"Abu Gharaib was dealt with and condemned"

Why have we not seen Donald Rumsfeld, or Dick Cheney, forced to testify about their involvements in policies of torture, then

Please let's not be hypocrites here.

"This is the problem. America always gets bashed"

This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that our military budget is greater than the rest of the world's, combined?

Hayden's summary is right on.

lally see's something I don't when he portrays Hayden's characterization of Sunnis as innocent. It is more the realization of the terrorism of the majority. Who have had to flee the country? Which communities have disproportionately been forced from their houses and into enclaves?

I'll go with Don Bacon in that Sunnis and Shias did indeed live side by side, if under the guns and repression of the Sunni minority. The thing is that if we wanted to bring peace and democracy to Iraq -- which I don't actually believe was the point -- if, war was not the way to do it. As has been proved. The cost in life, limbs, and minds, and the huge treasury thrown away into this bonfire of waste numbs the mind. And we will be writing checks for our maimed and damaged for decades to come, if not for the Iraqis. Plus the suicides.

The fact that the original act was criminal under international law should not be forgotten. And it would be better for everyone who cries when the U.S. gets bashed to review the depth of cynicism and hypocrisy in this present and previous administrations in dealing with repressive regimes.

The sheer misjudgement, mismanagement, deceit, corruption, supression of rights and laws, brutality involved in the prosecution of this act exceeds every prior stupidity by any U.S. administration, ably abetted by counter insurgency "experts" who have taken all their lessons from Rambo and John Wayne and none from reams of prior experience papers out there. All the bad actors were invited back because they were never properly slapped down before. Under the law.

Nor will they today or tomorrow.

nothere.

I'm a chick.

I was generalizing and extrapolating in an effort to point to the larger truth that our FP actively favors the Sunni regimes as a matter of tactics, strategeries and policies.

That said, Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq do have a history of cohabitation and the example of Lebanon's civil war horrors within living memory and legend as something to avoid at all costs. The Lebanese have said "never again" and thus far have resisted foreign interference, including our own in partnership with the Saudis, that seeks to exploit sectarian fissures in order to control who runs the place.

Ironically, most "serious" people selectively employ the example of Lebanon as a cautionary worst-case scenario that could befall Iraq unless we.......

Watching factional Lebanon in the long democratic process of political reconciliation aided by facilitation/encouragement of Qatar and France, I think damn, Iraq should be so lucky.

But Iraq has light sweet crude and those promising formations in the Sunni West ......

PS. In order to get to know some COIN experts, I suggest you check out the chatters who gather to debate and discuss counterinsugency issues on THE influential site dedicated to all things COIN.

http://abumuqawama.blogspot.com/

You will be pleasantly surprised to learn that Rambos and John Waynes are few and far between. It's those warped by ideology who are the problem.

BTW one of the core contributors who goes by the nom de "Charlie", is a chick, too.

;>}

We've dug up hundreds of thousands of bodies in mass graves as proof.

That not correct. We know Saddam was an awful tyrant, but we have not dug up much in the way of graves. Seems a lot of careless talk has not been verified. That's one reason his murder trial looked kind of flakey.

Now, you want to talk hundreds of thousands? There is no doubt the we, the U.S., have been the direct cause of hundreds of thousands. In two wars, we have killed more Iraqis than Saddam could dream of.

We took sides with one faction of Shiites when we allowed the Bush administration to create a bogus government which we have supported militarily for several years while they have performed ethnic cleansing on an impressive scale. Congratulations to all the Bush supporters.

If the US and Iraqi governments were to seek a renewal of the United Nations re-authorization when it expires on December 31, chances are that accepted human rights standards would be demanded for the Iraqis detainees, such as access to legal council, family members and international observers.

While a UN re-authorization would certainly initiate efforts to address human rights abuses, the fact that many Sunni and Shia groups are working in good faith toward a Status Of Forces Agreement with the US shows a powerful desire for Iraqi sovereignty and that becoming a protectorate of the UN is not seen as a step toward that sovereignty.

If the UN charter was re-authorized, it is not as if years of Bremerian "reconstruction" could be rebooted and now executed by consecutive thinkers. The UN is not going to receive trillions of dollars to referee the struggle between factions. Neither the US nor the UN are in a position to remodel the Iraqi state by executive fiat.

