The Rag Blog

The United States had 165,000 troops in Iraq in late 2005/early 2006 for the Iraqi national elections.

The Pentagon rotated troops out over the ensuing months and never replaced them until the troop level dropped by more than 35,000.

Now the administration is going to add 22,000 more troops in its vaunted “surge,” yet even after all the surge troops are rotated into Iraq, the total number of U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq will be less than the 165,000 we had in there in late 2005/early 2006.

The Washington Post put it this way:

Bush said it is now clear that there have not been sufficient troops in Baghdad, and that part of the difference in this approach is that the plan will be adequately resourced. Yet the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq after the planned increase will be about 153,000, less than the peak of about 165,000 in December 2005. Military experts last night wondered, as one said, how a “thin green line” of 17,500 additional soldiers in Baghdad could affect the security situation in a city where many of the 5 million residents are hostile to the U.S. presence. “Too little, too late — way too late,” said retired Col. Jerry Durrant, who has worked as a trainer of Iraqi forces.

So how is Bush’s vaunted troop surge really so different than previous administration war policy?

It seems to me to be just another dog and pony show designed by the administration’s propaganda-meisters to delay the inevitable withdrawal of U.S. troops from a ruptured and destroyed Iraq.

The big news story that night? President Lyndon B. Johnson’s State of the Union address.

The topic that dominated all others: Vietnam.

I’m going to guide you to some excerpts of that address — exactly 40 years ago tonight.

See how it compares to some of the excerpts from President Bush’s speech that were just released minutes ago:

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war–a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror – and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet. I cannot promise you that it will come this year–or come next year. Our adversary still believes, I think, tonight, that he can go on fighting longer than we can, and longer than we and our allies will be prepared to stand up and resist.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: Our South Vietnamese allies are also being tested tonight. Because they must provide real security to the people living in the countryside. And this means reducing the terrorism and the armed attacks which kidnaped and killed 26,900 civilians in the last 32 months, to levels where they can be successfully controlled by the regular South Vietnamese security forces. It means bringing to the villagers an effective civilian government that they can respect, and that they can rely upon and that they can participate in, and that they can have a personal stake in. We hope that government is now beginning to emerge.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: This forward movement is rooted in the ambitions and the interests of Asian nations themselves. It was precisely this movement that we hoped to accelerate when I spoke at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in April 1965, and I pledged “a much more massive effort to improve the life of man” in that part of the world, in the hope that we could take some of the funds that we were spending on bullets and bombs and spend it on schools and production.
GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting post up about supporters of this insane Iraq “Surge” idea. His notes that Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the architects of this surge plan, argues for a necessarily large increase in the number of American troops in Iraq. In fact, Kagan states pretty plainly that the surge won’t work unless many thousand more troops than are currently available are deployed to the region.

The president must request a substantial increase in ground forces end strength. This increase is vital to sustaining the morale of the combat forces by ensuring that relief is on the way. The president must issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this generation.

Glenn then makes a connection that’s patently obvious. If you are one such young Americans, and you support Bush’s war and Kagan’s plan for its escalation, you should enlist to serve your country in Iraq. And not only for the sake of rhetorical consistancy.

At this point, to continue supporting a policy that has caused such a cataclysmic loss of life, American, Iraqi and otherwise, one would have to think that “victory” in Iraq was the single most important cause of our time. After all, it would have to be worth several thousand American lives and, at best, several hundred thousand Iraqi lives.

I do not personally believe this, nor did I think that any such victory was attainable at any point during Bush’s Iraqi Adventure. So I did not support the war, because why should Americans or Iraqis die for something that isn’t truly essential for our survival, or that wasn’t even possible?

But if I did believe this, well…I’d only have a few options:

(1) Go off to war.

(2) Admit to myself and anyone else who asked that I’m a coward, willing to send other men to die for what I think is important but unwilling to potentially sacrifice my own life or the lives of close friends and family members.

(3) Find a way to aid the war effort significant enough to substitute for my presence on a battlefield.

The so-called right-wing “chickenhaws,” young men or the parents of young men who strongly support Bush’s war but refuse to serve, tend to go with #3. They claim that their writing about the war and bringing issues to the public’s attention compensate for their absence from the field of battle.

