War on Iraq

News and analysis on Sunni, Shiites, Kurds, oil, Blackwater, terrorism, anti-war protests, and troop withdrawal debates. Comprehensive coverage available here.

The Passage of the GI Bill is a Critical First Victory
Posted by Paul Rieckhoff, Huffington Post on May 16, 2008 at 5:39 AM.

On Thursday, May 15, the House of Representatives made history. By an overwhelming margin, lawmakers passed the a landmark new GI Bill which will make college affordable to the more than 1.6 million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

As President Roosevelt said when he signed the original GI Bill for veterans of World War II,

"[The GI Bill] gives emphatic notice to the men and women in our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down."

The House of Representatives renewed that promise. This is a tremendous and bipartisan commitment to our troops. We've seen enough bumper sticker and lapel pin patriotism; today, we saw the real thing.

The House vote is a crucial first step, but there is more to be done to get this bill made law. The GI Bill, which passed as a part of the war supplemental funding, still has to be approved by the Senate and be signed by the President. A second step was also taken today, as the Senate Appropriations Committee moved their matching GI Bill proposal out of committee.

I'd like to take a minute to talk about the people who deserve credit for moving the GI Bill this far:

• First and foremost, the bipartisan coalition of combat veterans who introduced the new GI Bill: Senators Webb, Hagel, Warner, and Lautenberg who put partisanship aside in favor of a fair benefit for the troops who served after them.

• The veterans' organizations (led by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, the Military Officers Association, and IAVA) who stood united on this issue, kept up the pressure, and refused to accept compromised or watered-down benefits.

• The many other supporters of a new GI Bill -- including at least 22 governors, an array of higher education groups, and of course, thousands of regular Americans who pressured their representatives to make this bill a top priority.

What's next? The Senate floor vote that may happen as early as Monday of next week. At this point, I am convinced the GI Bill has become an unstoppable force -- but I've been disappointed by Washington before. With your help, we can ensure that the GI Bill becomes law. You can follow the new GI Bill every step of the way here.

Former Head of Iraqi Anti-Corruption Agency Now an Undocumented Immigrant
Posted by Satyam Khanna, Think Progress on May 14, 2008 at 10:00 AM.

After the 2003 Iraq invasion, Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer created a major anti-corruption ministry in Iraq, the Public Integrity Commission (CPI). Last October, former CPI commissioner Judge Radhi al-Radhi, who was appointed by Bremer and whose work has been praised by top U.S. officials, told Congress about the “rampant” corruption in Iraqi ministries that had cost Iraq as much as $18 billion.

Radhi’s gripping account detailed how Prime Minister Maliki tried to subvert his commission and how nearly four dozen of his staff members were killed. Subsequently, he was forced to seek asylum in the United States.

But today, Radhi is living as an undocumented immigrant in Virginia. In a Democratic Policy Committee hearing yesterday, former State Department official James Mattil told Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) that Radhi has no “official status” in the U.S. Currently, only a group of Quakers and Arthur Brennan, the former head of the department’s Office of Accountability and Transparency, are funding Radhi, he said:

DORGAN: And where is Judge al-Radhi at the moment?

MATTIL: Living in an apartment in Springfield, maybe for the rest of the month if they can get it worked out that somebody is going to pay for it. But he’s not allowed to work. He has no official status, so he’s not — he’s undocumented — I don’t know what he is. I mean, he’s lost. He’s a person without a country.

Watch it.

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How the Pentagon Media Machine Operated
Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report on May 13, 2008 at 1:32 PM.

It’s been nearly a month since the New York Times first reported on a Pentagon program in which retired military officers, who’ve since become lobbyists or consultants for military contractors, were recruited to become propaganda agents of the Bush administration. Throughout the war in Iraq, these retired officers — or “message multipliers,” as they were described by internal Defense Department documents — took on roles as military analysts for all of the major news networks, without noting their puppet-like relationships with the Pentagon.

Despite the media’s reluctance to even acknowledge the controversy’s existence, a Pentagon document dump has led to some revelations that make the controversy look even worse.

Faiz reported this gem earlier today:

In a Feb. 16, 2006 email exchange, Pentagon media staffers discussed coordinating with the Heritage Foundation to identify someone to speak about detainee treatment at Gitmo. An anonymous employee suggested retired Army Sergeant Major Steve Short because “he seems to be on message and very articulate.”

Pentagon public affairs official Allison Barber responded by warning that the DoD could not officially “endorse” one particular speaker over another. “Important to remember that heritage can invite anyone to present and that we don’t really have an opinion on anyone,” Barber wrote.

The anonymous author then suggested he or she might lie and pretend not to have ever heard of Short: “gasp. are you telling me to tell a lie???? surely not! ;)”

Hilarious. The “wink” emoticon certainly makes it seem as if intentional deception was not an uncommon occurrence.

