The Consequences of War

Here in the United States, we've been spared the real consequences of war. Our media and government censor the images that are shown on television news and, until recently, even the returning bodies of soldiers in flag-draped caskets. But Iraqis have not been spared the real consequences of war. Thousands of thousands of Iraqis remain missing. The number of missing isn't clear. Many bodies are hidden in mass graves that are discovered every once in awhile. Other bodies remain in morgues, yet to be identified. According to an article in The New York Times today:

Dr. Munjid Salah al-Deen, the manager of Baghdad’s central morgue, said his staff was working to identify 28,000 bodies from 2006 to 2008 alone.("Fate of Missing Iraqis Haunts War's Survivors," by Timothy Williams and Suadad Al-Salhy, The New York Times, May 24, 2009)

The article opens with a story of a mother of seven children, six who are still alive, the seventh, a thirteen-year-old who went out to buy vegetables one afternoon and never returned home. The mother has exhausted her life savings searching for her son. Sometimes I stop and think of the original act that started us on a trajectory into war with Iraq--the loss of those original 4,000 or so lives in the Twin Towers and on those planes. Those terrorist actions were horrendous, evil. But has the loss of life since then--the war in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of homeless Iraqis, what's probably hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and the lives of American soldiers worth the cost? The answer to many of us in this country may come easily as we salute the flag and hear "The Star-Spangled Banner" sung on this Memorial Day Weekend. But the answer is not so easy for those who have borne the consequences of a war that was peddled in bad faith. The obscenity of that war goes beyond the bodies to the living, a mother searching for a lost son, a woman whose family survives by recycling aluminum cans they find in a nearby dump. Or what about the soldier home from war but unable to find a job, perhaps physically disabled or suffering from PTSD? Yes, we should remember the dead, memorialize their sacrifice. But we also should damn well do all we can to take care of the living.

Success?

Ummm. . . . Is this the "success" in Iraq we hear so much about from John McCain? The United States has been paying thousands of militia members $300 a month and promising them jobs with the Iraqi government. Of the 24,000 Sunni Sons of Iraq in Diyala province, 11,000 are on U. S. payrolls. (On Tuesday morning, gunfire erupted between police in Diyala province and Iraqi special forces.) The U. S. is paying a total of 103,000 militia members throughout Iraq. The agreement between the U. S. and these militias has greatly influenced the decline in violence that politicians always cite as evidence of success of the surge. Now the Iraqi government is backing out of its commitment toward these former insurgents. What happens when the promises fail?

Colin Kahl, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a centrist policy institute in Washington, who recently visited Iraq, said the dispute over the militias could set the stage for a return of widespread bloodshed, particularly because the Maliki government seemed intent on thwarting the plan.

Sources
Leila Fadel, "Key U. S. Iraq Strategy in Danger of Collapse," McClatchy Newspapers, posted Wednesday, August 20, 2008, at http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/49538.html

Nicholas Spangler, "U.S. Denounces Chaotic Iraqi Raid," McClatchy Newspapers, posted Wednesday, August 20, 2008, at http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/story/49518.html

Criminal History: best predictor of future behavior

In 2005, having been kidnapped and then released by insurgents in Iraq, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was wounded when U.S. soldiers fired upon her car on its way to the Baghdad International Airport. One of Sgrena's bodyguards was killed. The incident caused an international outcry, with Italians turning against the war in Iraq and influencing their government to pull out of the war.

I remember listening avidly to news reports of this event. The U.S. soldiers said that they had warned the occupants of the car, that they had a legitimate reason to shoot because the driver of the car did not respond. Sgrena and the surviving witnesses disputed the military's claims. What news media did not discover--or just did not report--was that the soldier who fired the fatal rounds, Army Spc. Mario L. Lozano Jr, had a criminal record in his civilian life. He had a record of domestic violence, of writing bad checks, of non-payment for child support, and of violently threatening other people--a record that ordinarily would have made him unfit for service in the military.

Because the U. S. military has a need for "bodies" in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has lowered recruiting standards. The Sacramento Bee has researched the records of military recruits with criminal backgrounds and has uncovered numerous consequences of these lowered standards. Many recruits with such records have continued their criminal behavior in the military, murdering Iraqis, their fellow soldiers, and other civilians and inflaming international ill will toward the United States.

