The Rag Blog

Al-Hayat this morning says Iraqi politicians and officers have said there are secret clauses in the Bush “new strategy” that talk about cooperation [between the Bush and Maliki administrations] in attacks on “extremist leadership”, both Shiite and Sunni, and [these sources have also said that] this starts with lightening (khatifa) operations [that will have] media reveberations that will assist in giving impetus to the American administration in its “second battle” of the occupation of Baghdad.

By way of elaboration, this is followed by a quote from an AFP item, and then remarks on the Iranian-diplomats affair.

Here is the AFP quote:

[AFP quoted] a high American military official who said on Thursday evening that the American forces can target extremist leadership in Baghdad as part of the new plan which the Iraqi government has agreed to by lifting restrictions that have up to now prevented the Americans from attacking certain of the extremist leadership.

And the journalist continues: “Observers don’t rule out the idea that the American forces might use the attack on the Iranian consulate in Irbil as a a model for lightening (khatifa) operations against military leaders in the Mahdi Army or [against] certain of the former officers who are believed to be running armed operations from their homes in Sunni strongholds in Baghdad.”

A few years ago, David Brooks, New York Times columnist and media pundit extraordinaire, penned a love letter to the idea of meritocracy. It is “a way of life that emphasizes … perpetual improvement, and permanent exertion,” he effused, and is essential to America’s dynamism and character. Fellow glorifiers of meritocracy have noted that our society is superior to nepotistic backwaters like Krygystan or France because we assign the most important jobs based on excellence. This makes us less prone to stagnancy or, worse yet, hideous national clusterfucks like fighting unwinnable wars for reasons nobody understands.

At Radar we are devoted re-readers of the Brooks oeuvre and were struck by this particular column. It raised interesting questions. Noticing our nation is stuck in an unwinnable war (or two), we wondered if America hasn’t stumbled off the meritocratic path. More specifically, since political pundits like Brooks play such a central role in our national decision-making process, maybe something is amiss in the world of punditry. Are the incentives well-aligned? Surely those who warned us not to invade Iraq have been recognized and rewarded, and those who pushed for this disaster face tattered credibility and waning career prospects. Could it be any other way in America?

Noticing our nation is stuck in an unwinnable war, ‘Radar’ wondered: Is something amiss in the world of punditry? So we selected the four pundits who were in our judgment the most influentially and disturbingly misguided in their pro-war arguments and the four who were most prescient and forceful in their opposition. (Because conservative pundits generally acted as a well-coordinated bloc, more or less interchangeable, all four of our hawks are moderates or liberals who might have been important opponents of the war — so, sadly, we are not able to revisit Brooks’s eloquent and thoroughly meritless prognostications.)

A Surge of Bodies

On January 4th, the Pentagon “announced the identities” of six American soldiers who had died between December 28th and New Year’s Eve. It was just one of many such listings over these last years and, like similar announcements, this one had a just-the-facts quality to it — spare to the bone, barely more information than you would get from a POW: rank, age, place of birth, date of death, place of death, type of death, and the unit to which the dead soldier belonged.

These announcements, which blend seamlessly into one another, also blend the dead into a relatively uniform mass. You can, of course, learn nothing from such skeletal reports about the dreams of these young men (and sometimes women), their hopes or fears, their plans for the future or lack of them, their talents and skills, their problems, their stray thoughts or deepest convictions, their worlds, and those who cared about them.

So few paragraphs are almost bound to emphasize not the individuality of the dead, but their similarity in death. Five of these soldiers died due to roadside explosives (IEDs), one from small-arms fire. Two died in Baghdad; two in Baqubah; the embattled capital of Diyala Province, north of Baghdad, where civil war rages; one in Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency; and one in Taji, also in the “Sunni Triangle.” None had a rank higher than sergeant. The oldest was only 22; the youngest, 20. Another thing five of the six had in common was not coming from a major American city.

