~

Referring to Admiral Fallon, head of the Central Command:

There's one little item that that whole squadron of good reporters have a very slim chance of knowing about. That is, that Admiral Fallon being a member of the US Navy, as was I, fully understands the old Navy cliche; "When the captain acts as the scoundrel, mutiny is not far behind." And like it or not, and no matter what the cadre of *Army generals* keep piping, the troops are getting really, really restless. Admiral Fallon knows this.

And since we are not any closer to any form of a meaningful outcome in the quagmire we are up to our collective necks in in Iraq than when I originally used the above cliche in my comment back in August 2005 in Ivo Daalder's Bush, the Pentagon, and Extremism, and in light of this latest circle-jerk that the Army brass and the White House has now cooked up, Fallon already knows the outcome as to whether the captain (Bush) will sink or swim on his own accord. He clearly realizes there's more water entering the bilges of this sinking adminstration than all the bilge-pumps could ever possibly handle.

~OGD~

Peter Principle: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence

Petraeus Principle: In the US Army some generals rise to levels beyond their levels of incompetence

General David Petreaus was in charge of the training of Iraqi army battalions from Jun 2004 to Sep 2005

Sep 2004–Petreaus: “Six battalions of the Iraqi regular army and the Iraqi Intervention Force are now conducting operations. . .Within the next 60 days, six more regular army and six additional Intervention Force battalions will become operational. . . Nine more regular army battalions will complete training in January”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49283-2004Sep25.html

Sep 2005–Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who oversees U.S. forces in Iraq, said there are fewer Iraqi battalions at “Level 1" readiness than there were a few months ago. . . The number of Iraqi army battalions that can fight insurgents without U.S. and coalition help has dropped from three to one, top U.S. generals told Congress yesterday.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2005/tr20050930-secdef4002.html

Feb 2007-General David Petraeus was named commander of multinational military forces in Iraq.

Most of what is reported in the WaPo piece could have been put out months ago. But that would have blown open the whole PR surge. I’m thinking that the jaded public just isn’t buying the pitch this time. Also, the GAO and other military are contradicting Petraeous. The media has no choice but to play it skeptically.

Katie Couric, Michal Gordon, O’hanlin and Pollock, even your local congressman couldn’t put this one over. I suspect congress will have still agree to give more time (that was inevitable) but they will attach plenty of caveats and conditions to it, believe you me.

Added: I just read most of Greenwald and he discusses the public's rejection of the surge campaign and the continued desire for withdrawal. He links to this unsurprising WaPo-ABC poll. 

Can you say "quagmire"?

Mission Accomplished: Petraeus has been 'Friedmanized'.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — The top American commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, has recommended that decisions on the contentious issue of reducing the main body of the American troops in Iraq be put off for six months, American officials said Sunday.

The Friedman, or Friedman Unit (F.U.), is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) on May 21, 2006. A Friedman is a unit of time equal to six months. Tom Friedman is a New York Times foreign affairs columnist. Many times he has used the six months time measure for progress in Iraq: (11/30/03), (6/3/04), (10/3/04), (11/28/04), (9/25/05), (9/28/05), (12/18/05), (12/20/05), (12/21/05), (1/23/06), (1/31/06), (3/2/06), (4/23/06) and (5/11/06).
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2884

Oh well, I've been cut off from blogging at work (I can't understand why:)). Yes, I was thinking about the last caveats they insisted on, benchmarks, which seem to be beside the point now. "Are we there yet?" Ha! Somehow, I don't think we'll ever get there. (Don Key was a quickly thought up user name when I had to re-register here).

~

Yes! As you know, I did yesterday... And thanks the rating acknowledging the significance of my point related to the original subject of this thread

And for those of you coming in late, you'll find my post here.

~OGD~

~

Ah yes ... Bamboozled.

But I'm sorry to inform you (with tongue planted firmly in cheek) that it appears that this ex-beauty queen runway strutter turned political pundit seems to think she has the market cornered on the use of the word...