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Rumsfeld Blames the Generals for Poor Pre-War Planning
Posted by Satyam Khanna, Think Progress on May 9, 2008 at 10:57 AM.

In February 2003, Gen. Eric Shinseki famously predicted that "several hundred thousand" troops would be needed for post-war hostilities in Iraq. According to documents recently released by the Pentagon in response to The New York Times's expose on its propaganda program, however, Donald Rumsfeld claimed in a 2006 briefing that the reason why he did not support a larger invasion force was because commanders did not request it:

RUMSFELD: Now, it turns out he [Shinkseki] was right. The commanders - you guys ended up wanting roughly the same as you had for the major combat operation, and that's what we have. There is no damned guidebook that says what the number ought to be. We were queued up to go up to what, 400-plus thousand.

Q: Yes, they were already in queue.

RUMSFELD: They were in the queue. We would have gone right on if they'd wanted them, but they didn't, so life goes on.

In reality, Rumsfeld fought back when generals like Shinseki requested more troops. He said in 2003 that Shinseki was "far from the mark." As McClatchy reported in 2004, "Central Command originally proposed a force of 380,000 to attack and occupy Iraq. Rumsfeld's opening bid was about 40,000. ... By September 2003, Rumsfeld and his aides thought, there would be very few American troops left in Iraq."

Pentagon’s Spin On GI Bill Is ‘Offensive Nonsense’
Posted by Jon Soltz, Think Progress on May 7, 2008 at 4:42 PM.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress highlighted the latest reason from the Bush administration to oppose a real GI Bill for troops, offered by Senators Webb and Hagel. The Pentagon spokesperson said, in part:

[W]e are certainly concerned that this would be eligible to them after only two years of service. We think pegging it to a longer period of service — the number we have in mind, at this point, is six years of service — that the longer you stay in, the sweeter the benefits are to you. Six years would show a commitment to service. … The last thing we want to do is provide a benefit — or the last thing we want to do is create a situation in which we are losing our men and women who we have worked so hard to train.

Wow. There are a few very serious flaws in this logic:

First, the time of service isn’t a measure of commitment to service. What about the troops who served under six years, did a few tours in Iraq, and came back without a limb, and could no longer serve? Have they shown less of a commitment to America? I would love for this spokesperson to go to Walter Reed and tell anyone there who served three years, but now cannot continue their service, that they haven’t shown a commitment.

Second, no one is leaving the military after two years. I’d note that when you sign up, it’s for an eight year contract, most for four years active. They can serve in a number of ways. For example, I served four and a half years active (because I was Stop Lossed), went to grad school and served in the reserves, but was called back up after ten months. So, the point remains that you’re not talking about a flood of people breaking their contract after three or four years. The overwhelming majority of men and women serve out their contract for eight years, so even if they do begin school when they’re done with their active duty commitment, the military can call them up at any time they need them, for the life of the troop’s contract. A GI Bill isn’t going to change it.

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Shifting the Blame in Gender-Motivated Violence
Posted by Lucinda Marshall, Feminist Peace Network on May 7, 2008 at 8:02 AM.

Anna Greer has a very thought-provoking piece in Wo! Magazine about the use of the passive voice in describing gender-based violence. She writes:

“One of the first things journalism students learn is to avoid the passive voice. So, you have to wonder why journalists are drawn to using passive voice when the subject of their article is male violence against women. What classically happens is that the actors in these stories are sidelined and we’re left with the women who get raped, sexually harassed, or beaten.”

“A recent story in the Sydney Morning Herald was a perfect example of passive voice subverting the object/subject relationship. ‘Don’t Want to Be Harassed? Stop Acting Like a Man’ read the headline. The article reported on a Canadian study which found that, in the workplace, men were more likely to sexually harass women who didn’t conform to traditional gender roles. In the process, it used passive voice to shift blame from the perpetrators of sexual harassment and placed it squarely on the shoulders of the victims.”

“The use of passive voice in articles such as this, subconsciously shapes the way people view violence against women. It is an insidious and unquestioned practice. In the passive voice version of the above story, men apparently don’t harass and intimidate women, women just run around getting themselves harassed. If active voice had been used, would the same conclusions be drawn? Would it have the same headline? No.”

“This is not merely an isolated incident or slip of the sub-editor’s metaphorical knife. It is a wide-spread practice - in news articles on the subject of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and domestic violence - to have the perpetrators painted out of the picture, either partly or completely.

Positioning a male abuser as the actor in a news article on sexual assault isn’t accusing all men of being abusers, just as identifying women as victims doesn’t imply that all women have suffered from sexual harassment or intimidation in the workplace. But let’s be real here. Men are the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of violence against women — as they are the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of violence against men, for that matter. And using the passive voice in articles on gendered violence positions female victims as somehow the root of the problem. It shifts the responsibility and blame from the actor to the person on the receiving end of the abuse.”

