Entries associated with the tag "Iraq":

Jim Holt lays it out so even I can understand it in the London Review of Books:

"It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion."

Former CIA Middle East officer Robert Baer in Time:

"Strengthening the Administration's case for a strike on Iran, there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It's another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking. And what do we do if just the opposite happens — a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration. 'IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this Administration. There will be an attack on Iran.'"

Somewhere along here the Bush administration has gone from wilfully ignorant to batshit crazy. The lesson going back at least to World War II is that bombing doesn't make the bombed population love the bombers, it unites them behind their leaders, no matter how evil.

Speaking of wilful ignorance, Rick Perlstein corrects some right-wing lies about Vietnam here. More here if you need a refresher course.

Of course, the spectacle of a right-wing president tying his foolish war to a liberal president's foolish war is bound to make one look around for alternatives. I have said, and will say, a lot of harsh things about dogmatic libertarianism, but one question libertarians -- unlike conservatives -- can be counted on to ask is, "Is this war really necessary?" The other day the Cato Institute's Jonathan Logan put it this way:

"President Bush's strategy for Iraq amounts to playing for time and hoping for a miracle. Bizarrely, the president has now invoked the Vietnam analogy in an effort to shore updomestic support for the war by reminding us that bad things happened after we left. This is true. It is also worth remembering that U.S. soldiers stopped dying after we left, and that the 'dominoes' that were to have fallen didn't fall. The United States won the Cold War just a decade and a half later. Our defeat in Vietnam did not prevent victory in the Cold War, and defeat in Iraq will not ensure defeat in the struggle against terrorism."

How will the mainstream media deal with veterans who deliver the bad news? Writing in the Nation, Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian report on 50 interviews with Iraq War veterans about the treatment of civilians.

"Their stories, recorded and typed into thousands of pages of transcripts, reveal disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq. Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished..."

"Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

"Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory."

Bad things happen in wars. But a real president would make it clear all down the line that when they do, they will be reported and punished. The fish -- or, in this case, the empire -- rots from the head.

Here's how Concerned Women for America sees the antiwar women activists at Code Pink (Christine MacDonald at Dallas Morning News, hat tip to Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon):

"Janice Crouse, a senior fellow with the conservative Concerned Women for America, said Code Pink members ... emphasize their femininity but advocate policies that are very aggressive and more often associated with men,' she said.

"'They cloak it all in a soft pink covering, when underneath they are hard as nails,' she said. 'They advocate for the most radical of leftist positions,' such as impeachment of the president.

"Ms. Crouse said her group has no position on the Iraq war but is 'very definitely not anti-war.'"

Code Pink's website is subtitled "Women for Peace," and the fourth item down on the page's list of issues is a petition to stop "honor killings" in general and to protest the stoning death of Du'a Khalil Aswad in Kurdistan April 7 in particular. These are causes associated with men?

Surely Crouse was trying to say that Code Pink is wrong on their policy positions. What she wound up saying was that it's "very aggressive" to oppose the Iraq War! Hasn't the lowbrow right-wing line always been that only cowards and wimps are against war?

A couple of snapshots, from the reinterpreted past and the ghastly present.

* Chicago's excellent Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, argues that fraud, deception, and lawbreaking are essential to modern-day conservatism, and calls to witness what happened when he made his case at a conservative conference in New Jersey in 2005:

"How did this roomful of 'conservative intellectuals,' including those beside me on the dais, respond to my argument that Richard Nixon loved conservatives specifically for their willingness, nay eagerness, to break the law? One of them, another YAF [Young Americans for Freedom] founder, M. Stanton Evans... quipped, 'I didn't like Nixon until Watergate.' Everyone laughed. Because it was - you know - a 'joke.'"

* Having failed at warmaking, Republicans are trying their hands at metaphor, with predictable results, collected by the Center for American Progress. You've probably heard Indiana Rep. Mike Pence's notorious equation of his heavily guarded trip to a Baghdad market to shopping at "any open-air market in Indiana in the summertime."

