Tag: Iraq

Donald Rumsfeld’s signature style during an interview is to abruptly launch into a series of questions and answers about the topic at hand that his questioner might ask, spun in a way that casts himself in the best possible light.

The technique has become hackneyed and self-parodying over the six years Rumsfeld has served as secretary of defense — and a politician who actually cared what people thought of him might try to come up with another linquistic device.

Instead, during his testimony before the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Rumsfeld offered a tour de force performance of self-interrogation.
Here are the 10 tough questions Donald Rumsfeld asked himself at the hearing:

1. Are there still Taliban around? You bet.
2. Are they occupying safe havens in Afghanistan and other places, correction in Pakistan and other places? Certainly they are.
3. Is the violence up? Yes.
4. Does the violence tend to be up during the summer and spring, summer, and fall months? Yes it does. And it tends to decline during the winter period.
5. Does that represent failed policy? I don?t know, I would say not. I think you?ve got an awful lot of very talented people engaged in this, and the decisions that are being made are being made with great care after a great deal of consideration.
6. Are there setbacks? Yes.
7. Are there things that people can?t anticipate? Yes.
8. Does the enemy have a brain and continue to make adjustments on the ground, requiring our forces to continue to make adjustments? You bet.
9. Is that going to continue to be the case? I think so.
10. Is this problem going to get solved in the near term about this violence struggle against extremism? No, I don?t believe it is. I think it?s going to take some time. And I know the question was some wars lasted three years, some wars lasted four years, some wars lasted five years. The Cold War lasted 40 plus years.

The first week in August seems to be an odd time for the swiftboaters to roll out their latest campaign, this time against Rep. Jack Murtha, the conservative Democrat, decorated Vietnam-era Marine and war critic. And yet, they have.

A group called Veterans for Truth is holding a “national” rally in Murtha’s Pennsylvania district tomorrow “to show their outrage at John Murtha over what he is saying about our troops,”according to a spokesman for the group.

As part of the campaign, there was an announcement today that Murtha is being sued for libel by a U.S. Marine:

Staff sergeant Frank D. Wuterich brought suit against Murtha earlier today, charging that the Congressman’s public statements that Marines had “killed innocent civilians in cold blood” defamed the Marine.

The incident in question occurred last June in Haditha. A group of Marines went on a rampage, allegedly killing 24 citizens, including unarmed women and children. Rep. Murtha was the first government official to reveal that the atrocities had occurred.

Coincidentally — or maybe not — results of a Pentagon investigation leaked to the press today confirm that reports of atrocities are accurate:

The Associated Press this morning reported that evidence collected by the Pentagon “supports accusations that U.S. Marines deliberately shot” 24 civilians, including unarmed women and children, in Haditha, Iraq last November–the incident Murtha was referring to.

Murtha was magnanimous about the lawsuit:

“I don’t blame the staff sergeant for lashing out,” Murtha said in a statement today. “When I spoke up about Haditha, my intention was to draw attention to the horrendous pressure put on our troops in Iraq and to the cover-up of the incident.”

The Representative once again used the occasion to call for a withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

If the Sec. of Defense doesn’t know whether a country we conquered is in civil war, who does?

[Reporter:] Is the country closer to a civil war?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, I don’t know. You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different. If you think of civil wars in other countries, this is really quite different. There is — there is a good deal of violence in Baghdad and two or three other provinces, and yet in 14 other provinces there’s very little violence or numbers of incidents. So it’s a — it’s a highly concentrated thing. It clearly is being stimulated by people who would like to have what could be characterized as a civil war and win it, but I’m not going to be the one to decide if, when or at all.

“I mean, what are people waiting for, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant to get out there before they call it a civil war.”

Semantic conspiracy: History will record that our invasion of Iraq in 2003 to depose Saddam Hussein had the unintended consequence of triggering a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. That much is clear. What is less clear is when our politicians and the media will be forced to come to terms with the reality on the ground in the new Iraq.

For the rest of us, it is past time to call the mess in Mesopotamia what it is — the Iraqi Civil War:

[BRIAN UNGER, substituting for Keith Olbermann on Countdown last night]: Jonathan, before anything else, I‘d like to get your take on whether this is or isn‘t a civil war in Iraq.

[JONATHAN ALTER, writer for Newsweek]: You know, I think it clearly is, by any historical standard. I mean, what are people waiting for, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant to get out there before they call it a civil war. A scholar in the “New York Times” recently went through about 10 recent wars that were categorized as civil wars, and none of them was as bad as this.

You know, so I think what‘s going on here is a semantic game where the media doesn‘t want to start calling it a civil war before the politicians do, because then they will be accused of liberal bias and the Democrats don‘t want to call it a civil war, because they‘ll be accused of lack of, you know, patriotism by the Republicans. And, of course, the administration doesn‘t want to call it that because it will confirm it‘s a fiasco.

So, everybody has this kind of semantic conspiracy to not call the elephant in the room, the elephant in the room.

The same cabal of conniving Republicans, million-dollar Kool Kids in the DC media and spineless Democrats who pretended to be blind to the false rationale for invading Iraq in 2002 is obfuscating the fact that our mission there has changed in 2006. We were conquerers then but now the billion-dollar robocop of the U.S. military is deployed as a beat cop, trying to keep the peace in the midst of a civil war.

