The Rag Blog

George W. Bush has purged senior military and intelligence officials who were obstacles to a wider war in the Middle East, broadening his options for both escalating the conflict inside Iraq and expanding the fighting to Iran and Syria with Israel’s help.

On Jan. 4, Bush ousted the top two commanders in the Middle East, Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, who had opposed a military escalation in Iraq, and removed Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, who had stood by intelligence estimates downplaying the near-term threat from Iran’s nuclear program.

Most Washington observers have treated Bush’s shake-up as either routine or part of his desire for a new team to handle his planned “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq. But intelligence sources say the personnel changes also fit with a scenario for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and seeking violent regime change in Syria.

Bush appointed Admiral William Fallon as the new chief of Central Command for the Middle East despite the fact that Fallon, a former Navy fighter pilot and currently head of the Pacific Command, will oversee two ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The choice of Fallon makes more sense if Bush foresees a bigger role for two aircraft carrier groups now poised off Iran’s coastline, such as support for possible Israeli air strikes against Iran’s nuclear targets or as a deterrent against any overt Iranian retaliation.

Though not considered a Middle East expert, Fallon has moved in neoconservative circles, for instance, attending a 2001 awards ceremony at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think tank dedicated to explaining “the link between American defense policy and the security of Israel.”

Bush’s personnel changes also come as Israel is reported stepping up preparations for air strikes, possibly including tactical nuclear bombs, to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, such as the reactor at Natanz, south of Tehran, where enriched uranium is produced.

The Sunday Times of London reported on Jan. 7 that two Israeli air squadrons are training for the mission and “if things go according to plan, a pilot will first launch a conventional laser-guided bomb to blow a shaft down through the layers of hardened concrete [at Natanz]. Other pilots will then be ready to drop low-yield one kiloton nuclear weapons into the hole.”

The Sunday Times wrote that Israel also would hit two other facilities – at Isfahan and Arak – with conventional bombs. But the possible use of a nuclear bomb at Natanz would represent the first nuclear attack since the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II six decades ago.

While some observers believe Israel may be leaking details of its plans as a way to frighten Iran into accepting international controls on its nuclear program, other sources indicate that Israel and the Bush administration are seriously preparing for this wider Middle Eastern war.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has called the possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb an “existential threat” to Israel.

After the Sunday Times article appeared, an Israeli government spokesman denied that Israel has drawn up secret plans to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. For its part, Iran claims it only wants a nuclear program for producing energy.

Negroponte’s Heresy

Whatever Iran’s intent, Negroponte has said U.S. intelligence does not believe Iran could produce a nuclear weapon until next decade.

Negroponte’s assessment in April 2006 infuriated neoconservative hardliners who wanted a worst-case scenario on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, much as they pressed for an alarmist view on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Unlike former CIA Director George Tenet, who bent to Bush’s political needs on Iraq, Negroponte stood behind the position of intelligence analysts who cited Iran’s limited progress in refining uranium.

“Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade,” Negroponte said in an interview with NBC News. Expressing a similarly tempered view in a speech at the National Press Club, Negroponte said, “I think it’s important that this issue be kept in perspective.”

Some neocons complained that Negroponte was betraying the President.

Can a marginal increase in the US troop presence in Iraq pave a new way forward? Or is it a detour — a marginal diversion from our present, failed course?

Even if we were to accept, at this late date, that our troubles in Iraq are due to our having invested too few bodies, why should we believe that a small increment can turn the tide?

These are among the questions raised by the Bush administration’s new initiative and they point to a more fundamental one:

What is the problem that has bedeviled the US effort in Iraq for nearly four years?

Few outside the administration would contest that the mission’s “measurables” are miserable. The progress in Iraq reconstruction has been glacial and the security situation has steadily deteriorated, despite a great expenditure of time, money, and lives. But why? Critics have variously targeted the administration’s strategy, planning, priories, and level of effort — which suggests that there might be a better way. And, indeed, the administration now claims to have discovered one.

Democrats’ own Rules Commmittee chair criticizes exemption, bill architecture

WASHINGTON — A major loophole in the Democrats’ recently unveiled ethics package will allow non-profit arms of controversial lobbying organizations to fund travel excursions for members of Congress, RAW STORY has discovered.

Though tasked with authoring the legislation, Rules Committee Chair Louise Slaughter (D-NY) said she disagreed with the exemption in an exclusive interview.