It has been years now since the last UN effort was blown up and gunned down in Iraq but my ears still ring with the sound of Kofi Annan explaining why the UN was not going to continue there: "I only had one Sergio."

First, the treaty (it's not an executive agreement, as the Bush administration claims) doesn't preclude President-elect Obama from implementing a 16-month withdrawal after he takes office. Read article 24 of the treaty.

Second, the horrors of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the Iraq civil war stem from the big lies of the Bush administration. Our government treated Iraq as part of the so-called Global War on Terror, and therefore anyone who fought against the occupation was officially labeled a "terrorist" or even tagged as "al-Qaeda." We have seen the consequences.

While sectarian tensions have always existed, the civil war was triggered by the occupation, as Sunnis (rightly or wrongly) viewed most Shiites as pro-occupation. For a while, the Shiite religious leaders preached tolerance, in the expectation that the new Shiite political dominance would eventually be accepted through elections. That didn't happen, and more radical Shiites went after the Sunnis-- guilty and innocent alike, as the U.S. forces stood by. The vast majority of Iraqi refugees are displaced Sunnis.

Now, of course, there is an ongoing power struggle between the Sadrists and Maliki's fractious coalition, which erupted into open warfare last spring. And let's not forget that Kurdistan wants Kirkuk and Mosul-- and their army is a match for Maliki's.

If I were Barack Obama, I'd be looking for ways to shorten that 16-month timetable.

We have posted the text of what appears to be the signed Status of Forces Agreement of November 17:
http://publicservice.evendon.com/SOFA-17Nov2008M.htm

Don
Pittsburgh, PA
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"The pact being negotiated between the US and Baghdad governments includes a direct rebuff to president-elect Barack Obama's promised policy of withdrawing American combat troops in 16-18 months. The pact instead would leave those troops in place until the end of 2011, a doubling of the timeline to which Obama pledged himself."

With all due respect, Mr. Hayden, have you read the document? For that matter, have you ever read a SOFA?

I would be very grateful for a copy, if you can direct me to one, because if your analysis above is correct, this is the weirdest SOFA in the history of the written word.

SOFAs do not (in my experience) deal with whether troops are in a country or not. They deal with the terms under which troops operate in a country.

They talk about things like visas, access to postal services, taxes, possession of weapons, civil and criminal liability, identity cards, use of airfields and railroads, the jurisdiction of military police, driver's licences, motor vehicle insurance, registration and plating of vehicles, jurisdiction of civilian police, live fire exercises, force security, and the application of domestic law to foreign troops.

They do not deal with how long a particular force must stay or when it will leave.

So if there is anything in this SOFA that says that the US must leave forces in Iraq until a specified date, I'd be very much surprised.

The more usual meaning of a terminal date in a SOFA is that the terms of the SOFA expire and any military or civilian personnel who were covered by it revert to the status of foreigners in another country without special protection.

Assuming that this document is similar to every other SOFA on the planet, the expiry date would appear to be a message from the Iraqi government that all US troops had better be out of the country by that date, unless they want to be subjected to Iraqi law. It does not mean that there is some obligation to keep troops in the country that long.

Have a look at

http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/b510619a.htm

It is is the official text of the NATO SOFA. It will give you a better idea of the subject matter usually addressed by a SOFA.

Of course, none of this affects your main point, which would appear to be that the US has aggressively abandoned the rule of law and is now facing the mess that this has created. You are correct, of course, but (again, with the greatest of respect) this is hardly news to the rest of the world.

Tom Hayden:

The hot debate among judge advocates, pro bono lawyers and Congressional investigators, is about a few hundred Guantanamo detainees, not the dark underside of counterinsurgency.

Thank you, Tom Hayden. This is true. The US military and CIA has tens of thousands of prisoners subject to torture, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But I respectfully take one exception to your statement.

US military aggression in other countries (Vietbam, Iraq, Afghanistan) is commonly called "counterinsurgency" but this is a misnomer.

An insurgency, according to the DOD Dictionary is:

An organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict.

US actions to overthrow a constitutional government, replace it with a puppet government and maintain a US military occupation obviously do not qualify as "counterinsurgency" but as an insurgency! The occupation resisters are the actual counterinsurgents, and they're properly fighting foreign insurgents!

Is this just semantics? No. Justice always accrues to the people fighting a foreign insurgents and occupiers. Regarding occupation resistance, these people are doing nothing less than you or I as Americans would do in the same circumstances.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, . . .