The Rag Blog

A study released today by the Congressional Budget Office shows that the real troop increase associated with President Bush’s escalation policy could be as high as 48,000, more than double the 21,500 soldiers that Bush has claimed.

As DefenseTech notes, extra forces are expected because the combat units being sent into Iraq “need to be backed up by support troops, ‘including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services.’” The CBO’s low estimate envisions at least 15,000 additional support personnel. The alternative scenario “would require about 28,000 support troops in addition to the 20,000 combat troops.”

Additionally, the cost of the escalation could be as much as five times higher than White House estimates:

According to the study, the costs for the “surge” would also be dramatically different than the President has said. The White House estimated a troop escalation would require about $5.6 billion in additional funding, the CBO now believes “that costs would range from $9 billion to $13 billion for a four-month deployment and from $20 billion to $27 billion for a 12-month deployment, depending upon the total number of troops deployed.”

Wayne S. Smith is now a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. and an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He was Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 1979 to 1982.

Raúl Castro has been acting president of Cuba since July 31, 2006. His brother, Fidel, passed the office to him then because of a serious illness. At this point, it is not clear whether Fidel Castro will recover and resume the presidency. It seems unlikely. But regardless of whether he does or not, he is now 80 and in poor health. One way or the other, his almost half-century rule in Cuba is nearing an end. What will be his legacy? Has the Cuba he leaves behind registered gains over Cuba as it was when he took power in 1959? Will it have a brighter future? And is it supported by the Cuban people?

The answers to those questions are mixed. Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He despises any system in which one class or group of people lives much better than another. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all — enough to eat, health care, adequate housing and education. The authoritarian nature of the Cuban Revolution stems largely from his commitment to that goal. Castro was convinced that he was right, and that his system was for the good of the people. Thus, anyone who stood against the revolution stood also against the Cuban people and that, in Castro’s eyes, was simply unacceptable. There is, then, very little in the way of individual freedoms – especially freedom of expression and assembly. And there are political prisoners — those who have expressed positions against the revolution — though today only some 300, down markedly from the number at the outset of the revolution.

And did the system provide that promised better way of life? It can be said that during the years of the Cuban-Soviet alliance, when Cuba enjoyed most favorable terms of trade with the Soviet Union, resulting in what amounted to a subsidy of five to six billion dollars a year, the Cuban people were indeed well off. They had free (and excellent) health care, education up through the post-graduate level, adequate housing, enough to eat, and various other benefits. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Cuba’s subsidy. Cuba went through some very difficult years — years of serious shortages of almost everything — of 18-hour-a-day blackouts and other difficulties.

It is a tribute to the durability of the Cuban people, and to a number of reforms to the economy carried out by the government, that they survived. But survive they did, and survive also did the revolution. At this point, the Cuban economy is making a strong comeback, thanks in part to new economic relationships with Venezuela and China, to a possible new oil field off the north coast, with other nations already bidding for drilling rights, to the fact that the price of nickel, Cuba’s largest export, is at an all-time high and that tourism continues to flourish and bring in much-needed hard currency despite U.S. travel controls blocking American tourists. The economy grew by at least eight percent in 2005 and closer to 12 percent in 2006.

For the average Cuban, life is still difficult. There are still shortages of almost all the basic necessities. Few go hungry, but the diet tends to be monotonous. Even so, the blackouts are now a thing of the past and there is renewed hope for the future. And they still have their free health care and education—something they do not want to give up!

Expectations in Miami and Washington had been that once Fidel Castro disappeared from the scene, the Revolution would crumble. But that, of course, has not been the case. Six months after Fidel passed the baton to Raúl, there has been no sign whatever of unrest. The Cuban people have accepted the transition with calm maturity—indicating a higher level of support for the Revolution than the exiles in Miami or the Bush administration had thought possible. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll conducted in Cuba indicated that 49 percent of the Cuban people supported Fidel Castro. Cuban officials strongly contest that finding, insisting that the percentage of supporters is much, much higher. But even as it stands, the poll indicates that a higher percentage of Cubans support Fidel than the percentage of Americans who support President Bush!

And what about Cuba’s place, its prestige, on the world stage? Here the gains are unquestionable. Before 1959, Cuba was considered as something of a banana republic. It played virtually no role in the international arena. But under Castro, it has played a prominent role, indeed at times a role that often resembled that of a world power.

