The friend of my friend is my enemy

That’s the basic logic of Chancellor Bush’s present push to demonize Iran.

Our man in the Green Zone is al-Maliki. His governing coalition relies most heavily on SCIRI and Dawa, the two Shi’ite factions whose leadership consists of returned exiles from Iran, and which are the prime beneficiaries of Iran’s financial and military largesse.

The only major Shi’ite group hostile to us is al-Sadr’s, an explicitly nationalist outfit whose attitude toward Tehran has been, “Off, off, eely tentacle!” And al-Sadr has neither employed IEDs, nor concentrated its fire on coalition forces; it is more interested in its fellow Iraqis, in sending the residents of Sunni sectors of the city into exile or into morgues.

Yet the noise machine is instructing us to believe that Iran is successfully killing off hundreds of GIs through their Shi’ite proxies, our own closest allies. It doesn’t make sense. Like DNA being translated backwards, it only makes anti-sense.

But there’s no need to take my word for it. The stodgy, conservative Financial Times sets forth its skepticism in a blistering editorial.

The main ingredient of the IEDs used by Iraqi insurgents is the high explosive the US left unsecured in nearly 100 arms dumps. Hizbollah, which is Iranian-backed, has helped the most anti-American Shia militia, Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army. It may also have imparted its roadside bomb expertise but so, frankly, could the internet.The Bush administration may be taking aim, ultimately, at Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. But what it is describing here is not rocket science.

Before the election, the war drummers beat on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It was a legitimate worry, which could have led to a superficially plausible casus belli. Since the election, they’ve switched their demonization strategy. Now it rests on a core that is patently nonsensical. Why would they devalue the currency of their own propaganda like this?

There is, unfortunately, one obvious answer. If Republicans had remained in control of Congress, Bush had a fair shot at obtaining a new AUMF, granting him license to attack Iran in a new preventive war. After November, that possibility evaporated. The challenge became to find grounds to start a war which would look defensive rather than pre-emptive. No one disputes the President’s power to respond to direct attacks on our forces. And so Iran must be painted as attacking our soldiers in Iraq. The propaganda has changed precisely because the goal – war with Iran – has not.

I wish I could think of an answer different from the obvious one.

Plain talk from the plains

Chuck Hagel has been a man on fire for the truth of late. It’s like a light bulb went on. Like the censor every politician, Democrat or Republican, carries around in his head, the one who whispers at every impulse to depart from Cloud Cuckoo Land, “You can’t say that, Michael Moore might approve,” has dropped his blue pencil behind the chaise longue and just can’t find it again.

But in an interview with GQ, he takes a couple giant leaps beyond even his celebrated remarks on the Senate floor.

Leap 1: Chuck confirms what a couple Dems peeped (without media echo) at the time. Bush initially insisted that the AUMF authorize not just war in Iraq, but any military step Dubya chose in “the region”. By implication, he intended to get cover not just for invading Baghdad, but also Damascus and Tehran. And, should they happen to strike oil, Armenia.

Leap 2: Chuck confirms that we were deliberately lied into the war (see p. 3 of the interview):

HAGEL. So the president comes out talking about “weapons of mass destruction” that this “madman dictator” Saddam Hussein has, and “our intelligence shows he’s got it,” and “he’s capable of weaponizing,” and so on.

GQ. And producing a National Intelligence Estimate that turned out to be doctored.
HAGEL. Oh yeah. All this stuff was doctored. Absolutely. But that’s what we were presented with. And I’m not dismissing our responsibility to look into the thing, because there were senators who said, “I don’t believe them.”

McCain’s badly stained Plain Talk jersey has just passed to a new player. And unless they’re willing to pass it on to Jim Webb on the other team, I’m betting it retires with him.

Congress unbound?

