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Hagel: What’s the Bush Administration Afraid Of?

Trish

Don’t miss the amazing interview with Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) in GQ. You’ll see why the Bush White House is so upset with this guy, and why there is such a remote chance he will ever drink the Kool-Aid.

A sample:

GQ: What would it take to secure Baghdad?
Hagel: It’s not ours to secure. We have never understood that! We have framed this in a way that never made sense: “Win or lose in Iraq.” Wait a minute! There is no win or loss for us. The Iraqis will determine how this turns out. We can help them with our blood and our treasure and our standing, but in the end they have to deal with the sectarian problems. That is what’s consuming that country. It’s not Al Qaeda. It’s not the terrorists. That’s not the main problem over there. It’s a civil war!

Hagel: “If Bill Clinton had invaded Iraq and after two years he was having the same problems, do you think the Republican Congress would have put up with that? I don’t think so”

GQ: The administration doesn’t call it that.
Hagel: They won’t call it civil war. Everybody calls it a civil war! Of course it’s a civil war. The generals call it a civil war. And it’s even worse than a civil war, because in addition to the sectarian violence, you’ve got Shia killing Shia. We have ethnic cleansing of major proportions going on in Baghdad. It’s reminiscent of Bosnia. A truck pulls up and Uncle Joe is put inside; his body is found in a dump two or three days later, arms bound, usually tortured—one of the favorite deals is to drill into their head a little bit while they’re still conscious and then shoot them. We can’t solve that!

GQ: If we can’t win and the public wants out, isn’t it the responsibility of Congress to check the power of the president?
Hagel: Sure.

GQ: But it seems Congress has been ineffective at that.
Hagel: Well, we have. We’ve abdicated our responsibilities. That has to do with the fact that the Republican Party controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate. When that happens, you get no probing, no questioning, no oversight. If Bill Clinton had invaded Iraq and after two years he was having the same problems, do you think the Republican Congress would have put up with that? I don’t think so.

…GQ: Does being a veteran also make you sensitive to the administration’s approach to interrogation and the use of secret military prisons?
Hagel: It does, because that’s not who America is. We have always, certainly since World War II, had the moral high ground in the world. But these secret prisons and the treatment at Guantánamo destroy all of that. We ought to shut down Guantánamo. There shouldn’t be any secret prisons. Why do we need those? What are we afraid of? Here we are, the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Why can’t we let the Red Cross into our prisons? Why do we deny they exist? Why do we keep them locked up? What are we afraid of? Why aren’t we dealing with Iran and Syria?

…GQ: You don’t hear very many politicians say that both sides of an issue are reasonable these days.
Hagel: We are living through one of the most transformative periods in history. If we are going to make it, we need a far greater appreciation and respect for others, or we’re going to blow up mankind. Look at what zealotry can do. Religious zealotry has been responsible for killing more people than any other thing. Look at the Middle East today. It’s all about religion. We need to move past those divisions and learn to be tolerant and respectful. If we go out there full of intolerance and hatred, we’ll never make it.

Read the whole interview. When the Rovian attacks start on Chuck Hagel — and they will — at least you’ll know what he really said.

Call to Arms for Young Conservatives: Bush Needs You! (Last Chance)

Jon Ponder

Now Is the Time for All Young Republicans to Come to the Aid of Their Dear Leader

Sign up! Sign up! Be part of the surge. Pres. Bush needs young Republicans to volunteer for service in Iraq. He especially needs the sons and daughters of members of his administration, his appointees and of Republican members of Congress to help him fight “the enemy” in Iraq.

Last night, in his State of the Union speech, Dear Leader sent out a call to arms:

Tonight I ask the Congress to authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next five years. (Applause.) A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. It would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.

It’s time for all GOP Dead-enders and One-Hundred-Percenters — the 30 percent of Americans who support this president and his war — to get their kids off their duffs, into uniform and onto streets of Baghdad.

Come on, boys and girls! Show us liberals that he is right and we are wrong.

To arms! To arms! To arms and Iraq!

