The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON (AFP) – President George W. Bush will reject any effort in Congress to limit the number of US forces in Iraq because it would hamstring American efforts to stabilize the wartorn country, national security adviser Stephen Hadley has said in an article.

“Any plan that limits our ability to reinforce our troops in the field is a plan for failure — and could hand Baghdad to terrorists and extremists before legitimate Iraqi forces are ready to take over the fight,” Hadley said in an opinion piece written for the Washington Post.

“That is an outcome the president simply could not accept,” Hadley wrote in the administration’s latest defense of the president’s plan to deploy an additional 21,500 troops in Iraq.

Congress is due to vote in early February on a non-binding motion criticizing Bush’s plan to introduce a troop “surge” to help quell sectarian violence in Iraq, with lawmakers from both parties readying resolutions ranging from broad support the president’s program to outright repudiation of it.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Iran is taking steps to greatly expand military and economic ties with Iraq, Tehran’s ambassador to Iraq said in an interview on Sunday with New York Times.

The ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, said Iran was prepared to offer Iraqi forces training, equipment and advisers for “the security fight” and was ready to assume major responsibility for the reconstruction of Iraq.

He also acknowledged for the first time that two Iranians detained last month by U.S. forces were security officials as the United States has claimed.

“They worked in the security sector in the Islamic Republic, that’s clear,” Qomi said in a 90-minute interview at the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad. The interview appeared in Monday’s New York Times.

The Iranians were in Iraq because “the two countries agreed to solve the security problems,” the ambassador said. The Iranians “went to meet with the Iraqi side,” he told the newspaper.

Qomi said the Iranians should not have been detained and he ridiculed evidence the U.S. military said it has which proving the Iranians were involved in planning attacks on American and Iraqi forces.

Another Way for Israel
Elik Elhanan
Combatants for Peace
Via The Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace

This is the message we want to bring to the American Jewish community: Let us try another way. In the eyes of many, the key to this conflict lies in the US. Your support is invaluable just as the lack of it is disastrous. Israel is now refusing to negotiate with Syria, the reason being that Washington wants it so. My question is: What do you want?

For many people in Israel this bleak picture serves to prove that indeed there is no partner and that the formula of land for peace does not work. These attitudes are supported by the political system both in Israel and internationally, and are frequently promoted by the media as undisputable truths. Both societies, the Palestinian and the Israeli, seem to be locking themselves in a violent nationalistic mindset where the needs of the other simply do not exist.

How should one deal with such a situation? The simplest answer would be to play along. The other answer is to confront these false notions, to insist on telling truth to power, to work and expose the contradictions that exist in any black-and-white vision of reality.

I am not a dedicated born again Christian like George W. Bush. However, there is a quote by JC that I really like.

Chuck Hagel came home from Vietnam in 1968 with shrapnel in his chest, scars on his face, and an unyielding certainty that the freedom of men is theirs alone to win. As an infantryman, he had not bombed from above or commanded from behind; he had stood knee-deep in the muck, face-to-face with the enemy, firing on men and watching them die. It’s a hard memory to leave behind. Even after four decades and a lifetime of change — a fortune earned in the investment-banking business; a decade as a senator from Nebraska; and a position as one of the GOP’s conservative torchbearers with a shot at the White House — Hagel has put everything on the line to oppose the war in Iraq, refusing to send a “surge” of new troops into battle, or to forget the lessons he brought home from the killing fields long ago.

Sitting in his office on a recent afternoon, Hagel leaned back in his armchair to explain, in a voice reminiscent of sandpaper on rough oak, how he was deceived by the president, and won’t let it happen again.

Critics charge that the Macquarie purchase of American Consolidated Media is designed to silence critics of a Texas toll road project.

Trans Texas CorridorAustralian toll road giant Macquarie agreed Wednesday to purchase forty local newspapers, primarily in Texas and Oklahoma, for $80 million. Macquarie Bank is Australia’s largest capital raising firm and has invested billions in purchasing roads in the US, Canada and UK. Most recently the company joined with Cintra Concesiones of Spain in a controversial 75-year lease of the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road.