The revelation yesterday that Scooter Libby acknowledged in November 2003 that he and Vice President Cheney may have talked in July about whether to tell reporters that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA further bolsters the theory that Cheney may be the prime force behind this whole sordid tale.

The conversation in question took place on July 12, 2003, as Cheney and his then-chief of staff were flying back from an event in Norfolk on Air Force Two.

According to multiple reports, Cheney was talking about how to discredit Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, who was making trouble with his suggestion that the administration manipulated intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq. Wilson felt the administration had intentionally disregarded the findings of a trip to Niger he had undertaken for the CIA.

A few days earlier, Cheney had scrawled in the margin of an offending op-ed piece by Wilson: “[D]id his wife send him on a junket?”

Yesterday, an FBI agent testified that Libby raised the possibility in a November 2003 interview that “there was a discussion whether to report to the press that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA,” during that July 12 flight. “Mr. Libby told us he believed they may have talked about it but he wasn’t sure.”

The timing is key. Because according to special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s indictment and reporting by the National Journal’s Murray Waas, it was immediately after disembarking from Air Force Two that Libby started working the phones.

Libby promptly called Judith Miller. He had already met with the then-New York Times reporter twice by that point. But in his phone conversation that afternoon, according to Miller, he mentioned Valerie Plame for a third time and pushed that angle sufficiently that she felt obliged to tell him that the Times wasn’t interested in writing a story about it.

Aside from winning, there aren’t that many ways of ending wars. Governments pay attention when the troops mutiny, when there are riots outside recruiting offices, when there’s revolution on the home front, when the money runs out.

In Vietnam the troops mutinied. Units shot their officers in the back or threw grenades into their tents. Navy ratings pushed aircraft off the side of aircraft carriers. In 1971 the Pentagon counted 503,926 “incidents of desertion” over the previous five years and reckoned that more than half of US ground forces openly opposed the war. At Christmastime in 1971 Vietnam Vets Against the War seized the Statue of Liberty, draping it with a banner demanding Bring our Brothers Home.

On the home front people fought the draft or simply fled it. In 1967 Maj. Gen. William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for Army intelligence, observed the great antiwar march from the roof of the Pentagon and concluded “the empire is coming apart at the seams.” He reckoned there were too few reliable troops to fight the war in Vietnam and hold the line at home.

The elites, always prone to panic in such matters, thought revolution was around the corner. The left, in those days prone to optimism, thought the same thing. In the end, Congress cut off the money. Between 1970 and 1973, Congress enacted five restrictions on funding of U.S. military operations in Indochina.

You don’t need a draft to have a vibrant antiwar movement. We saw that in the 1980s, with the campaign against US intervention in Central America. These struggles failed, but reignited a domestic spirit of resistance. Out of them, in part, came the Jackson Campaigns of 1984 and ’88. And just as the antiwar movement helped give us Jimmy Carter in ’76, in ’92 we got Bill.

Yet aside from a heartening flare-up against the WTO in Seattle, the Clinton years pretty much snuffed out the radical spark. Swallow NAFTA, sanctions against Iraq, plus welfare reform and the Effective Death Penalty Act, and you aren’t in any mindset to seize the Statue of Liberty.

Amman, Jordan – Earlier this week, I received a joyful phone call from Baghdad. Members of a family I’ve known since 1996 announced that one of their younger daughters was engaged. Broken Arabic and broken English crossed the lines: “We love you! We miss you!” My colleague here in Amman, who also knows this family well, shook her head, smiling, when I gave her the happy news. “What an amazing family,” she said. “Imagine all that they’ve survived.” A few hours later, the family sent us a text message: “Now bombs destroy all the glasses in our home – no one hurt.”

No one was home when the explosion shattered every window and damaged ceilings and walls. This was exceptionally fortunate, given that they are a family of nine living in a very small dwelling. The family has moved into an even smaller home where one daughter lives with her husband and newborn baby. It happens that their aunt and her three children are also with them. The aunt had traveled from Amman to secure needed documents in Baghdad. Seventeen people are crowded into an apartment the size of a small one car garage.

