THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
January 2007, Week Two
Page Four
- January 13: Bush says that if Democrats or rebellious Republicans want to criticize his plans to escalate hostilities in Iraq, they need to propose their own strategies in response. "To oppose everything while proposing nothing is irresponsible," Bush says.
Iraq war and occupation
(Meanwhile, as noted above, Congressional Republicans in support of Bush's policies, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, say that Congress has no business and no right to "interfere" in Bush's policy making.) McConnell and other Republican lawmakers meet with Bush to discuss how best to sell his new strategy. "Obviously, the need to secure Baghdad and strengthen an ally in the war on terror was among the items we discussed," McConnell says after the meeting. "But we also discussed the need to find bold solutions for other big issues." Democratic House member Tim Walz, a veteran of the Afghanistan war, says that he, like his fellow Democrats, believes sending more troops compounds a bad situation, and diplomatic and political solutions are needed, not more troops. "Before moving forward with this escalation, we owe it to these troops, to their families, and to all Americans to ask the tough questions and demand honest answers about this policy," he says in the Democrats' Saturday radio address. "Is there a clear strategy that the commanders on the ground believe will succeed? What are the benchmarks for success, and how long does the president believe it will take to achieve them? Is this a policy that will contribute to the America's security in the larger war on terror, or distract from it?" - Veteran Daily Kos "SusanG" lists several plans and initiatives for Bush's perusal. Democratic House member John Murtha has proposed that US troops immediately be redeployed, consistent with their safety; the creation of a quick reaction force in the region; the creation of an "over-the-horizon" force of Marines; and the diplomatic pursuit of security and stability in Iraq. And there is the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which said in November, "Our most important recommendations call for new and enhanced diplomatic and political efforts in Iraq and the region, and a change in the primary mission of US forces in Iraq that will enable the United States to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly. ...Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events within Iraq and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage them constructively. ... The primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq should evolve to one of supporting the Iraqi army, which would take over primary responsibility for combat operations. By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq.... The United States must not make an openended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq." And other plans are available. But, as Democratic House member Chris Murphy said during his campaign in August, "It is like dropping a raw egg and asking me what my plans are for putting it back together." "SusanG" adds, "This is your omelet, Mr. Bush. Unstuff your ears, do some research on what many, many military experts and Congressional leaders have recommended, and figure out how to re-shell your own damn egg. And quit whining in your radio addresses that other people won't clean up the mess you and you alone have made of the world." (AP/Yahoo! News, Daily Kos [multiple sources])
- January 13: The New York Times reports that the Pentagon is using little-known procedures to obtain banking and credit reports on thousands of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.
Domestic spying
On top of this intrusion into Americans' private lives, the CIA has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies. Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians. Such national security letters have been issued thousands of times by the FBI since 9/11, provoking outrage and court challenges from civil liberties advocates advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans' private lives. But the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic intelligence gathering; for that agency to engage in such activities is unprecedented and illegal. The Pentagon's own intelligence agencies and organizations have similar restrictions. - Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying. Both the military and the CIA are barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work. The CIA's role within the United States has been largely limited to recruiting people to spy on foreign countries, as far as is known. Both the Pentagon and the CIA insist that they have the needed authority to gather financial information on American citizens, and that the searches have provided "tremendous leads to follow" in pursuing terrorism suspects. Neither agency provides any details of any cases where this information was useful; in fact, says Army counterintelligence official Thomas Gandy, the information is mostly used to rule out suspects.
- Nevertheless, the information is so valuable, say military officials, that a permanent database will be established next year to correlate all the information gathered. National security experts and civil liberties advocates question the military's and the CIA's involvement in domestic intelligence activities, particularly in light of recent disclosures that the Counterintelligence Field Activity office had maintained files on Iraq war protesters in the United States in violation of the military's own guidelines. Some experts say the Pentagon has adopted an overly expansive view of its domestic role under the guise of "force protection," or efforts to guard military installations. "There's a strong tradition of not using our military for domestic law enforcement," says Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel at both the National Security Agency and the CIA who is the dean at the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific. "They're moving into territory where historically they have not been authorized or presumed to be operating." And John Radsan, an assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004 and now a law professor, says, "The CIA is not supposed to have any law enforcement powers, or internal security functions, so if they've been issuing their own national security letters, they better be able to explain how they don't cross the line."
- As noted elsewhere in this site, the Pentagon's domestic intelligence gathering activities have sometimes created conflicts with other federal agencies. Pentagon efforts to post American military officers at embassies overseas to gather intelligence for counterterrorism operations or future war plans has rankled some State Department and CIA officials, who see the military teams as duplicating and potentially interfering with the intelligence agency. Domestically, the FBI has complained about military officials dealing directly with local police -- rather than through the bureau -- for assistance in responding to possible terrorist threats against a military base. FBI officials say the threats have often turned out to be uncorroborated and, at times, have stirred needless anxiety. Oftentimes, the military's national security letters have caused consternation at the businesses who received them. Lawyers at financial institutions, which routinely provide records to the FBI in law enforcement investigations, have contacted bureau officials to say they were confused by the scope of the military's requests and whether they were obligated to turn the records over. Companies are not eager to turn over sensitive financial data about customers to the government, according to one official, "so the more this is done, and the more poorly it's done, the more pushback there is for the FBI."
- In October 2001, the USA Patriot Act relaxed the already-low standard for issuing the letters, requiring only that the documents sought be "relevant" to an investigation and allowing records requests for more peripheral figures, not just targets of an inquiry. Some Democrats have accused the FBI of using the letters for fishing expeditions, and the American Civil Liberties Union won court challenges in two cases, one for library records in Connecticut and the other for Internet records in Manhattan. Concerned about possible abuses, Congress imposed new safeguards in extending the Patriot Act last year, in part by making clear that recipients of national security letters could contact a lawyer and seek court review. Congress also directed the Justice Department inspector general to study the FBI's use of the letters, a review that is continuing. Unlike the FBI, the military and the CIA do not have wide-ranging authority to seek records on Americans in intelligence investigations. But the expanded use of national security letters has allowed the Pentagon and the intelligence agency to collect records on their own. After the 9/11 attacks, then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld directed military lawyers and intelligence officials to examine their legal authorities to collect intelligence both inside the United States and abroad. They concluded that the Pentagon had "way more" legal tools than it had been using, according to a senior Defense Department official. But some FBI officials say they were surprised by the Pentagon's interpretation of the law when military officials first informed them of it. "It was a very broad reading of the law," a former counterterrorism official says.
