Day: October 10, 2006

U.S. Military in Iraq Losing Faith in PM al-Maliki

Jon Ponder
Sec. Rice’s plane was forced to circle Baghdad for nearly an hour before landing because of a mortar attack near the airport.

Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer:

For weeks, unnamed U.S. commanders and officials in Baghdad have been telling journalists that they are losing faith in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They say he is unable to check sectarian violence and foster national reconciliation. Even Rice warned that Maliki’s six-month-old government had reached “a critical time.” Her own plane was forced to circle Baghdad for nearly an hour before landing because of a mortar attack near the airport.

On my last trip to Iraq in June, it was already clear that the prospects for a Maliki government were far from rosy. Why should anyone be surprised?

Having lived under dictatorship, or in exile, for decades, Iraqi leaders have no experience in running a country. Maliki was a compromise choice, a man whose chief qualification was that he had served as an aide to the previous (and incompetent) Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and came from Jaafari’s Dawa Party. The choice was made by the majority coalition of Shiite parties, who fought among themselves for weeks over the pick.

Cabinet posts were doled out to the various sectarian parties according to the number of assembly seats they had won in elections. Many ministers are more loyal to their parties than to the Maliki central government, and operate independent fiefdoms. Maliki didn’t even appoint a cabinet secretary (the official responsible for coordinating ministries and cabinet meetings) until last month.

The interior minister, Jawad Bolani, was chosen because he had no close affiliation to any party. The hope was that such “independence” would enable Bolani to purge the ministry of sectarian death squads that have infiltrated the police and commando forces. But, lacking a political base, Bolani has proved too weak – with one recent exception – to control or clean out this crucial ministry.

It is difficult to see how Iraq’s government will get much better.

Polls: Public Not Buying Hastert’s, GOP’s B.S. in Page Case

Buck Banks

Foley factor: According to National Journal’s PollTrack, recent polls seem to indicate the American public have a growing distrust and distaste for the GOP. To many, the Democrats are looking better — though the sentiment may be more like, “They may be ineffectual, but at least they ain’t creepy.”

The newest batch of polls following the week-old Mark Foley scandal confirms congressional Republicans’ worst fears: A majority of the country believes they chose to save their own political hides over the safety of young male pages.

Most respondents said their feelings about the president will impact their choices in the voting booth.

Nearly two-thirds of ABC News/Washington Post respondents said Republican leaders tried to cover up the Florida Republican’s sexually tinged communications with pages after first learning of them more than a year ago. Fifty-four percent of Gallup/USA Today and 52 percent of CNN respondents smelled a GOP cover-up. And nearly eight in 10 Americans polled by CBS News/New York Times believe GOP leaders fretted more over protecting their political standing than the teenage pages.

Republicans have tried to ping cover-up talk back onto Democrats and the “liberal media,” but Americans aren’t giving the party a pass. Three-quarters of CNN respondents and a slim majority polled by CBS/Times said the Republican leadership improperly handled the situation.

The new polls indicate that Americans want House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., who knew of the inappropriate e-mails and whispers about Foley’s predilections for at least a year, to lose his post. More than half of CNN respondents said the Illinois Republican should step down; pluralities of 43 to 46 percent agreed in the four other polls.
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U.S. Border Patrol: A Longer Fence Will Just Increase Corruption In the Ranks

Buck Banks

Do the math: Southern California has a 200-mile-long fence along its border with Mexico. Of the 172 current corruption cases involving U.S. Border Patrol guards, 72 – 40 percent – involve guards from Southern California. Now, if the U.S. government extends the wall another 700 miles, increasing its length by a factor of 3.5, then we could realistically expect the percentage of corruption cases centered on the U.S.-Mexico border to approach 90 percent or more.

Why? Because when they make it more difficult to cross the border, it causes an escalation in tactics by criminals. The bribe money goes up, the women they use to entice agents get more irresistible and the potential payoffs increase geometrically, not arithematically. And then there are the illegal aliens working for the Border Patrol, helping friends, relatives and countrymen to come to this great country where you can lie about your citizenship on a job application, pass a nonexistent background check, get a cool badge and be given the keys to the henhouse.

Of course, with the Border Patrol among the lowest-paid federal agencies, with morale in the toilet and the fact that the BP has started scraping the barrel bottom for new recruits, it’s no wonder picking up a few grand of easy money for letting a couple of cars pass through unsearched is difficult to resist.

Sorry Mr. Frost, good fences don’t make better neighbors, they just make worse border guards. For more details, go here.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used — we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immorality …. The time has now come for the nations of the world to submit to the just requisition of their conduct by international law.

— Linus Pauling (1901-1994), American scientist, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Breaking: Dennis Hastert to Hold News Conference at 11AM Eastern

Jon Ponder

C-SPAN just reported that House Speaker Dennis Hastert will hold a news conference this morning at 11AM Eastern.

UPDATE: Hastert let it be known that he is throwing his staff to the lions, purporting that they knew details about the Foley scandal that they did not share with him — which brings us to the standard GOP conundrum: Is Denny Hastert lying or is he an incompetent manager who is kept in the dark about serious matters like a chickenhawk running amok among the page boys?

Poll: 3% of Americans Believe Iraq War Is ‘Going Very Well’

Jon Ponder

New York Times/CBS Poll:

The public’s view of Iraq is as dark as it has been since the war began in 2003: two-thirds said the war was going somewhat or very badly, while only 3 percent said it was going very well. Two-thirds said they disapprove of how Mr. Bush is handling Iraq.

Mr. Bush’s job approval has slipped to 34 percent, one of the lowest levels of his presidency, posing a complication for the White House as it seeks to send him out on the road to rally the Republican base voters. Mr. Bush’s job approval rating has even slipped with his base: 75 percent of conservative Republicans approve of the way he has handled his job, compared with 96 percent in November 2004.

Mr. Bush clearly faces constraints as he seeks to address the public concerns about Iraq that have shrouded this midterm election: 83 percent of respondents thought that Mr. Bush was either hiding something or mostly lying when he discussed how the war in Iraq was going. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said Mr. Bush was personally aware of pre-9/11 intelligence reports that warned of possible domestic terrorist attacks using airplanes. When the same question was asked in May 2002, 41 percent said they believed Mr. Bush was aware.

President Cranky Pants

Jon Ponder

I read an account recently of the scene around George W. Bush when John Kerry conceded in the 2004 presidential election. Our macho el presidente broke down in tears and blubbered. He hugged everyone in the room except for Vice President Dick Cheney, according to the account I read.

Now, two years later, with a month to go before midterm elections, things are not looking good for his party’s continued control over the House and maybe even the Senate. How is the tough-guy-in-chief handling the bad news? Not so well:

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