Many of those who have seen through this war from the beginning have been expressing frustration with the Congress for diddling around with non-binding “sense of the chamber” resolutions against Bush’s surge. MEC over at
Mercury Rising posts a cogent defense of the strategy from Senator Levin on Fox:

So the power of this resolution is a first step to urge the president not to deepen our military involvement, not to escalate this matter. That is a first step. If the president does not take heed to that step, at that point, you then consider another step.But the worst thing we can do is to vote on something which is critical of the current policy and lose it, because if we lose that vote, the president will use the defeat of a resolution as support for his policy.

The public doesn’t support his policy. A majority of the Congress doesn’t support his policy. And we’ve got to keep a majority of the Congress — or put a majority of the Congress in a position where they can vote against the president’s policy, because that is the way in which we will begin to turn the ship around that is leading us in the wrong direction in Iraq.

MEC goes on to point out that the message to be sent is not being sent to Bush, who will never listen anyway. Rather, by echoing the electorate’s disapproval, it is setting up the real message, the one Bush will send to the electorate when he ignores the sense of the chamber resolutions, “Who cares what you think?”

The electorate’s disgust with that message from Bush is what will empower Congress to take the more substantive following steps. MEC’s brilliant observation is that the purpose of these initial resolutions is, in Downing Street parlance, to “wrongfoot” the President.

It’s ironic. This is exactly how Bush justified the invasion of Iraq: set Saddam Hussein up to defy a United Nations resolution, then use that defiance to justify moving against him.

The “surge” was initially supposed to be a two to four month affair. Tonight on ABC, General Keane was explaining that it will take 18 to 24 months to work. That is, for the duration of the Bush administration, the “surge” will be indistinguishable in any respect from an escalation. And that, undoubtedly, by design.

Had the surge duration been as initially advertised, Congress would have had to move precipitously to block it. But Chancellor Bush intends a longer game; and Congress may therefore do well to take a little time to set up its shot.

[Image by dogwelder]

A shift in the Central Front

Up until a few months ago, Chancellor Bush regarded Iraq as “the central front in the War on Terror.” With the arrival of the Splurge, the Augmentation, the New Fork Wayward, or whatever they’re calling it this news cycle, it became clear that he understands the Front has shifted.

Now that it’s clear the war is lost, the Central Front has become the battle to assign the blame for the loss to someone, anyone, but Bush. Ideally, to assemble a Dolchstoss narrative: The dang war was all but won until the wimpy Democrats and liberals stabbed America in the back.

The original Dolchstoss, of course, was Hitler’s explanation for why Germany lost WW I. It worked for him like a charm. The Republicans copied the strategy after Vietnam; and it worked like a charm for them, too. At least a third of the country still believes that narrative.

In order for the Dolchstoss narrative to take hold, though, two things are essential. Not too many Republicans can call for the war to end – a difficult line to hold when most of them understand how harshly the electorate will make them pay if we’re still massively bogged down in November ’08. And the war must be dragged out until the end of Bush’s term. That’s the real purpose of the Splurge: to stall a few months until the next bit of life support for the comatose war can be concocted.

While all these silly and deadly games are played out, though, two of the most prominent liberal hawks have finally begun to state out loud the long unspoken truth. Namely, the Central Front in the War on Terror is now, and always has been, Afghanistan. Ghastly as the consequences of the Iraq loss will be (and make no mistake, they will be vicious both for Iraq and America), they pale in significance next to the consequences of a loss in Afghanistan.

And Afghanistan is not at all a lost cause. Yet. We remain relatively popular with the general populace, which despises the Taliban and hopes for our protection from them. But the situation is deteriorating, even in the winter, a period when Mullah Omar’s legions have usually hibernated. Schoolteachers are regularly assassinated. And after a few months without major reinforcements, our failure to protect ordinary Afghanis could become so marked that the country tips.