- In a Sunday interview on Fox News, Dick Cheney claims that there is nothing illegal about the Pentagon and CIA collections of financial data, a claim that House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes isn't accepting. "Any expansion by the department into intelligence collection, particularly on US soil, is something our committee will thorough review," says Reyes. "We want our intelligence professionals to have strong tools that will enable them to interrupt the planning process of our enemies and to stop attacks against our country. But in doing so, we also want those tools to comply fully with the law and the Constitution."
- The ACLU is calling for a Congressional investigation. "This country has a long tradition of rejecting the use of the CIA and the Pentagon to spy on Americans, and rightfully so," says Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU's Washington office. "Today's published report that the Pentagon and CIA have been relying on 'national security letters' to collect the financial records of Americans without judicial supervision or Congressional oversight raises a host of questions that need to be answered." (New York Times, AP/Yahoo! News, New York Times)
- January 13: Two days after being excoriated on the floor of the Senate by Democrat Barbara Boxer over the administration's Iraq policies, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complains that Boxer's comments were too personal and inappropriate for the situation (see January 10 item for details).
Conservative smear campaigns
Boxer asked Rice, who is unmarried and has no children, "Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families." Rice attempts to twist Boxer's words into a condemnation of Rice's choice to live as a single, childless woman, complaining on Fox News, "In retrospect, gee, I thought single women had come further than that, that the only question is, 'Are you making good decisions because you have kids?'" Rice does not acknowledge the fact that Boxer has been one of the staunchest voices for women's rights, in Congress and elsewhere, for decades. Neither does she acknowledge that Boxer is making no judgments about Rice's life choices. Boxer restates her position by saying in response to Rice, "I spoke the truth at the committee hearing, which is that neither Secretary Rice nor I have family members that will pay the price for this escalation." - But Rice's objection is just one of an orchestrated, manufactured series of attempts from the right to vilify Boxer and accuse her of personally attacking Rice. White House press secretary Tony Snow leads the charge, saying, "I don't know if she was intentionally that tacky, but I do think it's outrageous. Here you got a professional woman, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Barbara Boxer is sort of throwing little jabs because Condi doesn't have children, as if that means that she doesn't understand the concerns of parents. Great leap backward for feminism." The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post answers with its own personal attack on Boxer, writing, "Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, an appalling scold from California, wasted no time yesterday in dragging the debate over Iraq about as low as it can go -- attacking Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for being a childless woman." And the response from the rightist blogosphere is predictable in its savagery; one post, from Ankle Biting Pundits, entitled "Barbara Boxer: Arrogant B*tch," reads in part, "This from people who consider themselves cultured and intellectual. What an embarrassment to liberals everywhere. Question is, does that ridiculously brutal slur even register with liberals, or is it just par for the course and Senator Boxer will easily get a pass for it?" Interesting, but not surprising, that the only "brutal slurs" seem to be directed at Boxer.
- Ironically, Laura Bush said in December 2006 that she believed Rice's status as a single, childless woman would limit her abilities to serve in high office. A People magazine interviewer asked, "Nancy Pelosi shattered Congress's glass ceiling by becoming the first female Speaker of the House. Do you think there's anything a woman would do differently with the Presidency?" and Laura replied, "[I]t isn't easy to live here. Dr. Rice, who I think would be a really good candidate, is not interested. Probably because she is single, her parents are no longer living, she's an only child. You need a very supportive family and supportive friends to have this job." (Washington Post, Democratic Underground [multiple sources])
- January 13: At a panel discussion at the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas calls the American mainstream media "lapdogs."
Conservative media slant
"I think the American press corps has lost its way," she says. "There's no reason the media played along with the administration's shifting rationales, all untrue in the run-up to the catastrophic war in Iraq. ...Congress rolled over, as we did, no questions asked. But the result of our default has been devastating. We lost our halo as the visionaries for a better mankind." Thomas was Ronald Reagan's favorite reporter, but is persona non grata in the Bush administration. (Memphis Commercial Appeal) - January 13: Slate's Dahlia Lithwick asks why the US continues to prosecute alleged terrorist Jose Padilla even though all the evidence indicates "he was just the wrong Muslim in the wrong airport on the wrong day."
US allegations of terrorism
She goes on to ask why the US is still holding hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, long after it has become clear that few, if any, of them are actually terrorists. And she asks why Bush continues to issue "grandiose and provocative signing statements, the latest of which claims that the executive branch holds the power to open mail as it sees fit." Lithwick says that for years she has attributed all of these actions, and other related actions, to what she calls "presidential blindness -- an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the president to believe that these futile little measures are somehow integral to combating terrorism." - Lithwick no longer believes this. "[I]t has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn't really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake." (Editor's note: this has been the stance of this site for the last six years. Welcome aboard, Ms. Lithwick.) Lithwick notes two telling instances about the Padilla case. The Justice Department, with the collusion of Dick Cheney's office, ensured that Padilla's case would stay out of the hands of the Supreme Court because neither the Justice Department officials nor the Cheney staffers wanted to risk losing the power to detain Americans as enemy combatants. By the same token, Padilla was eventually moved from military custody to the criminal courts in order to avoid the issue of his legal detention without charges from coming before the Court. Padilla's innocence or guilt has always been a side issue. "[T]his is why the White House yanked Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were only forum shopping for the best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their claims about Padilla's dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of advancing their larger claims about executive power. And when confronted with the possibility of losing on those claims, they yanked him back to the criminal courts as a way to avoid losing powers they'd already won."
- The Guantanamo Bay detention facilities are still open. In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld said the camp housed only "the worst of the worst." The camp was later proven to house, among other detainees, pre-teenaged children and elderly people suffering from dementia. Over half of the detainees have now been released without charge, and of the remainder, less than 80 will actually stand trial. Civil rights groups around the world clamor for the camp's immediate closure. And a Defense Department study has shown that only a small fraction of the detainees have any connections whatsoever to al-Qaeda. "But," Lithwick writes, "Guantanamo stays open for the same reason Padilla stays on trial. Having claimed the right to label enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without charges, the Bush administration is unable to retreat from that position without ceding ground. In some sense, the president is now as much a prisoner of Guantanamo as the detainees. And having gone nose-to-nose with the Congress over his authority to craft stripped-down courts for these 'enemies,' courts guaranteed to produce guilty verdicts, Bush cannot just call off the trials. The endgame in the war on terror isn't holding the line against terrorists. It's holding the line on hard-fought claims to absolutely limitless presidential authority."
