War in Iraq

Mon - April 23, 2007

FUBAR or plan G in Iraq

The film "Saving Private Ryan" taught me what the great WW2 acronym FUBAR meant for the GIs. I stuck in on my office door at the University of Adelaide for much the same reason. Phillip Carter in Slate resurrects the term in reference to the ever failing "plans" which the US have invented to fight the guerrilla war in Iraq. To counter those who now see the immanent failure and urge that there be a "Plan B", Carter argues that there have already been 6 plans in Iraq (A-F) all of which have failed miserably and that there should be instead a Plan G (for "get of of Iraq"). According to Cater the failed plans have been:

A. Rumsfeld's deeply flawed theory of "shock and awe"
B. the transition of security tasks to a new and smaller headquarters led by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and the transition of reconstruction to the nascent Coalition Provisional Authority, led by American proconsul L. Paul Bremer
C. in summer 2003—a combination of heavy-handed combat operations and token reconstruction efforts
D. a phased withdrawal and drawdown plan, which was contingent upon the successful transfer of security responsibility to Iraqi forces and the achievement of political milestones like the ratification of Iraq's Constitution
E. Operation Together Forward I and II. These joint pushes to secure Baghdad followed a "clear, hold, and build" strategy lifted straight from the counterinsurgency playbook
F. the current Petraeus plan —the surge—grew out of the recognition that Plans C, D, and E had created today's overlapping conflicts in Iraq, and that our best hope for Iraq was to establish some sense of security, which would enable the Maliki government to stabilize itself

I would add that the current plan seems to be to hold out until the change over to a Democratic regime in early 2009, dump the mess in their laps, and then blame them for the fiasco. A great Rovian scheme.

Posted at 09:49 PM Read More

Iraq war may cool war fever (temporarily)

Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute is somewhat optimistic about the possibility that the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq will ween Americans off the habit of seeing war and violence as the way to improve the world. I don't share that view. If past history is anything to go by (1945 to present) I would give a post-war "peace policy" 10 years at the most before the average American voter "forgets" any past negative experience and falls for the wiles of the next "patriotic", god-fearing president who comes along urging them to fight some over-inflated enemy from whatever "axis of evil" is current. I further predict that the same people who got the US into one failed war will, some 20 years later (given the electoral cycles), be back running the war after the next war (see Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al.), ad infinitum.

Posted at 09:00 PM Read More

Wed - April 18, 2007

Doouble moral standards - Iran's invasion of Mexico

Noam Chomsky plays a useful mental exercise to test how equally we exercise our moral sandards. He asks, what if Iran had invaded Mexico (and Canada too)? I think a better example would be, how would America react if China had invaded and occupied Mexico and Canada the way the US has invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. Would the American government as well as citizens go to the aid of fellow ethnic or religious groups in those countries the way the Iranians may have done in Iraq? Of course. QED.

Posted at 05:14 PM Read More

Wolfie in hot water

Rupert Cornwell of the Independent revels in some lovely ironies revealed by the behaviour of von Wolfowitz at the Weltbank:

"In contemplating the near-certain downfall of Paul Wolfowitz, it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry. Does one weep at the outrageous hypocrisy of it all: the president of the World Bank, self-appointed apostle of "good governance" and scourge of corruption, caught in a blatant act of nepotism and cronyism - exactly the vices he wants to stamp out in the Third World countries his organisation lends money to?

Or does one roar with laughter at the incongruity of it all: sex at the World Bank, as Wolfowitz the cerebral ideas man (even if his ideas about Iraq were as misbegotten as they get) is brought down by matters of the flesh, as he arranged promotions and lavish pay rises for his girlfriend Shaha Riza?"

Posted at 04:52 PM Read More

pour encourager les autres - when do we get to shoot a few?

