Sanchez also slams Bush as a "leader"

The question I have repeatedly ask is why Bush invaded Iraq, why he refuses to draw down the number of troops in what is clearly a war that has no benefit for America or Iraq and what it means to win there. Most of us blow off the ridiculous talking point from the administration that the reason we are there is to bring democracy to Iraq in the heart of the Middle East.

It appears logical to most of us that such a goal is unattainable. But a quote from Bush reported by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez strongly suggests the we should take the administration at their word. Bush really does take the "Bringing democracy to Iraq and the Middle East seriously. The Washington Post has reported this quote from Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez in his new memoir that clarifies all of it:

Getting lost in the media furor over McClellan's memoir is the new autobiography of retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the onetime commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, who is scathing in his assessment that the Bush administration "led America into a strategic blunder of historic proportions."

Among the anecdotes in "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story" is an arresting portrait of Bush after four contractors were killed in Fallujah in 2004, triggering a fierce U.S. response that was reportedly egged on by the president.

During a videoconference with his national security team and generals, Sanchez writes, Bush launched into what he described as a "confused" pep talk:

"Kick ass!" he quotes the president as saying. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal."

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"

A White House spokesman had no comment.

[h\t Laura Rozen at War & Piece.]

Any good management consultant will tell you that when you see an organization in disarray - as the U.S. government clearly has been since 2001 - the first place you look for a cause is at the person at the very top.

Bush's confused pep talk demonstrates that Bush has no clue how to command troops or be a leader of any effectiveness.

---

So what does this tell us about why Bush wanted the Iraq invasion and occupation, and why he refuses to pull troops out when it is clear that they are fighting and dying for no American purpose?

What Sanchez states Bush said in his pep talk is very revealing. It clearly displays what Bush thinks the invasion and occupation of Iraq is all about.

While the White House sold the war and occupation as going after Saddam's WMD's, Bush's repeated claims that this is a war for Democracy strongly suggests that he seriously believed and probably still does believe that he is taking Democracy to the Middle East. Bush thought - and apparently still thinks - that he could turn Iraq into a demonstration project that would reform the Middle East. Not a new thought, I know, but I think that was Bush's primary reason for invading Iraq, not WMD's. But more than that, his reference to the lesson from Vietnam shows how he thinks it is going to work.

Bush's statement shows that he is a right-wing true believer who thinks America lost Vietnam because of a lack of will. He thinks that America lost in Vietnam because we did not do everything necessary to win and instead simply got tired and impatient and quit.

This is the reverse of what most of us think. Most of us think that Vietnam was unwinnable and had no purpose, so America decided that the killing and the cost was unnecessary and we left. But since Bush believed (and apparently still believes) that the lesson of Vietnam was to pull out all the stops, not allow any consideration of human rights to deter us and to never quit. A key part of that is to do whatever it takes to win - abu Ghraib and Gitmo, anyone? If we pull out all the stops, do whatever is required to win in Iraq and don't leave until we win, then we will win there. And what does he think it means to win? That's why he invaded Iraq in the first place. He intends to bring democracy to Iraq and to the Middle East. Bush thinks that the Maliki government which America installed is the democracy we are fighting for. Flawed, corrupt, but still democracy.

It explains the often repeated story about Bush believing that history will vindicate him. Bush considers himself to be the embodiment of the "will to win" and the refusal to "lose" Iraq by leaving. Bush appears to define "winning" in Iraq as creating a sustainable democracy there. Bush is fighting as very hard to influence America to stay the course even after he leaves office, and at teh same time do whatever it takes to "win". Bush sees the current period as merely being a test of America's will to win. So he is also doing everything possible to tie the hands of the next President so that he cannot pull out of Iraq either.

All of that is states or implied in the confused pep talk that Lt. Gen Sanchez has reported.

America's road to Iraq and beyond

Want to know how the U.S. got into the current mess in Iraq? Mark Kleiman quotes Andrew Bacevich:

Iraq has not been kind to the reputation of senior U.S. commanders. For a brief moment in the early '90s, for example, H. Norman Schwarzkopf seemed a likely candidate to join the ranks of history's Great Captains. No more: Schwarzkopf's failure to finish off an adversary of remarkable ineptitude left Saddam Hussein in power, his Republican Guard largely intact, and Iraqi Kurds and Shia under Saddam's boot. One result was a large, permanent, and problematic U.S. military presence to keep Saddam in his "box." Once seen as a stupendous victory, Operation Desert Storm deserves to be enshrined as a giant step down the nation's road to Persian Gulf perdition.

In 2003, General Tommy Franks set out to clean up Stormin' Norman's mess. Although Franks has modestly described the ensuing invasion of Iraq as "unequaled in its excellence by anything in the annals of war," future generations are unlikely to sustain that judgment. When it came to leaving a tangle of loose ends, Franks made Schwarzkopf look like a piker. His niche in history will always be alongside Bremer and George Tenet, fellow recipients of the Medal of Freedom--the Three Stooges who labored mightily to convert a small, unnecessary war into an epic debacle.

