The Rag Blog

Americans can justifiably be proud of their nation’s great libraries, including such magnificent examples as the Harvard University Library, the Library of Congress – the biggest in the world – and the New York Public Library, a wonderful repository not only of a huge collection of books but also of an outstanding art collection.

On a trip to New York in 1989, I spent many pleasant hours browsing through books in the New York Public Library. Yet I only managed to see a very tiny fraction of the millions of books on its shelves. A lady volunteer who showed me around told me that the cost of building the library had been met entirely through donations from the city’s civic-minded residents. She said that even the cost of running the library is met entirely from donations.

Nowadays, however, in the post-9/11 era, even libraries in America are under siege. Under the provisions of the draconian Patriot Act, which was enacted by the US Congress in October 2001 with hardly any debate, in the wake of 9/11, the FBI has the right to obtain a court order to access any records that American public libraries have of books borrowed by customers.

Here’s what can happen: Say you’re living in the port city of San Diego and have borrowed a book on scuba diving from your local library and are reading it one afternoon in your backyard. A nosey neighbour spots you reading the book and telephones the FBI. “Ah ha!” cries the FBI. “A book on scuba diving! It’s obviously someone planning an underwater attack on naval installations in San Diego.”

So off goes the FBI and obtains a court order to access your library records. The next thing you know an FBI team has burst into your house with drawn guns and hauled you off downtown for interrogation. “How do we know you’re not a terrorist?” screams an FBI agent. “Down on the floor. Spread your legs. Who are your contacts in Al Qaeda,” screams another agent. It could be days before you’re able to prove your innocence and are released.

You can’t make this stuff up. George Bush believes that “the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude.” On the other side of the political divide, Presidential hopeful Joseph Biden — a sponsor of the anti-surge legislation pending before Congress — maintains that we’ve “done enough for the Iraqis.”

What a strange war we’re having Iraq. After four years of shifting rationales, Americans remain clueless about why Bush opened this Pandora’s box. The cold math that led to this disastrous imperial project is just too much for the pundits to own up to.

Far too many Americans trip over whatever happens to be the latest rationale for sending half our army half way around the world to fight a people that did us no harm. Even the anti-war camp is crowded with pundits whose gripe de jour is that Bush is a messianic Samaritan idealist who miscalculated the cost of exporting liberty to Iraqi ingrates.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s very gratifying to see the war party’s constituency dwindle to an irredentist thirty percent of the population. It wasn’t so long ago that opponents of the Iraq war were rewarded with scarlet letters identifying them as subversive Al-Qaeda apologists.

But if Gerald Ford went to the great beyond believing that Bush’s Iraqi expedition was motivated by a desire to ‘free people’ — we have a serious problem on our hand. Because that was hardly the mission in Iraq.

We ended up getting into this Mesopotamian mess because a number of constituencies — represented by skillful political operatives and lobbyists — combined forces to promote this debacle of choice.

There’s no denying the primary role of the neo-con think tanks and their Likudnik mass media collaborators in orchestrating this war. But let’s not forget that the Gulf States rolled out the red carpet for the Anglo-American invasion forces. Down on Main Street, the Armageddon worshipping dispensationalists fielded the jingoistic mobs that subscribe to the notion that a little hellfire and damnation in the Middle East will bring on the end of times. And, of course, there is that little detail about Iraqi oil reserves. Did I fail to mention Halliburton and the military industrial complex?

Yet for many Americans, launching this illegal war of aggression was just a primal act of vengeance in retribution for the atrocities of 9/11. This particular constituency enthusiastically lined up to join the war party — without the slightest need for an elaborate WMD hoax. They just wanted to kill as many Arabs as possible. Did it matter that the secular Baathist regime in Baghdad had nothing to do with Al Qaeda? Not a bit.

In Juan Cole’s news roundup this morning, he notes:

CSM [the Christian Science Monitor] writes on new counter-insurgency efforts by US in Iraq. The article points out that such efforts depend on good intelligence on the enemy. I’m not sure how we are going to get that.