It's worth it to go her link, simply for the almost cartoonish comedic value.

Sheesh!

~OGD~

That was cold, brother! I started to watch the video of Angela with Ann Coulter, but I thought my head might explode…

Well, I was happy to see that Hardball interviewed moveon and Kos tonight. I suppose the Repubicans were on FOX and the Democrats were in hiding.

Terrorism and Iraq are two different things.

Let me make it simple. In Iraq, America is the terrorist.

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. Maybe I'm jagged and looking for a fight. Maybe I'm just not sugar coating it.

Cutting and running or staying and dying. That's coming from a certain point of view, isn't it. Cowardice or Idiocy, but the people who get to be the victims in America's passion play hardly count. They're the unpaid extras in America's self absorbed little drama.

No wonder no one pays attention to them and no one cares. That's a choice.

Maybe the problem is that Americans keep making it all about America.

Maybe it should be about paying attention to the people under your boots.

You know what the sad thing is?

Osama Bin Laden has won.

The next time he pulls one of his stunts, the rest of the world is going to shrug and say 'the fuckers had it coming.'

On 9/11 we were all Americans.

Will that ever happen again?

I do know that the American people aren't terrorists, but I agree this government is.

But it's your government.

I think we were the last, best, hope for the world. No one has had the success for so many or the diversity of race and religion we've had. I'm proud of that legacy.

I used to think that too. Maybe tomorrow I'll think that again. Right now, I think it's been thrown away. America's feeding its worst impulses, and the enlightenment is going to have to look for a new champion.

We have a debt to pay to the iraqis, yes, indeed. But they haven't exactly been blameless either.

So national condemnation is too extreme for the Yanks, but it's just the right thing to apply to the Iraqi's. I don't recall them inviting you into their country.

Where have YOU motherfuckers been while all this crap has been going on? You Canadians? Pandering, electing farging right-wingers. Maybe YOU should be tending your own patch, eh?

Well, right at the moment, we're in Afghanistan. We've been in Afghanistan from the beginning. We were holding on in Afghanistan trying to make a difference, when your President was moving on to Iraq. We stuck it out in Afghanistan trying to make a difference.

As for electing farging right wingers, we surgically attached that bastige to left wing social democrats/socialists of the likes you see in Eruope.

But y'know what? All we've accomplished in Afghanistan is to make the world safe for heroin. We're playing cops and robbers, and Karzai is going 'hmm, we better sit down with these Taliban guys.'

It ain't going well.

Someone once told me that when I'm in a really bad mood, I have 436 teeth, they're all huge, jagged and visible.

I apologize for my bad mood, and I offer my compliments for your efforts to engage me.

Nevertheless, as I look back, it occurs to me that my original despairing point is quite correct. No one has had an original thought on Iraq in years, and no evolution in the real life situation has had any sort of impact.

There is a compelling need for original thinking on the subject.

So let's take a stab at it: The Military solution has failed, is failing, is continuing to fail and will fail into the forseeable future. The military solution is in fact a contributing factor to the lack of stability and social breakdown. Iraq as a military problem is insoluble, and the effort to look at it and treat it as a military problem leads us to ignore other issues which are far more pressing - the economic collapse, the ongoing infrastructural collapse, the approaching famine.

Okay, so when something isn't working, why keep beating our heads against the wall. Our heads will break before the wall does. The American Army is breaking even as we speak.

The problem isn't that there isn't enough firepower in Iraq. Hell, Iraq is lousy with firepower, there are seventeen militias in Baghdad alone. There are several militias that are operating very near the scale of full fledged armies... The Badr Brigades, the Peshmerga, the Mahdi Army, the Sunni tribes that we're arming.

The United States has done nothing about these militias, and cannot cope with them. We've given a pass to the Peshmerga, we've turned a blind eye to the Badr Brigades, we're actively arming up the Tribes and we've lost twice to the Mahdi army. Security issues should not be the issue it is in Iraq, not with so many armed groups with guns.