After Franks came the team of John Abizaid and Ricardo Sanchez (and, later, George Casey). These earnest and no doubt well-meaning men inherited a difficult situation and gave it their all, expending lives and money with abandon. Despite much huffing and puffing about "progress" and "turning points," they achieved negligible results: Iraq slowly descended toward chaos.

Petraeus is now engaged in an effort to slow and reverse that descent. Although the deluded and disingenuous may persist in pretending otherwise, his mission is not to "win" the Iraq war. Coalition forces in Iraq are not fighting to achieve victory. Their purpose is far more modest. According to Petraeus himself, U.S. troops and their allies are "buying time for Iraqis to reconcile." President Bush and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have explicitly endorsed this new strategy, but history will remember Petraeus as its principal architect. To avoid the fate of his hapless predecessors, Petraeus must show that his strategy of buying-time-to-reconcile can produce tangible results. Yet an exploration of what the buying-time strategy actually means reveals that the prospects of its success are exceedingly slim. The cult of Petraeus exists not because the general has figured out the war but because hiding behind the general allows the Bush administration to postpone the day when it must reckon with the consequences of its abject failure in Iraq.
[Emphasis added]

This is the best thumbnail description of how the U.S. got into Iraq that I have seen.

Also, if you have read any of my posts on "winning in Iraq" you will note that I keep asking what it means for the U.S. to win. As near as I can see, there is no goal in Iraq beyond simply keeping U.S. troops there until it has ceased to be Bush's problem and becomes someone else's.

General Petraeus strikes me as the most obviously political General in the American Army since Douglas MacArthur. He appears to be building his reputation towards a run for President on the Republican ticket, much as MacArthur intended to do after Korea. If that's the case, then Petreaus is going to have to kick the Iraq can down the road to someone else who will have to take the blame for the American failure there. Has his elevation to Centcom Commander achieved that? That's an open question.

But Petreaus's fate is a minor issue compared to what will happen in Iraq. That's the big open question.

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So who is Andrew Bacevich? Here is a biography found at the bottom of the document from which the above quote was taken.

Bacevich graduated from West Point in 1969 and served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, serving in Vietnam from the summer of 1970 to the summer of 1971. Afterwards he held posts in Germany, the United States, and the Persian Gulf up to his retirement from the service with the rank of Colonel in the early 1990s. He holds a Ph.D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University, and taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins University prior to joining the faculty at Boston University in 1998.

On May 13, 2007, Bacevich's son, also named Andrew J. Bacevich, was killed in action in Iraq, when he was killed by a suicide bomber south of Samarra in Salah Ad Din Province. The younger Bacevich, 27, was a First Lieutenant.[3] He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 8th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division.

Bacevich also has three daughters.[3]

Writings
He has described himself as a "Catholic conservative" and initially published writings in a number of traditionally conservative American political magazines, but recent writings have professed a dissatisfaction with the Bush administration and many of its intellectual supporters on matters of American foreign policy.

Both his recent books are critical of American foreign policy in the post Cold War era, maintaining the United States has developed an overreliance on military power, in contrast to diplomacy, to achieve its foreign policy aims. He also asserts that policymakers in particular, and the American people in general, overestimate the usefulness of military force in foreign affairs. Bacevich believes romanticized images of war in popular culture (especially movies) interact with the lack of actual military service among most of the population to produce in the American people a highly unrealistic, even dangerous notion of what combat and military service is really like. Finally, he attempts to place current policies in historical context, as part of an American tradition going back to the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, a tradition (of an interventionist, militarized foreign policy) which has strong bi-partisan roots. To lay an intellectual foundation for this argument, he cites two influential historians from the 20th century: Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams.

Ultimately, Bacevich eschews the partisanship of current debate about American foreign policy as short-sighted and ahistorical. Instead of blaming only one President (or his advisors) for contemporary policies, Bacevich sees both Republicans and Democrats as sharing responsibility for policies which may not be in the nation's best interest.

In March 2003, at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bacevich wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "if, as seems probable, the effort encounters greater resistance than its architects imagine, our way of life may find itself tested in ways that will make the Vietnam War look like a mere blip in American history."[1]

The new "McCain Unit" - four more years then success in Iraq

Here is Juan Cole’s comment on McCain's prediction of "success" in Iraq by 2013:

William Lind explains why McCain's fantasy of victory is highly unlikely to be fulfilled. Lind calls Iraq a 'fourth generation war' in which there is no real state capacity on which the US can build, and in which the enemy is shadowy and slips away before conventional forces (as in Basra, where rightwing commentators have mistaken the Mahdi Army's ability to melt away and lie low as a victory for the [non-existent] state). The US really only controls the ground on which its soldiers tread, and that reality may well not change during the next 4 years. If Lind is right, McCain is hanging US policy on a set of ideas out of the 1940s that have no application in Iraq today.