I don't remember anyone being held responsible for the death of Sgrena's bodyguard; what I do remember is the military's firm statement that the firing on the car was justified. Nothing of Lozano's background was included in the subsequent news reports of the event. Lozano himself, in the great tradition of covering one's ass, blames the victim:

"If it wasn’t for her, it wouldn’t have happened," he said. "It was her [Giuliana Sgrena's] idea to go over there and mingle with terrorists."

My God! This is what we have representing us in the "war on terror." Read the entire story.

The Agribusiness Empire and Iraq

I've been reading about a subject that seems far removed from the U. S. presence in the Middle East: the philosophy of unlimited and rapid economic growth, the effects of that philosophy on the environment and on communities, the limitations of that philosophy. In his book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Bill McKibben argues against America's secular religion of "More Means Better." He describes how a growth economy will ultimately meet its end in ecological disaster. Steady and rapid growth, as has occurred in the West since the discovery of fossil fuels, has led to increased consumption of natural resources. There are limits to those resources. McKibben suggests ways to ward off that disaster and to address the issues of decreased resources.

Americans have exported to the rest of the world the philosophy of "More Means Better," of the efficiency of the marketplace. The consequences, according to McKibben, will be astronomical. Every American, he writes, "uses 6 times as much as the average Mexican, 38 times as much as the average Indian, 531 times as much as the man in the Ethiopian street. That gives you," he continues, "some rough idea of what it would mean if most of the rest of the world even approached our level of consumption" (184).

The American dream these days seems not to be "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," so much as "buying stuff in all those malls and outlets." Go shopping, our president tells us in times of crisis. We're exporting the religion of consumption and corporate hegemony.

So I get to the last chapter in the book and see how even this subject connects to the war in Iraq. Here's the draw-dropping quote:

In Iraq, one of the first laws adopted by the U.S.-led transition government of 2003 protected the patenting of plants and seeds, even though 97 percent of Iraqi farmers used seeds saved from their own crops or from local markets to grow their food. "The new law is presented as being necessary to ensure the supply of good quality seeds in Iraq, and to facilitate Iraq's membership in the World Trade Organization," reported the GRAIN, an international organization promoting sustainable agriculture. "What it will actually do is facilitate the penetration of Iraqi agriculture by the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, and Dow Chemical." Does this sound overly suspicious? Daniel Amstutz, the man named by the U.S. government to oversee agriculture reconstruction in Iraq, was a former Cargill executive. "It's like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission," one observer said. "This guy is uniquely well-placed to...bust open the Iraqi market, but singularly ill-equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a developing country." (193)

I'm no leftist, and I don't want to think that the war in Iraq was an excuse for American corporate hegemony. But when I read stuff such as this, I get mighty suspicious. My Republican father is an avid gardener and an heirloom seed saver. He is always railing against those huge agri-businesses that patent seeds and plants. Would he be surprised, I wonder, to see this connection between the war in Iraq and seed-patenting? I sure was.

Here's the link to the article McKibben quotes, on the website of GRAIN: "Iraq's new patent law: A declaration of war against farmers"

UPDATE:

In re-reading this post, I realize that I come across as more naive than I really am. Of course, the Iraq war is connected to the philosophy of unlimited growth and our dependence upon resources that are diminishing. There are plenty of dictators in the world who abuse their citizens and a few who pose a threat to our country, yet we have not invaded their country. Iraqi oil and Iraq's proximity to other Middle Eastern countries with oil resources factored into our invasion of that country. I'm not saying it's the only reason; I'm saying it's one important reason. But what surprises me is that as soon as the CPA is in place, the first laws that organization passes include seed-patenting laws, laws that benefit American agribusiness. When everything is going to hell in Iraq, when the Iraqis are being slaughtered and there's looting in the streets, our government has time to pass seed-patenting laws. That's what I find jaw-droppingly unbelievable. And so it goes.

Quotations, Part II: Incompetency and ineptitude

From Patrick Cockburn's editorial, "Iraq is a Country No More," The Independent, 16 March 2008:

In those first months after the fall of Baghdad it was extraordinary, and at times amusing, to watch the American victors behave exactly like the British at the height of their power in 19th-century India. The ways of the Raj were reborn. A friend who had a brokerage in the Baghdad stock market told me how a 24-year-old American, whose family were donors to the Republican Party, had been put in charge of the market and had lectured the highly irritated brokers, most of whom spoke several languages and had PhDs, about the virtues of democracy.

In Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon (2008), A. J. Rossmiller (former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst) writes:

In my office [Office of Iraq Analysis] where we constantly read reports straight from the ground, the general consensus--despite being overwhelmingly populated by conservatives--was that the Iraq project was a debacle, mainly due to incompetent leadership in the Pentagon and the White House. We joked that President Bush had finally set up the conservative religious government he dreamed of. . . only it was an Islamist one in Iraq rather than a Christian one at home. (215)

From The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq (2005), by George Packer, on the looting that occurred in Iraq immediately after the U. S. forces won Baghdad:

"We're incompetent, as far as [the Iraqis] are concerned," said Noah Feldman, the New York University law professor who went to Baghdad as a constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. "The key to it all was the looting. That was when it was clear that there was no order. There's an Arab proverb: Better forty years of dictatorship than one day of anarchy." He added, "That also told them they could fight against us and we were not a serious force." (138)

"Our people don't understand what's going on, so they think the Americans are deliberately creating this chaos," Dr. Butti told me. The conspiracy theories were an attempt to make sense of the absurd. . . The notion that bad planning, halfhearted commitment, ignorance, and incompetence accounted for the anarchy simply wasn't believable. How were Iraqis to grasp that the same Washington think tank where Bush offered Iraq as a model for the region had contributed to the postwar collapse by shooting down any talk of nation building? Deliberate sabotage made more sense. (166)

From A. J. Rossmiller's Still Broken:

To be viewed as legitimate by its people, a government must generally be competent in two areas: security and basic services. Iraqis view the United States as the government as much as they view their own elected officials as the government (after all, they reason, an occupying military must control the state, right?), and failure to meet those basic requirements offers insurgents an opportunity to present themselves as able to govern effectively, or at least better. Further, because Iraqis see the U.S. as overwhelmingly powerful and advanced, they think we must be able to provide security and economic opportunity--so if these things do not exist, many believe, it must be because we purposefully fail to provide them. A frequent reference among Iraqis is that the U.S. put people on the moon; how could a nation that can land on the moon not provide electricity? (52-53)

From Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), by Thomas E. Ricks, on the Coalitional Provision Authority (CPA)--or, less honorably known as Can't Do Anything:

The U.S. civilian occupation organization was a house built on sand and inhabited by the wrong sort of people, according to many who worked there. "No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes," concluded retired Army Col. Ralph Hallenbeck, who worked at the CPA as a civilian contractor dealing with the Iraqi communications infrastructure. Personnel was an especially nettlesome issue. Hallenbeck said that in addition to being young and inexperienced, most of the young CPA people he met during his work as a contractor were ideologically minded Republicans whose only professional experience was working on election campaigns back in the United States. It was, as Zinni later commented, "a pickup team." Scott Erwin, a former intern for Vice President Cheney who worked on the budget for security forces, reported that his favorite job before that was "my time as an ice cream truck driver." (203)

From Packer's The Assassin's Gate, on the young members of the CPA:

Most of them [young members of the Coalition Provisional Authority] seemed to be Republicans, and more than a few were party loyalists who had come to Iraq as political appointees on ninety-day tours. They were astonishingly young. Many had never worked abroad, few knew anything about the Middle East, and that first summer only three or four of the Americans spoke Arabic. Some were simply unqualified for their responsibilities. A twenty-five-year-old oversaw the creation of the Baghdad stock market, and another twenty-five-year-old, from the Office of Special Plans, helped write the interim constitution while filling out his law school application.(184)

Almost all of [head of the CPA, Paul Bremer] Bremer's confidants were Americans. The Arabic-speaking ambassadors with years of experience in the Middle East had less access to the administrator and less work to do than his small coterie of trusted aides from Washington. An Iraqi who was close to the CPA told me that, in general, the less one knew about Iraq, the more influence one had. (198)

Why should we still care about the incompetent leadership of the Bush administration in the Iraq war? Because those leaders are still in power and because the Republican Party's nominee for president, John McCain, shows no indication of making any changes in leadership. The same people who advised George Bush are advising John McCain.

A Few Quotations: No Justice

Some of my reading recently has rather serendipitously connected with current events, particularly the war in Iraq. I've been thinking of how to write about what I've read. Until then, here are some quotations from that reading.