In fact, there’s been extensive discussion in the blogiverse the past few days over an article detailing how awful U.S. intelligence is in Iraq, with CIA staff unable to leave the Green Zone (or American military bases) because it’s too unsafe.

By contrast, the people we’re trying to impose our will on in Iraq have intelligence like this (more via Laura Rozen):

The armored sport-utility vehicles whisked into a government compound in the city of Karbala with speed and urgency, the way most Americans and foreign dignitaries travel along Iraq’s treacherous roads these days.

Iraqi guards at checkpoints waved them through Saturday afternoon because the men wore what appeared to be legitimate U.S. military uniforms and badges, and drove cars commonly used by foreigners, the provincial governor said.

Once inside, however, the men unleashed one of the deadliest and most brazen attacks on U.S. forces in a secure area. Five American service members were killed in a hail of grenades and gunfire in a breach of security that Iraqi officials called unprecedented.

As the New York Times notes:

The sophisticated attack hinted at what could be a new threat for American troops as they start a fresh security plan centered on small bases in Baghdad’s bloodiest neighborhoods, where soldiers will live and work with Iraqi forces. Military officials have said that one of their greatest concerns is that troops will be vulnerable to attack from killers who appear to be colleagues.

A homemade bomb exploded under a Humvee in Anbar province, Iraq, on August 21, 2004. The blast flipped the vehicle into the air, killing two US marines and wounding another – a soft-spoken 20-year-old named Jonathan Gadsden who was near the end of his second tour of duty. In previous wars, he would have died within hours. His skull and ribs were fractured, his neck was broken, his back was badly burned, and his stomach had been perforated by shrapnel and debris.

Gadsden got out of the war zone alive because of the Department of Defense’s network of frontline trauma care and rapid air transport known as the evacuation chain. Minutes after the attack, a helicopter touched down in the desert. Combat medics stanched the marine’s bleeding, inflated his collapsed lung, and eased his pain. He was airlifted to the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, located in an old health care facility called the Ibn Sina, which had formerly catered to the Baathist elite. Army surgeons there repaired Gadsden’s cranium, removed his injured spleen, and pumped him full of broad-spectrum antibiotics to ward off infection.

Three days later, he was flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest American military hospital in Europe. He was treated for his burns, and his spine was stabilized for the 18-hour flight to the US. Just a week after nearly dying in the desert, Gadsden was recuperating at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, with his mother, Zeada, at his bedside.

The surgeons, nurses, medics, and pilots of the evacuation chain have saved thousands of lives. Soldiers wounded in Vietnam were six weeks of transit time away from US hospitals, and one out of every four of them died. By contrast, a soldier’s odds of surviving battle injuries in Iraq are nine out of 10. Unfortunately, this remarkable advance in battlefield logistics has also resulted in an increase in the number of traumatically injured patients who are particularly susceptible to infections during their recovery. In Gadsden’s case, from the moment he was carried into the Ibn Sina, the injured marine was in the crosshairs of an enemy he didn’t even know was there.

At first, he did quite well. By early September, Gadsden was weaned off his ventilator and breathing on his own. For weeks he gradually improved. His buddies took him to a Washington Redskins game in his wheelchair, and the next day he navigated 50 feet with a walker. Soon Gadsden was transferred to a veterans’ hospital in Florida called the James A. Haley Medical Center, where he offered to serve as the eyes of a fellow marine blinded in an ambush. The doctors told Zeada that her son might be able to go home by the end of October.

But he still had mysterious symptoms that he couldn’t shake, like headaches, rashes, and intermittent fevers. His doctors gave him CT scans, laxatives, methadone, beta-blockers, Xanax, more surgery, and more antibiotics. An accurate evaluation of his case was difficult, however, because portions of his medical records never arrived from Bethesda. If they had, they would have shown a positive test for a kind of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii.

TOPEKA, Kan. – President Bush is losing the heartland.

Conservative Kansas – home to the Army’s Fort Riley, the U.S. Cavalry Museum, Republican icons Dwight Eisenhower and Bob Dole, and the place that gave Bush back to back landslide majorities – is turning against the Iraq war.

