The Rag Blog

KIRKUK, Iraq – Lt. Hiwa Raouf Abdul is not supposed to be in Kirkuk. The oil-rich city, which many fear is teetering on the brink of civil war, is off-limits to Kurdish Peshmerga militia members.

And yet, on Tuesday, the slender, 26-year-old Peshmerga officer breezed through one checkpoint after the next on his way into Kirkuk, exchanging waves and salutes with Iraqi army soldiers and policemen as he rode with a truckload of Peshmerga gunmen.

Abdul is stationed in the nearby Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, where the Peshmerga enforce strict security through a series of checkpoints, and his visit to Kirkuk came only because his commanders asked him to escort a reporter there.

But the ease with which a pickup truck carrying seven Peshmerga members, most of them wielding AK-47s, passed into Kirkuk says volumes about the challenge of pacifying flashpoint towns like Kirkuk and, ultimately, Iraq.

When he passed by the Iraqi army checkpoint on the edge of Kirkuk, Abdul looked at the soldiers saluting him and said, “They get their orders from the Iraqi army, but their loyalty is to the Kurds, to us.”

As with Shiite militias in Baghdad, the line between militia members and Iraqi security troops in Kirkuk is so thin that it at times doesn’t exist. And U.S. plans to build Iraq’s security forces – a process that has cost more than $15 billion nationwide – seem to have strengthened militias instead of discouraging them.

The issue of loyalty with Iraqi security forces is proving to be the Achilles’ heel of American plans to stabilize the war-torn nation. Without neutral Iraqi soldiers and police, an American withdrawal would almost certainly lead to greater sectarian bloodshed than Iraq is currently experiencing.

In June 2004, the American Coalition Provisional Authority issued an order outlawing militias and calling for their members to integrate into Iraq’s security forces. An exemption was made for the Peshmerga, provided that they remained in Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous state in northern Iraq, and not move to outside areas like Kirkuk.

Armed groups across Iraq reacted to the 2004 measure by enlisting in the army and police and maintaining large contingents of stand-alone militia groups, making them significantly more powerful.

Kirkuk is a tinderbox of sects vying for control of an area with billions of dollars worth of oil, but the Iraqi army isn’t a neutral presence, and many of its soldiers make no secret that their loyalty is to the Kurdish nation.

“I joined to defend my city and my people, who are Peshmerga,” said Iraqi Army Pvt. Kamaran Ahmed, a 31-year-old Kurd from Kirkuk. “From the time of the first prophet God sent to Earth, Kirkuk has been a part of Kurdistan and it will return to Kurdistan.”

At a press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels in June 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said: “Now what is the message there? The message is that there are no ‘knowns.’ There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.”

Strangely enough, Rumsfeld’s own career, which catches so much of the political history that has led us into our present catastrophe, qualifies — or at least did until today — as either a “known unknown” or even one of those mystifying “unknown unknowns.”

Every now and then, we need a little history to make sense of our world. But perhaps, in this case, “little” isn’t the most appropriate word. Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (he resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia) and bestselling author of biographies of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Clintons, explores both the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns of Donald Rumsfeld’s emblematic history and legacy, of his long march to power, and what he did with that power once it was in his hands. Morris’ two-parter on Rumsfeld’s legacy will be posted this week at Tomdispatch.com and, long as it is, it is actually a miracle of historical compression, packing into a relatively modest space an epic history none of us should avoid. Call it a necessary reckoning with disaster.

Donald Rumsfeld himself may be front and center, but the supporting cast of rogues — Dick Cheney, George Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Robert Gates, and so many others — makes this a summary meditation on some of the most costly lessons of our times. As a prophet, Rumsfeld may not have been exactly Delphic. “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months,” he said in an interview on November 14, 2002, “but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” Nonetheless, he remains an emblematic figure of our age. If you don’t understand him, you can’t fully grasp the unprecedented ruin which is American foreign policy today. It’s not something I often say, but this is simply a must-read. Tom

The Undertaker’s Tally (Part 1): Sharp Elbows
By Roger Morris

“…the finest Secretary of Defense this nation has ever had.” — Vice President Dick Cheney

“The past was not predictable when it started.” — Donald Rumsfeld

On a farewell flight to Baghdad in early December 2006, the departing Secretary of Defense reminisced about his start in politics more than forty years before. Aides leaned in to listen intently, but came away with no memorable revelations. It hardly mattered. As usual with this man who dominated government as no cabinet officer before him — including the power-ravenous Henry Kissinger he so despised and outdid in effect, if not celebrity — authentic history and Don Rumsfeld’s version of it bore little resemblance.