Everyone knew what Bush was going to say before he made his address tonight. And the ‘surge’ which Democrats hoped to block had already begun with advance elements of the 82nd Airborne already in Baghdad to arrange for arrivals of 17,500 more troops. “If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home,” Bush said. But the Iraqis are responsible for running their own government, and if they don’t shape up, that’s it for them.

Bush made clear he is embarking on a straightforward pacification program in Baghdad, made possible by an occupation run by American troops. This is to be an American military occupation. Maybe with a façade of Iraqis, but run by Americans, just as yesterday, American GIs ended up running the show in Haifa Street fighting.

As Bush has said in the past, Americans know what the word victory means, So, whatever happens, no matter what anyone says, we have to win the war. “Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States,” Bush said.

Observers grasp wildly for explanations as to why Bush does what he does. No matter what one thinks of the President, when push comes to shove, it’s hard to believe he really wants to drag out the war so it can be handed over to a successor in 2008; or that he is such a psycho that he can’t stop calling defeat victory. The Bushes doubtless don’t consider their family legacy to be made of such stuff.

There may well be a much more sinister game at play here. That centers around the emergence of Henry Kissinger over the last year as an outside advisor to Bush and other top officials in Washington.

Gareth Porter, the historian who ran the Indochina Resource Center in the early 70s, points out in a January 11 article on Asia Online that “although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi’ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the US position in the war is actually weak and unstable.“

To listen to Bush’s speech on Wednesday, you would imagine that al-Qaeda has occupied large swathes of Iraq with the help of Syria and Iran and is brandishing missiles at the US mainland. That the president of the United States can come out after nearly four years of such lies and try to put this fantasy over on the American people is shameful.

The answer to “al-Qaeda’s” occupation of neighborhoods in Baghdad and the cities of al-Anbar is then, Bush says, to send in more US troops to “clear and hold” these neighborhoods.

But is that really the big problem in Iraq? Bush is thinking in terms of a conventional war, where armies fight to hold territory. But if a nimble guerrilla group can come out at night and set off a bomb at the base of a large tenement building in a Shiite neighborhood, they can keep the sectarian civil war going. They work by provoking reprisals. They like to hold territory if they can. But as we saw with Fallujah and Tal Afar, if they cannot they just scatter and blow things up elsewhere.

Bush could not help taking swipes at Iran and Syria. But the geography of his deployments gives the lie to his singling them out as mischief makers. Why send 4,000 extra troops to al-Anbar province? Why ignore Diyala Province near Iran, which is in flames, or Babel Province southwest of Baghdad? Diyala borders Iran, so isn’t that the threat? But wait. Where is al-Anbar? Between Jordan and Baghdad. In other words, al-Anbar opens out into the vast Sunni Arab hinterland that supports the guerrilla movement with money and volunteers, coming in from Jordan. If Syria was the big problem, you would put the extra 4,000 troops up north along the border. If Iran was the big problem, you’d occupy Diyala. But little Jordan is an ally of the US, and Bush would not want to insult it by admitting that it is a major infiltration root for jihadis heading to Iraq.

01/10/07 “Information Clearing House” — — Is the surge an orchestrated distraction from the real war plan?

A good case can be made that it is. The US Congress and media are focused on President Bush’s proposal for an increase of 20,000 US troops in Iraq, while Israel and its American neoconservative allies prepare an assault on Iran.

Commentators have expressed puzzlement over President Bush’s appointment of a US Navy admiral as commander in charge of the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The appointment makes sense only if the administration’s attention has shifted from the insurgencies to an attack on Iran.

The Bush administration has recently doubled its aircraft carrier forces and air power in the Persian Gulf. According to credible news reports, the Israeli air force has been making practice runs in preparation for an attack on Iran.

Recently, Israeli military and political leaders have described Israeli machinations to manipulate the American public and their representatives into supporting or joining an Israeli assault on Iran.

Two US carrier task forces or strike groups will certainly congest the Persian Gulf. On January 9 a US nuclear sub collided with a Japanese tanker in the Persian Gulf. Two carrier groups will have scant room for maneuver. Their purpose is either to provide the means for a hard hit on Iran or to serve as sitting ducks for a new Pearl Harbor that would rally Americans behind the new war.

Whether our ships are hit by Iran in retaliation to an attack from Israel or suffer an orchestrated attack by Israel that is blamed on the Iranians, there are certainly far more US naval forces in the Persian Gulf than prudence demands.