Kansas Democrats are quicker to oppose Bush, but growing numbers of Kansas Republicans also are rejecting his plan to send more troops to Iraq and the war itself. That threatens Bush’s hope to maintain a solid base of support for his war policies and undermines White House efforts to portray war opposition as partisan Democratic politics.

“The president’s war ideas are not very popular here,” said Tim Shallenburger, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party. “Even good Republicans are getting frustrated and believe the president is being stubborn. … Seven out of 10 good conservative Republicans may not want to say it, but they oppose the war.”

If true, that would be a far more negative vote on the war than registered by Republicans nationally. Although Americans overwhelmingly oppose the Iraq war, 61 percent of Republicans still approve of Bush’s handling of it, according to the Gallup poll.

Their opposition is almost whispered among friends, largely under the surface in a state where Republicans are reluctant to protest or criticize the commander in chief, the title many use in discussing Bush.

But it’s there and it’s growing, say locals from small prairie towns to the suburbs of Kansas City, a simmering opposition in the heart of conservative country that explains why some Republicans in Congress increasingly feel free to turn against the president over the war.

Wassit, Jan 22, (VOI) – Large numbers of civil servants, leaders and members of political and religious movements and civil society workers staged a sit-in on Monday outside the U.S. base Delta in Wassit province to protest the arrest of two council members.

The protestors demanded the immediate release of the detained officials and an apology from the U.S. forces that made the arrests.

A U.S. force raided the provincial council on Tuesday and detained Qassem al-Aaraji and Fadel Jassem Abul-Taiyeb, without giving any reasons. The whereabouts of the two members are not known so far.

On Friday and as the protests continued demanding a release of the detained council members, the U.S. army said the two detained members were suspected of involvement in smuggling weapons.

Hamid Majid Idi, a participant of Monday’s protest, said the sit-in was an expression of denunciation of the arrests.

Another protestor told VOI “The sit-in is public and popular and it started in the morning outside Wassit Provincial Council and the demonstrators marched to reach the U.S. base in west of Kut.

Kut, capital city of Wassit province is 180 km southeast of Baghdad.

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — George W. Bush came to power in 2001 vowing to make his mark on history by overhauling taxes, pensions and schools. Instead, an item not on the original agenda — the war in Iraq — may consign him to the bottom tier of U.S. leaders.

That’s the view of a number of historians and presidential scholars, who say that unless Bush’s decision to inject some 20,000 more troops succeeds in quelling sectarian violence, he risks joining the ranks of such poorly regarded American leaders as James Buchanan and Warren G. Harding.

“Iraq has done enormous damage” to Bush’s standing, says Robert Dallek, the biographer of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Bush, he says, will rank “somewhere at the bottom.” Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas in Austin, says Bush’s effort to reverse the course of events in the war is “his last chance to avoid the dustbin of history.”

As Bush puts the finishing touches on tomorrow’s State of the Union address, the chaos in Iraq is emboldening political opponents and putting his presidency under siege. In a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll conducted Jan. 13-16, 49 percent of respondents said Bush will be remembered as a poor or below- average president, with 28 percent ranking him as average. Only 22 percent said Bush will be judged a success.

Army investigators say that Col. Michael D. Steele, a decorated combat veteran and brigade commander in Iraq, issued improper orders to his soldiers that contributed to the deaths of four unarmed Iraqi men during a raid in May, according to military documents.

No charges have been filed against Colonel Steele in the Army’s continuing investigation. But two Defense Department officials said last week that Colonel Steele was formally reprimanded in the summer by Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the former commander in Iraq, for not reporting the deaths and other details of the raid. The action was not made public.

The reprimand and the controversy surrounding the raid have effectively ended the career of Colonel Steele, an aggressive officer known for unorthodox methods and who was portrayed in the book and movie “Black Hawk Down” as a fearless fighter during Special Operations missions in Somalia in 1993.