This family suddenly joined the ranks of over a million people in Iraq who are homeless, displaced. I watched television coverage of the gruesome carnage at the intersection of the street where they had lived. The blood-spattered streets, charred vehicles, and desperate bereavement are part of everyday footage filmed in cities throughout the region, whether in Iraq, Lebanon, the West Bank, or Israel. The humanitarian crisis that mounts as a consequence of the catastrophic explosions and attacks is more difficult to portray.

“We need everything,” said the visiting aunt when I asked what they needed. A displaced family needs food, water, clothing, blankets, fuel and housing.

Every family in Baghdad struggles with fuel and energy crises. In Baghdad, there is one hour of electricity every 12 hours. Only the more well-to-do families can afford a generator for back-up electricity. The price of fuel for transportation has risen so high that any travel has become extremely expensive. Families with no income in a society that has 50 to 75 percent unemployment find themselves scrounging for basic necessities and not at all prepared to offer hospitality to newly displaced families.

Families who receive the dreaded knock on the door giving them 24 hours notice, – leave or you will be killed – often travel to other regions of Iraq, where they no longer have access to the rations distributed in their former neighborhoods. Many families are hungry and cold. Disease sets in, and they have no access to health care. Children aren’t easily accepted in overcrowded schools when families move into a new area. Sewage and sanitation systems are stressed by unexpected rises in neighborhood populations. A family might be welcomed by relatives who couldn’t bear to turn them away, but how are the host families and communities to manage continued hospitality with very little international relief or support available?

Consider, for instance, that over a third (38 percent) of Iraq’s people depend on the ration system for the meager allotments of lentils, rice, flour, salt and tea. If a family is displaced by an attack on their home, distance or personal safety often prohibits them from returning to pick up these supplies. Too often the agent who delivers the supplies can’t even approach the warehouse to collect them, because it is located in a “hot” area now controlled by a sect or militia to which he does not belong and which may kill him. In those cases, whole neighborhoods, already struggling and suffering, must go without a month’s supply of food.

Long-time readers of my commentaries will know that I do not subscribe to the liberal notion that our main problems in the Middle East derive from our blundering in without really understanding the peoples and cultures of the region – any more than I believe that the situation in Iraq right now derives from our lack of understanding that “Shi’a and Sunni have been killing each other for 14 centuries in Iraq.”

Instead, I believe that the significance of “our” failure to understand “them,” enormous as that failure is, pales in comparison with that of “our” failure to understand “us.” Instead of a deep analysis of the Shi’a-Sunni question in the Middle East, even a basic understanding of what we did in the Vietnam War, and why we did it, would have served us in much better stead in deciding whether or not to go to war.

Still, it is shocking, and not of minor importance, that over 5 years into the “war on terror,” we understand so little about Islam and Islamic cultures.

The proximate cause of this commentary is the recent flap over right-wing attempts to smear Barack Obama through claims that, while living in Indonesia as a boy, he attended a “madrassa.” In our current climate, this is much like claiming that the Pope was a member of the Hitler Youth.

The claim originated with a magazine linked to the insane megalomaniac, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, fellow traveler with numerous right-wing terrorists beloved of an earlier era of U.S. foreign policy. John Gibson of Fox News immediately jumped on it, speculating over the effect of radical Islamic indoctrination on Obama. CNN, with at least a modicum of actual journalistic sensibility, sent a reporter to Indonesia, who found that it was a normal public school.

Liberals then jumped to defend Obama, saying the claim he attended a madrassa was a lie.

Throughout the whole thing, we were told by countless ponderous TV pundits that a madrassa is a Saudi-funded school for religious fanatics that teaches Wahhabism and terrorism. Never mind that there was precious little Wahhabism in Indonesia over 35 years ago, when Obama was in school there. The word “madrassa,” after all, means what it means.

Except, of course, that it means no such thing. It is the most generic word for “school” in the Arab world, and in some other Islamic countries, where the language is full of Arabic loan words. It means a place of studying or learning. Considering everyone who has been to a madrassa as a terrorist in will then require that we take on the whole Muslim world.