Looked at in that sense, what's the point of US military intervention? Merely to be the biggest, baddest militia in Baghdad? It's hopeless and foolish.

Cutting and running and staying and dying are simply the two options of a military strategy, both of which represent failure. There's no military option that represents success.

So why are we tied to a losing and disastrous military solution?

Why not think outside the box? Why not think about Iraq in a nonmilitary way?

Let's think about Iraq, not as a military problem, but as a humanitarian catastrophe.

How do you deal with a humanitarian catastrophe? How do you deal with a flood, with a hurricane, with an earthquake or a forest fire...

These phenomena have many of the same symptoms. Massive destruction of property, disruption of infrastructure and services, collapse of law and order, loss of life, rise of injuries, eruption of disease, hunger, economic paralysis.

In essence, the Iraqi conquest and occupation in humanitarian terms have been an ongoing Iraqi-wide version of hurricane Katrina. The solution to dealing with Katrina in New Orleans was not more hurricanes. The solution in Iraq is not military force or more military force.

So, how do we deal with humanitarian catastrophes like New Orleans. Well, bad question, since the Bush administration dealt with it with no bid contracts, cronyism, photo-ops, advancing its agenda, and wholesale tacit ethnic cleansing.

Interestingly, this seems to be the Bush administration's approach in Iraq.

In both cases disastrous.

But let's get back to it. How do you deal with a humanitarian catastrophe? You triage, stabilize, restart and rebuild. You work with the locals, and you contribute help and aid as required.

So maybe the first step in Iraq is to triage the hell out of it. Identify what's going on, figure out what the most desperate human needs are, and start addressing them.

I've seen no evidence that the refugees, for instance, are being cared for. We're shifting immense burdens onto Syria and Jordan, but not contributing a dime. We're not dealing with internal refugees.

Malnutrition has doubled, medical care has collapsed, there are basic needs going unmet.

Why aren't we sending doctors and blankets and tents instead of soldiers?

If Bremer's insane economic policies wrecked the economy, what can be done to jumpstart it? Dispense with these policies for one thing. Lock down Iraq's wide open export/import system. Invest money into restarting the state factories, get people employed and earning money, which allows them to buy the products the factories consume. It doesn't matter if those industries are inefficient by outside standards. They need to be there for the economy to function. It's the same with the US and subsidized agriculture.

Once the economy actually is functioning again, then the Iraqi's can make their own decisions on liberalization. If they want to.

Let the militia's provide for security, and start negotiating treaties with the militias, and between the militias. Let them all keep each other on the honour system. Will it work? I don't know. But one thing I do guarantee is that America has failed utterly in providing the basic inherent security. So we have to try something else.

We're spending what? 150 billion dollars a year to keep these people under our boots, and 10 billion or less on reconstruction? That's just mental. We gotta come up with a better way...

Not so much a Marshall Plan as disaster relief and reconstruction.

Fallujah under the Jihadists was a far more viable city than it is now. Sure, we went in and beat the Jihadists fine.

What's the result? God knows how many casualties, a full third the population still living in refugee camps three years later, something like half the buildings destroyed or massively damaged, the football stadium is the site of a mass grave, no cars allowed to operate, 80% unemployment (compared to the Iraqi standard 30% to 50%), a police state system of ID cards, curfews and execution on the spot, huge piles of rubble on every streetcorner, water and electricity infrastructure only partially functional. The inhabitants live in a combination police state/ghost town.

Horrible thought, but we destroyed the city to save it. What came out of it? The inhabitants of Fallujah would have been better off if we'd have left that Fallujah mini-state alone, and looked for some other way to neutralize the Jihadists.

Is this Iraq's future under the American occupation, more and more piles of rubble, more and more mass graves, more and more ruins. Doesn't seem appealing.