From Greg Mortenson's and David Oliver Resin's Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace. . . One School at a Time (2006), in a conversation with Pakistani Brigadier General Bashir Baz, who was reacting to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan:

As he studied the [television] screen, Bashir's bullish shoulders slumped. "People like me are America's best friends in the region," Bashir said at last, shaking his head ruefully. "I'm a moderate Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?" Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of his desk. "Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years."

From Andrew Eames's The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie (2004), in a conversation with Alp Aslan, a Turkish man in Konya, Turkey, who answers the author's question about regional responses to the war in Iraq, which at that point hadn't yet started:

"Iraq will probably be a better place without Saddam Hussein, but the war must not go on for too long. Might is only right for a limited time, look at Genghis Khan. Justice, that is the important thing. If the US treats Iraq with justice, then I don't think there'll be any backlash from here...."

From A. J. Rossmiller's Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, From Baghdad to the Pentagon (2008):

In America's Iraq, the burden of proof is on the suspect. Guilty until proven innocent. The action units place the responsibility on the intel crew to sort out the guys they grab, and the intel guys figure that the action units will bring in only legitimate targets. In that space an innocent individual becomes a prisoner."

From Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks:

[Nir] Rosen, an Arabic speaker who had spent time in Egypt, Qatar, and Jordan, was stunned at how little the American soldiers understood of their environment. On another raid he witnessed, soldiers burst into a house, shot a man named Ayoub in the hand with nonlethal pellets, and arrested him. They seized two compact discs with images of Saddam Hussein on them--not knowing that the titles on the discs, in Arabic, were The Crimes of Saddam Hussein. "The soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt," Rosen wrote. Several hours later intelligence operatives intercepted a telephone call by another man. "Oh, shit," said Army Capt. Bill Ray, an intelligence officer; the man they had detained "was the wrong Ayoub." (275)

Back to Blackwater: Consequences of Privatization

Peter Singer has an interesting article in Salon on the tragic and dangerous consequences of our military outsourcing. I posted a couple of months back on the problems with the military contractor, Blackwater. Singer revisits and explains those problems in his essay, which can be found here.

Here are some excerpts that struck me:

• "In 2007, an internal Department of Defense census on the industry found almost 160,000 private contractors were employed in Iraq (roughly equal to the total U.S. troops at the time, even after the troop "surge"). Yet even this figure was a conservative estimate...."

• Singer points out that contractor deaths aren't counted in the military death toll (though many of those contractors are performing duties once the work of official military personnel), thus skewing the reported numbers of actual American lives lost in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan: "If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. By one count, as of July 2007, more than 1,000 contractors have been killed in Iraq, and another 13,000 wounded. . . .Since the troop "surge" started in January 2007, these numbers have accelerated -- contractors have been killed at a rate of nine per week."

• "According to testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Defense Contract Audit Agency has identified more than a staggering $10 billion in unsupported or questionable costs from battlefield contractors -- and investigators have barely scratched the surface."

• "Halliburton's contract has garnered the firm $20.1 billion in Iraq-related revenue and helped the firm report a $2.7 billion profit last year. To put this into context, the amount paid to Halliburton-KBR is roughly three times what the U.S. government paid to fight the entire 1991 Persian Gulf War.

• "[C]ontractors are one of the most visible and hated aspects of the American presence in Iraq."

  These contractors are not held responsible for criminal acts, hurt the goals of the military, and even detrimentally affect the decisions of our leaders. Will any of these issues be truly addressed in the hearings by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee?

Ten-Year-Old "Consents" to Rape?!

I haven't posted lately because I've been busy with projects and because I've been rather dispirited over the news. Nothing seems to change. The Democrats are in the majority in the House and Senate, yet they seem to be only weakly challenging the administration. There are a few lone voices--voices we've heard all along--but the Democratic leadership capitulates too easily to the fear of being negatively branded by Republican propagandists sometime in the future: fear of being called unpatriotic or weak on terror or [fill in the blank]. . . .

But more on that in the future.