Bush’s proposed surge appears to have no real military purpose. The US military opposes it as militarily pointless and as damaging to the US Army and Marine Corps. The surge can only be accomplished by keeping troops deployed after the arrival of their replacements. Moreover, the increase in numbers that can be achieved in this way are far short of the numbers required to put down the insurgency and civil war.

I’ve always been a Californian. Born and raised in rural Shasta County, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Californians, you could say that despite my British and Irish bloodlines, the sun runs through my veins. So when I told friends and family I’d be moving to Seattle last year, I received a lot of blunt skepticism. “You’ll never handle the weather,” they assured me. I scoffed at their warnings – for all the fog San Francisco gets, it might as well be the Pacific Northwest, I argued. However, after my first full month here qualified as the rainiest month in this history of Seattle, then newspapers dubbed a local December storm as the most destructive seen in fifteen years, I’m beginning to eat my words. If the Giants hadn’t re-signed Barry Bonds, I’d be starting to wonder if I’d made a big mistake.

In the Bay Area, the weather represents either a minor annoyance or something to celebrate. Days range from slightly wet to a bit windy to absolutely gorgeous, and almost every one of them is a day on which you could ride your bike to work.

After moving up to Seattle, however, the month of November quickly taught me things work a little differently up here. For thirty days and thirty nights, I don’t remember much sunshine. I do, however, remember a wide variety of weather I’d never seen before. Raining sleet. Sleeting hail. Sideways rain. Big, soft snowflakes that suddenly turned to raindrops, then right back to snow again. Ice rain. Rain Ice. All told, more than 15 inches of wet stuff fell from the sky during those thirty days.

As part of legislation submitted to implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations, the new Democratic majority in Congress has a plan to improve information sharing within the Homeland Security Department.

H.R. 1, the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007, submitted by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) would enact several dozen antiterrorism recommendations made by the commission. These include recommendations regarding cargo screening, transportation security, critical infrastructure protection and the national incident management system.

The 23-section bill addresses several sections of IT-related items, including information sharing. The bill directs the Homeland Security secretary to integrate intelligence components of the department — ranging from the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other units — into a new information-sharing environment (ISE) to be administrated by the Homeland Security undersecretary for intelligence and analysis.

An ISE, as defined by the legislation, is an approach that facilities the sharing of terrorism information. The approach may include any methods determined necessary and appropriate for carrying out the intent of the legislation.

The legislation directs the secretary to appoint knowledge management officers, and establish an internal training program and business processes for information-sharing. It also requires that the establishment of a “comprehensive IT network architecture” that will connect all of the databases within the Department of Homeland Security to each other, promoting internal information-sharing,” according to a summary distributed by Thompson’s office.

The legislation also would establish intelligence fusion centers in border states, specifically to enhance so-called border intelligence capabilities. It increases DHS’ involvement in other state and local fusion centers, to provide them with intelligence, assistance and appropriate training.

Now that portions of the secret information regarding the “Security and Prosperity Agreement Partnership” (aka the NAFTA super highway) is gradually getting out to more and more Americans, it raises even more questions how this all will turn out, especially if Americans don’t wake up to what is going on in our government.

I have had several readers contact me asking for more details on what they have recently learned, both by telephone and letter, and they didn’t have to twist my arm to continue giving additional information. An observation in the question of why President Bush has fought tooth and nail to keep from ever building a border fence between Mexico and the United States is because he’s giving us instead a secret highway that crosses an eliminated former U.S. border n this does away with any so-called “illegal immigrants” to worry about. It just facilitates the clear invasion of America by illegal aliens and the massive importation of Chinese goods into Mexican ports and then through America to Canada.

Think of all the American farms and communities that will be destroyed by eminent domain to make room for the “super slab.” Thousands of American jobs would be lost by our truckers and longshoremen, for example, in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California who average making $140,000 a year, plus factory workers.

What illegal goods such as drugs, guns, foodstuffs, etc., will be sent through America with only a Mexican inspection on sovereign Mexican territory in Kansas City. How many terrorists will use this easy entry into America?

It’s all called pushing the New World Order to arrive at a form of government modeled after the European Union.

Did you notice that during our recent election, stopping terrorism, illegal immigration, the dangers presented by this NAFTA highway were not even mentioned? Does Congress even care if our nation is destroyed? They were on notice due to U.S. Representative Virgil H. Goode’s (R-Va.) filing House Concurrent Resolution 487 that had a grand total of only three co-sponsors. That tells you a lot in itself.