“I would’ve done it straight out,” Slaughter said, noting that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Aspen Institute are exempt from many of its harshest restrictions.

Slaughter didn’t say who, if anyone, had pushed for the exemption. As chair, the New York Democrat was responsible for pulling together the ethics reform package, which was hammered out between members of the Democratic caucus.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declined to comment.

Media coverage of Gerald Ford’s death likely boosted President Bush’s decision to escalate America’s war in Iraq. Why? Because Bush made a point of strongly praising Ford for his politically unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon, saying Ford did what was best for America even though the action likely cost him the 1976 election. Bush sees escalating the Iraq war as analogous to Ford’s pardon— a decision unpopular at its time but for which history will vindicate him. The media whitewashing of Ford—which followed even greater historical reinventions after the deaths of Nixon and Ronald Reagan —confirms Bush’s view that history will absolve him for the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, and that expanding the war will not endanger his post-death legacy.

George W. Bush would likely have proposed escalating the Iraq War even if Gerald Ford had not died in December. But there’s no question that media coverage of Ford’s death, and that of other recent presidents, reaffirmed Bush’s view that the war will not hurt his legacy.

Excessive media coverage of Ford’s death has typically been attributed to a slow news week. But Frank Rich argued in the New York Times that it was an attempt to make the current President Bush look bad. Rich observed that all of Ford’s attributes highlighted by the media—his bipartisanship, lack of ideological rigidity, willingness to listen and be influenced by the opinions of others—are precisely those qualities missing in our current President.

But based on news clips I heard, Bush had his own interpretation of Ford’s death. He lauded Ford for putting the nation’s interests ahead of his own political needs, an interpretation of Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon that reverberated through the media. Bush said that Ford’s action cost him the 1976 presidential election, but that it was the right thing to do.

When Ford pardoned Nixon, most Americans were irate. The level of ongoing anger was not as great or sustained as that accompanying the Iraq war, but the fact that Bush and others believe it cost Ford the 1976 election against Jimmy Carter shows that—contrary to recent media spin—Americans did not appreciate the pardon for allegedly “putting our long national nightmare behind us.”

That latter view was the “spin” by Nixon defenders. Now its become the conventional wisdom for most of the American media.

If post-death historical revisionism can transform Ford’s pardon into a selfless act of political courage—rather than part a secret backroom deal that first enabled Ford to become Vice-President and then President— than Bush’s Iraq invasion and occupation can be similarly reinterpreted.

Maysan: Five People Die Amongst Them A Teenager and Two Children Die Scavenging For Copper

Five people were killed today by exploding ordinance from previous wars in two separate incidents.

In the first incident in West Amarah three brothers Hussein Sabri Matanch (Aged 18) and Rafael Qasim (Aged 12) and Jasim (Aged 9) were trying to dismantle a mortar shell to get at the copper inside it so that they could sell it to scrap dealers. Here’s how eyewitnesses to their deaths describe what happened:

“they were trying to dismantle a mortar shell to get at the copper to sell it to scrap dealers when it exploded in their hands and they died on the spot”

In the second incident this one 45 Km west of Amarah two people were killed extracting the contents of a mortar shell again to sell the copper inside to scrap dealers. It exploded. They died. Source: Aswat al Iraq [Arabic]

Commentary:

I started to translate the news from Arabic late this afternoon – I do have other things to do, and this was the first report to hit my screen. Increasingly frequently I want to scream as I do this and I’m not publishing anything else tonight I’m simply too revolted.

The report on Aswat al Iraq concludes by pointing out that there are many such incidents in Maysan every year. This is because it borders Iran and there’s lots and lots of unexploded ordinance littering the landscape just waiting for poverty stricken desperate people to try their luck at earning a few cents from scrap dealers.

Iraqi children scavenging for food: I get reports like this every week from Iraq, sometimes I get several reports a day. Most often they come from the border provinces. Erdla and myself have written here and published photographs like the one you see now time and time and again. We’ve written about the desperate plight of the people of Iraq. We’ve written repeatedly about children living in garbage dumps scavenging for food. Every time I go to Iraq I see children risk their lives by doing what as a former felix I can tell you is one of the most difficult and dangerous things you can do – defuse, by hand, corroded ordinance. That’s why you mostly don’t try to do it by hand. You get a sharpshooter, like Declan or Anto or Smurph to shoot the damned thing from a very safe distance and explode it that way. Only if that can’t be done do you go in and try to defuse it by hand.