Should Afghanistan fall to the Taliban, Pakistan is the next domino. The Islamist regime that would replace Musharraf would be infinitely more dangerous than the clerics in Iran. Unlike Iran,

• It would have no interest in cooperating with the U.S. in the struggle against terrorism. (The ayatollahs in Tehran were swift to denounce the 9/11 attack, gave us a lot of good intelligence in the ensuing months, until the “axis of evil” speech chilled relations.)
• It would already have nuclear weapons – quit a few of them, along with working missiles.
• It would be Sunni, in fact Wahabbist, a natural ally rather than a sworn enemy of Al Qaeda’s brand of Islamism.

Iran has been pragmatic and conservative in its dealings with other nations. It has initiated no wars, and vividly remembers the horrors of the war Saddam forced it to fight. It would be jealous of any nuclear weapons it eventually obtained, careful not to let them slip out of its control into jihadist hands, and is stable enough to enforce such a policy. A Talibanized Pakistan would labor under none of those constraints, and could easily pass suitcase bombs along to Al Qaeda.

Yet Bush is pulling troops out of Afghanistan to bolster his attempt to throw a string of sevens in an already lost Baghdad crap game. He is happy to lose the more important of the two wars, simply to avoid blame for the less important one he has already lost.

Earlier this week, Senator Clinton and Evan Bayh returned from their fact finding tour of the Middle East. The letter they wrote to Defense Secretary Gates afterward didn’t even mention Iraq. Instead, it baldly stated the crucial need for more troops in Afghanistan.

This is not only the desperately needed right approach for the sake of protecting the U.S. from real peril; it is also the Democrats’ ticket to seizing the mantle of the party which is strong on security. Rather than highlighting withdrawal from a lost battle, it highlights advance in a battle that is very winnable. It underscores, in terms that should be clear even to the bloodthirsty right, why the Splurge is folly.

And yesterday on Hardball, Senator Biden (of whom I am not usually a great fan) struck the same note with great clarity:

MATTHEWS: One of your potential rivals for the Democratic nomination for the president is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Senator Clinton has said we need more troops to go to Afghanistan, although she agrees with you on the need to cap the troop number in Iraq. Do you agree we need more troops in Afghanistan?

BIDEN: Yes. When the president announced his surge, I made the case that he should be surging in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. Chris, I know you know a lot about this. Imagine if we fail in Afghanistan.

What that will mean is Musharraf will cut even a closer deal with al Qaeda and with the Taliban, and if he doesn‘t, he puts himself in the position of being overthrown more than he is now. That is a radicalized country. It has nuclear weapons and it will be a disaster.

Bush’s New Wayward Foray

We’ve had The Speech, and it was hardly full of surprises. Nearly everything was the same old same old, and the rest had been well telegraphed. But several items jumped out as worthy of note.

First, Bush steered clear of any new catchphrase. No “surge”. No “New Way Forward”. That means Rove had tried out three hundred different catchphrases on six hundred different focus groups, and every last one bombed. Our Rovester has fallen upon hard times.

Second, Bush identified two things that have been done wrong so far. Not enough troops was the first (though Shinseki was still completely wrong; we’ve only been exactly 21,500 short apparently, not a couple hundred thousand.) The other thing?

And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have…
Now is the time to act. The Prime Minister understands this. Here is what he told his people just last week: “The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation.”

That is to say, these new troops (with their inadequate armor) will be doing sweeps through Sadr City, and those sweeps will not necessarily be as restrained as, say, the gentle way in which the Marines flattened Fallujah. And Bush is naive enough to think that Maliki will both (1) go meekly along with this and (2) escape assassination from within his own camp.

Third, Bush has used this speech to begin positioning himself for the assault on Iran. He identified Iran as the backer of our adversaries in Iraq, to whose “network” we will take the fight:

Iran is providing material support for attacks on American
troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

And since those “networks” extend past Iraq’s borders into the Persian motherland, we hear just two sentences further into the speech that

I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.

Notable also are the things Bush left unsaid.

He said he’d form “a new bipartisan working group” to advise him on the “war on terror”. He didn’t say that he would be hand picking which Democrats would be allowed into his “bipartisan” group; but I suppose by now that sort of weaseling really does go without saying.