The "McCain unit" is already a public relations bust. It sounds like a timetable to Democrats. It is too far off for most people to take seriously. The beauty of the Friedman unit was that it seemed relatively near, but people could be depended to forget about its last use before it was invoked again. The "McCain unit" will tax the public's patience too much, not to mention their pocket books. His unit probably has a $1 trillion tax bill attached to it all at once. And his unit is too specific, calling for "victory." The Friedman unit was deliberately vague about what exactly would happen in the next six months that was "crucial" for Iraq.

McCain just loves war. Every problem that he can recognize has war as its solution. His solution to the mistaken and overlong war in Iraq is, of course, more war. and if war is not the solution to a problem, then McCain does not view that as a problem the government can deal with. S we get the McCain fantasy that after just one more McCain Unit, or four more years, of war America will find success in Iraq. Of course, other than to declare "Victory" after four more years of struggle. McCain does not say what America will have won, either.

America has nothing to gain in Iraq that is worth the cost. The usual trope is that if the U.S. leaves Iraq then al-Qaeda in Iraq will win, so we have to stay (forever?) but al-Qaeda in Iraq is a foreign-led ragtag group of Sunnis. The Maliki government will brutally destroy any al-Qaeda elements that remain in Iraq within weeks of the departure of U.S. troops. Maliki only permits them to exist as bait to induce the Bush administration and any following Republican administration to keep troops in Iraq and strengthen the hold the Maliki government has on Iraq. Maliki wants to be the new dictator of Iraq, replacing Saddam, and that's all four more years of American troop presence will gain.

The name "McCain" has become a synonym for "clueless."

Chalabi is out; Maliki said so, Bush followed orders

This is interesting. Yesterday it was reported that the U.S. government has cut off relations with Ahmed Chalabi, the man as responsible as anyone else for the invasion of Iraq and the early candidate put up by the NeoCons and the Bush administration to take over Iraq and replace Saddam.

The Bush administration quickly abandoned their idea of turning the government over to him when it became clear that Chalabi had no base of support in Iraq and could not fulfill his extravagant promises. Instead they sent Jerry Bremer and his American Enterprise Institute kiddy corps to create a government and a free market economy.

Today we get the reason WHY the U.S. has, at long last, cut off relations with Chalabi. It is reported by McClatchy that Maliki told the U.S. to abandon him because Maliki sees Chalabi as a pretender to the throne in Iraq and wants the competition eliminated.

This is more clear than to say that Chalabi was being cut off because he has had contacts with the Iranians. The U.S. government has known that for years, and the State Department and the CIA both objected to the manner in which the Pentagon supported Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress even before the invasion of Iraq because it was believed that he had strong contacts with Iran. There has long been a debate about whether Chalabi is an Iranian agent. So his contacts with Iran are not new news. So why finally cut him off now? The news that Maliki wanted him out makes sense.

The earlier news that the Iranian government has decided to abandon their support for Muquatada al-Sadr and instead support al-Maliki suggests that Maliki's Shiite government of Iraq is strengthening. Since both the U.S. and Iran want to stabilize Iraq, this all makes sense.

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As always, I am not a middle east expert nor an expert on Iraq in any way. The best I can to is keep up with the news and some of the personalities as best I can and comment on the obvious implications. Chalabi has been the Bush administrations Iraqi-on-the-ground since before the invasion of Iraq, so this is probably representative of a very significant shift of power in that sad nation.

"Winning" in Iraq - the lesson of al-Radhi

Let's assume for a moment that there actually is some future gain in Iraq for America that is worth the effort. That is, let's assume that there is a possibility of "winning" in Iraq and it is just that we have not been permitted to know what the true goal that constitutes winning is.

The route to such "winning" must include successful reconstruction of Iraq after the destruction we created by invading. That's obvious, right?

For all the so-called "good news" out of Iraq regarding the schools and hospitals that have been rebuilt, nothing has lasted. Why? An Iraqi corruption judge, Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the former head of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, has explained to Congress in October, 2007 why reconstruction has not worked. Reconstruction has been totally stopped by the corruption of the al Maliki government.

al-Radhi, who is now seeking asylum in the U.S., stated that a whopping $18 billion has been lost to thieves in "nearly every ministry." (That's not the U.S.-provided Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Fund.) Corruption, he said, is not just getting worse, but has "stopped" reconstruction efforts.

Clearly a logical, rational person who wanted to "win" in Iraq would take rapid action to deal with the corruption that was blocking reconstruction there.

Rather than dealing with the corruption, the Bush administration has practiced the tactic of shooting the messenger. The Bush administration places a higher priority on preventing the American public from learning that Iraq Reconstruction is being blocked by the corruption of the government of al Maliki than it does on winning in Iraq. They appear to view the reputation of al Maliki to be critical to the reputation of the the Bush administration.

Former State Department officials told Congress earlier this week that, though Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the former head of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, was able to get access into the U.S., he is not allowed to work and is living hand to mouth. Why has he fallen through the cracks? [Snip]

One of the former officials testified that "a senior State Department official had ordered agency employees not to give al Radhi references or contact him" for help with his asylum.

That might have a lot to do with the trouble that Radhi gave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the administration. Like pointing out that corruption ran rampant under Maliki and that he'd jiggered the system so that corruption judges could not bring charges against any of his senior officials without his approval -- that was a decree on which Secretary of State Rice refused to pass judgment when she testified late last year. Rice also refused to comment on Radhi's many accusations.