- Lithwick notes that the presidential signing statements, legally meaningless as they are, have the sole purpose of "plant[ing] a flag on the moon -- one more way for the president to stake out the furthest corners in his field of constitutional dreams."
- Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington, has declared his allegiance to what he and others call "The New Paradigm," described by Lithwick and New Yorker reporter Jane Meyer as "a constitutional theory of virtually limitless executive power, wherein 'the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it.'" This is not a "new" paradigm. It is as old as the first organized form of monarchical government -- as old as the kings of Egypt and the emperors of China. But it is not democracy. Lithwick writes, "[T]his zeal to restore an all-powerful presidency traps the Bush administration in its own worst legal sinkholes. This newfound authority -- to maintain a disastrous Guantanamo, to stage rights-free tribunals and hold detainees forever -- is the kind of power Nixon only dreamed about. It cannot be let go." Lithwick concludes somberly, "The destruction of [Guantanamo prisoner Jumah] Al Dossari, Jose Padilla, [convicted 9/11 conspirator] Zacarias Moussaoui, and some of our most basic civil liberties was never a purpose or a goal -- it was a mere byproduct. The true purpose is more abstract and more tragic: To establish a clunky post-Watergate dream of an imperial presidency, whatever the human cost may be." (See the Imperial Presidency page of this site for more thoughts on the subject.) (Slate)
- January 13: An op-ed in the Madison, Wisconsin Capital Times observes that there is little hope that Congress can achieve anything of consequence in overseeing the excesses of the executive branch until the mainstream media performs its own oversight functions.
"Unitary executive"
The US cannot "wait for Congress to develop the spine it has been deprived of since the Watergate era," the Times editorializes. "There must be an external check and balance on the executive branch, and that will only happen if the media abandon the bended-knee position from which they have covered the Bush administration." The Times continues, "The willingness of most mainstream media outlets to continue to treat seriously the absurd and propagandistic claims of this president and his aides is at least as damaging to the discourse and, by extension, to the American experiment as the collapse of congressional oversight. To allow the administration and its supporters to suggest, at this late stage in the disaster that is the Iraq invasion and occupation, that challenges to the president's proposal to escalate the war are disrespectful of US troops serving there is to perpetuate a lie that warps the national debate in a manner that ensures more Americans and Iraqis will be killed. The president and his dwindling circle of supporters certainly have a right to make their pronouncements. But they do not have a right to expect that lies and spin will be swallowed by the media and then regurgitated into the living rooms of Americans." - The mainstream media failed once again to fulfill its function when, in response to Bush's January 10 address to the nation concerning his plans to escalate the US troop presence in Iraq, it "treated [the speech] as a meaningful statement regarding the future US presence in Iraq" instead of approaching the speech with "unbridled skepticism." The Times writes, "Just as it would be wrong for the media to censor Bush, it is equally wrong for the media to allow the madness of this modern-day King George to infect the discourse without the immediate application of the antidote of truth. Handing the bully pulpit over to a president who has repeatedly misused his position to deceive the Congress and the American people is not journalism; it is stenography. And make no mistake: A 'free' press that practices stenography to power is no different from the "kept" press of a totalitarian state. Indeed, the promise of 'freedom of the press' is nothing more than a meaningless clause in a disposable document if journalists do not use the freedom they have been afforded by the Constitution to challenge the status quo. ...There is a dawning realization that what's wrong with America is not just the fault of an incompetent and deceptive president, nor of a cowardly and dysfunctional Congress. The founders established a free press to keep watch on the executive branch particularly in a time of war. No less a figure than James Madison warned, 'A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.' Iraq is a tragedy. Proposals to escalate US involvement are a farce. And surely, Madison would tell us a media system that does not have the capacity to communicate that fact to the American people bluntly, and without apology is in need of radical reform." (Capital Times)
- January 13: Liberal blogger Brad Friedman excoriates the New York Times for joining the White House and conservative media outlets in deliberately misrepresenting Democratic senator Barbara Boxer's question to Condoleezza Rice during Rice's January 11 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (see January 11 and January 13 items on this page).
Conservative media slant
What Boxer was focusing on was Bush's abjuration on January 10 that the US "must expect more Iraqi and American casualties" as a result of his policies. In the questioning, Boxer told Rice, "You're not going to pay any particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family." The right-wing media, led by White House press secretary Tony Snow, immediately leapt upon the statement as some sort of personal attack on Rice, and several of the right-wing media mavens repeated and elaborated upon Snow's "a great leap backward for feminism" comment. The smear campaign was quickly in full swing. The Times, which should know better, left out the entirety of Boxer's question, thus rendering it nothing but an inexplicable slur upon Rice's status as a single woman without children. Friedman repeats Boxer's comment: "Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families. And I just want to bring us back to that fact." Rice herself admitted to the Times that "It didn't actually dawn on me that she was saying, 'you don't have children who can go to war'." It didn't dawn upon Rice because that wasn't what Boxer was saying. - But once Snow opened the floodgates, the smear began. The smear on Boxer isn't just a smear against a Democrat, but an opportunity to turn the focus away from both Rice's answer revealing that the White House hadn't bothered to measure the cost in increased deaths to US troops before announcing their new policy ("Senator, I don't think that any of us, uh, have a number. That, of expected casualties," said Rice) and from the fact that both Republicans and Democrats alike on the Senate committee are highly critical of the White House escalation plan for the Iraq War. Friedman observes, "While attacking the messenger to completely distract from the message is a time-honored and well-expected tactic from this White House and their sycophantic supporters, it continues to be distressing to see the once-great 'Paper of Record' irresponsibly pick up that ball and run in the same disingenuous direction. Who needs Judith Miller?"
- To make matters worse, not only did the Times repeat the usual smears from the usual conservative blogs and commentators, they misrepresented a statement to make it seem like a group known for its support of Boxer and women's rights was also critical of Boxer. According to the Times: "'I am deeply appalled by Senator Barbara Boxer's cruel and callous attack on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,' said Deneen Borelli, a fellow with an organization called Project 21, which describes itself as a 'leading voice in the African-American community.'" However, Borelli is not a member of Project 21, but a member of a group called the The National Leadership Network of Black Conservatives. The NLNBC features a photo of Utah Republican Orrin Hatch on the main page of its Web site, and boasts of having its members interviewed by such media commentators as Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Reagan, and G. Gordon Liddy, as well as being featured in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. The mistake is egregrious and horrendously deceptive.