Muslim Clerics Urge Sunnis, Shiites to Unite in the Fight Against Foreign Aggression

Buck Banks

Invasion persuasion: It’s happened — the mullahs have figured out the only way to get us out of Iraq is to get the Shiites and Sunnis to stop torturing and killing each other and to join together to torture and kill Americans. One wonders why it took them three years to figure that out.

It came down at a kind of cleric’s convention in Qatar last weekend:

We have an obligation to fight foreign occupation of Muslim countries and we should be united against foreign aggression.

A prominent Sunni Muslim cleric on Monday called on warring Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq to stop sectarian violence and fight U.S.-led “foreign occupiers”.

“It is a taboo for Muslims to kill each other,” said Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric living in Qatar.

The call to unite against “foreign occupiers” came after a three-day religious forum in Qatar grouping more than 200 Sunni and Shi’ite scholars from more than 40 countries.

“We have an obligation to fight foreign occupation of Muslim countries and we should be united against foreign aggression,” Qaradawi added.
[…]

The Urge to Surge Versus the Action-Reaction Scenarios

Buck Banks

Vietnam all over again: Congress Daily’s Charles C. Wilson was a Vietnam war correspondent in 1968 and he was embedded with the Marines in Iraq in 2003. His take on the potential response is chilling — what if the surge in troops turns the Sunni and Shia militias against the American invaders? It’s a worse-case scenario that is in the back of the minds of many whenever we hear the Commander-In-Chief start talking troop “augmentation.”

Note how easy it would be for suicidal Sunni or Shia mortar crews to fire shells into the Green Zone or into a slow moving American truck convoy out of Kuwait, perhaps inflicting heavy American casualties and making headlines around the world, just as the Tet offensive did in 1968.

What will Congress do in the likely event that the warring forces in Iraq respond to President’s Bush’s troop surge and anti-militia attacks by shifting their fire away from each other and onto Americans in their midst, inflicting heavy casualties in an Arab-world version of the Vietnam War’s Tet offensive?

“You are the first person to ask me that question,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., told me, acknowledging that he has been worrying about that possibility while pondering possible unintended consequences of Bush’s decision to send an additional 21,500 American troops to Iraq with orders to take on the armed militias, including the Mahdi Army controlled by Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

If Sadr’s militia, or any other one in Iraq, inflicts heavy casualties on American soldiers or civilians, “this place will go nuts,” Biden said, referring to Congress. In such a case, he predicted lawmakers would demand “complete withdrawal” of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Up to now, the Shiites and Sunnis have been more interested in killing each other by the score rather than Americans by the score. But hit-and-run wars such as Vietnam and Iraq have an action-reaction dynamic because, at bottom, they are a struggle for men’s minds, not territory. So militia leaders like Sadr would feel compelled to strike back in a telegenic way to stepped-up American attacks against them.

I saw this action-reaction phenomenon play out as a combat correspondent covering a slice of the country-wide Tet offensive in South Vietnam in 1968. Thirty-five years later, as a reporter embedded with the Marines during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I wondered why the same phenomenon did not take hold.

Looking back, the reason was that tribal leaders and their militias were waiting to see how long the invading American forces would stay in Iraq and what they would do there. Now they know, from Bush himself, that he intends to raise the stakes.
[…]

Is St. McCain Depressed?

Jon Ponder

Sen. John McCain’s performance on “Meet the Press” yesterday was decidely lackluster. The current GOP 2008 frontrunner and former maverick’s snap and crackle seemed to be replaced with a sodden doughiness. Perhaps it was the topic of the Iraq civil war and the “McCain surge,” which has been dragging Pres. Bush’s numbers lower since it was announced a few weeks ago.

The senator also made a wildly inaccurate reference to polling data ahead of the first Gulf War, which was caught by C&L. Sen. McCain said:

Only 15 percent of Americans supported the first Gulf War at the beginning.

But the actual data, from January 18, 1991 was the opposite:

The initial reaction by the American public to President Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq is positive, according the Gallup Poll.

Seventy-nine percent of those interviewed on Wednesday night said they approved “of the U.S. decision today to go to war with Iraq in order to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait,” while 15 percent disapproved, and 6 percent had no opinion.

We all make mistakes. But why so glum, Senator? Perhaps you’ve seen polling about how the war would affect your chances in 2008 if it is still raging? Or maybe you know some (new) dark truth about the current administration that is about to be revealed.