He said that the 21,500 would be sent in so that commanders would no longer have to play whack-a-mole, chasing the militias out of one neighborhood, only to have them return when we moved on to the next. He didn’t say why the militias wouldn’t simply return when the surge was over. And he didn’t say how long the surge would last, though the military certainly told him it couldn’t be sustained for more than four or five months. (Everyone who thinks the militias and the insurgents can’t sit tight for that long, polishing their weapons and enjoying the R & R, so signify by waving your dunce caps in the air. Thank you. Census taken.)

“Surge” is a technical term within physics, designating the third derivative of displacement with respect to time. But there’s an even shorter technical term physicists more commonly use for the same quantity.

The term is “jerk”.

Toys in the attic

I’ve taken to posting less, not because there’s less to note or say, but because there’s too much. But frankly, friends – that’s a mighty lily livered excuse, isn’t it?

Let me take a deep breath then, and mention just these few tidbits plucked from today’s stream, if only because I want them handy in this attic when I need them:

• The midget in the Oval Office has abandoned his promise to “listen to the generals on the ground”, turned his back in contempt on the American people, on the Congress, and on his Daddy’s rescue team the ISG. The Decider has decided that he will now be the hand puppet of the more insane elements of the American Enterprise Institute. It’s therefore useful to have at hand at least the executive summary from the AEI Kagan paper which has outshouted every voice of sanity in the land. Note that the summary doesn’t mention the trivial detail of the numbers Kagan is asking for his “surge” – at least 30K extra offerings to Moloch, for at least 18 months. That number, as Congressional hearings have repeatedly shown, and as the ones to come will show again, is pure fantasy.The AEI in its wisdom is telling the President to win the war with the batallions of soldiers to be found under cabbage leaves. The fairies will be glad to point them out, right there at the bottom of the garden.
• But suppose the fairies supplied those 30,000 troops. What effect would they have on the outcome of Bush’s War? General Petraeus, just promoted to Casey’s old job, happens to have been in charge of producing the Army’s new Counterinsurgency Manual (pdf). It explains (section 1-67) that successful containment of an insurgency typically requires a ratio of 20 to 25 combat troops to each 1,000 population. Of our 140,000 military in Iraq, 70K are combat, and 70K support. Baghdad’s population is over 5 million. So to actually do the job, by the military’s own standards, will take a shade under 190,000 more troops. For the duration of the conflict.
• The new Congress is going to be very busy. The House in particular will be doing lots of stuff, real fast. Fortunately, you can keep up to the minute tabs on the docket by checking the Daily Whip Line, courtesy of new Majority Whip James E. Clyburn. Today, f’rinstance, they were passing practically all of the 9/11 Commission’s ignored recommendations.

Splurge

For the last four years, Bush has been spending the nation’s monetary treasure, and its greater treasure, the blood and the limbs of its professional military, like a sailor on leave.

Next Wednesday he will take to the airwaves to explain that the only problem all this time has been that he hasn’t been spending them fast enough. He wants to go on one last spree through the supermarket of deficit, destruction, and death. Semi-officially, this strategery is known as a “surge”.

That’s three letters short. It’s the wastrel in chief’s last splurge.

Bush’s ponder heart

.

In his cowboy boots and Santa hat, Bush promised us all first row tickets to the premiere of his New Way Forward before Christmas. Then he changed his mind. It’ll be sometime after the first of the year. Because although presidenting is hard, wouldn’t you know it? Deciderating is even harder.

And stalling for two whole years, dragging the armed forces down into utter decomposition, just so that his successor will take part of the blame for his own titanic mistakes – that’s going to be hardest of all. Even though the press, the remorseful yet somehow unrepentant flock of liberal hawks, the Wise Men of the Baker-Hamilton commission (none of whom, oddly, were wise enough to advise against the Excellent Baghdad Adventure before it started), and the Pottery Barn centrists (“You break it, you own it. And that means you’ve got to stay until you’ve broken every last Hummel figurine in the shop”) will all join hands to help him stall.