There was portent in those beginnings. He came out of an affluent Chicago suburb in the 1950s with brusque confidence and usable contacts at Princeton, among them Frank Carlucci, a future Defense Secretary of mediocre mind, yet the iron conceit and shrewd fealty far more effectual in government than intellect or sensibility. After college and two years as a Navy pilot, Rumsfeld did politic stints as a Capitol Hill intern and Republican campaign aide, and by twenty-nine, back in Chicago in investment banking, was running for Congress.

As with much to come, a darker thread lay beneath the surface from the start. In a Republican primary tantamount to election, he was outwardly the boyish, speak-no-evil, underfunded, underdog challenger of an old party stalwart set to inherit the open seat. In fact, he was generously financed by wealthy friends, while his operatives — including Jeb Stuart Magruder of later Watergate infamy — furtively harried and smeared his opponent, using tactics never traced to Rumsfeld.

He went to Washington in December 1962 a handsome, square-jawed, safe-seat tribune from the North Shore’s lakeside preserves, epitomized by the leafy estates of Winnetka and high-end Evanston. The old Thirteenth District of Illinois was one of the wealthiest in the nation and had been smoothly in Republican grip for most of a century. In the House, Rumsfeld was soon seen by some as he always saw himself — a prodigy in the dull ranks of his Party.

Then, as afterward, he had no authentic qualifications or independent achievements. But that was always masked by the same muscular, aggressive style he took onto the mat as an Ivy League wrestler — “sharp elbows,” a meeker, envious colleague called it — as well as by the flaccid banality of most of the GOP in the 1960s. The Republican Party Rumsfeld strode into was already caught between the wasting death of Eisenhower worldliness and moderation (with Richard Nixon’s haunted succession in the wings) and a fitful right-wing urge to seize control that, in little more than a decade, would deliver the Reagan Reaction.

Rumsfeld’s own rightist mentality, his New Deal-phobic corporatist cant and Cold War chauvinism, came dressed more in modish vigor than telltale substance — and he was already attracted by a tough-minded layman’s zeal for the era’s pre-micro-processing but grandly prospering military technology. Like most of his generation born in the early 1930s, the scrap-drive, victory-bond children of World War II who came to govern the postwar world and would be the decisive elders of the post-9/11 era, he had no doubt about the natural nobility of America’s sway or the invincibility of its arms; all this made ever sleeker, ever more irresistible by the demonstrable twin deities of American capitalism — technology and “modern” management.

Here’s a classic Rumsfeldism: “We do have a saying in America: if you’re in a hole, stop digging … erm, I’m not sure I should have said that.” In Part 2 of his historical excavation of the life and world of Donald Rumsfeld (not to speak of the worlds of both President Bushes, the neocons, the U.S. military, the GOP, and an indolent media), Roger Morris, already deep in that hole, just keeps digging away. In doing so, he offers us the rest of Rumsfeld’s long march to power, his lasting legacies, and the costly lessons of this comeback kid. So much that went unheeded in the years in which Rumsfeld once again scaled the heights of power is now, thanks to Morris, compactly on the record.

“The absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence” is another infamous Rumsfeldism. How true. And in Rumsfeld’s absence, the evidence of how he changed our world for the worse will be with us to consider for years to come. So, if you missed it, check out “Sharp Elbows,” the first part of “The Undertaker’s Tally,” and then settle in for the sequel, the one you thought you knew until you read “The Power and the Glory.” Read it and remember, the bell tolls for thee. Tom

The Power and the Glory: The Undertaker’s Tally (Part 2)
By Roger Morris

In 1976, when Jimmy Carter took the Presidency from Gerald Ford, outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went off to seek corporate wealth as head of G.D. Searle, a Skokie pharmaceutical company. His period running the business, inherited by the family of his North Shore friend and early backer Dan Searle, would become part of Rumsfeld’s legend of success as a master manager, negligently accepted as fact by the media and Congressional representatives at his 2001 confirmation hearings.

The legend went this way: Political prodigy slashes payroll 60%, turns decrepit loser into mega-profit-maker, earns industry kudos and multiple millions. In looking at men of prominence like Rumsfeld who revolve in and out of the private sector, the Washington media almost invariably adopts the press-release or booster business-page version of events from what inside-the-Beltway types call “the real world.” In Rumsfeld’s case, behind the image of corporate savior lay a far more relevant and ominous history.