No, I think we have to write Fallujah off not as a victory but a catastrophic screw up. No matter who won Fallujah, the city lost. If it was a matter of showing who had the biggest dick, fine. But if it was a matter of protecting and helping people, well, then it's just a complete fubar.

There's got to be a different way to approach it.

If the American forces can't keep the peace, then somebody else must. If the militia's have the firepower, then the key is to negotiate with those militia's, to create truces and treaties among the militia's. To create common advantages to peace.

What common advantages do the militia's have. None. The economy is not functioning, everyone withdraws. It's easier to ethnically cleanse your neighborhood without risk, than to protect your people outside their neighborhood even if you could. As everyone withdraws, trade, commerce, interchange and exchange of all sorts breaks down. Iraq becomes a series of armed camps.

The logic of armed camps takes on a life of its own. Ethnic cleansing becomes a necessity, not a choice. Survival is in taking as much territory as you can grab and defeat or hold onto enough is in the possibility that you couldn't grab or hold enough.

The American forces ignore the militias, tolerating or accepting their existence. When not ignored, we're either funding them or fighting them. They're a fact of life which we don't acknowledge and can't seem to grasp. We try and run the government, run the country, as if they don't exist. Yet they do exist, and they operate under rules and frameworks that we establish, which lead to them tearing the country apart.

You want my advice? Take out 25,000 soldiers and send in 2500 diplomats. I mean real diplomats, negotiators, bargainers, hagglers, union reps, mediators. Hire them from Europe, from the Arab world, drag them out of Iraq, anywhere. Send them in there, and say 'there is a mission - negotiate truces and treaties between the militias.' Negotiate deals for them not to attack each other, and then for them not to attack each others territories, and then for them not to attack each others peoples in those territories, and then for them to tolerate each others peoples in their own territories. Find those basic economic and social interests, that allows them to work together to make sure that gasoline and kerosene get shipped through, that food gets delivered, that people can go to and from jobs. Will it be easy, not a shot, breaches will happen, arguments will rage, every now and then something will break down.

But if you change the rules, if we can find a way to change the logic of the situation so that cooperation pays off more than winner take all, then there's a chance that people will start working it out.

It strikes me that America's big power is to set ground rules. It can't decide who the parties are, it can't decide what they bring to the party. America's been playing the game with the idea that the only players are the ones it chooses, that the only plays are American plays. The Bush administration tried to treat Iraq as a spectator sport, with docile Iraqi's watching from the stands and on their televisions as America showboated around the field.

Instead, Iraq is a full contact sport, a participation sport. Other people, lots of people, everyone entered onto the field, because it was their country and their lives. They're all playing with the rules and the logic we set up... and where has it lead? To hell. And what do we bring to the game? Obliviousness. From the start, we've tried to make it so that no one else's point of view counted in Iraq but our own, and from the start that's been under attack.

I think we need to step back and understand what sort of rules we've established, and the inevitable logic that results from other people playing on the field and rules we've established.

There's no reset button. There are players now who wouldn't exist, except that we chose to create a certain kind of game. Now that they exist, they won't fade away.

But maybe we can still change their environment so that they see and find more rewards in some ways than in others.

Is this so hard? Christ, there's nothing to it! You know how we won Afghanistan? Suitcases full of cash. How we keep Afghanistan, more suitcases? How did Saddam's army fall apart so quickly? Suitcases full of cash to certain generals?

We're spending 150 billion dollars a year to grind an entire country into dust and get car bombs in our faces? What's the point. For the same money, we could send all our troops home, and buy, lock stock and barrel, every militia-member in Iraq. We could buy the Mahdi Army, the Badr Brigades, the Peshmerga, you name em. We could buy the insurgency. We could put everyone on our payroll.

Instead, of doing that, we've played the most half assed games of 'who has the biggest cock! Why it's us!!!' How has that been working out?

The only successes we have is occasions when soldiers sit down and play at being diplomats. But that's the one job they're not trained for, not qualified for, and not competent at. We needed horse traders not officers.