“When women are identified as the victims of gender-motivated violence and intimidation, the perpetrators must be identified as the actors. The use of passive voice cloaks this reality. Let’s place the blame where it belongs — squarely on the shoulders of the abusers.”

Kudos to Greer for totally nailing it. We cannot hope to end gendered violence until we accurately report and name what is happening and like UK activist Jennifer Drew, Greer is absolutely right that we have to place the blame on the perpetrators, not the victims.

King David (Petraeus)
Posted by Spencer Ackerman, Huffington Post on May 7, 2008 at 6:46 AM.

Originally appeared on the Washington Independent.

While commanding the 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, David H. Petraeus famously mused to journalist Rick Atkinson, "Tell me how this ends." Asked today by The Washington Independent how he would answer that if one of his own division commanders posed it, Petraeus replied by phone from Baghdad's Camp Victory, "I would just reiterate what our objectives are, and that is what we're trying to help the Iraqis achieve. And that is: an Iraq that is at peace with itself and with its neighbors; and can defend itself; that is a democracy in Iraqi fashion -- I would also say a government that is represent of and responsive to all its citizens."

(Matt Mahurin) But would that answer have satisfied Maj. Gen. Petraeus in 2003? "What I was asking was 'How?' in a couple respects," he said. "What that was about was, I think, very early on a recognition of how complex and challenging this was going be." He mentioned Amb. Ryan Crocker's comment to the Senate, that Iraq was "just plain hard," adding, "I think that's a very clear-eyed and, in a sense, coldly realistic appraisal of where we are, and how difficult it is."

Petraeus is no stranger to either difficulty or realism. His obstacles have come from many places, and long before he took command in Iraq, his most daunting challenge yet. In the Army, Petraeus studied counterinsurgency (COIN) early in his career in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when the Vietnam-wounded service wanted nothing to do with methods of warfare used to draw a civilian population's political and personal allegiance away from a guerrilla force. "Students of counterinsurgency know that counterinsurgencies are not quick endeavors," he said during an hour-long conversation. "To state the obvious, they take time, enormous perseverance, [and] they are exceedingly complex."

Indeed, Petraeus's 1987 Princeton dissertation focused on how the military systematically stripped away its institutional knowledge of counterinsurgency in the wake of the Vietnam trauma. He did not realize that he would ultimately become the military's most important advocate of counterinsurgency -- a discipline that, despite the traumatic experience of the Iraq war, is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of defense theorist-practitioners. Many of them refer to Petraeus as "King David."

Every army of liberation has a half-life after which it turns into an army of occupation...You can extend that half-life by being considerate of the population ... But over time, again, you are not one of them.

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Both Decrease And Increase In Troop Deaths Prove The Surge Is Success
Posted by Ali Frick, Think Progress on May 6, 2008 at 6:49 AM.

Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Max Boot is one of the most vocal supporters of a neocon foreign policy. He says those who favor withdrawal from Iraq engage in wishful thinking and claims there is copious evidence that Iran is training al Qaeda. He said former CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon's hesitation to bomb Iran embolden[ed] the mullahs, and claimed that the recently-revealed Pentagon propaganda program is simply part and parcel of the daily grind of Washington journalism.

He has also been a vociferous defender of the Iraq troop surge. Today, in an online debate on the surge, Boot points to the overall decrease in troop deaths as evidence of its success:

I could cite statistics to show how the “surge”—not only an increase in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq but also a change in their strategy to emphasis classic counterinsurgency—has been paying off: Civilian deaths were down more than 80 percent and U.S. deaths down more than 60 percent between December 2006 and March 2008.

Just two days ago, however, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Boot argued that the recent increase in U.S. troop casualties showed the surge was working. Acknowledging that April was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Iraq since August (Boot says 52 soldiers died; in fact 54 did), Boot says the U.S. is approaching “the enemy’s defeat“:

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Pentagon Backs Plan to Build "Zone of Influence" in Iraq
Posted by Satyam Khanna, Think Progress on May 5, 2008 at 2:15 PM.

The White House has repeatedly insisted that the United States has “no desire for permanent bases” in Iraq. Nevertheless, the Bush administration is seeking to leave its footprint on Iraq through other means. The AP reports that the Pentagon is backing a $5 billion dollar plan to “transform the U.S.-protected Green Zone” into a “centerpiece for Baghdad’s future,” resulting in “big paydays for early investors:“

For Washington, the driving motivation is to create a “zone of influence” around the new $700 million U.S. Embassy to serve as a kind of high-end buffer for the compound, whose total price tag will reach about $1 billion after all the workers and offices are relocated over the next year.