The four Iraqi men were killed on a channel island northwest of Baghdad on May 9 by members of the division’s Third Brigade Combat Team, which Colonel Steele commanded. Four soldiers were later charged with murder by military prosecutors, who said they captured the men, then turned them loose and killed them as part of a staged escape attempt. Over the past two weeks, two of the soldiers have pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

The military’s administrative investigation into Colonel Steele centered on how he communicated the rules of engagement, the instructions that all soldiers must follow to determine whether they may legally use lethal force against an enemy, to his soldiers before the raid.

The colonel improperly led his soldiers to believe that distinguishing combatants from noncombatants — a main tenet of the military’s standing rules of engagement — was not necessary during the May 9 mission, according to a classified report in June by Brig. Gen. Thomas Maffey, a deputy commander tapped by General Chiarelli to investigate Colonel Steele. “A person cannot be targeted on status simply by being present on an objective deemed hostile by an on-scene commander,” General Maffey wrote in his June 16 report.

As the US Congress prepares to vote on resolutions opposing additional American troops in Iraq, senior Democrats have warned President George W Bush that it is only the first of a series of steps that are being contemplated if he fails to heed the signals coming out of Capitol Hill.

The Non-Binding Resolution is likely to be debated and voted upon soon but Bush and his deputy Dick Cheney have said they will not budge from sending thousands more troops to Iraq no matter how much Congress opposes it.

The Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, who is also seeking the Democratic Party nomination for the Presidential election of 2008 has rejected the argument put forth by the Cheney that such political resolutions only embolden terrorists like Osama bin Laden.

“It’s about time we stopped listening to that ideological rhetoric and that “Bin Laden” and the rest. Bin Laden isn’t the issue here. Bin Laden will become the issue,” Biden said.

DUBAI, Jan 21 (Reuters) – Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said in remarks aired on Sunday he will push for dialogue between the United States and neighbouring Syria, which he said was helping Baghdad clamp down on terrorism.

Talabani, who paid a landmark visit to Syria earlier this month, said he had not received any request to mediate between Damascus and Washington from either nation.

But, “I personally will seek to give a true picture about Syria’s intentions and policy to the U.S. administration and I will seek to encourage our American friends to have a dialogue with Syria,” he told Al Arabiya television.

Syria’s U.S. ties went frosty when President Bashar al-Assad voiced opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq in 2003.

Iraqi and U.S. officials have often accused Syria of not doing enough to stop the flow of militants crossing its Iraqi borders to fight U.S.-led troops. Damascus repeatedly said it was doing all it can to control the long desert border.

“Syria wants … stability in Iraq and is backing us in fighting terrorism. There is no justification for a stern (U.S.) stance on Syria,” said Talabani, who lived in Syria in exile in the 1970s.

When we are talking about regime change in Iraq, you believe that the US did this for oil. But at the same as you know the US gets oil from other Gulf countries, South American countries, and Norway. How do you explain that?

The primary issue is not access but rather control. That is clear both from internal documentation and from the historical record. The US followed the same Middle East policies for decades when it was not using a drop of Middle East oil, and even now, intelligence projects that while controlling the Middle East for the traditional reasons, the US should rely on more secure Atlantic Basin reserves: West Africa and the Western hemisphere. Hence the kinds of considerations you raise are of only limited significance.

Over 60 years ago, the State Department described the oil reserves of the Gulf as “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Iraq is at the heart of the region, and is itself estimated to have the second largest reserves in the world (after Saudi Arabia). Iraqi sources are also very cheap to extract: no deep sea drilling, extraction from tar sands, etc. Establishment of a US client state in Iraq, and a base for long-term military deployment (as is now being implemented), would greatly enhance US dominance over this “stupendous source of strategic power” and ensure that the wealth from this great “material prize” would flow into the preferred hands. That is understood by the more astute policy analysts and planners. One of them, Zbigniew Brzezinski, pointed out that if the invasion of Iraq succeeded, the US would gain “critical leverage” over its industrial rivals in Europe and Asia. He was reiterating the observations of one of the most important of the early post-war planners, George Kennan, who advised that control over Middle East oil would provide the US with “veto power” over industrial rivals. The same factors enter into the conflicts over pipelines from Central Asia: US planners want to ensure that they go to the West, not the East, and that the pipelines should follow a complicated path to avoid Russia and Iran, so as to ensure US control. China, Russia, and other participants in the Asian Energy Security Grid and Shanghai Cooperation Council naturally have different ideas. Vice-President Dick Cheney, the most influential foreign policy figure in the Bush Administration, observed that control over pipelines can serve as a “tool of intimidation.” He was referring of course to control by others, but understands perfectly well that the same is true of US control.