It’s no news that George W. Bush has been living in a bubble world created by his handlers, but it’s hard not to believe that his own personal “bubble” isn’t far more longstanding than that. The problem, of course, is that only Mr. Bush and a few neocon stragglers are left inside the theater still showing his Iraq War movie. The Iraqis aren’t there. The man who pushed the button to shoot that missile surely wasn’t; nor were Zarqawi’s Shiite victims; nor were the 120 or more Iraqis who died this Tuesday, including the 41 bodies found dumped throughout Baghdad and the five found scattered around Mosul; nor was Dustin Donica, the 3,000th American who died in the war; nor was Pfc. Alan R. Blohm from Kenai, Alaska. None of them could put up a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster, cross-out the faces of the bad guys, land gloriously on an aircraft carrier, or dress up for war — and then go home “inspired.” They had the misfortune to be in a horrific reality into which a President, thoroughly in the dark, had sent them stumbling.

ANKARA, Jan 12 (Reuters) – Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Friday reaffirmed Turkey’s right to send troops into Iraq to crush Kurdish rebels there and chided U.S. officials for questioning it.

“The Turkish Republic will do whatever is necessary to combat the terrorists when the time comes, but it will not announce its plans in advance,” Erdogan told a news conference after a meeting of his ruling AK Party.

“We say we are ready to take concrete steps with the Iraqi government and we also say these steps must be taken now.”

In sharp language underscoring Turkish anxiety about the chaos in Iraq, Erdogan said it was wrong for Washington — “our supposed strategic ally” — to tell Turkey, with its historic and cultural ties in the region, to stay out of Iraq.

“We have a 350 km border with Iraq. We have historic relations … the United States is 10,000 km away from Iraq, and yet is it not intervening in Iraq’s internal affairs?” he said.

Turkish media say Erdogan has been irked by comments attributed to Washington’s envoy to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, warning third countries not to interfere in Iraqi affairs.

On Jan. 4, eighteen families of the Woodlands complex in New Orleans assembled for a press conference to protest their eviction by Johnson Properties Group, LLC. Minutes before the conference was to convene, organizers received a call from Johnson Properties Group agreeing not to enforce the eviction until at least Jan. 8.

The conference continued as scheduled with tenants vocalizing their anger at being evicted from their homes at Woodlands. Although the tenants were relieved at the temporary stay in their eviction, their struggle is far from over. As Common Ground Legal Team member Soleil Rodrigue points out, there is still a real need to “make sure that everyone has a place to be and has a place to sleep with their families and their children and that no one will leave here and go into the streets”.

Once the evictions are finalized 16 families with close to 40 children will have nowhere to go unless alternative housing is secured for them. Two families were able to find housing prior to the Jan. 4 eviction date. Along with the loss of housing, families are also losing job-training and employment programs provided at the Woodlands, making it less likely that they will be able to afford housing once the evictions are finalized.

The Woodlands had been managed by Common Ground Collective as a community-based initiative to provide relief and training to those suffering following Hurricane Katrina. The complex, whose rents were the lowest in the city, was sold out from under Common Ground’s management to Johnson Properties Group, at which time the new owners aggressively pursued the eviction of current residents.

Katrina survivors face national housing crisis

The Woodlands tragedy is just a snapshot of the greater housing crisis facing the survivors of Katrina more than a year after the U.S. national and state governments stood by as they lost their homes and loved ones. Housing costs across New Orleans have escalated 70 to 300 percent over pre-Katrina rates.

Government promises of funding for housing aid and recovery have gone unfulfilled. A recent federal appeals court decision gave the Bush administration permission to shut down a post-Katrina program that provided housing payments to 4,200 survivors living in Texas.

Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.

The President may have started a new secret, informal war against Syria and Iran without the consent of Congress or any broad discussion with the country.

The bare outlines of that order may have appeared in President Bush’s Address to the Nation last night outlining his new course on Iraq:

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

We’re also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence-sharing and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies. We will work with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to help them resolve problems along their border. And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.

Adding fuel to the speculation is that U.S. forces today raided an Iranian Consulate in Arbil, Iraq and detained five Iranian staff members. Given that Iran showed little deference to the political sanctity of the US Embassy in Tehran 29 years ago, it would be ironic for Iran to hyperventilate much about the raid.