Ayatollah Rebukes Ahmadinejad Over Nuclear Sabre Rattling

Jon Ponder

The slapfight between Pres. George Bush and his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has resembled a pair of five-year-olds squabbling in a sandbox. Now it appears a grown-up, albeit a very scary one, has stepped in:

Iran’s outspoken president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appears to be under pressure from the highest authorities in Iran to end his involvement in its nuclear program, a sign that his political capital is declining as his country comes under increasing international pressure.

Just one month after the UN Security Council imposed sanctions on Iran to curb its nuclear program, two hard-line newspapers, including one owned by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called on the president to stay out of all matters nuclear.

In the hazy world of Iranian politics, such a public rebuke was seen as a sign that the supreme leader himself — who has final say on all matters of state — might no longer support the president as the public face of defiance to the West.

It is the first sign that Ahmadinejad has lost any degree of Ayatollah Khamenei’s confidence, a potentially damaging development for a president who has rallied his nation and defined his administration by declaring nuclear power Iran’s “inalienable right.”

Iraqi View: The Surge Is a Very Bad Idea for So Many Reasons

Buck Banks

Canary in the mine shaft: Nadim al-Jabiri is a professor of political science at Baghdad University, a member of Iraq’s parliament, and the head of the Islamic Virtue Party (Al-Fadhila). He makes a pretty good argument why Iraqis think George Bush’s surge is a really bad idea:

Despite the overwhelming demands of the majority of Americans and Iraqis to end the war and occupation of Iraq, and despite the Baker-Hamilton report’s recommendations for de-escalation, President Bush and Prime Minister al-Maliki are designing a new “surge” targeting the Iraqi capital.

This will put an end to the participation of many Iraqi groups in the ongoing political process, because people like us will lose faith in achieving our goals.

and getting our country back through diplomacy.
Many Iraqis welcomed the first few steps President Bush took following the release of the Baker-Hamilton report recommendations, like pressuring Mr. Al-Maliki to include more Sunnis in the government, reconsidering the de-Baathification process, and re-evaluating the laws for distributing oil revenue. But the current Bush-Maliki plan for attacking Baghdad shows that the Baker-Hamilton report was not taken seriously enough. In fact, the new Bush-Maliki strategy is the polar opposite of that report’s major recommendations.

The new Bush-Maliki plan includes sending more U.S. troops to Iraq, mostly to Baghdad, and sending more Iraqi troops, mostly from the Kurdish militia “Peshmerga,” to Baghdad.

Increasing the U.S. troops will show Iraqis that the U.S. administration is against setting a timetable for withdrawing all the occupation forces. This will both increase and legitimize the Iraqi armed resistance to the occupation even more, and it will destroy all the other non-violent options. In addition, this will put an end to the participation of many Iraqi groups in the ongoing political process, because people like us will lose faith in achieving our goals
and getting our country back through diplomacy.

Sending the Peshmerga, the Iraqi Kurdish militia, to fight Iraqi Arabs will activate other militias and justify forming even more militias in the middle and south of Iraq. This could lead to increasing the civil violence, and might even spark an Arab-Kurd civil war that will be added to the current civil conflict that was fueled by the destruction of the Shia Shrines in Samarra in February of last year.

The current political plan of President Bush and Prime Minister al-Maliki in establishing a US-backed coalition that includes the few Shia and Sunni parties that are justifying the occupation and working to divide Iraqi into three separate regions will do nothing other than increase the violence and confirm sectarian divisions.

Iraqi political groups like Al-Fadila party, Al-Sadr movement, the National Dialogue Front, the Reconciliation and Liberation Front, and many other Sunnis, Shias, Kurd, and Turkoman groups can’t see any chance for this Bush-Maliki plan to succeed. Because, unlike our plans, this plan is not based on a political solution that can put Iraqis together in building a nonsectarian government that aims to stabilize Iraq and end any foreign intervention.