CAP also found downstate Illinois Rep. John Shimkus: "Imagine my beloved St. Louis Cardinals are playing the much despised Chicago Cubs. Who wins? We know it's the team that stays on the field." ("He's stealing second -- here's the throw -- it's in time -- he's dead!")

And Ohio's Rep. John Boehner likened Iraq to a small plastics and packaging company he used to run: "I have benchmarks every month, but if I didn't meet the benchmarks and if I missed the profit margin, I didn't shut down the business." (CAP: "100 U.S. soldiers weren't killed every month if Boehner couldn't sell enough bubble wrap.")

Writing at the History News Network, Christopher McKnight Nichols slaps down several presidents and those troglodytes who still worship at the shrine of Mars:

"The domino theory [that if Vietnam went Communist the rest of southern Asia was doomed to do the same] failed by the standard of its own predictions. Communism never took hold in Indonesia, Thailand, or more importantly, in any of the other large countries in the region, most notably, India. There was no cascade effect triggered by the U.S. departure from South Vietnam. The United States continued as an economic and military power. And now, America and Vietnam are trading partners, which President Bush should know as he visited that nation last year. Southeast Asia is a vibrant engine of global commerce and the region has closer ties to the United States now than at any time in the past."

Thus with the liberals' falsehood-based and unwinnable war from the 1960s and 1970s. Now the Cheney administration is peddling the same theory in order to escalate the conservatives' falsehood-based and unwinnable war in Iraq. Nichols doesn't say, but what's up with imagining whole countries as dominos? Is that thought, or a substitute for it?

"Ty has a plastic skull now, and the old one is still stuck in his insides. He taps the side of his waist, where there is a slight bulge. The lump of bone will be removed one day but he is in no hurry to undergo another operation. There will be plenty of those ahead: he hopes the sight in his blind eye can be restored, though he doubts he is going to rebuild his nose – it involves too many awkward skin grafts."

Sarah Baxter at Times Online tells the story of marine sergeant Ty Ziegel of downstate Metamora, whose truck met up with a suicide bomber while on patrol near Iraq's Syrian border in December 2004. 

Ziegel had met his fiance, Renee Klein, years earlier, when he went to work as a mechanic at her father's garage in their small town, population 2,700, near Peoria. She stuck with him through months of surgery that left almost everything unrecognizable except his deadpan wit. When the doctors removed the tracheostomy tube in his neck that had been feeding him while his lips were too burned, writes Baxter, "He said, ‘Renee, will you be my valentine?’ . . . His next words were: ‘Do you want to make out?’"

Photojournalist Nina Berman's coverage of their wedding last fall is here. (The Sun-Times reviewed her earlier book Purple Hearts Back From Iraq.)

Baxter writes, "He did not join the marines to get thanks and he does not feel strongly about the war one way or the other. ‘I’m not political and I don’t complain.’ His younger brother is also in the marines and may be deployed in Iraq. Sometimes it bothers Ty, but they both signed up, so that’s that."

There are intelligent conservatives -- some of them comment here. But North Carolina Republican Robin Hayes ain't one of them. He thinks we can win the war in Iraq by spreading "Christian principles" there: "Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the savior."

History suggests otherwise. Fred Clark explains at Slacktivist (where the comments are good too): "As a Christian, I wish there were something to his suggestion that if only everybody was a Christian there wouldn't be any more war, but that simply hasn't proven the case. Despite all that stuff in the Sermon on the Mount, we Christians have a pretty bellicose track record. Historically, the group of Christians that probably most resembles the meek peacemakers Jesus commanded his followers to be is the Amish. And while they may be, themselves, a peaceful people, their history is anything but. The Anabaptists faced lethally violent persecution -- all at the hands of other Christians.

"The Amish were never truly safe until they got to America.... Only a secular nation, one with an explicit prohibition against the establishment of religion, could provide a safe haven for the Christlike peace churches."

Riverbend, a "girl blog from Iraq," lists nine ways to tell if your country's in trouble, starting with "the UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI," and  "the abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country."  (Hat tip to Sam Smith's Progressive Review.)