These matters, though obvious, are largely excluded from Western discourse. Doctrinal managers would like us to believe that the US and UK would have “liberated” Iraq even if its major exports were lettuce and pickles and the major energy resources of the world were in the South Pacific. It takes really impressive discipline “not to see” the obvious.

Failing to prove the previous justifications to invade Iraq, the US then used democracy concerns to justify the war. This is your viewpoint stated in an interview. But as you know in the agenda of post- 9/11 New World Order spreading democracy is a key objective. So why do you doubt this democracy? While it is obvious that Saddam had and used chemical weapons against the Kurds?

To be more accurate, I was citing reports in the mainstream press and scholarship, which reviewed these very clear changes as they occurred. Interviews do not have footnotes, but the sources are cited in my books Hegemony or Survival (2004) and Failed States (2006). Bush, Blair, Powell and others stressed insistently that the “single question” is whether Saddam will abandon his programs of weapons of mass destruction. It was only after the failure to discover WMD that government rhetoric shifted to the President’s “messianic mission” to bring democracy to Iraq and the Middle East. Very quickly, journalism and much of scholarship shifted and commentators “jumped on the bandwagon,” as the prominent Middle East specialist Augustus John Norton accurately wrote. The “messianic mission” was proclaimed in Washington in November 2003 with great fanfare, and since then has become a staple of commentary, as reviewed in Failed States.

True, there were also the ritual phrases about bringing democracy, but they were marginal, and are routine no matter what policies are being undertaken. These conclusions, clear from the factual record, are now underscored by recently released secret documents, including the Presidential Directive of Aug. 29, 2002, called “Iraq Goals, Objectives and Strategy.” The proimary goal is “to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” and to prevent Iraq from “becoming a more dangerous threat to the region and beyond,” and to cut Iraq’s “links to and sponsorship of international terrorism.” Scattered through, again, are the routine and meaningless phrases about “moderation, pluralism and democracy,” which no one takes seriously because they accompany every plan, and always have. Not only is all of this familiar from long before, but it is also quite similar to the rhetoric of other powers, including the worst monsters. Even Stalin proclaimed the mission of establishing democracy. These are among the reasons why no one should pay attention to the exalted rhetoric of political leaders: it is predictable, and therefore carries no information.

I might add that of all the people in the world, Kurds should be the first to recognize these elementary truths, after their long history of betrayal on the part of pretended benefactors.

There have also been strenuous efforts to create the myth that the post-9/11 agenda was spreading democracy. That is dramatically false. 9/11 was followed by a remarkable display of contempt for democracy, both in words and in deeds, perhaps unique in history. I have reviewed the record in the books mentioned, and will not repeat here, but it is unmistakable.

The truth of the matter is recognized by the most prominent scholar/advocates of “democracy promotion.” The most respected of them is Thomas Carothers, head of the Democracy and Law project of the Carnegie Endowment, who describes himself as a neo-Reaganite. He writes in part from an insider’s perspective, having served in Reagan’s State Department programs of “democracy enhancement.” He is an honest scholar, and recognizes that these programs were a failure, in fact, a highly systematic failure. In the regions where US influence was least, there was progress in democracy, despite strenuous efforts of the Reagan administration to prevent it. The worst record was in the regions where the US had the most influence. He also explains the reasons: Washington would permit only “top-down forms” of democracy in which traditional elites, linked to the US, would retain power in deeply undemocratic societies.