When President Bush and his team began “marketing” (their word) the war in Iraq four years ago, former Sen. Gary Hart spoke out, predicting that Bush’s foolhardy enterrprise in Iraq would lead to a wider war. He was right:

Sometime in the fall of 2002, I likened a U.S. invasion of Iraq to “kicking open a hornets’ nest.” I predicted that, if the Iraqis decided to fight in the cities, our casualties would be between five and ten thousand U.S. troops at least. Now, U.S. casualties exceed 20,000.

But the “hornets’ nest” I predicted was not just an interminable and intractable U.S. occupation of Iraq. It was wider war in the Middle East. The larger hornets’ nest is now swarming.

By our justified overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, though unsuccessful decapitation of al Qaeda, we removed a thorn in Iran’s side. By removing Saddam Hussein, we removed a thorn in Iran’s other side.

But, inadvertantly and ignorantly, we empowered Iran to undertake a major intervention on behalf of the Shiite majority in Iraq. In response to our insistence that Iran not develop any nuclear capability, Iran and Syria have emboldened Hezbullah in Lebanon to energize Israel’s formidable military and Hamas to do the same.

While I’m in told-ya-so mode, I have to say that I predicted it back then too, although I used the “Pandora’s Box” analogy. My prediction that our invasion of Iraq would unleash a plague of nasties was not based on psychic powers or extreme brilliance (not hardly) but on a basic grasp of the history of confict in the region.

If this fool on a hill in West Hollywood could predict this outcome in 2002, it begs the question: Why couldn’t President Bush see where this perilous path would lead us?

In George Bush’s Iraq, Shiites are killing Sunnis on sight:

Masked Shiite gunmen stopped cars in western Baghdad Sunday and grabbed people off the streets, singling out the Sunni Arabs among them and killing at least 37, police said.

The attack in the Jihad neighborhood apparently was retaliation for the car bombing of a local Shiite mosque the night before.

I guess they didn’t get the memo from the vice president’s office informing them that they are in their last throes.

“Because which funeral do you go to? In my judgment, I think if I go to one I should go to all. How do you honor one person but not another?”

— President Bush, on why he never goes to the funerals of military personnel who have died because of his folly in Iraq.

Despicable.

War is hell — on the budget: Congress Daily reports that a congressional study found that spending on the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and the war on terror will total more than $500 billion next year. Here’s the breakdown:

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in a report that through the current fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the government will have spent $437 billion on overseas military and foreign aid funding. That includes the latest supplemental spending bill signed into law this month, which provided $69 billion for the war effort.

Congressional analysts are a bit mystified at the rapidly escalating costs.

Add in roughly $1.5 billion in fiscal 2007 Foreign Operations funds for Iraq and Afghanistan; $50 billion in Pentagon “bridge” funds for the first half of fiscal 2007, plus as-yet-undetermined supplemental funds for the remainder of the next fiscal year, and total war-related costs will easily soar over $500 billion one year from now.

At least $37 billion or so will have gone to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development for Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction, embassy operations and other foreign aid programs. War costs alone are expected to be at least $450 billion, not including the expected supplemental request early next year.

Even assuming an eventual troop drawdown to 74,000 by fiscal 2010, war costs between fiscal 2007 and fiscal 2016 could total another $371 billion, the report said. Adding that to the $437 billion appropriated through the end of this fiscal year, total costs would reach $808 billion by fiscal 2016.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks military spending has been pretty much unchecked. In 2006 Congress will appropriate to the military about $115.8 billion — a 72 percent increase over fiscal 2004, according to CRS. The monthly “burn rate” of spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is averaging $9.7 billion this year, an 18 percent jump from 2005. One major problem with this runaway spending is that the people studying it can’t figure out why it’s happening.

Congressional analysts are a bit mystified at the rapidly escalating costs. Most of the increases are due to operations and maintenance costs, which have jumped from $42.7 billion in fiscal 2004 to $60.9 billion in fiscal 2006, and a threefold increase in procurement funds, to $24.4 billion in fiscal 2006 from $7.2 billion, CRS said.

They said some of the operational increase is due to expected factors, such as fuel price hikes, body armor purchases and training of Iraqi and Afghan security forces. “These factors, however, are not enough to explain a 50 percent increase of over $20 billion in operating costs,” the report states.

Likewise, while increases were expected for force-protection equipment like armored humvees and night-vision goggles, as well as to replace damaged equipment, “These reasons are not sufficient, however, to explain the level of increases or predict whether these procurement levels are temporary or likely to rise still further,” CRS argues.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon claims that it will be 2012 before it untangles its Byzantine accounting processes to give more transparency to its spending and maybe better justify to Congress its requests for mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money. Until then, Congress — and the rest of us footing the bill — is just going to have to trust Rumsfeld & Co. that they really need the dough, honest.

Hell no, he won’t go: We received a press release today from www.ThankYouLt.org about First Lieutenant Ehren K. Watada, who refused orders today to deploy to Iraq with Stryker Brigade. He reported to duty at 2 a.m. at Ft Lewis, Wash., and refused orders to move to the adjacent McChord Air Force Base to prepare to fly to Iraq. Watada was ordered to remain on site pending further orders from his commanding officer and cannot make or receive phone calls or have any communications with anyone off-base.

The press release says that Watada is the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment to Iraq. He faces possible court-martial for disobeying orders and he intends to defend himself based on the illegality of the Iraq war and occupation. Lt. Watada, age 28, was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii where he enlisted in the Army and was obligated to serve on active duty as an Army officer for a term of three years ending Dec. 3, 2006.

Visit www.ThankYouLt.org to see photos of Watada and his parents and a video message from Watada, and to read messages of support. If you find his story compelling and want to show your support, you can sign a petition here.