Sal Costello, the leading opponent of toll road projects as head of the Texas Toll Party, says the move is directly related to a 4000-mile toll road project known as the Trans-Texas Corridor. It will cost between $145 and $183 billion to construct the road, expected to be up to 1200 feet wide, requiring the acquisition of 9000 square miles of land in the areas through which it will pass.

“The newspapers are the main communication tool for many of the rural Texan communities, with many citizens at risk of losing their homes and farms through eminent domain,” Costello wrote.

Being a military thinker of the profoundest sort, I offer the following manual of martial affairs for nations yearning to copy the American way of war. Read it carefully. Great clarity will result. The steps limned below will facilitate disaster without imposing the burden of reinventing it. The Pentagon may print copies for distribution.

(1) Underestimate the enemy. Fortunately this is easy when a technologically advanced power prepares to attack an underdeveloped nation. Its enemy’s citizens will readily be seen as gadgetless, primitive, probably genetically stupid, and hardly worth the attention of a real military.

(2) Avoid learning anything about the enemy—his culture, religion, language, history, or response to past invasions. These things don’t matter since the enemy is gadgetless, primitive, and probably genetically stupid. Anyway, knowledge would only make the enlisted ranks restive, and confuse the officer corps.

Blank ignorance of the language is especially desirable (as well as virtually guaranteed). For one thing, it will allow your troops to be seen as brutal invaders having nothing in common with the population; this helps in winning hearts and minds. For another, it will allow English-speaking officials of the puppet government to vet such information about the country as they permit you to have.

(3) Explain the invasion to the American public in simple moral terms suitable for middle-school children at an evangelical summer camp: We are bombing cities to bring the gift of democracy and American values, or to defeat some vague but frightening evil, perhaps lurking under the bed, or to get rid of a bad dictator no longer of service to us, or to bring freedom and prosperity to any survivors. (This doesn’t work in Europe, which is honestly imperialistic.) The public can then feel a sense of unappreciated virtue when the primitives resist. Sententious moralism should always trump reason.

(4) A misunderstanding of military reality helps. Besides, comprehension would only lead to depression. As Napoleon said, or may have, in war the moral is to the material as three is to one, which implies that unpleasant facts should be played down in favor of cultivating a cheerful attitude. Most especially, it should not be noted that a few tens of thousands of determined, probably genetically-stupid primitives with small arms can tie down a cheerful force however gaudily armed.

If you fancy losing an argument, try shooting down my contention that Mikhail Gorbachev is the leading historical figure of our time. Not one to miss a shooting opportunity, Dick Cheney tried. To my surprise, he won.

Westerners fondly remember Gorbachev for finishing off an ailing Soviet empire left bleeding from its Afghan travails. Defusing half a century of nuclear tension can leave a mark on impressionable minds. On Cheney’s-not so much. The former Defense Secretary had a tender spot for the Cold War and never forgave Gorbachev for ending it with not even a kind word for defense contractors. Cheney is the quintessential warrior, with plenty of dead quails and birdshot-peppered lawyers to prove it. He is the gallant hussar-one day greenlighting “Shock and Awe” to give Guernica a second chance; the next day apprising US Senator Pat Leahy of his favorite sexual technique: “Fuck yourself ! ” (1) Quite the martial wag, the man Maureen Dowd calls Big-Time Dick saluted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by persuading his boss to invade Panama (for reasons no one seems able to remember). And today it is anybody’s guess which Caribbean island the United States will invade to celebrate its victory in Iraq.