In the documented version of reality, derived from litigation and relatively obscure investigations in the U.S. and abroad, Searle turned out to enjoy its notable rise less thanks to Rumsfeldian innovative managerial genius than to old-fashioned reckless marketing of pharmaceuticals already on the shelf and the calling in of lobbying “markers” via its well-connected Republican CEO. And over it all wafted the distinctive odor of corrupt practices. A case in point was Searle’s anti-diarrhea medicine Lomotil, sold ever more widely and profitably internationally (in industry terms “dumped”) — especially in Africa in the late 1970s — despite the company’s failure to warn of its potentially dire effects on younger children.

“A blindly harmful stopcock,” one medical journal called the remedy, which could be poisonous to infants only slightly above Searle’s recommended dosage. Even taken according to directions, Lomotil was known to mask dangerous dehydration and cause a lethal build-up of fluids internally. Having advertised the medicine as “ideal for every situation,” Searle did not undertake a cautionary labeling change until the end of 1981, nearly five years into Rumsfeld’s tenure, and then only when threatened with damaging publicity by children’s advocacy groups. Part of the vast outrage of multinational “pharmas” exploiting the Third World, the company under Rumsfeld would, like the more publicized Upjohn with its Depo-Provera, be implicated in widespread bribery of officials (and others) in poorer countries to promote the sale of oral contraceptives which had been found unsafe for American or European women.

But Searle’s magic potion, concocted well before Rumsfeld’s arrival, was to be the controversial artificial sweetener aspertame, marketed under the trade name NutraSweet. By 1977, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had staunchly refused to approve aspertame for some 16 years, finding test data dubious or inconclusive and fearing that potential long-term dangers might prove prohibitive. As Rumsfeld took over in Skokie, the FDA was taking the rare step of recommending to Justice Department prosecutors that a grand jury investigate the company’s applications for FDA approval for “willful and knowing failure to make reports… concealing material facts and making false statements” in connection with the statutory application process required by law and FDA standards.

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) – Many adults in the United States have lost faith in the coalition effort, according to a poll by Ipsos-Public Affairs released by the Associated Press. 56 per cent of respondents think the war in Iraq is a hopeless cause, while 39 per cent deem it a worthy cause.

The coalition effort against Saddam Hussein’s regime was launched in March 2003. At least 3,130 American soldiers have died during the military operation, and more than 23,500 troops have been wounded in action.

In December 2005, Iraqi voters renewed their National Assembly. In May, Shiite United Iraqi Alliance member Nouri al-Maliki officially took over as prime minister.

On Jan. 10, U.S. president George W. Bush introduced his new course of action for the coalition effort, which includes an increase in U.S. troop levels. 63 per cent of respondents oppose this strategy, down seven points in a month.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted in favour of a non-binding resolution condemning Bush’s proposed course of action. Out of the 182 legislators who supported the resolution, 17 were members of the Republican Party.

If social promotion is a perverse gift to poor and disenfranchised youth, that is, to push them while failing through America’s school systems to get them out the door, just imagine what social promotion could do for a poor little rich kid whose father, connected to power and politics like rockets to Apollo’s rear, could promote George W. through Andover, Yale and Harvard upwards to the presidency.

In 1989, the young oilman, George W. Bush, was reported in Fortunate Son by J. H. Hatfield to have said “You know I could run for governor but I’m basically a media creation. I’ve never done anything. I’ve worked for my dad. I worked in the oil business. But that’s not the kind of profile you have to have to get elected to public office.” It’s true, especially when you tack on finking out of Texas Air National Guard duty and being remembered as a boozer and a cokehead. But then with a name like George Bush, things could be, well, overlooked, socially promoted.

And how strange that Hatfield’s book, packed with young Bush’s frauds, failures, and effronteries, was burned by its original publisher St. Martin’s Press, before release, and subsequently revived by Soft Skull Press. This would seem like a triumph for the free press if not for Hatfield’s tragic suicide that followed. This was the result of Bush harassment and false accusations of faulty reporting. Well, maybe social promotion needs some socialization as well — for the whole Bush family.

Help for Harken

As the late Hatfield pointed out, 1989 was the year that brought us George W’s Harken Energy Corporation. It “suffered losses of more than $12 million against revenues of $1 billion. That same year, Bush received $120,000 for consulting services to the company and stock options worth $131,250. He also was on the company payroll as a director and served on the exploration advisory board.” He’d started socially promoting himself.