It's clear that the the corruption in Iraq is matched by the corruption of the Bush administration. It's also clear that even if there were something that America could win in Iraq, this administration is making no real effort to do so. The conclusion should be that they have decided that since Iraq is unwinnable, all they want to do is avoid looking like they have failed in Iraq. That's the only reason possible why appearance is more important than success to them. They know success is impossible.

How the Pentagon has controlled the news on Iraq

We know that the TV news and media in general simply hasn't bothered to cover the news of the war of the occupation of Iraq for nearly a year-and-a-half now. But today the New York Times presents the story of how the news since before the invasion of Iraq has been manipulated by the Pentagon to present only what the Pentagon and the Bush administration want the public to hear. It's been a lot more than just Judy Miller at the New York Times.

The debate on Iraq has been one-sided since before there was a war and American occupation there. It's another failure of the American media, one slightly ameliorated by this New York Times report on that failure.

Glenn Greenwald weighs in on the story. He puts it into perspective. The story, while well-documented now, was originally reported in 2003.

Glenn also makes another point that shows the incompetence of the TV political media.

Having just watched more Sunday news shows than a human being should ever have to endure, it is striking -- though unsurprising -- that not a single one saw fit to mention this NYT story demonstrating that these news programs all fed government propaganda to their viewers. That they refuse to comment on this story and will now black it out says as much about what they really are, and what they really do, as the NYT story itself does.

This is just another nail in the coffin of the beltway TV news, added to the disaster of the ABC TV Democratic debate media "gotcha-attack" moderated by Stephanopolous and Gibson.

Add to this the clear preference the news media has shown for John McCain as a Presidential candidate along with their refusal to question his many gaffes and idiocies and it's no wonder that the American public is so uninformed. The media is extremely one-sided, spinning the positives and burying the negatives on those it supports while blowing the negative stories about those they oppose out of all proportion. In addition, the media makes a practice of building meaningless stories that show conflict just to build their own ratings and stoke the egos of the anchors.

It's a good thing we have the internet - for as long as it remains uncontrolled.

The result of the Petreaus hearings

Gen. Petreaus still can't tell us what benefit we get from the occupation of Iraq. That's the key result I have taken from yesterday's Senate hearings. What does the tremendous set of costs of our occupation of Iraq do to benefit America?

Note that McCain, when asked why we remain there, recycles an old Douglas MacArthur quote: "There is no substitute for Victory!" Apparently when the Marine Barracks in Lebanon was blown up killing about 245 Marines, Reagan should have occupied Lebanon or something, but instead he pulled the troops out of Lebanon. And the bad result was .... (crickets can be heard in the silence.)

Democracy Arsenal has a good summary of the results of the hearings. Here are some samples:

1. Petraeus and Crocker refuse to tell us what our long term strategy is in Iraq, holding to the weak excuse that they can't make predictions into the future. But they have no problem making scary predictions into the future about what will happen if we withdraw. Contradiction? We think so.

2. Senator Biden made Crocker admit that the threat from Al Qaeda central along the Afghan-Pakistan border is a higher priority than Al Qaeada in Iraq.

3. John McCain still seems to be confusing his Shi’a and his Sunnis. He seems to have this recurring problem and if he becomes President and does this in some international forum it will be REALLY REALLY bad.

4. Iran is the new Al Qaeda. A large portion of the questioning from Martinez, Lieberman, Graham was based on trying blame Iran from what happened in Basra. But as Senator Jack Reed pointed out the Iranians are actually supporting all of the various Shi’a groups in Iraq, including those in league with the central government.

Go read the summary.

Kevin Drum adds

Obama was able to hit Petraeus and Crocker very hard....He got Petraeus to agree with him that the total elimination of Al Qaeda is an impossible standard for withdrawal. Next he goes after Crocker's points about Iranian influence, pointing out that both Iran and Al Qaeda are in Iraq because we invaded and that we can not expect to eliminate Iranian involvement.

Then came the hammer. Obama pointed out that if the definition of success is put so high - no Al Qaeda, no Iranian influence, a prosperous diverse democracy we will be there forever. He then points out that we still, after 8 hours of testimony, have no definition of success....Crocker's weak response its "hard and complicated."

Essentially the White House and the American Republican Party are living in a fantasy world, and Gen. Petreaus and Crocker, as their designated men on the ground who are aware of the real facts (and who don't appear to be confusing conservative ideology for facts the way Jerry Bremer did when he headed the Coalition Provisional Government) refuse to contradict the fantastists and liars they work for.

The lesson of the hearings was that there is no possibility that the Bush administration will take any actions to get America out of the quagmire and military morass they have created in Iraq.

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Addendum 1:24 PM
dday at Hullabaloo points out that Sen. Biden forced Amb. Crocker to admit that Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is a more important problem for America than Iraq is. Joe Biden also made the point that Congressional permission was required before America makes any long-term commitment to Iraq.