- Friedman also notes that the Times quoted unnamed "Democratic senate staffers" who, according to the article, "complained privately that Ms. Boxer's exchange with Ms. Rice allowed the Bush administration to turn the tables on Iraq critics and sidestep the larger issue of the almost uniform opposition to the president's new plan to send an additional 21,500 U.S. soldiers to Iraq." Friedman notes that "given their tortured reporting and misrepresentations in the rest of the article, I'd suggest there is every reason to be dubious that such 'privately complaining Democratic Senate staffers' actually exist. If they do exist, however, then they too are guilty of the same thing that 'reporters' [Helene] Cooper and [Thom] Shanker and the Times editors are guilty of: Either being cowardly, irresponsible knee-jerk reactionists or, perhaps worse, purposely choosing to keep themselves so uninformed that they become little more than tools for a set of disingenuous Rightwing dead-enders and propagandists who are increasingly desperate enough that they are willing to slime and attack anybody who dares question the indefensible policies of the Bush White House." (BradBlog)
- January 14: Sometime in the next few months, the US's spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will exceed the $660 billion (in today's dollars) expended by the US in Vietnam.
Iraq war and occupation
By the time the US had spent that sum in Vietnam, in 1975, the troops were coming home at long last. By the time the bill for World War II passed the $600 billion mark, in mid-1943, the United States had driven German forces out of North Africa, devastated the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway, and launched the vast offensives that would liberate Europe and the South Pacific. Thusly, the Bush administration has spent more to accomplish less than any "wartime" president in American history. Though the loyalist Republican leadership of the previous Congresses have always passed Bush's war funding without hesitation, that will not continue with the Democrats now in control of the legislature. Democratic House member Zoe Lofgren says, "When you say for what we're spending in a month in Iraq, you could fully fund and double the science budgets of the United States and come up with a viable alternative to oil, it puts it in perspective." Even war supporter Judd Gregg, a Republican senator, criticizes the administration's approach to war costs, calling it "without any discipline as to how much is going to be spent." "They're gaming the system," he says. "Muting and undermining the legitimacy of the congressional role in funding is, I think, undermining to some degree the commitment to the war effort itself." The new plan will entail an additional $5.6 billion in military expenses and $1 billion in reconstruction and other civilian costs. - Last year, Congress approved a provision in the annual defense authorization bill calling on the administration to change course and put its request for war funds in regular spending bills subject to full congressional review. The author of the provision, GOP senator John McCain, says, "Neither the White House nor the Congress is making the tough decisions about how we are going to pay for the ongoing wars. Adding hundreds of billions of dollars that are more conveniently designated as emergency expenditures -- so they do not have to be budgeted for along with other national priorities -- is only making our fiscal problems that much greater." Democratic senator Edward Kennedy has proposed that Congress block spending for the escalation, a proposal countered by Republican rhetoric as exemplified by the pronouncement of House Republican C.W. Young, who says, "If you cut off funding, you're cutting off support for the troops." Whether you support the battle they're involved in or not, the vast majority of the American public is still very supportive of our troops."
- The parallels to Vietnam extend to the debates, or lack thereof, over war funding. After years of supinely approving every budget submitted to it to pay for the Vietnam war, Congress finally prohibited funding for military operations in Cambodia. From the beginning of Lyndon Johnson's troop buildup in 1965 to the fall of Saigon in 1975, the United States spent the equivalent of $662 billion in 2007 dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service. The war in Iraq is harder to measure because its costs tend to be mixed up with those of the war in Afghanistan and Bush's broader global war on terrorism, says Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. Starting with the anti-terrorism appropriation enacted a week after the attacks of 9/11, Kosiak figures the United States had spent $400 billion fighting terrorism through fiscal 2006, which ended September 30. For fiscal 2007, Congress has so far approved $70 billion. Bush will demand $100 billion more. And even if the fighting stops soon, which few expect, the bills would continue to accumulate as the Pentagon pushed to restore what the war had cost in troops and material. (Los Angeles Times)
- January 14: The Bush administration, surprised by the intensity and bipartisanship of the opposition to its escalation of the war, has decided to move forward with the "new way forward," before Congress can move to derail the plan.
Iraq war and occupation
The storm of criticism and opposition was exacerbated, say Bush advisors, by the slow, leaky way that the decision was reached. The policy review stretched two months after the election and the essence of the plan became known long before Bush announced it, making it what Washington Post reporters Peter Baker and Michael Abramowitz call "a political pinata for opponents." At this point, Bush officials have abandoned any hopes of turning Congressional Democrats to their side, and are focusing on retaining skeptical, skittish Republicans to stay loyal on the issue. Meanwhile, Bush has attacked Democrats as "irresponsible" for opposing the escalation plan without proposing alternatives, ignoring the fact that a number of alternatives have been proposed by various Democratic leaders. Since Bush roundly ignores any alternatives that are based on any sort of troop withdrawals, it seems obvious that Bush considers any plans that do not jibe with his own agenda "irresponsible." And Congressional Democrats are primed for a fight. "We are headed towards quite a donnybrook in Congress," says former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, the co-chairman of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, whose plan for withdrawing combat forces by early 2008 was never fully embraced by Bush or Democrats. "We had hoped that there would be more progress towards a more bipartisan approach." - Bush officials have resigned themselves to weathering the passage of a nonbinding Congressional resolution condemning the troop increase, and are merely trying to keep too many Republicans for voting for it. Former GOP senator Rick Santorum, who lost reelection, says that though Republicans do not want to walk away from Iraq, they are in "in full political survival mode" now. "It's very hard, particularly if you're on the ballot in two years, to run on the side of the president on anything to do with the war," says Santorum. GOP senator John Thune is more succinct: "Everybody is scared spitless." The opposition in the Republican Party seems to be coalescing around Senator Chuck Hagel, who says, "Even 50,000 troops wouldn't turn it around," and urges the White House to "get out of the bog of tactical thinking." To send more troops "into that grinder -- a tribal, sectarian civil war -- is not going to fix the problem," he says.