Yet “although Harken was a small oil company it paid big dividends to its top brass. In 1989, other executives in the firm drew six-figure salaries and five-figure bonuses. The following year, Harken’s board of directors lavishly awarded three more executives with six figure ‘incentives and performance’ compensation packages, even though the company lost $40 million and shareholder equity plunged to $3 million, down from more than $70 million in 1988 . . .”

In fact, “Harken’s largest creditors were threatening to foreclose on the struggling Texas company when suddenly, in January 1990, it acquired the exclusive and potentially lucrative rights to drill for oil and gas in Bahrain, a small Arab island emirate off the east coast of Saudi Arabia, about 200 miles southeast of Kuwait. Energy analysts marveled at how Harken, a small unknown company with operations primarily in Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma, was able to beat out the more experienced conglomerate, Amoco, especially since Harken had never drilled a single well overseas or offshore.

“‘This is an incredible deal, unbelievable for this small company,’ Charles Strain, a Houston-based energy analyst, told Forbes magazine. Under the terms of the agreement, Harken was award the exclusive right to explore for, develop, product, transport and market oil and gas through most of Bahrain’s offshore territories.”

02/16/07 “ICH” — — It is always painful to watch George stumble his way through press conferences. He can’t get through a sentence without at least two-three “uhs,” his eye lids flutter up and down in what my daughter, Carly, calls the “liar’s blink” and just because it is painful that a human like that is ostensibly the leader of the free world. There is always a plethora of things that he says, does, or screws up on to write about but this time what caught my attention happened during the Q & A. George was asked if he thought the economic sanctions on Iran would work because so many European nations trade with that country.

He stopped to collect his thoughts with what he thought must’ve looked like a studied and careful demeanor, but more like someone with a sour tummy, and said: “well, let’s put it this way…money trumps peace, sometimes. In other words, commercial interests are very powerful interests throughout the world (I added the italics). It is always interesting with people who frequently play fast and loose with the truth, such as the liars in BushCo, once in awhile, if they talk long enough they tell a truth.

In a rebuke of a surveillance practice greatly expanded by the New York Police Department after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal judge ruled today that the police must stop the routine videotaping of people at public gatherings unless there was an indication that unlawful activity may occur.

Nearly four years ago, at the request of New York City, the same judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., had given the police greater authority to investigate political, social and religious groups.

In today’s ruling, however, Judge Haight of Federal District Court in Manhattan found that by videotaping people who were exercising their right to free speech and breaking no laws, the Police Department had ignored the milder limits he had imposed on it in 2003.

Citing two events in 2005 — a march in Harlem and a demonstration by homeless people in front of the Upper East Side home of Mayor Michael Bloomberg — the judge said the city offered scant justification for videotaping the people involved.

“There was no reason to suspect or anticipate that unlawful or terrorist activity might occur,” he wrote, “or that pertinent information about or evidence of such activity might be obtained by filming the earnest faces of those concerned citizens and the signs by which they hoped to convey their message to a public official.”

While he called the police conduct “egregious,” Judge Haight also offered an unusual judicial mea culpa, taking responsibility for his own words in a 2003 order that, he conceded, had not been “a model of clarity.”

The restrictions on videotaping do not apply to bridges, tunnels, airports, subways or street traffic, Judge Haight noted, but are meant to control police surveillance at events where people gather to exercise their rights under the First Amendment.

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran has arrested some 65 men suspected of being behind a deadly bombing that killed members of the elite Revolutionary Guards in a southeastern border province, the student news agency ISNA said on Friday.

It quoted the local police chief as saying the suspects had clear links to U.S. and British intelligence services. The claim comes at a time when the United States has accused Iranian groups of involvement in the war in Iraq.

A booby-trapped car blew up a bus owned by the Guards on Wednesday, killing at least 11 people in the city of Zahedan, the capital of the Sistan-Baluchestan province which has been the center of low-level unrest over the past months.

The attack was claimed by a shadowy Sunni militant group, Jundallah (God’s soldiers), which Iran has said was linked to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. Tehran has blamed Jundallah for past killings in the area bordering Pakistan.

“Security forces have arrested some 65 suspects in Zahedan … They are linked to the terrorist Jundallah group,” local police commander Brigadier General Mohammad Ghafari was quoted by ISNA as saying.

Iran has accused Britain and the United States of supporting ethnic minority rebels operating in the sensitive border areas to destabilize the country.

“Our investigations clearly shows their connection to American and British intelligence organizations and also to groups opposed to the Islamic republic,” Ghafari said.

Iranian officials said on Wednesday that five of those behind the bombing, including the key suspect, were arrested by security forces.