Dick Cheney is a man of war, and a man on a mission: a crusader who won’t rest until the name Bush Jr is etched in the history books-not lost in the microscopic print of the endnotes section, mind you, as is destined to be Senior’s fate, but glowing in the radiant typeface of a chapter heading. That mission, for once, is all but accomplished. In January of 2001, George W. Bush took-er, grabbed-the reins of an American Empire at its zenith. He will soon hand back a smoldering wreckage of broken lives, enduring hatred, and vanished influence. Michael Ignatieff has called Pax Americana Empire Lite. (2) A better phrase would be Empire Short-Lived, or, if you’re William F. Buckley Jr and the vernacular ruffles your literary feathers, Imperium Brevissimum. At a recent ceremony for his son Jeb, George H. W. Bush was caught on national television sobbing uncontrollably. Pity the man who stands one short letter away from the worst president in US history. The letter is H, as in H for hubris.

The case for adding troops in Iraq — and keeping them there — rests on one basic assumption: As bad as things are now, they would become catastrophic if the United States leaves.

President Bush in his State of the Union address Tuesday warned that an early U.S. exit would create “a nightmare scenario” for America.

In his Jan. 10 address explaining his order of 21,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq, Bush said a retreat would “force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear that country apart, and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale. Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer, and confront an enemy that is even more lethal.”

Not everyone is convinced. Some analysts say the apocalyptic scenarios of U.S. withdrawal mirror arguments the administration and many others made for the U.S. invasion in 2003. The premise of the invasion — flawed as it turned out — was that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, posing a direct threat to the United States and the world.

“It’s remarkable how little time people have spent examining the assumptions,” said Kurt Campbell, a former national security official in the Clinton administration, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But the administration is not alone. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group, headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, and former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, laid out a “Pandora’s box” of dire scenarios of U.S. failure in Iraq:

Sectarian war in Iraq spreads across the Middle East. Neighboring regimes are destabilized, and populations radicalized. A humanitarian catastrophe of refugees and ethnic cleansing follows. Iranian influence rises. Regional war erupts. Oil supplies are disrupted. Al Qaeda claims victory, gains recruits and money and is emboldened to strike again. American credibility is damaged.

“If we get run off, there’s no reason to say it would be a positive thing, OK?” said retired Gen. William Nash, U.S. commander in Bosnia from 1995 to 1997. “But just think of the dire predictions that were made in 1975 when the helicopters were leaving the embassy grounds of Saigon and everybody thinking that the dominoes would begin to fall. Lo and behold, the dominoes not only didn’t fall, but a number of the regional actors started taking some responsibilities for some things.”

Bush said Tuesday night that if the United States withdraws, the result will be an “epic battle” between Sunni and Shiite extremists and the creation of a haven for oil-fueled al Qaeda terrorists. Out of the chaos, Bush said, “would emerge an emboldened enemy with new safe havens, new recruits, new resources and an even greater determination to harm America. To allow this to happen would be to ignore the lessons of Sept. 11 and invite tragedy.”

Terrible things cannot be ruled out, said Michael Mandelbaum, head of the foreign policy program at Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies. “But the relevant question for American foreign policy is, would they be terrible for us? Would we be worse off than we are now? And I don’t think that goes without saying.”

Dutch authorities say an Iraqi-born Dutch citizen, suspected of plotting attacks on American forces in Iraq, has been extradited to the United States.

Wesam al-Delaema was put on a plane and flown to an undisclosed location in the US after losing his final appeal against extradition in December.

He is set to become the first suspect tried in a US court for allegedly plotting attacks on US forces in Iraq.

Mr Delaema denies charges of “possessing a destructive device”.

Authorities say the evidence against him includes a videotape he made of Iraqi insurgents preparing a roadside bomb.

In Dutch court hearings, he argued that he was kidnapped and forced to make the video on pain of death.

Unknown destination

Mr Delaema was arrested in May 2005 in the Dutch city of Amersfoort in following a tip from US authorities.

His lawyers have argued that the US has no right to try him. They say they fear he could be tortured and will not get a fair trial.

But a Dutch judge said there was “no reason to believe that the US authorities will not abide by the commitments they have given or… deprive the suspect of his fundamental rights”.

The US has given assurances that he will be tried in a federal court, not by a military commission, and can serve any sentence in the Netherlands.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

A Dutch justice ministry spokesman said on Saturday that Mr Delaema was on his way to somewhere in the US.