- The biggest problem for the White House is the prospect of Congress restricting funds for more troops. Bush officials respond by counting on the funds already appropriated to deploy the additional troops, and hoping that by March, when the supplemental appropriations bill comes to the floor, enough successes in Iraq will be evident for them to argue that the plan is working. "This buys us time," says a senior administration official. And a political strategist who advises the White House adds, "The public responds to progress and to events. Every time they can see real progress -- an election, catching Saddam, whatever it is -- they like it." If violence can be tamped down, it could defuse some public hostility. If that happens, the White House plans on withdrawing US forces out of Baghdad entirely. "By the end of the year, Baghdad's got to look significantly different," says an NSC official. Interestingly, some Democrats believe that Bush made a fundamental mistake: had he embraced the Iraq Study Group, or even made a show of embracing some of its elements, he could have called the Democrats' bluff about wanting to work together, according to party strategists. "That would have really jammed us," says a top congressional Democratic aide. Now that the Bush administration has repudiated the ISG report, Democrats have put aside their own misgivings about the report and embraced it.
- Of the entire discussion, former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta, a member of the ISG panel, says, "This was a real missed opportunity. No president can conduct a war without the support of the American people and without the support of the Congress. That's the lesson of history." While some officials saw the report as an opportunity to change course, Panetta says, "I think deep down, they viewed it as a sign of weakness to abide by an outside group's recommendation." Even hardline conservative Alan Simpson, another panel member and a former GOP senator, can't believe that Bush has refused to open any diplomatic dialogue with Iran or Syria. "Nothing is ever solved by not talking to somebody," he says. He says he was stunned by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statement that Iran could use talks with the United States to extort concessions. "Where did that come from?" he demands. "What the hell is gained by not thinking of some kind of system to talk? It makes no sense." Rice's former counselor Philip Zelikow, who was intimately involved in Iraq policymaking before his recent resignation, says great thought was given to how to satisfy at least some Democrats. "If you were in our shoes, what is the approach that would satisfy the Democrats?" he asks, and answers himself, "That's not an easy question to answer" given the diversity of views within the party. But the only Democrat that this plan satisfies is "Independent Democrat" Joseph Lieberman, a war hawk. Even Bush supporter William Kristol has little good to say about the administration's handling of its Iraq policies: "Maybe you haven't noticed -- they're not the most competent at executing the war." (Washington Post, Independent)
- January 14: Iraqi government officials are fiercely disputing the tactics of Bush's plans for escalating US troop numbers in Iraq.
Iraq war and occupation
The wrangling and arguments have unnerved Americans working on the plan, who describe a skein of problems ranging from a contested chain of command to disputes over how to protect American troops deployed in some of Baghdad's most dangerous districts. The largely Shi'ite government of Nouri al-Maliki is bitterly opposed to US plans to pursue Shi'ite as well as Sunni militias and death squads, which is a keystone of the Bush plans for stabilizing Iraq. "We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government that is actually part of the problem," says an American military official in Baghdad involved in talks over the plan. "We are being played like a pawn." It is also anything but clear if al-Maliki will honor his promise to allow US troops to pursue members of the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. - For the critical post of operational commander for the Baghdad cleanup, al-Maliki has selected a Shi'ite officer from the southern Shi'ite heartland virtually unknown to the Americans, and whose hard-edged demands for Iraqi primacy in the effort has deepened American anxieties. The Iraqi commander, Lieutenant General Aboud Qanbar, will be part of what the Americans have described as a partnership between the two armies, with an American general, Major General Joseph Fil, commander of the First Cavalry Division, working with General Aboud, and American and Iraqi officers twinned down the operational chain. For the Americans, accustomed to clear operational control, the partnership concept is troublesome -- full of potential, some officers fear, for dispute with the Iraqis over tough issues like applying an equal hand against Shi'ite and Sunni gunmen.
- And the matter of who exactly will be in charge of the new crackdown -- al-Maliki or a "crisis council" made up of al-Maliki, Qanbar, and other top Iraqi ministers, still remains to be unsettled. Overall, the command structure, both civilian and military, is shaky. An American military official says that the arrangements appear unwieldy, and at odds with military doctrine calling for a clear chain of command. "There's no military definition for 'partnered,'" he says.
- The operation also faces huge logistical problems, centering around the establishment of three dozen or so "joint security sites" throughout Baghdad, many in police stations that have been among the most frequent targets in the war. But since many areas have no functional police stations, alternate sites are being sought. The provision of fuel for Iraqi Humvees and troop carriers is still being debated. Perhaps the most worrisome element, both logistically and strategically, is the plan's reliance on the National Police, which has been heavily infiltrated by sectarian, ideologically hardline Shi'ite militia members.
- Many experts believe that some Shi'ite and Sunni extremists have already left Baghdad, melting away into the obscurity of the countryside to wait out the "surge," and to re-enter and continue their guerrilla fighting after the operation to "pacify" Baghdad is over. "This is an enemy that will trade space for time," one American officer says. (New York Times)
- January 14: Bush allows himself to be interviewed by CBS's Scott Pelley for 60 Minutes.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
Most of the interview is unmemorable, as when he asserts that far from being stubborn, he actually is "a flexible, open-minded person," as evidenced by his "surge" policy, where he "spent a lot of time listening to a lot of people because, Scott, I fully understand the decisions I make could affect the life of some kid who wears the uniform. Or could affect the life of some child growing up in America 20 years from now." One exchange between Bush and Pelley is worth noting, however, when Bush blatantly lies about his handling of the manufactured "Iraq WMD crisis." Pelley asks, "You know better than I do that many Americans feel that your administration has not been straight with the country, has not been honest. To those people you say what?" - Bush: "On what issue? Like the weapons of mass destruction?"
- Pelley: "No weapons of mass destruction."
- Bush: "Yeah."
- Pelley: "No credible connection between 9/11 and Iraq."
- Bush: "Yeah."
- Pelley: "The Office of Management and Budget said this war would cost somewhere between $50 billion and $60 billion and now we're over 400."
- Bush: "I gotcha. I gotcha. I gotcha."
- Pelley: "The perception, sir, more than any one of those points, is that the administration has not been straight with...."
- Bush (the money quote): "Well, I strongly disagree with that, of course. So I strongly reject that this administration hasn't been straight with the American people. The minute we found out they didn't have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so."
- As this site has documented in exhaustive detail, Bush and his officials knew almost from the outset that the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs was, at best, dubious and inconclusive. His assertion that "The minute we found out they didn't have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so," is a lie so brazen that even the usually eloquent AmericaBlog is left spluttering: "Bush basically admitted all his major arguments about Iraq were lies. Then, he lied again saying he hasn't lied. In Bush world, just because something is a lie doesn't make it a lie. How can anyone believe anything the guy says?"