Having earlier posted on the horror of Saudi Arabian attitudes toward women who are raped, I would be remiss if I didn't bring to your attention two recent news items that I found through Broadsheet, stories that remind me all too vividly that sexual oppression and hateful, violent attitudes toward women are not limited to one culture. I hate to sound like a throw-back to the 70s, but, by god, are we progressing at all in our attitudes toward women? The first article is about a rape case in Australia: a ten-year-old girl was gang-raped, and the judge in the case did not send the perpetrators to jail because the girl "probably consented" to the rape. What ten-year-old consents to rape?

The second story is of a young woman from Houston, Texas, who was gang-raped by her colleagues in Baghdad, all of whom worked for Halliburton/KBR. After complaining about the rapes, she was kept under guard in a shipping container. After a sympathetic guard loaned her a cell phone, the woman called her father, who contacted the State Department. People were then sent to release her from the shipping container. Since then Halliburton/KBR and the State Department have worked to cover up the case, evidently. According to what the young woman told ABC News, Army doctors examined her and found evidence of rape--anally and vaginally--but--surprise!--the rape kit disappeared after being turned over to KBR security.

Ah, the vanishing rape kit act! In the 1980s, one of my aunts was raped in Dayton, Texas, and Liberty County officials lost her rape kit, too--very conveniently as they were accusing her of making up her story of her attack. When her experience became locally public, several women called her to describe similar experiences they had had with Dayton and Liberty County police.

Just as I was counting my blessings as a woman that I didn't live in an oppressive culture that holds women guilty for being raped, I am reminded that not too far beneath the surface, similar attitudes lurk in my own culture. When are we going to win this war?

Torture: "It Depends on Who Does It"

I've been following the debate on torture since those first pictures of Iraqi prisoners emerged from Abu Ghraib. That debate has revealed the moral bankruptcy of the Bush administration and most of the Republican party. Rudy Giuliani, the front runner (God help us!) for the Republican nomination for president, recently said in a town meeting that the definition of torture depended on "how it's done. . . the circumstances. . . . [and] "who does it."

Well, people who represent us are doing it, and with our votes and our silence, we're complicit. Giuliani recites the old, tired, Republican mantra that the "liberal media" is distorting the facts. It's not "liberal media" that calls waterboarding torture; this method has been considered torture--by people of all political persuasions-- since its first use. Joan Walsh, at Salon, directs readers to a recent editorial in The Washington Post by Evan Wallach, a former JAG in the Nevada National Guard. Wallach gives us a brief history of water torture, including details on how the United States prosecuted for war crimes people who performed waterboarding on prisoners.

In his article, Wallach writes that waterboarding does not "simulate drowning," as so many who try to downplay the details claim: "To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death." Wallach supplies testimony of people who have experienced this form of torture.

So waterboarding is torture when used by the Japanese in World War II against Allied soldiers--but it's NOT when used by operatives of the United States government against suspected terrorists? Would it be torture if Rudy Giuliani were waterboarded? I think Giuliani--and all those other Republican faces who downplay torture--would sing a different tune if he were strapped to a table with his head down and experienced water being poured on a cloth over his mouth and nose until he lost consciousness.

Torture is torture, no matter who does it or who the victim is.

UPDATE: This evening (8 Nov. 2007) on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, "a former Navy instructor and an intelligence expert" were questioned about the legality and effectiveness of waterboarding as a coercive technique to extract information from suspected terrorists and "enemy combatants." The transcript of that discussion can be found here, on the PBS website. More about Former Senior Chief Petty Officer Malcolm Nance, who, in my opinion, spoke so eloquently against the use of torture, can be found here. A short essay written by Malcolm Nance can be found here--and another here.

The "Menacing" Calls

I have tried to stick to my moratorium on responding to outrages resulting from the Iraq war, and so far I'm holding firm. However, I have to respond to an interview with Chris Matthews that I read online at TV Guide. Salon's "War Room" provided a link that didn't work, but I found the interview with a Google search. That interview followed up on some comments that Matthews made at the 10th anniversary party for Hardball. Matthews revealed that the Bush administration tried to silence discussion that was critical of the war in Iraq. He compares the treatment he received from the Clinton administration while he covered the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal with the treatment he has received from the Bush administration while covering the war in Iraq: "And the difference in these two cases was that although I was extremely tough on Clinton, there was never any attempt to silence me — whereas there was a concerted effort by [Vice President Cheney's office] to silence me. It came in the form of three different people calling trying to quiet me."