Poll: Vast Majority of GOPers Support Bush, War

Jon Ponder

Dead-enders: According to the new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, while almost two-thirds of Americans (60 percent) no longer believe the war in Iraq is worth fighting, fully three-quarters of Republicans remain convinced that America should stay in the middle of Iraq’s sectarian civil war:

By focusing on slight drops in Bush’s approval ratings, the Traditional Media overlook the threat posed to our national security by the blind, cult-like devotion to the president.

[Only about] one-fourth of Republicans said they did not believe the war was worth fighting, and a roughly equal number opposed the troop increase.

Even more alarming is the fact that a whopping 39 percent of Americans still approve of the job performance of George W. Bush, whose incompetence has been extraordinary by any rational standard.

In its analysis of these numbers, the Times, like most in the Traditional Media, focuses on the fact that support is diminishing slightly for the president and his war. But as long as Bush and his advisers know they have even this meager level of support they will continue to pursue their disastrous course in Iraq. By focusing on occasional slight drops in approval ratings, the media overlook the threat to our national security posed by this blind, cult-like devotion to Pres. Bush by a third of U.S. citizens.

Rocket Scientists, Brain Surgeons Agree: End is Near

Trish

Really smart people think, after six years of Bush, the world is in big trouble. But Bush is probably still trying to figure out how to “bring it on” faster.

The world edged closer toward nuclear holocaust and environmental catastrophe, a prominent international group of scientists warned today, moving their symbolic Doomsday Clock ahead two minutes.

“It is now five minutes to midnight,” said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “This change reflects the global failures to solve the problems posed by nuclear weapons and by climate change.”

It is now five minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock

…The symbolism of the move is significant because the organization, which includes more than a dozen Nobel laureates, has moved the clock only 18 times since it was set to seven minutes to midnight in 1947. The clock has been closer to midnight, two minutes away after the Eisenhower administration tested a nuclear bomb in 1953. But it is also a long way from its most optimistic setting, at 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Today’s change was the first since 2002.

The organization cited North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed emphasis on military uses and proliferation of nuclear weapons and the presence of 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia. The organization added global warming to its concerns, saying in its statement, “the dangers of climate change are nearly as dire as those of nuclear weapons.”

Pentagon Surplus Sales of Fighter Jet Parts Going to Iran

Jon Ponder

Before the Iranian revolution in 1979, when the Shah was a U.S. ally against the Soviets, we sold the Iranians the latest, greatest state-of-the-art military equipment our contractors could produce. Now, three decades, Iran is our enemy, so when they need to repair their aging helicopters and fighter jets, who do they buy from? The Pentagon’s sidewalk sale:

“Right Item, Right Time, Right Place, Right Price, Every Time. Best Value Solutions for America’s Warfighters.”
— Pentagon advertisement

Fighter jet parts and other sensitive U.S. military gear seized from front companies for Iran and brokers for China have been traced in criminal cases to a surprising source: the U.S. Defense Department.

In one case, federal investigators said, contraband bought at auction from Defense surplus stocks was delivered to Iran, which President George W. Bush had in his “axis of evil” grouping. Just Tuesday, the State Department branded Iran as the world’s worst exporter of terror

In the Iran case, a Pakistani arms broker convicted of exporting U.S. missile parts to Iran resumed business after his release from prison. He purchased Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran from a U.S. company that had bought them in a Pentagon surplus sale. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents say those parts made it to Iran…

“Right Item, Right Time, Right Place, Right Price, Every Time. Best Value Solutions for America’s Warfighters,” the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service says on its Web site, calling itself “the place to obtain original U.S. Government surplus property.”

Federal investigators are increasingly anxious that Iran is within easy reach of a top priority on its shopping list: parts for its precious fleet of F-14 “Tomcat” fighter jets the United States let Iran buy in the 1970s when it was an ally.

In one case, convicted middlemen for Iran bought Tomcat parts from the Defense Department’s surplus division. Customs agents confiscated them and returned them to the Pentagon, which sold them again, customs evidence tags still attached, to another buyer, a suspected broker for Iran.

“That would be evidence of a significant breakdown, in my view, in controls and processes,” said Greg Kutz, the Government Accountability Office’s head of special investigations. “It shouldn’t happen the first time, let alone the second time.”

Too bad the Pentagon didn’t offload some of their famous $500 hammers or $2,000 toilet seats on them.