- Most mainstream news outlets are cool to Bush's speech -- the New York Times writes, "Not much is new in the interview;" the Houston Chronicle writes, "It's not surprising to see Bush digging in his heels, avoiding difficult realities, or simply inventing a new narrative that suits him better;" the conservative Real Clear Politics blog writes, "As far as compelling television goes, Bush's interview with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes pales in comparison to Leslie Stahl's sit down with the families of the Duke lacrosse players...." and even that reliable conservative cheerleader, Rush Limbaugh, says, "I don't care how you thought he did, I don't know how many people watched it after CBS put these leaks out that Bush admitted this and said he was sorry and made Iraq worse and all this sort of stuff. The war at home here is a political war. Why then go to 60 Minutes?" But ABC's The Note, once considered a reliably nonpartisan source for insider news from Washington but now a harbinger of ABC's lurch to the right, says something entirely different: "On Iraq, the president had his best TV performance in years, minueting with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes, but that was largely offset by the grim news coverage out of Iraq (and the Gang of 500 mindset, which demands a fight over funding)." From Bush "minueting" to a pointless slap at Congress -- who do those Congressfolks think they are, exercising their constitutional duties? -- ABC is looking more like Fox News every day. (CBS News, AmericaBlog, Think Progress)
- January 14: Evidence of Bush's arrogant disconnect with reality continues to mount.
Iraq war and occupation
During an interview on CBS's 60 Minutes, Bush is asked if he owes the Iraqi people an apology for botching the management of the war. Bush replies, "Not at all. We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude." The Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson writes of Bush's statement, "That is inhuman. We destroyed a nation under the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction. Between our invasion and the ensuing civil war, at least 53,000 Iraqi civilians and over 3,000 American soldiers have been killed. Nearly 23,000 US soldiers have been wounded. Tyrants are being hanged, and tyranny is still in the streets. And the Iraqi people owe us a debt of gratitude?" Jackson quotes Bush's following statement: "I believe most Iraqis express that. I mean, the people understand that we've endured great sacrifice to help them. That's the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq." Jackson's reply is short and equally disbelieving: "And people thought President Johnson was deluded about Vietnam?" (AP/Guardian, Boston Globe) - January 14: Defending his and Bush's decision to escalate the conflict in Iraq, Dick Cheney says that the war in Iraq is emblematic of a fundamental, paradigmatic conflict that will be the driving force behind US foreign policy for generations to come.
Iraq war and occupation
"This is an existential conflict," Cheney says on Fox News Sunday. It is the kind of conflict that's going to drive our policy and our government for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years. We have to prevail and we have to have the stomach for the fight long term." Cheney also accuses Congressional Democrats of trying to "undermine the troops" by attempting to block Bush's escalation, and repeats the lie that Democrats have no strategies or plans of their own to offer for Iraq: "They have absolutely nothing to offer in its place," he says. "I have yet to hear a coherent policy from the Democratic side." Cheney is, of course, the beneficiary of softball questioning from Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace. Wallace gives Cheney the chance to respond to Republican senator Chuck Hagel's charge that Bush's plan may well be "the worst foreign policy blunder since the Vietnam War." Cheney replies that the most dangerous blunder would be to give up on the global fight against terrorism because the United States has decided the war in Iraq is too difficult. That is just what America's terrorist enemies are counting on, he says: "They're convinced that the United States will pack it in and go home if they just kill enough of us. They can't beat us in a standup fight, but they think they can break our will." - Cheney also speaks belligerently about Iran, almost daring the Iranians to challenge the US in or out of Iraq. "Iran is fishing in troubled waters inside Iraq. ...We do not want them doing what they can to destabilize the situation inside Iraq." Adding to the rhetoric is national security advisor Stephen Hadley, who says on NBC's Meet the Press, "We are going to need to deal with what Iran is doing inside Iraq."
- And in another example of the extremist rhetoric so often employed by Cheney in the past, he says that anyone who criticizes the Bush escalation is simply playing into the hands of al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorists. Cheney says withdrawing forces from Iraq rather than the troop "surge" would be "the most dangerous blunder" possible, a deliberate echo of Hagel's recent criticisms. "That is part and parcel of the underlying fundamental strategy that our adversaries believe afflicts the United States," Cheney says to Wallace. "They are convinced that the current debate in the Congress, that the election campaign last fall, all of that is evidence that they're right when they say the United States doesn't have the stomach for the fight in this war against terror. Bin Laden doesn't think he can beat us. He believes he can force us to quit. He believes after Lebanon and Somalia, the United States doesn't have the stomach for a long war and Iraq is the current central battlefield in that war, and it's essential we win there and we will win there. They're convinced that the United States will, in fact, pack it in and go home if they just kill enough of us." (CNN, AFP/Yahoo! News)
- January 14: The US Army manual, which outlines and details procedures for everything the Army does, has had 10 words quietly deleted from its intelligence-gathering guidelines, leading national security experts to believe that government lawyers are once again trying to assert the executive branch's "right" to wiretap Americans without a court warrant.
"Unitary executive"
The manual, described by the Army as a "major revision" to intelligence-gathering guidelines, addresses policies and procedures for wiretapping Americans, among other issues. The original guidelines, from 1984, said the Army could seek to wiretap people inside the United States on an emergency basis by going to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), or by obtaining certification from the attorney general "issued under the authority of section 102(a) of the Act." That last phrase is missing from the latest manual, which says simply that the Army can seek emergency wiretapping authority pursuant to an order issued by the FISA court "or upon attorney general authorization." It makes no mention of the attorney general doing so under FISA. In essence, the deletion gives the attorney general at least some authority to issue emergency wiretapping orders to the Army without going through FISA. While Bush officials call the wording change insignificant, the change is disturbing for many national security experts. Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, says, "The administration does not get to make up its own rules." Aftergood and the FAS only learned of the changes, finalized in November 2005, after waiting over a year for the fulfillment of a FOIA request. Aftergood says the deletion is particularly striking in light of the recent debate over the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program. Bush has asserted that he can authorize eavesdropping without court warrants on the international communications of Americans suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda. Like several other national security experts, Aftergood says the revised guidelines could suggest that Army lawyers had adopted the legal claim that the executive branch had authority outside the courts to conduct wiretaps. (New York Times) - January 14: More and more Israelis are turning away from their previous loud support of the Bush administration's Middle East policies and openly criticizing the US for creating more danger for Israel.