Amb. Crocker thought Maliki was going to move slowly in Basra

Ambassador Crocker learned March 21 that Maliki was going to use troops in Basra to bring order to the city, but he thought the plan was to methodically build up troops and gradually increase operations against the various Shiite militias and criminal gangs who have controlled it since the British pulled back from the city. What actually happened was that PM Maliki headed south and as the troops were still arriving he impulsively attacked. The government troops were not yet prepared for the attack they made, and did not expect the resistance they met. So the attack itself was not a surprise to American officials in Iraq, but the way it was done was not what was expected. According to Michale Gordon at the New York Times here is what happened:

The operation indicates that the Iraqi military can quickly organize and deploy forces over considerable distances. Two Iraqi C-130s and several Iraqi helicopters were also involved in the operation, an important step for a military that is still struggling to develop an air combat ability.

But interviews with a wide range of American and military officials also suggest that Mr. Maliki overestimated his military’s abilities and underestimated the scale of the resistance. The Iraqi prime minister also displayed an impulsive leadership style that did not give his forces or that of his most powerful allies, the American and British military, time to prepare.

“He went in with a stick and he poked a hornet’s nest, and the resistance he got was a little bit more than he bargained for,” said one official in the multinational force in Baghdad who requested anonymity. “They went in with 70 percent of a plan. Sometimes that’s enough. This time it wasn’t.”

As the Iraqi military and civilian casualties grew and the Iraqi planning appeared to be little more than an improvisation, the United States mounted an intensive military and political effort to try to turn around the situation, according to accounts by Mr. Crocker and several American military officials in Baghdad and Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Two senior American military officers — a member of the Navy Seals and a Marine major general — were sent to Basra to help coordinate the Iraqi planning, the military officials said. Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were pressed into service as combat advisers while air controllers were positioned to call in airstrikes on behalf of beleaguered Iraqi units. American transport planes joined the Iraqis in ferrying supplies to Iraqi troops.

The whole operation brings into question the effectiveness of the Maliki government. News reports suggest that this brings into sharp question how well the Iraqi Army is trained. It might. The most difficult and time-consuming training is of mid-level leaders and staff members, and this doesn't look like they performed well. But even well-trained mid-level leaders would be overridden by an impulsive commander who wanted to get everything over with quickly. I'd say that the failed operation should first be blamed on Maliki and top commanders before impugning the training and experience of mid-level commanders and staffers. When the commanders make incompetent decisions, it is hard to say how well the subordinates are performing.

The other question that comes into view is what can the American occupiers of Iraq do that is of any value to America? It is clear that any quick departure by U.S. troops will very probably mean the Maliki government disappears. The very weakness of that government is a pressure on the U.S. to keep troops in Iraq.

But then you have to ask why? What do we get out of staying in Iraq beyond protecting an incompetent government that most Iraqis don't support? Aren't we really just enabling slow, lengthy chaos with no resolution in sight in order to prevent rapid chaos that will rapidly be resolved by the parties directly involved?

Basra combat ending as Iran takes charge; Maliki losing power; Bush irrelevant

After a quickly called meeting to the Iranian holy city of Qom between Iraqi leaders including Mouktada al Sadr and the commander of Iran's Qods brigades, al Sadr ordered his troops to stop fighting Nouri al Maliki's troops. The fighting in Baghdad did stop. The irrelevant American leaders are nowhere to be seen.

The battle for Basra was started without any consultation or coordination with American troops, and the resolution is occurring when the Iranians declare it is time to stop fighting. Here is the report from McClatchy News Service on what happened to cause al Sadr's Sunday statement:

The backdrop to Sadr's dramatic statement was a secret trip Friday by Iraqi lawmakers to Qom, Iran's holy city and headquarters for the Iranian clergy who run the country.

There the Iraqi lawmakers held talks with Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Qods (Jerusalem) brigades of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and signed an agreement with Sadr, which formed the basis of his statement Sunday, members of parliament said.

Ali al Adeeb, a member of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's Dawa party, and Hadi al Ameri, the head of the Badr Organization, the military wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, had two aims, lawmakers said: to ask Sadr to stand down his militia and to ask Iranian officials to stop supplying weapons to Shiite militants in Iraq. [Snip]

In addition to Sadr, who is in Qom pursuing religious studies, Iraqi lawmakers met Suleimani, said Osama al Nejafi, a legislator on the parliamentary committee formed to solve the Basra crisis.

"An agreement was signed," Nejafi said, referring to Sadr. "Iran was part of the problem and an effective part of the negotiations."

Sadr issued a nine-point statement Sunday saying he would renounce anyone who carried arms against the government and government forces. The statement also asked the government to halt all raids against the Mahdi army, end detentions of militia members who had not been charged and implement the general amnesty law.

To preserve the "unity" of Iraq Sadr called for an end to "all armed manifestations in Basra and in all provinces."

The Qom discussions may or may not bring an end to the fighting but they almost certainly have undermined Maliki - who made repeated declarations that there would be no negotiations and that he would treat as outlaws those who did not turn in their weapons for cash. The blow to his own credibility was worsened by the fact that members of his own party had helped organize the Iran initiative.