This sort of ignorance is widespread. Jeff Stein, a reporter for Congressional Quarterly, found that numerous figures in the FBI and Congress did not know the difference between Sunni and Shi’a; more shocking, many did not know whether al-Qaeda and Hizbullah were Sunni or Shi’a – including the incoming Chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

To get slightly more sophisticated, Nicholas Kristof, one of the supposedly more intellectual regular columnists for the New York Times, developing the bubble-gum-wrapper historical theory that Islam needs to go through something like the Protestant Reformation, wrote a column several months ago called “Looking for Islam’s Luthers.” If he understood anything about Wahhabism, he would know that its founder was Islam’s Luther, and that more recent extremists like Sayyid Qutb were similar to founders of other Protestant sects. They are protesting the corruption of Arab leaders who are cozy with the West and getting paid hand over fist for it just like Luther and others criticized the medieval Catholic Church for its cozy relations with princes and potentates and its sale of offices and indulgences.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Congress has the power to end the war in Iraq, a former Bush administration attorney and other high-powered legal experts told a Senate hearing on Tuesday.

Facing mounting opposition over his Iraq troop increase plan, President George W. Bush insisted it would be “too extreme” if lawmakers pass a resolution condemning his Iraq policy.

Four out of five experts called before the Senate Judiciary Committee said Congress could go even further and restrict or stop U.S. involvement in Iraq if it chose.

“I think the constitutional scheme does give Congress broad authority to terminate a war,” said Bradford Berenson, a Washington lawyer who was a White House associate counsel under Bush from 2001 to 2003.

“It is ultimately Congress that decides the size, scope and duration of the use of military force,” said Walter Dellinger, former acting solicitor general, the government’s chief advocate before the Supreme Court, in 1996-97.

The hearing was frequently punctuated by outbursts from more than a dozen anti-war protesters, who were asked several times to be quiet but not thrown out.

It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:

1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America’s global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.
2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The U.S. military drive to train and equip Iraq’s security forces has unwittingly strengthened anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, which has been battling to take over much of the capital city as American forces are trying to secure it.

U.S. Army commanders and enlisted men who are patrolling east Baghdad, which is home to more than half the city’s population and the front line of al-Sadr’s campaign to drive rival Sunni Muslims from their homes and neighborhoods, said al-Sadr’s militias had heavily infiltrated the Iraqi police and army units that they’ve trained and armed.

“Half of them are JAM. They’ll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night,” said 1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the Army’s 1st Infantry Division, using the initials of the militia’s Arabic name, Jaish al Mahdi. “People (in America) think it’s bad, but that we control the city. That’s not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It’s hostile territory.”

The Bush administration’s plan to secure Baghdad rests on a “surge” of some 17,000 more U.S. troops to the city, many of whom will operate from small bases throughout Baghdad. Those soldiers will work to improve Iraqi security units so that American forces can hand over control of the area and withdraw to the outskirts of the city.

The problem, many soldiers said, is that the approach has been tried before and resulted only in strengthening al-Sadr and his militia.

Amid recurring reports that al-Sadr is telling his militia leaders to stash their arms and, in some cases, leave their neighborhoods during the American push, U.S. soldiers worry that the latest plan could end up handing over those areas to units that are close to al-Sadr’s militant Shiite group.

Alastair Macdonald is about to end an assignment of almost two years in Baghdad as the Reuters Bureau Chief for Iraq. In the following story, he reflects on the difficulties of covering Iraq and on the work of the Iraqi colleagues he leaves behind.

By Alastair Macdonald – Witness

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – There is good news in Iraq.

For Reuters journalists, this week’s high points were the safe return of two colleagues seized by a death squad which shot two other hostages and the survival of the teenage nephew of another employee who was kidnapped and tortured in Baghdad.

The lows, as I complete nearly two years running the news agency’s operations in Iraq, were sending condolences to the family of our former driver Ismail Ibrahim, who was gunned down in Mosul this month, and trying to find out from U.S. forces why they seem intent on detaining our reporter in Ramadi for a third time.

All in all, as I write to the sound of mortars rattling our windows in central Baghdad, it’s a routine week, four years into a war that has turned into a bad dream for millions of people — and in which I discovered a cure for nightmares.

More on that later.

BAGHDAD, 29 Jan 2007 (IRIN) – In a series of articles, IRIN documented the levels of violence and consequent needs of the population in six different areas of Iraq: Anbar province, the southern provinces, Baghdad province, Kurdistan, Kirkuk province, and Salah ad-Din province.

Anbar province plagued by violence