Bush's foreign policies
Israeli experts contend that American policies have destabilized Iraq, emboldened anti-Western forces from Iran to Lebanon and paved the way for militant Islamists to gain control of the Palestinian Authority. "The threats to Middle East security and stability worsened in 2006," experts at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies recently warned. "The American failure in Iraq has hurt the standing of the U.S. in the Middle East." The experts concluded that it would be best for the US to get out of Iraq rather than escalating. "There's no Israeli interest being served by continued American presence in Iraq," said Mark Heller, a Jaffee Center researcher who helped produce the group's annual "Middle East Strategic Balance" report. "There's a basic overall interest in not having the United States perceived as a weak or failing power," he said. "But any initial goals that might have been served by getting rid of Saddam Hussein have long since been banked." The Bush administration, according to the former head of the Jaffee Center, Yossi Alpher, is "simply discredited in the region as a player." - One of the central pretexts for the war in Iraq was securing the safety and predominance of Israel. Since 9/11, Israel has been perhaps the staunchest ally of the US anywhere in the world; that loyalty has been reciprocated by most Bush officials, especially the neoconservatives who drove the administration's Middle East policy. But now, a growing number of Israeli experts think that US policy has backfired. The threat from Hussein's Iraq has been replaced by the dangers of a volatile civil war that threatens to spill over Iraq's borders. Perhaps worse, by ousting both Hussein and the Taliban, the United States eliminated two major counterbalances to Iran, which now enjoys growing power and influence. "When the United States removed Saddam Hussein from power, people were happy here because he represented a major threat," says Eytan Gilboa, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University. "But that elevated the Iranian threat, and Iran is the most dangerous country in the world." Israeli leaders now consider Iran to be their biggest and most pressing danger. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, regularly antagonizes Israel by questioning whether the Holocaust happened and touting the eventual obliteration of Israel.
- Some Israeli experts argue that now Iraq is no longer a threat, Iran should be the focus of the international community. Former Israeli ambassador to the US Daniel Ayalon says, "In the long run, I think this will help peace and security in the Middle East. The fact that we do not have Saddam Hussein there allows the world to focus on the ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad." Others fear that the US's obsession with Iraq is preventing it from confronting Iran, who backs the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. "With American attention so much focused on Iraq, it comes at the expense of its ability to blunt the slow Iranian progression towards nuclear capability," says Uzi Arad, a former director of intelligence with Israel's Mossad.
- Iran also has vowed to provide more funding for Hamas, the militant group committed to Israel's destruction that won last year's election to run the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and the West Bank. For many Israelis, the ascension of Hamas is a bitter example of the Bush administration's flawed attempt to impose democratic principles on the Middle East. "This is a big failure," Gilboa said. "I think that Americans too often equate democracy with elections, and they don't understand that elections should be the last step, not the first one." Many Israelis resented the US's insistence that Palestine should hold elections in 2006 even when it appeared Hamas would take control of the Palestinian government. When Hamas won a majority and took control of the government, Israel, the United States and the international community cut off financial support to the Palestinian Authority, a move that hobbled the authority. International isolation, however, has failed to compel Hamas to make significant concessions. Now the US is launching a renewed effort to empower Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian president whose weakened Fatah Party lost to Hamas last year. Abbas is one ally whom Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hopes to enlist during her upcoming visit to the Middle East. She is working to create a coalition of moderate Middle East leaders who share US fears that militant anti-Western forces are on the rise. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert backs that effort, but Rice is likely to face greater skepticism in other countries in the region. Heller says it is because of American hubris and ignorance of matters in the region that it cannot secure more allies and more credibility. "It's kind of a flattering image that Americans have of themselves and, frankly, that everyone has of America, that somehow the United States is capable of doing anything it sets its mind to and all it needs is political will," he says. "I think it's a total misreading of reality." (McClatchy/Raleigh News and Observer)
- January 14: BearingPoint, the private firm appointed to advise the US government on the economic reconstruction of Iraq, has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican Party coffers and has admitted that its own finances are in chaos because of accounting errors and bad management.
Republican corruption
BearingPoint's own financial reputation is in shreds, having failed to report its own financial results for over a year and facing legal actions from creditors and shareholders. The firm faces being thrown off the New York Stock Exchange. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, BearingPoint employees gave $117,000 to the 2000 and 2004 Bush election campaigns, more than any other Iraq contractor. Other recipients include three prominent Congressmen on the House of Representatives' defense sub-committee, which oversees Defense Department contracts. In 2005, BearingPoint, though taking in over $3.4 billion, reported a loss of $722 million. The company just released those figures last month, after a nine-month delay, and has refused to make 2006 figures available as yet. - Analysts say the company has been plagued with poor management controls ever since splitting off from accounting giant KPMG, but because the executives of the firms are so strongly aligned with Bush administration officials, it has been given the lucrative job of advising the US government on Iraq's economic reconstruction since the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Its most recent work is legislation, ready to be presented to the Iraqi parliament, that would privatize Iraq's oil industry and give American oil companies huge shares of the profits. Since 2003, BearingPoint has been accused of incompetence, a lackadaisical approach to the critical tasks in Iraq, and of slovenly work. According to USAid's independent inspector, "BearingPoint's extensive involvement in the development of the Iraq economic reform program creates the appearance of unfair competitive advantage in the contract award process." But the firm has already branched out to advise the governments of Jordan and Egypt as well as Iraq, and has won over $100 million of US government contracts in Afghanistan. BearingPoint has dramatically stepped up its attempts to buy influence in Washington. Its contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan coincide with a big increase in its lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. In 2005, the latest year for which figures have been collated, BearingPoint paid $1 million to lobbyists, equalling the record total it paid in 2003. That is five times its average annual bill for lobbyists prior to the war in Iraq. It also dramatically increased its political contributions in the run-up to the midterm elections, distributing $120,000 to candidates and campaign groups from its employee-sponsored political fund. That compares with $61,000 in the 2004 elections. (Independent)
- January 14: A thoughtful editorial by the McClatchy newspaper group accuses Bush and his officials of "offering an incomplete, oversimplified and possibly untrue version of events...that raises new questions about the accuracy of the administration's statements about Iraq."