Gristmill lists the ten most bizarre environmental events of 2006, including, "When Chevy offered net surfers the opportunity to edit their own Chevy Tahoe ads online, enviros grabbed the opportunity to match slick, soaring shots of SUVs rolling over mountainous terrain with titles like 'Gas Guzzler!'" Joel Makower has a more sober list, on which Wal-Mart's green makeover ranks #1.  [CORRECTION FROM COMMENTS:  Wal-Mart was one of ten; the list was not prioritized.]

Dan Gilmoor at the Center for Citizen Media makes ten predictions about blogging and journalism in 2007, in the form of a multiple-choice quiz. For instance, "5. Most newspaper executives will: A. Continue to downsize their newsrooms without any real plan for the long term. B. Complain incessantly about competition from online advertising competitors. C. Remain suspicious of citizen media except as a possible way to save money. D. Innovate at the edges, not in the core functions."

At Guardian Unlimited Tim Radford lists the 11 most interesting science books coming out in the next few months. Best title:  How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take to Change a Planet? Best synopsis: the book about various "gloriously implausible but not necessarily impossible ideas ... including, of course, the proposition that we will all be reassembled as cyber-identities in a cosmic computer and experience a subjective eternity in the last crushing seconds of time." See ya there. (Hat tip to Butterflies and Wheels.)

Dean Baker at Beat the Press offers ten resolutions for writers on economics, for instance: "Unless a reporter can identify the cause of a run-up in stock prices, he/she cannot say whether it indicates good news for the economy as a whole. Therefore, it should not be reported as good news."

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate ranks the ten most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006. Guantanamo was only #9. Be afraid, speak out anyway, and don't forget the ACLU.

Juan Cole of the University of Michigan finishes up the year with the top ten myths about Iraq.  Here's one:

Myth: "The Sunni Arab guerrillas in places like Ramadi will follow the US home to the American mainland and commit terrorism if we leave Iraq."

Cole: "This assertion is just a variation on the invalid domino theory. People [sic] in Ramadi only have one beef with the United States. Its troops are going through their wives' underwear in the course of house searches every day. They don't want the US troops in their town or their homes, dictating to them that they must live under a government of Shiite clerics and Kurdish warlords (as they think of them). If the US withdrew and let the Iraqis work out a way to live with one another, people in Ramadi will be happy."

He also notes, "The Iraqi 'government' is barely functioning. The parliament was not able to meet in December because it could not attain a quorum. Many key Iraqi politicians live most of the time in London, and much of parliament is frequently abroad. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki does not control large swathes of the country, and could give few orders that had any chance of being obeyed. The US military cannot shore up this government, even with an extra division, because the government is divided against itself. Most of the major parties trying to craft legislation are also linked to militias on the streets who are killing one another."

American troops continue to make a bad situation worse. "In my view, Shiite leaders such as Abdul Aziz al-Hakim are repeatedly declining to negotiate in good faith with the Sunni Arabs or to take their views seriously. Al-Hakim knows that if the Sunnis give him any trouble, he can sic the Marines on them. The US presence is making it harder for Iraqi to compromise with Iraqi."

Read the whole thing (scroll down to December 26).

The eleventh myth is that the country's full of good news that's not reported. Columbia Journalism Review has multiple eyewitnesses on that one. Here's Rajiv Chadrasekaran of the Washington Post: "You’ve got public information officers saying, 'Sure, we’ll take you there, but you can’t say where it is, and you can’t name anybody, and you can’t take any pictures, because if we point out the location of this, it could be a target for the insurgency, and if we name people, they could be subject to retribution.' Is that really progress when you can’t go and report basic facts of something because they’re too worried it’s going to be attacked?" (Hat tip to Beachwood Reporter.) 

The op-ed page of today's Tribune features a syndicated column by Washington Post pundit Charles Krauthammer. Either the Trib didn't notice or didn't care, but the column (which ran in last Friday's Post) is based on a flagrant lie, which was detected eons ago in blogosphere time, first by conservative writer Andrew Sullivan on Friday and then by political scientist/blogger Brendan Nyhan on Saturday.

Krauthammer writes: "Our objectives in Iraq were twofold and always simple: depose Saddam Hussein and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government."