William Lind reminds us that back in the good old days the Brits sometimes shot a commanding officer who had badly screwed up a battle:

"In 1756, at the beginning of the Seven Year's War, the French took the island of Minorca in the Mediterranean from the British. Admiral Byng was sent out from London to relieve the island's garrison, then under siege. He arrived, fought a mismanaged battle with the attending French squadron, then retired to Gibraltar. Deprived of naval support, the garrison surrendered. Byng was court-martialed for his failure, found guilty, and shot."

The 20thC modern practice is shoot the lowest ranks and promote the commanding officers to safety. Abu Ghraib anybody?

Posted at 04:48 PM Read More

Sassoon on the War

A Statement Against the Continuation of the War

By SIEGRFRIED L. SASSOON

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

Siegfried L. Sassoon. July 1917

Posted at 04:42 PM Read More

Bill Moyers and the Lies that led to war - PBS April 25

David Swanson reports the following:

"Bill Moyers has put together an amazing 90-minute video documenting the lies that the Bush administration told to sell the Iraq war to the American public, with a special focus on how the media led the charge. I've watched an advance copy and read a transcript, and the most important thing I can say about it is: Watch PBS from 9:00 to 10:30 PM on Wednesday, April 25. Spending that 90 minutes will actually save you time because you'll never watch television news again - not even on PBS, which comes in for its own share of criticism."

Quite appropriate that it should air on ANZAC Day...

Posted at 04:37 PM Read More

Looking from the side at atrocities

John Pilger likens the reaction of ordinary people in the UK, Australia and the US to what is going in Iraq to what "good Germans" did in the 1930s and 1940s. They "looking from the side" and pretended not to see what was happening. But those at the top know exactly what is going on and do not look from the side. They look full on. A passage:

"Last October, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing Street officials derided the study as “flawed.” They were lying. They knew that the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defense, Sir Roy Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its methods as “robust” and “close to best practice,” and other government officials had secretly approved the “tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.” The figure for Iraqi deaths is now estimated at close to a million – carnage equivalent to that caused by the Anglo-American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s, which produced the deaths of half a million infants under the age of five, verified by Unicef. That, too, was dismissed contemptuously by Blair."

Posted at 03:37 PM Read More

Scott Ritter and the failure of the Democrats to oppose the war

Scott Ritter laments how the anti-war sentiments of the mid-term elections have been frittered away by the Pelosi-led Democratic Congress. He lays much of the blame on the Israel lobby. I think it goes much deeper than this. The Democrats are really the second wing of the war party (as Justin Raimondo likes to put it) so what did he expect to happen? They only from the Republican wing of the war party on the timing and the degree of reckless in fighting those wars, not whether or not those wars should be fought in the first place.

Posted at 03:20 PM Read More

Philip Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiement

Philip Zimbardo is interviewed on Democracy Now about his new book about his notorious 1971 "prison experiment" at Stanford in which he observed 24 students in a simulated prison turn into fawning prisoners and nazi-like prison guards. It turned so terrible that he cancelled the experiment after only a few days. It seems that all it takes to turn average American students into monsters is a uniform and a hierarchy of authority. It is very similar to Stanley Milgram's conclusions. Here is a key passage:

In a broader sense what the study really gets at, and what I try to capture in the The Lucifer Effect is that, it’s really a celebration of the human mind infinite capacity to be kind, or cruel, caring or selfish, creative or destructive. To make some of us be villains and some of us heroes. And it all depends on the situation. When we have total freedom, we choose situations that we know we can control. But when we're in situations where other people are in charge, in the military, in prisons, in some schools, in some families, we are – we can be transformed.

Posted at 03:10 PM Read More

3 unmentionable words

Tom Engelhardt speaks the unmentionable words about the war in Iraq: the air war, the construction of permanent bases, and the role of mercenaries. On the latter, about 600 mercenaries have been killed in Iraq, wich when added to the 3,300 official US war dead is close approaching 4,000. Englehardt should continue building his "Devil's Dictionary" based on the linguistic contortions of the Iraq war. Ambrose Bierce wrote the first and best Devil's Dictionary towards the end of the 19thC. I think it was he who said that "war is God's way of teaching Americans geography." If so, very cruel.