Matthews describes how it's now normal to receive "an almost menacing call" when he plans to air views the administration or some of the presidential campaigners do not like: "[T]heir people call up and threaten, or challenge, and get very nasty."

That folks in the Bush administration try to quiet people who are critical of the administration or who hold views contrary to the purposes and goals of the administration is not news. What's news to me is that Matthews describes these menacing calls as "the norm." Successful bullying has a cumulative effect--no matter who is doing the bullying. This administration's disregard for the First Amendment makes it easier for others in power to disregard the First Amendment.

Katie Couric also says she received corporate pressure from NBC to be less critical of the Iraq war and the administration in interviews on the Today show: "I think there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations."

So Sick: The Blackwater Horror

I am so sick of the incompetence, venality, greed, and jingoism associated with the war in Iraq. The latest Blackwater scandal just joins the list of ways our government has mismanaged the war. I read these stories of gun-toting, trigger-happy security contractors slaughtering Iraqi civilians, and I can't help wonder why more Americans aren't disgusted with the choices our leaders have made in beginning and directing this war. Are people incapable of empathizing with the Iraqi mother cradling her dead son in her arms, with the Iraqi taxi driver desperately crawling away from the bloody scene, with the Iraqi husband remembering his wife as a "beautiful woman"?

Or how about the family of the Iraqi bodyguard shot by a drunken Blackwater employee? The drunken 26-year-old was hustled out of the country after the murder.

I don't doubt Blackwater has some competent and ethically-motivated employees, men (mostly) who see themselves as patriots supporting the USA's military efforts in Iraq. At least one Blackwater security guard was heard yelling "No, no, no, no," gesturing to his colleagues to stop the gunfire that killed at least 17 Iraqis. But what we have here is a mercenary army that's been operating under the radar of oversight and a company that that has enriched itself immensely in the horror of Iraq.

The actions of Blackwater security contractors have also compromised military efforts in Iraq.

I recall that not one Iraqi was on the planes that flew into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon or the plane that crashed in that Pennsylvania field. There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the events of 9/11. I recall that the Taliban--which did and does support Al-Qaeda, is regaining power in parts of Afghanistan and that Osama bin Laden is still at large. The Iraq war has been obscenely cheered by neo-con leaders who are forming another cheer-leading section for war against Iran.

Anyone for supporting further incompetence, venality, and greed?

Updates

Military Eyewitnesses to the Blackwater event

New Evidence

"Our Level of Confidence is Under Control"

Watching General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker facing the hours of questioning from members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, I couldn't help but feel a little sympathy for the two men. Both men looked as if they were in the hot seat--as they were and as they should be. The reports of these two men have been touted by the Bush administration for months as the Holy Grail to understanding the need to keep our troops in Iraq. Petraeus and Crocker were going to provide us with the answers.

Of the long excerpt of exchanges I watched on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, one struck me most forcefully. John McCain asked Ambassador Crocker whether he had any confidence that the Maliki government of Iraq had any hope of meeting the benchmarks the U. S. had set out for the country. Crocker's response? "Our level of confidence is under control."

Tom gave out a sharp bark of laughter when Crocker said this. "Did you hear that?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, smiling and yet also feeling some sympathy for the ambassador.

Ambassador Crocker parsed his answer very carefully. "Our level of confidence is under control." What a contrast that is to our president's saying that we're "kicking ass" in Iraq. What a contrast to Donald Rumsfeld's opinion that the Iraqis would embrace us as liberators. I think of Molly Ivins, grinning in her grave, not a triumphant grin but a bitter grin. Her words, in 2002: "The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? ... There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now."

There was no triumphalism in the voices of either of these two men. They tried to paint as positive a picture as they could, but they were far from triumphant.

After the long excerpt from the hearings, Jim Lehrer talked with Joe Biden, Democratic senator, and Richard Lugar, Republican senator. There was no triumphalism here, either.

What do you think, Lehrer asked Lugar, of the plan to keep over 100,000 troops in Iraq to next summer?

Lugar's response? “This [keeping 100,000 troops in Iraq] has a very narrow margin of success.”

Yes, I would say that our level of confidence is very much under control.

UPDATE, 12 Sept.: I've read several news reports on the hearings yesterday and noted that reporters recorded Ambassador Crocker as saying "MY level of confidence is under control"--not "Our."