Amazingly, Krauthammer airbrushes the claim that Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction," the notoriously false rationale used by the Cheney administration during the run-up to the war -- and echoed by tame columnists at the time. Fortunately for the rest of us, it's not 1984, so Nyhan can refute Krauthammer simply by quoting his old columns, which dwelled obsessively on WMD.

Hey, it's the Trib's newspaper, the Trib's reputation, and the Trib's stock price (not necessarily in that order). But why should the rest of us settle for sloppy seconds that were full of E. coli the first time around?

"'Hope' is the thing with feathers." Peter Nicholson appreciates Emily Dickinson and then -- this takes real guts -- addresses a poem to her.

"By defining certain regimes (including Iran and Syria) as evil, the Bush Administration has essentially made sensible policy impossible." David Kaiser compares our position to that of Germany's in 1918.

Mocking suburban pretensions with a subdivision name generator, at DenverInfill Blog. Actually, in the midwest I suspect any place with superfluous "e" to be a trailer court.

Angry Bear wonders, "Why is driving with one’s bright lights on illegal, and driving an SUV legal?"

Amanda Marcotte says sex isn't just inevitable, it's fun: "Until people stop buying into the premise that sexual pleasure is somehow immoral in and of itself, they’re going to be easily wowed by antichoice arguments that assume that women should be punished for having sex."

Iraq'd. "Colonel Hammes recalls that the person given the job of planning for [Iraqi] prisons and police [in 2003] was 25 and that this was his first job after college. He didn’t worry about having a staff of only four, the young appointee said, because they were all his fraternity brothers." Via Cato. 

"1. It is the morning of the day on which you will die. For breakfast, you:

    (a) have a hearty breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee that your wife cooked for you in the kitchen of your Victorian townhouse.

    (b) enjoy eggs benedict on a rice cake with a side helping of tofu granola and wheatgrass, and a steaming mug of soy latte double decaf.

    (c) smoke five Camel Light cigarettes and chug a lukewarm can of 'Columbian taste' coffee that was really made in a factory in Saudi Arabia.

    (d) Noon is too late for breakfast."

From Sgt. "Roy Batty"at the Sandbox milblog.  Read the whole thing.

• A joke to die for, 1944: "Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin's radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. 'Why don't you just jump?' suggests Göring." Munitions worker Marianne Elise K. was executed in Nazi Germany in 1944 for telling that one. More here. (Hat tip to 3 Quarks Daily.)

• A joke not understood by the teller, 2006: "Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence." -- Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam, quoted by Andrew Sullivan.

• A joke that's funny if you're a historian: "[E]ven if the evacuation of Mesopotamia is begun immediately, considered as a technical staff problem it is impossible to complete it under 12 months." One series of quotes from English newspapers during their Iraq war, 75 years ago, collected at Daily Kos. Aside from the archaic names and style, they could have been written in this country yesterday.

Oberlin College history professor Gary Kornblith writes that he recently asked his students to imagine a scenario:

“‘It is April 12, 1865. Richmond has fallen, and Robert E. Lee has surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. All major military operations have been completed.’ Then I wrote on the board in big letters: ‘Mission Accomplished.’ I proceeded to ask if the Civil War was really over by April 12, 1865, or whether it was just entering a new phase—one that would turn out differently than the phase of conventional warfare.”

Haw! He said “Mission Accomplished”!  . . . Of course you see where this was going, but I didn’t.

Kornblith was and is convinced that the Iraq war was a bad idea, and that the Bush administration’s blundering attempts to impose Western-style democracy on the cheap will fail.

But he also thinks that the federal government should have stayed the course during Reconstruction and done whatever it took to foster real democracy in the former Confederacy, instead of pulling out in 1877 and leaving blacks to the un-tender mercies of their former owners. (The book to read is Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.)

Of course 19th-century Mississippi is not 21st-century Iraq--history doesn’t provide any “lessons” that crudely obvious--and Kornblith hasn’t changed his mind about either one. But comparing the two episodes has made him “less confident than before about passing judgment on how others have tried to shape the world.”