So the result is that Maliki has lost a great deal of prestige just prior to regional elections, the opposite of what he wanted, while the Iranians have demonstrated they are the most important power in Iraq, notwithstanding the presence of 150,000 American troops.

Here is Juan Cole's take on what happened:

A parliamentary delegation from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's own coalition (mainly now the Da`wa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq) defied him by going off to the holy seminary city of Qom in Iran and negotiating directly with Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr and with the leader of the Quds Brigades of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Qasim Sulaymani.

As a result of those parleys, Muqtada al-Sadr called on his followers to stand down, though I read his statement as permitting continued armed self-defense, as at Basra where the Iraqi Army is attacking them and the US is bombing them. Significantly, he calls on the Mahdi Army to stop attacking the HQs of rival political parties. That language suggests that the parties are suffering from such attacks and are worried that party infrasture is being degraded ahead of the October 1 provincial elections. The southern parties have essentially defied al-Maliki and Bush to make a separate peace.

The entire episode underlines how powerful Iran has become in Iraq. The Iranian government had called on Saturday for the fighting to stop. And by Sunday evening it had negotiated at least a similar call from Sadr (whether the fighting actually stops remains to be seen and depends on local commanders and on whether al-Maliki meets Sadr's conditions).

Juan Cole also points to reports from McClatchy that show that the cease fire has not yet taken effect in Baghdad, Basra, Diyala, Karbala, Salahuddin, Mosul, or Kirkuk.

The lessons so far? Iraq is a mess, in spite of the surge, as it has been for the five years since Bush invaded that nation. Al Maliki, the leader Bush supports, is losing power, as al Sadr is gaining it. Iran dominates the entire Iraqi landscape too a degree that would have been impossible without the American invasion and the removal of Saddam.

Bush and Gen Petreaus are nowhere to be seen and are having no significant effect on the current violence in Iraq, although American soldiers have been sucked into the fighting.

The sole remaining purpose for American troops in Iraq now is to support the Maliki government as Maliki loses power; and to continue with a presence in Iraq until after the next American President (Democratic) is sworn in next January. This is intended by bush to give the Republicans the political talking point they will aim at the Democrats: "We Republicans didn't pull out of Iraq! You pulled out of Iraq so you Democrats lost Iraq!" Republican sound bytes will never address the fact that there is nothing there for Americans to win. We're just providing combat troops and aircraft to the maw with no prospect of any gain.

That's that state of disaster that is Bush's War in Iraq today.

The Battle for Basra - II

The New York Times points out that the Battle for Basra between al Maliki's best division (the 14th) and the Mahdi Army (Shiite militia) is not going well for Maliki's troops.

At a news briefing in Basra on Saturday, Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul-Kader Jassem al-Obeidi , conceded that the assault had not gone according to expectations. “We were surprised by a very strong resistance that made us change our plans,” he said.

The assault on Basra appears to have been poorly planned and conducted with too few troops. It is not surprising that it is not going well. Cernig at the NewsHoggers writes:

"Maliki's assault on the Sadrists, painted as a general assault on "criminal militias", but somehow managing to leave his SIIC/Badr Brigade allies well alone, is failing badly. Everywhere, the Mahdi Army are holding their own territories and even expanding the fight into new towns and neighbourhoods. Given the unreasonably small force with which Maliki launched his assault, and the estimated 60% penetration of the region's police by the Mahdi Army which has led to widespread desertions, Fester and I are convinced that Maliki had a good idea this would happen. His main purpose in mounting the assault was to ensnare US occupation forces into stepping into the lead, battling Sadr's forces for him and for his SIIC allies. {Snip]

Maliki is now in a position whereby he might - might - be able to win or stalemate the battle with American assistance, but there's no way he can win the political war he's started. He will either fall or be forced to painfully backtrack to negotiate a settlement which will favor Sadr more than it does himself. He's toast and Sadr, despite the many op-eds written over the last four years claiming the opposite, very much isn't."

Cernig's entire post is well worth reading. He also points to the ongoing war in Mosul that has lasted for months now, the flair-ups of violence in Sadr City in Baghdad as a result of this attack on the Mahdi Army in Basra, and the reports that the Turks are shelling the Kurds in Northern Iraq (if such an entity can still be said to exist.)

Then we get the report from Juan Cole:

The Times of Baghdad reports in Arabic that clashes continued on Friday between Iraqi government forces and the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and the provinces of the middle Euphrates and the south, causing hundreds of casualties, including among women, children and the elderly. The fighting also did damage to Iraq's infrastructure, as well as to oil facilities and pipelines, damage that might run into the billions of dollars.

The US got drawn into the fighting on Friday. US planes bombed alleged Mahdi Army positions both in Basra and in Sadr City in Baghdad (as well as in Kadhimiya). Kadhimiya is a major Shiite shrine neighborhood in northwest Baghdad, and the spectacle of the US bombing it is very unlikely to win Washington any friends among Iraqi Shiites.

Despite the US intervention, government troops were unable to pierce Mahdi Army defenses or over-run their positions.