Commemorating 9/11

Just a few minutes ago, I walked out into the late-morning sunshine to pull dead plants from the window boxes at the front of our "new" (mid-40s model) house. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a woman in her late 60s walking down our street, her little dog forging ahead on its leash. As I crossed the sidewalk to attend to the other window box, the woman asked me, "Where are all the American flags on this street?"

A little confused, I replied, "Uh, I don't know. Should there be flags?"

"To commemorate 9/11," she replied. "Everyone is supposed to fly the flag."

I answered, "Well, I guess people commemorate in different ways."

"Evidently not this street," she said, her voice heavy with judgment, as she walked on, assessing the neighborhood. Cowardly absolving myself from the actions of my neighbors--though I was as guilty as they since I also did not have a flag flying in my yard--I said, "Well, I'm new here." I heard the woman's short laugh in the distance.

Clearly, people judge us by our outward expressions of faith or patriotism. But I was brought up in a strict Southern Baptist culture, and I took those stories of Jesus seriously as a child:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. . . . But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. . . . .When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. . . . But when you do fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen."

This just sounds like wisdom to me, no matter what one's religious or irreligious persuasion. The advice jibes with my own tendency to Stoicism. Flying a flag reveals a person's true heart no more than praying on a street corner. I'm suspicious of people who make a great deal of praying in public; I am suspicious of people who worship the flag.

Anyway, this administration has been commemorating 9/11 every day for the past six years. I think a silent prayer and little bit of humility is in order for today.

Taking Reponsibility, Looking Ahead in Iraq

Two articles on Iraq recently published online are worth a close read. One looks back to one of the worst errors the United States made in the early days of the war, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, thus dumping 250,000 men onto the streets, angry, armed, and jobless. Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate, discusses who was probably responsible for that disastrous decision. President Bush says it wasn't his order but L. Paul Bremer's decision. Paul Bremer has publicly replied that he received the order from Donald Rumsfeld and that President Bush commended the order. But Kaplan shows how all the principal parties, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had decided to disband only the elite Republican Guards, not the ordinary enlisted men in the Iraqi army. So where do you think the finger points for what most believe was the worst decision in the early months of the Iraq war, a decision that led to the chaos and violence? Read Kaplan's piece for one analysis.

The second article is by George Packer, in The New Yorker. Packer, a journalist who supported President Bush's decision to invade Iraq but who quickly became disenchanted with the war because of its poor execution, has written extensively on the war in Iraq and has been to Iraq several times. (I highly recommend his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, as well as Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11 and Thomas Ricks' Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.) Packer's recent article, "Planning for Defeat", looks ahead to the decisions which will have to be made in the next few months. He rightly points out that these decisions are not ones relegated to one administration or one party. We are all responsible, and our decisions will determine America's standing in the world.

Soldiers Speak

In this morning's New York Times online, several sergeants, staff sergeants, and an army specialist have co-published their views on the situation in Iraq, titled, "The War as We Saw It". In this editorial the writers describe their skepticism at the press coverage "portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable," and they warn that "[t]he ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security." These words are important to keep in mind as just such American observers as Michael O'Hanlon, Kenneth Pollack, and William Kristol have returned from recent trips to Iraq describing the safety with which they have walked down such formerly violent streets. When General Petraeus and the Bush administration give us the much-heralded September report on the success of the surge, will the sunny side of the American occupation again be served up for our consumption? We deserve the truth, a thorough explanation of the complexities of the war in Iraq, the hard work of either staying or leaving, neither of which is a good option. (Nor do we seem to have anything close to Solomonic leadership that can split this baby.)

These soldiers' op-ed is a rebuttal to the happy talk of the O'Hanlon and Pollack op-ed of two weeks ago, "A War We Just Might Win". As these men of the 82nd Airborne Division explain, the military successes of our superior forces are offset by tremendous failures elsewhere, particularly in improving "basic social and economic conditions."

The United States has "failed on every promise," but no one takes responsibility or blame in the Bush administration. The pattern is to repeat platitudes until they are either accepted as wisdom or forgotten on the way to the mall.

UPDATE, 12 September 2007: Two of the men who wrote the editorial "The War as We Saw It," criticizing the war in Iraq, are now dead, killed in Iraq. Staff Sergeant Yance Gray was killed September 10th in an accident in Baghdad. Sergeant Omar Mora was killed in the same vehicle rollover accident.