Posted at 02:41 PM Read More

The Surge and 4th Generation War

A number of commentators who are versed in the theory and history of asymmetrical or 4th generation warfare have predicted that the American surge in Iraq will force the resistance to fade away and hide, or relocate elsewhere to fight where the US is not. The main group fighting the US are Sunnis and this group represents only 20% of the Iraqi people. They have bogged the US down in an unwinnable war. If the surge targets the Shia majority (40% of the population), which have not been fighting the US since they are waiting for the American to finish of the Sunnis and Baathists for them, this could ignite a much bigger war of resistance against the Americas which could see them humbled in a very embarrassing manner. Dilip Hiro discusses the manoeuvring of Sadr and Sistani. Robert Parry argues that the resistance would benefit from a longer war and that Bin Ladn may well have deliberately helped swing the election in Bush's favour in 2004 by appearing to support Kerry on the eve of the election. Bush's surge plan is therefore going to plan - their plan, not his. Chris Floyd on the possibility of US brigades being diverted to protect the southern supply routes from Sia attack and how the MP cafeteria blast in the Green Zone makes a mockery of the surge. Paul Rogers on the problems ahead.

Posted at 02:37 PM Read More

Andrew Sullivan reviews Dinesh D'Souza

Andrew Sullivan very critically reviews Dinesh D'Souza's book on the Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11 in the New Republic Online. Apparently the world would be better off if it were run by two mutually exclusive and contradictory worldviews (Christianity and Islam) than by "secular humanists". Very odd.

Posted at 02:14 PM Read More

Wed - April 11, 2007

What is it about the Brits?

Middle East journalism has Robert Fisk and "Security Studies" has Paul Rogers whose articles appear in opendemocracy.net . He is a Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University in the UK. His latest piece argues that Al Qaida has morphed and developed over the last 7 years into a much more formidable enemy than it was in the beginning. The US has played into its hands with its foolish invasion of Iraq, its torturing of Iraqi prisoners, the massive killing of civilians, the collapse of civilian infrastructure, the electoral success of the Shias, the failure to impose "order" in the cities, and on and on. While the collapse of Iraq continues, Afghanistan returns to the control of the drug warlords and Pakistan hovers on the brink of another coup with the prospect of Islamic fundamentalists gaining control of nuclear weapons. Rogers calmly takes us through all this turmoil and lays it out as he sees it without nationalistic propaganda or partisanship.

Posted at 08:58 PM Read More

Fisk on the Middle East

It is very "old school" to believe that to accurately and seriously report the news from a particular region of the world, like the middle east, one should rely upon journalists who know the local languages, who have lived there for considerable periods of time, and who have read deeply in the history, culture and politics of the region. This view is beyond the comprehension of CNN and Fox and is one that is gradually being let go by the major state run broadcasters like the Australian ABC and the BBC. Thank God (if there is one - see Richard Dawkins) for the Independent newspaper of London who employs Robert Fisk, based in Beirut, to report on what is happening in Iraq and elsewhere in the middle east. He would not play well on Fox or CNN because he has a sad tale to tell about Western arrogance, ignorance, and immorality which would not be good for ratings. His most recent post examines the failing "surge" in Baghdad in the light of the policy of "strategic hamlets" in Vietnam (encircle the natives to prevent them from having any contact with the revolutionaries). A couple of weeks ago he reported on the ignorance and fear in the US heartland which led naive young students to swallow the Bush line that "if we don't fight them over there we will have to fight them over here".

Posted at 08:36 PM Read More

Surging towards defeat

He told you so (repeatedly)

Fisk on War and Shakespeare

Powers' review of Risen's State of War

What are the priorities of the US press - hunting accidents or an illegal war?

Whose to blame for the civil war in Iraq?

Yet another article on the real costs of the Iraq war

Where are all the anti-war songs?

The consequences of a war against Iran

Invasion redux

Permanent Baes in Iraq