Iraq war and occupation
On January 10, Bush said in his primetime speech, "When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation. We thought that these elections would bring Iraqis together -- and that as we trained Iraqi security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops. But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq -- particularly in Baghdad -- overwhelmed the political gains Iraqis had made. Al-Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq's election posed for their cause. And they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shi'a Islam -- the Golden Mosque of Samarra -- in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq's Shi'a population to retaliate. Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today." While Bush's version of history helps justify his "new way forward" in Iraq, in which US forces will largely target Sunni insurgents and leave it to Iraq's US-backed Shiite government to putatively disarm its allies in Shi'ite militias and death squads. However, Bush ignores the 15 months of violence preceding the February 2006 attack on the Askariya Mosque which saw Shi'ite death squads, some backed by Iran, target Sunni politicians and clerics. He also blames al-Qaeda fighters for the bombing, leaving out the participation of native Shi'ite groups may have had. - The editorial observes, "Blaming the start of sectarian violence in Iraq on the Golden Dome bombing risks policy errors because it underestimates the depth of sectarian hatred in Iraq and overlooks the conflict's root causes. The Bush account also fails to acknowledge that Iranian-backed Iraqi Shi'ite groups stoked the conflict." But this has become the story promulgated by Bush officials, and largely accepted by mainstream media outlets. "Much like the administration's pre-war claims about Saddam's alleged ties to al-Qaeda and purported nuclear weapons program, the claims about the bombing of the Shi'ite mosque in Samarra ignore inconvenient facts and highlight questionable but politically useful assumptions," the editorial continues. "No one disagrees that the February bombing of the Golden Dome shrine was a pivotal moment. In the days following the attack, armed Shi'ites stormed Sunni mosques and neighborhoods, killing hundreds. Baghdad's Sunni residents responded by arming themselves, and Sunni insurgents set off car bombs in Shi'ite neighborhoods. By October, the monthly death toll was reaching into the thousands." The Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia led by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, was and is considered the source of most of these attacks, and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell urged a US offensive against the militia. But Powell was overruled by then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who refused to consider fighting what they called a two-front war against Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias.
- On January 30, 2005, the Iraqi people elected a member of the Shi'ite Dawa Party, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, to be prime minister, and put a largely Shi'ite government in charge of the country. Instead of cracking down on the Shi'ite militias, al-Jaafari's government was inserting Shi'ite militias and death squads into the Iraqi army and police. In February 2005, Knight Ridder reporter Hannah Allam predicted that Iraq was heading for civil war, writing, "Shi'ite Muslim assassins are killing former members of Saddam Hussein's mostly Sunni Muslim regime with impunity in a wave of violence that, combined with the ongoing Sunni insurgency, threatens to escalate into civil war. The war between Shi'ite vigilantes and former Ba'ath Party members is seldom investigated and largely overshadowed by the insurgency. ...Iraq's new Shi'ite leaders have little interest in prosecuting those who kill their former oppressors or their enemies in the insurgency." By August 2005, reports indicated that the militant Shi'ite group known as the Badr Organization, led in part by Iraq's interior minister, was, in the words of reporter Tom Lasseter, "conducting a terror campaign against Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority that includes kidnappings, threats and murders." Since then, US forces have found hundreds upon hundreds of dead Iraqis, mostly Sunnis, apparently murdered by Shi'ite militias and death squads. Lasseter wrote in December 2005, "The Iranian-backed militia the Badr Organization has taken over many of the Iraqi Interior Ministry's intelligence activities and infiltrated its elite commando units. That's enabled the Shi'ite Muslim militia to use Interior Ministry vehicles and equipment -- much of it bought with American money -- to carry out revenge attacks against the minority Sunni Muslims, who persecuted the Shi'ites under Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein."
- The McClatchy editorial says that the January 10 speech is just the latest in a nearly five-year campaign of lies and misinformation about Iraq coming from the White House: "The administration has continued to offer inaccurate information to Congress, the American people and sometimes to itself. The Iraq Study Group, in its December report, concluded, for example, that the US military was systematically under-reporting the violence in Iraq in an effort to disguise policy failings. The group recommended that the military change its reporting system. Whether many of the administration's statements about Iraq for nearly five years have been deliberately misleading or honest but gullible mistakes hasn't been determined. The Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete an investigation into the issue that was begun but stalled when Republicans controlled the committee." Only now, with Democrats in charge of Congress and planning hearings on Iraq, may some of the truth be told. (McClatchy/Editor and Publisher)
- January 14: One of the architects of the Bush "surge" plan is Fred Kagan, a neoconservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a frequent fixture on news shows.
Iraq war and occupation
Kagan is indeed a scholar, but has no real expertise on insurgencies, civil war, or nation stabilization. Instead, Kagan is a historian whose one major work focused on Napoleon. Talking Points Memo observes, "So I am completely baffled by the extent to which the media has given him credibility as a 'military expert'; one imagines how the surge would have been received if Kagan was accurately identified as 'an expert on Napoleon and the early 19th century Russian army.' His CV [curriculum vitae] reveals no publications in refereed history or political science journals in the last decade. Basically the intellectual architect of the surge is an oped/Weekly Standard writer whose only substantive expertise is on Napoleon. Great...." Kagan's original plan called for an escalation of 80,000 troops, but in the preceding weeks he trimmed his recommendations to 30,000 in order to line up with Bush officials' own planning. A Talking Points Memo poster observes acidly, "Your downplay of Kagan as a military expert is baseless, he stayed at the Holiday Inn last night." Daily Kos diarist "The Angry Rakkasan" is more blunt, calling Kagan an "unqualified fraud." "Rakkasan" combs through Kagan's CV and finds that he is not a military veteran, and that during his brief stint as an "unsalaried intern" at the Defense Department in 1991, he focused on Cold War and Soviet-era politics. He has written numerous scholarly articles, but almost none of them have been "peer-reviewed," which in plain speak means they are almost worthless. None of his articles have been on Iraq or the Middle East. What he is, is a frequent contributor to the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard. "Rakkasan" writes, "Frederick Kagan is a fraud in that he espouses knowledge on military matters in Iraq that he does not have. He has never served in the military and he has never conducted scholarly research on the Middle East, much less Iraq or Iraqi society. ...This is who the President of the United States listens to on Iraq -- a student of Russian and Napoleonic history. This is madness. Frederick Kagan is an amateur who should be exposed and run out of Washington on a rail for all the damage he is doing to our nation." (Belgravia Dispatch/Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos)