So we shall be treated to the spectacle of George W. Bush “thinking”. Which is to say, diving so deep into his own gut, the place he has always assured us is the sole source of all his thoughts, that he’ll need a bathysphere for the journey. And then we’ll all need a firehouse crew to hose down the smell of the prize with which he emerges from the depths.

[Cartoon by Nick Anderson, Washington Post]

The Baker-Hamilton report: the dead-enders speak

Being on the road during the week of the Unveiling of the long awaited report, I must confess that even now I have not sat down and read the thing. I’ve had to piece my impressions together from newspapers, and bloggers left and right.

Nevertheless, I feel confident in submitting this Tomgram by Michael Schwartz as recommended reading on the topic. It places the BH report in the context of the real reasons for invading Iraq – a program and a set of goals (namely, a perpetual military presence in the heart of the world’s Oil Alley, together with the privatization of Iraq’s oil fields) which Baker-Hamilton continues to line up squarely behind.

Schwartz is particularly good at homing in on the qualifications and weasel words missed by the press. Attentively read, they imply that the commission has not in fact recommended anything like a substantial drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq in the near term. Nor has it suggested that the threat of withdrawal be used to light a fire under the feet of the Maliki government. The actual threat, no doubt read clearly by Maliki and friends, has been obscured by press coverage here.

Most striking is the report’s twenty-first (of seventy-nine) recommendations, aimed at describing what the United States should do if the Iraqis fail to satisfactorily fulfill the many tasks that the ISG has set for them. “If the Iraqi government does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government.”

This could be interpreted as a threat that the United States will withdraw — and the mainstream media has chosen to interpret it just that way. But why then did Baker and his colleagues not word this statement differently? (“… the United States should reduce, and ultimately withdraw, its forces from Iraq.”) The phrase “reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government” is probably better interpreted literally: that if that government fails to satisfy ISG demands, the U.S. should transfer its “political, military, or economic support” to a new leadership within Iraq that it feels would be more capable of making “substantial progress toward” the milestones it has set. In other words, this passage is more likely a threat of a coup d’état than a withdrawal strategy — a threat that the façade of democracy would be stripped away and a “strong man” (or a government of “national salvation”) installed, one that the Bush administration or the ISG believes could bring the Sunni rebellion to heel.

Ketchup post

Items that lately caught my nictitating eye:

• Torture from the top: The ACLU’s FOIA endeavors have turned up a Bush executive order and a DOD memorandum authorizing torture. Or whatever they’re calling it nowadays. In a Spiegel interview, Ron Suskind confirms that Bush knew who was waterboarding whom.
• Go, Go, Go: WaPo today passed on the deliberations of a Pentagon review of three Iraq options: Go Big, Go Long, Go Home. Consensus is forming on bumping up in country numbers by 20 or 30K “for a while”, then scaling back quickly to 60K for forever or until The End Of Evil.
• A Connecticut Patriot: Senator Dodd introduces legislation to repeal the noxious portions of the Torture Act. He does a commendably thorough job.
• Sneak Thieves? For reasons I may expound later, I’m dubious about this. But O’Dell and cohorts at Election Defence Alliance believe they have a smoking gun that November 2006 was rigged, but the ploy fell short because the riggers didn’t realize how big the Democratic wave would be.
• Euphemism of the Week: A Vietnam Vet commenting at TPM Cafe recalls how he and his fellow draftees, thrust to the front lines, summed up their job positions: “Ordnance Absorption Technicians”.
• Goo Is Good: Nanotechnologists at Rice University have come up with a high tech manufacture/ low tech distribution way to clean up the arsenic poisoning most of the drinking wells in Bangla Desh and southeast India. Rust particles, each smaller than a virus, can adsorb the toxin on their surfaces. Once they’ve done their work, an ordinary hand magnet can scoop them up, with their cargo, leaving potable water behind.