After the Gulf War, the Iraqi's pretty much rebuilt their country within a few months. They literally reconstructed bridges and electrical grids, water and sewer networks, without spare parts, with duct tape and baling wire. They did it faster, more cheaply, more economically and more effectively than the Americans were able to do it in years.

So I don't think we have to teach them anything.

It's a joke, like training the Iraqi Army. This is a country that fought two or three major wars in the last couple of decades. They have soldiers who know how to shoot, already.

So its back to disaster relief. Figure out how to triage, get them back on their feet, and they'll take care of it after that.

It's not about the suitcases full of cash. That worked here and there. What we're doing now isn't working. What it really is about is about finding what works.

Diplomats and union reps, horse traders and negotiators instead of soldiers and officers to deal with the militia and put together enough truces to keep the country quiet.

And then go on to the next issue in critical ways, arresting an accumulating famine, getting key infrastructure back on line, shutting down the wild west imports market, restarting the state industries, getting the economy going again.

Cool the trash talk. In your rather limitd way, you're saying he's personally responsible for what goes on with government policy north of the border, and therefore he can't share his opinions about all the rotteness this administration has stirred up in the world, and all the B.S. it uses to neutalize public opposition? Makes about as much (or less) sense as someone telling you, love it or leave it Bud! (In fact, I always enjoy V's comments whether I agree with them or not.)

One the matter at hand, Power relations are an unspoken part of any dialog. The policy makers here are in a very different position from the critics. Somehow, we need to make Congress aware, along with the talk, some actions are in order, NOW. And -

We need to make the public understand, an ugly price will need to be paid for what has been done no matter what the future course of action. At this point, there are only bad choices and less bad choices. Better to bite the bullet now and try to figure out the best choices in the bad lot. Then push to get started on them, right now.

Kevin Russell Cook

workerbee,

I rated your comment above highly the other day because I thought you were making a lucid and important point: Iraq is a world problem, it was considered so before we invaded, and just because the U.S. messed it up a gazillion times worse doesn't mean everyone else gets a total freebie from it. But something about it bothered me, too, I almost responded then, but decided not to.

I came back today because Tom Friedman's column today reminded me today of the point I wanted to make. He is making the claim that they mostly don't give a damn about Iraq in China. Whether that's true or not, it gets at what bothered me about your comment, what made it not seem exactly "right" to me--

Most of us in the West didn't give a damn about this while it was going on:

Despite 4 Million Deaths, the Congo's War Remains Largely Ignored, March 14, 2005.

As I recall, there was little outrage, there was not 24/7 coverage, there was not blogging going on about it all day.

So this IS in way very much about America! If America wasn't involved in Iraq, few Americans would care and many who resent us or dislike us for our superpower status wouldn't care either.

My point: I think that's reality but it's a warped reality. Sometimes I look at the U.N. news pages, like IRIN or UN News Service to get a reality check on my own perspective. Rarely is Iraq at the top of their news or concerns there. It is not the be-all and end-all of world quagmire messes in history, though many might think so simply by virtue of Americans being involved there. This is also why in the past I have raised what I think is the warping perspective of getting most of one's news from Amerocentric sites like these.

Since we can vote on policy here, but not in other countries, we argue about our actions, not theirs. There is a point in official complaints to other countries, especially when they are backed by some kind of stick. There is no point in kvetching about it here.

"Hate America First" is juvenile, exactly like a teenager that complains his parents hate him since they want him to improve.

I had not said that. But here it is from you:

On September 10, 2007 - 11:49pm workerbee said: "...the American people aren't terrorists, but I agree this government is."

Please, don't try to bully people, in person, or on paper. This cafe is not provided as a place for name calling. Try to manage that understandable frustration. You'll feel better.

By the way, I agree, too. As our friend V originally said here, in Iraq it is the USA (my country) that has behaved as terrorists.

Kevin Russell Cook

Isn't it.

It's soooo much "more adult" to be condescending and snide.

Whatever.

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