Al-Zaman says that the police force in Basra suffered numerous mutinies and instances of insubordination, with policemen refusing to fire on the Mahdi Army. The government response was to undertake a widespread purge of disloyal elements.

[Hmm. I wonder where fired policemen with combat training and guns could find another job . . . Maybe with the Mahdi Army?]

The Mahdi Army opened a number of new fronts in the fighting, in Nasiriya, Karbala, Hilla, and Diwaniya, as a means of reducing the pressure on its fighters in the holy city of Karbala. Local medical officials reported 36 dead in the fighting in Nasiriya.

The Mahdi Army used its position near Nasiriya to attack government troops attempting to go south to join the effort in Basra, and is said to have inflicted substantial casualties on them.

In Baghdad, Mahdi Army fighters clashed with government forces in 31 districts.

In the meantime, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called for a decisive military victory and rejected calls by southern tribal sheikhs and a large number of Shiite ayatollahs for him to engage in dialogue and negotiation in order to reach a ceasefire and to save civilians who are threatened with a humanitarian catastrophe from shortages of water and food, as well as lack of medical care.

al Maliki seems to have staked his political future on the outcome of this battle with Mouktada al Sadr's forces, and it may well be that he timed it so that the American forces had to intervene on his side.

Since Gen Petreaus has been negotiating with Mouktada al Sadr, this could be Maliki's effort to force Petreaus and the American forces to support him in his internecine political battles for control of Iraq. There are indications that Dick Cheney may have known this was coming, and is playing some more of his behind the scenes politics both in the U.S. and in Iraq. Is this going to be used by Cheney and the Republicans to ratchet up the difficulties in Iraq so that the incoming Democratic President will be forced to either send in more troops to pacify that nation or remove American troops from the scene and thus be politically vulnerable in American politics to the cry of "You lost Iraq"? This goes back to my theory that the Republicans are using the Occupation of Iraq as a kubuki theater play to manipulate American politics, so that what really happens in Iraq is of almost no interest to the Republicans. All that matters is how they can spin it for American voters.

Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization, and the term "Byzantine politics" was invented to describe the way politics in Turkey and the Tigris-Euphrates valley works. The Republicans thought they could predict what would happen there as a result of "Bush's War" and they found disaster instead.

American troops will not be successful in Iraq. They will be co opted by one side or the other in their internecine wars and used to fight for things that have nothing to do with America's interests.

America should have learned that by now. The Bush administration is too stupid and proud of their conservative ideology to become aware of reality.

How the Iraq invasion became such a disaster

In my previous post, The Battle for Basra, I concluded that Iraq is presently a disaster and that the disaster is

... a direct result of the idiocy of invading Iraq in the first place, followed by Jerry Bremer's compounding of the idiocy when he disbanded the Iraqi government and military forces. Removing Saddam might have been a reasonable goal (although the cost of the invasion certainly was not justified by that one goal) but Bremer's idea that Baathists were the same as Nazis after WW II and that he was going to deBaathify Iraq the way the allied occupiers of Germany did that country was a fantasy. The occupation of Iraq was not planned and without such an occupation, the destruction of the local government and military was simply the creation of the chaos that is Iraq today.

What used to be the nation of Iraq has been shattered and destroyed, and American troops are now fighting on one side of an Iraqi civil war in which we have no real interest beyond the protection of the prestige of George Bush and the Republican Party prior to the November 2008 Presidential election.

American troops are also in the unenviable position of protecting the Sunni militias and tribes in Anbar Province from the Shiite government of al Maliki, as well as protecting the Kurds in the North from the Shiite government.

So, having destroyed Iraq as a nation, the American military is currently preventing two civil wars from occurring and actively being sucked into taking sides in the third between the two major Shia factions.

The recently aired Frontline Series Bush's War shows why the invasion became such a disaster. While there is a lot of blame to go around with many people in the Bush administration responsible for a variety of blunders, the most significant blame is that of Bush himself. Blunders occur in war, but in this case the utter lack of leadership from Bush encouraged and created blunders and failed to recognize and correct them. Bush's failures as a leader are quite obvious.

Bush failed to provide direction, coordination and control to Rumsfeld (DoD), Powell DoS), and the Intelligence Community. Worse, Bush took the job of post-invasion planning and operation away from the experts in the Department of State and gave it to Rumsfeld who did not perform the job. The overall coordination job should have been Bush's through the National Security Council, and Bush simply walked off and failed to act when Rumsfeld cut the State Department out of planning the post-invasion operations. Then Bush stupidly let Rumsfeld cut the Intelligence Community out of the operation and replaced their analysis with incompetent material from Doug Feith and his Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Pentagon.

You'd think the conservatives around Bush would have been ready to invade Iraq competently. They had more than enough time to prepare. It's clear that the top members of the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq on the day Bush was sworn in, and they were simply looking for an excuse. The events of 9/11 gave them the excuse. It was not a very good excuse, but they forced the invasion of Iraq on America as a response to the al Qaeda terrorist attack on 9/11.

The invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and too expensive for any possible realistic gain. Then, in addition to being essentially rationally purposeless, as the Frontline show clearly demonstrates the invasion was bungled terribly.

Donald Rumsfeld wanted to conduct the invasion, and he wanted no interference. So he went to Bush and got Bush to give the Pentagon responsibility for both the invasion and for the post-invasion planning and occupation. This meant that the State Department was shut out of the planning for the occupation. Then Rumsfeld ignored his Generals when they told him the occupation could not be done on the cheap. Instead Rumsfeld apparently planned to simply turn Iraq over to Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress and get the Americans out. The news reports from 2003 stated that Rumsfeld planned to have no more than about 30,000 troops in Iraq by early 2004.

In short, Bush gave total control of the invasion to Rumsfeld and offered no oversight. He also removed Colin Powell and the State Department from any significant input.

When the Iraqis failed to respond favorably to having Chalabi imposed on them, Rumsfeld and Bush installed Jerry Bremer as leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority. This was a hip pocket decision based on the utter failure of Rumsfeld to permit adequate planning for the post-invasion Iraq. It followed Bush's pattern. Choose someone with impeccable conservative credentials, preferable someone with a business back ground, hand him the job and then ignore him and how he performed it.

Bremer saw himself as the Viceroy of Iraq. A Viceroy has total control of both civilian and military administration of the country, something that members of the Bush administration felt had been lacking in Vietnam. So he showed up in Iraq, took control on May 11, 2003, and on May 23, 2003 issued the order dissolving the Iraqi Army. This was done with so little coordination that many of the principle members of the President National Security Council - the body responsible for ensuring proper coordination of major critical decisions like this - were surprised when he informed them May 22 that he was issuing the order the next day.

Again, bush had chosen an individual, given him a task and failed to direct coordination between him and the other effected parts of the U.S. government. Whether Bremer was freelancing when he dissolved the Iraqi Army (something there were no plans for in Rumsfeld's invasion orders and something which obviously required a much larger U.S. Army in Iraq than existed then or at any time since to deal with) or whether Bremer went to Iraq with instructions to perform the deBaathification as he claims, is not at this time known. But the fact that he could issue such an order with no coordination and no preparation is a total failure of both George Bush as President and of Condi Rice as his National Security Adviser responsible for such intragovernmental coordination.

Then, shortly after Bremer created the Coalition Provisional Authority, Rumsfeld informed him that he had no control over military operations in Iraq. Here are two separate individuals given overlapping authority by President Bush, and although Jerry Bremer was under the impression taht he was in Iraq as America's Viceroy, Rumsfeld simply refused to cooperate. This shows that Bush never gave Rumsfeld and Bremer a clear vision of how the Iraq invasion and occupation was supposed to work, and then when conflicts occurred between those two who he had each given independent authority over the same operation, Bush and Rice failed to coordinate and work out how they would work together. Since Rumsfeld had the power of the Pentagon, all he had to do was refuse to cooperate with Bremer and Bremer was neutered - unless Rice worked out a system of coordination (she didn't) or Bush himself brought the two together and told them how they would work together (he didn't.)

Then, there is Dick Cheney. Cheney made himself the most powerful man in the federal government when, as self-selected vice-President elect chose the people who were loyal to him to put into key federal government jobs. And why was Cheney self-selected as Veep? Because of Bush's failure to control who was Vice President - he delegated that decision to Cheney, who, surprise, surprise, chose himself.

The Pattern of Bush's utter failure as President is clear. He has been a figurehead, with no interest in what actually got done or even what was attempted. He has chosen people who often were incapable of doing the job he assigned them (Rumsfeld is the prime example) and then failed to give them clear guidance regarding what job was to be done. Then he failed to ensure coordination between the various individuals when their jobs should have been mutually supportive (Rumsfeld, Powell and Tenet of the CIA), and failed to make them coordinate their actions when required (particularly Bremer and Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld and the CIA.)

On coordination, that was the job of the National Security Director, Condeleeza Rice, during the invasion and early occupation of Iraq. With Bush's refusal to get involved in government activities and his adverse attitude for telling someone he was failing or - god Forbid - firing someone, Rice was not able to do the job at all. We'll never know if she was capable of it. She clearly failed, but the blame for that failure rests with her boss, George Bush.

So while the Bush administration has failed utterly in every matter of importance, and while a lot of people contributed to that failure, the greatest failure is the failure of leadership and vision that George Bush refused to contribute. He ran a shop that amounted to anarchy among the most powerful members of government, and never stepped in to take control.

Why? Why did Bush fail so abjectly?

As far as I can tell, he has never understood the job of manager or leader, and has no aptitude for such a job, nor interest in putting in the effort to accomplish such a job. He was a passive individual chosen to be made President, and while he seems to enjoy the perks of the job, he has not bothered to exert himself to perform it beyond reading speeches someone else has written for him and accepting the adulation of crowds of carefully selected supporters. Even in public he has been protected from those who would confront him with his many failures.

How did Iraq become such a disaster? It was conducted by the single poorest excuse for a President America has ever endured.