Every time I’ve been to Iraq since the Americans invaded I’ve seen something I never saw before – children scavenging in garbage dumps for food. There is now a thriving trade of children being kidnapped, sold, and exported to paedophile brothels. My last few trips I’ve seen something that I’ve never ever ever seen before in Iraq. Children with the tell-tale red rash around their mouths. That’s not even the worst of it.

Once they arrive in her camp Maryam routinely now has to lock up some of the kids that Ali manages to talk off the streets and into one of her refugee convoys. She locks them in the Mosque basement while they undergo withdrawal symptoms. Several of them have died in convulsions because they’re simply too weakened to survive cold turkey.

On 14 November, Bridget Ash wrote to the BBC’s Today programme asking why the invasion of Iraq was described merely as “a conflict”. She could not recall other bloody invasions reduced to “a conflict”. She received this reply:

Dear Bridget You may well disagree, but I think there’s a big difference between the aggressive “invasions” of dictators like Hitler and Saddam and the “occupation”, however badly planned and executed, of a country for positive ends, as in the Coalition effort in Iraq. Yours faithfully, Roger Hermiston Assistant Editor, Today

In demonstrating how censorship works in free societies and the double standard that props up the facade of “objectivity” and “impartiality”, Roger Hermiston’s polite profanity offers a valuable exhibit. An invasion is not an invasion if “we” do it, regardless of the lies that justified it and the contempt shown for international law. An occupation is not an occupation if “we” run it, no matter that the means to our “positive ends” require the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, and an unnecessary sectarian tragedy.

Those who euphemise these crimes are those Arthur Miller had in mind when he wrote: “The thought that the state . . . is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.” Miller might have been less charitable had he referred directly to those whose job it was to keep the record straight.

Christopher King explores the phenomenon of the American peasant – that segment of US society which, through suspension of all critical faculties and indifference to the truth, defy logic and evidence by supporting the war against Iraq.

The peasant is a type who has disappeared from Western Europe with excellent effects both socially and politically. The American peasant however has a lot to answer for. This is most vividly shown in the public’s judgment about the rightness of the Iraq war where views are sharply divided between Europe and America.

The historical peasant was an agricultural worker who was poor, uneducated and usually worked so hard he had no time or energy for anything else. Any opinions or judgments that such a man might make would necessarily be of poor quality. In America, the land of plenty, opportunity and electronic information which has never seen a peasant class of this sort, how can the peasant possibly exist and indeed be blamed for his judgments?

I wish to discuss here one strand, but an important one, of many that made the Iraq war possible. Others for example are those of the Rumsfelds who were in it for the money, the Condoleezza Rices and Colin Powell who were careerists and the Richard Perles together with sundry Zionist supporters and collaborators for whom Saddam was their worst enemy. We can easily understand them and their self-interests. Everyone got what s/he wanted except for Colin Powell whose unwise United Nations performance in identifying mobile chemical factories will make him a joke far beyond his lifetime. I am not concerned about these. I am interested in the major segment of quiet peasants who believed uncritically what they were told and supported the war by their compliance. I am speaking of a peasant state of mind. We cannot blame our historical peasant for poor judgment or lack of knowledge. He cannot help his position. The American peasant has no such excuse.

The first step must be the recognition that the solution to the Iraq crisis must be generated first internally, and then, importantly, at the regional level. . . No foreign power, no matter how benevolent, should be allowed to dictate the terms of a possible historic and stable settlement in the Middle East. . .

Secondly, the basis of a settlement must take into account the fact that the forces that have been unleashed by the invasion of Iraq must be acknowledged and accommodated. These forces, in turn, must accept limits to their demands and claims. That would apply, in particular, to the Shias and the Kurds, the two communities who have been seen to have gained from the invasion of Iraq.

Thirdly, the Sunni Arab community must become convinced that its loss of undivided power will not lead to marginalisation and discrimination. . .

Fourthly, the existing states surrounding Iraq feel deeply threatened by the changes there. That needs to be recognised and treated in any lasting deal for Iraq and the area. . .

The Iraqi government that has arisen as a result of the admittedly flawed political process must be accepted as a sovereign and responsible government. No settlement can possibly succeed if its starting point is the illegitimacy of the Iraqi government or one that considers it expendable.