“When you have $1 billion hanging out there and 1,000 employees lying around, you kind of want to know who your neighbors are. You want to influence what happens in your neighborhood over time,” said Navy Capt. Thomas Karnowski, who led the team that created the development plan.

An incentive for the project, which would include hotels, resorts, and commercial development in the Green Zone, appears to be lining the pockets of investors and allies rather than re-building Iraq’s economy. In fact, Karnowski acknowledged that American officials would vet potential investors because of a “vested interest” — mirroring the cronyism of Saddam’s Hussein’s regime.

Some Iraqi leaders even have drawn parallels to the U.S.-backed development plan and what Saddam Hussein did in the area — known by its Iraqi name of Tashri during his regime. Hussein stocked the neighborhood with family and tribal allies, political loyalists and members of his elite Republican Guard. Karnowski called the accusation “partially true.”

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In Iraq 70 Percent of People Lack Clean Water
Posted by Abigail Brown, Water For The Ages on May 1, 2008 at 12:00 PM.

Less than half of Iraq's population of 29 million people have access to clean, drinkable water. And, according to a recent report by Oxfam, the number of civilians in Iraq without water has risen from 50 percent to 70 percent during 2003 to 2007 (the continued US occupation).

Recent History of Water in Iraq

In the recent past, Iraq had over 140 drinking water and treatment facilities in operation. Air attacks in 1991, during the Persian Gulf War destroyed many of these water treatment plants.

At the same time, UN imposed sanctions disallowed trade between Iraq and other countries. This made import of needed chemicals and supplies for upkeep of the water treatment facilities difficult.

By 2003, Iraq's 140 major water treatment facilities were operating at about 35 percent of their design capacity. In March 2003, the US government launched a direct-attack on Iraq. This continued war, for over five-years now, has rendered useless the already deteriorating water infrastructure systems across the country.

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McCain's Elitism and the New GI Bill
Posted by Mike Connery, AlterNet on April 30, 2008 at 12:33 PM.

Jim Webb and John McCain are throwing down over the new GI Bill and the dividing lines are pretty startling, especially when the current threads of the presidential race are considered. Charges of elitism are being thrown at Obama left and right, as are questions about his patriotism. Meanwhile, John McCain is actively working against a bill that would provide robust support to our troops as they transition back to civilian life.

The bill is the updated version of the GI Bill that helped so many soldiers finance their education after WWII. Sen. Jim Webb has proposed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would provide serious support to our veterans:

• Make benefits available to all members of the military who have served on active duty since 9/11/2001, including activated reservists and National Guard.

• Provide benefits for tuition, housing, and books for up to 36 months of education for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

• Link amount of benefits to amount of time served on active duty.

• Increase amount of time after leaving active duty to collect educational assistance to fifteen years compared to ten.

• Allows additional payments for tutorial assistance as well as licensure and certification tests.

• Create a new program in which the government will agree to match, dollar for dollar, any voluntary additional contributions to veterans from institutions whose tuition is more expensive than the maximum assistance provided.

McCain has proposed a much watered down version of this bill that would provide most benefits to career officers. If shortchanging the grunts to enrich the officers isn't elitist, I don't know what is. What's worse, now that he's come under fire for his weak-ass proposal, he's trying to shift the blame to Sen. Webb.

From the Politico:

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Politico Reporter Plays Fast and Loose with Anti-War Organizer's Words
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on April 26, 2008 at 1:41 PM.

Journalist Martin Kady II wrote a story today in the Politico that I criticized here.  Here's the specific problematic passage.

Leaders of the anti-war movement are also accepting that their best hope is a symbolic vote.

We're advocating putting as many of the provisions in the first round" of the legislation, said John Isaacs, executive director of Council for a Livable World, which is part of a larger anti-war coalition led by MoveOn.org. "We recognize that ultimately the wars are going to be funded, ... that some type of supplemental will be passed.

John Isaacs denied saying that this would be a symbolic vote, and it's quite obvious that a war funding could have conditions - a timeline for withdrawal for instance - attached, obviating the point of Kady's paragraph.  Furthermore, I have confirmed with Moveon that neither Eli Pariser, Nita Chaudhary, or Ilyse Hogue spoke with the Politico for this article.

I am emailing Martin Kady II to ask him which leaders of the anti-war movement he means, why he quoted a member of a different group to represent Moveon, and whether he will provide the full context of Isaacs's quote.

UPDATE:  I have gone back and forth with Kady numerous times, and he will not provide me with information on which anti-war leaders he or other Politico reporters talked to, nor would he provide evidence to back up his claim about anti-war groups.  Furthermore, when pressed, he changed the wording from 'leaders' to 'members' when characterizing the anti-war proponents he apparently is citing.

Ryan Grim, who helped Kady write the story, instantly sent me the full quote by John Isaacs, which, as you can see, undercuts Kady's article.

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Labor's First Strike Against the War Gains Momentum