“I see the imminent death of 20,000 men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds …
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.”
Hamlet, Act IV; according to White House spin part of reading-adverse President George W Bush’s book list during the summer of 2006.

And so, after a tsunami surge of spin, US President George W Bush is heading toward escalation, summoning his 21,500 men, supported by barely 11% of Americans. Escalation in Iraq is the name of the president’s game, and that also applies to Somalia – the new Afghanistan.

In far from accidental timing, the good old “war on terror” is back from the grave (nobody really related to the “long war” newspeak). After all, the galleries had to be reminded that there’s a Pentagon-concocted “arc of instability” running from the Horn of Africa to the Middle East and then to the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Himalayas. The “war on terror” has expanded to the business of killing Africans, now afforded membership of the ever-expanding “axis of evil”.

Bush, in front of a stack of books he never reads, blamed al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni Arab resistance and “Shi’ites supported by Iran” for his failures; committed five more brigades to Baghdad and 4,000 extra troops to guerrilla and al-Qaeda-controlled al-Anbar province. As if these shock troops will be enough to pursue the “fight against terror”. Bush’s plan ultimately breaks down to a slightly bulkier US militia in Iraq capable of killing more Arabs.

Taking the bull by the Horn

With some aplomb, the White House/Pentagon axis has managed to turn Somalia into the new Afghanistan, in more ways than one and just in time for Bush’s announcement of his escalation-tainted “new way forward”. The Pentagon maintained it had “credible” intelligence before it decided to strike alleged al-Qaeda-infested villages in southern Somalia. This is highly suspect.

The intelligence was provided by unsavory, corrupt Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi – who came up with the clever plot of concocting a fictitious jihad conducted by “neo-Taliban” in Somalia and selling it handsomely to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon. He’s now posing as a prime US ally in the “war on terror”, just as Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov did in the autumn of 2001.

Zenawi’s US-trained Ethiopian troops, the ones who invaded Somalia, are infested with CIA operatives and Special Forces – all of them flown in from the strategic US-controlled (since September 11, 2003) Camp Le Monier in Djibouti.

Arab media are having a field day reporting that Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf, a reconverted warlord “elected” by fellow warlords (all armed by the US) and then legitimized by the United Nations, told African journalists in Mogadishu that the US had the right to bomb “anywhere in the world”. According to the Kenyan newspaper The Daily Nation, this new US campaign of targeted assassinations has in fact killed scores of civilians.

But with the help of Ethiopia’s dictatorship – whose soldiers it trained – Washington is being rewarded with one more client regime, and a crucial foothold in the Horn of Africa, right on the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, very close to the Red Sea and literally next door to Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

The basic fact remains that Bush’s escalation is designed to smash Muqtada’s Mehdi Army. That can only mean, in practice, a mini-genocide of vast masses of unruly, extremely dispossessed Shi’ites: the coming battle of Sadr City, which the Pentagon has been itching to launch since the spring of 2004. The Pentagon is actually declaring war on no fewer than 2.2 million (poor) people. A sinister symmetry still applies: the Pentagon will attack dispossessed Shi’ite masses – just as the Israeli Defense Forces attacked dispossessed Shi’ite masses in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US forces are likely to deliberately target both Shiite and Sunni extremist leaders under a new no holds barred policy for Baghdad agreed to by the Iraqi government, a senior US military official said.

The official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said the Iraqis had agreed to lift restrictions that in the past have prevented US forces from deliberately targeting certain extremist leaders.

“One way to erode their military capability is get to at their leadership,” said the official, referring to sectarian militias and death squads. “So, yes, I expect extremist leaders on both sides of the equation to be targeted.”

George W. Bush has an urge to surge. Like every junkie, he asks for just one more fix: let him inject just 21,000 more troops and that will win the war.

Terrorists fired a rocket from across the street into the US embassy in Athens on Friday morning. The rocket exploded in the bathroom on the third floor but did not cause casualties.

Greek leftist groups have targeted the US embassy and its personnel in the past, and passions run high in Greece against the US role in Iraq, which is generally seen as mere predatory imperialism and capitalist grasping.